T'ung and Pollard's Colloquial Chinese course is the ideal introductory course for all dedicated learners of Mandarin Chinese. Written by experienced teachers, the course provides a rigorous introduction to the pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar of Mandarin Chinese. By the end of this rewarding course learners will be able to communicate confidently in a wide variety of situations. The solid foundation provided is also ideal for those who wish to advance their language skills to higher levels. Divided into 17 lessons, each lesson contains conversations based on common daily situations, vocabularies, grammar notes and exercises to help learn and practice basic skills. Key features include: clear grammar explanations lots of exercises for regular practice Pinyin Romanization used throughout Chinese-English glossary for quick reference. Audio material to accompany the course is available to download free in MP3 format from www.routledge.com/cw/colloquials. Recorded by native speakers, the audio material features the dialogues and texts from the book and will help develop your listening and pronunciation skills.

'Te-Ping Chen's Land of Big Numbers contains 10 illuminating, sharp stories set in China, penned by a former investigative reporter who worked in Beijing for several years' The Independent 'In this magnificent collection of stories, the author and former Beijing-based correspondent vividly captures the desires and losses of a richly drawn cast while drawing on the realities of contemporary China' Cosmopolitan A dazzling debut collection which, deftly and urgently, tells the stories of those living in the biggest and most complicated country on earth. A brother competes for gaming glory while his twin sister exposes the dark side of the Communist government on her underground blog; a worker at a government call centre is alarmed one day to find herself speaking to a former lover; a delicious new fruit arrives at the neighbourhood market and the locals find it starts to affect their lives in ways they could never have imagined; and a young woman's dreams of making it big in Shanghai are stalled when she finds herself working as a florist. These are just some of the myriad lives to be evoked in The Land of Big Numbers, a collection of stories which - sometimes playfully, sometimes darkly - draws back the curtain on the realities of modern China and unveils a cast of characters as rich and complicated as any in world literature. With virtuosic brilliance, Te-ping Chen sheds light on a country much talked about but little understood and announces the birth of a bright new star in the literary firmament. "A spectacular work, comic, timely, profound. Te-Ping Chen has a superb eye for detail in a China where transformation occurs simultaneously too fast and too slow for lives in pursuit of meaning in a brave new world. Her characters are achingly alive. It's rare to read a collection so satisfying, where every story adds to a gripping and intricate world." Madeleine Thien, author of the Booker-shortlisted Do Not Say We Have Nothing "Te-Ping Chen shows us how much life, loss, and quiet pleasure exists in the world, just out of view." Alexandra Kleeman

The Principle of Large Numbers indicates that macro fluctuations have weak microfoundations; persistent business cycles and interrupted technologies can be better characterized by macro vitality and meso foundations. Economic growth is limited by market extent and ecological constraints. The trade-off between stability and complexity is the foundation of cultural diversity and mixed economies. The new science of complexity sheds light on the sources of economic instability and complexity. This book consists of the major work of Professor Ping Chen, a pioneer in studying economic chaos and economic complexity. The chapters are selected from works completed since 1987, including original research on evolutionary dynamics of division of labor, empirical and theoretical studies of economic chaos, and stochastic models of collective behavior. Offering a new perspective on market instability and the changing world order, the basic pillars in equilibrium economics are challenging by solid evidence of economic complexity and time asymmetry, including Friedman's theory of exogenous money and efficient market, the Frisch model of noise-driven cycles, the Lucas model of microfoundations and rational expectations, the Black-Scholes model of option pricing, and the Coase theory of transaction costs. Throughout, a general framework based on complex evolutionary dynamics is developed, which integrates different insights from Smith, Malthus, Marx, Schumpeter, and Keynes and others a new understanding of the evolutionary history of division of labor. This book will be of interest to postgraduates and researchers in Economics, including macroeconomics, financial economics, advanced econometrics, and economic methodology.

Examines the major issues of language planning and policy in Japan, Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Vietnam, particularly those relating to the selection of official language, script, and written language.

The Principle of Large Numbers indicates that macro fluctuations have weak microfoundations; persistent business cycles and interrupted technologies can be better characterized by macro vitality and meso foundations. Economic growth is limited by market extent and ecological constraints. The trade-off between stability and complexity is the foundation of cultural diversity and mixed economies. The new science of complexity sheds light on the sources of economic instability and complexity.

