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This book presents the latest research on global well-posedness including asymptotic behavior of solutions to some non-classical diffusion equations with fading memories, nonlocal terms or delays in several time-dependent spaces. The results collected in this book have been established by the authors and their collaborators over recent years.This book has two distinguishing features. First, while there are many published works on non-classical diffusion equations in Sobolev spaces without time-dependent terms but few results in time-dependent spaces, this book fills this gap. Second, this book provides new results on the existence, regularity and upper semicontinuity of time-dependent global attractors, strong attractors, and pullback attractors in time-dependent spaces, as well as the ideas and methods for dealing with these problems that can be used in other related models.

Chinese traders and explorers first visited the Maldives, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, in the early fourteenth century. The traveler Wang Dayuan “discovered” the island sultanate for the Chinese world, and merchants increasingly dealt in Maldivian goods such as coconuts, cowrie shells, and ambergris. Zheng He's fifteenth-century voyages ventured to the islands, by then a trading hub, and brought their envoys to Beijing. But the Maldives faded from Chinese records by the end of the sixteenth century, after the Ming state suddenly retreated from the Indian Ocean and shifted focus to Southeast Asia.Discovered but Forgotten is a pioneering examination of China's relations with the Maldives and Sino-Indian Ocean interactions, offering new ways to understand Chinese maritime exploration and the global history of the Indian Ocean. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including written records, Chinese and Jesuit maps, and archaeological analysis of shipwrecks—Bin Yang provides a comprehensive account of Chinese links to the Maldives and the Indian Ocean world from ancient times through the late Ming era. He scrutinizes Chinese understandings of the islands, emphasizing both seafaring material culture and textual knowledge production. Yang reconsiders the works of travelers such as Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta in light of Chinese explorations, and he opens a window onto a colorful world of intriguing commodities, port marriages, and voyages across the vast waters of maritime Asia. Transregional and interdisciplinary, Discovered but Forgotten reveals how a remote archipelago shaped the vast Chinese empire.

This book first describes fundamental knowledge on human thermal comfort, adaptive thermal comfort, thermal comfort in sleeping environments, modeling of human thermal comfort, and thermal comfort assessment using human trials. Next, it presents an in-depth review of concept progress and evaluation of various personal comfort system, summarizes important findings and feasible applications, current gaps as well as future research needs. The seven chapters included in this section are task/ambient conditioning systems, personalized ventilation systems, electric fans, personal comfort systems, thermoelectric systems, personal thermal management systems, and wearable personal thermal comfort systems. This book provides valuable guidance for personal comfort system design and further improvement on the personal comfort performance. It will be a valuable resource for academic researchers, engineers in industry, and government regulators in the field of sustainable buildings and built environment.

This book elaborates on the physical principles of polarization remote sensing. It explains the reflective characteristics of surface objects and atmosphere separately, including theory, experiment, instrument and application. In addition, it introduces how polarization remote sensing works in advanced research programs as it can be used in aviation, astronomy, disaster risk prevention and navigation fields. This book serves as a fundamental and comprehensive reference for researchers and students.

Presents the first ever guide for vehicle scanning of the dynamic properties of bridges Written by the leading author on the subject of vehicle scanning method (VSM) for bridges, this book allows engineers to monitor every bridge of concern on a regular and routine basis, for the purpose of maintenance and damage detection. It includes a review of the existing literature on the topic and presents the basic concept of extracting bridge frequencies from a moving test vehicle fitted with vibration sensors. How road surface roughness affects the vehicle scanning method is considered and a finite element simulation is conducted to demonstrate how surface roughness affects the vehicle response. Case studies and experimental results are also included. Vehicle Scanning Method for Bridges covers an enhanced technique for extracting higher bridge frequencies. It examines the effect of road roughness on extraction of bridge frequencies, and looks at a dual vehicle technique for suppressing the effect of road roughness. A filtering technique for eliminating the effect of road roughness is also presented. In addition, the book covers the identification of bridge mode shapes, contact-point response for modal identification of bridges, and damage detection of bridges—all through the use of a moving test vehicle. The first book on vehicle scanning of the dynamic properties of bridges Written by the leading author on the subject Includes a state-of-the-art review of the existing works on the vehicle scanning method (VSM) Presents the basic concepts for extracting bridge frequencies from a moving test vehicle fitted with vibration sensors Includes case studies and experimental results The first book to fully cover scanning the dynamic properties of bridges with a vehicle, Vehicle Scanning Method for Bridges is an excellent resource for researchers and engineers working in civil engineering, including bridge engineering and structural health monitoring.

