All the world’s a stage, but someone has to build it. Smooth Diao’s day is going anything but. Judging by how the stagehands treat him, you wouldn’t guess that he’s the foreman who makes sure there’s food on their tables – or that this bunch of yokels work for Xi’an’s premier theatre company, where their unseen grafting makes all the dazzling performances possible. Whoever said showbusiness was glamorous? Keeping the gang out of trouble in the city's many dives and cheap noodle bars is a thankless job when all Smooth wants to do is get home in time every night to salvage his third marriage. So, when this motley crew is given a seemingly ideal chance to set the stage for a performance in the nation's capital, it’s make or break. Can they set their internal drama aside and ignore the sneers of high society long enough to prove their worth? It’s time someone noticed who really makes the show go on.

The Material Point Method: A Continuum-Based Particle Method for Extreme Loading Cases systematically introduces the theory, code design, and application of the material point method, covering subjects such as the spatial and temporal discretization of MPM, frequently-used strength models and equations of state of materials, contact algorithms in MPM, adaptive MPM, the hybrid/coupled material point finite element method, object-oriented programming of MPM, and the application of MPM in impact, explosion, and metal forming. Recent progresses are also stated in this monograph, including improvement of efficiency, memory storage, coupling/combination with the finite element method, the contact algorithm, and their application to problems.

Cloud computing has become integrated into all sectors, from business to quotidian life. Since it has revolutionized modern computing, there is a need for updated research related to the architecture and frameworks necessary to maintain its efficiency. The Handbook of Research on End-to-End Cloud Computing Architecture Design provides architectural design and implementation studies on cloud computing from an end-to-end approach, including the latest industrial works and extensive research studies of cloud computing. This handbook enumerates deep dive and systemic studies of cloud computing from architecture to implementation. This book is a comprehensive publication ideal for programmers, IT professionals, students, researchers, and engineers.

This is the first book devoted to mobility management, covering the important principles, technologies and applications of mobility management based on years of academic research and industry experiences. The content is organized according to the reference models proposed by the authors, and emphasizes on technical principles rather than protocol details; a systematic and comprehensive introduction is presented yet without losing focuses; the existing technologies in cellular system, mobile Internet and IMS/SIP are also extensively compared. This book can be an indispensable reference for mobile communication engineers, computer network engineers, researchers and anyone else involved in academic, industrial and standardization activities on mobility management.

Wearable Systems Based Gait Monitoring and Analysis provides a thorough overview of wearable gait monitoring techniques and their use in health analysis. The text starts with an examination of the relationship between the human body's physical condition and gait, and then introduces and explains nine mainstream sensing mechanisms, including piezoresistive, resistive, capacitive, piezoelectric, inductive, optical, air pressure, EMG and IMU-based architectures. Gait sensor design considerations in terms of geometry and deployment are also introduced. Diverse processing algorithms for manipulating sensors outputs to transform raw data to understandable gait features are discussed. Furthermore, gait analysis-based health monitoring demonstrations are given at the end of this book, including both medical and occupational applications. The book will enable students of biomedical engineering, electrical engineering, signal processing, and ergonomics and practitioners to understand the medical and occupational applications of engineering-based gait analysis and falling injury prevention methods.

This volume is devoted to original research results and survey articles reviewing recent developments in reduction for stochastic PDEs with multiscale as well as application to science and technology, and to present some future research direction. This volume includes a dozen chapters by leading experts in the area, with a broad audience in mind. It should be accessible to graduate students, junior researchers and other professionals who are interested in the subject. We also take this opportunity to celebrate the contributions of Professor Anthony J Roberts, an internationally leading figure on the occasion of his 60th years birthday in 2017.

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), with a history of thousands of years, is the crystallization of the ancient Chinese people's experience in their struggle against diseases. It is also an integral part of their splendid culture. Under the influence and direction of classic Chinese philosophies, it has undergone long-term medical practice and infiltrated into, as well as absorbed from, other subjects at that time, thus gradually evolving into a unique medical theoretical system that contributed significantly to the health care of the Chinese people and the prosperity of the Chinese nation. This 7-volume set comprehensively covers the main components of TCM, such as Basic Theory, Diagnosis, Prescription, Chinese Materia Medica, Tui Na, Acupuncture and Moxibustion.

This book considers the promise of women's and gender history for revolutionizing our understanding of the past while also acknowledging the current national political, financial, and other contextual realities that can (and do) constrain or promote the possibilities for researching and writing women's history. The editors assert that the promise of women's and gender history is a cutting edge field of research, "a revolutionary development in the politics of historical scholarship," essential for understanding the human past. Further, they argue for the inseparability of women's history and gendered analytical approaches. The contributors to the volume address questions including: what have been the achievements of women's and gender history over the past two decades? To what extent has it succeeded in making women's history an integral part of historical study rather than an optional specialist area? What impact has the study of manhood, masculinities, and men's gendered power had on our understanding of women's lives? What is the relationship between gender studies and new critical histories of colonialism and empire, contact zones, cross-cultural encounters, and racialization? How is new work on cultural geography and spatial categories impacting on our historical understandings of bodily difference? This book was originally published as a special issue of the Women's History Review.

This book considers the promise of women's and gender history for revolutionizing our understanding of the past while also acknowledging the current national political, financial, and other contextual realities that can (and do) constrain or promote the possibilities for researching and writing women's history. The editors assert that the promise of women's and gender history is a cutting edge field of research, "a revolutionary development in the politics of historical scholarship," essential for understanding the human past. Further, they argue for the inseparability of women's history and gendered analytical approaches. The contributors to the volume address questions including: what have been the achievements of women's and gender history over the past two decades? To what extent has it succeeded in making women's history an integral part of historical study rather than an optional specialist area? What impact has the study of manhood, masculinities, and men's gendered power had on our understanding of women's lives? What is the relationship between gender studies and new critical histories of colonialism and empire, contact zones, cross-cultural encounters, and racialization? How is new work on cultural geography and spatial categories impacting on our historical understandings of bodily difference? This book was originally published as a special issue of the Women's History Review.

This book, based on the theory of Marxism-Leninism, aims to study the essence, content and features of various legal systems in China in different historical periods, as well as the rules of the development of Chinese legal systems. It effectively combines classic analysis and historical analysis to probe historical facts and elaborate the historical role of the legal system, revealing both the general and the specific rules of the development of China s legal system on the basis of the existing relevant research. The subject matter is of abundant theoretical and practical significance, as it enriches Marxist legal studies, deepens readers' understanding of China s legal civilization and offers guiding principles for the creation of socialist legal systems with Chinese characteristics. It discusses the trends in thinking on the reconstruction of the legal system; changing laws; western legal culture; the legal system in the period of westernization, constitution and reform; preparation for constitutionalism; modification of the law during the late Qing Dynasty; criminal, civil and commercial legislation; and judicial reforms in the modern era as well as the various ups and downs and cases of malconduct after the founding of the People's Republic of China.

This is the first book devoted to mobility management, covering the important principles, technologies and applications of mobility management based on years of academic research and industry experiences. The content is organized according to the reference models proposed by the authors, and emphasizes on technical principles rather than protocol details; a systematic and comprehensive introduction is presented yet without losing focuses; the existing technologies in cellular system, mobile Internet and IMS/SIP are also extensively compared. This book can be an indispensable reference for mobile communication engineers, computer network engineers, researchers and anyone else involved in academic, industrial and standardization activities on mobility management.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th Asia-Pacific Conference APWeb 2014 held in Changsha, China, in September 2014. The 34 full papers and 23 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 134 submissions. The papers address research, development and advanced applications of large-scale data management, web and search technologies, and information processing.

This is a unique book that provides a comprehensive understanding of nonlinear equations involving the fractional Laplacian as well as other nonlocal operators. Beginning from the definition of fractional Laplacian, it gradually leads the readers to the frontier of current research in this area. The explanations and illustrations are elementary enough so that first year graduate students can follow easily, while it is advanced enough to include many new ideas, methods, and results that appeared recently in research literature, which researchers would find helpful. It focuses on introducing direct methods on the nonlocal problems without going through extensions, such as the direct methods of moving planes, direct method of moving spheres, direct blowing up and rescaling arguments, and so on. Different from most other books, it emphasizes on illuminating the ideas behind the formal concepts and proofs, so that readers can quickly grasp the essence.

This book presents a new semiotic theory based upon category theory and applying to a classification of creativity in music and mathematics. It is the first functorial approach to mathematical semiotics that can be applied to AI implementations for creativity by using topos theory and its applications to music theory. Of particular interest is the generalized Yoneda embedding in the bidual of the category of categories (Lawvere) - parametrizing semiotic units - enabling a ÄŒech cohomology of manifolds of semiotic entities. It opens up a conceptual mathematics as initiated by Grothendieck and Galois and allows a precise description of musical and mathematical creativity, including a classification thereof in three types. This approach is new, as it connects topos theory, semiotics, creativity theory, and AI objectives for a missing link to HI (Human Intelligence). The reader can apply creativity research using our classification, cohomology theory, generalized Yoneda embedding, and Java implementation of the presented functorial display of semiotics, especially generalizing the Hjelmslev architecture. The intended audience are academic, industrial, and artistic researchers in creativity.

The three-volume set LNCS 11857, 11858, and 11859 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second Chinese Conference on Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision, PRCV 2019, held in Xi'an, China, in November 2019. The 165 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 412 submissions. The papers have been organized in the following topical sections: Part I: Object Detection, Tracking and Recognition, Part II: Image/Video Processing and Analysis, Part III: Data Analysis and Optimization.

The three-volume set LNCS 11857, 11858, and 11859 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second Chinese Conference on Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision, PRCV 2019, held in Xi'an, China, in November 2019. The 165 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 412 submissions. The papers have been organized in the following topical sections: Part I: Object Detection, Tracking and Recognition, Part II: Image/Video Processing and Analysis, Part III: Data Analysis and Optimization.

The three-volume set LNCS 11857, 11858, and 11859 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second Chinese Conference on Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision, PRCV 2019, held in Xi'an, China, in November 2019. The 165 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 412 submissions. The papers have been organized in the following topical sections: Part I: Object Detection, Tracking and Recognition, Part II: Image/Video Processing and Analysis, Part III: Data Analysis and Optimization.