Chinese Charting of Maritime Asia

Author(s):  
Timothy Brook

Navigation played a major role in the integration of East Asian polities and economies prior to and during the arrival of European traders in the 16th and 17th centuries. That arrival stimulated an increase in the volume of intra-regional trade in East Asia as Chinese merchants organized exports on a large scale to meet European demand, yet the history of the production of nautical charts in China has been little studied, due in no small part to the poor survival of sea charts and other documentation. The most important new addition to maritime charting in the past decade is the rediscovery of the Selden Map in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. This map of navigation routes throughout East Asia is unprecedented, and may be seen as marking the beginning of the transformation of Chinese cartography under the influence of European mapping techniques.

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoshimi Kubota ◽  
Steven Clemens ◽  
Kyung Eun Lee ◽  
Ann Holbourn ◽  
Etsuko Wakisaka ◽  
...  

Abstract The history of abrupt climate change in East Asia is often discussed from hydroclimate proxies that record the isotopic composition of rainfall. However, the underlying mechanisms remain obscure because water-isotope proxies respond to a wide variety of environmental variables. Here, we investigated millennial-scale climate variability in East Asia over the past 400,000 years using paired foraminiferal oxygen isotope and Mg/Ca records from the East Asian continental margin, thereby resolving variance into temperature and rainfall components. We found that the temperature and rainfall variabilities are largely asynchronous, with times when the global climate shifts from interglacial to glacial periods being the notable exception. These findings highlight the importance of both mean global state and magnitude of North Atlantic variability in determining the East Asian climate. Without a strong North Atlantic forcing, the regional feedback system might generate asynchronous temperature and rainfall variations, which is the background climate feature in East Asia.


2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Blesson Varghese ◽  
Nan Wang ◽  
David Bermbach ◽  
Cheol-Ho Hong ◽  
Eyal De Lara ◽  
...  

Edge computing is the next Internet frontier that will leverage computing resources located near users, sensors, and data stores to provide more responsive services. Therefore, it is envisioned that a large-scale, geographically dispersed, and resource-rich distributed system will emerge and play a key role in the future Internet. However, given the loosely coupled nature of such complex systems, their operational conditions are expected to change significantly over time. In this context, the performance characteristics of such systems will need to be captured rapidly, which is referred to as performance benchmarking, for application deployment, resource orchestration, and adaptive decision-making. Edge performance benchmarking is a nascent research avenue that has started gaining momentum over the past five years. This article first reviews articles published over the past three decades to trace the history of performance benchmarking from tightly coupled to loosely coupled systems. It then systematically classifies previous research to identify the system under test, techniques analyzed, and benchmark runtime in edge performance benchmarking.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
LEIGH K. JENCO ◽  
JONATHAN CHAPPELL

Abstract This article argues for a ‘history from between’ as the best lens through which to understand the construction of historical knowledge between East Asia and Europe. ‘Between’ refers to the space framed by East Asia and Europe, but also to the global circulations of ideas in that space, and to the subjective feeling of embeddedness in larger-than-local contexts that being in such a space makes possible. Our contention is that the outcomes of such entanglements are not merely reactive forms of knowledge, of the kind implied by older studies of translation and reception in global intellectual history. Instead they are themselves ‘co-productions’: they are the shared and mutually interactive inputs to enduring modes of uses of the past, across both East Asian and European traditions. Taking seriously the possibility that interpretations of the past were not transferred, but rather were co-produced between East Asia and Europe, we reconstruct the braided histories of historical narratives that continue to shape constructions of identity throughout Eurasia.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 16-19
Author(s):  
Yoshiyuki Kikuchi

