This is the first comprehensive grammar of Shaowu, a Min language spoken in Shaowu city and its environs in northwestern Fujian province, China. The book offers first-hand linguistic data collected over four years in the field, now placed at the disposal of researchers and students working in language documentation, comparative linguistics and Sinitic typology. It can serve as a reference grammar for those interested in learning the Shaowu language, thereby helping to preserve it. In addition, the book provides insights into Shaowu's classification which has been widely debated, thus elucidating its genetic affiliation. The book first presents Shaowu's geography, demography and history. It then profiles the language's phonology and lexicon, before providing a detailed description of its syntax, notably on its nominal, predicate, clausal and complex sentence structures, which are the focus of the book. The typological profile of Shaowu is also treated with the conclusion that the language has Gan, Hakka, Mandarin and even some Wu overlays on its Min base. The Shaowu language serves an excellent example to illustrate the degree of hybridity a language can attain due to intensive language contact over time.

After a summer spent trying to prevent a catastrophic war among the Greek gods, Percy Jackson finds his seventh-grade school year unnervingly quiet. His biggest problem is dealing with his new friend, Tyson―a six-foot-three, mentally challenged homeless kid who follows Percy everywhere, making it hard for Percy to have any “normal” friends.

But things don’t stay quiet for long. Percy soon discovers there is trouble at Camp Half-Blood: the magical borders which protect Half-Blood Hill have been poisoned by a mysterious enemy, and the only safe haven for demigods is on the verge of being overrun by mythological monsters. To save the camp, Percy needs the help of his best friend, Grover, who has been taken prisoner by the Cyclops Polyphemus on an island somewhere in the Sea of Monsters, the dangerous waters Greek heroes have sailed for millennia―only today, the Sea of Monsters goes by a new name…the Bermuda Triangle.

Now Percy and his friends―Grover, Annabeth, and Tyson―must retrieve the Golden Fleece from the Island of the Cyclopes by the end of the summer or Camp Half-Blood will be destroyed. But first, Percy will learn a stunning new secret about his family―one that makes him question whether being claimed as Poseidon’s son is an honor or simply a cruel joke.

This book discusses the physics of the dynamics of ions in various ionically conducting materials, and applications including electrical energy generation and storage. The experimental techniques for measurements and characterization, molecular dynamics simulations, the theories of ion dynamics, and applications are all addressed by the authors, who are experts in their fields. The experimental techniques of measurement and characterization of dynamics of ions in glassy, crystalline, and liquid ionic conductors are introduced with the dual purpose of introducing the reader to the experimental activities of the field, and preparing the reader to understand the physical quantities derived from experiments. These experimental techniques include calorimetry, conductivity relaxation, nuclear magnetic resonance, light scattering, neutron scattering, and others. Methods of molecular dynamics simulations are introduced to teach the reader to utilize the technique for practical applications to specific problems. The results elucidate the dynamics of ions on some issues that are not accessible by experiments. The properties of ion dynamics in glassy, crystalline and liquid ionic conductors brought forth by experiments and simulations are shown to be universal, i.e. independent of physical and chemical structure of the ionic conductor as long as ion-ion interaction is the dominant factor. Moreover these universal properties of ion dynamics are shown to be isomorphic to other complex interacting systems including the large class of glass-forming materials with or without ionic conductivity.By covering the basic concepts, theories/models, experimental techniques and data, molecular dynamics simulations, and relating them together, Dynamics of Glassy, Crystalline and Liquid Ionic Conductors will be of great interest to many in basic and applied research areas from the broad and diverse communities of condensed matter physicists, chemists, materials scientists and engineers. The book also provides the fundamentals for an introduction to the field and it is written in such a way that can be used for teaching courses either at the undergraduate or graduate level in academic institutions.

