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Introduction - P R Kumaraswamy China and Israel - P R Kumaraswamy Normalization and After Chinese-Palestinian Relations - William W Haddad and Mary Foeldi-Hardy China and Iraq - John Calabrese A Stake in Stability Sino-Turkish Relations - Mehmet Ogutcu Preparing for the Next Century Sino-Pakistan Relations and the Middle East - Samina Yasmeen China's Middle East Strategy - Barry Rubin Chinese Arms Exports to Iran - Bates Gill Chinese Policies on Arms Control and Proliferation in the Middle East - Gerald Steinberg China and Proliferation - Ashok Kapur Implications for India China's Economic Relations with the Middle East - Yitzhak Shichor New Dimensions The Middle Kingdom Meets the Middle East - David Dewitt Challenges and Opportunities

"The Leonardo Almanac" is an invaluable one-stop resource for those who are working at the intersection of the arts, sciences, and technology. Included are profiles of organizations and individuals active in the related fields. The organizations directory alone contains more than 500 entries for artist-in-residence, grant and fellowship, sound and music, computer arts, video, and multimedia programmes. In addition there is an artists' words on works archive, a speakers network, a section with bibliographies on everything from fractals to virtual reality to CD-ROM and multimedia, and a calendar listing of events, competition, and funding deadlines. "The Leonardo Almanac" is a consolidated and expanded version of the Leonardo Fine Art Science and Technology (FAST) Database and Archive project. It covers a wide range of topics including computer graphics and animation, holography, robotics, telecommunications and art, video, computer literature, applications of artificial intelligence to the arts, applications of computers to music, and new materials on the arts. The in-depth profiles, examples of artists' works, detailed programmes for educational institutions and research facilities, funding agencies, and artist-in-resident programmes make this a book for helping people connect with the practitioners, institutions, and programmes that can best meet the needs of their specific circumstances.

I must bring to your readers' attention one rather important omission from the (admittedly incomplete) diskography of computer music that you published in Computer Music Journal 17:4. You cite all of the Wergo computer music releases except my favorite-James Dashow's. Its reference (in your format) is: James Dashow: Archimedes, Mnemonics, and Oro, Argento, and Legno. Wergo WER 2018-50. Your own reviewer, Thomas DeLio, said in Computer Music Journal 14:2, "Each of these works exhibits the sophistication, originality, and richness of invention that we have come to expect from Dashow, one of the very best composers working with computers today.... The various formal-expressive shapes heard on this album, though quite complex and varied, are clearly audible and provide a refreshing and original listening experience. .... This CD represents a significant contribution to the most important goal of serious artists today-the creation of an art that is truly for and about our time." I personally could not agree more with this assessment.

Several factors contribute to the emergence of small but powerful computer music workstations, either as single units in a larger network of computers, or as standalone computer music systems. The current state of hardware and software development has reached a level of sophistication that makes it possible to have access to computer power and programs previously only available on larger computers for a fraction of the price. Major sound synthesis software systems have been rewritten in the C programming language, contributing to their portability and extensibility. This affects systems built within the UNIX environment, as well as those built upon other operating systems, since C has become a significant development language across operating system boundaries. Recent developments that allow for the writing and reading of standard operating system soundfiles make the necessity of designing and maintaining separate soundfile management systems virtually obsolete. The implementation of a variety of userinterface styles to computer music applications has made the creation environment much more accessible to musicians as a whole, and to composers in particular. These factors, combined with decreasing prices for powerful microcomputers, larger and faster disk drives, and the availability of high-quality, lower-cost sound conversion systems, point in a new direction: powerful, dedicated machines for individual artists, smaller computer music facilities, and larger systems based on networks of semiindependent computer music workstations. In order to identify the practical considerations pertaining to the implementation of such a system, it is useful to address the issues in the context of an actual computer music studio installation. The system described has been designed and realized, con