This book focuses on agricultural waste treatment and renewable energy production from the perspective of anaerobic digestion. It covers topics on anaerobic digestion processes and practices in various types of biogas plant construction and management and systematically addresses the principle and main features of three kinds of anaerobic digestion systems: household digesters, biogas septic tanks, and biogas plants. Instructive, informative and easy to understand, the book offers a valuable asset for researchers, technicians, graduate students and managerial personnel working in the areas of renewable energy, agricultural ecological engineering and the treatment and utilization of agricultural wastes.

Acupuncture has been an important branch of Traditional Chinese Medicine for over 3000 years and is the most popular practice among non-Chinese practitioners outside of China. In 1998, the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) held a consensus conference and endorsed the practice of acupuncture as an effective pain control agent - since then acupuncture has become even more popular. Clinical practice is always an inviting form of research. In the field of acupuncture, research concentrates on the neurological pathways of the meridians and acupoints, the neurological functional changes within the central nervous system, and innovative devices being invented, etc. It appears that there will be a long way before firm explanations can be acquired for the explanation of the physiological effects of acupuncture. The technique of acupuncture is easily acquired although the evidence of efficacy remains subjective. Before the evidence can be sorted out through scientific explorations, confidence on efficacy can rely only on literature search and sharing of expert experiences. This is a user-friendly book for all professionals practicing acupuncture. The contents consist of all the popular areas of clinical application viz. pain control and neuromuscular training. Each chapter is composed of two parts: clinical evidences as previously recorded in literature and personal experiences of the author. Acupuncture practice requires a thorough knowledge of the treatment choices relevant to particular conditions, as well as their modifications. This book offers quick references for this purpose.

This volume presents 27 selected papers in topics that range from statistical applications in business and finance to applications in clinical trials and biomarker analysis. All papers feature original, peer-reviewed content. The editors intentionally selected papers that cover many topics so that the volume will serve the whole statistical community and a variety of research interests. The papers represent select contributions to the 21st ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium. The International Chinese Statistical Association (ICSA) Symposium took place between the 23rd and 26th of June, 2012 in Boston, Massachusetts. It was co-sponsored by the International Society for Biopharmaceutical Statistics (ISBS) and American Statistical Association (ASA). This is the inaugural proceedings volume to share research from the ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium.

This book provides a comprehensive description of the catalytic technologies for selective hydrogenation of benzene to cyclohexene. Focusing on selective hydrogenation of benzene to prepare cyclohexene and its downstream products, such as cyclohexanone, bulk chemicals and high-value fine chemicals, it also discusses the objective laws, reaction mechanisms and scientific significance based on experimental data, analysis and characterization results. Given its scope, the book will appeal to a broad readership, particularly professionals at universities and scientific research institutes, senior undergraduates, master's and doctoral graduate students as well as practitioners in industry.

This book provides an overview of plasticizers, from the latest global research developments to the laws and regulations applied to their use. In addition the book details the author's recently developed methodology for a catalytic hydrogenation of phthalate plasticizers. It presents insights into the development of the catalytic phthalate hydrogenation from the reaction mechanism and catalyst characterization to pilot tests and its industrialization. Given its scope, the book will appeal to a broad readership, particularly professionals at universities and scientific research institutes, as well as practitioners in industry.

This book utilises the Expectancy-Value theory and the Undermining Effect of Extrinsic Reward theory to examine the impact of the Central Government-Funded Teacher Education policy (CGFTE) policy on Chinese pre-service teachers' motivations for choosing the teaching profession. Quantitative data analysis revealed six distinct categories of motivations to teach: teacher influence, job advantages (extrinsic), social value (altruistic), personal interest (intrinsic), others' suggestions, and fallback career. These categories were further exemplified in ten narrative stories. The findings indicate that the CGFTE policy attracts high-school graduates with higher intrinsic motivation to enrol in teacher-training programs. However, it seems ineffective in increasing their intrinsic career-choice motivation. It is argued that the CGFTE policy, which emphasizes extrinsic benefits but limits professional development, does not have a significant negative impact on pre-service teachers' motivation to choose teaching. This conclusion is supported by the offsetting effects of the policy's restrictive and encouraging aspects, as explained by the Expectancy-Value theory and qualitative data. Nevertheless, the intrinsic motivation of policy-funded pre-service teachers did not improve as much as that of their self-supported counterparts, indicating potential undermining effects of the policy. The study concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for enhancing the CGFTE policy, teacher training, and career education in China. The book will be an essential read to students and scholars of higher education, Chinese studies, and educational studies in general.

