Based on first-hand materials gathered through decades of field research and fleshed out with the author's insightful religious, cultural, and historical observations extending back to Qing Dynasty times, ancient archaeological discoveries and the legacy of Siberian peoples, this two-volume ethnological study investigates shamanic rituals, myths and lore in northern China and explores the common ideology underlying the origins of the region's cultures. The book discusses the spiritual world of northern Shamanism and investigates the various shamanic rituals, divination, spirit idols and myths, illuminating how worship and ideas are imbedded in and interweave with the indigenous environment, culture and history of people in northern China. This mythic heritage embodies the peoples' understanding of the natural world, the creation of humankind, social life and history as well as their interaction with their surroundings. It is shown that shamanic spirituality in northern China is characterised by functionality and practicality in daily-life situations, in contrast to the received wisdom that defines shamanic praxis as a pure supernatural spirit journey. The book will be of great value for scholars of religion and anthropologists as well as ethnologists in the fields of Shamanism studies, Northeast Asian folklore and Manchu studies.

This book places the topic of the state and society in the context of modern development in China over the past century, investigating the dynamic relation and internal tension between the state's power enhancement and society's vitality activation instead of simply regarding the country and society as two separate entities. Building a modern country and activating the people's vitality involves three closely linked and mutually supporting aspects: establishing the identity recognition of the people to unite the nation; adjusting the organizational system of the society to promote mobilization and institute a social incentive system; and determining dominant strategies and means for the interaction between the country and society to address social-governance issues. This book carefully sheds light on the logic behind China's roundabout strategy for building a modern country and motivating the vitality of its people.

Focusing on significant and cutting-edge preoccupations within children’s literature scholarship, The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature and Culture presents a comprehensive overview of the print, digital, and electronic texts for children aged zero to thirteen as forms of world literature participating in a panoply of identity formations. Offering five distinct sections, this volume will: • Familiarize students and beginning scholars with key concepts and main methodological resources guiding contemporary inquiry into children’s literature. • Describe the major media formats and genres for texts expressly addressing children. • Consider the production, distribution, and valuing of children’s books from an assortment of historical and contemporary perspectives, highlighting context as a driver of content. • Map how children’s texts have historically presumed and prescribed certain identities on the part of their readers, sometimes addressing readers who share some part of the author’s identity, sometimes seeking to educate the reader about a presumed “other,” and in recent decades increasingly foregrounding identities once lacking visibility and voice. • Explore the historical evolutions and trans-regional contacts and (inter)connections in the long process of the formation of global children’s literature, highlighting new issues such as retranslation, transnationalism, transculturality, and new digital formats for considering cultural crossings and renegotiations in the production of children’s literature. Methodically presented and contextualized, this volume is an engaging introduction to this expanding and multifaceted field.

Exploratory data analysis, also known as data mining or knowledge discovery from databases, is typically based on the optimisation of a specific function of a dataset. Such optimisation is often performed with gradient descent or variations thereof. In this book, we first lay the groundwork by reviewing some standard clustering algorithms and projection algorithms before presenting various non-standard criteria for clustering. The family of algorithms developed are shown to perform better than the standard clustering algorithms on a variety of datasets.

We then consider extensions of the basic mappings which maintain some topology of the original data space. Finally we show how reinforcement learning can be used as a clustering mechanism before turning to projection methods.

We show that several varieties of reinforcement learning may also be used to define optimal projections for example for principal component analysis, exploratory projection pursuit and canonical correlation analysis. The new method of cross entropy adaptation is then introduced and used as a means of optimising projections. Finally an artificial immune system is used to create optimal projections and combinations of these three methods are shown to outperform the individual methods of optimisation.

This monograph offers a comprehensive overview of diverse quantization phenomena in layered materials, covering current mainstream experimental and theoretical research studies, and presenting essential properties of layered materials along with a wealth of figures. This book illustrates commonly used synthesis methods of these 2D materials and compares the calculated results and experimental measurements, including novel features not yet reported. The book also discusses experimental measurements of magnetic quantization, theoretical modeling for studying systems and covers diversified magneto-electronic properties, magneto-optical selection rules, unusual quantum Hall conductivities, and single- and many-particle magneto-Coulomb excitations. Rich and unique behaviors are clearly revealed in few-layer graphene systems with distinct stacking configuration, stacking-modulated structures, silicon-doped lattices, bilayer silicene/germanene systems with the bottom-top and bottom-bottom buckling structures, monolayer and bilayer phosphorene systems, and quantum topological insulators. The generalized tight-binding model, the static and dynamic Kubo formulas, and the random-phase approximation are developed/modified to thoroughly explore the fundamental properties and propose the concise physical pictures. Different high-resolution experimental measurements are discussed in detail, and they are consistent with the theoretical predictions. Aimed at readers working in materials science, physics, and engineering this book should be useful for potential applications in energy storage, electronic devices, and optoelectronic devices.

