In her extensively researched exploration of China in British children's literature, Shih-Wen Chen provides a sustained critique of the reductive dichotomies that have limited insight into the cultural and educative role these fictions played in disseminating ideas and knowledge about China. Chen considers a range of different genres and types of publication--travelogue storybooks, historical novels, adventure stories, and periodicals--to demonstrate the diversity of images of China in the Victorian and Edwardian imagination. Turning a critical eye on popular and prolific writers such as Anne Bowman, William Dalton, Edwin Harcourt Burrage, Bessie Marchant, G.A. Henty, and Charles Gilson, Chen shows how Sino-British relations were influential in the representation of China in children's literature, challenges the notion that nineteenth-century children's literature simply parroted the dominant ideologies of the age, and offers insights into how attitudes towards children's relationship with knowledge changed over the course of the century. Her book provides a fresh context for understanding how China was constructed in the period from 1851 to 1911 and sheds light on British cultural history and the history and uses of children's literature.

The colonial legacy in the construction of the modern Indian state has left a deep imprint on contemporary Indians' self-identity and self-determination. Borderland Politics in Northern India is a collection of essays, giving detailed accounts of the many different ways that people throughout India understand their homeland, the territory where they live, and the broader region to which they belong. Mona Chettri looks at the Gorkha community in the Darjeeling hills to the northeast, Manjeet Baruah examines Assam, and L. Lam Khan Piang explores the dispersion of the Zo people throughout many northeastern states. In the northwest, Aijaz Ashraf Wani illustrates how Jammu and Kashmir state is severed along complex regional, religious, and ethnic lines. This book is an invaluable source for readers interested in comparative studies of borderlands globally. It also contributes to South Asian studies broadly conceived, to Indian border studies, and to local social, cultural, and political histories of the constituent border regions of Northern India. This book was published as a special issue of Asian Ethnicity.

An upsurge in violence between Uyghur and Han in China's far western region of Xinjiang has gained increased media and academic attention in recent years as was evidenced in the July 2009 riots. Numbering over eight million, the Uyghur are China's fifth-largest minority nationality, and their mounting aspiration for obtaining more autonomy has contributed to the recent ethnic conflicts in the region. This book looks at those who are seeking to preserve the Uyghur identity, and support the secession of Xinjiang from China in order to create their own independent state by exploring the global operations and sister groups of the Uyghur diaspora umbrella organization, the World Uyghur Congress (WUC). It examines the networks of the WUC, the coalitions it has formed, the strategies the organization pursues to raise public awareness about Uyghur issues around the globe, and looks at the actors that have emerged as key players in the contemporary WUC network. Further, this book shows that the Uyghur lobby is not a unified movement, but that the local groups that it consists of are highly constrained by the broader domestic politics of their host countries, a fact which has a significant impact on the lobby's ability to realize its strategic and political ambitions. In turn, Yu-Wen Chen gauges the impact of the WUC on public opinion and policymakers in the world's democracies, and shows how since Uyghur organizations have been given legitimacy by liberal democracies and international governmental organizations, they can no longer be considered merely splintered members of a far-flung diaspora locked in a one-sided struggle with Beijing. Indeed, Uyghur activists can and do use their hard-won legitimacy as legal migrants and asylum seekers to influence politics in their host countries. This unique and timely study reveals how an issue concerning a Chinese minority has been catapulted onto the wider global political stage, and as such, it will be of great interest to students and scholars working on Chinese politics, the Uyghur issue, and minority and ethnic politics, social movements, human rights, and international politics more broadly.

In her extensively researched exploration of China in British children's literature, Shih-Wen Chen provides a sustained critique of the reductive dichotomies that have limited insight into the cultural and educative role these fictions played in disseminating ideas and knowledge about China. Chen considers a range of different genres and types of publication-travelogue storybooks, historical novels, adventure stories, and periodicals-to demonstrate the diversity of images of China in the Victorian and Edwardian imagination. Turning a critical eye on popular and prolific writers such as Anne Bowman, William Dalton, Edwin Harcourt Burrage, Bessie Marchant, G.A. Henty, and Charles Gilson, Chen shows how Sino-British relations were influential in the representation of China in children's literature, challenges the notion that nineteenth-century children's literature simply parroted the dominant ideologies of the age, and offers insights into how attitudes towards children's relationship with knowledge changed over the course of the century. Her book provides a fresh context for understanding how China was constructed in the period from 1851 to 1911 and sheds light on British cultural history and the history and uses of children's literature.

