Dan Wang

This unique text helps make sense of big data in engineering applications using tools and techniques from signal processing. It presents fundamental signal processing theories and software implementations, reviews current research trends and challenges, and describes the techniques used for analysis, design and optimization. Readers will learn about key theoretical issues such as data modelling and representation, scalable and low-complexity information processing and optimization, tensor and sublinear algorithms, and deep learning and software architecture, and their application to a wide range of engineering scenarios. Applications discussed in detail include wireless networking, smart grid systems, and sensor networks and cloud computing. This is the ideal text for researchers and practising engineers wanting to solve practical problems involving large amounts of data, and for students looking to grasp the fundamentals of big data analytics.

The brief focuses on applying sublinear algorithms to manage critical big data challenges. The text offers an essential introduction to sublinear algorithms, explaining why they are vital to large scale data systems. It also demonstrates how to apply sublinear algorithms to three familiar big data applications: wireless sensor networks, big data processing in Map Reduce and smart grids. These applications present common experiences, bridging the theoretical advances of sublinear algorithms and the application domain. Sublinear Algorithms for Big Data Applications is suitable for researchers, engineers and graduate students in the computer science, communications and signal processing communities.

America used to pride itself on ambition. Today, it looks stuck. Meanwhile, China has been busy building the future. Over the past six years, technology analyst Dan Wang lived through China’s astonishing, messy progress and the dissolution of its relationship to the West. In Breakneck, Wang offers a new framework for understanding China — which helps us to see global geopolitics more clearly too. While China is an engineering state, fearlessly building megaprojects, America is a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad. Building big has fuelled China’s economic ascent. At the same time, social engineering has led to unbearable costs, including the traumas of zero-Covid and the one-child policy. Wang traverses China’s dazzling metropolises and factory complexes, blending political and economic analysis with reportage to show how the Communist Party’s darkening ambitions have unsettled its people. As the US and China are gearing up for a new Cold War, Breakneck reveals both the remarkable strengths and the appalling weaknesses of the engineering state. China has learned from the West's successes and failures - and now we in turn can learn from China, not least by taking its global ambitions seriously.

A new theory of personhood makes the case that a “person” has always been an aesthetic category, not just a legal, political, or moral one. What does it mean to be a person? One might think of the possession of certain rights, having the capacity for love, or being self-determined. But if words like “person” or “love” seem to carry an internal meaning, where does this meaningfulness come from? Lyric Personhood contends that to be encultured in the modern West is to learn, on top of everything else, an unspoken and mostly felt sense of what it would mean to be someone, a sense transmitted not only in language but also through encounters with aesthetic form. Through close readings that span nineteenth-century European opera, commercial cinema, and amateur YouTube proposal videos, Dan Wang shows that a “person” has become an aesthetic concept—and not just a legal, moral, political, or philosophical one—in the last two hundred years of European culture. It’s hard to let go of the organizing promise of romantic love, the dream of therapeutic “health,” and the aspiration to belong to national culture, Wang argues, because these longings have been shaped by an archive of sentimental and melodramatic works that trains people in what to expect from life, genre, and even the knowing promised in theory itself. Tracing a surprisingly continuous imagination of personhood through opera and film aesthetics, Lyric Personhood introduces modes of reading audiovisual works that allow a longer story to be told about the forms that make personhood sensible in the West.

A new theory of personhood makes the case that a “person” has always been an aesthetic category, not just a legal, political, or moral one. What does it mean to be a person? One might think of the possession of certain rights, having the capacity for love, or being self-determined. But if words like “person” or “love” seem to carry an internal meaning, where does this meaningfulness come from? Lyric Personhood contends that to be encultured in the modern West is to learn, on top of everything else, an unspoken and mostly felt sense of what it would mean to be someone, a sense transmitted not only in language but also through encounters with aesthetic form. Through close readings that span nineteenth-century European opera, commercial cinema, and amateur YouTube proposal videos, Dan Wang shows that a “person” has become an aesthetic concept—and not just a legal, moral, political, or philosophical one—in the last two hundred years of European culture. It’s hard to let go of the organizing promise of romantic love, the dream of therapeutic “health,” and the aspiration to belong to national culture, Wang argues, because these longings have been shaped by an archive of sentimental and melodramatic works that trains people in what to expect from life, genre, and even the knowing promised in theory itself. Tracing a surprisingly continuous imagination of personhood through opera and film aesthetics, Lyric Personhood introduces modes of reading audiovisual works that allow a longer story to be told about the forms that make personhood sensible in the West.

