This book revisits the discourse theories of Habermas and Foucault in a Chinese context. After arguing that Habermas’s Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy is too normative and idealistic, it presents Foucault’s Discourse Theory of Power Relations to illustrate the tensions between different Western discourse theories. The book then draws on the normative concept of Confucian Rationality from traditional Chinese cultural sources in order to investigate how adaptable these two discourse theories are to the Chinese society, and to balance the tension between them. Presenting these three dimensions of discourse theory, as well as the relations between them, it also uses empirical descriptions of certain facts of political-legal discussion both in traditional China and in the country’s new media age to explain, supplement and question this theoretic framework. The book asserts that, because of the diverse modes of thinking in specific cultures, there might be different normative paradigms of discorse and different political-legal discussion modes across corresponding cultural contexts. Normative discourse theories provide guidance for the practices of deliberative democracy and legal discussions, which can in turn verify, supplement, improve and challenge the normative discourse theories. In addition to demonstrating the multiple dimensions of discourse theories, this research also promotes an approach to the Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy that combines elements of both Chinese and modern society.

Using a broad set of macroeconomic country characteristics to supplement a new and comprehensive micro-level dataset for 140 countries, we identify structural factors, policies, and individual characteristics that are associated with financial inclusion—in general, and for women in particular. We find that structural country characteristics, such as resource-richness and level of development, and policies, such as stronger institutions, and financial development are significantly related to financial inclusion. We find a robust negative relationship between being female and financial inclusion as in previous studies, and our analysis points to legal discrimination, lack of protection from harassment, including at the work place, and more diffuse gender norms as possible explanatory factors.

Disorienting Politics mines 21st-century media artifacts—including films like The Martian and TV/streaming media shows such as Firefly and House of Cards—to make visible the economic, cultural, political, and ecological entanglements of China and the United States. Describing these transpacific entanglements as “Chimerica”—coined by economic historians to reference the symbiosis of China and America—Yang examines how Chimerican media, originating in the US but traversing national boundaries in their production, circulation, and consumption, co-create the figure of rising China and extend a political imagination beyond the conventional ground of the nation. Examining how Chimerican media are shaped by and perpetuate uneven power relations, Disorienting Politics argues that the pervasive tendency among wide-ranging cultural producers to depict the Chinese state as a racialized Other in American media life diminishes the possibility of engaging transpacific entanglements as a basis for envisioning new political horizons. Such othering of China not only results in overt racism against people of Asian descent, Yang argues, but also impacts the wellbeing of people of color more generally. This interdisciplinary book demonstrates the ways in which race is embedded in geopolitics even when the subject of discussion is not the people, but the (Chinese) state. Bridging media and cultural studies, Asian and Asian American studies, geography, and globalization studies, Disorienting Politics calls for a relational politics that acknowledges the multifarious interconnectivity between people, places, media, and environment.

In the field of image processing, many applications require real-time execution, particularly those in the domains of medicine, robotics and transmission, to name but a few. Recent technological developments have allowed for the integration of more complex algorithms with large data volume into embedded systems, in turn producing a series of new sophisticated electronic architectures at affordable prices. This book performs an in-depth survey on this topic. It is primarily written for those who are familiar with the basics of image processing and want to implement the target processing design using different electronic platforms for computing acceleration. The authors present techniques and approaches, step by step, through illustrative examples. This book is also suitable for electronics/embedded systems engineers who want to consider image processing applications as sufficient imaging algorithm details are given to facilitate their understanding.

This book provides engineers with a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art in reflectarray antenna research and development. The authors describe, in detail, design procedures for a wide range of applications, including broadband, multi-band, multi-beam, contour-beam, beam-scanning, and conformal reflectarray antennas. They provide sufficient coverage of basic reflectarray theory to fully understand reflectarray antenna design and analysis such that the readers can pursue reflectarray research on their own. Throughout the book numerous illustrative design examples including numerical and experimental results are provided. Featuring in-depth theoretical analysis along with practical design examples, em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"Reflectarray Antennas is an excellent text/reference for engineering graduate students, researchers, and engineers in the field of antennas. It belongs on the bookshelves of university libraries, research institutes, and industrial labs and research facilities.

This overview and analysis of current arbitration law and practice in mainland China offers critical analysis of significant Chinese arbitration law materials and key cases decided by the Supreme People's Court of the People's Republic of China (PRC). It also provides the full texts of around two hundred decisions of the Supreme People's Court of the PRC dating from 1990 to 2013, with enclosures of lower People's Courts' decisions presented in a systematic fashion. The analysis not only highlights the importance of the materials, judicial interpretations and key cases, but also enables readers to read mainland Chinese statutes, judiciary interpretations and cases independently and confidently.

We investigate the link between gender inequality in financial inclusion and income inequality, with three contributions to the recent literature. First, using a micro-dataset covering 146,000 individuals in over 140 countries, we construct novel, synthetic indices of the intensity of financial inclusion at the individual and country level. Second, we derive the distribution of individual financial access “scores” across countries to document a “Kuznets”-curve in financial inclusion. Third, cross-country regressions confirm that our measure of inequality in financial access is significantly related to income inequality, above and beyond other factors previously highlighted in the literature.

This book introduces readers to the principles and practical applications of intelligent robot system with robot operating system (ROS), pursuing a task-oriented and hands-on approach. Taking the conception, design, implementation, and operation of robot application systems as a typical project, and through “learning-by-doing, practicing-while-learning” approach, it familiarizes readers with ROS-based intelligent robot system design and development step by step. The topics covered include ROS principles, mobile robot control, Lidar, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), navigation, manipulator control, image recognition, vision calibration, object grasping, vision SALM, etc., with typical practical application tasks throughout the book, which are essential to mastering development methods for intelligent robot system. Easy to follow and rich in content, the book can be used at colleges and universities as learning material and a teaching reference book for “intelligent robot,” “autonomous intelligent system,” “robotics principles,” and “robot system application development with ROS” in connection with automation, robotics engineering, artificial intelligence (AI), mechatronics, and other related majors. The book can assist in mastering the development and design of robot systems and provide the necessary theoretical and practical references to cultivate robot system development capabilities and can be used as teaching material for engineering training and competitions, or for reference, self-study, and training by engineering and technical personnel, teachers, and anyone who wants to engage in intelligent robot system development and design.

This paper assesses the extent of economic and financial integration among the East African Community (EAC) along a number of dimensions and, where possible, whether integration has increased in the wake of the major regional integration policy milestones.

A growing body of empirical evidence suggests that inequality—income or gender related—can impede economic growth. Using dynamic panel regressions and new time series data, this paper finds that both income and gender inequalities, including from legal gender-based restrictions, are jointly negatively associated with per capita GDP growth. Examining the relationship for countries at different stages of development, we find that this effect prevails mainly in lower income countries. In particular, per capita income growth in sub-Saharan Africa could be higher by as much as 0.9 percentage points on average if inequality was reduced to the levels observed in the fastgrowing emerging Asian countries. High levels of income inequality in sub-Saharan Africa appear partly driven by structural features. However, the paper’s findings show that policies that influence the opportunities of low-income households and women to participate in economic activities also matter and, therefore, if well-designed and targeted, could play a role in alleviating inequalities.