This book consists of the major work of Professor Ping Chen, a pioneer in studying economic chaos and economic complexity. The chapters are selected from works completed since 1987, including original research on evolutionary dynamics of division of labor, empirical and theoretical studies of economic chaos, and stochastic models of collective behavior. Offering a new perspective on market instability and the changing world order, the basic pillars in equilibrium economics are challenging by solid evidence of economic complexity and time asymmetry, including Friedman 's theory of exogenous money and efficient market, the Frisch model of noise-driven cycles, the Lucas model of microfoundations and rational expectations, the Black-Scholes model of option pricing, and the Coase theory of transaction costs.

Throughout, a general framework based on complex evolutionary dynamics is developed, which integrates different insights from Smith, Malthus, Marx, Schumpeter, and Keynes and others a new understanding of the evolutionary history of division of labor. This book will be of interest to postgraduates and researchers in Economics, including macroeconomics, financial economics, advanced econometrics, and economic methodology.

Key features: Contains the contributions of international experts from the UK, USA, Australia, Spain and Taiwan Includes over 1,500 high-quality illustrations Maintaining the health of pigs is vital in pig farming and production. This new book written by experts from around the world focuses on the health of pigs, first with coverage of the disorders of pigs organised by clinical sign and body system. The book explores environmental medicine and then health maintenance. Treatment options are discussed, emphasizing a reduction in antimicrobial use and an increased awareness of a holistic approach to treatment. The book includes over 1,500 high-quality illustrations to enhance the clinical description, as well as a wealth of high-quality videos to test the reader in making differential diagnoses with treatment options. Quizzes at the end of each section also encourage reflective learning. Clinical examination of the individual pig and groups are covered along with environmental medicine, making this the ideal reference for veterinary practitioners and students. Those interested in population medicine (poultry, aquaculture, cattle and small ruminant and apiaries) will particularly enjoy the holistic approach to veterinary medicine. All those who appreciate the many talents of pigs will enjoy the practical approach to managing the health of their animals. This book moves veterinary science forward, promoting health rather than treating disease. It will be your number one reference for keeping your pigs healthy.

Examines the major issues of language planning and policy in Japan, Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Vietnam, particularly those relating to the selection of official language, script, and written language.

Material Science and Environmental Engineering presents novel and fundamental advances in the fields of material science and environmental engineering. Collecting the comprehensive and state-of-art in these fields, the contributions provide a broad overview of the latest research results, so that it will proof to be a valuable reference book to academics and professionals in these areas.

By analyzing the interactions between China's central government and its local governments and enterprises, this book constructs an analytical framework of government-enterprise collusion, analyzing the impact of collusion within the China model on Chinese society. Against the background of decentralization and under information asymmetry, this text argues that Chinese local governments connive at enterprises' adoption of a low-cost 'bad' mode of production - a 'stimulus' for quick growth at the cost of safer working conditions - so as to obtain fiscal or political capital for further promotion. Through an examination of coalmine mortality rate, environmental pollution, food safety and house pricing, the book argues that collusion is the intrinsic drive of the China model. It consider how against a backdrop of political centralization and economic decentralization, collusion exacerbates corruption and impacts both on the country's social development and on its foreign direct investment. Offering an analysis of future prospects for the China model, it puts forward key policy proposals to improve domestic institutional construction through reform.

The book offers an interdisciplinary perspective on finance, with a special focus on stock markets. It presents new methodologies for analyzing stock markets' behavior and discusses theories and methods of finance from different angles, such as the mathematical, physical and philosophical ones. The book, which aims at philosophers and economists alike, represents a rare yet important attempt to unify the externalist with the internalist conceptions of finance.

The book offers an interdisciplinary perspective on finance, with a special focus on stock markets. It presents new methodologies for analyzing stock markets' behavior and discusses theories and methods of finance from different angles, such as the mathematical, physical and philosophical ones. The book, which aims at philosophers and economists alike, represents a rare yet important attempt to unify the externalist with the internalist conceptions of finance.

A Tender Voyage is the first full-length study of the history of childhood and children's lives in late imperial China. The author draws on an extraordinary range of sources to analyze both the normative concept of childhood-literary and philosophical-and the treatment and experience of children in China. The study begins with the history of pediatrics and newborn care and their evolution over time. The author moves on to the social environment of the child, including models of upbringing and expected behavior and the treatment of different kinds of children, including the rebellious and the "gentle" child. She examines the role of the mother, notably her close and complex relations with her sons, and the broader emotional world of children, their relationships with the adults around them, and the destructive power of death. The last section discusses concepts of childhood in China and the West. Throughout, the study keeps in view the issue of representation versus practice, the role of memory, and the importance of listening for what is not said.

Covers the transmission of real-time video and audio for internet experimentation. Provides detailed descriptions of how the various hardware and software systems can be seamlessly integrated for a complete internet remote experimentation system. Contains examples of real working experiments that are currently running.

