Books published by Springer Nature Singapore

This book highlights the state-of-the-art research and discovery in the use of chitosan-based nanocomposites in biomedical applications, including the scope to which these novel materials have been incorporated by the community. It provides an exceptional insight into the strategies for the synthesis and chemical modifications of chitosan, characterization techniques, their use as anticancer agents, antimicrobial, antiviral, and antifungal agents, their role in the biomedical field, and applications in drug delivery, gene therapy, dentistry, orthopedics, etc. This book will also emphasize the challenges with previous signs of progress and way for further research, details relating to the current pioneering technology, and future perspectives with a multidisciplinary approach. Furthermore, it presents up-to-date information on the economics, toxicity, and regulations related to these novel materials.

This book presents select proceedings of the International Conference on Materials Processing and Characterization (ICMPC 2021). It particularly focuses on emerging trends related to advanced materials processing and characterization and current practices in industries. It discusses innovative manufacturing processes, standards and technologies used to broaden the knowledge of materials and also help to increase innovation and responsiveness to ever-increasing international needs, more in-depth studies of functionally graded materials/ tailor-made materials. This book will be a valuable resource for students, researchers, and professionals working in the various areas of materials science.

This book continues the author's long-term reflections (over 20 years of scholarship and experience in intercultural communication education) around the fascinating and yet contestable notion of interculturality in education. As an unstable and polysemic notion, interculturality deserves to be opened up again and again and there is a need to engage with it continuously, observing, critiquing and problematizing its complexities. This book urges researchers, students and interculturalists to take the time to think carefully and deeply about interculturality and to find inspiration beyond the dominating 'Western' ideological world of intercultural research and education.This book starts from short fragments written by the author for himself over a period of one year. In these short statements and notes about interculturality, the author reflects creatively on the questions he had in mind at the time of writing and offers some (temporary) answers, which, in turn, are questioned and revised. Over the 1000 fragments that the author wrote, he selected about 100, for which he wrote commentaries, referring to and reviewing current research and debates on interculturality in the process. One of the specificities of the book is to be highly multidisciplinary to help us get used to looking for inspiration in other fields of research and creativity.The fragments can be read randomly - the reader may open the book at any page and pick any fragment. The author suggests reading each individual fragment first and then the accompanying explanatory texts. While reading them, the reader is also invited to reflect on any potential addition to what the author wrote - anything they might dis-/agree with, anything they would have wanted to discuss with the author. Questions have been added at the end of each chapter for readers to reflect on and to enrich their own criticality and reflexivity. The book serves as continuous guidance for engaging with interculturality.

This book critically explores pedagogical activities, policies, and coursework that teacher education programs can provide to more fully prepare teacher candidates and in-service educators for professional practice in urban schools. It illustrates how teacher educators from across the United States are supporting teacher candidates and in-service teachers to possess the knowledge, skills, and dispositions for equity-oriented instructional practices and advocacy for professional engagement in the urban context.Chapters share insider perspectives of urban teacher education on preparing teachers to teach in culturally, linguistically, and socio-economically diverse classrooms. They discuss teacher educators' learning about their own practice in the preparation of teachers for city schools, preparing teacher candidates from rural and suburban contexts to teach in urban settings, and supervising practicing teachers in city classrooms. The volume also focuses on the interplay of cultural and linguistic parity between teacher educators and their preservice/in-service teacher students, implementing learning activities or coursework about teaching in urban schools, and enacting critical pedagogical practices.This book will be beneficial to teacher educators focused on teacher preparation for city classrooms and urban school districts, and researchers seeking to adopt self-study methodology in their own research endeavors.

This book explores East Asia's and the Asia Pacific's energy security exploring key issues including major trans-border energy projects, major country's energy mix policy, trans- border pipelines, LNG transfer between nations, balance of power relations between major powers, the North Korean energy situation, energy alliances, Belt and Road Initiative, Indo-Pacific Strategy, World Choke point and more. In particular, this book provides the detailed analysis of the current problems of energy security and diplomacy among various countries as well as policy implications. It will clearly serve as a manual to enhance energy security in the region and boost energy transaction as well as the pioneering step to conceptualize the notion of energy security among political circles, in the diplomatic community and energy industry as well as international relations academics.

