This book explores the unfolding of modernity in the greater Asia that uniquely takes shape at different times and places, with a particular attention to a common thread that has been at heart of the development: religion. The status of religion has been relegated in the Western modernity to such that its effects be restricted within the private realm and not be exerted in the public or one's rationality. This edited volume sheds light on the multifarious forces of religion both in the past and present that have impacted on the essential aspects of modern society - aspects in which one does not usually have recourse to religion in the West - from science and technology, politics, and to identity in Asia. Interdisciplinary approaches in the volume allow one to broadly examine religious practices within Asian contexts, thus enabling to reevaluate the concept, scope, and gamut of so-called religion.

Database technology is an important subject in Computer Science. Every large company and nation needs a database to store information. The technology has evolved from file systems in the 60's, to Hierarchical and Network databases in the 70's, to relational databases in the 80's, object-oriented databases in the 90's, and to XML documents and NoSQL today. As a result, there is a need to reengineer and update old databases into new databases. This book presents solutions for this task. In this fourth edition, Chapter 9 - Heterogeneous Database Connectivity (HDBC) offers a database gateway platform for companies to communicate with each other not only with their data, but also via their database. The ability of sharing a database can contribute to the applications of Big Data and surveys for decision support systems. The HDBC gateway solution collects input from the database, transfers the data into its middleware storage, converts it into a common data format such as XML documents, and then distributes them to the users. HDBC transforms the common data into the target database to meet the user's requirements, acting like a voltage transformer hub. The voltage transformer converts the voltage to a voltage required by the users. Similarly, HDBC transforms the database to the target database required by the users. This book covers reengineering for data conversion, integration for combining databases and merging databases and expert system rules, normalization for eliminating duplicate data from the database, and above all, HDBC connects all legacy databases to one target database for the users. The authors provide a forum for readers to ask questions and the answers are given by the authors and the other readers on the Internet.