[Review of] Ruthanne Lum McCunn, Chinese American Portraits: Personal Histories, 1828·1988

With her latest book, Chinese American Portraits, Ruthanne Lum McCunn adds to her growing list of publications about the painful struggle and heroic survival of the Chinese in America. In an engaging novelistic style, accompanied by equally eloquent photographs, she tells detailed stories of seventeen diverse men and women, ranging from Yung Wing, educator and patriot, and the first Chinese to graduate from an American university (Yale, class of 1854), to Ho Yuet Fung, writer and filmmaker, who emigrated from Hong Kong in the 1970s. Interspersed within these primary narratives are photographs and lengthy captions telling the stories of other Chinese in America. How the author chose which stories to highlight and which to condense is a mystery, for each story is compelling. On the one hand, the photographs and brief stories interspersed within the pages of longer stories tend to be something of a distraction; on the other hand, in this compromise fashion, many stories beyond the major seventeen get told. The reader cannot help but be impressed by the richness of the author\u27s store as suggested by the large quantity and variety of these small vignettes

The Decision of Work and Study and Employment Outcomes

The paper studies factors that contribute to student's work study decision while attending postsecondary institutions using SLID and YITS data. It further tests that how the work decision can affect their future employment outcomes.postsecondary eduction;labour supply decisions;return to schooling

Deriving consensus rankings via multicriteria decision making methodology

Purpose - This paper seeks to take a cautionary stance to the impact of the marketing mix on customer satisfaction, via a case study deriving consensus rankings for benchmarking on selected retail stores in Malaysia. Design/methodology/approach - The ELECTRE I model is used in deriving consensus rankings via multicriteria decision making method for benchmarking base on the marketing mix model 4P's. Descriptive analysis is used to analyze best practice among the four marketing tactics. Findings - Outranking methods in consequence constitute a strong base on which to found the entire structure of the behavioral theory of benchmarking applied to development of marketing strategy. Research limitations/implications - This study looks only at a limited part of the puzzle of how consumer satisfaction translates into behavioral outcomes. Practical implications - The study provides managers with guidance on how to generate a rough outline of potential marketing activities that can be used to take advantage of capabilities and convert weaknesses and threats. Originality/value - The paper interestingly portrays the effective usage of multicriteria decision-making and ranking method to help marketing managers predict their marketing trends

Prediction Model for H1N1 Disease

This research has used the H1N1 disease based on the data collected from outpatient clinics (private and public sectors) across Hong Kong with influenza like illness. The objective of this project is to develop a prediction model of H1N1 disease using Multilayer Perceptron. The experiment using WEKA machine learning tool produced the best parameter's values for the datasets. The General Methodology of Design Research (GMDR) and Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) has been used throughout the study as a guideline. Prediction model for H1N1 disease using MLP has been generated and MLP has performs the good result where the value of accuracy for the H1N1 disease is 88.57%

Total blow-up of a quasilinear heat equation with slow-diffusion for non-decaying initial data

summary:We consider solutions of quasilinear equations $u_{t}=\Delta u^{m} + u^{p}$ in $\mathbb R^{N}$ with the initial data $u_{0}$ satisfying $0 0$. It is known that if $01$, the blow-up set is empty. We find solutions $u$ that blow up throughout $\mathbb R^{N}$ when $m>p>1$

Existence and stability of stationary solutions to the Allen-Cahn equation discretized in space and time

The existence and stability of the Allen–Cahn equation discretized in space and time are studied in a finite spatial interval. If a parameter is less than or equals to a critical value, the zero solution is the only stationary solution. If the parameter is larger than the critical value, one has a positive stationary solution and this positive stationary solution is asymptotically stable