Jie Xu

This book systematically studies blockchain adaptability and scalability, combining theoretical analysis with practical implementation. The book provides a comprehensive exploration of blockchain adaptability and scalability solutions through six chapters. Chapter 1 introduces blockchain overviews and current scalability challenges, emphasizing the need for adaptive and scalable blockchains. Chapter 2 systematically reviews consensus protocols, from classical BFT to modern PoW, PoS, and sharding approaches, setting the theoretical foundation for subsequent chapters. Chapter 3 presents AdaptPoW, which enhances PoW blockchain adaptability and scalability through dynamic structure adjustment and efficient transaction processing. Chapter 4 presents AdaptPoS, a PoS-based system with role decoupling and filter mechanism, enabling dynamic throughput adjustment while maintaining security. Chapter 5 describes AdaptShard for sharding-based blockchains, including its transaction allocation and optimistic processing strategy for cross-shard transactions. Chapter 6 concludes with insights and future research directions.

This book is a collection of seven articles published in the past decade by the author. These articles are concerned with various issues including possessor raising, null subject, null object, pied-piping in logical form, focus marker, question formation, and adverbial reflexive. Each article has made a contribution to its topic. More importantly, these seven articles, taken as a whole, also constitute a window through which readers may look at the issues from a formal syntactic perspective and get a sense as how works have been conducted in the framework concerned, how arguments have been constructed, and how justifications have been provided in the field.

This book is a collection of seven articles published in the past decade by the author. These articles are concerned with various issues including possessor raising, null subject, null object, pied-piping in logical form, focus marker, question formation, and adverbial reflexive. Each article has made a contribution to its topic. More importantly, these seven articles, taken as a whole, also constitute a window through which readers may look at the issues from a formal syntactic perspective and get a sense as how works have been conducted in the framework concerned, how arguments have been constructed, and how justifications have been provided in the field.

As business becomes increasingly globalized and China establishes its growing role in the international business environment, developing an understanding of the complex culture is important to anyone acting in the global arena. This book offers readers a thorough and nuanced resource to that end, describing the ever-evolving Chinese way of life circa 2014, based on extensive primary and secondary data. Taking an anthropological approach to achieve a well-rounded representation, the book covers 51 topics that would have been studied if China were a newly discovered civilization. It explores the culture through its examination of the nine core concepts that best represent the Chinese way of life. While the book is a rigorous treatment of the Chinese way of life, it is also filled with personal stories and perspectives from close to 1000 successful Chinese from academia, business, and government. The Chinese Way equips international business students, scholars, and practitioners with a deep understanding of a society that is a major player in global business today and offers a foundation for successful business interactions with Chinese companies, organizations, and people.

As business becomes increasingly globalized and China establishes its growing role in the international business environment, developing an understanding of the complex culture is important to anyone acting in the global arena. This book offers readers a thorough and nuanced resource to that end, describing the ever-evolving Chinese way of life circa 2014, based on extensive primary and secondary data. Taking an anthropological approach to achieve a well-rounded representation, the book covers 51 topics that would have been studied if China were a newly discovered civilization. It explores the culture through its examination of the nine core concepts that best represent the Chinese way of life. While the book is a rigorous treatment of the Chinese way of life, it is also filled with personal stories and perspectives from close to 1000 successful Chinese from academia, business, and government. The Chinese Way equips international business students, scholars, and practitioners with a deep understanding of a society that is a major player in global business today and offers a foundation for successful business interactions with Chinese companies, organizations, and people.

Database systems have been driving dynamic web sites since the early 90s; nowadays, even seemingly static web sites employ a database back-end for personalization and advertising purposes. In order to keep up with the high demand fuelled by the rapid growth of the Internet, a number of caching and materialization techniques have been proposed for web databases over the years. The main goal of these techniques is to improve performance, scalability, and manageability of database-driven dynamic web sites, in a way that the quality of data is not compromised. Although caching and materialization are well understood concepts in the traditional database and networking/operating systems literature, the Web and web databases bring forth unique characteristics that warrant new techniques and approaches. In this survey, the authors adopt a data management point of view to describe the system architectures of web databases, and analyze the research issues related to caching and materialization in such architectures. They also present the state of the art in caching and materialization for web databases and organize current approaches according to the fundamental questions, namely how to store, how to use, and how to maintain cached/materialized web data. Finally, they associate work in caching and materialization for web databases to similar techniques in other related areas, such as data warehousing, distributed systems, and distributed databases.