Book Review: “ASIA ON TOUR: Exploring the rise of Asian tourism”

A review of the book "Asia on Tour: Exploring the Rise of Asian Tourism," edited by Tim Winter, Peggy Teo and T. C. Chang is presented

Race, Slavery, and the Re-evaluation of the T\u27ang Canon

In his article Race, Slavery, and the Revaluation of the T\u27ang Canon Gregory E. Rutledge re-evaluates—from the purview of African Diaspora literary studies—historiography that considers the place of East African slave lore in T\u27ang Dynasty fiction. Julie Wilensky\u27s The Magical Kunlun and \u27Devil Slaves\u27: Chinese Perceptions of Dark-skinned People and Africa before 1500 (2002), a revision of Chang Hsing-lang\u27s The Importation of Negro Slaves to China Under the T\u27ang Dynasty (A.D. 618-907) (1930), is pivotal since it occupies the nexus between European-American, East-Asian, and African-Diasporic canons and policies. Rutledge situates Wilensky\u27s and Chang\u27s works in the context of Edward W. Said\u27s Orientalism, an essential heurist for understanding Western subjugation of the Orient. However, in light of Wilensky\u27s and Chang\u27s non-engagement with the vast body of Western research on slavery, Rutledge argues that an older Afro-Orientalist frame is needed to establish an heuristic sensitive to the ancient East African culture and exceptionalism immanent in the stories Wilensky and Chang treat

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article Race, Slavery, and the Revaluation of the T\u27ang Canon Gregory E. Rutledge re-evaluates—from the purview of African Diaspora literary studies—historiography that considers the place of East African slave lore in T\u27ang Dynasty fiction. Julie Wilensky\u27s The Magical Kunlun and \u27Devil Slaves\u27: Chinese Perceptions of Dark-skinned People and Africa before 1500 (2002), a revision of Chang Hsing-lang\u27s The Importation of Negro Slaves to China Under the T\u27ang Dynasty (A.D. 618- 907) (1930), is pivotal since it occupies the nexus between European-American, East-Asian, and African-Diasporic canons and policies. Rutledge situates Wilensky\u27s and Chang\u27s works in the context of Edward W. Said\u27s Orientalism, an essential heurist for understanding Western subjugation of the Orient. However, in light of Wilensky\u27s and Chang\u27s non-engagement with the vast body of Western research on slavery, Rutledge argues that an older Afro-Orientalist frame is needed to establish an heuristic sensitive to the ancient East African culture and exceptionalism immanent in the stories Wilensky and Chang treat

Comments on "The Role of the Central Asian Mountains on the Midwinter Suppression of North Pacific Storminess" - Reply

We thank Chang and Lin for their thoughtful and constructive comments on our study (Park et al. 2010). In Park et al. (2010), we did not explicitly state that the topography-forced stationary waves are the direct cause for the reduced downstream transient eddy kinetic energy (EKE). The response of stationary waves to topography may saturate even with a relatively small mountain (Cook and Held 1992); furthermore, their magnitudes are much smaller than thermally forced stationary waves (Chang 2009; Held et al. 2002). Instead, we suggest that quasistationary waves generated by the central Asian mountains may strongly affect North Pacific storminess by changing the year-to-year variability of westerly winds over the eastern Eurasian continent. Observational analyses indicate that the midwinter suppression of North Pacific storminess does not occur every year. Some years experience stronger and more meridionally confined zonal winds over the western North Pacific, leading to stronger midwinter suppression (Harnik and Chang 2004; Nakamura and Sampe 2002)

Algebraic tori revisited

Let $K/k$ be a finite Galois extension and \pi = \fn{Gal}(K/k). An algebraic torus $T$ defined over $k$ is called a $\pi$-torus if T\times_{\fn{Spec}(k)} \fn{Spec}(K)\simeq \bm{G}_{m,K}^n for some integer $n$. The set of all algebraic $\pi$-tori defined over $k$ under the stably isomorphism form a semigroup, denoted by $T(\pi)$. We will give a complete proof of the following theorem due to Endo and Miyata \cite{EM5}. Theorem. Let $\pi$ be a finite group. Then $T(\pi)\simeq C(\Omega_{\bm{Z}\pi})$ where $\Omega_{\bm{Z}\pi}$ is a maximal $\bm{Z}$-order in $\bm{Q}\pi$ containing $\bm{Z}\pi$ and $C(\Omega_{\bm{Z}\pi})$ is the locally free class group of $\Omega_{\bm{Z}\pi}$, provided that $\pi$ is isomorphic to the following four types of groups : $C_n$ ($n$ is any positive integer), $D_m$ ($m$ is any odd integer $\ge 3$), $C_{q^f}\times D_m$ ($m$ is any odd integer $\ge 3$, $q$ is an odd prime number not dividing $m$, $f\ge 1$, and $(\bm{Z}/q^f\bm{Z})^{\times}=\langle \bar{p}\rangle$ for any prime divisor $p$ of $m$), $Q_{4m}$ ($m$ is any odd integer $\ge 3$, $p\equiv 3 \pmod{4}$ for any prime divisor $p$ of $m$).Comment: To appear in Asian J. Math. ; the title is change

The Coset Spin-4 Casimir Operator and Its Three-Point Functions with Scalars

We find the GKO coset construction of the dimension 4 Casimir operator that contains the quartic WZW currents contracted with completely symmetric SU(N) invariant tensors of ranks 4, 3, and 2. The requirements, that the operator product expansion with the diagonal current is regular and it should be primary under the coset Virasoro generator of dimension 2, fix all the coefficients in spin-4 current, up to two unknown coefficients. The operator product expansion of coset primary spin-3 field with itself fixes them completely. We compute the three-point functions with scalars for all values of the 't Hooft coupling in the large N limit. At fixed 't Hooft coupling, these three-point functions are dual to that found by Chang and Yin recently in the undeformed AdS_3 bulk theory (higher spin gravity with matter).Comment: 65 pages; the ambiguity for the two coefficient functions is clarified and the abstract, the introduction, the subsection 3.4 and the conclusion are improved and to appear in JHE

Fine grain software pipelining of non-vectorizable nested loops

This paper presents a new technique to parallelize nested loops at the statement level. It transforms sequential nested loops, either vectorizable or not, into parallel ones. Previously, the wavefront method was used to parallelize non-vectorizable nested loops. However, in order to reduce the complexity of parallelization, the wavefront method regards an iteration as an unbreakable scheduling unit and draws parallelism through iteration overlapping. Our technique takes a statement rather than an iteration as the scheduling unit and exploits parallelism by overlapping the statements in all dimensions. In this paper, we show how this finer grain parallelization can be achieved with reasonable computational complexity, and the effectiveness of the resulting method in exploiting parallelism