Suicides, excessive overtime, hostility and violence on the factory floor in China. Drawing on vivid testimonies from rural migrant workers, student interns, managers and trade union staff, Dying for an iPhone is a devastating expose of two of the world's most powerful companies: Foxconn and Apple. As the leading manufacturer of iPhones, iPads and Kindles, and employing one million workers in China alone, Taiwanese-invested Foxconn's drive to dominate global electronics manufacturing has aligned perfectly with China's goal of becoming the world leader in technology. This book reveals the human cost of that ambition and what our demands for the newest and best technology mean for workers. Foxconn workers have repeatedly demonstrated their power to strike at key nodes of transnational production, challenge management and the Chinese state, and confront global tech behemoths. Dying for an iPhone allows us to assess the impact of global capitalism's deepening crisis on workers.

This book features not only the latest trends but also academic and industry practitioner stakeholders' perspectives on language and functional role issues facing the rapidly developing corporate communication (CC) profession in the Greater China region. The book also explores the implications for Western societies that cross-culturally engage with Chinese partners in CC practices. The book's chapters are oriented on five main themes, namely: Development of the CC Profession, Bilingual Practices in Corporate Communication, Corporate Social Responsibility, Employee Communications, and Media Discourse & Persuasive Communication. The first two cluster themes feature a review of the PR/CC profession's evolutionary path to its current status as a more distinct and diversified CC profession emphasizing the role of language and particularly the bilingualism phenomenon, whereas the other cluster themes, which adopt the perspectives of academics and those of CC practitioners, span from cross-cultural, profession-wide and bilingual communication issues to applications of heuristic knowledge within industry-specific workplace contexts.

This book examines service-learning - a valuable means of promoting civic engagement and youth leadership in students by enabling them to apply their knowledge to needy people in the community. It describes selected service-learning projects in different areas by highlighting the subjects being offered, service site(s), completed service projects, evaluation findings and teachers' reflections. Although service-learning has increased tremendously in the West, its development in different Chinese societies is still in its infancy. As such, this book provides valuable insights on the implementation and future directions of the service-learning movement in China by documenting lessons learned and sharing success stories. It also discusses related evaluation findings and impacts on students to show that service-learning can increase students' empathy, social awareness, social responsibility and psychosocial skills and as a result can improve their quality of life. In addition, the book highlights how service-learning activities promote the well-being of the clients and communities being served. It also stimulates thinking and sharpens the thoughts of educators, administrators and those who wish to promote the quality of life of students and service recipients through service-learning.

'Finalist' 2019 Association of American Publishers PROSE Award - Education Practice and Theory We live in a complex age, with multiple challenges to the practice of educational leadership, and where there is widespread evidence of individuals wanting to retire early from leadership positions, and of fewer wishing to take up the role. This highly experienced team of cross-cultural researchers combine scholarly research with over a decade of extensive empirical research using an innovative 'portrait' methodology to investigate the challenges that educational leaders on two continents currently face. The kinds of challenges described include: * the personal (e.g. being new to the job, coping with the role, approaching retirement) * the inter-personal (e.g. power relations, personal challenges with staff, parents and children) * the local (e.g. issues faced by the school in the community) * the national (e.g. government initiatives, inspection) * the global (e.g. the impact of economic forces on political and institutional management). Sustainable School Leadership then contributes to the field of educational leadership in several ways. First, the authors bring scholarly enquiry to life by providing detailed descriptions of the challenges which individual educational leaders face in different cultures in a globalised world. Second, they show how the combined insights from individual portraits provide important and meaningful critiques of national policies and organizational functioning. Such critiques can then inform current and future leadership research by a better understanding of how links between the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels of education promote or discourage school leaders' sustainability. Finally, the authors present important cross-cultural comparisons of eastern and western approaches to educational leadership, suggesting that sustainability - or a lack of it - may have different roots in different cultures. Sustainable School Leadership is relevant to students on educational leadership and management courses, academics and researchers and school leaders.

