The First World War and its aftermath were significant events with widespread consequences that impacted everyday people. This book is the first comprehensive analysis of the various ways in which the Great War affected urban life, extending beyond the typically recognized regions such as the European Great powers, the USA, and its colonies and spheres of influence. It explores the impacts on peripheral cities in East Asia, Southern Europe, Latin America, and Africa, which have often been ...

This book unravels the mysteries of the Chinese school system to enable international scholars to better understand the logic of basic education in China. By collecting the latest, first-hand empirical data, it outlines a panoramic and vivid portrait of Chinese schools from principals’, teachers’, students’ and parents’ perspectives, including descriptions of their daily lives. It also interprets different stakeholders’ duties and explains the unique characteristics and operation model of ...

This book examines the pedagogical encounters within children's ecological and socio-cultural historical contexts, and aspects of playful learning and development within these contexts. It addresses research and practices varying across learning contexts, providing easily adaptable exemplary practices leading to children's positive learning and development.The book offers a unified general cultural-historical theoretical model for exploring new contexts at different stages of child...

Suffocating smog regularly envelops Chinese metropolises from Beijing to Shanghai, clouding the future prospect of China's growth sustainability. Air pollutants do not discriminate between the rich and the poor, the politician and the "average Joe." They put everyone's health and economic prosperity at risk, creating future costs that are difficult to calculate. Yet many people, including some in China, are concerned that addressing environmental challenges will jeopardize economic growth....

Many conventional survival analysis methods, such as the Kaplan-Meier method for survival function estimation and the partial likelihood method for Cox model regression coefficients estimation, were developed under the assumption that survival times are subject to right censoring only. However, in practice, survival time observations may include interval-censored data, especially when the exact time of the event of interest cannot be observed. When interval-censored observations are presen...

This book focuses on the evaluation methodology for automotive human-machine interaction (HMI), which aim to reduce driving distractions, lower operational loads, optimize user experience design, and enhance user value.The book is divided into three parts. The first part, consisting of Chapters 1–3, introduces the evolution of automotive HMI and proposes a three-dimensional orthogonal evaluation system for automotive HMI that is comprehensive, systematic, and quantifiable. This eva...

A cutting-edge, advanced level, exploration of optical sensing application in power transformersOptical Sensing in Power Transformers is filled with the critical information and knowledge on the optical techniques applied in power transformers, which are important and expensive components in the electric power system. Effective monitoring of systems has proven to decrease the transformer lifecycle cost and increase a high level of availability and reliabil...

Precision motion control is strongly required in many fields, such as precision engineering, micromanufacturing, biotechnology, and nanotechnology. Although great achievements have been made in control engineering, it is still challenging to fulfill the desired performance for precision motion control systems. Substantial works have been presented to reveal an increasing trend to apply optimization approaches in precision engineering to obtain the control system parameters. In this book, w...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the CVPR 2025 Challenge on Foundation Models for 3D Biomedical Image Segmentation, MedSegFM 2025, held in Nashville, TN, USA, during June 11–15, 2025.The 13 full papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 19 submissions. This conference provides state-of-the-art algorithms for biomedical image segmentation foundation models.

This book presents several novel constructive methodologies for global stabilization and H-infinity control in switched dynamic systems by using the systems’ structure information. The main features of these new approaches are twofold: i) Novel Lyapunov functions are constructed and new switching strategies are designed to guarantee global finite-time stabilization of the closed-loop switched dynamic systems,while ii) without posing any internal stability requirements on subsystems, the st...

This LNCS conference set constitutes the proceedings of the First Medical Image Segmentation Challenge, MedSAM on Laptop 2024, Held in Conjunction with CVPR 2024, in Seattle, WA, USA, held in June 2024.The 16 full papers presented were thoroughly reviewed and selected from the 200 submissions. This challenge aims to prompt the development of universal promotable medical image segmentation foundation models that are deployable on laptops or other edge devices without reliance on GPU...

This book explores the fundamental theories, methodologies, and innovative directions of public finance research, focusing on its relationship with and role in state governance.Public finance is the foundation and an important pillar of state governance. The two mutually reinforce each other at the macro level and in broader contexts, necessitating the reconstruction of a public finance discipline system that meets the needs of Chinese society. This book addresses key theoretical i...