Books published by Springer Nature Singapore

This book reviews the presentation of conjugal relationships in Chinese culture and their perception in the West. It explores the ways in which the act of marriage is represented/misrepresented in different literary genres, as well as in cultural adaptations. It looks at the gendered characteristics at play that affect conjugal relationships in Chinese societal practices more widely. It also distinguishes between the essential features that give rise to nuptial arrangements from the Chinese perspective, looking at what in which Sino and/or Western mentalities differ in terms of notions of autonomy in marriage. It excavates the extent to which marriage is constituted in forms of transaction between female and male bodies and asks under what circumstances wedding ceremonies constitute archetypal or counter-archetypal notions in pre-modern and modern society. Authors cover a range of fascinating cultural topics, such as posthumous marriage (necrogamy) as an ancient and popular folk culture from the perspective of Confucian ideology, as well as looking at marriage from ancient to present times, duty and rights in conjugal relations, inter-racial and inter-cultural marriage, widowhood in Confucian ideology, issues of legitimacy in marriage and concubinage, the taboos surrounding divorce and re-marriage, and conjugal violence. The book serves to revisit the cultural connections between marriage and various art forms, including literature, film, theatre, and other adaptations. It is a rich intellectual resource for scholars and students researching the historical roots, cultural interpretations, and evolving aspects of marriage as shown in literature, art, and culture.

This book builds an information platform on China's industrial competitiveness, providing scientific design and application case studies for integrated analysis and decision-making facilities and mechanisms for enterprises, industries, financial institutions and governments, which can make up for the lack of adequate information in China's market operations, especially the problems of duplicate construction and vicious competition aggravated by the lack of systematically processed industrial information. This book not only pursues innovation in technical methods and application theories but also pursues the collection, processing and collation of relevant domestic and international data and development and application so as to provide primary results for an industrial competitiveness database adapted to government management needs. The research is closely related to the actual problems in China and extensively uses statistical data to make various model analyses, which has a relativelysizeable academic value.

This book is a collection of selected papers submitted to the 2022 International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Engineering Applications organized in Tokyo, Japan, May 13-15, 2022 (ISDEA2022). The book is organized according to the conference¿s five major themes, including 1) Theory and Application of Intelligent Computing, 2) Intelligent Information System and Management Decision, 3) Artificial Intelligence and Robots, 4) Mechanical design and intelligent manufacturing and 5) Intelligent control and detection technology. ISDEA establishes a platform for researchers and scholars working in the field of intelligent systems design and engineering applications to present their newest research results, exchange innovative ideas, propose new models, as well as demonstrate advanced methodologies and novel design and systems.

This book includes selected papers from the 5th International Conference on Computational Vision and Bio Inspired Computing (ICCVBIC 2021), held in Coimbatore, India, during November 25-26, 2021. This book presents state-of-the-art research innovations in computational vision and bio-inspired techniques. The book reveals the theoretical and practical aspects of bio-inspired computing techniques, like machine learning, sensor-based models, evolutionary optimization and big data modeling and management that make use of effectual computing processes in the bio-inspired systems. It also contributes to the novel research that focuses on developing bio-inspired computing solutions for various domains, such as human-computer interaction, image processing, sensor-based single processing, recommender systems and facial recognition, which play an indispensable part in smart agriculture, smart city, biomedical and business intelligence applications.

This book is a compilation of selected papers from the 5th International Conference on Building Energy and Environment (COBEE2022), held in Montreal, Canada, in July 2022. The work focuses on the most recent technologies and knowledge of building energy and the environment, including health, energy, urban microclimate, smart cities, safety, etc. The contents make valuable contributions to academic researchers, engineers in the industry, and regulators of buildings. As well, readers encounter new ideas for achieving healthy, comfortable, energy-efficient, resilient, and safe buildings.

