A sweeping, tragic novel spanning five generations and two continentsGold Mountain Blues is a rich saga chronicling the lives of five generations of a Chinese family from Guangdong Province, which are transformed by the promise of a better life in Gold Mountain, the Chinese name for Canada’s majestic West Coast.In 1879, 16-year-old Fong Tak-Fat boards a ship to Canada determined to make a life for himself and to support his family back home. He will blast r...

On July 19, 1048, the Yellow River breached its banks, drastically changing its course across the Hebei Plain and turning it into a delta where the river sought a path out to the ocean. This dramatic shift of forces in the natural world resulted from political deliberation and hydraulic engineering of the imperial state of the Northern Song Dynasty. It created eighty years of social suffering, economic downturn, political upheaval, and environmental changes, which reshaped the medieval Nor...

Quotient Space Based Problem Solving provides an in-depth treatment of hierarchical problem solving, computational complexity, and the principles and applications of multi-granular computing, including inference, information fusing, planning, and heuristic search. - Explains the theory of hierarchical problem solving, its computational complexity, and discusses the principle and applications of multi-granular computing - Describes a human-like, theoretical framework using quotient space th...

This book highlights processes, impacts and management practices of bamboo expansion occurring in areas where it is distributed around the world. Although not conceptually plant invasions, bamboo expansion has been considered an “invasion” based on its characteristics and the impacts it caused on adjacent ecosystems it expanded into, including altered element cycling, transformed soil microbial community compositions, decreased biodiversity, fluctuated primary productions, etc. However, th...

This monograph is an up-to-date presentation of the analysis and design of singular Markovian jump systems (SMJSs) in which the transition rate matrix of the underlying systems is generally uncertain, partially unknown and designed. The problems addressed include stability, stabilization, H∞ control and filtering, observer design, and adaptive control. applications of Markov process are investigated by using Lyapunov theory, linear matrix inequalities (LMIs), S-procedure and the stochastic...

Providing fresh perspectives on managing expatriates in the changing host country of China, this book investigates expatriate management from a language and identity angle. The authors’ multilingual and multicultural backgrounds allow them to offer a solid view on the best practices towards managing diverse groups of expatriates, including Western, Indian, and ethnic Chinese employees. With carefully considered analysis which incorporates micro and macro perspectives, together with indigen...

A daughter discovers the dramatic history that shaped her mother’s secret life in an emotional and immersive novel by Zhang Ling, the bestselling author of A Single Swallow.There was rarely a time when Phoenix Yuan-Whyller’s mother, Rain, didn’t live with her. Even when Phoenix got married, Rain, who followed her from China to Toronto, came to share Phoenix’s life. Now at the age of eighty-three, Rain’s unexpected death ushers in a heartrending separation....

A catastrophic disaster in China triggers a mother’s heartbreaking choice and a daughter’s reconciliation with the past in a powerful novel by the author of A Single Swallow and Where Waters Meet.In the summer of 1976, an earthquake swallows up the city of Tangshan, China. Among the hundreds of thousands of people scrambling for survival is a mother who makes an agonizing decision that irrevocably changes her life and the lives of her children. In...

The eagerly awaited English translation of award-winning author Zhang Ling’s epic and intimate novel about the devastation of war, forgiveness, redemption, and the enduring power of love.On the day of the historic 1945 Jewel Voice Broadcast—in which Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender to the Allied forces, bringing an end to World War II—three men, flush with jubilation, made a pact. After their deaths, each year on the anniversary of the broadcast, their ...

In the current digital era with the exponential growth of medical knowledge, voluminous textbooks have gradually been replaced by the pocketbooks with tables, figures, images, and e-links to digital book versions with supplemental materials available online. The advent of novel next-generation sequencing (NGS) and multi-omics single cell methods have uncovered causative molecular mechanisms in most of the known non-neoplastic hematologic disorders. There is an urgent need for a concise and...

This book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the pathologic features of common benign and malignant hematopoietic disorders in spleen and liver for practicing pathologists, hematopathologists and clinicians. The authors are from large academic centers, affiliated teaching hospitals and central referral clinics and are experienced in the diagnosis of hematopoietic disorders in the spleen and liver. The book consists of 21 chapters, with the first three chapters devoted to n...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th Pacific Rim Conference on Artificial Intelligence, PRICAI 2016, held in Phuket, Thailand, in August 2016.The 53 regular papers and 15 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 161 submissions. Pricai covers a wide range of topics such as AI foundations; applications of AI; semantic web; information retrieval; constraint satisfaction; multimodal interaction; knowledge representation; soc...