An elaborate and pervasive set of practices, called guanxi, underlies everyday social relationships in contemporary China. Obtaining and changing job assignments, buying certain foods and consumer items, getting into good hospitals, buying train tickets, obtaining housing, even doing business—all such tasks call for the skillful and strategic giving of gifts and cultivating of obligation, indebtedness, and reciprocity.Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's close scrutiny of this phenomenon serves ...

Features of statistical and operational research methods and tools being used to improve the healthcare industryWith a focus on cutting-edge approaches to the quickly growing field of healthcare, Healthcare Analytics: From Data to Knowledge to Healthcare Improvement provides an integrated and comprehensive treatment on recent research advancements in data-driven healthcare analytics in an effort to provide more personalized and smarter healthcare services....

This volume offers state-of-the-art research in service science and its related research, education and practice areas. It showcases recent developments in smart service systems, operations management and analytics and their impact in complex service systems. The papers included in this volume highlight emerging technology and applications in fields including healthcare, energy, finance, information technology, transportation, sports, logistics, and public services. Regardless of size and ...

As a well-known text mining tool, topic modeling can effectively discover the latent semantic structure of text data. Extracting topics from documents is also one of the fundamental challenges in natural language processing. Although topic models have seen significant achievements over the past three decades, there remains a scarcity of methods that effectively model temporal aspect. Moreover, many contemporary topic models continue to grapple with the issue of noise contamination, particu...

This book is a comprehensive and intensive book for graduate students in fluid dynamics as well as scientists, engineers and applied mathematicians. Offering a systematic introduction to the physical theory of vortical flows at graduate level, it considers the theory of vortical flows as a branch of fluid dynamics focusing on shearing process in fluid motion, measured by vorticity.It studies vortical flows according to their natural evolution stages,from being gen...

This volume celebrates the 100th birthday of Professor Chen-Ning Frank Yang (Nobel 1957), one of the giants of modern science and a living legend. Starting with reminiscences of Yang's time at the research centre for theoretical physics at Stonybrook (now named C. N. Yang Institute) by his successor Peter van Nieuwenhuizen, the book is a collection of articles by world-renowned mathematicians and theoretical physicists. This emphasizes the Dialogue Between Physics and Mathematics ...

This book introduces the latest research developments in composite nanomaterials and summarizes the fundamentals and technical approaches in synthesis, fabrication and processing of composite nanomaterials. The author describes the intrinsic relationship between the catalytic properties and the physical and chemical effects in the composite materials, providing for theoretical and technical bases for effectively developing novel electrocatalyst - applications of the nanocomposites in energ...

Stories Old and New is the first complete translation of Feng Menglong’s Gujin xiaoshuo (also known as Yushi mingyan, Illustrious Words to Instruct the World), a collection of 40 short stories first published in 1620 in China. This is considered the best of Feng’s three such collections and was a pivotal work in the development of vernacular fiction. The stories are valuable as examples of early fiction and for their detailed depiction of daily life among a broad range of social c...

This volume is the proceedings of a special conference dedicated to the legacy of Prof. S.-S. Chern, virtually held at the Chern Institute of Mathematics, Nankai University. The conference lasted 2 weeks, and included more than 80 talks, highlighted by a special public lecture by Sir Roger Penrose, on his Nobel winning work on black-holes.The talks ranged from string theory to number theory, from algebraic geometry to muon detectors, from machine-learning to category theory, etc., ...

This collection, in three volumes, presents the scientific achievements of Roderick S C Wong, spanning 45 years of his career. It provides a comprehensive overview of the author's work which includes significant discoveries and pioneering contributions, such as his deep analysis on asymptotic approximations of integrals and uniform asymptotic expansions of orthogonal polynomials and special functions; his important contributions to perturbation methods for ordinary differential equations a...

This book highlights the mathematical models and solutions of the generalized dynamics of soft-matter quasicrystals (SMQ) and introduces possible applications of the theory and methods. Based on the theory of quasiperiodic symmetry and symmetry breaking, the book treats the dynamics of individual quasicrystal systems by reducing them to nonlinear partial differential equations and then provides methods for solving the initial-boundary value problems in these equations. The solutions obtain...

This book informs best practice for enhancing young children’s STEM learning experiences in formal settings such as preschool environments and less formal settings such as home environments. It is the first collection of multidisciplinary and multinational studies on early STEM programs worldwide and presents diverse, authentic, and current STEM-relevant scenarios that address two fundamental problems: where are we in early STEM education? and where shall we go?Th...