The book Labour and delivery:Update discusses protocols for labour management from A to Z in a concise manner and easy to understand language. It covers latest guidelines for breech delivery, management of preterm labour and premature preterm rupture of membranes and labour complications .It revisits instrumental vaginal delivery as many gynecologists and obstetricians lack the skill for forceps and ventouse delivery.This book covers all the latest cochrane reviews,RCOG, NICE ,ACOG guidelines and other studies for managing various labour conditions. It includes all the latest developments and research to keep the readers abreast with the latest evidence-based strategies.The book is a ready revision tool for busy practitioners, postgraduates, undergraduates,midwifes, and for those who want to focus on delivery and labour events.

This book offers the assessment of Myanmar¿s societal changes, development aspects, and political situation over the course of the nation¿s short lived democratic transition disrupted by the coup d¿état on 1 February 2021. A multitude of authors with different expertise add new dimensions of analysis to provide a foundation for any future international cooperation in Myanmar¿s center and peripheries. The military¿s institutionalization of its influence and control in political, economic and social affairs has negatively affected the safety, security and peace of people and their communities at the periphery. This in turn has led the people to undertake local grassroots initiatives towards securing a genuine democratic transition at the local and national level. The chapters probe into Myanmar¿s transition and political crisis through in-depth discussion on the issues such as, but not limited to, state fragility, community resilience, political leadership, ethnic women¿s organizations, human security, education equality, IDPs and non-state actors, ethnic community-based health organizations, the 2020 election, peace process, development issues, the coup¿s destruction, and a new-born unity. The book covers an important collection of inputs from young and prominent scholars alike, offering a valuable resource for general readers, students, and practitioners. The editors present this volume as a vital collection to literature at a time of heated political crisis and societal responses on her current course since the contributors highlight the state of Myanmar by also focusing on the margins, the grassroots, and the recent coup.

This book mainly focuses on the miracle of Chinäs foreign trade in the past 40 years from five perspectives: first, it briefly reviews the import substitution strategy China adopted before its opening-up; second, it analyzes the export-oriented strategy that contributes a lot to Chinäs economic growth since 1980s; third, it discusses the impacts of trade liberalization and Chinäs participation in WTO on Chinese firms; forth, it addresses the deepening opening-up in the context of global financial crisis; last, it provides policy advice on Chinäs newly conducted all-around opening-up strategy. By dividing Chinäs opening-up into five stages, this book offers a comprehensive discussion to understand and analyze the reason, performance and challenge of Chinäs economic growth from the perspective of foreign trade.

This book offers philosophical readings of the contemporary university and is motivated by a series of pressing challenges in the global context of Higher Education. It argues that the university is a place for community, for refuge, for enlightenment and the careful questioning of knowledge, but it is also a place for visceral ambition and for intellectual cowardice, for blinkered individualism and professional competitiveness. In the context of a highly competitive post-crash global economy, contemporary students are placed under increasing pressure to distinguish themselves from their peers via a portfolio of learning excellence and extracurricular achievement. Growing numbers undertake part or full-time employment in order to cover registration fees and the basic costs of living. University staff take on very different forms of pressure that operate across the life-course of an academic career ¿ from early-career anxieties to the worries of moreprivileged and permanent faculty who fear they do not meet ever-changing structures, assumptions and demands of the university itself.This book argues that these interlinked agendas demand consideration from philosophers of education in Ireland, Europe and further afield. It proposes that we must embody a very careful balancing act: one where we remember the romantic ideals and promises of the university while still acknowledging the very real and pressing challenges faced by our staff and students. The book will be of interest to academics, graduate students, and advanced-level undergraduates in Philosophy, Education, Mental Health, and Organizational Psychology in both North America and Europe.

This book covers the latest developments in phenolic foams and their applications. Compared with polystyrene and polyurethane foams, phenolic foams are known as third-generation polymeric foams. Phenolic foams exhibit excellent fire-retardant properties, including low flammability, low peak heat release rate, no dripping during combustion, and low toxicity. This book discusses various aspects of phenolic foams including properties, synthesis, fabrication methodologies, and applications. The contents also cover the methods for toughening of phenolic foams to make them more widely applicable. This book is of interest to both academics and industry alike. It is also a useful reference for fire safety regulators and policy-makers looking for new materials and methods for sustainable fire protection.

Carbon stabilization involves to capturing carbon from the atmosphere and fix it in the forms soil organic carbon stock for a long period of time, it will be present to escape as a greenhouse gas in the form of carbon dioxide. Soil carbon storage is an important ecosystem service, resulting from interactions of several ecological processes. This process is primarily mediated by plants through photosynthesis, with carbon stored in the form of soil organic carbon. Soil carbon levels have reduced over decades of conversion of pristine ecosystems into agriculture landscape, which now offers the opportunity to store carbon from air into the soil. Carbon stabilization into the agricultural soils is a novel approach of research and offers promising reduction in the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.  This book brings together all aspects of soil carbon sequestration and stabilization, with a special focus on diversity of microorganisms and management practices of soil in agricultural systems. It discusses the role of ecosystem functioning, recent and future prospects, soil microbial ecological studies, rhizosphere microflora, and organic matter in soil carbon stabilization. It also explores carbon transformation in soil, biological management and its genetics, microbial transformation of soil carbon, plant growth promoting rhizobacteria (PGPRs), and their role in sustainable agriculture.  The book offers a spectrum of ideas of new technological inventions and fundamentals of soil sustainability. It will be suitable for teachers, researchers, and policymakers, undergraduate and graduate students of soil science, soil microbiology, agronomy, ecology, and environmental sciences 

This book seeks to break new ground, both empirically and conceptually, in examining discourses of identity formation and the agency of critical social practices in Malaysia. Taking an inclusive cultural studies perspective, it questions the ideological narrative of 'race' and 'ethnicity' that dominates explanations of conflicts and cleavages in the Malaysian context. The contributions are organised in three broad themes. 'Identities in Contestation: Borders, Complexities and Hybridities' takes a range of empirical studies-literary translation, religion, gender, ethnicity, indigeneity and sexual orientation-to break down preconceived notions of fixed identities. This then opens up an examination of 'Identities and Movements: Agency and Alternative Discourses', in which contributors deal with counter-hegemonic social movements-of anti-racism, young people, environmentalism and independent publishing-that explicitly seek to open up greater critical, democratic space within the Malaysian polity. The third section, 'Identities and Narratives: Culture and the Media', then provides a close textual reading of some exemplars of new cultural and media practices found in oral testimonies, popular music, film, radio programming and storytelling who have consciously created bodies of work that question the dominant national narrative. This book is a valuable interdisciplinary work for advanced students and researchers interested in representations of identity and nationhood in Malaysia, and for those with wider interests in the fields of critical cultural studies and discourse analysis."e;Here is a fresh, startling book to aid the task of unbinding the straitjackets of 'Malay', 'Chinese' and 'Indian', with which colonialism bound Malaysia's plural inheritance, and on which the postcolonial state continues to rely. In it, a panoply of unlikely identities-Bajau liminality, Kelabit philosophy, Islamic feminism, refugee hybridity and more-finds expression and offers hope for liberation"e;. Rachel Leow, University of Cambridge"e;This book shakes the foundations of race thinking in Malaysian studies by expanding the range of cases, perspectives and outcomes of identity. It offers students of Malaysia an examination of identity and agency that is expansive, critical and engaging, and its interdisciplinary depth brings Malaysian studies into conversation with scholarship across the world"e;.Sumit Mandal, University of Nottingham Malaysia"e;This is a much-needed work that helps us to take apart the colonial inherited categories of race which informed the notion of the plural society, the idea of plurality without multiculturalism. It complicates the picture of identity by bringing in religion, gender, indigeneity and sexual orientation, and helps us to imagine what a truly multiculturalist Malaysia might look like"e;.Syed Farid Alatas, National University of Singapore

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th China Conference onMachine Translation, CCMT 2022, held in Lhasa, China, during August 6-10, 2022.The 16 full papers were included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 73 submissions.

