Language and Social Change in China: Undoing Commonness through Cosmopolitan Mandarin offers an innovative and authoritative account of the crucial role of language in shaping the sociocultural landscape of contemporary China. Based on a wide range of data collected since the 1990s and grounded in quantitative and discourse analyses of sociolinguistic variation, Qing Zhang tracks the emergence of what she terms "Cosmopolitan Mandarin" as a new stylistic resource for a rising urban elite and a new middle-class consumption-based lifestyle. The book powerfully illuminates that Cosmopolitan Mandarin participates in dismantling the pre-reform, socialist, conformist society by bringing about new social distinctions. Rich in cultural and linguistic details, the book is the first of its kind to highlight the implications of language change on the social order and cultural life of contemporary China. Language and Social Change in China is ideal for students and scholars interested in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, and Chinese language and society.

A variety of devices at nanometer/molecular scale for electronic, photonic, optoelectronic, biological, and mechanical applications have been created through the rapid development of materials and fabrication technology. Further development of nanodevices strongly depends on the state-of-the-art knowledge of science and technology at the sub-100 nm scale. This book presents and highlights some of the key advances on, but not limited to, electronic and optoelectronic devices of nanometer/molecular scale, nanomechanics and nanoelectromechanical systems, electromechanical coupled devices, manipulation and aligning processes at nanometer/molecular scale, quantum phenomena, modeling of nanodevices and nanostructures, fabrication and property characterization of nanodevices, and nanofabrication with focused beam technology.

This book follows the citizenship-based approach and interrogates the policies on urban village redevelopment from a perspective of social exclusion and inclusion. It focuses on two questions: how policy makers and urban villagers understand social inclusion differently, and what makes a difference in enhancing social inclusion. Firstly, an examination of citizenship conceptions, as reflected in the Chinese traditional discourses, provides the basis for questioning the political rhetoric of social inclusion in China. Secondly, a comparison between policy makers' and villages' interpretations on urban citizenship helps explore the different understandings of citizenship between them. Finally, by studying six redeveloped urban villages in the city of Xi'an, the book identifies what villagers strive for, and discusses how their strivings make a difference in achieving social inclusion during urban village redevelopment.

This book follows the citizenship-based approach and interrogates the policies on urban village redevelopment from a perspective of social exclusion and inclusion. It focuses on two questions: how policy makers and urban villagers understand social inclusion differently, and what makes a difference in enhancing social inclusion. Firstly, an examination of citizenship conceptions, as reflected in the Chinese traditional discourses, provides the basis for questioning the political rhetoric of social inclusion in China. Secondly, a comparison between policy makers' and villages' interpretations on urban citizenship helps explore the different understandings of citizenship between them. Finally, by studying six redeveloped urban villages in the city of Xi'an, the book identifies what villagers strive for, and discusses how their strivings make a difference in achieving social inclusion during urban village redevelopment.

The aim of this book is to explain to high-performance computing (HPC) developers how to utilize the Intel® Xeon Phi™ series products efficiently. To that end, it introduces some computing grammar, programming technology and optimization methods for using many-integrated-core (MIC) platforms and also offers tips and tricks for actual use, based on the authors’ first-hand optimization experience. The material is organized in three sections. The first section, “Basics of MIC�, introduces the fundamentals of MIC architecture and programming, including the specific Intel MIC programming environment. Next, the section on “Performance Optimization� explains general MIC optimization techniques, which are then illustrated step-by-step using the classical parallel programming example of matrix multiplication. Finally, “Project development� presents a set of practical and experience-driven methods for using parallel computing in application projects, including how to determine if a serial or parallel CPU program is suitable for MIC and how to transplant a program onto MIC. This book appeals to two main audiences: First, software developers for HPC applications – it will enable them to fully exploit the MIC architecture and thus achieve the extreme performance usually  required in biological genetics, medical imaging, aerospace, meteorology and other areas of HPC. Second, students and researchers engaged in parallel and high-performance computing – it will guide them on how to push the limits of system performance for HPC applications.

The aim of this book is to explain to high-performance computing (HPC) developers how to utilize the Intel(r) Xeon Phi series products efficiently. To that end, it introduces some computing grammar, programming technology and optimization methods for using many-integrated-core (MIC) platforms and also offers tips and tricks for actual use, based on the authors first-hand optimization experience.

