Books bound to be written in by their owners have their own history, and believe it or not, many patents filed in the US patent office. Take a look at the material culture of bound structures in a whole new way.

This essay examines the relationships of performing bodies to elaborate “Asian/American corporeal citations” and argues that such citations create the grounds for a politics of mobility. Revisiting and extending Sau-ling Wong’s theoretical engagement with “myths of mobility,” it specifically uses the nexus of mourning, performance, and racialization to rearticulate modes of cultural passing by constructing a lineage through several men: screen star Toshiro Mifune, actor Lane Nishikawa (who invokes Mifune through Nishikawa’s elegiac solo piece Mifune and Me), and the author (disciplined through acting classes with Nishikawa). The stakes of re-membering are further articulated through the interweaving of the bodily acts associated with the death of the author’s grandfather, Bo Jung. Joining the principal argument with this more personal reflection is an attempt to think through the implications of Nishikawa’s theatrical memorial and to grapple with loss and the complex, nonlinear structures of memory that attend it. Ultimately, all the cultural transmissions discussed place the body at the center of transnational, racial, and ethnic discourses. In so doing, the essay revises kinship as the foundation for what might otherwise be too easily read as diasporic cultural productions.

Gigabit optical fiber communications channels typically exhibit linear and nonlinear distortion as a result of non -ideal transmitter, fiber, receiver, and optical amplifier components. Transmitted data bits begin to spread and overlap as a result of chromatic and polarization mode dispersion in the fiber, which is exacerbated by the finite spectral width of the modulated optical source. The pulse spreading is pattern-dependent and thus can be characterized as intersymbol interference, with associated jitter influenced by the bit rate, component choices, and link length. Any uncompensated link has a maximum data rate and/or maximum transmission length beyond which irresolvable bit errors will be incurred; compensation is required to further increase data rates and/or extend transmission length. Optical correction methods are effective for chromatic dispersion compensation but are difficult to implement for polarization mode dispersion, which can vary over time and atmospheric conditions. Electronic equalization on the receiver side of the link is an attractive low cost conceptual solution, but is complicated by the nonlinearities introduced by the magnitude-squared response of the optoelectronic receiver. This work describes the development, analysis, and implementation of a technique for purely electronic compensation of both linear and nonlinear distortion mechanisms. The proposed circuit is composed of one or more Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs) and a Look Up Table (LUT) memory. Samples of photodetector output signal data taken at various points in time are fed to the LUT which links received vectors to an estimate of the transmitted pattern. The size and complexity of the design can be scaled and its configuration can be optimized for the compensation of a particular fiber channel. A high- speed electronic equalizer, composed of 3 independent and bypassable 2 bit ADC's and a 64 bit LUT, has been demonstrated in this work using InGaP/GaAs HBT technology. The circuit includes a novel memory cell design to implement the LUT. With optimized settings, the equalizer is able to distinguish between transmitted 1's and 0's up to 5GHz with dispersion over 3 bit periods, using select distortion examples for which a standard decision circuit fails. A method to approximate the Bit Error Rate (BER) of the equalized system is applied to analysis of the equalization technique using extensive fiber simulations and a numerical equalizer model. The results indicate that the best results can be obtained when the fiber communications channel is tuned to optimize transmission. In these conditions, system simulations indicate that the system with the equalizer can outperform systems with a standard decision circuit by extending transmission lengths in some cases as much as 60% at 10Gbps