Another Rock, Another Hong Kong Story: Lion Rock from Below and Above

2020 ◽  
pp. 120-148
Author(s):  
Helena Y.W. Wu
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Cultural Currency ◽  
A Site ◽  
High Degree

Chapter 5 brings the book back to the present times. As an actual hill in Hong Kong named after the shape of its ridge, Lion Rock marks its appearance, both physical and textual, in different realities. Meanwhile, Lion Rock still possesses a high degree of cultural currency in today’s Hong Kong. As an emblematic icon since the 1970s, Lion Rock is understood by the local population as a synonym for Hong Kong’s unbeatable spirit, a site of collective memory and a symbol of Hong Kong at large, intersecting cultural representations with real-life scenarios. By tracing the pre-1997 and post-1997 trajectories of Lion Rock, the chapter discusses the experiences of enchantment, disenchantment and re-enchantment in the making of the city’s own myth across generations.

The Hangover after the Handover

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helena Y.W. Wu
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
British Colony ◽  
One Country Two Systems ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Interdisciplinary Study

As a former British colony (1842-1997) and now a Special Administrative Region (from 1997 onwards) practicing the “One Country Two Systems” policy with the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong has witnessed at all times how relations are formed, dissolved and refashioned amidst changing powers, identities and narratives. With an eye to real-life events and cultural representations, the book presents an interdisciplinary study of “local relations” through the lens of the things and places that stand or that have once stood for Hong Kong’s “local”. The book argues that the signification of the local and the constellation of local relations embody the continuous acts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization beyond the political arena and through the cultural and social relations formed between cultural icons and urban dwellers. In its post-handover, post-hangover years where Hong Kong’s local multiples by appearance and connotation as in the 2014 Umbrella Movement and the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill Protests, the book proposes lessons to learn from the city in face of the discourses of nationalism, globalization and localism. As more are to unfold, the book opens up manifold postcolonial perspectives by the agency of both human and nonhuman to confront and interrogate the contemporary experiences—unprecedented since the Cold War era—shared by Hong Kong and the world where established beliefs and systems are continuously challenged in the postmillennial era. After all, what does it mean, or take, to live in post-1997 Hong Kong when the local, global and national are constantly given new meanings?

‘Hong Kong can afford a typhoon or two’: British discussions of revolving storms

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Chi Chi Huang
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Far East ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Significant Element ◽  
The Far East ◽  
Weather Events ◽  
British Press ◽  
The Tropics

Abstract This article examines the way in which the British press reported on typhoons that affected Hong Kong during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Typhoons were a significant element in the narration of the British Empire, featuring frequently in British accounts of their involvements in the Far East, where Hong Kong was its only colony. I suggest that these accounts need to be considered alongside the consolidation of the ‘tropics’ as a region in British perceptions, and in doing so, this article opens discussions of the study of tropicality to the consideration not just of climate, but also of the significance of singular weather events. This article argues that the cultural representations of typhoons in the British press were a tool of ‘othering’. In particular, there were two significant shifts around the 1880s in these reports. First, the term ‘typhoon’ became tied to these types of storms that affected Hong Kong. Second, the stories that were told about typhoon events emphasized British heroism and colonial management. Both these shifts in reporting stripped away the weather wisdom that British sailors had earlier identified in the local population.

The economic analysis of rationality in the tradition of Harvey Leibenstein

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-38
Author(s):  
Ivan V. Rozmainsky ◽  
Yulia I. Pashentseva
Keyword(s):  
Economic Analysis ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Informal Institutions ◽  
External Information ◽  
Urban Residents ◽  
The Future ◽  
Information Constraints ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Market Capitalism

The paper is devoted to the economic analysis of rationality in the tradition of Harvey Leibenstein: the authors perceive rationality as “calculatedness” when making decisions, while the degree of this “calculatedness” is interpreted as a variable. Thus, this approach does not correspond to the generally accepted neoclassical interpretation of rationality, according to which rationality is both full and constant. The authors believe that such a neoclassical approach makes too stringent requirements for the abilities of people. In real life, people do not behave like calculating machines. The paper discusses various factors limiting the degree of rationality of individuals. One group of factors is associated with external information constraints such as the complexity and extensiveness of information, as well as the uncertainty of the future. Another group of factors is related to informal institutions. In particular, the paper states that the system of planned socialism contributes to less rationality than the system of market capitalism. Thus, in the post-socialist countries, including contemporary Russia, one should not expect a high degree of rationality of the behavior of economic entities. The paper mentions, in particular, the factors of rationality caused by informal institutions, such as the propensity to calculate, the propensity to be independent when making decisions and the propensity to set goals. The authors also believe that people who live on their own are usually more rational than people who share a common household with someone else. This assumption is verified econometrically based on data on young urban residents collected by the authors. It turned out that the behavior of people included in this database, in general, corresponds to what the authors believed.

