FinTech transformations have brought changes to the global financial markets and merit the attention of financial regulators across jurisdictions. This book is one of the first ones of its kind to look at open banking (OB). It examines regulatory approaches to OB by taking a broad view of comparative legal systems and through perspectives of transaction costs, public choice, and institutional design. The book looks at the legal implications by engaging in a two-tiered comparative analysis: comparing between compulsory and voluntary approaches to OB policies and comparing the legal systems between the West (i.e., the EU and the UK) and an Asian economy (i.e., Taiwan).
A treatise on investigating tracking control and synchronization control of fractional-order nonlinear systems with system uncertainties, external disturbance, and input saturation Robust Adaptive Control for Fractional-Order Systems, with Disturbance and Saturation provides the reader with a good understanding on how to achieve tracking control and synchronization control of fractional-order nonlinear systems with system uncertainties, external disturbance, and input saturation. Although some texts have touched upon control of fractional-order systems, the issues of input saturation and disturbances have rarely been considered together. This book offers chapter coverage of fractional calculus and fractional-order systems; fractional-order PID controller and fractional-order disturbance observer; design of fractional-order controllers for nonlinear chaotic systems and some applications; sliding mode control for fractional-order nonlinear systems based on disturbance observer; disturbance observer based neural control for an uncertain fractional-order rotational mechanical system; adaptive neural tracking control for uncertain fractional-order chaotic systems subject to input saturation and disturbance; stabilization control of continuous-time fractional positive systems based on disturbance observer; sliding mode synchronization control for fractional-order chaotic systems with disturbance; and more. Based on the approximation ability of the neural network (NN), the adaptive neural control schemes are reported for uncertain fractional-order nonlinear systems Covers the disturbance estimation techniques that have been developed to alleviate the restriction faced by traditional feedforward control and reject the effect of external disturbances for uncertain fractional-order nonlinear systems By combining the NN with the disturbance observer, the disturbance observer based adaptive neural control schemes have been studied for uncertain fractional-order nonlinear systems with unknown disturbances Considers, together, the issue of input saturation and the disturbance for the control of fractional-order nonlinear systems in the present of system uncertainty, external disturbance, and input saturation Robust Adaptive Control for Fractional-Order Systems, with Disturbance and Saturation can be used as a reference for the academic research on fractional-order nonlinear systems or used in Ph.D. study of control theory and engineering.
This book aims to discuss the cutting-edge materials and technologies for zinc-air batteries. From the perspective of basic research and engineering application, the principle innovation, research progress, and technical breakthrough of key materials such as positive and negative electrodes, electrolytes, and separators of zinc-air batteries are discussed systematically, which can be used to guide and promote the development of zinc-air battery technology. We do believe that our experiences and in-depth discussions would make this book useful for researchers at all levels in the energy area and provide them with a quick way of understanding the development of zinc-air batteries.
Extremal Optimization: Fundamentals, Algorithms, and Applications introduces state-of-the-art extremal optimization (EO) and modified EO (MEO) solutions from fundamentals, methodologies, and algorithms to applications based on numerous classic publications and the authors’ recent original research results. It promotes the movement of EO from academic study to practical applications. The book covers four aspects, beginning with a general review of real-world optimization problems and popular solutions with a focus on computational complexity, such as "NP-hard" and the "phase transitions" occurring on the search landscape. Next, it introduces computational extremal dynamics and its applications in EO from principles, mechanisms, and algorithms to the experiments on some benchmark problems such as TSP, spin glass, Max-SAT (maximum satisfiability), and graph partition. It then presents studies on the fundamental features of search dynamics and mechanisms in EO with a focus on self-organized optimization, evolutionary probability distribution, and structure features (e.g., backbones), which are based on the authors’ recent research results. Finally, it discusses applications of EO and MEO in multiobjective optimization, systems modeling, intelligent control, and production scheduling. The authors present the advanced features of EO in solving NP-hard problems through problem formulation, algorithms, and simulation studies on popular benchmarks and industrial applications. They also focus on the development of MEO and its applications. This book can be used as a reference for graduate students, research developers, and practical engineers who work on developing optimization solutions for those complex systems with hardness that cannot be solved with mathematical optimization or other computational intelligence, such as evolutionary computations.