Originating in the sea, especially in the waters surrounding the low-lying islands of the Maldives, Cypraea moneta (sometimes confused with Cypraea annulus) was transported to various parts of Afro-Eurasia in the prehistoric era, and in many cases, it was gradually transformed into a form of money in various societies for a long span of time. Yang provides a global examination of cowrie money within and beyond Afro-Eurasia from the archaeological period to the early twentieth century. By focusing on cowrie money in Indian, Chinese, Southeast Asian and West African societies and shell money in Pacific and North American societies, Yang synthsises and illustrates the economic and cultural connections, networks and interactions over a longue durée and in a cross-regional context. Analysing locally varied experiences of cowrie money from a global perspective, Yang argued that cowrie money was the first global money that shaped Afro-Eurasian societies both individually and collectively. He proposes a paradigm of the cowrie money world that engages local, regional, transregional and global themes.

This book reviews the current applications of molecular tools in cytopathology and provides a concise handbook for those who provide care in this era of personalized medicine. Specifically, the text provides a comprehensive and concise review of the emerging molecular tests available clinically in different subspecialities of diagnostic pathology. It reviews the current data of molecular testing already applied in cytopathology, discusses some of the biomarkers with potential utility in cytopathology in the near future and reviews the technical challenges in applying and validating molecular tools in liquid-based cytologic materials. Molecular Cytopathology will serve as a valuable resource for cytopathologists, cytotechnologists, pathology trainees, and clinicians with an interest in molecular applications in cytopathology.

Selected, peer reviewed papers from the 2013 International Conference on Applied Science, Engineering and Technology (ICASET 2013), May 19-21, 2013, Qingdao, China

Shape memory polymers (SMPs) are some of the most important and valuable engineering materials developed in the last 25 years. These fascinating materials demonstrate remarkably versatile properties-including capacity for actuation and stimulus responsiveness-that are enabling technologists to develop applications used to explore everything from th

For buildings and factories located near railway or subway lines, the vibrations caused by the moving trains, especially at high speeds, may be annoying to the residents or detrimental to the high-precision production lines. However, there is a lack of simple and efficient tools for dealing with the kind of environmental vibrations, concerning simulation of the radiation of infinite boundaries; irregularities in soils, buildings and wave barriers; and dynamic properties of the moving vehicles. This book is intended to fill such a gap.Compared with the boundary element method (BEM) for solving the half-space problems, the finite/infinite element method (FIEM) presented in this book has the following advantages:• It requires less effort in formulation and computation.• It can be directly incorporated in an existing FEM analysis program.• It is capable of simulating the irregularities in buildings, soils and tunnels.• It can be used to evaluate the efficiency of various wave barriers for vibration reduction.The methodology presented in the book can be adopted to analyze the vibrations caused by road traffic as well.

Founded in 1987, China Merchants Bank (CMB) is a pioneer in the use of technical innovation and IT as a competitive tool in the rapidly evolving Chinese banking sector. With a relatively small branch network when compared to its larger competitors, CMB uses an IT-driven strategy to introduce an'all-in-one'card, which integrates a suite of financial products to drive its personal banking business enabling CMB to be ranked 6th among China's commercial banks and 2nd among the other national commercial banks in terms of total assets as of June 2006. Underlying its excellence in personal banking is CMB's leadership in developing its credit card business. By April 2006, CMB had issued a total of over 5 million credit cards, capturing one-third of the Chinese credit card market. In September 2006, CMB's IPO in Hong Kong fetched about $2.4 billion and, given deregulation in the banking sector in China, CMB's President was presented with new challenges and opportunities concerning how such funds should be productively allocated to ensure CMB's competitiveness.

The commercial operation of the bullet train in 1964 in Japan marked the beginning of a new era for high-speed railways. Because of the huge amount of kinetic energy carried at high speeds, a train may interact significantly with the bridge and even resonate with it under certain circumstances. Equally important is the riding comfort of the train cars, which relates closely to the maneuverability of the train during its passage over the bridge at high speeds.This book is unique in that it is devoted entirely to the interaction between the supporting bridges and moving trains, the so-called vehicle-bridge interaction (VBI). Finite element procedures have been developed to treat interaction problems of various complexities, while the analytical solutions established for some typical problems are helpful for identifying the key parameters involved. Besides, some field tests were conducted to verify the theories established.This book provides an up-to-date coverage of research conducted on various aspects of the VBI problems. Using the series of VBI elements derived, the authors study a number of frontier problems, including the impact response of bridges with elastic bearings, the dynamic response of curved beam to moving centrifugal forces, the stability and derailment of trains moving over bridges shaken by earthquakes, the impact response of two trains crossing on a bridge, the steady-state response of trains moving over elevated bridges, and so on.