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Ethnic Minorities in Socialist China: Development, Migration, Culture, and Identity, edited by Dr. Han Xiaorong and translated into English by Zeng Qiang, presents nine articles written by Chinese scholars about the transformation of China's ethnic minority groups in the socialist era. Focusing on seven of the 55 ethnic minorities in China, the nine articles cover four major themes: development, migration, culture and identity. These case studies are based on both fieldwork and written sources, and most authors make connections between their case studies and relevant social scientific theories. Peoples and places studied include the autonomous regions of Tibet and Inner Mongolia; the Hanni, Dai, and Bai peoples of Yunnan Province; Miao farmers of Yangjiang in Guangdong; and the Yi people of the Pearl River Delta region. These studies, which originally appeared in Open Times (开放时代), broadly reflect the concerns, interests and perspectives of the Chinese scholars involved in the study of China's ethnic minorities.

Extremal Optimization: Fundamentals, Algorithms, and Applications introduces state-of-the-art extremal optimization (EO) and modified EO (MEO) solutions from fundamentals, methodologies, and algorithms to applications based on numerous classic publications and the authors'recent original research results. It promotes the movement of EO from academic study to practical applications. The book covers four aspects, beginning with a general review of real-world optimization problems and popular solutions with a focus on computational complexity, such as'NP-hard'and the'phase transitions'occurring on the search landscape. Next, it introduces computational extremal dynamics and its applications in EO from principles, mechanisms, and algorithms to the experiments on some benchmark problems such as TSP, spin glass, Max-SAT (maximum satisfiability), and graph partition. It then presents studies on the fundamental features of search dynamics and mechanisms in EO with a focus on self-organized optimization, evolutionary probability distribution, and structure features (e.g., backbones), which are based on the authors'recent research results. Finally, it discusses applications of EO and MEO in multiobjective optimization, systems modeling, intelligent control, and production scheduling. The authors present the advanced features of EO in solving NP-hard problems through problem formulation, algorithms, and simulation studies on popular benchmarks and industrial applications. They also focus on the development of MEO and its applications. This book can be used as a reference for graduate students, research developers, and practical engineers who work on developing optimization solutions for those complex systems with hardness that cannot be solved with mathematical optimization or other computational intelligence, such as evolutionary computations.