A collection of 15 classic Chinese folk stories—passed down from generation to generation—presented in both Chinese and English. Welcome to the fascinating world of Chinese folklore. The fifteen stories in this book address universal converns such as the origins of humankind, the impact of wars and natural disasters, the great deeds of cultural heroes, the struggle for dignity and justice for the common man, and the yearnings of the human heart. For readers from around the world, this book is a window to some of the historical and cultural facets of China that remain relevant today. These stories can be enjoyed in English by readers with no knowledge of Chinese, while the bilingual format and vocabulary lists are an added bonus for language students. Each story is given in parallel Chinese and English versions, and is accompanied by a short essay about its historical context, a vocabulary list, discussion questions, and native speaker audio recordings. Enjoy fifteen classic Chinese folk tales, including: "Taming the New Year's Beast" — How the Lunar New Year festival came about, celebrated after the ferocious monster Nian was frightened off by sparks, explosive noises and the color red when it came hunting for children and animals "Two Virtuous Mothers of Ancient China" — The philosopher Mencius's mother, a virtuous widow, illustrates the importance of not wasting one's education through her efforts to ensure her son's success "The Chinese Romeo and Juliet" — A classic tale of tragic love, Zhu Yingtai, the beloved daughter of a local official, is disguised as a young male scholar to study in Hangzhou — some distance away from her home. While she was in the academy she met a soulmate, Liang Shanbo, and as they studied together for three years, she developed feelings for him "Judge Bao Takes On the Emperor's Son-in-Law" — The famous Judge Bao decided to right a wrong when the emperor's son-in-law, Chen Shimei, committed bigamy by pretending to be single in order to become the imperial son-in-law. He even attempted to hide this crime by obliterating his wife and two children, but was thwarted by Judge Bao, who risked his own life and career to carry out justice
This book provides readers with rich context and detailed description leading to new perspectives on major historical events in China. Positioned as a thought leader and highly acclaimed arts professional in China, the author is able to give a historical account of China’s twentieth century that is richly informed by its valent fields of political economy and cultural studies. Western readers' knowledge of China’s twentieth century remains based on pioneering research of modern scholars such as Fairbank and Jonathan Spence. In recent years, however, it is rare to see a complete history of China spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which also includes the first two decades of the twenty-first century. This book contributes new narrative and perspective to this span of history. Now, as the Sino-US trade conflict makes dramatic impact on a post-COVID global economy, readers have the need for a fresh understanding of how China came to be what it is today. The author’s groundbreaking work provides new insight provided by newly uncovered sources explaining how China came to be what it is today from a cultural and sociological perspective, in a historical mode.
This fascinating book presents the unusual career of a scientist of Chinese Malaysian origin, Ho Peng Yoke, who became a humanist and rendered his services to both Eastern and Western intellectual worlds. It describes how Ho adapted to working under changing social and academic environments in Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Hong Kong and England. His activities also covered East Asia, Europe and North America.Ho Peng Yoke worked in collaboration with Joseph Needham of Cambridge over different periods spanning half a century in the monumental series Science and Civilization in China. Ho subsequently succeeded Needham as Director of the Needham Research Institute, where he held the post for 12 years. In the introduction to the final volume of that series, the Oxford scholar Mark Elvin remarked that Ho OC had long piloted the ship through difficult times.OCO This book tells the story and more.
Mom By: Peng Xueming “In a child’s heart, his mother can never die. Mothers are immortal; they are the souls, lives, and family that will live forever.”
Exiled Pilgrims contains thirty-two personal accounts by people who, as teenagers, went to rural China in 1964 and 1965. Barred from high school or college by political discrimination, the authors left the cities for the countryside in hopes of redeeming their “original sin” while making a difference in rural China with their hard work, only to find out that their idealism was futile in a mundane world and absurd time. Thus their pilgrimage to an illusory utopia turned into a painful search for truth and a tough struggle to liberate themselves against enormous odds. The book is the first and only collection of stories by members of a once marginalized and heretofore largely unheard-of group in contemporary China. "The stories of these young 'exiled pilgrims' bring the reader uplifting examples of the resilience of the human spirit. Their stories are heart-breaking, but the voice is never cynical, and hope is a constant. Exiled Pilgrims is a treasure." Carole Head, High Point University "The stories compiled here detail the daily life of a strange and fascinating period, always with emotion, often with humor, showing that one can speak about serious things without being dry. Reading this book is an excellent and pleasant way to understand the real China under Mao." Michel Bonnin, School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, Paris "These individualized accounts reflect the shining—and somewhat sad—lives of pre-Cultural Revolution zhiqing. In their stories, the authors not only record their personal experiences, but also provide insightful explanation for the origins, evolution, and impact of such phenomena as the implementation of the class line at schools and the utopian orientation among the Chinese youth in the early and mid-1960s. Together with the valuable photos and rare documents, stories in Exiled Pilgrims give us a fairly comprehensive portrayal of the collective journey of pre-Cultural Revolution zhiqing." Liu Xiaomeng, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing
Though there are a number of well-written works on Chinese divination, there are none that deal with the three sophisticated devices that were employed by the Chinese Astronomical Bureau in the eleventh century and for hundreds of years thereafter. Chinese experts applied the methods associated with these devices to both weather forecasting and to the interpretation of human affairs. Hidden by a veil of secrecy, these methods have always been relatively little known other than by their names. The first work in any language to explore these three methods, known as sanshi (three cosmic boards), this book sheds light on a topic which has been shrouded in mystery for centuries, having been kept secret for many years by the Chinese Astronomical Bureau.