The material is organized in three sections. The first section, Basics of MIC, introduces the fundamentals of MIC architecture and programming, including the specific Intel MIC programming environment. Next, the section on Performance Optimization explains general MIC optimization techniques, which are then illustrated step-by-step using the classical parallel programming example of matrix multiplication. Finally, Project development presents a set of practical and experience-driven methods for using parallel computing in application projects, including how to determine if a serial or parallel CPU program is suitable for MIC and how to transplant a program onto MIC.

This book appeals to two main audiences: First, software developers for HPC applications it will enable them to fully exploit the MIC architecture and thus achieve the extreme performance usually required in biological genetics, medical imaging, aerospace, meteorology and other areas of HPC. Second, students and researchers engaged in parallel and high-performance computing it will guide them on how to push the limits of system performance for HPC applications. "

One of the most important methods in dealing with the optimization of large, complex systems is that of hierarchical decomposition. The idea is to reduce the overall complex problem into manageable approximate problems or subproblems, to solve these problems, and to construct a solution of the original problem from the solutions of these simpler prob lems. Development of such approaches for large complex systems has been identified as a particularly fruitful area by the Committee on the Next Decade in Operations Research (1988) [42] as well as by the Panel on Future Directions in Control Theory (1988) [65]. Most manufacturing firms are complex systems characterized by sev eral decision subsystems, such as finance, personnel, marketing, and op erations. They may have several plants and warehouses and a wide variety of machines and equipment devoted to producing a large number of different products. Moreover, they are subject to deterministic as well as stochastic discrete events, such as purchasing new equipment, hiring and layoff of personnel, and machine setups, failures, and repairs.

This book overviews the current status of research and development activities of CNTs in nanodevices, nanomaterials, or nanofabrication. This book presents 15 state-of-the-art review articles that cover CNT synthesis technologies for growing highly orientated CNTs, chirality-pure CNTs and CNTs at a large throughput and low cost, CNT assembly techniques, CNT sorting and separation processes, CNT functionalization engineering for more functionalities, CNT fundamental properties and their practical/potential electrical, electronic, optical, mechanical, chemical and biological applications.

This edited volume contains 16 research articles. It presents recent and pressing issues in stochastic processes, control theory, differential games, optimization, and their applications in finance, manufacturing, queueing networks, and climate control. One of the salient features is that the book is highly multi-disciplinary. The book is dedicated to Professor Suresh Sethi on the occasion of his 60th birthday, in view of his distinguished career.

Most manufacturing systems are large, complex, and operate in an environment of uncertainty. It is common practice to manage such systems in a hierarchical fashion. This book articulates a new theory that shows that hierarchical decision making can in fact lead to a near optimization of system goals. The material in the book cuts across disciplines. It will appeal to graduate students and researchers in applied mathematics, operations management, operations research, and system and control theory.

This book focuses on two-time-scale Markov chains in discrete time. Our motivation stems from existing and emerging applications in optimization and control of complex systems in manufacturing, wireless communication, and ?nancial engineering. Much of our e?ort in this book is devoted to designing system models arising from various applications, analyzing them via analytic and probabilistic techniques, and developing feasible compu- tionalschemes. Ourmainconcernistoreducetheinherentsystemcompl- ity. Although each of the applications has its own distinct characteristics, all of them are closely related through the modeling of uncertainty due to jump or switching random processes. Oneofthesalientfeaturesofthisbookistheuseofmulti-timescalesin Markovprocessesandtheirapplications. Intuitively,notallpartsorcom- nents of a large-scale system evolve at the same rate. Some of them change rapidly and others vary slowly. The di?erent rates of variations allow us to reduce complexity via decomposition and aggregation. It would be ideal if we could divide a large system into its smallest irreducible subsystems completely separable from one another and treat each subsystem indep- dently. However, this is often infeasible in reality due to various physical constraints and other considerations. Thus, we have to deal with situations in which the systems are only nearly decomposable in the sense that there are weak links among the irreducible subsystems, which dictate the oc- sional regime changes of the system. An e?ective way to treat such near decomposability is time-scale separation. That is, we set up the systems as if there were two time scales, fast vs. slow. xii Preface Followingthetime-scaleseparation,weusesingularperturbationmeth- ology to treat the underlying systems.

