Cosmo is a young boy whose life has been changed forever, after falling out of the tree he loved to climb. Now, Cosmo is disabled and uses a wheelchair. Now, Cosmo wants to have a conversation with the tree. In this outstanding debut collection for children, Stephen Lightbown draws on his own personal experiences as a wheelchair user, while creating a unique and utterly engaging character in Cosmo. Written in Cosmo’s voice and peppered with contributions from the boy’s family, these poems take the reader on a journey of challenges, questions, hurts, explorations and triumphs. Cosmo is endlessly open and curious, and his observations and reflections are at once perceptive, raw, hilarious, confronting and enchanting. How can Cosmo come to terms with, and adapt to, this seismic change in his life? Is his life as he knew it gone? Could there be new possibilities ahead, and also new abilities that Cosmo doesn't yet know he possesses? And will the tree ever reply to his number one question: why?

This book focuses on the interaction and mutual influences between the East and the West in terms of their legal systems and practices. In this regard, it highlights Professor Herbert H.P. Ma's achievements and his efforts to bring Eastern and Western legal concepts and systems closer together. The book shows that, while there have been convergences between different legal regimes in many fields of law, diverse legal practices and approaches rooted in differing cultural, social, political and philosophical backgrounds do remain, and that these differences are not necessarily negative elements in the contemporary legal order. By examining different levels of the legal order, including domestic, regional and multilateral, it goes on to argue that identifying these diversities and addressing the interactions and mutual influences between different regimes is a worthwhile undertaking, not only in terms of mutual enrichment, but also with regard to intensifying the degree of desirable coordination between different legal systems. All chapters were written by leading experts, practitioners and scholars from different jurisdictions with expertise in various fields of law and different levels of the legal order, and discuss a number of issues with particular focus on either "one-way" or mutual influences between the Eastern and the Western legal systems, practices and philosophies.

This book addresses the challenges of designing high performance analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) based on the "smart data converters" concept, which implies context awareness, on-chip intelligence and adaptation. Readers will learn to exploit various information either a-priori or a-posteriori (obtained from devices, signals, applications or the ambient situations, etc.) for circuit and architecture optimization during the design phase or adaptation during operation, to enhance data converters performance, flexibility, robustness and power-efficiency. The authors focus on exploiting the a-priori knowledge of the system/application to develop enhancement techniques for ADCs, with particular emphasis on improving the power efficiency of high-speed and high-resolution ADCs for broadband multi-carrier systems.

This multidisciplinary reference takes the reader through all four major phases of interdisciplinary inquiry: adequate conceptualization, rigorous formulation, substantive interpretation, and innovative implementation. The text introduces a novel synthetic paradigm of public health reasoning and epidemic modelling, and implements it with a study of the infamous 14th century AD Black Death disaster that killed at least one-fourth of the European population.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic silently started in early 2020, and no one was prepared for it. Unlike the outbreak of SARS in 2002-2003, a similar coronavirus, it was less contagious than COVID-19, but tended to be more deadly. The COVID-19 virus is much more contagious with a relatively lower chance of causing death. Nevertheless, it is still one of the most dangerous viruses in human history. Studies of COVID-19 have attracted tremendous attention from academia and governments. However, they tend to focus on the fields of biology, virology, public health, and psychology instead of the politics, policies, and political attitudes related to the pandemic. Of course, it is critical to understand the nature of this virus and seek proper policy remedies to stop the pandemic and help citizens to regain their everyday lives, but how the pandemic has affected the public and their views toward politics is equally important as it will determine political outcomes in the near future. We compare the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on public opinion, the dynamics of party politics in Taiwan, and some of its strategic neighbors.

This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the theoretical foundation and algorithmic tools necessary in the design of efficient tag counting and monitoring algorithms in emerging RFID systems. The book delivers an in-depth analysis on the following problems ranging from theoretical modeling and analysis, to practical algorithm design and optimization: Stability analysis of the frame slotted Aloha protocol, the de facto standard in RFID tag counting and identification; Tag population estimation in dynamic RFID systems; Missing tag event detection in the presence of unexpected tags; Missing tag event detection in multi-group multi-region RFID systems. The target readers are researchers and advanced-level engineering students interested in acquiring in-depth knowledge on the topic and on RFID systems and their applications.

