Crafted from a research project that lasted for three years, this book examines the impacts of China's universal two-child policy under the lens of education and focuses specifically on early childhood. This book not only provides number projection, but also the prediction and judgment of the supply and demand of service resources in early childhood education. It attempts to reveal the attitudes and views of families and stakeholders on the universal two-child policy and present the public's policy requirements for the quality of early childhood education. In addition, it analyses possible problems and challenges in current kindergarten layouts and resources allocation. Lastly, it aims to provide references and bases for formulating the plan that adapts to changes of Chinese preschoolers, supply guarantee of future early childhood education and the construction of public service system. Offering rich insights into the current and future status of education in China, this text will be of interest to students, scholars, and researchers of sociology, early childhood education, contemporary China studies, East Asian educational practices and policy.

Drawing on state-of-the-art research results, Resistance Welding: Fundamentals and Applications, Second Edition systematically presents fundamental aspects of important processes in resistance welding and discusses their implications on real-world welding applications. This updated edition describes progress made in resistance welding research and practice since the publication of the first edition. New to the Second Edition: Significant addition of the metallurgical aspects of materials involved in resistance welding, such as steels, aluminum and magnesium alloys, zinc, and copper Electric current waveforms commonly used in resistance welding, including single-phase AC, single-phase DC, three-phase DC, and MFDC Magnesium welding in terms of cracking and expulsion The effect of individual welding parameters 2-D and 3-D lobe diagrams New materials for the ultrasonic evaluation of welds, including A-scan, B-scan, and in-line A-scan The book begins with chapters on the metallurgical processes in resistance spot welding, the basics of welding schedule selection, and cracking in the nugget and heat-affected zone of alloys. The next several chapters discuss commonly conducted mechanical tests, the monitoring and control of a welding process, and the destructive and nondestructive evaluation of weld quality. The authors then analyze the mechanisms of expulsion-a process largely responsible for defect formation and other unwanted features-and explore an often overlooked topic in resistance welding-related research: the influence of mechanical aspects of welding machines. The final chapters explain how to numerically simulate a resistance welding process and apply statistical design and analysis approaches to welding research. To obtain a broad understanding of this area, readers previously had to scour large quantities of research on resistance welding and essential related subjects, such as statistical analysis. This book collects the necessary information in one source for students, researchers, and practitioners in the sheet metal industry. It thoroughly reviews state-of-the-art results in resistance welding research and gives you a solid foundation for solving practical problems in a scientific and systematic manner.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become pervasive in most areas of research and applications. While computation can significantly reduce mental efforts for complex problem solving, effective computer algorithms allow continuous improvement of AI tools to handle complexity-in both time and memory requirements-for machine learning in large datasets. Meanwhile, data science is an evolving scientific discipline that strives to overcome the hindrance of traditional skills that are too limited to enable scientific discovery when leveraging research outcomes. Solutions to many problems in medicine and life science, which cannot be answered by these conventional approaches, are urgently needed for society. This edited book attempts to report recent advances in the complementary domains of AI, computation, and data science with applications in medicine and life science. The benefits to the reader are manifold as researchers from similar or different fields can be aware of advanced developments and novel applications that can be useful for either immediate implementations or future scientific pursuit. Features: Considers recent advances in AI, computation, and data science for solving complex problems in medicine, physiology, biology, chemistry, and biochemistry Provides recent developments in three evolving key areas and their complementary combinations: AI, computation, and data science Reports on applications in medicine and physiology, including cancer, neuroscience, and digital pathology Examines applications in life science, including systems biology, biochemistry, and even food technology This unique book, representing research from a team of international contributors, has not only real utility in academia for those in the medical and life sciences communities, but also a much wider readership from industry, science, and other areas of technology and education.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become pervasive in most areas of research and applications. While computation can significantly reduce mental efforts for complex problem solving, effective computer algorithms allow continuous improvement of AI tools to handle complexity-in both time and memory requirements-for machine learning in large datasets. Meanwhile, data science is an evolving scientific discipline that strives to overcome the hindrance of traditional skills that are too limited to enable scientific discovery when leveraging research outcomes. Solutions to many problems in medicine and life science, which cannot be answered by these conventional approaches, are urgently needed for society. This edited book attempts to report recent advances in the complementary domains of AI, computation, and data science with applications in medicine and life science. The benefits to the reader are manifold as researchers from similar or different fields can be aware of advanced developments and novel applications that can be useful for either immediate implementations or future scientific pursuit. Features: Considers recent advances in AI, computation, and data science for solving complex problems in medicine, physiology, biology, chemistry, and biochemistry Provides recent developments in three evolving key areas and their complementary combinations: AI, computation, and data science Reports on applications in medicine and physiology, including cancer, neuroscience, and digital pathology Examines applications in life science, including systems biology, biochemistry, and even food technology This unique book, representing research from a team of international contributors, has not only real utility in academia for those in the medical and life sciences communities, but also a much wider readership from industry, science, and other areas of technology and education.