Abstract East Asia occupies a substantial position in IUPAC today. The incumbent president for 2018-2019, Qi-Feng Zhou, is from China/Beijing, and three out of ten elected members of the Bureau are from East Asia: Mei-Hung Chiu from China/Taipei, Kew-Ho Lee from Korea, and Ken Sakai from Japan. This region is thus well-represented in the IUPAC leadership. However, this is not how this now global institution looked in the past. Its first president from East Asia was Saburo Nagakura (b. 1920) from Japan who assumed this office from 1981-1982, more than 60 years after the IUPAC was established in 1919. He was followed by Jung-Il Jing from Korea (2008-2009), Kazuyuki Tatsumi (2012-2013) from Japan, and Zhou. In terms of national adhering organizations (NAOs), Japan was the first East Asian nation admitted to IUPAC in 1921, but we had to wait until the late 1970s for all other national chemical communities in East Asia to be officially admitted to the IUPAC: The Chemical Society Located in Taipei in 1959, the Korean Chemical Society in 1963, and the Chinese Chemical Society in 1979. East Asia’s position in the IUPAC is the outcome of a rather long historical process.


Significance It is the only country in South-east Asia with a large-scale nuclear plant, although this was never loaded with fuel. Other countries in the region have tentative plans to develop nuclear power programmes. Impacts The current absence of nuclear power programmes will help avert the diversion of capital from renewable energy development in the region. South-east Asian countries with small, non-power reactors, built for research, will try to maintain these facilities. Across the region, the need for electricity grid investment will increase as more decentralised generation sources are deployed.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 598-611 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph MacKay

Abstract International relations (IR) has seen a proliferation of recent research on both international hierarchies as such and on historical IR in (often hierarchical) East Asia. This article takes stock of insights from East Asian hierarchies for the study of international hierarchy as such. I argue for and defend an explanatory approach emphasizing repertoires or toolkits of hierarchical super- and subordination. Historical hierarchies surrounding China took multiple dynastic forms. I emphasize two dimensions of variation. First, hierarchy-building occurs in dialogue between cores and peripheries. Variation in these relationships proliferated multiple arrangements for hierarchical influence and rule. Second, Sinocentric hierarchies varied widely over time, in ways that suggest learning. Successive Chinese dynasties both emulated the successes and avoided the pitfalls of the past, adapting their ideologies and strategies for rule to varying circumstances by recombining past political repertoires to build new ones. Taken together, these phenomena suggest new lines of inquiry for research on hierarchies in IR.


2017 ◽  
pp. 26
Author(s):  
Edward W. Choi

While regional actors in the East Asian higher education sphere share a history of collaboration, they implement regionalization schemes largely based on different needs, goals, timetables, and customs. This piece presents a summary of key regionalization efforts and intitial indications for a path forward.


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. E4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shervin Rahimpour ◽  
Michael M. Haglund ◽  
Allan H. Friedman ◽  
Hugues Duffau

Lesion-symptom correlations shaped the early understanding of cortical localization. The classic Broca-Wernicke model of cortical speech and language organization underwent a paradigm shift in large part due to advances in brain mapping techniques. This initially started by demonstrating that the cortex was excitable. Later, advancements in neuroanesthesia led to awake surgery for epilepsy focus and tumor resection, providing neurosurgeons with a means of studying cortical and subcortical pathways to understand neural architecture and obtain maximal resection while avoiding so-called critical structures. The aim of this historical review is to highlight the essential role of direct electrical stimulation and cortical-subcortical mapping and the advancements it has made to our understanding of speech and language cortical organization. Specifically, using cortical and subcortical mapping, neurosurgeons shifted from a localist view in which the brain is composed of rigid functional modules to one of dynamic and integrative large-scale networks consisting of interconnected cortical subregions.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yang Xu ◽  
Barbara Claire Malt ◽  
Mahesh Srinivasan

One way that languages are able to communicate a potentially infinite set of ideas through a finite lexicon is by compressing emerging meanings into words, such that over time, individual words come to express multiple, related senses of meaning. We propose that overarching communicative and cognitive pressures have created systematic directionality in how new metaphorical senses have developed from existing word senses over the history of English. Given a large set of pairs of semantic domains, we used computational models to test which domains have been more commonly the starting points (source domains) and which the ending points (target domains) of metaphorical mappings over the past millennium. We found that a compact set of variables, including externality, embodiment, and valence, explain directionality in the majority of about 5000 metaphorical mappings recorded over the past 1100 years. These results provide the first large-scale historical evidence that metaphorical mapping is systematic, and driven by measurable communicative and cognitive principles.


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