This book reports initial efforts in providing some useful extensions in - nancial modeling; further work is necessary to complete the research agenda. The demonstrated extensions in this book in the computation and modeling of optimal control in finance have shown the need and potential for further areas of study in financial modeling. Potentials are in both the mathematical structure and computational aspects of dynamic optimization. There are needs for more organized and coordinated computational approaches. These ext- sions will make dynamic financial optimization models relatively more stable for applications to academic and practical exercises in the areas of financial optimization, forecasting, planning and optimal social choice. This book will be useful to graduate students and academics in finance, mathematical economics, operations research and computer science. Prof- sional practitioners in the above areas will find the book interesting and inf- mative. The authors thank Professor B.D. Craven for providing extensive guidance and assistance in undertaking this research. This work owes significantly to him, which will be evident throughout the whole book. The differential eq- tion solver "nqq" used in this book was first developed by Professor Craven. Editorial assistance provided by Matthew Clarke, Margarita Kumnick and Tom Lun is also highly appreciated. Ping Chen also wants to thank her parents for their constant support and love during the past four years.

One major branch of enhancing the performance of evolutionary algorithms is the exploitation of linkage learning. This monograph aims to capture the recent progress of linkage learning, by compiling a series of focused technical chapters to keep abreast of the developments and trends in the area of linkage. In evolutionary algorithms, linkage models the relation between decision variables with the genetic linkage observed in biological systems, and linkage learning connects computational optimization methodologies and natural evolution mechanisms. Exploitation of linkage learning can enable us to design better evolutionary algorithms as well as to potentially gain insight into biological systems. Linkage learning has the potential to become one of the dominant aspects of evolutionary algorithms; research in this area can potentially yield promising results in addressing the scalability issues.

Genetic algorithms (GAs) are powerful search techniques based on principles of evolution and widely applied to solve problems in many disciplines. However, most GAs employed in practice nowadays are unable to learn genetic linkage and suffer from the linkage problem. The linkage learning genetic algorithm (LLGA) was proposed to tackle the linkage problem with several specially designed mechanisms. While the LLGA performs much better on badly scaled problems than simple GAs, it does not work well on uniformly scaled problems as other competent GAs. Therefore, we need to understand why it is so and need to know how to design a better LLGA or whether there are certain limits of such a linkage learning process. This book aims to gain better understanding of the LLGA in theory and to improve the LLGA's performance in practice. It starts with a survey of the existing genetic linkage learning techniques and describes the steps and approaches taken to tackle the research topics, including using promoters, developing the convergence time model, and adopting subchromosomes.

In recent years, the issue of linkage in GEAs has garnered greater attention and recognition from researchers. Conventional approaches that rely much on ad hoc tweaking of parameters to control the search by balancing the level of exploitation and exploration are grossly inadequate. As shown in the work reported here, such parameters tweaking based approaches have their limits; they can be easily fooled by cases of triviality or peculiarity of the class of problems that the algorithms are designed to handle. Furthermore, these approaches are usually blind to the interactions between the decision variables, thereby disrupting the partial solutions that are being built up along the way.

One major branch of enhancing the performance of evolutionary algorithms is the exploitation of linkage learning. This monograph aims to capture the recent progress of linkage learning, by compiling a series of focused technical chapters to keep abreast of the developments and trends in the area of linkage. In evolutionary algorithms, linkage models the relation between decision variables with the genetic linkage observed in biological systems, and linkage learning connects computational optimization methodologies and natural evolution mechanisms. Exploitation of linkage learning can enable us to design better evolutionary algorithms as well as to potentially gain insight into biological systems. Linkage learning has the potential to become one of the dominant aspects of evolutionary algorithms; research in this area can potentially yield promising results in addressing the scalability issues.

In recent years, the issue of linkage in GEAs has garnered greater attention and recognition from researchers. Conventional approaches that rely much on ad hoc tweaking of parameters to control the search by balancing the level of exploitation and exploration are grossly inadequate. As shown in the work reported here, such parameters tweaking based approaches have their limits; they can be easily fooled by cases of triviality or peculiarity of the class of problems that the algorithms are designed to handle. Furthermore, these approaches are usually blind to the interactions between the decision variables, thereby disrupting the partial solutions that are being built up along the way.

