ISHM is an innovative combination of technologies and methods that offers solutions to the reliability problems caused by increased complexities in design, manufacture, use conditions, and maintenance. Its key strength is in the successful integration of reliability (quantitative estimation of successful operation or failure), "diagnosibility" (ability to determine the fault source), and maintainability (how to maintain the performance of a system in operation). It draws on engineering issues such as advanced sensor monitoring, redundancy management, probabilistic reliability theory, artificial intelligence for diagnostics and prognostics, and formal validation methods, but also "quasi-technical" techniques and disciplines such as quality assurance, systems architecture and engineering, knowledge capture, information fusion, testability and maintainability, and human factors. This groundbreaking book defines and explains this new discipline, providing frameworks and methodologies for implementation and further research. Each chapter includes experiments, numerical examples, simulations and case studies. It is the ideal guide to this crucial topic for professionals or researchers in aerospace systems, systems engineering, production engineering, and reliability engineering.Solves prognostic information selection and decision-level information fusion issuesPresents integrated evaluation methodologies for complex aerospace system health conditions and software system reliability assessmentProposes a framework to perform fault diagnostics with a distributed intelligent agent system and a data mining approach for multistate systemsExplains prognostic methods that combine both the qualitative system running state prognostics and the quantitative remaining useful life prediction

Integrated System Health Management: Perspectives on Systems Engineering Techniques

Engineering & Transportation

Xu, Lei

Xu, Jiuping

Engineering

Academic Press

Uncle Three loves good food, good booze, good card games, and bad women—and he’s never found a grave he wouldn’t rob. He can’t help it—it’s in his blood—grave robbing has been the family business for centuries. So when his bookseller nephew comes to him with a map to an ancient tomb, Uncle Three sets off to find it, in the company of some grave-robbing colleagues, his nerdy nephew, and a strange poker-faced guy that nobody can quite figure out. Uncle Three knows that the grave he seeks will lead him and his companions to “another kind of world,” but not even he could ever imagine what they are about to find. Lost in a labyrinthine cavern that is full of dead bodies, Uncle Three and his comrades fight for their lives as they come up against vampires, corpse-eating bugs, and blood zombies. The first volume of The Grave Robbers’ Chronicles, which will soon be followed by Angry Sea, Hidden Sand, Cavern of the Blood Zombies is as impossible to put down as a bag of good potato chips. A story with more twists and turns than a burial cavern and the funniest grave robbers the world has ever known, it’s kept Chinese readers awake far into the night. Now it’s your turn…

Cavern of the Blood Zombies (Grave Robbers' Chronicles)

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Things Asian Press/Global Directions

When Uncle Three’s boat disappears in the South China Sea, an undersea grave robbing adventure begins for Fats, Poker-face and Uncle Three’s long-suffering nephew. While searching for their reprobate leader, they find themselves lost in a labyrinth of shifting rooms—and pursued by two monsters that are as tenacious as they are deadly. Who can be trusted? Who is lying? Answers to these questions shift and change as quickly as the rooms that imprison the gang of grave robbers. Rapidly each of them realizes nobody is to be relied on and that the truth is harder to find than any tomb’s treasure trove or the enigmatic and elusive Uncle Three. This second volume of The Grave Robbers’ Chronicles continues the fast-paced horror saga that began in Cavern of the Blood Zombies, rich with humor, history, and a black-hearted femme fatale who is definitely out for blood.

Angry Sea, Hidden Sands (Grave Robbers' Chronicles)

Uncle Three is nowhere to be found and to make matters worse, there’s convincing evidence that he may be a liar and a killer. Exhausted and discouraged, his nephew decides to abandon the family business of robbing ancient graves with the intention of resuming the life of an honest man. Then his childhood friend emerges from prison with a scheme that promises treasure and adventure—along with the possibility of finding Uncle Three, as well as savage monkeys with a tendency toward kleptomania, gigantic rats who hunger for human flesh, a band of rival grave robbers who believe murder is a justifiable step to take when trying to achieve success, and a mysterious bronze tree that conceals deadly secrets.