Politics, history, and religion have long lent Tibet a glamorous air, particularly in the West. But Tibet can be understood in an astonishingly wide variety of other ways, including linguistic, ecological, environmental and climatological, geographical, geological, economic, biologic, sociologic, medicinal. Tibetan Studies in Comparative Perspective touches on all the elements of the Tibet issue, offering invaluable insight to a wide variety of readers, from specialists to those with a general interest in the topic. By putting readers into the shoes of all the stakeholders, from the Dalai Lama in his home in exile and the various Tibetan exile communities, to decision makers in Beijing, New Delhi, Washington and London, the issues at stake come into bold relief. Furthermore, the book examines the potential opportunities that lay ahead, documents where and how Tibetans have been dispersed and offers a glimpse into the social and political undercurrents sending shudders through this exiled nation. With the chasm between exiles and indigenous Tibetans growing ever-larger, what challenges do Tibetans confront just to remain Tibetan? And how will this shape the future of their political movement? The book provides a timely re-examination of the contemporary predicament of Tibetans, both in and out of Tibet. This book was published as two special issues of Asian Ethnicity.

The colonial legacy in the construction of the modern Indian state has left a deep imprint on contemporary Indians self-identity and self-determination. "Borderland Politics in Northern India" is a collection of essays, giving detailed accounts of the many different ways that people throughout India understand their homeland, the territory where they live, and the broader region to which they belong. Mona Chettri looks at the Gorkha community in the Darjeeling hills to the northeast, Manjeet Baruah examines Assam, and L. Lam Khan Piang explores the dispersion of the Zo people throughout many northeastern states. In the northwest, Aijaz Ashraf Wani illustrates how Jammu and Kashmir state is severed along complex regional, religious, and ethnic lines. This book is an invaluable source for readers interested in comparative studies of borderlands globally. It also contributes to South Asian studies broadly conceived, to Indian border studies, and to local social, cultural, and political histories of the constituent border regions of Northern India.

This book was published as a special issue of Asian Ethnicity."

An upsurge in violence between Uyghur and Han in China's far western region of Xinjiang has gained increased media and academic attention in recent years as was evidenced in the July 2009 riots. Numbering over eight million, the Uyghur are China's fifth-largest minority nationality, and their mounting aspiration for obtaining more autonomy has contributed to the recent ethnic conflicts in the region. This book looks at those who are seeking to preserve the Uyghur identity, and support the secession of Xinjiang from China in order to create their own independent state by exploring the global operations and sister groups of the Uyghur diaspora umbrella organization, the World Uyghur Congress (WUC). It examines the networks of the WUC, the coalitions it has formed, the strategies the organization pursues to raise public awareness about Uyghur issues around the globe, and looks at the actors that have emerged as key players in the contemporary WUC network. Further, this book shows that the Uyghur lobby is not a unified movement, but that the local groups that it consists of are highly constrained by the broader domestic politics of their host countries, a fact which has a significant impact on the lobby's ability to realize its strategic and political ambitions. In turn, Yu-Wen Chen gauges the impact of the WUC on public opinion and policymakers in the world's democracies, and shows how since Uyghur organizations have been given legitimacy by liberal democracies and international governmental organizations, they can no longer be considered merely splintered members of a far-flung diaspora locked in a one-sided struggle with Beijing. Indeed, Uyghur activists can and do use their hard-won legitimacy as legal migrants and asylum seekers to influence politics in their host countries. This unique and timely study reveals how an issue concerning a Chinese minority has been catapulted onto the wider global political stage, and as such, it will be of great interest to students and scholars working on Chinese politics, the Uyghur issue, and minority and ethnic politics, social movements, human rights, and international politics more broadly.

