Leverage Of The Weak

Comparing Taiwan and South Korea strategically, Hwa-Jen Liu seeks an answer to a deceptively simple question: Why do social movements appear at different times in a nation’s development? Despite their apparent resemblance—a colonial heritage, authoritarian rule, rapid industrialization, and structural similarities—Taiwan and South Korea were opposites in their experiences with two key social movements. South Korea followed a conventional capitalist route: labor movements challenged the system long before environmental movements did. In Taiwan, pro-environment struggles gained strength before labor activism. Liu argues that part of the explanation lies in an analysis of how movements advance their causes by utilizing different types of power. Whereas labor movements have the power of economic leverage, environmental movements depend on the power of ideology. Therefore, examining material factors versus ideational factors is crucial to understanding the successes (or failures) of social movements. Leverage of the Weak is a significant contribution to the literature on social movements, to the study of East Asian political economies, and to the progress of the comparative-historical method. It enhances knowledge of movement emergence, investigates the possibilities and obstacles involved in forging labor–environment alliances, and offers the first systematic, multilayered comparisons across movements and nations in East Asia.

Strategies for Growth in SMEs explores for the first time the role of information and information systems (IS) concepts in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Most IS research focuses on large firms, yet the majority of firms in most economies are SMEs. The book considers the applicability of IS theory and practice to SMEs and develops new theories that are relevant to these firms.Composed of 6 sections, it covers, amongst other things; the nature of SMEs, the background to IS, and SMEs' use of IS, issues of IS strategy and planning in SMEs, the way that firms can transform through use of IS, evaluation, IS flexibility, business process re-engineering, resource-based strategy and knowledge management, the appropriateness of existing theories and the development of new models to address SME-specific issues. The final section of the book reviews the learning in the previous chapters and poses future agendas for research.Written by two of the leading figures in the field, this book will be essential reading for researchers in IS and SMEs, students on entrepreneurship or IS courses, and others that focus on SMEs. * A unique text relating IS theory to SMEs* Benefit from the authors' years of experience in the field* Familiarise yourself with this growth area for research and courses

This expansive, four-volume ready-reference work offers critical coverage of contemporary issues that impact people of color in the United States, ranging from education and employment to health and wellness and immigration. People of Color in the United States: Contemporary Issues in Education, Work, Communities, Health, and Immigration examines a wide range of issues that affect people of color in America today, covering education, employment, health, and immigration. Edited by experts in the field, this set supplies current information that meets a variety of course standards in four volumes. Volume 1 covers education grades K–12 and higher education; volume 2 addresses employment, housing, family, and community; volume 3 examines health and wellness; and volume 4 covers immigration. The content will enable students to better understand the experiences of racial and ethnic minorities as well as current social issues and policy. The content is written to be accessible to a wide range of readers and to provide ready-reference content for courses in history, sociology, psychology, geography, and economics, as well as curricula that address immigration, urbanization and industrialization, and contemporary American society.

Water Security in the Middle East argues that, while conflicts over transboundary water systems in the Middle East do occur, they tend not to be violent nor are they the primary cause of a war in this region. The contributors in this collection of essays place water disputes in larger political, historical and scientific contexts and discuss how the humanities and social sciences contribute towards this understanding. The authors contend that international sharing of scientific and technological advances can significantly increase access to water and improve water quality. While scientific advances can and should increase adaptability to changing environmental conditions, especially climate change, national institutional reform and the strengthening of joint commissions are vital. The contributors indicate ways in which cooperation can move from simple coordination to sophisticated, adaptive and equitable modes of water management.