This book presents advances in control technologies for efficient operation of the brushless doubly-fed induction generator (BDFIG). For robust and low-cost operation of BDFIGs, it is required to keep high-quality output voltage and eliminate the speed/position encoder under different loads and operation conditions. Some advanced control technologies, from the authors' latest work on these topics, are presented to achieve this goal with simple and accurate texts, illustrations, and tables. The qualified outcomes obtained from this book assure the high-performance operation of BDFIGs and also give the readers a straight insight toward challenges in this research area in the future.

This book provides a comprehensive description of the catalytic technologies for selective hydrogenation of benzene to cyclohexene. Focusing on selective hydrogenation of benzene to prepare cyclohexene and its downstream products, such as cyclohexanone, bulk chemicals and high-value fine chemicals, it also discusses the objective laws, reaction mechanisms and scientific significance based on experimental data, analysis and characterization results. Given its scope, the book will appeal to a broad readership, particularly professionals at universities and scientific research institutes, senior undergraduates, master's and doctoral graduate students as well as practitioners in industry.

This book focuses on agricultural waste treatment and renewable energy production from the perspective of anaerobic digestion. It covers topics on anaerobic digestion processes and practices in various types of biogas plant construction and management and systematically addresses the principle and main features of three kinds of anaerobic digestion systems: household digesters, biogas septic tanks, and biogas plants. Instructive, informative and easy to understand, the book offers a valuable asset for researchers, technicians, graduate students and managerial personnel working in the areas of renewable energy, agricultural ecological engineering and the treatment and utilization of agricultural wastes.

This volume presents 27 selected papers in topics that range from statistical applications in business and finance to applications in clinical trials and biomarker analysis. All papers feature original, peer-reviewed content. The editors intentionally selected papers that cover many topics so that the volume will serve the whole statistical community and a variety of research interests. The papers represent select contributions to the 21st ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium. The International Chinese Statistical Association (ICSA) Symposium took place between the 23rd and 26th of June, 2012 in Boston, Massachusetts. It was co-sponsored by the International Society for Biopharmaceutical Statistics (ISBS) and American Statistical Association (ASA). This is the inaugural proceedings volume to share research from the ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium.

This book covers the science of interfaces between an aqueous phase and a solid, another liquid or a gaseous phase, starting from the basic physical chemistry all the way to state-of-the-art research developments. Both experimental and theoretical methods are treated thanks to the contributions of a distinguished list of authors who are all active researchers in their respective fields. The properties of these interfaces are crucial for a wide variety of processes, products and biological systems and functions, such as the formulation of personal care and food products, paints and coatings, microfluidic and lab-on-a-chip applications, cell membranes, and lung surfactants. Accordingly, research and expertise on the subject are spread over a broad range of academic disciplines and industrial laboratories. This book brings together knowledge from these different places with the aim of fostering education, collaborations and research progress.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-competition proceedings of the AI Ops Competition on Large-Scale Disk Failure Prediction, conducted between February 7th and May 15, 2020 on the Alibaba Cloud Tianchi Platform. A dedicated workshop, featuring the best performing teams of the competition, was held at the 24th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, PAKDD 2020, in Singapore, in April 2019. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the workshop was hosted online. This book includes 13 selected contributions: an introduction to dataset, selected approaches of the competing teams and the competition summary, describing the competition task, practical challenges, evaluation metrics, etc.

This book undertakes two main tasks. First, it provides an overview of Sino-Mexican trade and economic relations since the normalization of diplomatic relations in the 1980s. Second, it presents a re-evaluation of Mexico's trade policies with China, from the import substitution industrialization (ISI) period in the early 1990s to the strengthening of economic and trade relations in recent years. Both aspects are addressed within a unified framework by documenting historical events and conducting empirical analyses throughout Mexico's economic development, which has been characterized by both growth and stagnation. The book analyzes the Sino-Mexican trade conflicts and cooperation by examining cases of antidumping (AD) and flows of international trade, and by addressing the current obstacles.

Transgenic plants are cultivated on a large scale worldwide, and most of the harvested products are fed to domestic animals. By gathering together more than 150 feeding studies with food-producing animals, and covering both first- and second-generation transgenic plants, this book provides the first central resource of this information for researchers, students, policy makers and all those who are interested in future developments in the field.

These books, with of a total of 40 chapters, are a comprehensive and complete introductory text on the synthesis, characterization, and applications of nanomaterials. They are aimed at graduate students and researchers whose background is chemistry, physics, materials science, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, and biomedical science.

The first part emphasizes the chemical and physical approaches used for synthesis of nanomaterials. The second part emphasizes the techniques used for characterizing the structure and properties of nanomaterials, aiming at describing the physical mechanism, data interpretation, and detailed applications of the techniques. The final part focuses on systems of different nanostructural materials with novel properties and applications.