A journalist travels throughout mainland China and Taiwan in search of his family’s hidden treasure and comes to understand his ancestry as he never has before. In 1938, when the Japanese arrived in Huan Hsu’s great-great-grandfather Liu’s Yangtze River hometown of Xingang, Liu was forced to bury his valuables, including a vast collection of prized antique porcelain, and undertake a decades-long trek that would splinter the family over thousands of miles. Many years and upheavals later, Hsu, raised in Salt Lake City and armed only with curiosity, moves to China to work in his uncle’s semiconductor chip business. Once there, a conversation with his grandmother, his last living link to dynastic China, ignites a desire to learn more about not only his lost ancestral heirlooms but also porcelain itself. Mastering the language enough to venture into the countryside, Hsu sets out to separate the layers of fact and fiction that have obscured both China and his heritage and finally complete his family’s long march back home. Melding memoir, travelogue, and social and political history, The Porcelain Thief offers an intimate and unforgettable way to understand the complicated events that have defined China over the past two hundred years and provides a revealing, lively perspective on contemporary Chinese society from the point of view of a Chinese American coming to terms with his hyphenated identity.
A journalist travels throughout mainland China and Taiwan in search of his family’s hidden treasure and comes to understand his ancestry as he never has before. In 1938, when the Japanese arrived in Huan Hsu’s great-great-grandfather Liu’s Yangtze River hometown of Xingang, Liu was forced to bury his valuables, including a vast collection of prized antique porcelain, and undertake a decades-long trek that would splinter the family over thousands of miles. Many years and upheavals later, Hsu, raised in Salt Lake City and armed only with curiosity, moves to China to work in his uncle’s semiconductor chip business. Once there, a conversation with his grandmother, his last living link to dynastic China, ignites a desire to learn more about not only his lost ancestral heirlooms but also porcelain itself. Mastering the language enough to venture into the countryside, Hsu sets out to separate the layers of fact and fiction that have obscured both China and his heritage and finally complete his family’s long march back home. Melding memoir, travelogue, and social and political history, The Porcelain Thief offers an intimate and unforgettable way to understand the complicated events that have defined China over the past two hundred years and provides a revealing, lively perspective on contemporary Chinese society from the point of view of a Chinese American coming to terms with his hyphenated identity.
The most comprehensive reference on fluorescent nanodiamond physical and chemical properties and contemporary applications Fluorescent nanodiamonds (FNDs) have drawn a great deal of attention over the past several years, and their applications and development potential are proving to be manifold and vast. The first and only book of its kind, Fluorescent Nanodiamonds is a comprehensive guide to the basic science and technical information needed to fully understand the fundamentals of FNDs and their potential applications across an array of domains. In demonstrating the importance of FNDs in biological applications, the authors bring together all relevant chemistry, physics, materials science and biology. Nanodiamonds are produced by powerful cataclysmic events such as explosions, volcanic eruptions and meteorite impacts. They also can be created in the lab by high-pressure high-temperature treatment of graphite or detonating an explosive in a reactor vessel. A single imperfection can give a nanodiamond a specific, isolated color center which allows it to function as a single, trapped atom. Much smaller than the thickness of a human hair, a nanodiamond can have a huge surface area that allows it to bond with a variety of other materials. Because of their non-toxicity, nanodiamonds may be useful in biomedical applications, such as drug delivery and gene therapy. The most comprehensive reference on a topic of rapidly increasing interest among academic and industrial researchers across an array of fields Includes numerous case studies and practical examples from many areas of research and industrial applications, as well as fascinating and instructive historical perspectives Each chapter addresses, in-depth, a single integral topic including the fundamental properties, synthesis, mechanisms and functionalisation of FNDs The first book published by the key patent holder with his research group in the field of FNDs Fluorescent Nanodiamonds is an important working resource for a broad range of scientists and engineers in industry and academia. It will also be a welcome reference for instructors in chemistry, physics, materials science, biology and related fields.
This book provides a comprehensive review of functional nanomaterials for electrochemical applications, presenting interesting examples of nanomaterials with different dimensions and their applications in electrochemical energy storage. It also discusses the synthesis of functional nanomaterials, including quantum dots; one-dimensional, two-dimensional and three-dimensional nanostructures; and advanced nanocomposites. Highlighting recent advances in current electrochemical energy storage hotpots: lithium batteries, lithium-ion batteries, sodium-ion batteries, other metal-ion batteries, halogen ion batteries, and metal–gas batteries, this book will appeal to readers in the various fields of chemistry, material science and engineering.
As computer power grows and data collection technologies advance, a plethora of data is generated in almost every field where computers are used. The com puter generated data should be analyzed by computers; without the aid of computing technologies, it is certain that huge amounts of data collected will not ever be examined, let alone be used to our advantages. Even with today's advanced computer technologies (e. g. , machine learning and data mining sys tems), discovering knowledge from data can still be fiendishly hard due to the characteristics of the computer generated data. Taking its simplest form, raw data are represented in feature-values. The size of a dataset can be measUJ·ed in two dimensions, number of features (N) and number of instances (P). Both Nand P can be enormously large. This enormity may cause serious problems to many data mining systems. Feature selection is one of the long existing methods that deal with these problems. Its objective is to select a minimal subset of features according to some reasonable criteria so that the original task can be achieved equally well, if not better. By choosing a minimal subset offeatures, irrelevant and redundant features are removed according to the criterion. When N is reduced, the data space shrinks and in a sense, the data set is now a better representative of the whole data population. If necessary, the reduction of N can also give rise to the reduction of P by eliminating duplicates.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Symposium on Computational and Information Science, CIS 2004, held in Shanghai, China in December 2004. The 190 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 450 submissions. The papers address virtually all computational and algorithmic aspects in various sciences, mathematics, and engineering as well as data and information engineering. The papers are organized in four main parts on high performance computing and algorithms, computational modeling and simulation, bioinformatics and medical informatics, and data engineering and information science.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.