Meet Detective Beans, the best kitten detective in town, equipped with his tie, brown trench coat, and--GASP. It's gone! His detective hat is missing! Follow along to discover the charming, whimsical, and mysterious world of Detective Beans.

Meet Detective Beans (just Beans for short), a young cat sleuth dedicated to doing whatever it takes to solve the case. After a night of mystery movies with his best friend, Biscuit, Detective Beans wakes up to find his detective hat is missing. There's only one thing to do: hit the streets of Cat Town and find that missing hat! Cat Town is full of suspects, from the neighborhood bird to a magician in the park, and each twist and turn in this journey leads to an interesting new encounter -- and to solving a much bigger case than Beans could have imagined.

Brilliantly written and illustrated by New Zealand comic artist Li Chen, creator of the internationally popular ExtraOrdinary Comics, Detective Beans and the Case of the Missing Hat is filled with charming cat capers, warm-hearted humor, and detective stories all in the form of a graphic novel that will entertain comics fans and middle grade readers everywhere.

Meet Detective Beans, the best kitten detective in town, equipped with his tie, brown trench coat, and--GASP. It's gone! His detective hat is missing! Follow along to discover the charming, whimsical, and mysterious world of Detective Beans.

Meet Detective Beans (just Beans for short), a young cat sleuth dedicated to doing whatever it takes to solve the case. After a night of mystery movies with his best friend, Biscuit, Detective Beans wakes up to find his detective hat is missing. There's only one thing to do: hit the streets of Cat Town and find that missing hat! Cat Town is full of suspects, from the neighborhood bird to a magician in the park, and each twist and turn in this journey leads to an interesting new encounter -- and to solving a much bigger case than Beans could have imagined.

Brilliantly written and illustrated by New Zealand comic artist Li Chen, creator of the internationally popular ExtraOrdinary Comics, Detective Beans and the Case of the Missing Hat is filled with charming cat capers, warm-hearted humor, and detective stories all in the form of a graphic novel that will entertain comics fans and middle grade readers everywhere.

Snazzy, appealing artwork, with firm lines, stylish focus, and an atmosphere reminiscent of hardboiled, 1930s detective tales, enhances this absurdly funny and clever graphic novel, which features vivid characters, snappy dialogue, and nonstop action . . . Catnip to feline lovers and mystery fans alike. - Kirkus

[A] hardboiled-detective spoof full of sight gags and witty banter. - Booklist (starred review)

For readers who love their mysteries with a side of cute, this title is a must-read. - School Library Journal

The world's cutest cat detective is back on the case in this indie bestselling series. Li Chen's newest Detective Beans adventures are a must-read for anyone who loves mystery stories, cute animals, and hilarious original storytelling.

Detective Beans is back on the case! In this series of mysteries and adventures, the world's cutest cat detective comes to the aid of her fellow villagers, searching for a cooky thief (with surprising results!), aiding a deceptive duck in the recovery of lost goods, and even doing his best to help a confused bear prove that the moon is made of cheese. In addition to these small capers, Adventures in Cat Town features behind-the-scenes footage of the crime-solving documentary directed by Beans best friend, Biscuits, as well as comics, stories, and even horoscopes illustrated by Beans himself. Called a must-read by School Library Journal and absurdly funny and clever by Kirkus, it's no mystery why this new series is such a hit!

The world's cutest cat detective is back on the case in this indie bestselling series. Li Chen's newest Detective Beans adventures are a must-read for anyone who loves mystery stories, cute animals, and hilarious original storytelling.

Detective Beans is back on the case! In this series of mysteries and adventures, the world's cutest cat detective comes to the aid of her fellow villagers, searching for a cooky thief (with surprising results!), aiding a deceptive duck in the recovery of lost goods, and even doing his best to help a confused bear prove that the moon is made of cheese. In addition to these small capers, Adventures in Cat Town features behind-the-scenes footage of the crime-solving documentary directed by Beans best friend, Biscuits, as well as comics, stories, and even horoscopes illustrated by Beans himself. Called a must-read by School Library Journal and absurdly funny and clever by Kirkus, it's no mystery why this new series is such a hit!

