When an ambitious feline detective gets his paws on a mysterious treasure map, curiosity turns into a full-blown adventure! Li Chen's bestselling, award-winning series continues—for mystery fans and cat-lovers alike.Detective Beans is determined to be the world's greatest detective, but before his mom will let him solve any cases, he has to clean his room first. Then a piece of misdelivered mail and a mysterious treasure map from an old sea captain crack open a who...

Meet Detective Beans, the best kitten detective in town, equipped with his tie, brown trench coat, and—GASP. It’s gone! His detective hat is missing! Discover the charming, whimsical, and mysterious world of Detective Beans in this new graphic novel series for middle grade readers.Meet Detective Beans (just Beans for short), a young cat sleuth dedicated to doing whatever it takes to solve the case. After a night of mystery movies with his best friend, Biscuit, Dete...

Among the most productive ecosystems on earth, wetlands are also some of the most vulnerable. Australian Wetland Cultures argues for the cultural value of wetlands. Through a focus on swamps and their conservation, the volume makes a unique contribution to the growing interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities.The authors investigate the crucial role of swamps in Australian society through the idea of wetland cultures. The broad historical and cultural range of the boo...

This volume, edited by Kim Golombisky, applies an intersectional lens to advertising, focusing on gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, age, class, and nationality. Intersectional feminist perspectives on advertising are rare in the advertising industry, even as it faces pressure to reform. This anthology focuses on advertising messaging to follow up the professional practices covered in Feminists, Feminisms, and Advertising, edited by Kim Golombisky and Peggy Kreshel. In this ne...

Trends often play a dominant role in many empirical time series data, but do we truly understand these trends? What challenges arise when dealing with complex, nonstationary trending time series? How do we model such trends in fields like economics, finance, and climate change?This book provides an overview of recently developed models for trending time series and introduces new nonlinear, nonparametric, and semiparametric methods. Specifically, it offers practical approaches to ad...

The essays in this volume address the displacement of natural and cultural heritage caused by disasters, whether they be dramatic natural impacts or terrible events unleashed by humankind, including holocaust and genocide. Disasters can be natural or human-made, rapid or slow, great or small, yet the impact is effectively the same; nature, people and cultural heritage are displaced or lost. Yet while heritage and place are at risk from disasters, in time,sites of suffering are sometimes re...

Polarity phenomena are pervasively observed in natural languages. Previous studies on Chinese polarity items are mainly in line with the non-veridicality approach. This book, however, employs the downward-entailing hypothesis as its analytical foundation, and argues that downward entailment is the only licensor for different kinds of Chinese polarity items, and non-veridicality is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition and thus offers inferior explanatory power compared with the form...

The book focuses on the current research of the relation between protein phosphorylation and meat quality, reviews the influence mechanism of protein phosphorylation on meat quality, and summarizes the improvement of meat quality by regulating protein phosphorylation. It could help to clarify some dilemmas and encourage further research in this field, aiming for effective application of protein phosphorylation in meat quality in the near future. The book is written for researchers and grad...

English-language translations of traditional plays from the marionette puppet theater of Northern China.Marionette puppet theater has a rich and ancient history in China, extending back to the Han dynasty and reaching its heyday in the Qing dynasty. While this art form is nearly extinct in northern China today, a handful of troupes in Heyang County in Shaanxi Province, which claims to be the birthplace of marionette theater, continue to perform skits and scenes fro...

This book aims at discussing the development of MOOCs in China in relation to MOOCs in other countries or areas. Based on the history of MOOCs, we summarize and compare the development of MOOCs in China and other countries with empirical evidence from a comprehensive investigation about MOOCs in Asian, United States, and Europe. Then we discuss about the importance of MOOCs in China and its role in the reform of higher education system, and the model of teaching and learning in China. Afte...

First English translations of a novel and two play excerpts based on tales of the goddess Chen Jinggu, an eighth-century shaman and present-day cult deity.This book offers the first translation into English of the Chinese novel Haiyouji, as well as excerpts of a marionette play based on the cult lore of the goddess Chen Jinggu (766–790), a historical shaman priestess who became one of Fujian's most important goddesses and the Lüshan Sect's chief deity. The...

Digital Functions and Data Reconstruction: Digital-Discrete Methods provides a solid foundation to the theory of digital functions and its applications to image data analysis, digital object deformation, and data reconstruction. This new method has a unique feature in that it is mainly built on discrete mathematics with connections to classical methods in mathematics and computer sciences.Digitally continuous functions and gradually varied functions were developed in the l...