Over the last few decades there has been growing recognition of the importance of a peaceful and stable South China Sea for Indo-Pacific security and development, a recognition that has been underlain, paradoxically, by the increasingly precarious situation in this body of water that straddles critical shipping lanes from the Indian to the Pacific Ocean. This book informs its readership of the most recent developments in the South China Sea with insightful and prescient analyses from both ...

This book presents a novel approach by decoupling the various modules of sharding blockchains and providing detailed insights into the functions and design methodologies of each key module. Previous sharding blockchain solutions suffered from tight coupling between functional modules, making it challenging to achieve optimal security, performance, and scalability. Building upon this foundation, the authors present a universal composable method for composing sharding blockchains in a flexib...

For many years, political leaders and analysts have debated the impacts of China’s rise on the stability of the existing international system. International observers have also debated whether China would be a status quo power or a revisionist power, and whether China would observe the rules and regulations of international institutions and regimes. China Joins Global Governance: Cooperation and Contentions, edited by Mingjiang Li, provides an insightful contribution to our understanding o...

The nature of the economic cycle has been a long-standing problem for economists, given much attention by especially Malthus, Marx and Keynes. Key questions include: What are the causes of the economic cycle? Are the causes endogenous or exogenous? and Why is the economic cycle irregular? Economists’ views on these matters have differed, some concluding that governments can intervene effectively to stimulate economic growth, while others argue that government intervention is ineffective an...

This book presents a bio-inspired hierarchical control scheme step by step toward developing limbless robots capable of 3D locomotion, fast reflex response, as well as sophisticated reaction to environmental stimuli. This interdisciplinary book introduces how to combine biological concept with locomotion control of limbless robots. The special features of the book include limbless locomotion classification and control, design of biological locomotor and the integration of sensory informati...

This SpringerBrief offers two concrete design examples for traffic offloading. The first is an optimal resource allocation for small-cell based traffic offloading that aims at minimizing mobile users’ data cost. The second is an optimal resource allocation for device-to-device assisted traffic offloading that also minimizes the total energy consumption and cellular link usage (while providing an overview of the challenging issues). Both examples illustrate the importance of proper resource...

Due to recent advances in laparoscopic gastrectomy for gastric cancer, a high-resolution atlas in this field was felt necessary. This book describes the laparoscopic surgical procedure and precautions of lymph node (LN) dissection, comprehensively. The details of preoperative preparation, regional LN dissection, and digestive tract reconstruction are introduced based on a large numbers of clinical cases. Modified intracorporeal anastomosis procedure and clinical application of indo cyanine...

Convergence in crossover service explores the crossover phenomenon, crossover services and the convergence issues that arise in typical crossover scenarios. Unlike traditional service integration, crossover services need to realize multidimensional convergence of pattern, design, run-time environment, quality, and value.This book creatively proposes a framework of crossover service pattern modeling, simulation, evaluation, and convergence to achieve quantitative calculation and ana...