Four passports. Four women. One family history spanning seventy-four years.In 1949, as the Chinese Civil War drew to a close, history tore a Hakka family apart. Three brothers and a cousin were scattered across Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore—each carrying a piece of a family that might never be whole again.Across three generations, from 1949 to 2023, their descendants would grow up under different flags, with different names, nationalities...

This thesis provides an innovative strategy for rail crack monitoring using the acoustic emission (AE) technique. The field study presented is a significant improvement on laboratory studies in the literature in terms of complex rail profile and crack conditions as well as high operational noise. AE waves induced by crack propagation, crack closure, wheel-rail impact and operational noise were obtained through a series of laboratory and field tests, and analyzed by wavelet transform (WT) a...

In 2023, world hunger and food insecurity looms as present as ever. The threat of foodborne illness is also alive and well, as 1 in 10 people fall ill each year from the consumption of contaminated food. Meanwhile, thirty percent of all the food produced on our planet is lost or wasted, due in large part to spoilage. In the face of these realities, as well as those of climate change, population growth, ecosystem degradation and increasing resource scarcity, the dire need for a more sustain...

In his third life, Kinnosuke belonged to a famous author.Now, in his ninth, he wants nothing more to do with humans, who bring nothing but trouble and suffering. Drawn to the city in search of food, he comes across the Hokuto-do Bookshop, owned by a curious woman who has already given a home to four contented cats.Soon Kinnosuke begins to notice the shop's quirks: there are few customers, but it never goes out of business. No stock is ordered, but it never ...

This book systematically examines how the digitalization of global value chains (GVCs) has driven the high-quality development of China's manufacturing industry. It reveals the intrinsic mechanisms and pathways through which digital technologies reshape the international division of labor and promote industrial upgrading.Integrating theory with empirical analysis, the book establishes an innovative measurement framework for GVC digitalization. Using data from China's manufacturing ...

This book is a timely and valuable guide for innovators, designers, managers, and students who want to boost their design thinking projects through leveraging artificial intelligence capabilities. It offers over 40 traditional design thinking tools enhanced with AI. Each AID tool is ready for use, with specific step by step instructions that require little previous AI knowledge. So, if you would like to use AI to create a “Critical Items Diagram,” deploy “Explorative AI-to-AI Interviews,” ...

Nine BBC Radio full-cast dramatisations of the crime novels of Qiu Xiaolong, set in Shanghai. Starring Jamie Zubairi as Chief Inspector Chen Cao, an astute young policeman with twin passions for food and poetry.Through thrilling crime drama, these nine mysteries paint a portrait of modern life in communist China, depicting traditional Shanghai life amidst the old alleyways and how it is rapidly changing with modernisation."Witty and thrilling" The Daily Telegraph

This volume LNCS 14163 constitutes the refereed proceedings of 14th International Conference of the CLEF Association, CLEF 2023, in Thessaloniki, Greece, during September 18–21, 2023.The 10 full papers and one short paper included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 35 submissions. The conference focuses on authorship attribution, fake news detection and news tracking, noise-detection in automatically transferred relevance judgments, impact of online education on...

Tu Youyou's Journey in the Search for Artemisinin is an autobiographical science book chronicling in detail the great experiences of Tu Youyou from her childhood to winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.As Tu Youyou is the first female scientist from China to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, this win created a sudden wave of interest in medicine, resulting in numerous autobiographical books about Tu Youyou appearing on the market. Contrary to these mass market tit...

This book, written by experts in the field, is based on the latest research on the analysis and synthesis of switched time-delay systems. It covers the stability, filtering, fault detection and control problems, which are studied using the average dwell time approach. It presents both the continuous-time and discrete-time systems and provides useful insights and methods, as well as practical algorithms that can be considered in other complex systems, such as neuron networks and genetic reg...

This book presents an investigation of language contact, focusing on Northwestern China. It breaks down the barrier between human sciences and natural sciences in order to reconsider the diversity of languages on the basis of the latest research findings from genetics, linguistics, and other domains, offering valuable insights into when and how the divergence of languages and genes began and language and gene admixture and replacement occurred. The book focuses on language evolution betwee...

Lignin is one of the most abundant plant-derived feedstock on earth and qualifies as a renewable material. However, lignin is widely recognized as waste byproduct of the cellulosic ethanol and pulp and paper industry. How to properly modify lignin and develop it into functional polymers is a huge challenge, but an attractive research topic in both industry and academia.This book brings together leading engineering approaches to address the challenges of lignin valorization. It presents the...