The5th editionof the InternationalSymposium onBioinformaticsResearchand Applications (ISBRA 2009) was held during May 13-16, 2009 at Nova Sou- eastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The symposium provides a forum for the exchange of ideas and results among researchers, developers, and prac- tioners working on all aspects of bioinformatics and computational biology and their applications. The technical program of the symposium included 26 contributed papers, selected by the Program Committee from a number of 55 full submissions - ceived in response to the call for papers. The technical program also included contributed papers and abstracts submitted to the Second Workshop on C- putational Issues in Genetic Epidemiology (CIGE 2009), which was held in c- junction with ISBRA 2009. Additionally, the symposium included poster s- sions and featured invited keynote talks by four distinguished speakers: Mikhail Gelfand from the Russian Academy of Sciences and Moscow State University spoke on evolution of regulatory systems in bacteria, Nicholas Tsinoremas from the Miller School of Medicine and the College of Arts and Sciences at the U- versity of Miami spoke on bioinformatics challenges in translational research, Esko Ukkonen from the University of Helsinki spoke on motif construction from high-throughputSELEXdata, andShamil SunyaevfromBrighamand Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School spoke on interpreting population seque- ing data. We would like to thank the Program Committee members and external - viewers for volunteering their time to review and discuss symposium papers.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed joint post-workshop proceedings of three international workshops held in conjunction with the 10th Asia-Pacific Web Conference, APWeb 2008, in Shenyang, China, in April 2008 (see LNCS 4976).

The 15 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited papers and 4 keynote lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. Topics addressed by the workshops are business intelligence and data mining (BIDM 2008), health data management (IWHDM 2008), and data engineering and Web technology research (DeWeb 2008). The papers focus on issues such as Web searching, Web services, database, data mining, bioinformatics, and business intelligence.

This edited volume contains sixteen research articles and presents recent and pressing issues in stochastic processes, control theory, differential games, optimization, and their applications in finance, manufacturing, queueing networks, and climate control. One of the salient features is that the book is highly multi-disciplinary. It assembles experts from the fields of operations research, control theory and optimization, stochastic analysis, and financial engineering to review and substantially update the recent progress in these fields. Another distinct characteristic of the book is that all papers are motivated by applications in which optimization, control, and stochastics are inseparable. The book will be a timely addition to the literature and will be of interest to people working in the aforementioned fields.

Most importantly, this volume is dedicated to Professor Suresh Sethi on the occasion of his 60th birthday. In view of his fundamental contributions, his distinguished career, his substantial achievements, his influence on the areas of control theory and applications, operations research, and management science, and his dedication to the scientific community, a number of leading experts in the fields of optimization, control, and operation management, have contributed to this volume in honor of him.

Language and Social Change in China: Undoing Commonness through Cosmopolitan Mandarin offers an innovative and authoritative account of the crucial role of language in shaping the sociocultural landscape of contemporary China. Based on a wide range of data collected since the 1990s and grounded in quantitative and discourse analyses of sociolinguistic variation, Qing Zhang tracks the emergence of what she terms "Cosmopolitan Mandarin" as a new stylistic resource for a rising urban elite and a new middle-class consumption-based lifestyle. The book powerfully illuminates that Cosmopolitan Mandarin participates in dismantling the pre-reform, socialist, conformist society by bringing about new social distinctions. Rich in cultural and linguistic details, the book is the first of its kind to highlight the implications of language change on the social order and cultural life of contemporary China. Language and Social Change in China is ideal for students and scholars interested in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, and Chinese language and society.

Most manufacturing systems are large, complex, and operate in an environment of uncertainty. It is common practice to manage such systems in a hierarchical fashion. This book articulates a new theory that shows that hierarchical decision making can in fact lead to a near optimization of system goals. The material in the book cuts across disciplines. It will appeal to graduate students and researchers in applied mathematics, operations management, operations research, and system and control theory.

In view of Professor Wendell Fleming's many fundamental contributions, his profound influence on the mathematical and systems theory communi ties, his service to the profession, and his dedication to mathematics, we have invited a number of leading experts in the fields of control, optimiza tion, and stochastic systems to contribute to this volume in his honor on the occasion of his 70th birthday. These papers focus on various aspects of stochastic analysis, control theory and optimization, and applications. They include authoritative expositions and surveys as well as research papers on recent and important issues. The papers are grouped according to the following four major themes: (1) large deviations, risk sensitive and Hoc control, (2) partial differential equations and viscosity solutions, (3) stochastic control, filtering and parameter esti mation, and (4) mathematical finance and other applications. We express our deep gratitude to all of the authors for their invaluable contributions, and to the referees for their careful and timely reviews. We thank Harold Kushner for having graciously agreed to undertake the task of writing the foreword. Particular thanks go to H. Thomas Banks for his help, advice and suggestions during the entire preparation process, as well as for the generous support of the Center for Research in Scientific Computation. The assistance from the Birkhauser professional staff is also greatly appreciated."