From an indispensable voice on China, comes a riveting, first-hand account of China's seismic progress For close to a decade, Dan Wang has been observing China’s tumultuous and astounding growth. The state has constructed towering bridges, gleaming railways and sprawling factories to improve economic outcomes in record time. But rapid change has also sent ripples of pain throughout society.China has grown so quickly in part by beating America at its own game: capitalism and harnessing the restless energy of a vast population. Here Wang blends political and economic analysis with reportage into a provocative new framework for understanding China – one that helps us see America more clearly, too. Whereas China is an engineering state, relentlessly building big, the United States has transformed into a lawyerly society, stalling every attempt to make change, both good and bad.As relations between the US and China are tense and uncertain and the potential for dreadful conflict looms, Wang offers an inventive new way of thinking about the two superpowers. Breakneck reveals that each country points towards a better path for the other. How much better the world would be, he argues, if Americans could live in a society not only governed by lawyers, and Chinese citizens could live with a state that values their individual liberties.

For close to a decade, technology analyst Dan Wang--"a gifted observer of contemporary China" (Ross Douthat)--has been living through the country's astonishing, messy progress. China's towering bridges, gleaming railways, and sprawling factories have improved economic outcomes in record time. But rapid change has also sent ripples of pain throughout the society. This reality--political repression and astonishing growth--is not a paradox, but rather a feature of China's engineering mindset.In Breakneck, Wang blends political, economic, and philosophical analysis with reportage to reveal a provocative new framework for understanding China--one that helps us see America more clearly, too. While China is an engineering state, relentlessly pursuing megaprojects, the United States has stalled. America has transformed into a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and badBlending razor-sharp analysis with immersive storytelling, Wang offers a gripping portrait of a nation in flux. Breakneck traverses metropolises like Shanghai, Chongqing, and Shenzhen, where the engineering state has created not only dazzling infrastructure but also a sense of optimism. The book also exposes the downsides of social engineering, including the surveillance of ethnic minorities, political suppression, and the traumas of the one-child policy and zero-Covid.In an era of animosity and mistrust, Wang unmasks the shocking similarities between the United States and China. Breakneck reveals how each country points toward a better path for the other: Chinese citizens would be better off if their government could learn to value individual liberties, while Americans would be better off if their government could learn to embrace engineering--and to produce better outcomes for the many, not just the few.

• A communicative approach lets students learn by using the language in real-life situations• A focused companion to the Student’s Book with similar structure and consolidation of key language and skills• Audio CD contains extensive listening practice and topic related conversations recorded by native speakers• Language in context presents key vocabulary and language points in realistic situations• Extra reading passages to boost student character knowledge• Self-assessment sections after each unit help students to reflect on their individual progress

The educational system in China is marked by its dramatic inequality between rural and urban schools. The challenges facing rural schools are usually understood as disadvantages in funding, facilities, and staffing, which consequently result in undesirable student performance in general. This book, however, penetrates these phenomena on the surface and brings forth a much deeper moral crisis in rural education, a crisis that is entrenched in the complicated interlocking of formal and informal institutions within and beyond the school. The Demoralization of Teachers describes the work and workplace in a rural school from the perspective of teachers who were working there. It faithfully depicts the lamentable state of teachers’ work morale in the school and, little by little as if a detective story, reveals the reasons for the teachers’ demoralization by vivid narratives. The book demonstrates the profound impact on the meanings of teaching exerted by the state curriculum reform, the formal and informal norms and regulations in the school, and the erosion of moral integrity in the state bureaucracy and the society at large. The crisis in the rural school stops to be a “rural” or educational problem in nature, but mirrors the societal-wide transformation in political economy as well as in ideology in the current reform China. The sheer complexity of the moral crisis in this ethnography calls for renewed efforts to identify and investigate the educational problems in rural China from fresh theoretical perspectives that situate rural education in broader historical and social contexts and processes.