This book explores how language ideologies have emerged for gangtaiqiang through a combination of indexical and ideological processes in televised media. Gangtaiqiang (Hong Kong-Taiwan accent), a socially recognizable form of mediatized Taiwanese Mandarin, has become a stereotype for many Chinese mainlanders who have little real-life interaction with Taiwanese people. Using both qualitative and quantitative approaches, the author examines how Chinese millennials perceive gangtaiqiang by focusing on the following questions: 1) the role of televised media in the formation of language attitudes, and 2) how shifting gender ideologies are performed and embodied such attitudes. This book presents empirical evidence to argue that gangtaiqiang should, in fact, be conceptualized as a mediatized variety of Mandarin, rather than the actual speech of people in Hong Kong or Taiwan. The analyses in this book point to an emerging realignment among the Chinese towards gangtaiqiang, a variety traditionally associated with chic, urban television celebrities and young cosmopolitan types. In contrast to Beijing Mandarin, Taiwanese Mandarin is now perceived to be pretentious, babyish, and emasculated, mirroring the power dynamics between Taiwan and China.
This book is edited based on a series of lectures on Chinese cultural history delivered at the Peking University in 2004. It stands out with its distinctive methodology and unique stand, and is popular with readers, with 17 reprints for the Chinese edition since 2006.Before the 1980s, traditional culture was often the target of criticisms and put in a negative light in China. After the 1980s, due to the belief that traditional culture can contribute to modernization, people decided to 'take its essence and discard its dregs'. As of today, most books on this theme have been written in accordance with this principle.However, in this book, the author argues that many problems have emerged from the modernization of the Western society, and thus the need for reflection and re-examining. Traditional Chinese culture is a source for comparison and reflection. As such, when we discuss traditional culture nowadays, not only should we excavate its long-hidden meanings, but we should also develop contrastive resources to facilitate our collaborative development in future.The discussions in this book adopt a vertical structure that begins with how Chinese define a human, followed by topics on the human body, Qi, food, male and female, home and state, the relationship between heaven and human beings, ritual systems, historical consciousness, thinking patterns, the art of expressing sentiments, commitments to the politics of virtues and achievements, and cultural practices. In every chapter, there is also a horizontal method of comparison on Chinese, Western and Indian cultures, to foreground the particularities and advantages of the Chinese culture.Apart from elaborating on the major characteristics of traditional Chinese culture, there is also a discussion on how the modern disdain for and misunderstandings of the traditional culture originated from the West. The author also elaborates on Montesquieu's views of China and the various misconceptions and misunderstandings of the traditional Chinese legal systems. Finally, it ends with the author's thoughts on the revitalization of the Chinese civilization.
An important comparative study of Japanese politics that reveals that green issues have yet to displace the traditional urban politics of post-industrial Japan. This is unlike the rise of green parties and politics in Europe. Unlike Europe, it seems that political values in Japan are still informed by the conservative values of hierarchy and deference.
Drawing on the life stories of 266 migrants in South China, Choi and Peng examine the effect of mass rural-to-urban migration on family and gender relationships, with a specific focus on changes in men and masculinities. They show how migration has forced migrant men to renegotiate their roles as lovers, husbands, fathers, and sons. They also reveal how migrant men make masculine compromises: they strive to preserve the gender boundary and their symbolic dominance within the family by making concessions on marital power and domestic division of labor, and by redefining filial piety and fatherhood. The stories of these migrant men and their families reveal another side to China’s sweeping economic reform, modernization, and grand social transformations.
This book presents a detailed analysis of the Chinese pivotal constructions (PVCs) and their diachronic developments from a constructionalist perspective, with the focus on the growth of the constructional hierarchies of these constructions and the changes with respect to both the form and meaning properties over time. The most important enabling factor behind the diachronic developments of the PVCs has been the sanction of the new instances conflicting with the constructions’ specifications. Throughout history the PVCs have grown along the two dimensions, i.e., inclusiveness and multileveledness, leading to a steady increase in the sizes of their constructional hierarchies. The two-dimensional expansion of the PVCs’ constructional hierarchies has been accompanied by the gradual relaxation of the conditions constraining the earliest instances, on multiple schematicity levels. This book will be valuable to scholars working on diachronic construction grammar and language change as well as to those interested in the history of Chinese language.
