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This book is a personal saga of woe and intrigue. It recounts a seemingly endless succession of false starts, missteps, detours, dead ends, and disappointments, endured over five years, in the ultimately successful pursuit of a sponsoring unit in the People's Republic of China, for a research project on the rural industrial and artisanal enterprises of Dongyang country, Zhejiang Province. We follow author Cooper in his veritable Confucian perambulation from ministry to ministry, bureau to bureau, institute to institute, academy to academy, office to office, university to university, until he finally manages to reach a quid pro quo with Zhejiang University. Under that agreement, the project would be carried out in collaboration with Professor Jiang Yinhuo of the department of economics. The trials, tribulations and humiliations Cooper and Jiang suffered under the close supervision of the county Foreign Affairs and Public Security Offices while they gathered their 'data' over two field seasons, are described in detail.
In late imperial China, opera transmitted ideas across the social hierarchy about the self, family, society, and politics. Beijing attracted a diverse array of opera genres and audiences and, by extension, served as a hub for the diffusion of cultural values. It is in this context that historian Andrea S. Goldman harnesses opera as a lens through which to examine urban cultural history. Her meticulous yet playful account takes up the multiplicity of opera types that proliferated at the time, exploring them as contested sites through which the Qing court and commercial playhouses negotiated influence and control over the social and moral order. Opera performance blurred lines between public and private life, and offered a stage on which to act out gender and class transgressions. This work illuminates how the state and various urban constituencies manipulated opera to their own ends, and sheds light on empire-wide transformations underway at the time.
Written by a team of pioneering scientists from around the world, Low Temperature Plasma Technology: Methods and Applications brings together recent technological advances and research in the rapidly growing field of low temperature plasmas. The book provides a comprehensive overview of related phenomena such as plasma bullets, plasma penetration into biofilms, discharge-mode transition of atmospheric pressure plasmas, and self-organization of microdischarges. It describes relevant technology and diagnostics, including nanosecond pulsed discharge, cavity ringdown spectroscopy, and laser-induced fluorescence measurement, and explores the increasing research on atmospheric pressure nonequilibr...
Old Stories Retold explores the ways modern Chinese narratives dramatize and embody the historical sense that links them to the past and to the Chinese literary tradition. Largely guided by Walter Benjamin’s discussions of history, G. Andrew Stuckey looks at the ways Chinese narrative engages a historical process that pieces together fragments of the past into new configurations to better serve present needs. By examining intertextual connections between separate texts, Stuckey seeks to discover traces of an “original,” whether it be thought of as the past, history, or tradition, when it has been rewritten in modern and contemporary Chinese fiction. Old Stories Retold shows how the articulation of the past into new historical configurations disrupts accepted understandings of the past, and as such, can be intentionally pitted against modernist historical knowledge to resist the modernist ends that this knowledge is mobilized to achieve.
This volume represents the latest research in cultural anthropology on an ascendant and globalizing China, covering the many different dimensions of China’s ascendancy both within China itself and beyond. It focuses not only on the real and perceived successes of China in the past four decades, but also on the difficulties, tensions, and dangers that have emerged as a result of rapid economic development: class polarization, state expansion, psychological distress, and environmental degradation. Including contributions by some of the most well-known cultural anthropologists of China, as well as rising innovative younger scholars, this book documents and analyzes China’s multifaceted tran...
Social robots not only work with humans in collaborative workspaces – we meet them in shopping malls and even more personal settings like health and care. Does this imply they should become more human, able to interpret and adequately respond to human emotions? Do we want them to help elderly people? Do we want them to support us when we are old ourselves? Do we want them to just clean and keep things orderly – or would we accept them helping us to go to the toilet, or even feed us if we suffer from Parkinson’s disease? The answers to these questions differ from person to person. They depend on cultural background, personal experiences – but probably most of all on the robot in quest...
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the joint conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases: ECML PKDD 2008, held in Antwerp, Belgium, in September 2008. The 100 papers presented in two volumes, together with 5 invited talks, were carefully reviewed and selected from 521 submissions. In addition to the regular papers the volume contains 14 abstracts of papers appearing in full version in the Machine Learning Journal and the Knowledge Discovery and Databases Journal of Springer. The conference intends to provide an international forum for the discussion of the latest high quality research results in all areas related to machine learning and knowledge discovery in databases. The topics addressed are application of machine learning and data mining methods to real-world problems, particularly exploratory research that describes novel learning and mining tasks and applications requiring non-standard techniques.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Knowledge Science, Engineering and Management, KSEM 2009, held in Vienna, Austria, in November 2009. The 42 revised full papers and 2 discussion panels presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions for inclusion in the book. The papers provide new ideas and report state of the art research results in the broad areas of knowledge science, knowledge engineering, and knowledge management.
The book Eco-Restoration of the Polluted Environment: A Biological Perspective explores recent advances in biological strategies for the remediation of polluted environments, including soil, water, and air. It covers bioremediation of heavy metals, radioactive waste, and waste gases, which are believed to be bottleneck problems for researchers working in this field. The book contains separate chapters on genetic engineering technology for enhancement of the bioremediation potential of bioresources and the role of biosurfactants, enzymes, and exo-polysaccharides for bioremediation of polluted environments, along with basic aspects of eco-restoration by microorganisms. It summarizes the signif...