A favorite icon for cigarette manufacturers across China since the mid-twentieth century has been the panda, with factories from Shanghai to Sichuan using cuddly cliché to market tobacco products. The proliferation of panda-branded cigarettes coincides with profound, yet poorly appreciated, shifts in the worldwide tobacco trade. Over the last fifty years, transnational tobacco companies and their allies have fueled a tripling of the world's annual consumption of cigarettes. At the forefront is the China National Tobacco Corporation, now producing forty percent of cigarettes sold globally. What's enabled the manufacturing of cigarettes in China to flourish since the time of Mao and to prosper even amidst public health condemnation of smoking? In Poisonous Pandas, an interdisciplinary group of scholars comes together to tell that story. They offer novel portraits of people within the Chinese polity—government leaders, scientists, tax officials, artists, museum curators, and soldiers—who have experimentally revamped the country's pre-Communist cigarette supply chain and fitfully expanded its political, economic, and cultural influence. These portraits cut against the grain of what contemporary tobacco-control experts typically study, opening a vital new window on tobacco—the single largest cause of preventable death worldwide today.

A favorite icon for cigarette manufacturers across China since the mid-twentieth century has been the panda, with factories from Shanghai to Sichuan using cuddly cliche to market tobacco products. The proliferation of panda-branded cigarettes coincides with profound, yet poorly appreciated, shifts in the worldwide tobacco trade. Over the last fifty years, transnational tobacco companies and their allies have fueled a tripling of the world's annual consumption of cigarettes. At the forefront is the China National Tobacco Corporation, now producing forty percent of cigarettes sold globally. What's enabled the manufacturing of cigarettes in China to flourish since the time of Mao and to prosper even amidst public health condemnation of smoking? In Poisonous Pandas, an interdisciplinary group of scholars comes together to tell that story. They offer novel portraits of people within the Chinese polity-government leaders, scientists, tax officials, artists, museum curators, and soldiers-who have experimentally revamped the country's pre-Communist cigarette supply chain and fitfully expanded its political, economic, and cultural influence. These portraits cut against the grain of what contemporary tobacco-control experts typically study, opening a vital new window on tobacco-the single largest cause of preventable death worldwide today.

Advanced Rehabilitative Technology: Neural Interfaces and Devices teaches readers how to acquire and process bio-signals using biosensors and acquisition devices, how to identify the human movement intention and decode the brain signal, how to design physiological and musculoskeletal models and establish the neural interfaces, and how to develop neural devices and control them efficiently using biological signals. The book takes a multidisciplinary theme between the engineering and medical field, including sections on neuromuscular/brain signal processing, human motion and intention recognition, biomechanics modelling and interfaces, and neural devices and control for rehabilitation. Each chapter goes through a detailed description of the bio-mechatronic systems used and then presents implementation and testing tactics. In addition, it details new neural interfaces and devices, some of which have never been published before in any journals or conferences. With this book, readers will quickly get up-to-speed on the most recent and future advancements in bio-mechatronics engineering for applications in rehabilitation.

The primary purpose of this book is to help the student understand the principles of multimedia interface design and to develop essential skills. The underlying philosophy of the approach in this course is that concepts are learned and remembered better when learned in a real work environment.

Comparative studies in information and library science published in the past ten years have reflected a broad spectrum of backgrounds, interests, and issues. But until now, services between different countries have never been gathered or organized into a single source. As demand from researchers, students, directors, and practitioners for literature in this field continues to grow, the need for a focused book on international and comparative librarianship has become more evident. Authors Yan Quan Liu and Xiaojun Cheng address this gap as it pertains to Asian nations. This contributed volume, International and Comparative Studies in Information and Library Science: A Focus on the United States and Asian Countries, addresses such issues as research methodologies, information policy, professional education, information organization, as well as school, academic, and public libraries. The book also features a comprehensive bibliography of related articles, books, proceedings, and other publications in both English and Chinese. In addition, this volume features four appendixes that include lists of the curriculum, journal titles, conferences, and websites relating to international and comparative librarianship available at the time of publication.