From the vantage point of rural grandparents’ mediated structure of feelings, this book explores changing family intimacy and dynamics in contemporary rural China in relation to media. Based on a 10-month ethnography involving 18 rural families (live-in studies with 11), it explores how media technology and culture reconfigures desires, attachments, disappointments, and grievances in family life. This book joins the emerging field that emphasizes the importance of affective and emotional, ...

This book presents comprehensive experimental, numerical, and theoretical studies on the highway bridge under collision and explosion. Highway bridge is one of the significant civil infrastructures of public transportation, which plays an important role in the sustained and stable growth of the national economy. However, with the development of the transportation industry and bridge construction, the risks of accidental vehicle- and vessel-bridge collisions, as well as the explosion during...

A dynamic network is frequently encountered in various real industrial applications, such as the Internet of Things. It is composed of numerous nodes and large-scale dynamic real-time interactions among them, where each node indicates a specified entity, each directed link indicates a real-time interaction, and the strength of an interaction can be quantified as the weight of a link. As the involved nodes increase drastically, it becomes impossible to observe their full interactions at eac...

This book is about the Ultra-high Performance Cementitious Composites (UHPCC), which is a relativity new type of cementitious materials. UHPCC has very low water-to-binder ratio, high amount of high-range water reducer, fine aggregates and high-strength steel or organic fibers. With the prominent mechanical properties, e.g., high compressive and tensile strength, high ductility, and high fracture energy, UHPCC has been becoming the most prospective construction cement-based material for bo...

The three volume set LNAI 10462, LNAI 10463, and LNAI 10464 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications, ICIRA 2017, held in Wuhan, China, in August 2017.The 235 papers presented in the three volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 310 submissions. The papers in this first volume of the set are organized in topical sections on soft, micro-nano, bio-inspired robotics; human-machine interaction; swarm ro...

International Perspectives on the Belt and Road Initiative investigates the most significant global‐scale international trade expansion and capital investment programme since the Second World War.This book focusses on the multi-national perspectives of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in order to interrogate the Chinese government’s representation of it as a symbol of "peace, cooperation, development and mutual benefit." With specific focus on the interrelationship betwe...

This book presents comprehensive experimental, numerical, and theoretical research on projectile impact analysis, such as the rigid projectile penetration/perforation of concrete and metallic targets, and shaped-charge-formed projectile and jet penetrations. Concrete and metal materials are widely used in protective structures in both civil engineering and armored vehicles, such as military fortifications, underground shelters, infantry fighting vehicles, and tanks, which are designed to w...

Negotiations on trade facilitation were concluded at the WTO 9th Ministerial Conference in 2013, and the Agreements on Trade Facilitation (TFA), therefore, became the first fully multilateral agreement in WTO history. Since then, trade facilitation has been in the limelight on the stage of the world trading system. During recent years, the TFA has been consistently on the agenda of the summits of G20, G7, and APEC. The Agreement has come into force and shall be implemented on a global scal...

This book proposes the concept of a multi-layer pavement system to fulfill the blast resistance requirement for pavement design. It also presents a damage pattern chart for multi-layer pavement design and rapid repair after blast load. Such a multi-layer system consists of three layers including asphalt concrete (AC) reinforced with Geogrid (GST) at the top, a high-strength concrete (HSC) layer in the middle, and engineered cementitious composites (ECC) at the bottom. A series of large-sca...

Beginning from centuries of anecdotal descriptions of cell death, such as those on the development of the midwife toad in 1842 by Carl Vogt, to modern-day investigations of cell death as a biological discipline, it has become accepted that cell death in multicellular organisms is a normal part of life. This book provides a comprehensive view of cell death, from its mechanisms of initiation and execution, to its implication in human disease and therapy.Physiological cell death plays...

This book includes presentations given at the 88th annual meeting of the Psychometric Society, held in Maryland, USA on July 24–28, 2023.The proceeding covers a diverse set of psychometric topics. The topics include, but are not limited to item response theory, cognitive diagnostic models, Bayesian estimation, validity and reliability issues, and several applications within different fields. The authors are from all over the world, they work in different psychometrics areas, as wel...

This book addresses the fundamental theory and key technologies of narrowband and broadband mobile communication systems specifically for railways. It describes novel relaying schemes that meet the different design criteria for railways and discusses the applications of signal classification techniques as well as offline resource scheduling as a way of advancing rail practice. Further, it introduces Novel Long Term Evolution for Railway (LTE-R) network architecture, the Quality of Service ...