LIKE A DUCK ON WATER: CHINESE ACADEMIC MIGRANTS IN THE U.S. AND THEIR SUBURBAN WEEKEND CHINESE SCHOOL

Current literature is scarce on the diverse experiences of hundreds of thousands of mainland Chinese who, since 1979, have come to the U.S. primarily for graduate study and mostly settled here afterwards in dispersed university or corporate jobs and suburban residences. After the Immigration Act of 1990, many of them have become visible experts in science and engineering. Yet their struggles as Chinese academic migrants simultaneously privileged by their educational backgrounds and disadvantaged by their outsider status in the U.S. often remain invisible. Possibly due to the myth of “model minority,” mainstream America has seen them as doing-well and well-behaving, and scholarship in gender studies, Asian-American studies, science and technology studies, and (sub)urban studies has barely acknowledged this group. This dissertation documents how a group of Chinese academic migrants engage with everyday struggles around their paradoxical (im)migrant statuses through participation in a weekend Chinese language school. The title of this dissertation speaks to how this group, while appearing peaceful and at ease on the surface, is actually paddling non-stop underneath. Through individual and communal bootstrapping, they manage to survive harsh disciplining mechanisms such as an often-excruciating immigration policy and the tricky discourses of multiculturalism. My data analysis draws upon diverse fields including education, sociology, philosophy, cultural geography, Asian-American studies, gender studies, migration and globalization studies. What is also interesting about this research is that it focuses on Chinese schools (instead of Chinatowns) as significant institutions that mediate this group’s migration experience

Idiosyncratic Risk and the Creative Destruction in Japan

The dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese equity market provides a unique opportunity to examine market-and firm-specific risks over different market conditions. The price behavior of Japanese equities in the 1990s is found to resemble that of U.S. equities during the Great Depression. Both show increasing market volatility and a prolonged large co-movement in equity prices. What is unique about the Japanese case is the surprising fall in firm-level volatility and turnover in Japanese stocks after its market crash in 1990. This large decrease in firm-level volatility may have impeded Japan's capital formation process as it has become more difficult over the past decade for both investors and managers to separate high quality from low quality firms. Using data on firm performance fundamentals and corporate bankruptcies, we show that the fall in firm-level volatility and turnover in Japanese stocks could be attributed to the sharp increase in earnings homogeneity among Japanese firms and the lack of corporate restructuring.

Device-free Localization using Received Signal Strength Measurements in Radio Frequency Network

Device-free localization (DFL) based on the received signal strength (RSS) measurements of radio frequency (RF)links is the method using RSS variation due to the presence of the target to localize the target without attaching any device. The majority of DFL methods utilize the fact the link will experience great attenuation when obstructed. Thus that localization accuracy depends on the model which describes the relationship between RSS loss caused by obstruction and the position of the target. The existing models is too rough to explain some phenomenon observed in the experiment measurements. In this paper, we propose a new model based on diffraction theory in which the target is modeled as a cylinder instead of a point mass. The proposed model can will greatly fits the experiment measurements and well explain the cases like link crossing and walking along the link line. Because the measurement model is nonlinear, particle filtering tracing is used to recursively give the approximate Bayesian estimation of the position. The posterior Cramer-Rao lower bound (PCRLB) of proposed tracking method is also derived. The results of field experiments with 8 radio sensors and a monitored area of 3.5m 3.5m show that the tracking error of proposed model is improved by at least 36 percent in the single target case and 25 percent in the two targets case compared to other models.Comment: This paper has been withdrawn by the author due to some mistake