At first glance, medicine and poison might seem to be opposites. But in China's formative era of pharmacy (200–800 CE), poisons were strategically deployed as healing agents to cure everything from chills to pains to epidemics. Healing with Poisons explores the ways physicians, religious devotees, court officials, and laypeople used powerful substances to both treat intractable illnesses and enhance life. It illustrates how the Chinese concept of du—a word carrying a core meaning of "potency"—led practitioners to devise a variety of techniques to transform dangerous poisons into efficacious medicines.
Recounting scandals and controversies involving poisons from the Era of Division to the early Tang period, Yan Liu considers how the concept of du was central to the ways people of medieval China perceived both their bodies and the body politic. Liu also examines a wide range of du-possessing minerals, plants, and animal products in classical Chinese pharmacy, including the highly poisonous herb aconite and the popular arsenic drug Five-Stone Powder. By recovering alternative modes of understanding wellness and the body's interaction with potent medicines, this study cautions against arbitrary classifications and exemplifies the importance of paying attention to the technical, political, and cultural conditions in which substances become truly meaningful.
Healing with Poisons is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) and the generous support of the University at Buffalo Libraries.
Many models have been devised to analyze urbanization and the physical, socioeconomic, and institutional factors impacting urban development. This book presents a simulation model of urban development based on cellular automata principles and provides theoretical context
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Includes bibliographical references and index. ; This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the University at Buffalo Libraries. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org. ; At first glance, medicine and poison might seem to be opposites. But in China's formative era of pharmacy (200-800 CE), poisons were strategically employed as healing agents to cure everything from abdominal pain to epidemic disease. Healing with Poisons explores the ways physicians, religious figures, court officials, and laypersons used toxic substances to both relieve acute illnesses and enhance life. It illustrates how the Chinese concept of du-a word carrying a core meaning of "potency"-led practitioners to devise a variety of methods to transform dangerous poisons into effective medicines. Recounting scandals and controversies involving poisons from the Era of Division to the Tang, historian Yan Liu considers how the concept of du was central to how the people of medieval China perceived both their bodies and the body politic. He also examines the wide range of toxic minerals, plants, and animal products used in classical Chinese pharmacy, including everything from the herb aconite to the popular recreational drug Five-Stone Powder. By recovering alternative modes of understanding wellness and the body's interaction with foreign substances, this study cautions against arbitrary classifications and exemplifies the importance of paying attention to the technical, political, and cultural conditions in which substances become truly meaningful. Healing with Poisons is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) and the generous support of the University at Buffalo. ; Healing with Poisons was made possible in part by a grant from the Traditional Chinese Culture and Society Book Fund, established through generous gifs from Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Tomas Ebrey. Additional support was provided by grants from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and the Julian Park Publication Fund of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Bufalo.
"Throughout history, expanding cities have always run over villages, hamlets, estates, gardens, and soft elements that constitute the countryside, the domain that hosts agriculture and nature." Urban Villages, essentially a composite of these "soft" elements, remained as one of the hardest anchors among the residual or by-product in China's urban development. Until 1985, the Pearl River Delta region had been mainly dominated by farms and small rural villages. The onset of economic reform and the open-door policy brought an influx of foreign investment which fueled the unstoppable train of urbanization. Rapid urbanization let to the formation of Urban Villages, a contested space between urban and rural land. Conflicts between different constituents of these spaces start to emerge. In the view of city government, urban villages are illegal constructions rather than a part of the city's fabric. They are often considered an urban pathology that is incompatible to the city's modernity. Thus, the complex power structure within the debate of urban villages is often misconstrued and misunderstood as the dichotomy between city government and indigenous villagers. However, the migrant workers, the most vulnerable group who relies heavily on urban villages' informal housing are often neglected and ignored by planners and architects. Therefore, there is an opportunity to dissect the urban landscape from an alternative point of view: finding spatial agencies for migrant workers. The project focuses on researching urban villages within the Pearl River Delta region of China. The research strives to identify and understand the constituents at play and their respective spatial agencies and find possible interventions in both conventional and non-conventional design method that would start generating spatial agencies for migrant workers.
