New Releases by Tao Lin

An off-kilter and funny novel in which confused yet intelligent animals attempt to interact with confused yet intelligent humans, resulting in the death of Elijah Wood, Salman Rushdie and Wong Kar Wai; a vegan dinner at a sushi restaurant is attended by a dolphin, a bear, a moose, an alien, three humans and the President of the USA, who lectures on the arbitrary nature of consciousness, truth and the universe before getting drunk and playing poker.

Poetry. Asian American Studies. Winner of the 2005 December Prize. Reading Tao Lin is like looking the wrong way down Frank O''Hara''s ear trumpet at a 21st century Mayakovski IM-ing Lili Brik. This book is fun, smart, manic and ecstatic; it puts on a clean shirt before it loads the gun. "YOU ARE A LITTLE BIT HAPPIER THAN I AM has the energy and oddness of a thing that is rising very fast that is not supposed to be rising, or that is supposed to be rising but for a moment you forget that, and for a moment this ordinary thing looks very strange and exciting"--Deb Olin Unferth. Tao Lin is 23 and lives in New York City. Visit his blog reader-of-depressing-books.blogspot.com.

Many books describe the experiences of an American traveler in China, and still others describe the experiences of Chinese in their native country. But this book is unique. It is a nonfiction love story, not a travelogue--an East-West romance that focuses on the lovers'' responses to absurd bureaucratic challenges during an other, wise idyllic courtship. After the first part, narrated by the American, the authors alternate rather than merge their viewpoints in a single voice. They tell their story from the different perspec, tives of a Western man and a Chinese woman. As they work through their cultural differences and the obstacles frustrating their desire to marry, the two storytellers mature. Novelists have traced teenagers coming of age, but here is a nonfic, tion account of growth achieved by a middle-aged couple. They learn from each other, from their allies in Beijing, even from the bureau, crats, as they move toward an emotional and sexual climax. This memoir has a fictional shape!

The Bayesian network model forms the basis for probabilistic reasoning in this exposition. A Bayesian network consists of a directed acyclic graph, and a set of conditional probability tables. The directed acyclic graph encodes the conditional independencies of the domain variables. The product of the conditional probability tables defines a joint probability distribution representing the domain knowledge. In order to build a Bayesian network, one may construct the directed acyclic graph based on the causal relationships of the variables involved. However, in many applications it may be necessary to construct the directed acyclic graph from the conditional independency information supplied by the experts.

This paper offers a continuous time, general equilibrium model where a risky asset is traded among risk-averse overconfident investors. Two kinds of overconfidence are introduced: investors exhibit relative overconfidence if each investor believes her model is better than others'' and aggregate overconfidence if they believe signals have more information content than those in the true model. Relative overconfidence creates market price underreaction, while aggregate overconfidence generates overreaction. Excess trading volume is generated from relative overconfidence but not aggregate overconfidence. A high equity premium and excess price change volatility result from aggregate overconfidence in the early stages of investors'' extrapolation of information, but not in the steady state.

Abstract: "Recently a probability interpretation of moments was proposed as a compromise between the Elmore delay and higher order moment matching for RC timing estimation [5]. By modeling RC impulses as time-shifted incomplete gamma distribution functions, the delays could be obtained via table lookup using a gamma integral table and the first three moments of the impulse response. However, while this approximation works well for many examples, it struggles with responses when the metal resistance becomes dominant, and produces results with impractical time shift values. In this paper the probability interpretation is extended to the circuit homogeneous response, without requiring the time shift parameter. The gamma distribution is used to characterize the normalized homogeneous portion of the step response. For a generalized RC interconnect model (RC tree or mesh), the stability of the homogeneous-gamma distribution model is guaranteed. It is demonstrated that when a table model is carefully constructed, the h-gamma approximation provides for excellent improvement over the Elmore delay in terms of accuracy, with very little additional cost in terms of CPU time."

Iceberg system is a departmental database system. It is built for the graduate advisors of the CIS department. It stores the graduate student''s information, such as background, bridge requirement and transcript. The graduate advisors can process the student''s records using the graphic user interface of Iceberg system. Iceberg system is an example of the powerful Java language. We use the latest Java technologies to build a flexible system, which is easily extended. The system consists of Iceberg client, Iceberg server and Oracle data source. The Iceberg client is a web-based applet, which can be easily accessed using a browser. The Iceberg server runs on a fast UNIX machine, providing service to the Iceberg client through RMI. The most interesting feature of Iceberg system is the component architecture of the Iceberg client. The Iceberg client is consisted of visual components that have no knowledge of each other at compile time. They are assembled together at run time, following the instruction of a script file. Since the container component can hold any components the Iceberg system is readily extendable.