Enforcing Performance: Disciplining Girls in British Co-educational Boarding School Stories, 1928–58

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-138
Author(s):  
CLARE HOLLOWELL
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Boarding School ◽  
Educational Setting ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
School Stories ◽  
School Story ◽  
Girls School ◽  
A Site

This paper examines girls and power in British co-educational boarding school stories published from 1928 to 1958. While feminist scholars have hailed the girls’ school story as a site of potential resistance to constricting gender roles, the same can not be said of the co-educational school story. While the genres share many tropes and characterisation, the move from an all-female world to a co-educational setting allows the characters access to a narrower range of gender roles, and renders the female characters significantly less powerful. The disciplinary structures of the co-educational schools, mirroring those in real life, operate in a supposedly progressive manner that in fact removes girls from access to power.

Reproduction of the Roman snail (Helix pomatia L.) from a local natural population in farm conditions and in a natural habitat

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maciej Ligaszewski ◽  
Przemysław Pol
Keyword(s):  
Natural Population ◽  
Natural Habitat ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Helix Pomatia ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Animal Reproduction ◽  
Snail Helix Pomatia ◽  
June July ◽  
A Site

AbstractThe aim of this study was to compare the quality of clutches and reproduction results of two groups of Roman snails (Helix pomatia) from the same local population, laying eggs simultaneously in semi-natural farm conditions and in a natural habitat. The study material were Roman snails aged 2 or more years which had entered the third phenological season of their life and thus the first season of sexual maturity. Observations were conducted at an earthen enclosure in a greenhouse belonging to the experimental farm for edible snails at the National Research Institute of Animal Reproduction in Balice near Kraków (Poland) as well as at a site where a local population naturally occurs in the uncultivated park surrounding the Radziwiłł Palace. In the June-July season, differences among such parameters as weight of clutch, number of eggs in clutch, mean egg weight, and hatchling percentage when compared to the total number of eggs in the clutch were compared. It was determined that clutches of eggs from the natural population laid in the greenhouse were of lesser weight (P<0.01), contained fewer eggs (P<0.05), and the mean weight of individual eggs was less (P<0.05) than in clutches laid simultaneously in a natural habitat. Both in the greenhouse and the natural habitat, in the first phase of laying eggs (June) the weight of the clutch and number of eggs its contained were greater than in the second phase (July). However, only for snails laying eggs in the greenhouse were these differences statistically significant (P<0.05) and highly significant (P<0.01), respectively. Statistically significant differences were not observed in hatchling percentage between eggs laid in the greenhouse and the natural habitat. The lower number of eggs laid in the farmed conditions of the greenhouse was successfully compensated for by the absence of mass destruction by rodents which occurred in the natural habitat.

CONTEXTUALIZING PALIMPSEST OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY IN AN URBAN HERITAGE SITE: Case Study of Chahar Bagh, Shiraz - Iran

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leila Mahmoudi Farahani ◽  
Marzieh Setayesh ◽  
Leila Shokrollahi
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Active Part ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Urban Heritage ◽  
Heritage Site ◽  
Historical Sites ◽  
A Site ◽  
Historical Centre

A landscape or site, which has been inhabited for long, consists of layers of history. This history is sometimes reserved in forms of small physical remnants, monuments, memorials, names or collective memories of destruction and reconstruction. In this sense, a site/landscape can be presumed as what Derrida refers to as a “palimpsest”. A palimpsest whose character is identified in a duality between the existing layers of meaning accumulated through time, and the act of erasing them to make room for the new to appear. In this study, the spatial collective memory of the Chahar Bagh site which is located in the historical centre of Shiraz will be investigated as a contextualized palimpsest, with various projects adjacent one another; each conceptualized and constructed within various historical settings; while the site as a heritage is still an active part of the city’s cultural life. Through analysing the different layers of meaning corresponding to these adjacent projects, a number of principals for reading the complexities of similar historical sites can be driven.

scholarly journals Design of Optimal Rainfall Monitoring Network Using Radar and Road Networks

Entropy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 378
Author(s):  
Taeyong Kwon ◽  
Seongsim Yoon ◽  
Sanghoo Yoon
Keyword(s):  
Road Networks ◽  
Monitoring Network ◽  
Conditional Entropy ◽  
Radar Data ◽  
Disaster Risk ◽  
Water Levels ◽  
The Road ◽  
Dam Operation ◽  
A Site ◽  
High Degree

