Yong shi wo ai

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Claire Voisin

"Although the majority of the world's Herons live in the tropics and subtropics, Europe is home to nine species, some large, some small, some colonial, some solitary breeders. Highly specialized birds, they exhibit many interesting differences in their behaviour and ecology and are a favourite group for many ornithologists. Voisin begins her book with a general description of the family before going on to treat each species in more detail. The species accounts summarize such topics as field characters, distribution, population size, breeding and feeding ecology and behaviour."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

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Lingchei Letty Chen

"Writing Chinese addresses complex issues surrounding the claim of "Chineseness" in our increasingly borderless world. Cutting across geographical boundaries, the author undertakes a comparative study of the politics of Chinese cultural identity facing writers of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the US-Chinese, and the Chinese diaspora in the West. Here Letty Chen challenges current discussions of hybridity and nationalism by contrasting the experiences of writers in all parts of greater China with those of the Chinese diaspora. Professor Chen proposes an aesthetics of hybridity as a way to envision an open, creative, and individualized notion of Chinese cultural identity."--Publisher's website.

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Pankaj K. Das

This book presents the background material necessary for an understanding of modern optical signal processing. Intended for graduate students in electrical engineering, physics, or optical engineering, the book covers fundamentals of geometrical and physical optics; propagation in anisotropic media; fiber optics; integrated optics; the electro-optic, acousto-optic and magneto-optic effects; noise and stochastic processes; matched, adaptive, Kalman, and lattice filters; two-dimensional signal processing; and the ambiguity and Wigner distribution functions. A discussion of non-optical signal processing devices, e.g. SAW, CCD, and digital, helps to provide an appreciation of the advantages of optical signal processing. The necessary mathematics is presented in the appendix.

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Leonard Koren

“Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional... The immediate catalyst for this book was a widely publicized tea event in Japan. The Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi has long been associated with the tea ceremony, and this event promised to be a profound wabi-sabi experience. Hiroshi Teshigahara, the hereditary iemoto (grand master) of the Sogetsu school of flower arranging, had commissioned three of Japan’s most famous and fashionable architects to design and build their conceptions of ceremonial tea-drinking environments. Teshigahara in addition would provide a fourth design. After a three-plus-hour train and bus ride from my office in Tokyo, I arrived at the event site, the grounds of an old imperial summer residence. To my dismay I found a celebration of gorgeousness, grandeur, and elegant play, but hardly a trace of wabi-sabi.^ One slick tea hut, ostensibly made of paper, looked and smelled like a big white plastic umbrella. Adjacent was a structure made of glass, steel, and wood that had all the intimacy of a highrise office building. The one tea house that approached the wabi-sabi qualities I had anticipated, upon closer inspection, was fussed up with gratuitous post-modern appendages. It suddenly dawned on me that wabi-sabi, once the preeminent high-culture Japanese aesthetic and the acknowledged centerpiece of tea, was becoming—had become?—an endangered species. Admittedly, the beauty of wabi-sabi is not to everyone’s liking. But I believe it is in everyone’s interest to prevent wabi-sabi from disappearing altogether.^ Diversity of the cultural ecology is a desirable state of affairs, especially in opposition to the accelerating trend toward the uniform digitalization of all sensory experience, wherein an electronic “reader” stands between experience and observation, and all manifestation is encoded identically...”