Welcome to the proceedings of the 17th Multimedia Modeling Conference (MMM 2011) held in Taipei, Taiwan, during January 5–7, 2011. Following the success of the 16 preceding conferences, the 17th MMM brought together researchers,developers, practitioners, and educators in the field of multimedia. Both practical systems and theories...

The challenge is to develop an existing network so as to maximise its...

In 1999, in The Return of Depression Economics, Paul Krugman surveyed the economic crises that had swept across Asia and Latin America, and pointed out that those crises were a warning for all of us: like diseases that have become resistant to antibiotics, the economic maladies that caused the Great Depression were making a comeback. In...

Dr. Alireza Azmandian was born in Tehran in 1953 and traveled to America in 1985, where he earned his master's degree in Engineering Management and his Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Southern California. He returned to Iran in 1997 in order to pass on the invaluable achievements of the "technology...

Travel to exotic places is fascinating, and equally so are infections and other dangers of exotic travel. Moreover, one need not be traveling to suffer these maladies; sometimes they travel to you. The enormous global mobility demands a public health response. The result is the concept of ‘travel medicine’ as a separate...

The second congress of the Paci?c Asian Society of Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery (PASMISS) held in Phuket,Thailand,August 5–6,2002,was highly s- cessful. Dr.Akira Dezawa, the president, had worked hard in organizing the congress,which was well attended.All scienti?c papers presented were of the highest standard and were worthy of...

TV viewers today are exposed to overwhelming...

This book examines North Korea’s nuclear diplomacy over a long time period from the early 1960s, setting its dangerous brinkmanship in the wider context of North Korea’s military and diplomatic campaigns to achieve its political goals. It argues that the last four decades of military adventurism demonstrates Pyongyang’s...