When Wang Ping was nine years old, she secretly set about binding her feet with elastic bands. Footbinding had by then been outlawed in China, women s feet liberated, but at that young age she desperately wanted the tiny feet her grandmother had deformed and malodorous as they were. By first examining the root of her own girlhood desire, Wang unleashes a fascinating inquiry into a centuries-old custom.
Aching for Beauty combines Wang s unique perspective and remarkable literary gifts in an award-winning exploration of the history and culture surrounding footbinding. In setting out...

Multirate Switched-Capacitor Circuits for 2-D Signal Processing introduces the concepts of analog multirate signal processing for the efficient implementation of two-dimensional (2-D) filtering in integrated circuit form, particularly from the viewpoints of silicon area and power dissipation. New 2-D switched-capacitor (SC) networks and design techniques are presented, both with finite impulse response (FIR) and infinite impulse response (IIR) with separable denominator polynomial, which offer simpler and more systematic synthesis procedures than currently available design techniques...

An exploration of the history and cultural practice of footbinding in China reveals the traditions that contributed to and surrounded its thousand-year enforcement, as well as its related literature, music, contests, and rewards.

"Wang Ping is a fearless, phenomenal writer."--Louise Erdrich

This proceedings contains nearly 200 papers on cutting-edge research presented at the seventh international Symposium on Coastal Engineering and Science of Coastal Sediment Processes, held May 2-6, 2011, in Miami, Florida, USA. This technical specialty conference was devoted to promoting an interdisciplinary exchange of state-of-the-art knowledge among researchers in the fields of coastal engineering, geology, oceanography, and related disciplines, with a theme of bringing together theory and practice. Focusing on the physical aspects of sediment processes in various coastal environments,...

From ancient times China's remote and exotic South--a shifting and expanding region beyond the Yangtze River--has been an enduring theme in Chinese literature. For poets and scholar-officials in medieval China, the South was a barbaric frontier region of alienation and disease. But it was also a place of richness and fascination, and for some a site of cultural triumph over exile. The seven essays in this collection explore how tensions between pride in southern culture and anxiety over the alien qualities of the southern frontier were behind many of the distinctive features of medieval...