Politics, history, and religion have long lent Tibet a glamorous air, particularly in the West. But Tibet can be understood in an astonishingly wide variety of other ways, including linguistic, ecological, environmental and climatological, geographical, geological, economic, biologic, sociologic, medicinal. Tibetan Studies in Comparative Perspective touches on all the elements of the Tibet issue, offering invaluable insight to a wide variety of readers, from specialists to those with a general interest in the topic. By putting readers into the shoes of all the stakeholders, from the Dalai Lama in his home in exile and the various Tibetan exile communities, to decision makers in Beijing, New Delhi, Washington and London, the issues at stake come into bold relief. Furthermore, the book examines the potential opportunities that lay ahead, documents where and how Tibetans have been dispersed and offers a glimpse into the social and political undercurrents sending shudders through this exiled nation. With the chasm between exiles and indigenous Tibetans growing ever-larger, what challenges do Tibetans confront just to remain Tibetan? And how will this shape the future of their political movement? The book provides a timely re-examination of the contemporary predicament of Tibetans, both in and out of Tibet. This book was published as two special issues of Asian Ethnicity.

This book addresses the needs of researchers and practitioners in the field of high-speed trains, especially those whose work involves safety and reliability issues in traction systems. It will appeal to researchers and graduate students at institutions of higher learning, research labs, and in the industrial R&D sector, catering to a readership from a broad range of disciplines including intelligent transportation, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, the biological sciences and engineering, economics, ecology, and the mathematical sciences.

This book addresses the needs of researchers and practitioners in the field of high-speed trains, especially those whose work involves safety and reliability issues in traction systems. It will appeal to researchers and graduate students at institutions of higher learning, research labs, and in the industrial R&D sector, catering to a readership from a broad range of disciplines including intelligent transportation, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, the biological sciences and engineering, economics, ecology, and the mathematical sciences.

This book is a collection of principles and current practices in omics research, applied to skeletal muscle physiology and disorders. The various sections are categorized according to the level of biological organization, namely, genomics (DNA), transcriptomics (RNA), proteomics (protein), and metabolomics (metabolite). With skeletal muscle as the unifying theme, and featuring contributions from leading experts in this traditional field of research, it highlights the importance of skeletal muscle tissue in human development, health and successful ageing. It also discusses other fascinating topics like developmental biology, muscular dystrophies, exercise, insulin resistance and atrophy due to disuse, ageing or other muscle diseases, conveying the vast opportunities for generating new hypotheses as well as testing existing hypotheses by combining high-throughput techniques with proper experiment designs, bioinformatics and statistical analyses. Presenting the latest research techniques, this book is a valuable resource for the physiology community, particularly researchers and grad students who want to explore the new opportunities for omics technologies in basic physiology research.

This book introduces the fundamental concepts, methods, and applications of Hausdorff calculus, with a focus on its applications in fractal systems. Topics such as the Hausdorff diffusion equation, Hausdorff radial basis function, Hausdorff derivative nonlinear systems, PDE modeling, statistics on fractals, etc. are discussed in detail. It is an essential reference for researchers in mathematics, physics, geomechanics, and mechanics.

This volume provides a succinct up-to-date summary of global research on principal instructional leadership as it has evolved over the past 50 years. The book’s particular focus is on the development and use of the Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale (PIMRS). The PIMRS is the most widely used survey instrument designed for assessing instructional leadership for research and practice. It has been used in more than 250 studies in more than 30 countries around the world. The authors provide a detailed conceptual and data-based description of the rationale and development of the instrument as well as the ways in which it has been used in practice. The book also provides, for the first time, a comprehensive assessment of the scale’s measurement properties. This represents essential information for future users of the instrument across different national contexts. Finally, the volume outlines an agenda for improving future research on the role of principal instructional leadership in student learning and school effectiveness.

