The Art of Being is a powerful account of how the literary form of the novel reorients philosophy toward the meaning of existence. Yi-Ping Ong shows that for Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Beauvoir, the form of the novel in its classic phase yields the conditions for reconceptualizing the nature of self-knowledge, freedom, and the world. Their discovery gives rise to a radically new poetics of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century realist novel. For the existentialists, a paradox lies at the heart of the novel. As a work of art, the novel exists as a given totality. At the same time, the capacity of the novel to compel belief in the free and independent existence of its characters depends on the absence of any perspective from which their lives may be viewed as a consummated whole. At stake in the poetics of the novel are the conditions under which knowledge of existence is possible. Ong's reframing of foundational debates in novel theory takes us beyond old dichotomies of mind and world, interiority and totality, and form and mimesis. It illuminates existential dimensions of novelistic realism overlooked by empirical and sociological approaches. Bringing together philosophy, novel theory, and intellectual history with groundbreaking readings of Tolstoy, Eliot, Austen, James, Flaubert, and Zola, The Art of Being reveals how the novel engages in its very form with philosophically rich notions of self-knowledge, freedom, authority, world, and the unfinished character of human life.

Solving modern biological problems requires advanced computational methods. Bioinformatics evolved from the active interaction of two fast-developing disciplines, biology and information technology. The central issue of this emerging field is the transformation of often distributed and unstructured biological data into meaningful information. This book describes the application of well-established concepts and techniques from areas like data mining, machine learning, database technologies, and visualization techniques to problems like protein data analysis, genome analysis and sequence databases. Chen has collected contributions from leading researchers in each area. The chapters can be read independently, as each offers a complete overview of its specific area, or, combined, this monograph is a comprehensive treatment that will appeal to students, researchers, and R&D professionals in industry who need a state-of-the-art introduction into this challenging and exciting young field.

The 14th International Nitrogen Fixation Congress was held in Beijing, China from October 27th through November 1st, 2004. This volume constitutes the proceedings of the Congress and represents a compilation of the presentations by scientists from more than 30 countries around the World who came to Beijing to discuss the progress made since the last Congress and to exchange ideas and information. This year marked the 30th anniversary of the first Congress held in Pullman, Washington, USA, in 1974. Since then, this series of Congresses has met five times in North America (three in the United States and once each in Canada and Mexico), once in South America (Brazil), four times in Western Europe (once each in Spain, The Netherlands, Germany and France), once in Eastern Europe (Russia), and once in Australia; and now for the first time in Asia. China was a most appropriate choice because China is a big country with the largest population in the World, about 1. 3 billion people, which is about 22% of the World's population. It is traditionally an agricultural country, even though China has only 7% of the available farming land. This situation explains why agriculture and its productivity are major issues for the Chinese people, its government and the scientists in the field.

We would like to welcome you to the proceedings of the workshops held in c- junction with the 27th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2008). While the ER main conference covers a wide spectrum of conceptual modeling research, increasingly complex real-world problems demand new p- spectives and activeresearchin new applications.The ER workshopsattempt to provideresearchers, students, andindustry professionalswitha forumto present and discuss emerging hot topics related to conceptual modeling. We received 13 excellent proposals for workshops to be held with ER 2008. We accepted the following seven based on peer reviews: 1. The Second International Workshop on Conceptual Modeling for Life S- ences Applications (CMLSA 2008), organized by Yi-Ping Phoebe Chen and Sven Hartmann. 2. The 5th International Workshopon Evolution and Change in Data Mana- ment (ECDM 2008), organized by Fabio Grandi. 3. The 4th International Workshop on Foundations and Practices of UML (FP-UML 2008), organized by Juan Trujillo and Andreas L. Opdahl. 4. The First International Workshop on Modeling Mobile Applications and Services (M2AS 2008), organized by Fernando Ferri, Patrizia Grifoni, and Maria Chiara Caschera. 5. The Second International Workshop on Requirements, Intentions and Goals in Conceptual Modeling (RIGiM 2008), organized by Colette Rolland, C- son Woo, and Camille Salinesi. 6. The Second International Workshop on Semantic and Conceptual Issues in Geographic Information Systems (SeCoGIS 2008), organized by Esteban Zim anyi and Christophe Claramunt. 7. The 5th International Workshop on Web Information Systems Modeling (WISM 2008), organized by Flavius Frasincar, Geert-Jan Houben, and Philippe Thiran."

The 14th International Nitrogen Fixation Congress was held in Beijing, China from October 27th through November 1st, 2004. This volume constitutes the proceedings of the Congress and represents a compilation of the presentations by scientists from more than 30 countries around the World who came to Beijing to discuss the progress made since the last Congress and to exchange ideas and information. This year marked the 30th anniversary of the first Congress held in Pullman, Washington, USA, in 1974. Since then, this series of Congresses has met five times in North America (three in the United States and once each in Canada and Mexico), once in South America (Brazil), four times in Western Europe (once each in Spain, The Netherlands, Germany and France), once in Eastern Europe (Russia), and once in Australia; and now for the first time in Asia. China was a most appropriate choice because China is a big country with the largest population in the World, about 1. 3 billion people, which is about 22% of the World's population. It is traditionally an agricultural country, even though China has only 7% of the available farming land. This situation explains why agriculture and its productivity are major issues for the Chinese people, its government and the scientists in the field.

Solving modern biological problems requires advanced computational methods. Bioinformatics evolved from the active interaction of two fast-developing disciplines, biology and information technology. The central issue of this emerging field is the transformation of often distributed and unstructured biological data into meaningful information.

This book describes the application of well-established concepts and techniques from areas like data mining, machine learning, database technologies, and visualization techniques to problems like protein data analysis, genome analysis and sequence databases. Chen has collected contributions from leading researchers in each area. The chapters can be read independently, as each offers a complete overview of its specific area, or, combined, this monograph is a comprehensive treatment that will appeal to students, researchers, and R&D professionals in industry who need a state-of-the-art introduction into this challenging and exciting young field.

The 16th international conference on Multimedia Modeling (MMM2010) was held in the famous mountain city Chongqing, China, January 6-8, 2010, and hosted by Southwest University. MMM is a leading international conference for researchersand industry practitioners to share their new ideas, original research results and practicaldevelopment experiences from all multimedia related areas. MMM2010attractedmorethan160regular, specialsession, anddemosession submissions from 21 countries/regions around the world. All submitted papers were reviewed by at least two PC members or external reviewers, and most of them were reviewed by three reviewers. The review process was very selective. From the total of 133 submissions to the main track, 43 (32. 3%) were accepted as regular papers, 22 (16. 5%) as short papers. In all, 15 papers were received for three special sessions, which is by invitation only, and 14 submissions were received for a demo session, with 9 being selected. Authors of accepted papers come from 16 countries/regions. This volume of the proceedings contains the abstracts of three invited talks and all the regular, short, special session and demo papers. The regular papers were categorized into nine sections: 3D mod- ing;advancedvideocodingandadaptation;face, gestureandapplications;image processing;imageretrieval;learningsemanticconcepts;mediaanalysisandm- eling; semantic video concepts; and tracking and motion analysis. Three special sessions were video analysis and event recognition, cross-X multimedia mining in large scale, and mobile computing and applications. The technical programfeatured three invited talks, paralleloral presentation of all the accepted regular and special session papers, and poster sessions for short and demo pape