Genetic algorithms (GAs) are powerful search techniques based on principles of evolution and widely applied to solve problems in many disciplines. However, most GAs employed in practice nowadays are unable to learn genetic linkage and suffer from the linkage problem. The linkage learning genetic algorithm (LLGA) was proposed to tackle the linkage problem with several specially designed mechanisms. While the LLGA performs much better on badly scaled problems than simple GAs, it does not work well on uniformly scaled problems as other competent GAs. Therefore, we need to understand why it is so and need to know how to design a better LLGA or whether there are certain limits of such a linkage learning process. This book aims to gain better understanding of the LLGA in theory and to improve the LLGA's performance in practice. It starts with a survey of the existing genetic linkage learning techniques and describes the steps and approaches taken to tackle the research topics, including using promoters, developing the convergence time model, and adopting subchromosomes.

A proper examination of the world political situation makes it necessary to consider the fact of the increasing importance of Commu nist China in world affairs. It seems that this big and ancient country expects to be considered not only as the most important country of Asia, not to say of the communist world, but as one of the great powers of the second half of this century. Being one of the largest countries in the world, with a larger popu lation than that of the United States and the Soviet Union combined (the two recognized powers of this era), China plays a significant role in world affairs at the same time that she tries to challenge the leader ship of communism. As the years have passed and Communist China has been kept out of the United Nations, her attitude has changed to such a point that one fears the possibility of her forming a new organi zation that may evolve in rivalry with the work of the United Nations. Therefore, there is a deservedly great concern about the way China conducts her international policy. Under these circumstances, it goes without saying that it is important to ascertain the kind of political thought that has motivated Commu nist leaders in China, and the ultimate goal of their revolutionary movement, which has been for some time now responsible for dangerous situations in the Far East and in other areas of the world.

Material Science and Engineering presents novel and fundamental advances in the field of material science and engineering. This proceedings collects the comprehensive and worldwide research results on Metallic Materials and Applications, Chemical Materials, Electronic Materials, Nanomaterials, Composite and Polymer Materials, Bio and Medical Materials, Functional and Ceramic Materials, Environmental Materials, Building Materials and Interior Design, Fiber Materials, and Mechanical Property of Materials. Collecting the comprehensive and state-of-art in these fields, the contributions provide a broad overview of the latest research results, so that Material Science and Engineering will prove to be a valuable reference book to academics and professionals in material science and engineering.

This book reports initial efforts in providing some useful extensions in - nancial modeling; further work is necessary to complete the research agenda. The demonstrated extensions in this book in the computation and modeling of optimal control in finance have shown the need and potential for further areas of study in financial modeling. Potentials are in both the mathematical structure and computational aspects of dynamic optimization. There are needs for more organized and coordinated computational approaches. These ext- sions will make dynamic financial optimization models relatively more stable for applications to academic and practical exercises in the areas of financial optimization, forecasting, planning and optimal social choice. This book will be useful to graduate students and academics in finance, mathematical economics, operations research and computer science. Prof- sional practitioners in the above areas will find the book interesting and inf- mative. The authors thank Professor B.D. Craven for providing extensive guidance and assistance in undertaking this research. This work owes significantly to him, which will be evident throughout the whole book. The differential eq- tion solver "nqq" used in this book was first developed by Professor Craven. Editorial assistance provided by Matthew Clarke, Margarita Kumnick and Tom Lun is also highly appreciated. Ping Chen also wants to thank her parents for their constant support and love during the past four years.

By analyzing the interactions between China's central government and its local governments and enterprises, this book constructs an analytical framework of government-enterprise collusion, analyzing the impact of collusion within the China model on Chinese society. Against the background of decentralization and under information asymmetry, this text argues that Chinese local governments connive at enterprises' adoption of a low-cost 'bad' mode of production - a 'stimulus' for quick growth at the cost of safer working conditions - so as to obtain fiscal or political capital for further promotion. Through an examination of coalmine mortality rate, environmental pollution, food safety and house pricing, the book argues that collusion is the intrinsic drive of the China model. It consider how against a backdrop of political centralization and economic decentralization, collusion exacerbates corruption and impacts both on the country's social development and on its foreign direct investment. Offering an analysis of future prospects for the China model, it puts forward key policy proposals to improve domestic institutional construction through reform.

A Tender Voyage is the first full-length study of the history of childhood and children's lives in late imperial China. The author draws on an extraordinary range of sources to analyze both the normative concept of childhood - literary and philosophical - and the treatment and experience of children in China. The study begins with the history of pediatrics and newborn care and their evolution over time. The author moves on to the social environment of the child, including models of upbringing and expected behavior and the treatment of different kinds of children, including the rebellious and the gentle child. She examines the role of the mother, notably her close and complex relations with her sons, and the broader emotional world of children, their relationships with the adults around them, and the destructive power of death. The last section discusses concepts of childhood in China and the West. The study keeps in view throughout the issue of representation versus practice, the role of memory, and the importance of listening for what is not said.