In a competitive world, research in manufacturing systems plays an important role in creating, updating and improving the technologies and management practices of the economy. This volume presents some of the most recent results in stochastic manufacturing systems. Experts from the fields of applied mathematics, engineering and management sciences review and substantially update the recent advances in the control and optimization of manufacturing systems. Recent Advances in Control and Optimization of Manufacturing Systems consists of eight chapters divided into three parts which focus on Optimal Production Planning, Scheduling and Improvability and Approximate Optimality and Robustness. This book is intended for researchers and practitioners in the fields of systems theory, control and optimization, and operation management as well as in applied probability and stochastic processes.

One of the most important methods in dealing with the optimization of large, complex systems is that of hierarchical decomposition. The idea is to reduce the overall complex problem into manageable approximate problems or subproblems, to solve these problems, and to construct a solution of the original problem from the solutions of these simpler prob lems. Development of such approaches for large complex systems has been identified as a particularly fruitful area by the Committee on the Next Decade in Operations Research (1988) [42] as well as by the Panel on Future Directions in Control Theory (1988) [65]. Most manufacturing firms are complex systems characterized by sev eral decision subsystems, such as finance, personnel, marketing, and op erations. They may have several plants and warehouses and a wide variety of machines and equipment devoted to producing a large number of different products. Moreover, they are subject to deterministic as well as stochastic discrete events, such as purchasing new equipment, hiring and layoff of personnel, and machine setups, failures, and repairs.

Feng Shui and the City analyses the past and contemporary influences of traditional geomancy on Chinese built environments across three domains: domestic spaces, spaces of commercial development and the public realm. Using Lefebvre's notion of absolute and abstract space-spaces of 'symbolic existence' and 'everyday life' versus spaces of domination and control, it tracks evolving attachment to, and use of, Feng Shui in Guangdong and Hong Kong. The book seeks to understand the changing role of Feng Shui in modern urban development and its regulation, and to question what constitutes authentic Feng Shui today.

This volume collects papers, based on invited talks given at the IMA workshop in Modeling, Stochastic Control, Optimization, and Related Applications, held at the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications, University of Minnesota, during May and June, 2018. There were four week-long workshops during the conference. They are (1) stochastic control, computation methods, and applications, (2) queueing theory and networked systems, (3) ecological and biological applications, and (4) finance and economics applications. For broader impacts, researchers from different fields covering both theoretically oriented and application intensive areas were invited to participate in the conference. It brought together researchers from multi-disciplinary communities in applied mathematics, applied probability, engineering, biology, ecology, and networked science, to review, and substantially update most recent progress. As an archive, this volume presents some of the highlights of the workshops, and collect papers covering a broad range of topics.

This volume collects papers, based on invited talks given at the IMA workshop in Modeling, Stochastic Control, Optimization, and Related Applications, held at the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications, University of Minnesota, during May and June, 2018. There were four week-long workshops during the conference. They are (1) stochastic control, computation methods, and applications, (2) queueing theory and networked systems, (3) ecological and biological applications, and (4) finance and economics applications. For broader impacts, researchers from different fields covering both theoretically oriented and application intensive areas were invited to participate in the conference. It brought together researchers from multi-disciplinary communities in applied mathematics, applied probability, engineering, biology, ecology, and networked science, to review, and substantially update most recent progress. As an archive, this volume presents some of the highlights of the workshops, and collect papers covering a broad range of topics.

In view of Professor Wendell Fleming's many fundamental contributions, his profound influence on the mathematical and systems theory communi ties, his service to the profession, and his dedication to mathematics, we have invited a number of leading experts in the fields of control, optimiza tion, and stochastic systems to contribute to this volume in his honor on the occasion of his 70th birthday. These papers focus on various aspects of stochastic analysis, control theory and optimization, and applications. They include authoritative expositions and surveys as well as research papers on recent and important issues. The papers are grouped according to the following four major themes: (1) large deviations, risk sensitive and Hoc control, (2) partial differential equations and viscosity solutions, (3) stochastic control, filtering and parameter esti mation, and (4) mathematical finance and other applications. We express our deep gratitude to all of the authors for their invaluable contributions, and to the referees for their careful and timely reviews. We thank Harold Kushner for having graciously agreed to undertake the task of writing the foreword. Particular thanks go to H. Thomas Banks for his help, advice and suggestions during the entire preparation process, as well as for the generous support of the Center for Research in Scientific Computation. The assistance from the Birkhauser professional staff is also greatly appreciated."