Series-parallel conversion systems, in which multiple standardized converter modules are connected in series or parallel at the input and output sides, to meet the demands of various applications. This book focuses on the control strategies for the series-parallel conversion systems with DC-DC converters and DC-AC inverters as the basic modules, respectively, to achieve input voltage/current sharing and output voltage/current sharing among the constituent modules. The detailed theoretical analysis with design examples and experimental validations are presented. This book is essential and valuable reference for graduate students and academics majoring in power electronics and engineers engaged in developing DC-DC converters, DC-AC inverters and power electronics transformers.

This useful reference is the first book to address key aspects of food powder technology. It assembles organized and updated information on the physical properties, production, and functionality of food powder, previously unavailable in book form.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics, ICMLC 2005, held in Guangzhou, China in August 2005.

The 114 revised full papers of this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 2461 paper submissions and 1050 real conference presentations respectively during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on agents and distributed artificial intelligence, control, data mining and knowledge discovery, fuzzy information processing, learning and reasoning, machine learning applications, neural networks and statistical learning methods, pattern recognition, vision and image processing.

This useful reference is the first book to address key aspects of food powder technology. It assembles organized and updated information on the physical properties, production, and functionality of food powder, previously unavailable in book form.

Drawing on state-of-the-art research results, Resistance Welding: Fundamentals and Applications, Second Edition systematically presents fundamental aspects of important processes in resistance welding and discusses their implications on real-world welding applications. This updated edition describes progress made in resistance welding research and practice since the publication of the first edition.

New to the Second Edition:

• Significant addition of the metallurgical aspects of materials involved in resistance welding, such as steels, aluminum and magnesium alloys, zinc, and copper
• Electric current waveforms commonly used in resistance welding, including single-phase AC, single-phase DC, three-phase DC, and MFDC
• Magnesium welding in terms of cracking and expulsion
• The effect of individual welding parameters
• 2-D and 3-D lobe diagrams
• New materials for the ultrasonic evaluation of welds, including A-scan, B-scan, and in-line A-scan

The book begins with chapters on the metallurgical processes in resistance spot welding, the basics of welding schedule selection, and cracking in the nugget and heat-affected zone of alloys. The next several chapters discuss commonly conducted mechanical tests, the monitoring and control of a welding process, and the destructive and nondestructive evaluation of weld quality. The authors then analyze the mechanisms of expulsion a process largely responsible for defect formation and other unwanted features and explore an often overlooked topic in resistance welding-related research: the influence of mechanical aspects of welding machines. The final chapters explain how to numerically simulate a resistance welding process and apply statistical design and analysis approaches to welding research.

To obtain a broad understanding of this area, readers previously had to scour large quantities of research on resistance welding and essential related subjects, such as statistical analysis. This book collects the necessary information in one source for students, researchers, and practitioners in the sheet metal industry. It thoroughly reviews state-of-the-art results in resistance welding research and gives you a solid foundation for solving practical problems in a scientific and systematic manner.

Political discourse or ideology has been extensively studied from different perspectives, including that of discourse studies. Yet, without taking into account the wider socio-historical contexts within which the object of analysis is produced, constructed and received, any analysis of political speeches per se would be superficial (Bourdieu, 1991). Subscribing to this epistemological thrust, this study is aimed at exploring the ways in which language is employed by politicians as a tool to represent their political ideologies in political discourse with special reference to the presidential debates in the course of the presidential election in the United States. This study is theoretically informed by the non-linguistic, critical discourse analysis, and political linguistic approaches to the study of language, ideology and power. By applying such methodology to the analysis of the 2004 American presidential debates between Bush and Kerry, this study identifies major discursive manifestations of ideologies of the confronting political parties (The Republican and the Democratic) and social camps (anti-terrorism and terrorism).

This study is an attempt to throw light on the current trends in the global shipping industry, its laws and regulations, its queer financing structure, its strengths and weaknesses and above all its international nature which cuts across the boundaries of the nations of the world. Several aspects of the shipping industry are critically evaluated. It would be also appropriate to state that in no way is this an exhaustive study of the industry. On the contrary it specifically highlights certain aspects that have assumed critical importance and would have a bearing on the future of the industry.

Computational models have been playing a significant role for the computer-based analysis of biological and biomedical data. Given the recent availability of genomic sequences and microarray gene expression data, there is an increasing demand for developing and applying advanced computational techniques for exploring these types of data such as functional interpretation of gene expression data, deciphering of how genes and proteins work together in pathways and networks, extracting and analysing phenotypic features of mitotic cells for high throughput screening of novel anti-mitotic drugs. Successful applications of advanced computational algorithms to solving modern life-science problems will make significant impacts on several important and promising issues related to genomic medicine, molecular imaging, and the scientific knowledge of the genetic basis of diseases.