Coulomb Excitations and Decays in Graphene-Related Systems provides an overview of the subject under the effects of lattice symmetries, layer numbers, dimensions, stacking configurations, orbital hybridizations, intralayer and interlayer hopping integrals, spin-orbital couplings, temperatures, electron/hole dopings, electric field, and magnetic quantization while presenting a new theoretical framework of the electronic properties and the electron-electron interactions together. This book presents a well-developed theoretical model and addresses important advances in essential properties and diverse excitation phenomena. Covering plenty of critical factors related to the field, the book also addresses the theoretical model which is applicable to various dimension-enriched graphene-related systems and other 2D materials, including layered graphenes, graphites, carbon nanotubes, silicene, and germanene. The text is aimed at professionals in materials science, physics, physical chemistry, and upper level students in these fields.

Based on first-hand materials gathered through decades of field research and fleshed out with the author's insightful religious, cultural, and historical observations extending back to Qing Dynasty times, ancient archaeological discoveries and the legacy of Siberian peoples, this two-volume ethnological study investigates shamanic rituals, myths and lore in northern China and explores the common ideology underlying the origins of the region's cultures. The book discusses the spiritual world of northern Shamanism and investigates the various shamanic rituals, divination, spirit idols and myths, illuminating how worship and ideas are imbedded in and interweave with the indigenous environment, culture and history of people in northern China. This mythic heritage embodies the peoples' understanding of the natural world, the creation of humankind, social life and history as well as their interaction with their surroundings. It is shown that shamanic spirituality in northern China is characterised by functionality and practicality in daily-life situations, in contrast to the received wisdom that defines shamanic praxis as a pure supernatural spirit journey. The book will be of great value for scholars of religion and anthropologists as well as ethnologists in the fields of Shamanism studies, Northeast Asian folklore and Manchu studies.

This study, first published in 1994, is intended to deepen the readers understanding of the phenomenon of equilibrium credit rationing in two areas. The first area concerns the form that equilibrium credit rationing assumes and its importance in determining the behaviour of interest rates. The second concerns the role of equilibrium credit rationing in transmitting monetary shocks to the real sector. This title will be of interest to students of monetary economics.

This study, first published in 1994, is intended to deepen the readers understanding of the phenomenon of equilibrium credit rationing in two areas. The first area concerns the form that equilibrium credit rationing assumes and its importance in determining the behaviour of interest rates. The second concerns the role of equilibrium credit rationing in transmitting monetary shocks to the real sector. This title will be of interest to students of monetary economics.

" Translator] Red Pine's out-of-the-mainstream work is uncanny and clearheaded."--"Kyoto Journal"

"Red Pine's succinct and informative notes for each poem are core samples of the cultural, political, and literary history of China."--"Asian Reporter"

Wei Ying-wu (737-791) is considered one of the great poets of the T'ang Dynasty, ranked alongside such poets as Tu Fu, Li Pai, and Wang Wei. Strangely, though, only a handful of Wei Ying-wu's poems have ever been translated into English.

True to his reputation as one of the world's leading translators of Chinese, Red Pine (a.k.a. Bill Porter) translates 175 of Wei's poems and demonstrates why he is "one of the world's great poets." Presented in a bilingual Chinese-English format, with extensive notes and an informative introduction, "In Such Hard Times" is a long-overdue world premiere.

"A courtyard of bamboo in the snow at midnight"
"a lone lantern a book on my table"
"if I hadn't encountered the teachings of inaction"
"how else could I have gained this life of leisure"

Wei Ying-wu (737-791) is considered one of the great poets of the T'ang Dynasty. Born into an aristocratic family in decline, Wei served in several government posts without distinction. He disdained the literary establishment of his day and fashioned a poetic style counter to the mainstream: one of profound simplicity centered in the natural world.

Red Pine (a.k.a. Bill Porter) is one of the world's leading translators of Chinese literary and religious texts.

The movement of Asian citizens across continents now occurs on an unprecedented scale, with a surge in Asian tourists now visiting Europe, North America, Africa and Oceania. Tourists from China, Taiwan, India, Thailand, Malaysia, and to a lesser extent Korea and Japan are meeting the citizens of cultures they had previously only been able to read about or view from afar. This book seeks to understand the experiences of, and reactions to, Asian tourists travelling out of Asia.Questions about Asian tourist contact with unfamiliar countries and cultures will be addressed. What are the interests of Asian tourists and what drives these interests? What impacts are they having on host communities, both in terms of the provision and co-creation of desired experiences and in the human dimensions of social contact? The volume addresses fresh implications for marketing, planning and policy which these tourist markets pose for good governance. This book confronts the limitations of our understanding of how to manage the tourist experience when that understanding has been built almost entirely on the behaviours and travels of western tourists.

