A trenchant defense of hierarchy in different spheres of our lives, from the personal to the politicalAll complex and large-scale societies are organized along certain hierarchies, but the concept of hierarchy has become almost taboo in the modern world. Just Hierarchy contends that this stigma is a mistake. In fact, as Daniel Bell and Wang Pei show, it is neither possible nor advisable to do away with social hierarchies. Drawing their arguments from Chine...

This book provides a comprehensive, up-to-date, and rigorously detailed introduction to Non-Axiomatic Logic (NAL), a groundbreaking framework for adaptive systems operating under conditions of insufficient knowledge and resources. Designed according to the principles of human cognition, NAL serves as a cornerstone for advancing general-purpose Artificial Intelligence while addressing many topics in logic, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and computer science.Now fully expanded ...

This book explores how genomic data are revolutionising basic and applied invasion science. It shows how genomic technologies can reveal key drivers of biological invasions, such as hybridisation and rapid adaptation, and illustrates major breakthroughs achieved through the study of model systems. Multiple layers of variation are considered, including epigenetic variation and genetic variation, from chromosomal rearrangements to single nucleotide polymorphisms. Applied topics emphasise sta...

Federated Learning for Smart Mobility: Towards Secure, Efficient, and Sustainable Transportation explores how federated learning (FL) reshapes the future of intelligent transportation and the Internet of Things (IoT). As data privacy and communication efficiency become pressing challenges, FL offers a distributed and privacy-preserving paradigm for model training across vehicles, sensors, and edge devices without sharing raw data.This SpringerBrief provides a concise yet c...

This book focuses on anti-disturbance intrusion- and fault-tolerant consensus control for MASs. The main feature of this book is the successful introduction of event-triggered distributed adaptive feedback control methodology, observer technology, and sliding mode technology to solve the problem of anti-disturbance, intrusion-tolerant, and fault-tolerant control of MAS. Meanwhile, pinning control strategies are proposed to realize the cluster consensus control of MAS. In addition, based on...

This book is a full review of China's foreign trade in the past 70 years of institutional changes and reform. It presents a magnificent historical overview for China's economic history, sometimes full of trials and hardships, while facing the growth and rise. The author aims to build a unique narrative system to analyze the success and failure, gain and loss during the period, and present the China path in foreign trade among numerous events and different stages under a complex context. It...

The years 2021 to 2030 have been designated as "The United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration". Ecological restoration and biodiversity conservation efforts face unprecedented challenges, especially in developing countries and areas, such as the Hindu Kush-Himalayan (HKH) region. This huge HKH region, which includes areas in eight separate countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, India, China, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Bhutan), is a biodiversity hotspot with a vast array of ecosystems, ...

Driven by the advent of two-dimensional materials, valleytronics is emerging as the next hot field of research in materials science. While the use of charge or spin degrees of freedom in electronic materials as information carriers is familiar and well-appreciated, employment of the valley degree of freedom as an information carrier has remained elusive for many decades. Shortly following the discovery of isolated graphene, 2D semiconductors such as transition metal dichalcogenides were al...

Gene flow is a natural process that occurs spontaneously and enables the evolution of life. However, with the release of genetically modified organisms, concerns have focused on introduced foreign transgenes and their dispersal in nature through gene flow. This book examines gene flow of transgenes, such as herbicide resistance genes, with the goal of understanding the factors that may affect the process of gene flow. A greater biological understanding is essential to make sound management...

This book focuses on the control of fractal behaviors in nonlinear dynamics systems, addressing both the principles and purposes of control. For fractals in different systems, it presents revealing studies on the theory and applications of control, reflecting a spectrum of different control methods used with engineering technology. As such, it will benefit researchers, engineers, and graduate students in fields of fractals, chaos, engineering, etc.

This book addresses a number of questions from the perspective of complex systems: How can we quantitatively understand the life phenomena? How can we model life systems as complex bio-molecular networks? Are there any methods to clarify the relationships among the structures, dynamics and functions of bio-molecular networks? How can we statistically analyse large-scale bio-molecular networks?Focusing on the modeling and analysis of bio-molecular networks, the book presents various...

This book aims to explain and explore the distribution mechanism adopted by China, which prioritizes distribution according to performance while taking factors of production into consideration. This mechanism is designed in the context of current market-oriented economy, but it also leads to problems such as the widening income gap among the citizens. Besides serving for economic growth, the authors proposed balancing the interests through policies among different groups as one of the key ...