This volume provides a succinct up-to-date summary of global research on principal instructional leadership as it has evolved over the past 50 years. The book's particular focus is on the development and use of the Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale (PIMRS). The PIMRS is the most widely used survey instrument designed for assessing instructional leadership for research and practice. It has been used in more than 250 studies in more than 30 countries around the world. The authors provide a detailed conceptual and data-based description of the rationale and development of the instrument as well as the ways in which it has been used in practice. The book also provides, for the first time, a comprehensive assessment of the scale's measurement properties. This represents essential information for future users of the instrument across different national contexts. Finally, the volume outlines an agenda for improving future research on the role of principal instructional leadership in student learning and school effectiveness.

High definition video requires substantial compression in order to be transmitted or stored economically. Advances in video coding standards from MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 to H.264/AVC have provided ever increasing coding efficiency, at the expense of great computational complexity which can only be delivered through massively parallel processing. This book will present VLSI architectural design and chip implementation for high definition H.264/AVC video encoding, using a state-of-the-art video application, with complete VLSI prototype, via FPGA/ASIC. It will serve as an invaluable reference for anyone interested in VLSI design and high-level (EDA) synthesis for video.

Multimedia data are used more and more widely in human being's life, e.g., videoconferencing, visual telephone, IPTV, etc. Nearly most of the applications need multimedia transmission techniques that send multimedia data from one side to another side and keep the properties of efficiency, robustness and security. Here, the efficiency denotes the time cost of transmission operations, the robustness denotes the ability to survive transmission errors or noises, and the security denotes the protection of the transmitted media content. Recently, various intelligent or innovative techniques are invented, which bring vast performance improvements to practical applications. For example, such content transmission techniques as p2p, sensor network and ad hoc network are constructed, which adaptively use the peers' properties to improve the network's resources. Multimedia adaptation techniques can adjust the multimedia data rate in order to compliant with the network's bandwidth. Scalable encryption techniques can generate the data stream that can be correctly decrypted after bit rate conversion. Ubiquitous multimedia services make the user share any kind of content anywhere. The book includes fourteen chapters highlighting current concepts, issues and emerging technologies. Distinguished scholars from many prominent research institutions around the world contribute to the book. The book covers various aspects, including not only some fundamental knowledge and the latest key techniques, but also typical applications and open issues. For example, the covered topics include the present and future video coding standards, stereo and multiview coding techniques, free-viewpoint TV techniques, wireless broadcasting techniques, media streaming techniques, wireless media transmission techniques and systems, and User-Generated Content sharing.

The portable device and mobile phone market has witnessed rapid growth in the last few years with the emergence of several revolutionary products such as mobile TV, converging iPhone and digital cameras that combine music, phone and video functionalities into one device. The proliferation of this market has further bene?ted from the competition in software and applications for smart phones such as Google's Android operating system and Apple's iPhone App- Store, stimulating tens of thousands of mobile applications that are made ava- able by individual and enterprise developers. Whereas the mobile device has become ubiquitous in people's daily life not only as a cellular phone but also as a media player, a mobile computing device, and a personal assistant, it is p- ticularly important to address challenges timely in applying advanced pattern recognition, signal, information and multimedia processing techniques, and new emerging networking technologies to such mobile systems. The primary objective of this book is to foster interdisciplinary discussions and research in mobile multimedia processing techniques, applications and s- tems, as well as to provide stimulus to researchers on pushing the frontier of emerging new technologies and applications. One attempt on such discussions was the organization of the First Int- national Workshop of Mobile Multimedia Processing (WMMP 2008), held in Tampa, Florida, USA, on December 7, 2008. About 30 papers were submitted from10countriesacrosstheUSA, Asia andEurope.

High definition video requires substantial compression in order to be transmitted or stored economically. Advances in video coding standards from MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 to H.264/AVC have provided ever increasing coding efficiency, at the expense of great computational complexity which can only be delivered through massively parallel processing.

This book will present VLSI architectural design and chip implementation for high definition H.264/AVC video encoding, using a state-of-the-art video application, with complete VLSI prototype, via FPGA/ASIC. It will serve as an invaluable reference for anyone interested in VLSI design and high-level (EDA) synthesis for video.

