Daiyu was named after a ghost… Little Daiyu is twelve when her parents disappear. So she runs, disguising herself as a boy, to sweep the steps of Master Wang\"s calligraphy school in Zhifu. But this is just the beginning of a journey that sends her across an ocean to San Francisco and the lawless American west. Kidnapped. Trafficked. Betrayed....

Daiyu never wanted to be like the tragic heroine for whom she was named, revered for her beauty and cursed with heartbreak. But when she is kidnapped and smuggled across an ocean from China to America, Daiyu must relinquish the home and future she imagined for herself....

Structural health monitoring (SHM) can be characterized as the integration of sensing and intelligence to enable the potential damage to be monitored, analyzed, localized, and predicted in real time and in a nondestructive manner....

Over the past two decades, extensive research has been conducted on the application of fiber-optic sensors (FOSs) in structural health monitoring (SHM). In Volume 1 of this book a long-gauge sensing technique for incorporating a proposed areawise sensing, developed by the authors, was introduced....

Structural health monitoring (SHM) can be characterized as the integration of sensing and intelligence to enable the potential damage to be monitored, analyzed, localized, and predicted in real time and in a nondestructive manner....

Over the past two decades, extensive research has been conducted on the application of fiber-optic sensors (FOSs) in structural health monitoring (SHM). In Volume 1 of this book a long-gauge sensing technique for incorporating a proposed areawise sensing, developed by the authors, was introduced....

This book examines the personal and professional lives of secondary head teachers in Chuxiong, Yunan Province, in China. The approach used to research this topic is based on theoretical and methodological ideas drawn from Gronn and Day, Bakioglu, and Ribbins and his various collaborators....

The empirical study of soft power presents a challenge for social scientists. Conventional wisdom asserts that China’s soft power is growing alongside its hard power, but few scholars have been able to demonstrate this phenomenon empirically....

Heat stress causes major losses to cotton seed and lint yield. Introduction of heat stress tolerance to Arkansas cotton varieties is highly desirable. However, very little is known about the molecular basis of heat stress tolerance in cotton....

This study explores the relationship between students' missing responses on a large-scale assessment and their cognitive skill profiles and characteristics....

This work reports a study to investigate and compare the coverage of Google Scholar, Citeseer in comparison with a traditional abstracting and indexing service (LISA) in library and information science....

In recent years large-scale global optimization (GO) problems have drawn considerable attention. These problems have many applications, in particular in data mining, computational biology, computational chemistry, and medicine....

The application of polymeric materials with uniformly controlled nanostructures templated with hexagonal lyotropic liquid crystals (LLCs) has potential applications in separation technology....

The AEC industry has long been in need of effective modes of information exchange and knowledge sharing, but their practice in the industry is still far from satisfactory. Fundamentally, the industry lacks a culture of information and knowledge sharing....