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 ...

Volume 10 in the series of the annual journal Reviews of Accelerator Science and Technology (RAST), will be its final volume. Its theme is 'The Future of Accelerators'. This volume, together with previous 9 volumes, gives readers a complete picture as well as detailed technical information about the accelerator field, and its many driving and fascinating aspects.This volume has 17 articles. The first 15 articles have a different approach from the previous volumes. They emphasize the more p...

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...

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 ...

This book examines practices on the relationship between sign and meaning in the Pre-Imperial period of China from the semiotics perspective. Although the Chinese civilization did not develop a comprehensive semiotics system in that period, they are highly semiotic in many ways. The thinking and application of signs of Chinese people can be found in many classics, such as The Book of Changes, The Analects of Confucius, Tao De Jing and Zhuangzi. This book begins its study by re-examining th...

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...

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...

As accelerator science and technology progressed over the past several decades, the accelerators themselves have undergone major improvements in multiple performance factors: beam energy, beam power, and beam brightness. As a consequence, accelerators have found applications in a wide range of fields in our life and in our society. The current volume is dedicated to applications in energy and security, two of the most important and urgent topics in today's world.This volume makes an effort...

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...

As particle accelerators strive forever increasing performance, high intensity particle beams become one of the critical demands requested across the board by a majority of accelerator users (proton, electron and ion) and for most applications. Much effort has been made by our community to pursue high intensity accelerator performance on a number of fronts. Recognizing its importance, we devote this volume to Accelerators for High Intensity Beams. High intensity accelerators have become a ...

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...