Culture has an abiding influence on the way countries and business corporations are governed. This book introduces the reader to the deep philosophies that drive corporations and governments in East Asia, from China through Japan and South Korea to Singapore. With sparkling clarity and spiced with anecdotes and case studies, it depicts how respect for cultures can lead to spectacular success, or the lack of it to failure. Confucian practices such as guanxi in Chinese society, the benevolent culture of entity firms in Japan, and patriarchal chaebols in South Korea are analyzed with examples like Esquel, Nissan, and Samsung. A delightful chapter on Daoism shows how it drives Jack Ma's Alibaba.com. In the governance of nations, the author reinforces Burke's dictum that systems of government must be consonant with traditional cultures, and he calls out misguided attempts by the West to foist liberal democracies on civilizations in the East where respect for authority and communitarian values come before individual interest. The author advances the novel concept of the meritocratic democracy in which leaders are chosen not by electoral popularity but by proven ability. In a thought-provoking concluding chapter, he evaluates prospective constitutional changes in China that would enshrine meritocratic democracy as an alternative to liberal democracies that have turned dysfunctional in many Western nations.

Culture has an abiding influence on the way countries and business corporations are governed. This book introduces the reader to the deep philosophies that drive corporations and governments in East Asia, from China through Japan and South Korea to Singapore. With sparkling clarity and spiced with anecdotes and case studies, it depicts how respect for cultures can lead to spectacular success, or the lack of it to failure. Confucian practices such as guanxi in Chinese society, the benevolent culture of entity firms in Japan, and patriarchal chaebols in South Korea are analyzed with examples like Esquel, Nissan, and Samsung. A delightful chapter on Daoism shows how it drives Jack Ma's Alibaba.com. In the governance of nations, the author reinforces Burke's dictum that systems of government must be consonant with traditional cultures, and he calls out misguided attempts by the West to foist liberal democracies on civilizations in the East where respect for authority and communitarian values come before individual interest. The author advances the novel concept of the meritocratic democracy in which leaders are chosen not by electoral popularity but by proven ability. In a thought-provoking concluding chapter, he evaluates prospective constitutional changes in China that would enshrine meritocratic democracy as an alternative to liberal democracies that have turned dysfunctional in many Western nations.

This book includes results of the seventh International Conference on Fuzzy Information and Engineering (ICFIE'2014) and the 1st International Conference of Operations Research and Management (ICORM'2014) on November 7-11, 2014 in ZhuHai, China. The book, contains 35 selected high-quality papers, and is divided into five main parts: Part I focuses on ``Fuzzy Systems and Its Applications", Part II on ``Fuzzy Mathematics and Its Applications", Part III discusses ``Fuzzy Information and Computer", Part IV is devoted to ``Operations Research and Management and Its Applications" and Part V includes various other topics.

A colorful and funny story about hats and animals. For readers ages 3 years and up. Woosh! Bear's colorful hat is blown away. From there it goes on a serendipitous adventure through all of Bear's animal friends back to his head. Will Bear get his hat back? The illustrations, full of emotion, movement, and playfulness, add to this colorful and funny story about hats and animals.

The book focuses on Schema Matching, the task of (semi-)automatically identifying semantic correspondences between elements of metadata structures, such as, database schemas, ontologies, and XML message formats. It is of key importance for interoperability and data integration in numerous applications, such as data warehousing, integration of web-sources, message mapping in E-business, and ontology alignment on the Semantic Web. However, in today's systems, schema matching is still manual; a time-consuming, tedious, and error-prone process, which becomes increasingly impractical considering the high complexity and number of schemas and data sources to be dealt with. In this book, the author Do Hong Hai describes the architecture, functionality, and evaluation of the schema matching system COMA++ (Combining Matchers), which was developed by himself in his Ph.d thesis. COMA++ represents a generic and customizable system for semi-automatic schema matching, which can combine different match algorithms in a flexible way. In comprehensive evaluations using large real-world schemas and ontologies, COMA++ has shown high quality as compared to the state of the art, proving its practicability for different domains. In addition, the book describes a new data integration approach, GenMapper (Generic Mapper), which utilizes instance-level correspondences between objects of data sources.