When it became evident that the People's Republic of China (PRC) was on the verge of banning the Falun Gong movement, Li Hongzhi, the movement's founder, and his family escaped China, relocating permanently in the United States. Subsequently, the dramatic crackdown on Falun Gong in 1999 made international headlines. From the safety of his new home, Master Li encouraged his followers left behind in the PRC to vigorously demonstrate against the Chinese government, even if it meant imprisonment or even death. Further, Master Li actively discourages his followers from telling outsiders about his esoteric teachings; rather, he explicitly directs them to say that Falun Gong is just a peaceful spiritual exercise group being persecuted by the PRC. Not only has Falun Gong succeeded in propagating their side of the story in the media but the group will vigorously protest any news story that disagrees with their point of view. In more recent years, Falun Gong has attempted to silence critical scholars, including two of the contributors to the present volume. Enlightened Martyrdom: The Hidden Side of Falun Gong provides a comprehensive overview of Falun Gong: the movement's background, history, beliefs and practices. But whereas prior treatments have generally tended to downplay Falun Gong's 'dark side, ' in Enlightened Martyrdom, we have made an effort to include treatments of the less palatable aspects of this movement.

When it became evident that the People's Republic of China (PRC) was on the verge of banning the Falun Gong movement, Li Hongzhi, the movement's founder, and his family escaped China, relocating permanently in the United States. Subsequently, the dramatic crackdown on Falun Gong in 1999 made international headlines. From the safety of his new home, Master Li encouraged his followers left behind in the PRC to vigorously demonstrate against the Chinese government, even if it meant imprisonment or even death. Further, Master Li actively discourages his followers from telling outsiders about his esoteric teachings; rather, he explicitly directs them to say that Falun Gong is just a peaceful spiritual exercise group being persecuted by the PRC. Not only has Falun Gong succeeded in propagating their side of the story in the media but the group will vigorously protest any news story that disagrees with their point of view. In more recent years, Falun Gong has attempted to silence critical scholars, including two of the contributors to the present volume. Enlightened Martyrdom: The Hidden Side of Falun Gong provides a comprehensive overview of Falun Gong: the movement's background, history, beliefs and practices. But whereas prior treatments have generally tended to downplay Falun Gong's 'dark side, ' in Enlightened Martyrdom, we have made an effort to include treatments of the less palatable aspects of this movement.

Over two-dimensional Folded Optical Orthogonal Coding (FOOe network, a simple threshold detection scheme is illustrated to detect the number of simultaneous network users and to adjust the detection threshold value instantaneously. A special wavelength called pilot wavelength is added into the original transmission patterns of every network user. At the receiver, we can acquire the number of simultaneous network users from the power of the pilot wavelength. Consequently, by adjusting the detection power threshold to the optimum threshold value, we can decrease the bit error rate (BER) and improve the system performance for the discussed two- dimensional optical code-division multiple-access (2D-OCDMA) network. Compared with conventional network system adopting prime codes or modified prime codes, the proposed FOOC network with pilot wavelength threshold detection shows an enhanced BER performance and supports more simultaneous network users.