The usefulness of the book to the reader is exposure to many different classes of materials and relaxation phenomena. They are tied together by the universal relaxation and diffusion properties they share, and a consistent explanation of their origin. The readers can apply what they learn to solve their own problems and use it as a stepping-stone to make further advances in theoretical understanding of the origin of the universality.

Percy Jackson isn’t expecting freshman orientation to be any fun. But when a mysterious mortal acquaintance appears on campus, followed by demon cheerleaders, things quickly move from bad to diabolical.

In this latest installment of the blockbuster series, time is running out as war between the Olympians and the evil Titan lord Kronos draws near. Even the safe haven of Camp Half-Blood grows more vulnerable by the minute as Kronos’s army prepares to invade its once impenetrable borders. To stop them, Percy and his demigod friends must set out on a quest through the Labyrinth―a sprawling underground world with stunning surprises at every turn. Full of humor and heart-pounding action, this fourth book promises to be their most thrilling adventure yet.

Discover the fantastical creatures that inhabit famous historical landmarks around the world using the UV flashlight included with the book. Shine the light on 18 real-life locations to reveal a unicorn at dawn in the Harz Mountains of Germany, come face-to-face with Bigfoot in Yosemite National Park, and watch a Pegasus soar over the Parthenon in Greece. With more than 30 mythical beasts from around the world, this collection is perfect for any fantasy fan or history lover!

The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Sianne Ngai offers a theory of the aesthetic categories that most people use to process the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime. Ngai explores how each of these aesthetic categories expresses conflicting feelings that connect to the ways in which postmodern subjects work, exchange, and consume. As a style of performing that takes the form of affective labor, the zany is bound up with production and engages our playfulness and our sense of desperation. The interesting is tied to the circulation of discourse and inspires interest but also boredom. The cute's involvement with consumption brings out feelings of tenderness and aggression simultaneously. At the deepest level, Ngai argues, these equivocal categories are about our complex relationship to performing, information, and commodities. Through readings of Adorno, Schlegel, and Nietzsche alongside cultural artifacts ranging from Bob Perelman's poetry to Ed Ruscha's photography books to the situation comedy of Lucille Ball, Ngai shows how these everyday aesthetic categories also provide traction to classic problems in aesthetic theory. The zany, cute, and interesting are not postmodernity's only meaningful aesthetic categories, Ngai argues, but the ones best suited for grasping the radical transformation of aesthetic experience and discourse under its conditions.

When the goddess Artemis goes missing, she is believed to have been kidnapped. And now it’s up to Percy and his friends to find out what happened.

Who is powerful enough to kidnap a goddess?

They must find Artemis before the winter solstice, when her influence on the Olympian Council could swing an important vote on the war with the titans. Not only that, but first Percy will have to solve the mystery of a rare monster that Artemis was hunting when she disappeared―a monster rumored to be so powerful it could destroy Olympus forever.

Long known as the world's factory, China is the largest manufacturing economy ever seen, accounting for more than 10% of global exports. China is also, of course, home to the largest workforce on the planet, the crucial element behind its staggering economic success. But who are China's workers who keep the machine running, and how is the labor process changing under economic reform? Pun Ngai, a leading expert in factory labor in China, charts the rise of China as a world workshop and the emergence of a new labor force in the context of the post-socialist transformations of the last three decades. The book analyzes the role of the state and transnational interests in creating a new migrant workforce deprived of many rights and social protection. As China increases its output of high-value, high-tech products, particularly for its own growing domestic market of middle-class consumers, workers are increasingly voicing their discontent through strikes and protest, creating new challenges for the Party-State and the global division of labor. Blending theory, politics, and real-world examples, this book will be an invaluable guide for upper-level students and non-specialists interested in China's economy and Chinese politics and society.