How did American schoolchildren, French philosophers, Russian Sinologists, Dutch merchants, and British lawyers imagine China and Chinese law? What happened when agents of presumably dominant Western empires had to endure the humiliations and anxieties of maintaining a profitable but precarious relationship with China? In Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes, Li Chen provides a richly textured analysis of these related issues and their intersection with law, culture, and politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Using a wide array of sources, Chen's study focuses on the power dynamics of Sino-Western relations during the formative century before the First Opium War (1839-1842). He highlights the centrality of law to modern imperial ideology and politics and brings new insight to the origins of comparative Chinese law in the West, the First Opium War, and foreign extraterritoriality in China. The shifting balance of economic and political power formed and transformed knowledge of China and Chinese law in different contact zones. Chen argues that recovering the variegated and contradictory roles of Chinese law in Western modernization helps provincialize the subsequent Euro-Americentric discourse of global modernity.

Chen draws attention to important yet underanalyzed sites in which imperial sovereignty, national identity, cultural tradition, or international law and order were defined and restructured. His valuable case studies show how constructed differences between societies were hardened into cultural or racial boundaries and then politicized to rationalize international conflicts and hierarchy.

The twelve case studies in Chinese Law: Knowledge, Practice and Transformation, 1530s to 1950s, edited by Li Chen and Madeleine Zelin, open a new window onto the historical foundation and transformation of Chinese law and legal culture in late imperial and modern China. Their interdisciplinary analyses provide valuable insights into the multiple roles of law and legal knowledge in structuring social relations, property rights, popular culture, imperial governance, and ideas of modernity; they also provide insight into the roles of law and legal knowledge in giving form to an emerging revolutionary ideology and to policies that continue to affect China to the present day.

(1) From Public Critique to Secret Assistance: Divergence in and Response of the Party Central Committee to the Reforms and Open-Up Policies of Guangdong after the Two Provincial Conferences in 1982 (Li Chen); (2) Imagining the Crowd: Screening the Masses of China's Cultural Revolution (Li Guo); (3) Mountain Heads in the Military of the Chinese Communist Party and the Way Mao Governed the Military Since 1949 (Shen Xiaoyun); (4) Wang Jingwei before Fleeing and Chen Bijun in Prison: A Reading of The Diary of Chen Kewen (Bin Yang); (5) Frontier as Ruin: The National Allegory in Landscape (Wu Xueshan); (6) Uncanny, or Old Ghosts Coming Again: Mirror Images and Visual Illusions in Modern China (Hongfeng Tang); (7) Cultural Interaction and Comparative Literature in Modern China: A Special Issue (Yao Dadui); (8) God vs. Dragon: On Samuel I. Woodbridge's English Translation (1895) of Westward Journey Stories Contained in a Script of Tongzi Drama (Wu Xiaofang); (9) The Circulation and Reproduction of World Literature: Aesop's Fables in Modern China (Yao Dadui); (10) Chinese Genres, Western Works: The Formation of the Idea of Foreign Literature in Late Qing China (Carlos Yu-Kai Lin)

Polarity phenomena are pervasively observed in natural languages. Previous studies on Chinese polarity items are mainly in line with the non-veridicality approach. This book, however, employs the downward-entailing hypothesis as its analytical foundation, and argues that downward entailment is the only licensor for different kinds of Chinese polarity items, and non-veridicality is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition and thus offers inferior explanatory power compared with the former.

To begin with, it lays the groundwork for this research by presenting a brief introduction to polarity phenomena and reviewing the existing relevant theories. Then it addresses the status of the commonly used element dou in Chinese. Specifically, it applies the tripartite structural frame to the studies of dou, and examines the role of dou in licensing the polarity items. Moreover, it investigates the properties and behavior of dou with respect to modality. Based on the analysis above, it observes that non-interrogative wh-indeterminates in Chinese can be licensed in the restriction domain of a necessity operator. Also, the non-uniformity of three Chinese polarity items, i.e., shenme, na-CL, and renhe, is scrutinized within the downward-entailing framework.

This book will appeal to scholars, teachers and students in the field of linguistics, especially in the areas of formal semantics and generative grammar. Researchers and engineers in cloud computing and big data who are seeking help from linguistic contributions to meaning and logic will also benefit from it.

Digital Functions and Data Reconstruction: Digital-Discrete Methods provides a solid foundation to the theory of digital functions and its applications to image data analysis, digital object deformation, and data reconstruction. This new method has a unique feature in that it is mainly built on discrete mathematics with connections to classical methods in mathematics and computer sciences.