This edited book covers all aspects of forest deforestation and degradation in detail and their link to land degradation. Poor natural resource management is often a contributory factor in the depletion of resources particularly like degradation of land which hinders the goals to achieve land degradation neutrality (LDN). Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 15.3 states: "e;By 2030, combat desertification, restore degraded land and soil, including land affected by desertification, drought, and floods, and strive to achieve a land degradation-neutral world."e; To achieve the set goals a comprehensive multidirectional approach is required involving policymakers, field functionaries, researchers, and above all educators. The book compiles the field experiences and wisdom of some of the best researchers and authors working in the field of land degradations for quite a long time. The objective of the book is to disseminate the status of land degradation, the importance of achieving land degradation and share success stories of reclaiming Land degradation, and suggests means and ways of achieving land degradation neutrality. This book act as a repository of knowledge on Land degradation neutrality for students, researchers and practitioners, and policy planners. 

This book serves as a reference point to inform continuing professional learning and development (CPLD) initiatives at both individual and institutional levels. It serves as a guide for faculty engaged in online teaching within the higher education sector, in universities and vocational education institutions. It moves beyond a technology-driven approach by emphasising pedagogy and design as key issues in online teaching practice. It will highlight challenges to staff engagement and how they may be overcome, drawing on evidence-based examples and models of CPLD from institutions around the world. It is underpinned by a framework that emphasises the need for CPLD that is sustainable and adaptable to a range of contexts, particularly in professional learning and development. This book also highlights practices aimed at sustainable, continuing, learning, and brings together a range of solutions and suggestions to assist educators and institutions with CPLD.

This book highlights the current and recent state-of-the-art developments in energy harvesting systems for health supervising applications. It explores the exciting potential of energy harvesting as a crosscutting field of research to intersect with other areas to envisage new products, solutions, and applications. Among all these new opportunities for synergy, there is a research area that fully matches the features offered by energy harvesting with its power supply's main needs- health supervising (HS), which consists of monitoring the health or operating conditions of anything, such as structures, buildings, public health, environment, etc. The book covers the hand in hand evolution towards a new paradigm: truly self-powered devices based on a single transducer acting as a sensor and as power source simultaneously and efficiently. This evolution is illustrated by the concept and implementation of novel state-of-the-art architecture for self-powered energy harvesting systems for applications that range from structural health monitoring to point-of-care medical devices.

This book presents a comprehensive discussion of sociocultural perspectives on graduate employability and workplace-based learning development. It draws on Vygotsky's theories such as situated learning and sociocultural perspectives, as well as the constructivist learning theory. This book showcases theoretical and empirical analyses that show how institutions, decision-makers or academics can work together to enhance job employability in this age of uncertainty. It discusses issues such as the development of emerging and employability skills, examines research in higher education and workplace-based learning development, and proposes directions for the changing nature in real-world settings. This book details empirical research in the field using quantitative, qualitative and mixed method approaches, and summarizes the key conclusions pertaining to graduate employability skills as well as workplace learning culture and technology-mediated environment. It includes contributions from experienced international scholars, and offers detailed insights for readers who want a timely understanding of research trends in graduate employability and workplace-based learning development.

This book focuses on Meso- to Neoproterozoic geology and Petroleum resources in China. It offers the oldest sediments knowledge for petroleum generation, accumulation, alteration and preservation in the world. It provides a valuable contribution to the understanding of a potential Precambrian oil and gas exploration realm through well-developed Meso- to Neoproterozoic sedimentary strata with petroleum resources. This work will appeal to a wide readership, from geologists, geochemists, petroleum prospector, university faculty members to advanced students working for Precambrian and petroleum geological and geochemical research.

This book connects the Biblical Paul's work as an educator with the revival of interest in Paul's impact on contemporary social and cultural experience, sometimes referred to as 'Paul's new moment'. It presents Paul's letters as being the testament of an educator who brought a radical emancipatory approach to the communities with whom he lived and worked. The book draws on history, philosophy, New Testament studies, and social theory to present the case for Paul as the initiator of a pedagogy of the event. This book explores the concept of a pedagogy of the event, and provides a case study of success in its implementation.

This book explains the mathematical structures of supersymmetric quantum field theory (SQFT) from the viewpoints of functional and infinite-dimensional analysis. The main mathematical objects are infinite-dimensional Dirac operators on the abstract Boson-Fermion Fock space. The target audience consists of graduate students and researchers who are interested in mathematical analysis of quantum fields, including supersymmetric ones, and infinite-dimensional analysis. The major topics are the clarification of general mathematical structures that some models in the SQFT have in common, and the mathematically rigorous analysis of them. The importance and the relevance of the subject are that in physics literature, supersymmetric quantum field models are only formally (heuristically) considered and hence may be ill-defined mathematically. From a mathematical point of view, however, they suggest new aspects related to infinite-dimensional geometry and analysis. Therefore, it is important to show the mathematical existence of such models first and then study them in detail. The book shows that the theory of the abstract Boson-Fermion Fock space serves this purpose. The analysis developed in the book also provides a good example of infinite-dimensional analysis from the functional analysis point of view, including a theory of infinite-dimensional Dirac operators and Laplacians.

This book illustrates the latest developments in literacy and language assessment in the digital context, and subsequently presents a rigorous validation study on a newly proposed form of assessment (scenario-based assessment, SBA) that seeks to respond to the contextual change of literacy activities. It combines theories and innovative practices in both the literacy and language assessment sectors.The empirical validation study on SBA, presented here, can help readers understand how digital scenarios can be realized in assessment practices with the aid of computer technology, and how the scenario settings in the digital context can affect EFL learners' reading-to-writing performance. In this way, it can facilitate the reconceptualization of L2 literacy in the digital context. Moreover, the evidence and critical examination presented here can offer readers more comprehensive insights into the value or validity of a given innovative approach before it is adopted in their contexts.   

This book covers different aspects of biodegradable packaging, such as their sourcing and application in food industries. The book focuses on the production and characterization of biodegradable food packaging derived from plant, animal and microbial sources. Chapters highlight the nano-technological interventions in biodegradable food packaging and the less studied microbial biopolymer-based biodegradable food packaging makes it distinct from other related books. It includes the latest research and development in the areas of food processing, food packaging, material science and polymeric science. It also discusses the standards and regulatory guidelines about the biodegradability testing of these polymers.This book is meant for researchers in food science, food packaging, bioprocess technology, polymer science and biochemical engineering. It is also beneficial for faculty members and students of food microbiology, food technology, dairy technology. The book is also meant for small entrepreneurs and farmers who are interested in bio-plastic usage for food packaging.

This edited book examines the impact of COVID-19 on selected areas of mobile studies, ranging from mobile public spaces to mobile workspaces. This book offers insights into how to leverage mobile devices, as well as features and communication to contain the pandemic. Specifically, it highlights the Chinese experience and lessons, and the country's expertise in social capital management during the health crisis, governance of information flow and order, combating fake news and the infodemic, documenting the pandemic, and lessons learned from mobile health communication. It also discusses how small companies can survive the death of foreign trade during the pandemic.  Looking beyond the pandemic, the book also explores the challenges and opportunities posed by the pandemic by investigating mobile learning, mobile journalism, mobile marketing and mobile workspaces. Given its scope, this book will enhance the global efforts in fighting the pandemic and contribute to the current body of knowledge on how to leverage mobile technologies to enhance public health communication during public health crises.       

This book presents a series of studies focusing on the role of social capital in the labor market and beyond. Using the effect of individual social capital on labor markets as an example, this book pays special attention to the origins of and solutions to the endogeneity problem. It uses several identification strategies to systematically test for the causal effects of social capital.First, this book constitutes the first attempt to offer a systematic account of the progress made by social scientists in improving causal inferences into the role of social capital in labor markets. Second, the book adopts specialized approaches-both classical and new-toward different sources of endogeneity. Incorporating the latest research from outside fields, such as economics, into sociological research is a small but significant methodological innovation. Third, in addition to empirical research, this book undertakes an innovative exploration of the theory of social capital. It creatively explains the dynamic evolution of social capital, which helps balance objectivism and subjectivism when analyzing interpersonal actions.For sociologists who focus on quantitative research methods and social capital, scholars who study Chinese societies, and related students, this book provides both advanced methods and rich empirical research.

This book provides a framework of protest handling which redirects our attention away from the strength of protesters and towards the constraints of state power, drawing on detailed case studies randomly collected in 7 provinces in China over the last decade. It finds that the challenges of retaining legitimacy, the propensity for responsiveness, the contradictions of the petition system, and the dynamics of elite alignments are key elements shaping the fate of nail-like petitions. A nail-like person refers to the individual who looks like a stubborn nail on a plank of wood that cannot be easily hammered down. His persistent protest thus is theoretically puzzling, since such individual-based protest is assumed to be too weak to effectively challenge a powerful authoritarian regime. Although this phenomenon is widely observed in China, it is ignored by current studies on collective action. Meanwhile, this book delves into the life politics of nail-like persons and reveals that their escalation of grievance, marginalized social status, inability of pursuing desirable lives through legitimate means, and communication with fellow petitioners also reinforce their determination of contention. This book describes deeply the fate of individual-based protests in China. It scrutinizes the state's role in shaping contention at its macro, intermediate, and micro levels, and meanwhile pay more attention to local specifics that are crucial to uncovering the logic of petitioners' actions and consciousness. This book has implications for scholars and graduates who are interested in contentious politics and state-society interactions in China.