This book places the topic of the state and society in the context of modern development in China over the past century, investigating the dynamic relation and internal tension between the state's power enhancement and society's vitality activation instead of simply regarding the country and society as two separate entities. Building a modern country and activating the people's vitality involves three closely linked and mutually supporting aspects: establishing the identity recognition of the people to unite the nation; adjusting the organizational system of the society to promote mobilization and institute a social incentive system; and determining dominant strategies and means for the interaction between the country and society to address social-governance issues. This book carefully sheds light on the logic behind China's roundabout strategy for building a modern country and motivating the vitality of its people.

Action recognition technology has many real-world applications in human-computer interaction, surveillance, video retrieval, retirement home monitoring, and robotics. The commoditization of depth sensors has also opened up further applications that were not feasible before. This text focuses on feature representation and machine learning algorithms for action recognition from depth sensors. After presenting a comprehensive overview of the state of the art, the authors then provide in-depth descriptions of their recently developed feature representations and machine learning techniques, including lower-level depth and skeleton features, higher-level representations to model the temporal structure and human-object interactions, and feature selection techniques for occlusion handling. This work enables the reader to quickly familiarize themselves with the latest research, and to gain a deeper understanding of recently developed techniques. It will be of great use for both researchers and practitioners.

Exploratory data analysis, also known as data mining or knowledge discovery from databases, is typically based on the optimisation of a specific function of a dataset. Such optimisation is often performed with gradient descent or variations thereof. In this book, we first lay the groundwork by reviewing some standard clustering algorithms and projection algorithms before presenting various non-standard criteria for clustering. The family of algorithms developed are shown to perform better than the standard clustering algorithms on a variety of datasets. We then consider extensions of the basic mappings which maintain some topology of the original data space. Finally we show how reinforcement learning can be used as a clustering mechanism before turning to projection methods. We show that several varieties of reinforcement learning may also be used to define optimal projections for example for principal component analysis, exploratory projection pursuit and canonical correlation analysis. The new method of cross entropy adaptation is then introduced and used as a means of optimising projections. Finally an artificial immune system is used to create optimal projections and combinations of these three methods are shown to outperform the individual methods of optimisation.

Coulomb Excitations and Decays in Graphene-Related Systems provides an overview of the subject under the effects of lattice symmetries, layer numbers, dimensions, stacking configurations, orbital hybridizations, intralayer and interlayer hopping integrals, spin-orbital couplings, temperatures, electron/hole dopings, electric field, and magnetic quantization while presenting a new theoretical framework of the electronic properties and the electron-electron interactions together. This book presents a well-developed theoretical model and addresses important advances in essential properties and diverse excitation phenomena. Covering plenty of critical factors related to the field, the book also addresses the theoretical model which is applicable to various dimension-enriched graphene-related systems and other 2D materials, including layered graphenes, graphites, carbon nanotubes, silicene, and germanene. The text is aimed at professionals in materials science, physics, physical chemistry, and upper level students in these fields.

This book presents a new perspective on so far neglected important areas in clinical sport psychology and sport psychiatry. The authors use the results of an empirical qualitative and transcultural study, to evaluate post psychological traumata of "training peak, performance low" syndrome in sport. The results support the view of athlete, the symptoms are severe enough to constitute a clinical diagnosis, may suffer under depression from two medical psychological standard systems - in this case, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) - offer the same results as international standard systems - in this case, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM IV TR). The book speaks to professionals in sport sciences, sociology, psychology and medicine. It specifically is of relevance for coaches, athletes, sport managers, mental training counselors and to anyone who is interested in serious sport practice.

Visual object tracking, i.e., consistently inferring the motion of a target from image sequences, is a must-have component to bridge low-level image processing and high-level video analysis, which gains great popularity due to its applications in diverse areas, such as human-computer interaction, security video surveillance, medical image processing, and robotics. In this book, we focus on how to enhance the generality and reliability of object-level tracking given no prior knowledge about targets. We propose two novel ideas: context-aware and attentional tracking, where the tracker discovers some auxiliary objects that have short-term motion correlations with the target as the spatial contexts, or augments the observation models by selectively attending discriminative regions inside the target, or adaptively tuning the feature granularity and model elasticity. These approaches achieve promising results on challenging real-world videos. The book sheds some light on recent progress of visual tracking and should be useful to professionals in computer vision research, or anyone else who may be considering utilizing visual tracking in intelligent video analysis systems.