Bronze Tree of Death (Grave Robbers' Chronicles, 3)

Children's Books

Science Fiction & Fantasy

It’s a grave-robbing reunion when Fats, Poker-face, Panzi, and Uncle Three’s long-suffering nephew find themselves on a train headed for a mysterious, mythical palace in a world of glaciers, avalanches, and blizzards. They have no idea why Uncle Three has sent the message that brought them all together again but they soon discover that they aren’t alone in their search. Their femme fatale adversary, Ning, is on the same trail, with a team of foreigners—and quite possibly a hostage—Uncle Three.

Palace of Doom (Grave Robbers Chronicles, 4)

Written by a man known as “the Stephen King of China,” The Grave Robbers’ Chronicles (known in Chinese as ???? / Daomu Biji), is as impossible to put down as a bag of good potato chips. A story with more twists and turns than a burial cavern, disgusting and unsettling monsters, and the funniest grave robbers the world has ever known, it’s kept Chinese readers awake far into the night. Now it’s your turn… The Grave Robbers’ Chronicles is a novel about the grave-robbing adventures of Wu Xie, a young man hailing from a family that had been tomb-raiders for centuries. It is one of the most popular novel series in China with several million fans.  In volume 5:    When Uncle Three finally tells his side of the story, his nephew still feels skeptical. When mysterions videtapes show up in the mail, with scenes that are mystifying, horrible, and involve faces that are much too familiar, they bring questions that demand action and answers..  An abandoned house holds more peril than anyone expected—and a notebook with a message from the past. An expedition into the Gobi Desert turns into a rainforest  adventure with deadly snakes and  a tragic death. Then there is It, a mysterious and demonic force that threatens to destroy the lives and minds of the grave-robbing companions.  Once again Panzi, Fats, Qilin, and Uncle Three’s nephew, with Ning added to the group, band together to follow the incomplete and possibly flawed leadership of a man who is perhaps a killer, probably a liar, and beyond a doubt the most engaging villain in horror fiction. Deadly Desert Winds skillfully introduces new characters and devious plot twists that make this adventure series more compelling than ever before.  The fifth volume of the Grave Robbers’ Chronicles will soon be followed by Graveyard of a Queen, the sixth in the series. Will the questions be answered? Will the adventures continue? And who will be the next to die?

Deadly Desert Winds (Grave Robbers Chronicles, 5)

Travel

Asia

Graveyard of a Queen (Grave Robbers Chronicles, 6)

With the growing popularity of “big data”, the potential value of personal data has attracted more and more attention. Applications built on personal data can create tremendous social and economic benefits. Meanwhile, they bring serious threats to individual privacy. The extensive collection, analysis and transaction of personal data make it difficult for an individual to keep the privacy safe. People now show more concerns about privacy than ever before. How to make a balance between the exploitation of personal information and the protection of individual privacy has become an urgent issue.In this book, the authors use methodologies from economics, especially game theory, to investigate solutions to the balance issue. They investigate the strategies of stakeholders involved in the use of personal data, and try to find the equilibrium. The book proposes a user-role based methodology to investigate the privacy issues in data mining, identifying four different types of users, i.e. four user roles, involved in data mining applications. For each user role, the authors discuss its privacy concerns and the strategies that it can adopt to solve the privacy problems.The book also proposes a simple game model to analyze the interactions among data provider, data collector and data miner. By solving the equilibria of the proposed game, readers can get useful guidance on how to deal with the trade-off between privacy and data utility. Moreover, to elaborate the analysis on data collector’s strategies, the authors propose a contract model and a multi-armed bandit model respectively. The authors discuss how the owners of data (e.g. an individual or a data miner) deal with the trade-off between privacy and utility in data mining. Specifically, they study users’ strategies in collaborative filtering based recommendation system and distributed classification system. They built game models to formulate the interactions among data owners, and propose learning algorithms to find the equilibria.

Data Privacy Games

Jiang, Chunxiao

Qian, Yi

Ren, Yong

Reference

Springer

The Legend of Mawangdui

Zhang Dongxia

China Intercontinental Press

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