This book focuses on the interaction and mutual influences between the East and the West in terms of their legal systems and practices. In this regard, it highlights Professor Herbert H.P. Ma's achievements and his efforts to bring Eastern and Western legal concepts and systems closer together. The book shows that, while there have been convergences between different legal regimes in many fields of law, diverse legal practices and approaches rooted in differing cultural, social, political and philosophical backgrounds do remain, and that these differences are not necessarily negative elements in the contemporary legal order. By examining different levels of the legal order, including domestic, regional and multilateral, it goes on to argue that identifying these diversities and addressing the interactions and mutual influences between different regimes is a worthwhile undertaking, not only in terms of mutual enrichment, but also with regard to intensifying the degree of desirable coordination between different legal systems. All chapters were written by leading experts, practitioners and scholars from different jurisdictions with expertise in various fields of law and different levels of the legal order, and discuss a number of issues with particular focus on either "one-way" or mutual influences between the Eastern and the Western legal systems, practices and philosophies.

This book addresses the challenges of designing high performance analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) based on the “smart data converters� concept, which implies context awareness, on-chip intelligence and adaptation. Readers will learn to exploit various information either a-priori or a-posteriori (obtained from devices, signals, applications or the ambient situations, etc.) for circuit and architecture optimization during the design phase or adaptation during operation, to enhance data converters performance, flexibility, robustness and power-efficiency. The authors focus on exploiting the a-priori knowledge of the system/application to develop enhancement techniques for ADCs, with particular emphasis on improving the power efficiency of high-speed and high-resolution ADCs for broadband multi-carrier systems. 

This multidisciplinary reference takes the reader through all four major phases of interdisciplinary inquiry: adequate conceptualization, rigorous formulation, substantive interpretation, and innovative implementation. The text introduces a novel synthetic paradigm of public health reasoning and epidemic modelling, and implements it with a study of the infamous 14th century AD Black Death disaster that killed at least one-fourth of the European population.

This book studies solutions of the Polubarinova-Galin and Loewner-Kufarev equations, which describe the evolution of a viscous fluid (Hele-Shaw) blob, after the time when these solutions have lost their physical meaning due to loss of univalence of the mapping function involved. When the mapping function is no longer locally univalent interesting phase transitions take place, leading to structural changes in the data of the solution, for example new zeros and poles in the case of rational maps. This topic intersects with several areas, including mathematical physics, potential theory and complex analysis. The text will be valuable to researchers and doctoral students interested in fluid dynamics, integrable systems, and conformal field theory.

'Did you know, you can bump into a poem anywhere? You find them in houses, fields, oceans, cities, trees...the list is endless! I've even found poems in people's faces, when they laugh or cry, or get excited. Of course, you have to write the poems you find, because poems can't hold a pen or type on a keyboard. This book is full of poems I found when I was looking out for them. I had to dig some out of my imagination - ouch! You'll discover in the pages some things that I think should be in a poem, but I'm sure you can think of more. Go hunting!' Coral Rumble's warm, vibrant, exciting world of poems is complemented by Shih-Yu Lin's expressive colour illustrations.

This three-volume set LNCS 11901, 11902, and 11903 constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 10thth International Conference on Image and Graphics, ICIG 2019, held in Beijing, China, in August 2019. The 183 full papers presented were selected from 384 submissions and focus on advances of theory, techniques and algorithms as well as innovative technologies of image, video and graphics processing and fostering innovation, entrepreneurship, and networking.

This three-volume set LNCS 11901, 11902, and 11903 constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 10thth International Conference on Image and Graphics, ICIG 2019, held in Beijing, China, in August 2019. The 183 full papers presented were selected from 384 submissions and focus on advances of theory, techniques and algorithms as well as innovative technologies of image, video and graphics processing and fostering innovation, entrepreneurship, and networking.

This three-volume set LNCS 11901, 11902, and 11903 constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 10thth International Conference on Image and Graphics, ICIG 2019, held in Beijing, China, in August 2019. The 183 full papers presented were selected from 384 submissions and focus on advances of theory, techniques and algorithms as well as innovative technologies of image, video and graphics processing and fostering innovation, entrepreneurship, and networking.

This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the theoretical foundation and algorithmic tools necessary in the design of efficient tag counting and monitoring algorithms in emerging RFID systems. The book delivers an in-depth analysis on the following problems ranging from theoretical modeling and analysis, to practical algorithm design and optimization: Stability analysis of the frame slotted Aloha protocol, the de facto standard in RFID tag counting and identification; Tag population estimation in dynamic RFID systems; Missing tag event detection in the presence of unexpected tags; Missing tag event detection in multi-group multi-region RFID systems. The target readers are researchers and advanced-level engineering students interested in acquiring in-depth knowledge on the topic and on RFID systems and their applications.