In an era of escalating conflict-induced and climate-induced migration and cross-border interaction, transnational-competence (TC) preparation for displaced persons, members of their host communities, humanitarian responders, and health-care professionals is increasingly critical. Building on insights from those engaged with a range of humanitarian crises and global-justice contexts, along with multidisciplinary research findings, this cutting-edge volume provides practical guidelines for preparing stakeholders for effective short-term and long-term responses to challenges arising in the wake of population dislocation generated by armed conflict, persecution, and climate change. Addressing the need to equip humanitarian care-givers and care-receivers with valuable skills for working together across barriers and boundaries, the guidance presented in the book enables educators, trainers, and field-based multinational and local responders to enhance and evaluate the quality and sustainability of humanitarian efforts that promote and bolster resilience and belonging and augment well-being, justice, and sustainable development. It features comprehensive TC-teaching and learning strategies coupled with tailored on-site and remote approaches and methods. Authoritative and insightful, Migrant Health and Resilience will be essential reading for the staff of NGOs, international organizations, national and local governments, and professional bodies working in development and humanitarian-crisis contexts, as well as for students, higher-education instructors, scholars, and evaluators.

This fascinating volume offers a critique of recent institutional and cultural turns in heterodox economics and political economy. Using seven case studies as examples, the authors explore how research on sense- and meaning-making can deepen critical studies in political economy, illuminating its role in critiquing the specific categories, contradictions and crisis-tendencies of capitalism.Parts I and II provide a foundation in institutionalism, international political economy and historical semantics, before introducing an original account of sense- and meaning-making and its role in remaking social relations. This account connects the evolution of both economic and extra-economic concepts to dispositives (problem-oriented social fixes), institutions, and capitalist restructuring. In Parts III and IV, specific case studies demonstrate how this new research program can be applied to issues such as competitiveness, the knowledge-based economy, governmental technologies, institutional and spatio-temporal fixes and crisis management. Scholars and students of heterodox, cultural, political and institutional economics will find this book a comprehensive and illuminating addition to their libraries.

Evaluation Across Newspaper Genres: Hard News Stories, Editorials and Feature Articles is the first book-length study of evaluation or stance in three major newspaper genres: hard news stories, editorials and feature articles, the last of which is a Cinderella genre in linguistic studies. It offers a fresh approach to exploring the ways in which evaluation or stance contributes to the construction of the three newspaper genres, each with a distinct communicative purpose. Key features include using a 900,000-word comparable corpus of newspaper texts arranged by genre and topic domain, drawing on a specially developed framework of analysis with a strong orientation to news values, carrying out structural analysis by creating sub-corpora of different parts of newspaper texts and adopting a functional approach to evaluation in newspaper discourse. Evaluation Across Newspaper Genres amply demonstrates that evaluation plays a vital and yet dynamic role in the construction of hard news stories, editorials and feature articles by performing a great variety of discourse functions. In doing so, the book also illuminates such important linguistic concepts as specificity/variation and textual colligation. Providing a new and unifying perspective on evaluation as a prime driver of text construction, it will be of interest and use to researchers, teachers and students of English language, applied linguistics and journalism.

This unique book represents another concerted research effort concerning Chinese mathematics education, with contributions from the world's leading scholars and most active researchers. The book presents the latest original research work with a particular focus on the 'teaching' side of Chinese mathematics education to a wide international audience. There are mainly three sections in the book. The first section introduces readers to a historical and contemporary perspective, respectively, on traditional mathematical teaching in ancient China and on how modern Chinese mathematics teachers teach and pursue their pre-service training and in-service professional development. The second section presents studies investigating a wide range of issues at both the macro- and micro-levels on how Chinese mathematics teachers teach mathematics. The third section focuses on Chinese mathematics teachers, investigating issues about their knowledge, belief, teacher training and professional development. Like its predecessor, How Chinese Learn Mathematics: Perspectives from Insiders, this book is a must for educational researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers who are interested in knowing more about mathematics teaching, teachers, teacher education and professional development concerning Chinese teachers and learners.

