This book provides an up-to-date account of relevant early childhood policy and practice in five Chinese societies: the People's Republic of China or Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, and Taiwan. It analyses how traditional Chinese values, Eastern and Western curricular approaches, and socio-political, economic, cultural and demographic changes influence current policies, services and practice. It addresses responses to global concerns about the excluded and disadvantaged, and about quality, and explains lessons from and for Chinese early childhood education. This book is the first English-language research-based review of early childhood education and the factors that affect it in different Chinese societies. It is particularly timely given the increased recognition of the importance of early childhood education for human capital development globally, and the international interest in understanding early education in Chinese societies.iv>

This book presents a series of innovative technologies and research results on adaptive control of dynamic systems with quantization, uncertainty, and nonlinearity, including the theoretical success and practical development such as the approaches for stability analysis, the compensation of quantization, the treatment of subsystem interactions, and the improvement of system tracking and transient performance. Novel solutions by adopting backstepping design tools to a number of hotspots and challenging problems in the area of adaptive control are provided. In the first three chapters, the general design procedures and stability analysis of backstepping controllers and the basic descriptions and properties of quantizers are introduced as preliminary knowledge for this book. In the remainder of this book, adaptive control schemes are introduced to compensate for the effects of input quantization, state quantization, both input and state/output quantization for uncertain nonlinear systems and are applied to helicopter systems and DC Microgrid. Discussion remarks are provided in each chapter highlighting new approaches and contributions to emphasize the novelty of the presented design and analysis methods. Simulation results are also given in each chapter to show the effectiveness of these methods. This book is helpful to learn and understand the fundamental backstepping schemes for state feedback control and output feedback control. It can be used as a reference book or a textbook on adaptive quantized control for students with some background in feedback control systems. Researchers, graduate students, and engineers in the fields of control, information, and communication, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer science, and others will benefit from this book.

In practice, actuators often undergo failures and various factors influence its effectiveness. Also due to the increasing complexity of large-scale systems, subsystems are often interconnected, whereas the interactions between any two subsystems are difficult to deal with. This book details a series of new methodologies of designing and analyzing adaptive backstepping control systems involving treatment on actuator failures, subsystem interactions and nonsmooth nonlinearities. Moreover, it discusses some interesting open issues in adaptive failure accommodation, decentralized adaptive control and distributed adaptive coordinated control.

This volume is a comprehensive and cutting-edge reference book reflecting current knowledge in the rapidly growing area of organizational creativity. The contributors to this volume are all leading researchers in the field of organizational creativity. This volume: provides a historical review of organizational creativity theory and research presents critical reviews and summaries of research on micro, meso, and macro topics (e.g., leadership, feedback, goals and role expectations, groups and teams, social networks, climate and culture, deep structures, sense-making processes, and creativity and organizational change) concerning organizational creativity demonstrates contributions of creativity to individual work outcomes and organizational success discusses emerging areas and highlights promising future research trends. Professors and graduate students in management and psychology will find this volume most beneficial. Professors and graduate students in marketing, sociology, and education also may find this book useful and relevant. Thoughtful managers and executives, professionals and knowledge workers, and aspiring managers and MBA students also would find this book beneficial in sharpening their thinking, and helping them to identify the right tools for managing creativity.

This book provides an up-to-date account of relevant early childhood policy and practice in five Chinese societies: the People's Republic of China or Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, and Taiwan. It analyses how traditional Chinese values, Eastern and Western curricular approaches, and socio-political, economic, cultural and demographic changes influence current policies, services and practice. It addresses responses to global concerns about the excluded and disadvantaged, and about quality, and explains lessons from and for Chinese early childhood education. This book is the first English-language research-based review of early childhood education and the factors that affect it in different Chinese societies. It is particularly timely given the increased recognition of the importance of early childhood education for human capital development globally, and the international interest in understanding early education in Chinese societies.iv>

This book presents new methodologies for the design and analysis of adaptive control systems based on the backstepping approach. Our emphasis is on - namic uncertain systems with nonsmooth nonlinearities,such as backlash,de- zone, hysteresis and saturation, or time-varying parameters, or interactions. The backstepping approach, a recursive Lyapunov-based scheme, was p- posed in the beginning of 1990s. With this method the construction of feedback controllawsandLyapunovfunctions issystematic,followingastep-by-stepal- rithm. Backstepping can be used to relax the matching condition, which blocked the traditional Lyapunov-based design. A major advantage of backstepping is that it has the ?exibility to avoid cancellations of useful nonlinearities and achieve regulation and tracking properties. The technique was comprehensively addressed by Krstic, Kanellakopoulos and Kokotovic in [1]. However, there is still no monograph available to address problems such as the handling of n- smooth nonlinearities, time varying parameters and system interactions using this approach. Nonsmooth nonlinearities such as dead-zone, backlash, hysteresis and satu- tion are common in industrial control systems, such as mechanical, hydraulic, biomedical, piezoelectric, and physical systems. Such nonlinearities are usually poorlyknownandmayvarywithtime,andthey oftenlimitsystemperformance.

This volume is a comprehensive and cutting-edge reference book reflecting current knowledge in the rapidly growing area of organizational creativity. The contributors to this volume are all leading researchers in the field of organizational creativity. This volume: provides a historical review of organizational creativity theory and research presents critical reviews and summaries of research on micro, meso, and macro topics (e.g., leadership, feedback, goals and role expectations, groups and teams, social networks, climate and culture, deep structures, sense-making processes, and creativity and organizational change) concerning organizational creativity demonstrates contributions of creativity to individual work outcomes and organizational success discusses emerging areas and highlights promising future research trends. Professors and graduate students in management and psychology will find this volume most beneficial. Professors and graduate students in marketing, sociology, and education also may find this book useful and relevant. Thoughtful managers and executives, professionals and knowledge workers, and aspiring managers and MBA students also would find this book beneficial in sharpening their thinking, and helping them to identify the right tools for managing creativity.

Research-based investigations of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship have the potential to inform each other and enrich our knowledge of each of these areas, particularly with regard to cognitive processes and effective behaviors. Yet, while these research streams have increasingly received a great deal of attention, they have developed largely independently of one another. The Oxford Handbook of Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship addresses the critical need to integrate these three interrelated literatures. The Handbook features contributions from the leading scholars in these research areas. As a group, the chapters examine the intersections of these topics to synthesize contemporary research and provide direction and stimulation for further interdisciplinary investigations of organizational creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

In many predictive modeling tasks, one has a fixed set of observations from which a vast, or even infinite, set of potentially predictive features can be computed. Of these features, often only a small number are expected to be useful in a predictive model. Models which use the entire set of features will almost certainly overfit on future data sets. The book presents streamwise feature selection which interleaves the process of generating new features with that of feature testing. Streamwise feature selection scales well to large feature sets. The book also describes how to use streamwise feature seleciton in multivariate regressions. It includes a review of traditional feature selecitions in a general framework based on information theory, and compares these methods with streamwise feature selection on various real and synthetic data sets. This book is intended to be used by researchers in machine learning, data mining, and knowledge discovery.

In practice, actuators often undergo failures and various factors influence its effectiveness. Also due to the increasing complexity of large-scale systems, subsystems are often interconnected, whereas the interactions between any two subsystems are difficult to deal with. This book details a series of new methodologies of designing and analyzing adaptive backstepping control systems involving treatment on actuator failures, subsystem interactions and nonsmooth nonlinearities. Moreover, it discusses some interesting open issues in adaptive failure accommodation, decentralized adaptive control and distributed adaptive coordinated control.