Kate is a 30-something social anthropologist returning to the emotional crime scene she reluctantly calls home. While she mercilessly unearths the remnants of a life littered with abandonment, lies and loss, she also unravels the coil that binds her to Iris, the mother she never knew. Iris' haunting disappearance lurks on the periphery of Kate's strained relations with her only surviving family: Joe, her taciturn father; Rose, her benevolent aunt; and Elaine, her reticent stepmother. Like the endangered cultures she researches, Kate faces extinction through contact with poisonous knowledge and must weigh the price of truth or risk annihilation at the hands of those she so desperately wants to trust.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence, PReMI 2009, held in New Delhi, India in December 2009. The 98 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 221 initial submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on pattern recognition and machine learning, soft computing andapplications, bio and chemo informatics, text and data mining, image analysis, document image processing, watermarking and steganography, biometrics, image and video retrieval, speech and audio processing, as well as on applications.

This edited book gives a comprehensive picture of the state of the art in authoring systems and authoring tools for advanced technology instructional systems. It includes descriptions of fifteen systems and research projects from almost every significant effort in the field. The book will appeal to researchers, teachers and advanced students working in education, instructional technology and computer-based education, psychology, cognitive science and computer science.