There has been much scientific interest in the behaviour of colloidal particles at liquid interfaces. From a research aspect they provide model systems for fundamental studies of condensed matter physics. From a commercial aspect they provide applications for making new materials in the cosmetics, food and paint industries. In many cases of colloidal particles at interfaces, the mechanism of particle interactions is still unknown. Particle-Stabilized Emulsions and Colloids looks at recent studies on the behaviour of particles at liquid interfaces. The book first introduces the basic concepts and principles of colloidal particles at liquid-liquid interfaces including the interactions and conformations. The book then discusses the latest advances in emulsions and bicontinuous emulsions stabilized by both solid and soft particles and finally the book covers applications in food science and oil extraction. With contributions from leading experts in these fields, this book will provide a background to academic researchers, engineers, and graduate students in chemistry, physics and materials science. The commercial aspects will also be of interest to those working in the cosmetics, food and oil industry.

Pressure is one of the essential thermodynamic variables that, due to some former experimental difficulties, was long known as the forgotten variable. But this has changed over the last decade. This book includes the most essential first experiments from the 1960s and reviews the progress made in understanding glass formation with the application of pressure in the last ten years. The systems include amorphous polymers and glass-forming liquids, polypeptides and polymers blends. The thermodynamics of these systems, the relation of the structural relaxation to the chemical specificity, and their present and future potential applications are discussed in detail. The book provides (a) an overview of systems exhibiting glassy behavior in relation to their molecular structure and provides readers with the current state of knowledge on the liquid-to-glass transformation, (b) emphasizes the relation between thermodynamic state and dynamic response and (c) shows that the information on the pressure effects on dynamics can be employed in the design of materials for particular applications. It is meant to serve as an advanced introductory book for scientists and graduate students working or planning to work with dynamics. Several scientific papers dealing with the effects of pressure on dynamics have appeared in leading journals in the fields of physics in the last ten years. The book provides researchers and students new to the field with an overview of the knowledge that has been gained in a coherent and comprehensive way.

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The first book to present the history, ideas, life and works of Chinese midwives and birth attendants, this volume seeks to encapsulate and explain the changing ideas about the practice of midwifery in China. Using participant observations and interviews, it examines each phase of the development of midwifery in depth. Providing a systematic study of the existing literature and contemporary national health policies, it analyses the factors contributing to the current demise of midwifery in China, such as the absence of national regulation, high standards of education and national midwives' associations. Furthermore, it argues that China's national statistics in the past six decades demonstrate clear evidence that minimising maternal mortality rates will only happen through wider availability of services, rather than through obstetric technology or facility based care. Ultimately, therefore this book supports the view that humanity and midwifery will survive to overcome domination by both technology and market forces and that economic growth and medical technology alone will not be sufficient in providing effective healthcare. This book is an indispensable resource for the study of Chinese midwifery, both in theory and in practice. As such it will be useful to students and scholars of Midwifery, Women's Health, Sociology and culture and society in China.

This edited volume advances our understanding of urban activism beyond the social movement theorization dominated by thesis of political opportunity structure and resource mobilization, as well as by research based on experience from the global north. Covering a diversity of urban actions from a broad range of countries in both hemispheres as well as the global north and global south, this unique collection notably focuses on non-institutionalised or localised urban actions that have the potential to bring about radical structural transformation of the urban system and also addresses actions in authoritarian regimes that are too sensitive to call themselves "movement". It addresses localized issues cut off from international movements such as collective consumption issues, like clean water, basic shelter, actions against displacement or proper venues for street vendors, and argues that the integration of the actions in cities in the global south with the specificity of their local social and political environment is as pivotal as their connection with global movement networks or international NGOs. A key read for researchers and policy makers cutting across the fields of urban sociology, political science, public policy, geography, regional studies and housing studies, this text provides an interdisciplinary and international perspective on 21st century urban activism in the global north and south.

Housing markets were at the centre of the recent global financial turmoil. In this study, a multidisciplinary group of leading housing analysts from the USA, Europe, Asia and Australasia explore the impact of the crisis within and between countries.