“Bellicise is an organization built on secrecy. We are the elite. No one can know of your involvement. Not your best friend, not your ex-boyfriend, no one.” She put her hands on Calista’s shoulders and looked her squarely in the eyes. “Calista, can I trust you to keep our secrets?” ___________________________________________ Calista Vance lives a normal life filled with commonplace struggles. She’s just an ordinary woman. Until the day she isn’t. Calista’s boyfriend, Grant Reynolds, suddenly ends their long-term relationship. She is shattered, but something isn’t adding up. What is he hiding? That’s when Calista meets Coco, a chic girl entangled in a sumptuous world of luxury and duplicity—and a Firebrand in an underground organization known as Bellicise. Recruited by Bellicise, Calista’s shiny new life full of glitter, gowns, and galas, seems too good to be true. Because it is. Someone is following her. The expectations of Bellicise weigh on her conscience. Her morals and unwavering trust are tested. Will Calista’s broken past dictate her future? Can she remain true to herself as the fragile girl she used to be fades away? What is it that Bellicise really wants?

Contains the approved word and phrase contractions used by personnel of the Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies in the use of air traffic control, communications, weather, charting, and associated services.

Nilsystems play a key role in the structure theory of measure preserving systems, arising as the natural objects that describe the behavior of multiple ergodic averages. This book is a comprehensive treatment of their role in ergodic theory, covering development of the abstract theory leading to the structural statements, applications of these results, and connections to other fields. Starting with a summary of the relevant dynamical background, the book methodically develops the theory of cubic structures that give rise to nilpotent groups and reviews results on nilsystems and their properties that are scattered throughout the literature. These basic ingredients lay the groundwork for the ergodic structure theorems, and the book includes numerous formulations of these deep results, along with detailed proofs. The structure theorems have many applications, both in ergodic theory and in related fields; the book develops the connections to topological dynamics, combinatorics, and number theory, including an overview of the role of nilsystems in each of these areas. The final section is devoted to applications of the structure theory, covering numerous convergence and recurrence results. The book is aimed at graduate students and researchers in ergodic theory, along with those who work in the related areas of arithmetic combinatorics, harmonic analysis, and number theory.

This books analyzes different approaches to modeling earthquake-induced structural pounding and shows the results of the studies on collisions between buildings and between bridge segments during ground motions. Aspects related to the mitigation of pounding effects as well as the design of structures prone to pounding are also discussed. Earthquake-induced structural pounding between insufficiently separated buildings, and between bridge segments, has been repeatedly observed during ground motions. The reports after earthquakes indicate that it may result in limited local damage in the case of moderate seismic events, or in considerable destruction or even the collapse of colliding structures during severe ground motions. Pounding in buildings is usually caused by the differences in dynamic properties between structures, which make them vibrate out-of-phase under seismic excitation. In contrast, in the case of longer bridge structures, it is more often the seismic wave propagation effect that induces collisions between superstructure segments during earthquakes.

The papers in this volume cover a wide range of subjects covering the most recent developments in Celestial Mechanics from the theoretical point of nonlinear dynamical systems to the application to real problems. We emphasize the papers on the formation of planetary systems, their stability and also the problem of habitable zones in extrasolar planetary systems. A special topic is the stability of Trojans in our planetary system, where more and more realistic dynamical models are used to explain their complex motions: besides the important contribution from the theoretical point of view, the results of several numerical experiments unraveled the structure of the stable zone around the librations points. This volume will be of interest to astronomers and mathematicians interested in Hamiltonian mechanics and in the dynamics of planetary systems.

A retelling of the world's most classic fairytale. Anti-Cinderella starts as you would expect, but good intentions lead to deadly consequences. Now Anya must bear the choice of sacrificing someone close to her for her dream, or sacrificing her dream to save an entire kingdom. Either way, someone loses their happy ending, and their life.

​The last two decades increasingly have challenged the field of management by confronting it with rapidly growing levels of dynamism, inter-connectedness, and complexity. Systems-based management approaches, their promise already proven, offer great potentials for influencing and coping with this development. This collection of essays offers ideas and exemplary case studies from experts in systemic management, organiza-tional cybernetics, and system dynamics for meeting the challenges in so-cio-economic systems. This book was compiled to honor the academic achievement of Markus Schwaninger, a leading protagonist in developing the field of systemic management and organizational cybernetics. His stature in the field is demonstrated in the forewords by Raul Espejo and John Sterman. The efforts of 18 researchers and practitioners, all closely related to Markus Schwaninger, offer conceptual and empirical approaches that will allow managers and advanced students of the management profession to analyze, understand, and design intelligent organizations. The book weaves its content from both theory and practice and offers hints for improving a variety of organizations, both private and public, profit and non-profit, and large and small.​

Underactuated multibody systems are intriguing mechatronic systems, as they posses fewer control inputs than degrees of freedom. Some examples are modern light-weight flexible robots and articulated manipulators with passive joints. This book investigates such underactuated multibody systems from an integrated perspective. This includes all major steps from the modeling of rigid and flexible multibody systems, through nonlinear control theory, to optimal system design. The underlying theories and techniques from these different fields are presented using a self-contained and unified approach and notation system. Subsequently, the book focuses on applications to large multibody systems with multiple degrees of freedom, which require a combination of symbolical and numerical procedures. Finally, an integrated, optimization-based design procedure is proposed, whereby both structural and control design are considered concurrently. Each chapter is supplemented by illustrated examples.