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Creative Belonging
No full textChina is a multicultural country home to fifty-five ethnic minority groups, yet due to linguistic and cultural barriers many of these groups remain understudied or unknown in the West. The Qiang, one of modern China’s officially recognized ethnic minorities, is also China’s longest-standing ethnoracial identity marker that has existed since the earliest recorded history of China. Creative Belonging investigates the formation and evolution of the Qiang as a people, a concept, and a cultural history in China. It further examines how the contemporary Qiang ethnic group interacts strategically with mainstream Chinese society, challenging the historically entrenched hierarchies between the sociocultural “centers” of China and its ethnic “peripheries.” This book is based on years of ethnographic and textual-archival research in the Himalayan regions of southwest China, where the contemporary Qiang group resides. Drawing on a diverse range of official and local political discourses and previously unstudied literary, historiographical, and cinematic works, Yanshuo Zhang illuminates how the Qiang have carved out spaces of “creative belonging” within the parameters of multiculturalism in contemporary China. Rooted in ethnographic and textual-archival research, the book presents original materials produced by Qiang indigenous writers, scholars, artists, grassroots village cultural activists, and entrepreneurs at both the local and the global levels. Creative Belonging invites readers to rethink ethnicity and national belonging in China by centering minority groups’ efforts to expand the meanings and implications of “Chinese culture.
Slow Electronics with Reservoir Computing
No full textThis open access book discusses “slow electronics”, the study of devices processing signals with low frequencies. Computers have the remarkable ability to process data at high speeds, but they encounter difficulties when handling signals with low frequencies of less than ~100Hz. They unexpectedly require a substantial amount of energy. This poses a challenge for such as biomedical wearables and environmental monitors that need real-time processing of slow signals, especially in energy-limited 'edge’ environments with small batteries. One possible solution to this issue is event-driven processing, which entails the use of non-volatile memory to read/write data and parameters every time a slow (sporadic) signal is detected. However, this approach is highly energy-consuming and unsuitable for the edge environments. To address this challenge, the authors propose “slow electronics” by developing electronic devices and systems that can process low-frequency signals more efficiently. The biological brain is an excellent example of the slow electronics, as it processes low-frequency signals in real time with exceptional energy efficiency. The authors have employed reservoir computing with a spiking neural network (SNN) to simulate the learning and inference of the brain. The integration of slow electronics with SNN reservoir computing allows for real-time data processing in edge environments without an internet connection. This will reveal the determinism or periodicity behind unconscious behaviours and habits that have been difficult to explore due to privacy barriers thus far. Moreover, it may provide a more profound understanding of a craftsman's skills, which they may not even be aware of. This book emphasises the most recent concepts and technological developments in slow electronics. Discussion on the captivating subject of slow electronics are given by delving into the complexities of reservoir calculation, analogue CMOS circuits, artificial neuromorphic devices, and numerical simulation with extended time constants, paving the way for more people-friendly devices in the future
Quantum Computing from Hopfield Nets
No full textThis open access book is meant as a textbook for Computer Science students who are looking for a gentle introduction to the world of quantum computing. More specifically, it is written for readers who have basic knowledge of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) and have a certain familiarity with search algorithms, optimization techniques, and neural networks. This is not because the authors are interested in Quantum AI or Quantum ML, but because they start from the basic premise that there exists a conceptual bridge between certain AI/ML models and certain quantum computing models. The purpose of this book is therefore 1) to revisit these AI/ML models and their applications, and 2) to build on this familiar foundation to segue into the study of quantum computing and its possible use cases. The presentation is technical but pragmatic and practice oriented. The authors cover theory to the necessary extent but largely proceed in an example-driven manner. Most of the examples are concerned with combinatorial optimization and consider problems that can be cast as quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problems. Numerous python/numpy/scipy codes support the mathematical discussion and demonstrate how to put theory into practice, accompanied by exercises for each chapter. Parts of the material were adopted from long running lectures on pattern recognition, on the foundations of quantum computing, and on quantum computing algorithms, which are taught by the authors in the Computer Science master’s program at the University of Bonn
