In recent years, economic relations between Latin American countries and the People's Republic of China have developed steadily, exhibiting marked tendencies toward greater diversification. Using newly released data from the Chinese Government along with extensive interviews in China and Latin America, Li gives us the first systematic analysis of the economic and political ideas underlying this surge in Sino-Latin American economic relations. His focus on China's relations with six major trading partners--Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, Chile, Mexico, and Peru--provides an accurate assessment of trends and prospects for an emerging bilateral economic partnership. The conclusions of this study find that Sino-Latin American ties have become less ideological and present PRC involvement has been largely compatible with Western interests. Since China is expected to develop into a major economic player in Latin America in the years to come, it is important for the United States to understand the implications of these burgeoning relations. This study is a valuable and much-needed contribution to the literature of South-South cooperation and collective self-reliance.

Li examines three main areas of Sino-Latin American economic relations: trade, aid, and investment. Beginning with the Communist Revolution in China, he traces the history of China's relations with the six Latin countries, moving through early developments, the post-Cuban Revolution era, the 1970s normalization period, and China's Open-Door policy. Future prospects are considered in the concluding chapters, with hopes for greater economic interactions depending on the outcomes of China's own economic reforms and Latin America's economic recession. This book will be of interest to those who practice in the sphere of world political-economic relations, as well as academics who study them.

Nonlinearities and optics, optoelectronics and fiber communications are discussed systematically in this book. In a unified theoretical treatment, the book addresses the three categories of materials: fibers, semiconductors, and nonlinear crystals. In each case emphasis is placed on the nonlinear character of their refractive indices and optical absorption. The text also gives an in-depth analysis of the uses and limitations of phontonic nonlinearities with regard to wavelength division multiplexing and high-speed fiber communications. It will be of interest to graduate students as well as researchers and engineers in the fields of nonlinear optics and optical communications.

This book reviews and presents several approaches to advanced decision-making models for safety and risk assessment. Each introduced model provides case studies indicating a high level of efficiency, robustness, and applicability, which allow readers to utilize them in their understudy risk-based assessment applications. The book begins by introducing a novel dynamic DEMATEL for improving safety management systems. It then progresses logically, dedicating a chapter to each approach, including advanced FMEA with probabilistic linguistic preference relations, Bayesian Network approach and interval type-2 fuzzy set, advanced TOPSIS with spherical fuzzy set, and advanced BWM with neutrosophic fuzzy set and evidence theory. This book will be of interest to professionals and researchers working in the field of system safety and reliability and postgraduate and undergraduate students studying applications of decision-making tools and expert systems.

As the first English-language book on Taiwan's relations with Latin America, this book examines the major issues and theoretical debates on Taiwan's activities in Latin America, and its relations with the US and China. Latin America has become a crucial frontline for Taiwan. Today, more than at any time since the end of WWII, Taiwan's future as an independent state hinges on the balance of power between the United States and China. This book provides the most detailed and sophisticated analysis of contemporary Taiwan's relations with Latin America and offers insight into the US-China rivalry in the "backyard" of the United States. By bringing together a group of scholars from Taiwan, US, and Latin America, this book examines Taiwan-Latin America relations on various issues amid the intensifying the US-China strategic competition, such as public diplomacy, trade, investment, energy, and cultural exchanges. More than ever before, an understanding of Taiwan's relations with Latin America and the great power rivalry in the Western Hemisphere is essential for students and policy makers alike. The book will be of great interest to university students at all levels, as well as specialists on international relations, foreign policy, as well as Asian and Latin American studies.

.cs39D0DC8F{text-align: left;text-indent:36pt;padding:0pt 0pt 0pt 0pt;margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0pt}.cs5EFED22F{color: #000000;background-color: transparent;font-family: Times New Roman; font-size:12pt; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; }The on-going debate on China's development model presents a fascinating yet very different image of Chinese exceptionalism, an idea that is similar to American exceptionalism. Is China exceptionalism a myth or reality? Will modern China, born of Confucian creeds, be culturally, economically and politically distinct from Western industrialized nations in an age of globalization? Does the Confucian culture make any qualitative difference in China's developmental path and her international behavior in dealing with other nations? Will China be something of a paradox? Will this claim of distinction be a double-edged sword that will eventually hunt China in its future development? To decipher the complex Chinese labyrinth, this coedited book explores the development of a new social democracy, the Chinese vision of human rights and civil society, the asymmetry between economic and political development and the puzzle it presents, and the informal politics and Chinese innovation on governance and problem solving. We will also present a number of studies detailing innovations and systems that are distinctively Chinese, including innovations at local governances, the intriguing relationship between NGOs and the state, the grievance-addressing system (xinfang), and the co-existence of atheists and theists in China. As a multi-disciplinary research project, it attempts to shed some lights on these important questions.