Digitally continuous functions and gradually varied functions were developed in the late 1980s. A. Rosenfeld (1986) proposed digitally continuous functions for digital image analysis, especially to describe the continuous component in a digital image, which usually indicates an object. L. Chen (1989) invented gradually varied functions to interpolate a digital surface when the boundary appears to be continuous. In theory, digitally continuous functions are very similar to gradually varied functions. Gradually varied functions are more general in terms of being functions of realnumbers; digitally continuous functions are easily extended to the mapping from one digital space to another.

This will be the first book about digital functions, which is an important modern research area for digital images and digitalized data processing, and provides an introduction and comprehensive coverage of digital function methods. Digital Functions and Data Reconstruction: Digital-Discrete Methods offers scientists and engineers who deal with digital data a highly accessible, practical, and mathematically sound introduction to the powerful theories of digital topology and functional analysis, while avoiding the more abstruse aspects of these topics.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 20th International Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems, ISMIS 2012, held in Macau, China, in December 2012. The 42 regular papers and 11 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 88 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: knowledge discovery and data mining; intelligent information systems; text mining and language processing; knowledge representation and integration; music information retrieval; recommender systems; technology intelligence and applications; product configuration; human factors in information retrieval; social recommender systems; and warehousing and OLAPing complex, spatial and spatio-temporal data.

Digital Functions and Data Reconstruction: Digital-Discrete Methods provides a solid foundation to the theory of digital functions and its applications to image data analysis, digital object deformation, and data reconstruction. This new method has a unique feature in that it is mainly built on discrete mathematics with connections to classical methods in mathematics and computer sciences.

Digitally continuous functions and gradually varied functions were developed in the late 1980s. A. Rosenfeld (1986) proposed digitally continuous functions for digital image analysis, especially to describe the continuous component in a digital image, which usually indicates an object. L. Chen (1989) invented gradually varied functions to interpolate a digital surface when the boundary appears to be continuous. In theory, digitally continuous functions are very similar to gradually varied functions. Gradually varied functions are more general in terms of being functions of realnumbers; digitally continuous functions are easily extended to the mapping from one digital space to another.

This will be the first book about digital functions, which is an important modern research area for digital images and digitalized data processing, and provides an introduction and comprehensive coverage of digital function methods. Digital Functions and Data Reconstruction: Digital-Discrete Methods offers scientists and engineers who deal with digital data a highly accessible, practical, and mathematically sound introduction to the powerful theories of digital topology and functional analysis, while avoiding the more abstruse aspects of these topics.

The twelve case studies in Chinese Law: Knowledge, Practice and Transformation, 1530s to 1950s, edited by Li Chen and Madeleine Zelin, open a new window onto the historical foundation and transformation of Chinese law and legal culture in late imperial and modern China. Their interdisciplinary analyses provide valuable insights into the multiple roles of law and legal knowledge in structuring social relations, property rights, popular culture, imperial governance, and ideas of modernity; they also provide insight into the roles of law and legal knowledge in giving form to an emerging revolutionary ideology and to policies that continue to affect China to the present day.

How did American schoolchildren, French philosophers, Russian Sinologists, Dutch merchants, and British lawyers imagine China and Chinese law? What happened when agents of presumably dominant Western empires had to endure the humiliations and anxieties of maintaining a profitable but precarious relationship with China? In Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes, Li Chen provides a richly textured analysis of these related issues and their intersection with law, culture, and politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Using a wide array of sources, Chen's study focuses on the power dynamics of Sino-Western relations during the formative century before the First Opium War (1839-1842). He highlights the centrality of law to modern imperial ideology and politics and brings new insight to the origins of comparative Chinese law in the West, the First Opium War, and foreign extraterritoriality in China. The shifting balance of economic and political power formed and transformed knowledge of China and Chinese law in different contact zones. Chen argues that recovering the variegated and contradictory roles of Chinese law in Western modernization helps provincialize the subsequent Euro-Americentric discourse of global modernity.

Chen draws attention to important yet underanalyzed sites in which imperial sovereignty, national identity, cultural tradition, or international law and order were defined and restructured. His valuable case studies show how constructed differences between societies were hardened into cultural or racial boundaries and then politicized to rationalize international conflicts and hierarchy.