This book provides a comprehensive discussion of Adaptable Design (AD). It covers the conception, method, and application of AD to the real-world product design. AD's benefits are substantial as it upgrades, reuses, remanufactures and recycles products throughout the product lifecycle. It rapidly adapts the existing design in development of new designs. Key elements of AD include rationalized function structures, adaptable product architectures, adaptable interfaces, and adaptability evaluations. The main feature of AD is adaptability in design methods and product applications with general and specific adaptability. AD has also modeling and evaluating adaptabilities.
Since 1819, more than 6,200 place (street and village) names divided into more than 3,900 name groups were known in Singapore. Based on digitised historical newspapers, dated back to 1830, municipal records and Malay dictionaries, the origins, meanings and date of naming for many place names are uncovered. As part of Singapore history, place names known since 1936 are recorded in this book.Although place names are fairly static in nature, there have been more than 100 name changes. The naming trends transitioned from English to Malay and then back to English names. Discover that Toa Payoh was not named after a big swamp, Anderson Road was named before John Anderson, a former Governor, took up his job and many more new findings in this exciting book.This book is a complete listing of all place names since 1936, together with the most comprehensive annotations to date — a first in Singapore. It is also the only book of its kind that analyses naming trends. Information on the origins or date of naming was based on primary sources such as old maps, minutes of municipal meetings, Chinese books and digitised newspapers.
This book chronicles the dramatic events that have taken place since China opened up to the world in 1978 and adopted a policy of economic reform. It records how economic policies were drafted between 1978 and 1991, brought into law, initiated and then im
This revelatory book shows how the influential and controversial Empress Dowager Cixi used art and architecture to establish her authority Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908), who ruled China from 1861 until her death in 1908, is a subject of fascination and controversy, at turns vilified for her political maneuvering and admired for modernizing China. In addition to being an astute politician, she was an earnest art patron, and this beautifully illustrated book explores a wide range of objects, revealing how the empress dowager used art and architecture to solidify her rule. Cixi's art commissions were innovative in the way that they unified two distant conceptions of gender in China at the time, demonstrating her strength and wisdom as a monarch while highlighting her identity as a woman and mother. Artful Subversion examines commissioned works, including portrait paintings and photographs, ceramics, fashion, architecture, and garden design, as well as work Cixi created, such as painting and calligraphy. The book is a compelling study of how a powerful matriarch at once subverted and upheld the Qing imperial patriarchy.
Everyone knows that China is the original home of porcelain, and Jingdezhen is the porcelain capital of the world. To the boys who grew up in Jingdezhen, mud is a toy they often play with. So that a boy got the nickname "mud paw" as his dirty hands. Mud Paw is a story about three boys and their lives which were growing as the porcelain.
This book comprehensively covers many aspects of green mine, including the basic situation of green mines, mine facilities, extraction management, ecological environment, scientific and technological innovation, standardized management, environmental protection inspectors, and special tools in response to the needs of green mine construction, assessment, and management. It is highly informative with valuable techniques and tools providing insights both for scholars and practitioners working in green mine field.
This book explores how, unlike in the West, the daily religious life of most Chinese people spreads without institutional propagation. Based upon more than a decade of field research in rural China, the book demonstrates the decisive role of rites of passage and yearly festival rituals held in every household in shaping people’s religious dispositions. It focuses on the family, the unit most central to Chinese culture and society, and reveals the repertoire embodied in daily life in a world envisioned as comprising both the “yin” world of ancestors, spirits, and ghosts, and the “yang” world of the living. It discusses especially the concept of bai, which refers to both concrete bodily movements that express respect and awe, such as bowing, kneeling, or holding up ritual offerings, and to people’s religious inclinations and dispositions, which indicate that they are aware of a spiritual realm that is separate from yet close to the world of the living. Overall, the book shows that the daily practices of religion are not a separate sphere, but rather belief and ritual integrated into a way of dwelling in a world envisaged as consisting of both the “yin” and the “yang” worlds that regularly communicate with each other.
This interesting book is a compilation of recent stories from a regular column called “Science Monitor” in The Straits Times, Singapore's main English daily. They focus on exposing health and beauty fads and fallacies like purported breast enlargement methods, baldness treatment and skin renewal therapies which have begun plaguing consumers in Asia. Written by a well-known columnist, Andy Ho, PhD, this book provides a handy review of what cutting-edge research says about these scams. Readers can apply these valuable insights, which the author has backed up by poring over medical books and journals and by talking to the best physicians and scientists, and then decide for themselves if they want to part with their money, or worse, gamble with their health.
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