Making (Non)Sense: On Ruth Ozeki\u27s A Tale for the Time Being

This essay investigates the knowledge produced around Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being through a discussion of its marketing processes and its reception, as well as through textual analysis. I first draw upon Sau-ling Wong’s observations about the problem of a US-centric referential framework in the internationalization of Asian American studies to examine a Western-centric framing in the marketing strategies of the US/Canada and the UK editions of Ozeki’s novel. Next, I turn to an examination of how reviews and selected readers’ responses to Ozeki’s novel show an at-times incoherent process of making sense of this text. In the latter part of the paper, I analyze the parallel depictions of Fukushima and Cortes Island, Ruth’s dreams, and Haruki #1’s diary in Ozeki’s novel. Attending to how Ozeki’s narratives destabilize the process of making sense, I argue that the novel is neither easy to read nor as transparent as the marketing strategies and reviews and readers’ responses suggest. The difficulties of making sense represented in A Tale for the Time Being thereby have the potential to intervene in a Western-centric, posivistic reading of the Asian other, challenging us to rethink the analytic frameworks we bring to bear while reading Asian American literary texts

Neural Lyapunov Control

We propose new methods for learning control policies and neural network Lyapunov functions for nonlinear control problems, with provable guarantee of stability. The framework consists of a learner that attempts to find the control and Lyapunov functions, and a falsifier that finds counterexamples to quickly guide the learner towards solutions. The procedure terminates when no counterexample is found by the falsifier, in which case the controlled nonlinear system is provably stable. The approach significantly simplifies the process of Lyapunov control design, provides end-to-end correctness guarantee, and can obtain much larger regions of attraction than existing methods such as LQR and SOS/SDP. We show experiments on how the new methods obtain high-quality solutions for challenging control problems.Comment: NeurIPS 201

Revisiting B\to\pi K, \pi K^{\ast} and \rho K decays: CP violations and implication for New Physics

Combining the up-to-date experimental information on $B\to\pi K, \pi K^{\ast}$ and $\rho K$ decays, we revisit the decay rates and CP asymmetries of these decays within the framework of QCD factorization. Using an infrared finite gluon propagator of Cornwall prescription, we find that the time-like annihilation amplitude could contribute a large strong phase, while the space-like hard spectator scattering amplitude is real. Numerically, we find that all the branching ratios and most of the direct CP violations, except $A_{CP}(B^{\pm}\to K^{\pm}\pi^{0})$, agree with the current experimental data with an effective gluon mass $m_g\simeq0.5 {\rm GeV}$. Taking the unmatched difference in direct CP violations between $B\to\pi^{0} K^{\pm}$ and $\pi^{\mp}K^{\pm}$ decays as a hint of new physics, we perform a model-independent analysis of new physics contributions with a set of $\bar{s}(1+\gamma_{5})b\otimes\bar{q}(1+\gamma_{5})q$ (q=u,d) operators. Detail analyses of the relative impacts of the operators are presented in five cases. Fitting the twelve decay modes, parameter spaces are found generally with nontrivial weak phases. Our results may indicate that both strong phase from annihilation amplitude and new weak phase from new physics are needed to resolve the $\pi K$ puzzle. To further test the new physics hypothesis, the mixing-induced CP violations in $B\to\pi^{0}K_{S}$ and $\rho^{0}K_{S}$ are discussed and good agreements with the recent experimental data are found.Comment: Version published in JHE

Geometry of Seduction: the Beautiful Hair of Chinese «Medusa»

El objetivo principal de este trabajo consiste en indagar sobre la geometría2 que se da en las estrategias de seducción desplegadas por los personajes de Jin Ping Mei (1617?),3 una de las novelas más eróticas del mundo. El trabajo parte del conjunto de ideas y proposiciones que nos ofrecen los textos literarios chinos sobre la hermosa cabellera femenina. Se analizan tanto las descripciones del cabello (el color y el volumen) como los accesorios para cuidarlo de cara a la seducción, con una atención especial a la horquilla. Por otro lado, se trata de correr el velo y descubrir la competitividad constante de seducción entre las medusas.The main objective of this study is to investigate the heterogeneity that occurs in the seduction strategies deployed by the characters in one of the world’s most erotic novels, Jin Ping Mei (1617?). The study begins with a variety of proposed ideas and propositions regarding the beauty of female hair in Chinese literary texts. Then, the study engages with the descriptions about hair and hair accessories in this novel. Finally, the study unveils the constant competition between «medusas» the seducers.Este artículo se ha realizado en el marco del proyecto de investigación núm. 20720171052, organizado por la Universidad de Xiamen

A critique on the “where-what” perspective for organizational memory research

Abstract. The following issues regarding to organization memory were mainly discussed in extant literature: 1. What is organization memory – organizations as knowledge bases. 2. Where is the memory stored? This article offers a compact commentary for these two questions, revisiting from a where-what perspective – that we should consider the nature of the context where known memory is embedded then we could really know the nature of what that knowledge piece is. Implications for research were elaborated.Keywords. Organization memory, Knowledge bases, Known memory.JEL. D80, L22, L23

The Relationship between Stock Price and EPS: Evidence Based on Taiwan Panel Data

In this study, we use panel cointegration methods to investigate the relationship between stock prices and earnings-per-share (EPS). Furthermore, we consider whether stock prices respond to EPS under the different level of growth rate of operating revenue. The empirical result indicated that the cointegration relationship existed between stock prices and EPS in the long-run. Furthermore, we found that for the firm with a high level of growth rate, EPS has less power in explaining the stock prices however, for the firm with a low level of growth rate, EPS has a strong impact in stock prices.Earnings Response Coefficient (ERC)