Now in its ninth edition, Air Transportation: A Global Management Perspective by John Wensveen is a well-proven, accessible textbook that offers a comprehensive introduction to the theory and practice of air transport management. In addition to explaining the fundamentals, the book transports the reader to the leading edge of the discipline, using past and present trends to forecast future challenges and opportunities the industry may face, encouraging the reader to think deeply about the decisions a manager implements. The word "Global" has been added to the subtitle for this edition, reflecting an increased emphasis on worldwide operations, including North America, Latin America/Caribbean, Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa. The ninth edition focuses on the "Age of Acceleration," addressing trends related to emerging technologies, such as autonomy, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality, 3-D printing, data analytics, blockchain, cybersecurity, etc. New material includes extra information on airport management and operations, air carrier business models, aviation risk, safety and security, and how changing political landscapes impact the aviation industry. Enhanced content is supported by the addition of new chapters and online supplemental resources, including PowerPoint presentations, chapter quizzes, exam questions, and links to online resources. This wide-ranging textbook is appropriate for nearly all aviation programs that feature business and management. Its student-friendly structure and style make it highly suitable for modular courses and distance-learning programs, or for self-directed study and continuing personal professional development.

This text focuses on the practical aspects of crystal structure analysis, and provides the necessary conceptual framework for understanding and applying the technique. By choosing an approach that does not put too much emphasis on the mathematics involved, the book gives practical advice on topics such as growing crystals, solving and refining structures, and understanding and using the results. The technique described is a core experimental method in modern structural chemistry, and plays an ever more important role in the careers of graduate students, postdoctoral and academic staff in chemistry, and final-year undergraduates. Much of the material of the first edition has been significantly updated and expanded, and some new topics have been added. The approach to several of the topics has changed, reflecting the book's new authorship, and recent developments in the subject.

Most data scientists and engineers today rely on quality labeled data to train machine learning models. But building a training set manually is time-consuming and expensive, leaving many companies with unfinished ML projects. There's a more practical approach. In this book, Wee Hyong Tok, Amit Bahree, and Senja Filipi show you how to create products using weakly supervised learning models. You'll learn how to build natural language processing and computer vision projects using weakly labeled datasets from Snorkel, a spin-off from the Stanford AI Lab. Because so many companies have pursued ML projects that never go beyond their labs, this book also provides a guide on how to ship the deep learning models you build. Get up to speed on the field of weak supervision, including ways to use it as part of the data science process Use Snorkel AI for weak supervision and data programming Get code examples for using Snorkel to label text and image datasets Use a weakly labeled dataset for text and image classification Learn practical considerations for using Snorkel with large datasets and using Spark clusters to scale labeling

Unstructured text, as one of the most important data forms, plays a crucial role in data-driven decision making in domains ranging from social networking and information retrieval to scientific research and healthcare informatics. In many emerging applications, people's information need from text data is becoming multidimensional—they demand useful insights along multiple aspects from a text corpus. However, acquiring such multidimensional knowledge from massive text data remains a challenging task. This book presents data mining techniques that turn unstructured text data into multidimensional knowledge. We investigate two core questions. (1) How does one identify task-relevant text data with declarative queries in multiple dimensions? (2) How does one distill knowledge from text data in a multidimensional space? To address the above questions, we develop a text cube framework. First, we develop a cube construction module that organizes unstructured data into a cube structure, by discovering latent multidimensional and multi-granular structure from the unstructured text corpus and allocating documents into the structure. Second, we develop a cube exploitation module that models multiple dimensions in the cube space, thereby distilling from user-selected data multidimensional knowledge. Together, these two modules constitute an integrated pipeline: leveraging the cube structure, users can perform multidimensional, multigranular data selection with declarative queries; and with cube exploitation algorithms, users can extract multidimensional patterns from the selected data for decision making. The proposed framework has two distinctive advantages when turning text data into multidimensional knowledge: flexibility and label-efficiency. First, it enables acquiring multidimensional knowledge flexibly, as the cube structure allows users to easily identify task-relevant data along multiple dimensions at varied granularities and further distill multidimensional knowledge. Second, the algorithms for cube construction and exploitation require little supervision; this makes the framework appealing for many applications where labeled data are expensive to obtain.