This book includes a set of rigorously reviewed world-class manuscripts addressing and detailing state-of-the-art research projects in the areas of Computer Science, Informatics, and Systems Sciences, and Engineering. It includes selected papers from the conference proceedings of the Eighth and some selected papers of the Ninth International Joint Conferences on Computer, Information, and Systems Sciences, and Engineering (CISSE 2012 & CISSE 2013).
Margaret Diaz reimagines a classic tale with a modern twist. A young woman enters a complex relationship with a powerful man, where passion transforms into manipulation and control, revealing the dark cost of power.
A widowed doctor escorts a freed slave and her daughter across the West to find a distant faith healer, battling the mother’s belief of possession and the doctor’s suspicion of disease as everything the child touches dies.
A young change-maker goes deep into dairy land and takes on the giants of New Zealand’s most powerful industry, exposing the whitewash and searching for solutions.
In his search for human connection, Leo attempts to meet up with a woman he found on a dating site but instead falls into a severe blackmailing trap set up by Karl, who has a criminal past.
A veteran sports agent races to secure a final lucrative contract for his star client, as both their careers and lives hang in the balance.
A chronically married couple flirts with a threesome to rediscover themselves.
Set in the sleepless night of Nuit Blanche, White Night follows six different stories as they weave their way through various art installations and tackle issues of love, loss, aging and the ever important question; is it art? White Night is a feature film shot entirely in one night by five different directors.
LBJ centers on the political upheaval that Vice President Johnson faced when he was thrust into the presidency at the hands of an assassin’s bullet in November 1963. With political battles on both sides of the aisle, Johnson struggles to heal a nation and secure his presidency by passing Kennedy’s historic Civil Rights Act.
As a victim and survivor of sex trafficking, Alys I. Lashley endures a lonely, desperate, and paranoid existence. Starving, broke…her sleazy landlord begins to demand lurid favors in exchange for rent, but she can only hold him off for so long. Then one day, a lawyer visits and reveals that Alys has been named in a will to inherit a mysterious property. All she must do is travel to the secluded house in the cold dead of winter and claim it in person. Alys revels in her good fortune until she finds a mysterious DVD lying on the floor of the house cellar. Alys places the disc in the player and watches a video recording made by an uncaught serial killer and rapist. He informs Alys that she was lured there. Everything – including the food – is booby-trapped. And he might still be alive.
The strange case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once believed to be the wealthiest man in Russia, who rocketed to prosperity and prominence in the 1990s, served a decade in prison, and became an unlikely martyr for the anti-Putin movement.
