A selection of papers from the millennium conference of the British Association of Applied Linguistics. The boundaries of the title have been widely interpreted, ranging from work on the linguistic repercussions of individual and group identity boundaries, to work dealing with ways of crossing national and cultural boundaries through language learning.
Inverse problems have a long history in acoustics, optics, electromagnetics and geophysics, but only recently have the signals provided by ocean acoustic sensors become numerous and sophisticated enough to allow for realistic identification of the ocean parameters. Acoustic signals propagating for long distances in the water column and reflections of underwater sound from the ocean boundaries provide novel problems of interpretation and inversion. The chapters in this volume discuss some of the contemporary aspects of these problems. They provide recent and useful results for bottom recognition, inverse scattering in acoustic wave guides, and ocean acoustic tomography, as well as a discussion of some of the new algorithms, such as those related to matched-field processing, that have recently been used for inverting experimental data. Each chapter is by a noted expert in the field and represents the state of the art. The chapters have all been edited to provide a uniform format and level of presentation.
Japan joined the League of Nations in 1920 as a charter member and one of four permanent members of the League Council. Until conflict arose between Japan and the organization over the 1931 Manchurian Incident, the League was a centerpiece of Japan’s policy to maintain accommodation with the Western powers. The picture of Japan as a positive contributor to international comity, however, is not the conventional view of the country in the early and mid-twentieth century. Rather, this period is usually depicted in Japan and abroad as a history of incremental imperialism and intensifying militarism, culminating in war in China and the Pacific. Even the empire’s interface with the League of Nations is typically addressed only at nodes of confrontation: the 1919 debates over racial equality as the Covenant was drafted and the 1931-1933 League challenge to Japan’s seizure of northeast China. This volume fills in the space before, between, and after these nodes and gives the League relationship the legitimate place it deserves in Japanese international history of the 1920s and 1930s. It also argues that the Japanese cooperative international stance in the decades since the Pacific War bears noteworthy continuity with the mainstream international accommodatationism of the League years. Thomas Burkman sheds new light on the meaning and content of internationalism in an era typically seen as a showcase for diplomatic autonomy and isolation. Well into the 1930s, the vestiges of international accommodationism among diplomats and intellectuals are clearly evident. The League project ushered those it affected into world citizenship and inspired them to build bridges across boundaries and cultures.Burkman’s cogent analysis of Japan’s international role is enhanced and enlivened by his descriptions of the personalities and initiatives of Makino Nobuaki, Ishii Kikujir , Nitobe Inaz , Matsuoka Y suke, and others in their Geneva roles.
In a world of chaotic alignments, traditional logic with its strict boundaries of truth and falsity has not imbued itself with the capability of reflecting the reality. Despite various attempts to reorient logic, there has remained an essential need for an alternative system that could infuse into itself a representation of the real world. Out of this need arose the system of Neutrosophy (the philosophy of neutralities, introduced by FLORENTIN SMARANDACHE), and its connected logic Neutrosophic Logic, which is a further generalization of the theory of Fuzzy Logic. In this book we study the concepts of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) and their Neutrosophic analogue, the Neutrosophic Cognitive Maps (NCMs). Fuzzy Cognitive Maps are fuzzy structures that strongly resemble neural networks, and they have powerful and far-reaching consequences as a mathematical tool for modeling complex systems. Neutrosophic Cognitive Maps are generalizations of FCMs, and their unique feature is the ability to handle indeterminacy in relations between two concepts thereby bringing greater sensitivity into the results. Some of the varied applications of FCMs and NCMs which has been explained by us, in this book, include: modeling of supervisory systems; design of hybrid models for complex systems; mobile robots and in intimate technology such as office plants; analysis of business performance assessment; formalism debate and legal rules; creating metabolic and regulatory network models; traffic and transportation problems; medical diagnostics; simulation of strategic planning process in intelligent systems; specific language impairment; web-mining inference application; child labor problem; industrial relations: between employer and employee, maximizing production and profit; decision support in intelligent intrusion detection system; hyper-knowledge representation in strategy formation; female infanticide; depression in terminally ill patients and finally, in the theory of community mobilization and women empowerment relative to the AIDS epidemic.
Comic book artists are now developing cutting-edge, extreme comic book characters that go beyond the traditional heroes and villains. The heroes are grittier. The women are sexier. The pages are designed for maximum impact. Heroes have been turned into highly cool antiheroes, such as the famous characters Spawn and War Blade. Cutting-edge comics venture beyond the traditional boundaries to extreme anatomy, extreme costuming, extreme special effects, and extreme methods of storytelling.