Based on the Judicial Transparency Index Assessment (2019 and 2020) conducted in China by the Institute of Law of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, this book summarizes and analyzes the current situation of judicial openness in China, using a sample of 218 courts across the country for the study. The book analyzes the ideological and institutional origins of judicial openness and examines the operation of judicial openness through the practical experience of role replacement. By analyzing evaluation data in the fields of audit information disclosure, trial information disclosure, judicial enforcement data disclosure, and judicial reform data disclosure, the book points out that the current judicial disclosure has made significant progress, but there are still problems such as unclear disclosure standards, insufficient rigidity in disclosure requirements, and the scope of disclosure still needs to be expanded. The book recommends accelerating the disclosure of judicial legislation, public standards, and strengthening assessment and accountability.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th China Conference on Knowledge Graph and Semantic Computing: Knowledge Graph Empowers the Digital Economy, CCKS 2022,  in Qinhuangdao, China, August 24-27, 2022.The 15 full papers and 2 short papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 100 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: knowledge representation and reasoning; knowledge acquisition and knowledge base construction; linked data, knowledge integration, and knowledge graph storage managements; natural language understanding and semantic computing; knowledge graph applications; and knowledge graph open resources.

This book offers a snapshot of interculturality as a complex, unstable and highly political object of research and education when it locates at the centre of multifaceted dialogues between teachers and students; students and students; teachers, students, scholars and readers. The context of the book is a Chinese course on intercultural communication education where students engage with local and international teachers. By listening to the intriguing and stimulating voices of these students in dialogue with the teachers, the reader also has the opportunity to enter the intercultural world of Chinese youth, beyond stereotypes. The unique approach proposed in the book is of interest to students, teachers of intercultural communication education, teacher educators, researchers and anyone wishing to build up supercriticality in relation to the fascinating notion of interculturality. The book contains 15 chapters and revolves around five main dialogues between the students and their teachers. Following each dialogue, the floor is given to the students to react to the dialogues and to share their views on questions that emerged from the main dialogues. The book conveys the authors' excitement about approaching interculturality in supercritical ways, engaging in the process with multiple voices.

This book uncovers the crucial issues in learning technologies in this digital transformation moment, specifically within the COVID-19 umbrella effects. Remote learning, educational technologies, or distance learning are usually used topics by teachers, students, and researchers because the educational context should be transformed and even reinvented itself drastically. Technologies have been used more intensively in the last year than during the last decade. However, what is the effect of these "e;new"e; technologies on the teaching and learning methodologies? Are teachers and students fully digital competent to integrate these technologies in their teaching and learning activities? In this book, the authors claim to go forward that the online teaching conception to replicate the face-to-face teaching through a camera. They propose adapting the active methodologies to the online or hybrid context, which is a challenge that must be corroborated with rigorous educational research.

Wineinformatics is a new data science application with a focus on understanding wine through artificial intelligence. Thousands of new wine reviews are produced monthly, which benefits the understanding of wine through wine experts for winemakers and consumers. This book systematically investigates how to process human language format reviews and mine useful knowledge from a large volume of processed data.This book presents a human language processing tool named Computational Wine Wheel to process professional wine reviews and three novel Wineinformatics studies to analyze wine quality, price and reviewers. Through the lens of data science, the author demonstrates how the wine receives 90+ scores out of 100 points from Wine Spectator, how to predict a wine's specific grade and price through wine reviews and how to rank a group of wine reviewers. The book also shows the advanced application of the Computational Wine Wheel to capture more information hidden in wine reviews and the possibility of extending the wheel to coffee, tea beer, sake and liquors.This book targets computer scientists, data scientists and wine industrial researchers, who are interested in Wineinformatics. Senior data science undergraduate and graduate students may also benefit from this book.