The Last Lifeline

A middle-aged, independent, has it-all woman survives a nearly fatal road traffic accident in March 2004. She then begins a tortuous journey of physical, mental and emotional healing. Stripped of all her friends and family, she is left to overcome these challenges on her own. Yet, all hope is not lost. She finds healing in the most unlikely place, the Physiotherapy department of a local hospital, through simple people doing simple acts of kindness. As the physical landscape changes from winter to spring, she slowly renews herself from deep within while desperately clinging to her most prized possession: her independence.

An armed, violent man escapes jail and flees police in Talon County, Maine, where a widespread chase stretches from Bangor to Portland. A torrential rainstorm hits the coast of Maine in a fury of blackouts as police canvas the area for Brad Rayon, who terrorizes a small community, killing anybody who gets in his way. Several break-ins, thefts, and arsons are reported in the area, but for Ash and his boyfriend Wally, it is a series of personal threats that heightens to life-threatening attacks. With Wally at work, Ash is alone when he hears the first of many strange noises outside his house. It starts with crank calls, a heavily obscured voice calling out his name on the other end. There are knocks at the front door. He hears footsteps in the house, somebody walking around, and a large shadow filling the corner of a room. Ash’s past is riddled with abuse and violence, and he struggles to understand what’s real and imagined. Will Ash be the fugitive’s next victim, or is the ongoing trail of dead bodies a figment of Ash’s troubled imagination?

*

The busy port of Wilmington, North Carolina, was a key city linking the Confederacy to the goods and the weapons merchants of Europe and the world. By late 1864, the port city had become an important target for Federal military leaders. To keep the city from falling, the Confederacy relied on a strong system of fortifications, the most formidable of which was Fort Fisher. The Federal Army in late 1864 and early 1865 made the fort the target of the largest amphibious operation prior to World War II. The successful reduction of the post sounded the knell for the brief life of the Confederacy and brought to a close one of the most interesting eras in Wilmington history.

Reuse and integration are defined as synergistic concepts, where reuse addresses how to minimize redundancy in the creation of components; while, integration focuses on component composition. Integration supports reuse and vice versa. These related concepts support the design of software and systems for maximizing performance while minimizing cost. Knowledge, like data, is subject to reuse; and, each can be interpreted as the other. This means that inherent complexity, a measure of the potential utility of a system, is directly proportional to the extent to which it maximizes reuse and integration. Formal methods can provide an appropriate context for the rigorous handling of these synergistic concepts. Furthermore, formal languages allow for non ambiguous model specification; and, formal verification techniques provide support for insuring the validity of reuse and integration mechanisms. This edited book includes 12 high quality research papers written by experts in formal aspects of reuse and integration to cover the most recent advances in the field. These papers are extended versions of some of the best papers, which were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration and the IEEE International Workshop on Formal Methods Integration - both of which were held in San Francisco in August 2014.