In From Revolution to Reform, He Li examines political and economic transformation in China and Mexico, from the Mexican and Chinese revolutions at the beginning of the 20th century, to economic reforms and political liberalization in recent decades. Li also explores lessons that other developing countries could learn from the experiences of China and Mexico.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Health Information Science, HIS 2014, held in Shenzhen, China, in April 2014. The 29 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 61 submissions. They cover a wide range of topics in health information sciences and systems that support the health information management and health service delivery. They deal with medical/health/biomedicine information resources, such as patient medical records, devices and equipments, software and tools to capture, store, retrieve, process, analyse, and optimize the use of information in the health domain; data management, data mining, and knowledge discovery, all of which play a key role in the decision making, management of public health, examination of standards, privacy and security issues; computer visualization and artificial intelligence for computer-aided diagnosis; and development of new architectures and applications for health information systems.

Nonlinearities and optics, optoelectronics and fiber communications are discussed systematically in this book. In a unified theoretical treatment, the book addresses the three categories of materials: fibers, semiconductors, and nonlinear crystals. In each case emphasis is placed on the nonlinear character of their refractive indices and optical absorption. The text also gives an in-depth analysis of the uses and limitations of phontonic nonlinearities with regard to wavelength division multiplexing and high-speed fiber communications. It will be of interest to graduate students as well as researchers and engineers in the fields of nonlinear optics and optical communications.

In this book, we introduce the background and mainstream methods of probabilistic modeling and discriminative parameter optimization for speech recognition. The specific models treated in depth include the widely used exponential-family distributions and the hidden Markov model. A detailed study is presented on unifying the common objective functions for discriminative learning in speech recognition, namely maximum mutual information (MMI), minimum classification error, and minimum phone/word error. The unification is presented, with rigorous mathematical analysis, in a common rational-function form. This common form enables the use of the growth transformation (or extended Baum-Welch) optimization framework in discriminative learning of model parameters. In addition to all the necessary introduction of the background and tutorial material on the subject, we also included technical details on the derivation of the parameter optimization formulas for exponential-family distributions, discrete hidden Markov models (HMMs), and continuous-density HMMs in discriminative learning. Selected experimental results obtained by the authors in firsthand are presented to show that discriminative learning can lead to superior speech recognition performance over conventional parameter learning. Details on major algorithmic implementation issues with practical significance are provided to enable the practitioners to directly reproduce the theory in the earlier part of the book into engineering practice. Table of Contents: Introduction and Background / Statistical Speech Recognition: A Tutorial / Discriminative Learning: A Unified Objective Function / Discriminative Learning Algorithm for Exponential-Family Distributions / Discriminative Learning Algorithm for Hidden Markov Model / Practical Implementation of Discriminative Learning / Selected Experimental Results / Epilogue / Major Symbols Used in the Book and Their Descriptions / Mathematical Notation / Bibliography

This book reviews and presents several approaches to advanced decision-making models for safety and risk assessment. Each introduced model provides case studies indicating a high level of efficiency, robustness, and applicability, which allow readers to utilize them in their understudy risk-based assessment applications. The book begins by introducing a novel dynamic DEMATEL for improving safety management systems. It then progresses logically, dedicating a chapter to each approach, including advanced FMEA with probabilistic linguistic preference relations, Bayesian Network approach and interval type-2 fuzzy set, advanced TOPSIS with spherical fuzzy set, and advanced BWM with neutrosophic fuzzy set and evidence theory. This book will be of interest to professionals and researchers working in the field of system safety and reliability and postgraduate and undergraduate students studying applications of decision-making tools and expert systems.

In recent years, we have witnessed a rapid expansion of using super-thin metasurfaces to manipulate light or electromagnetic wave in a subwavelength scale. However, most designs are confined to a passive scheme and monofunctional operation, which hinders considerably the promising applications of the metasurfaces. Specifically, the tunable and multifunctional metasurfaces enable to facilitate switchable functionalities and multiple functionalities which are extremely essential and useful for integrated optics and microwaves, well alleviating aforementioned issues. In this book, we introduce our efforts in exploring the physics principles, design approaches, and numerical and experimental demonstrations on the fascinating functionalities realized. We start by introducing in Chapter 2 the "merging" scheme in constructing multi-functional metadevices, paying particular attention to its shortcomings issues. Having understood the merits and disadvantages of the "merging" scheme, we then introduce in Chapter 3 another approach to realize bifunctional metadevices under linearly polarized excitations, working in both reflection and transmission geometries or even in the full space. As a step further, we summarizes our efforts in Chapter 4 on making multifunctional devices under circularly polarized excitations, again including designing principles and devices fabrications/characterizations. Starting from Chapter 5, we turn to introduce our efforts on using the "active" scheme to construct multifunctional metadevices under linearly polarized wave operation. Chapter 6 further concentrates on how to employ the tunable strategy to achieve helicity/frequency controls of the circularly polarized waves in reflection geometry. We finally conclude this book in Chapter 7 by presenting our perspectives on future directions of metasurfaces and metadevices.