Nation states have long and successfully claimed to be the proper and sovereign forum for determining a country's international economic policies. Increasingly, however, supranational and non-governmental actors are moving to the front of the stage. New forms of multilateral and global policy-making have emerged, including states and national administrations, key international organizations, international conferences, multinational enterprises, and a wide range of transnational pressure groups and NGOs that all claim their share in exercising power and influence on international and domestic policy-making. In honour of Professor Mitsuo Matsushita's intellectual contributions to the field of international economic law, this volume reflects on the current state and the future of international economic law. The book addresses a broad spectrum of themes in contemporary international economic regulations and focuses specifically on the significant areas of Professor Matsushita's scholarship, including the rise of the soft-law mechanism in international economic regulation, the role of the WTO and dispute settlement, and specific areas such as competition, subsidies, anti-dumping, intellectual property, and natural resources. Part one of the volume provides a comprehensive and critical analysis of the rule-based international dispute settlement mechanisms; Part two investigates the normative influences to and from WTO law; and Part three focuses on policy and law-making issues.

"Introductory Continuum Mechanics with Applications to Elasticity" is a new kind of textbook: by combining continuum mechanics with elasticity theory and examples, it consolidates two textbooks into one. Not only does this save students on traditional book costs, but it also naturally blends these related topics into a cohesive book.
With unique examples and problem sets, the title also serves as a solid introduction to continuum mechanics and elasticity. Developed from years of notes and classroom testing, the title is the perfect blend of content: multi-faceted and challenging, but without drowning the readers in complexity.
Tariq Khraishi is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of New Mexico. His research work is in the areas of mechanics and materials science, as well as in the scholarship of teaching and learning. In particular, he has been involved in modeling, theoretical and experimental research in biomechanics, dislocation dynamics, eigenstrain theory and modeling, fracture mechanics, nanomaterials, composites, irradiation damage in materials, void growth and interaction in superplastic materials, heteroepitaxy and stresses in thin films, as well as active learning in engineering courses. He is a fellow of ASME and has published over 100 refereed works, including another textbook on materials science/engineering.
Yu-Lin Shen is currently a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of New Mexico. He received his Ph.D. in engineering from Brown University in 1994, and was a post-doctoral research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the faculty of the University of New Mexico in 1996. Professor Shen is widely recognized for his research in mechanical behavior of materials, especially in modeling. His numerical modeling experience spans disparate length scales from the continuum level down to atomistics, focusing on mechanical issues related to thin films, composite materials and microelectronic devices, and packages. In 2005 Professor Shen was elected a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). He is also the author of the book "Constrained Deformation of Materials," published by Springer in 2010.

Historical Commentary And Notes By Robert C. North.

In the engineering design domain, product design process is a major focus. In this process, product designs are conceived through several consecutive stages, where several decision making tools are deployed. Decision making in such settings involves a variety of complexities such as uncertainty, or ambiguity of available data, or missing information. Despite these complexities, however, designers and manufacturers need to make appropriate decisions to prevent from design failures, and achieve success in the marketplace. Accordingly, decision makers require an effective tool to assist them in making appropriate decisions. In this work, we introduce data envelopment analysis (DEA) to the product design domain for solving problems in two important focus areas: conceptual design problems and product family design problems. DEA has been widely applied in various fields and has been proved to be effective. In the book, we provide DEA implementations on three case studies to demonstrate its applicability in the product design domain. The results of the case studies reveal that DEA is effective in generating appropriate product design strategies.

Taiwan's nativist literature, known as Taiwan hsiang-t'u literature, originated in the Japanese occupation when Taiwanese native authors strived to establish a "national" literature distinct from Japanese and Chinese literatures. Drawing on recent colonial/postcolonial theory, this project aims to investigate the process of writing in which the native tongue profoundly undermined the privileged status of the colonizer's language and through which natives could articulate their colonial existence. It argues that the new conception of Taiwanese writing produced a new literature where the cultural "otherness" was traversed by the language and literature of the colonized. Concurrently, the practice of Taiwanese writing as a means of resistance to the writing of the colonizer constructed a new paradigm for Taiwanese "national" identity.

With the rapid growth of Internet, E-learning systems have become more and more popular because they can enable learners to study at any time and any location, so the need of learning resources and instructional design is also increasing rapidly. Many international standards have been proposed to model the structures and guiding rules of learning activities for the purpose of sharing and reusing. However, there are still no effective models to describe complex instructional design knowledge, and the effective authoring systems of instructional design and learning content navigating sequence are also required. Moreover, without an intelligent knowledge management scheme, the huge amount of learning resources will confuse the teachers in learning activity design. It implies that how to visualise and integrate the heterogeneous instructional design and navigating sequence knowledge in a learning platform becomes an important issue. Therefore, the author proposes an Intelligent Assisted Instructional Design System (IAIDS), which is an instructional design expert system consisting of Knowledge Representation (KR) module to model the instructional design graphically, knowledge acquisition (KA) module to assist teachers to edit instructional design and navigating sequence efficiently, Knowledge Management (KM) module to support teachers to manage and retrieve learning contents in repositories, and Knowledge Inference (KI) module to display the learning activity in a portable and modifiable platform.