The book covers different techniques and methodologies involved in the nutritional quality analysis of forages. It also discusses the nutritional quality, anti-nutritional components, factors affecting forage quality, feed processing and conservation. Different techniques and methodologies have been presented in a simplified manner. The book has been divided in separate chapters and each chapter discusses different aspect of forage quality. Further, the book also covers the topics on conservation and processing of forages and management techniques for improving the forage nutritional quality. This book is an essential source of information for research scholars, post-graduate students and scientists working on forage quality estimation and also in livestock and dairy industries.

This book discusses the extraction, purification, modification, and processing of biobased materials and their various industrial applications, across biomedical, pharmaceutical, construction, and other industries. It includes contributions from experts on hybrid biopolymers and bio-composites, bioactive and biodegradable materials, bio-inert polymers, natural polymers and composites, and metallic natural materials. Therefore, this encyclopedia is a useful reference for scientists, academicians, research scholars, and technologists. Major challenges of biobased materials are their efficient development, cost-effective, and green & environment friendly production/applications. This encyclopedia answers these challenges to professionals and scientists for proper utilization of biobased materials. It presents the recent practices of biobased materials technology in different scientific and engineering domains. It helps the bounded industrial outcomes to reach the general readership of different domains. This encyclopedia bridges the technological gaps between the industrial and academic professionals and the novice young students/scholars. The interdisciplinarity of this encyclopedia makes it unique for a wide readership.  The topic of biobased materials is currently popular in the scientific community, working in such following areas as Recycled materials, Renewable materials, Materials for efficiency, Materials for waste treatment, Materials for reduction of environmental load, Materials for easy disposal or recycle, Hazardous free materials, Materials for reducing human health impact, Materials for energy efficiency, Materials for green energy, etc. This is a relatively hot topic in materials science and has strong demands for energy, material and money savings, as well as heavy contamination problems, despite that the area of biobased materials belongs to most important fields of modern science & technology, no important encyclopedias have been published in the area of "e;biobased materials"e;

This book presents the advancement of coating materials technology especially in agriculture, particularly for fertilizers. Fertilizers are a critical component in meeting rising demands and ensuring global food security. A new generation of fertilizers made by coating granules with biopolymers address these issues. Coating in agriculture is an important area in research for a more sustainable future. Many examples and instances from existing research and related research gaps are discussed. It includes applications of composites as fertilizer's coating, advantages and disadvantages of fertilizer coating from composites, applications of bacteria in composite, applications of bacteria in fertilizer industry as well as the common techniques of coating fertilizers with drying process.

This book is inspired by the development of distributed model predictive control of networked systems to save computation and communication sources. The significant new contribution is to show how to design efficient DMPCs that can be coordinated asynchronously with the increasing effectiveness of the event-triggering mechanism and how to improve the event-triggered DMPC for different requirements improvement of control performance, extension to interconnected networked systems, etc. The book is likely to be of interest to the persons who are engaged in researching control theory in academic institutes, the persons who go in for developing control systems in R&D institutes or companies, the control engineers who are engaged in the implementation of control algorithms, and people who are interested in the distributed MPC.

This book conducts a comparative analysis of social and economic changes in the welfare state transformations in China and India, at national and sub-national levels. Discussions are made based on impacts from the social and economic changes in the last century and the fourth industrial revolution on welfare state transformations in China and India, the world's two largest countries in terms of population and density.First-hand empirical work is conducted by a group of scholars from India and China, which draws on inter-disciplinary and cross-cultural academic traditions to deepen social, cultural and legal understanding between the two countries.This book would appeal to undergraduate and graduate students in comparative sociology, political science, law and comparative welfare studies as well as researchers in these fields, as well as researchers in policy think-tanks and research institutes and officials in government and non-governmental organizations.

This book provides a series of methods for flexibly and actively manipulating thermal emission and photoluminance by advanced nanostructures-metamaterials. Nanostructures in subwavelength scales can be designed to precisely modulate light-matter interactions and thereby tailoring both thermal radiations and photon emissions. This book explores approaches for designing different kinds of nanostructures, including multilayers, gratings, nanoridges, and waveguides, to improve the flexibility and functionality of micro/nanodevices. With the help of these subwavelength nanostructures, thermal radiation and photoluminescence have been fully manipulated in near and far fields regarding to the intensity, spectrum, polarization, and direction. The proposed methods together with designed metamaterials open new avenues for designing novel micro-/nanodevices or systems for promising applications like thermal energy harvesting, detecting, sensing, and on-chip quantum-optical networks.

