Pragmatic competence plays a key role in intercultural communication, particularly for students studying in a target community. This book investigates the effect of study abroad on second language learners’ productive and receptive pragmatic competences, as well as their cognitive processes during speech act production. It employs a variety of research instruments, both quantitative and qualitative, to explore learners’ pragmatic development over one year. The inclusion of a control group ...

This atlas provides detailed information on the human lymphatic system in the head, neck and chest regions as well as the extremities, with more than 400 photographs and radiographs, including micro and macro views of the morphology. Much of the content is presented for the first time, such as the individual differences in lymphatic distribution, especially in the head neck region; characteristics of the indirect precollecting lymph vessel in the scalp; the lymphatic ampulla and diverticul...

China has experienced radical societal change since the initiation of the reform and openness programme in 1978. These changes have brought about significant income discrepancy between regions, social classes and generations; rendering the fair distribution of income an ever more important socio-economic question.This book is a collection of eleven papers on the income distribution problem in Chinese society from 1978 to the early 21st century authored by Zhao Renwei, the former di...

The idea of colliding two particle beams to fully exploit the energy of accelerated particles was first proposed by Rolf Wideröe, who in 1943 applied for a patent on the collider concept and was awarded the patent in 1953. The first three colliders — AdA in Italy, CBX in the US, and VEP-1 in the then Soviet Union — came to operation about 50 years ago in the mid-1960s. A number of other colliders followed.Over the past decades, colliders defined the energy frontier in particle physics. Dif...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Third CSIG Conference on Emotional Intelligence, CEI 2025, held in Shenzhen, China during December 5-7, 2025.The 21 full papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 79 submissions. The CEI 2025 conference focused on frontier research topics and the latest technological advances in affective computing and artificial intelligence, highlighting the applications of emotional intelligence across multiple disciplines...

The 4-volume set LNAI 13455 - 13458 constitutes the proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications, ICIRA 2022, which took place in Harbin China, during August 2022.The 284 papers included in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 442 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: Robotics, Mechatronics, Applications, Robotic Machining, Medical Engineering, Soft and Hybrid Robots, Human-robot Collabor...

This book presents a systematic study of an emerging field in the development of multi-agent systems. In a wide spectrum of applications, it is now common to see that multiple agents work cooperatively to accomplish a complex task. The book assists the implementation of such applications by promoting the ability of multi-agent systems to track — using local communication only — the mean value of signals of interest, even when these change rapidly with time and when no individual agent has ...

Over the past several decades major advances in accelerators have resulted from breakthroughs in accelerator science and accelerator technology. After the introduction of a new accelerator physics concept or the implementation of a new technology, a leap in accelerator performance followed. A well-known representation of these advances is the Livingston chart, which shows an exponential growth of accelerator performance over the last seven or eight decades. One of the breakthrough accelera...

This cutting edge collection presents a political reading of the power of modern sport in Asia. Providing an interdisciplinary study of political and cultural tensions in Asia, past and present, through the key case-study of sport, it illuminates the complex practices and legacies of Japanese imperialism across East and Southeast Asia through the 20th century and beyond. Focusing on the deep background to contemporary dynamics of intraregional tensions, it examines sport both as a tool of ...

Enzymatic Plastic Degradation, Volume 648 in the Methods in Enzymology series, continues the legacy of this premier serial with chapters authored by leaders in the field. Chapters in this latest release include Evaluating plastic pollution and environmental degradation, Assessment methods for microplastic pollution in the oceans and fresh water, Exploring microbial consortia from various environments for plastic degradation, Characterization of filamentous fungi for attack on synthetic pol...

The 3-volume set, LNAI 16074-16076, constitutes the proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications, ICIRA 2025, which took place in Okayama, Japan, during August 6-9, 2025.The 165 full papers included in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 329 submissions.They were organized in topical sections as follows:Part 1: Robotic Dexterous Manipulation and Intelligent Control; Intelligent Perception and Contr...

Drylands, a home for nearly 2.5 billion people, are highly vulnerable to anthropogenic climate change, and dryland area may expand to 50% of the Earth's surface by 2100. Climate change may aggravate the prevalence of undernutrition and malnutrition because of adverse effects on quantity and quality of food production in these regions. This book takes a holistic approach to sustainable management of drylands to make agriculture drought-resilient. Eminent scientists from around the world sha...