Transport Transitions: Advancing Sustainable and Inclusive Mobility
No full textThis is an open access book. It gathers the proceedings of the 10th edition of Transport Research Arena (TRA 2024), held on 15-18 April, 2024, in Dublin, Ireland. Contributions cover a wide range of research findings, methodological aspects, technologies and policy issues that are currently reshaping the transport and mobility system in different parts of Europe. Bridging between academic research, industrial developments, and regulations, this book offers a comprehensive review of the state-of-the art in transportation, with a special emphasis on topics concerning digital transition in transport, and inclusive and sustainable mobility alike. This is the sixth volume of a 6-volume set
Process Monitoring, Fault Diagnosis, and Tolerant Control for Complex Industrial Systems
No full textThis open access book details fault diagnosis, prognosis, and tolerant control for complex industrial systems. It is also dedicated to Professor Steven X. Ding for his retirement. This book proposes data-driven quality-related fault diagnosis schemes based on space projection for linear/nonlinear systems. It also introduces credible and efficient fault prognosis techniques for complex industrial systems. It combines fault detection and re-configuration toward the design of fault-tolerant control methods. It will be a useful reference for students and researchers working on fault diagnosis
Planetarity from Below
No full textWhat can migrant ecologies teach us about collective planetary futures? In Planetarity from Below, Emily Yu Zong argues that modern freedom has framed migration in anthropocentric terms, neglecting that migration is also an ecological process. Analyzing a diverse body of migration literature across Australia, North America, and China, she explores how these works unlearn modern capitalist systems of property, individualism, and freedom while imagining collaborative and ecological survival from the margins. Through short stories, memoirs, speculative fiction, poetry, and documentary films, Zong unpacks a decolonial migrant ecopoetics, revealing a pluralist method of worldmaking—from Australia’s oceanic refugee camps, Indigenous Canadian land, and Chinese migrant worker sweatshops, to climate futures. These migrant ecologies imagine freedom “from below” not simply as individual survival or assimilation but as an unruly and contingent process of shared creativity with animals, waters, minerals, waste, and technology. Shifting environmental ethics from individual morality to a political ecology of sustaining life in precarity, Zong introduces decolonial knowledges, imaginations, and praxes that help us expand justice and freedom beyond the human, asking how borderland subjectivities can open new possibilities for multispecies flourishing
Old English Biblical Prose
No full textProvides the first in-depth study of the earliest attempts to make the sacred words of the Bible available to English readers, clerical and lay, in prose writing. "This is a hugely valuable study - deeply informative about an important tradition of biblical translation from the early medieval period, bringing together material that has previously been considered in isolation, and drawing out a big-picture account of the ebb and flow of biblical translations into the vernacular. Will be a useful point of reference for any interested reader and includes surprises and delights for even the most specialist readers." Professor Jonathan Wilcox, University of Iowa The story of the English Bible begins not with the King James Version or Wycliffe but in the Old English period. Between the ninth and eleventh centuries, a remarkably diverse corpus of biblical translations, paraphrases, adaptations and summaries were produced in Old English. Yet while Old English biblical verse has been extensively studied, the much larger corpus of vernacular biblical prose remains neglected by historians of the Bible and medievalists. This book provides the first in-depth study of the genre. Dispelling the notion that access to the Bible was restricted to the Latinate clergy in the early medieval period, it demonstrates how Old English biblical prose made key elements of Scripture available and meaningful to laypeople. Through case studies of the Prose Psalms, Mosaic Prologue to the Domboc, Wessex Gospels, Heptateuch and Treatise on the Old and New Testaments, as well as many other works, it highlights the crucial contributions of well-known figures such as King Alfred and Ælfric of Eynsham while also showcasing the work of anonymous authors who translated, adapted and interpreted the Bible, sometimes in creative and surprising ways. Cumulatively, these case studies show how vernacular biblical prose played a central role in the emergence of English national identity before the Norman Conquest. This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND
