Chang, Ji-Mei

University of Southern California, Department of Curriculum, Teaching, & Special Education, 1989, Ph.D. University of Southern California, School of Education, 1978, M.S. National Chengchi University, Department of Education, 1970, B.A.https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/erfa_bios/1002/thumbnail.jp

Eileen Chang and cinema

The death of Eileen Chang on September 8, 1995 in Los Angeles made headlines in all the Chinese newspapers. In the Chinese-speaking areas of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China, a veritable cult of mystique has been built around her by both public media and the large number of her fans (who called themselves Chang-mi or Chang-fans”). However, in the last twenty-three years of her life Chang lived quietly and incognito in Los Angeles, shunning all social contact and escaping publicity by constantly changing her residences in numerous hotels, motels, and small apartment houses until her death in an obscure apartment building in the Westwood section of Los Angeles. This “mystery” of her last years adds only more glamour to her legend: she was like a retired movie star past her prime, like Greta Garbo

Possible structure in the cosmic ray electron spectrum measured by the ATIC-2 and ATIC-4 experiments

A strong excess in a form of a wide peak in the energy range of 300-800 GeV was discovered in the first measurements of the electron spectrum in the energy range from 20 GeV to 3 TeV by the balloon-borne experiment ATIC (J. Chang et al. Nature, 2008). The experimental data processing and analysis of the electron spectrum with different criteria for selection of electrons, completely independent of the results reported in (J. Chang et al. Nature, 2008) is employed in the present paper. The new independent analysis generally confirms the results of (J. Chang et al. Nature, 2008), but shows that the spectrum in the region of the excess is represented by a number of narrow peaks. The measured spectrum is compared to the spectrum of (J. Chang et al. Nature, 2008) and to the spectrum of the Fermi/LAT experiment.Comment: LaTeX2e, 10 pages, 4 figures, a paper for ECRS 2010 (Turku, Finland); http://www.astrophys-space-sci-trans.net/7/119/2011

The Chang-Refsdal Lens Revisited

This paper provides a complete theoretical treatment of the point-mass lens perturbed by constant external shear, often called the Chang-Refsdal lens. We show that simple invariants exist for the products of the (complex) positions of the four images, as well as moment sums of their signed magnifications. The image topographies and equations of the caustics and critical curves are also studied. We derive the fully analytic expressions for precaustics, which are the loci of non-critical points that map to the caustics under the lens mapping. They constitute boundaries of the region in the image domain that maps onto the interior of the caustics. The areas under the critical curves, caustics and precaustics are all evaluated, which enables us to calculate the mean magnification of the source within the caustics. Additionally, the exact analytic expression for the magnification distribution for the source in the triangular caustics is derived, as well as a useful approximate expression. Finally, we find that the Chang-Refsdal lens with the convergence greater than unity can exhibit third-order critical behaviour, if the reduced shear is exactly equal to \sqrt{3}/2, and that the number of images for N-point masses with non-zero constant shear cannot be greater than 5N-1.Comment: to appear in MNRAS (including 6 figures, 3 appendices; v2 - minor update with corrected typos etc.

On Such a Full Sea of Novels: An Interview with Chang-rae Lee

An interview with author Chang-rae Lee

The relationship between tax evasion and tax revenue in Chang, Lai and Chang (1999)

Chang, Lai and Chang (1999) use a micro-founded short-term macroeconomic model, with an imperfectly competitive market, to analyze, among other issues, the relationship between tax evasion and tax revenue. They show that this relationship depends upon the market structure. In particular, when the market becomes perfectly competitive, this relationship can be non monotonic. Although CLC give an intuition of this result, based on the interaction of two opposite effects, they do not make explicit the form of this relationship. The goal of this note is precisely to show that, within the Chang, Lai and Chang (1999) model, one can completely characterize the shape of the relationship between tax evasion and tax revenue under perfect competition. Under some parametric conditions, the tax revenue decreases with tax evasion otherwise, their relationship takes the form of a `Laffer curve'.