This book presents a compilation of extended versions of selected papers from 20th IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (IEEE ICMLA 2021). It focuses on deep learning networks and their applications in domains such as healthcare, security and threat detection, fault diagnosis and accident analysis, and robotic control in industrial environments. It highlights novel ways of using deep neural networks to solve real-world problems, and also offers insights into deep learning architectures and algorithms, making it an essential reference guide for academic researchers, professionals, software engineers in industry, and innovative product developers. The book is fourth in the series published since 2017.

This book presents the design of modular architecture flight simulators. Safe transportation of people and goods is one of the main directions for the development of the world economy. At the same time, in conditions of constantly increasing intensity of air traffic, the actions of people, responsible for piloting aircraft and air traffic control are of particular importance. In this regard, special attention should be paid to the process of training such specialists. This book describes various flight simulators of an aircraft, as well as to assess the impact of various characteristics of aviation simulators on the quality of skills of aviation specialists. The book discusses the following issues:1) method of setting dynamic parameters;2) methods of correction of simulator parameters, according to expert opinions of operating organizations;3) modules of simulators of operation of various aircraft units and flight conditions;4) prospects for the development of aviation simulators;5) collection and evaluation of information in the process of training on aviation simulators.

This book features selected papers from the International Conference on Communication and Applied Technologies (ICOMTA 2022), jointly organized by the Universidad del Rosario (Bogota, Colombia) and the Universidad Politecnica Salesiana (Cuenca, Ecuador), and as collaborators at the University of Vigo (Galicia, Spain), the University of Santiago de Compostela-Political Research Team (Galicia, Spain), and the Network of Communication Researchers of Ecuador (RICE), during August, 31-September 2, 2022. It covers recent advances in the field of digital communication and processes, digital social media, software, big data, data mining, and intelligent systems.

This book adopts a cross-sectional approach and mainly focuses on one of the core pragmatic constructs, formulaic/pragmatic routines, in addition to components put forward by Roever (2011) and Taguchi (2013). It actively integrates multidimensional pragmatic modalities-including both production (initiating and responding) and reception (recognition, comprehension, and perception), together with learners' cognitive processes-rather than one or two types of task modalities. Focusing more on the Chinese EFL context instead of Japanese or European L1 learners, it also takes advantage of an emerging instrument, the computer-animated elicitation task, for data collection based on authentic oral responses and to avoid "e;coached"e; responses. The socio-cognitive approach, proposed by the famous linguistic expert Prof. Istvan Kecskes, is subsequently applied to conduct an in-depth analysis of the data. Hence, the book introduces a new and fruitful theoretical perspective to the traditional L2 pragmatic research field. 

This book presents select peer-reviewed proceedings of the International Conference on Futuristic Advancements in Materials, Manufacturing and Thermal Sciences (ICFAMMT 2022). The book provides an overview of the latest research in the area of thermal sciences such as computational and numerical methods in fluid flow and heat transfer, advanced energy systems, optimization of thermal systems, technologies for space, and aerospace applications, supersonic combustion, two-phase / multiphase flows. The book will be useful for researchers and professionals working in the field of thermal sciences

The book presents the results of studies on selected problems (such as predictive model of transcription initiation and termination, protein recognition codes, protein structure prediction, feature selection for disease prediction, information retrieval from medical imaging) of Bioinformatics and Information Retrieval. Information Retrieval is one of the contemporary answers to new challenges in threat evaluation of composite systems. This book provides a practical course in computational data analysis suitable for students or researchers with no previous exposure to computer programming. It describes in detail the theoretical basis for statistical analysis techniques used throughout the textbook, from basic principles. It presents walk-throughs of data analysis tasks using different tools to help in taking decisions in healthcare management.

This book gives an overview of electronic waste (e-waste) management and the latest technological aspects of recycling and disposal of obsolete electronic components while minimizing the environmental impact of toxic chemicals and heavy metals from e-waste. As electronics become more accessible worldwide, this effect generates up to 50 tonnes of e-waste that is only set to increase every year. The chapters in this book explore different strategies through recycling practices, green computing, and eco-friendly approach in handling e-waste through government policies to mitigate the growing side effects of e-waste. This book caters to researchers, policymakers, and industrial practitioners who are interested in more sustainable practices in e-waste management.