"Throughout history, expanding cities have always run over villages, hamlets, estates, gardens, and soft elements that constitute the countryside, the domain that hosts agriculture and nature." Urban Villages, essentially a composite of these "soft" elements, remained as one of the hardest anchors among the residual or by-product in China's urban development. Until 1985, the Pearl River Delta region had been mainly dominated by farms and small rural villages. The onset of economic reform and the open-door policy brought an influx of foreign investment which fueled the unstoppable train of urbanization. Rapid urbanization let to the formation of Urban Villages, a contested space between urban and rural land. Conflicts between different constituents of these spaces start to emerge. In the view of city government, urban villages are illegal constructions rather than a part of the city's fabric. They are often considered an urban pathology that is incompatible to the city's modernity. Thus, the complex power structure within the debate of urban villages is often misconstrued and misunderstood as the dichotomy between city government and indigenous villagers. However, the migrant workers, the most vulnerable group who relies heavily on urban villages' informal housing are often neglected and ignored by planners and architects. Therefore, there is an opportunity to dissect the urban landscape from an alternative point of view: finding spatial agencies for migrant workers. The project focuses on researching urban villages within the Pearl River Delta region of China. The research strives to identify and understand the constituents at play and their respective spatial agencies and find possible interventions in both conventional and non-conventional design method that would start generating spatial agencies for migrant workers.
In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the emerging field of positive organizational behavior. The field of Positive Organizational Behavior (POB) has its roots in the concept of "positive psychology" (Bakker & Schaufeli, 2008) but is more narrowly defined as "the study and application of positively oriented human resources strengths and psychological capacities that can be measured, developed, and effectively managed for performance improvement in today's workplace" (Luthans, 2002, p.698). More and more researchers have begun to emphasize what is right with people rather than focusing on what is wrong with people. Given this opportunity, this dissertation explicitly focuses upon the power of positive psychological states and behaviors, such as psychological safety, job engagement, positive employee health, and proactive behaviors, which may have strong influence on employees' behavior in the organization. A new emerging leadership style, authentic leadership, was employed as an important antecedent to see how leadership can promote these positive states and behaviors. Based on Ryff's (1995) positive human health concepts, this dissertation developed a positive employee health construct which focuses on organizational context and environments. A four dimensional measure was developed for this construct, including leading a purposeful worklife, quality connection to others, positive self-regard and mastery, and perception of negative events. An initial nomological network was tested for the construct validity. In addition to developing a valid measure for positive employee health, another objective of this dissertation is to examine incremental predictive validity of authentic leadership and the relationship between authentic leadership and several previously unexamined outcomes (i.e., positive employee health, job engagement, proactivity, job performance, and workplace deviance behavior). Many scholars believe that the influence of authentic leadership has an important role in modern organization and society because it helps to restore basic confidence, hope, optimism, resiliency, and meaningfulness. This dissertation adopted a positive organizational behavior approach to furthering our understanding of the process by which authentic leadership influences several important positive outcomes. Findings of this dissertation indicated that newly developed positive employee health construct is useful in predicting job satisfaction and life satisfaction. It is significantly related to but also distinguished from other similar construct, such as psychological well-being and vigor. In addition, this dissertation also found that authentic leadership can be used to predict employees' psychological safety, job engagement, positive employee health, knowledge sharing, and workplace deviance behavior. Indirect relationships between authentic leadership and job performance and proactivity through the mediation effect of job engagement were partially supported. Although authentic leadership can be distinguished from transformational leadership, it only showed incremental predict validity over transformational leadership with job engagement as outcome. Results of this study also suggest that need for leadership and perception of organizational politics may work as direct outcomes of authentic leadership rather than moderators as proposed.
In: The Canadian journal of economics: the journal of the Canadian Economics Association = Revue canadienne d'économique, Volume 56, Issue 2, p. 676-718
AbstractThis paper studies the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on innovation by domestic firms in China. A difference‐in‐difference estimation strategy yields causal evidence by exploiting China's deregulation of FDI in 2002. Analysis of a matched firm–patent data set from 1998 to 2007 shows that both the quantity and quality of innovation by domestic firms benefited from the presence of FDI. Emphasizing the importance of knowledge spillover from FDI in similar technology domains, the authors examine the role of horizontal FDI and FDI in technologically close industries—those sharing similar technology domains. Findings show that the latter generates much more substantial positive spillover than the former. The paper also shows that knowledge spillover from FDI in similar technology domains is not driven by input–output linkages. In addition, the spillover effect is stronger in cities with higher human capital stock and firms with higher absorptive capacity.