This textbook highlights the theory of fractional calculus and its wide applications in mechanics and engineering. It describes in details the research findings in using fractional calculus methods for modeling and numerical simulation of complex mechanical behavior. It covers the mathematical basis of fractional calculus, the relationship between fractal and fractional calculus, unconventional statistics and anomalous diffusion, typical applications of fractional calculus, and the numerical solution of the fractional differential equation. It also includes latest findings, such as variable order derivative, distributed order derivative and its applications. Different from other textbooks in this subject, the book avoids lengthy mathematical demonstrations, and presents the theories in close connection to the applications in an easily readable manner. This textbook is intended for students, researchers and professionals in applied physics, engineering mechanics, and applied mathematics. It is also of high reference value for those in environmental mechanics, geotechnical mechanics, biomechanics, and rheology.

This book is a collection of principles and current practices in omics research, applied to skeletal muscle physiology and disorders. The various sections are categorized according to the level of biological organization, namely, genomics (DNA), transcriptomics (RNA), proteomics (protein), and metabolomics (metabolite). With skeletal muscle as the unifying theme, and featuring contributions from leading experts in this traditional field of research, it highlights the importance of skeletal muscle tissue in human development, health and successful ageing. It also discusses other fascinating topics like developmental biology, muscular dystrophies, exercise, insulin resistance and atrophy due to disuse, ageing or other muscle diseases, conveying the vast opportunities for generating new hypotheses as well as testing existing hypotheses by combining high-throughput techniques with proper experiment designs, bioinformatics and statistical analyses. Presenting the latest research techniques, this book is a valuable resource for the physiology community, particularly researchers and grad students who want to explore the new opportunities for omics technologies in basic physiology research.

The development of new information and communication technologies has a considerable impact on the way humans interact with each other and their environment. The proper use of these technologies is an important consideration in the success of modern human endeavors. Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Telecommunications, Wireless Systems, and Mobile Computing explores some of the latest advances in wireless communication technologies, making use of empirical research and analytical case studies to evaluate best practices in the discipline. This book will provide insight into the next generation of information and communication technologies for developers, engineers, students, researchers, and managers in the telecommunications field.

Due to the tremendous amount of data generated daily from fields such as business, research, and sciences, big data is everywhere. Therefore, alternative management and processing methods have to be created to handle this complex and unstructured data size. Big Data Management, Technologies, and Applications discusses the exponential growth of information size and the innovative methods for data capture, storage, sharing, and analysis for big data. With its prevalence, this collection of articles on big data methodologies and technologies are beneficial for IT workers, researchers, students, and practitioners in this timely field.

The expansion of the digital age continues to bring new mobile devices, technologies and methods that are introduced every day. Though commonly used, the technologies of these devices remain unfamiliar to users due to the complicated and fast-evolving disciplines. Mobile and Handheld Computing Solutions for Organizations and End-Users discusses a broad range of topics in order to advance handheld knowledge and apply the proposed methods to real-world issues for organisations and end users. This book brings together researchers and practitioners involved with mobile and handheld computing solutions useful for IT students, researchers, and scholars.

This book of text, cases and materials from Asia is designed for scholars and students of constitutional law and comparative constitutional law. The book is divided into 11 chapters, arranged thematically around key ideas and controversies, enabling the reader to work through the major facets of constitutionalism in the region. The book begins with a lengthy introduction that critically examines the study of constitutional orders in 'Asia', highlighting the histories, colonial influences, and cultural particularities extant in the region. This chapter serves both as a provisional orientation towards the major constitutional developments seen in Asia - both unique and shared with other regions - and as a guide to the controversies encountered in the study of constitutional law in Asia. Each of the following chapters is framed by an introductory essay setting out the issues and succinctly highlighting critical perspectives and themes. The approach is one of 'challenge and response', whereby questions of constitutional importance are posed and the reader is then led, by engaging with primary and secondary materials, through the way the various Asian states respond to these questions and challenges. Chapter segments are accompanied by notes, comments and questions to facilitate critical and comparative analysis, as well as recommendations for further reading.The book presents a representative range of Asian materials from jurisdictions including: Bangladesh, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, South Korea, Sri Lanka , Taiwan, Timor-Leste and the 10 ASEAN states.