Uncertainty in the rainfall network can lead to mistakes in dam operation. Sudden increases in dam water levels due to rainfall uncertainty are a high disaster risk. In order to prevent these losses, it is necessary to configure an appropriate rainfall network that can effectively reflect the characteristics of the watershed. In this study, conditional entropy was used to calculate the uncertainty of the watershed using rainfall and radar data observed from 2018 to 2019 in the Goesan Dam and Hwacheon Dam watersheds. The results identified radar data suitable for the characteristics of the watershed and proposed a site for an additional rainfall gauge. It is also necessary to select the location of the additional rainfall gauged by limiting the points where smooth movement and installation, for example crossing national borders, are difficult. The proposed site emphasized accessibility and usability by leveraging road information and selecting a radar grid near the road. As a practice result, the uncertainty of precipitation in the Goesan and Hwacheon Dam watersheds could be decreased by 70.0% and 67.9%, respectively, when four and three additional gauge sites were installed without any restriction. When these were installed near to the road, with five and four additional gauge sites, the uncertainty in the Goesan Dam and Hwacheon Dam watersheds were reduced by up to 71.1%. Therefore, due to the high degree of uncertainty, it is necessary to measure precipitation. The operation of the rainfall gauge can provide a smooth site and configure an appropriate monitoring network.

scholarly journals 32.L. Workshop: Deconstructing the DALY: step by step guide to calculating YLL and YLD

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (Supplement_5) ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Population Health ◽  
Burden Of Disease ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Estimation Methods ◽  
Years Of Life Lost ◽  
Supporting Evidence ◽  
Methodological Choices ◽  
Multiple Components ◽  
Life Years

Abstract A Burden of Disease (BoD) approach can be used to summarise the debilitating effects of morbidity and premature mortality in a population in a consistent and comparable manner. Summary measures of population health such as the Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY) have become key metrics for quantifying burden of disease. DALYs quantify the health gap between a life lived in perfect health and current health status, as the number of healthy life years lost due to illness (Years Lived with Disability, YLDs) and premature death (Years of Life Lost, YLLs). DALYs combine the effects of morbidity and mortality in an equitable way, and can therefore be used to identify the leading causes of disease or injury that cause BoD and to quantify the relative importance of specific risk factors. BoD studies are becoming an increasingly popular way to assess national and local population health as a means to influence national and local policy decisions. The increasing prominence of the burden of disease approach, however, comes at a cost. Calculations of DALYs involve multiple components and as such can be difficult for people to interpret. Burden of disease methodology is complex and highly data intensive, which has led to major disparities across researchers and nations in their capacity to perform studies, to interpret the soundness of available estimates, or to evidence and advocate for the use of particular methodological choices. In this skills-building seminar, we will give an overview of the methodology of calculating the DALY. It will outline the single steps to be undertaken, and the necessary assumptions that have to be taken, on the way to the calculation of the DALYs. This workshop will be supported by technical presentations from burden of disease experts about different choices of estimation methods to calculate both the fatal burden (YLL) and the non-fatal burden (YLD). Throughout the presentations, cerebrovascular disease will be used as a case study, giving a complete, real-life example of how DALYs are calculated. Overall, the aim is to demonstrate the importance of the choices researchers make when designing and interpreting BoD studies as a means of supporting evidence-based decision making. The workshop will foresee ample time for interaction with the audience and discussion of the implications of the different methodological choices. Key messages Although burden of disease methodology is complex, with calculations of DALYs involving multiple components, simple roadmaps can be created to enhance methodological knowledge. The choices and assumptions researchers make are important when designing and interpreting burden of disease studies.

AN EFFICIENT APPROACH FOR THE THREE-DIMENSIONAL CONTAINER PACKING PROBLEM WITH PRACTICAL CONSTRAINTS

2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (03) ◽  
pp. 279-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
ZHIHONG JIN ◽  
KATSUHISA OHNO ◽  
JIALI DU
Keyword(s):  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Packing Problem ◽  
Utilization Rate ◽  
Benchmark Problems ◽  
Rectangular Container ◽  
Efficient Packing ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Practical Constraints ◽  
Inherent Stability

This paper deals with the three-dimensional container packing problem (3DCPP), which is to pack a number of items orthogonally onto a rectangular container so that the utilization rate of the container space or the total value of loaded items is maximized. Besides the above objectives, some other practical constraints, such as loading stability, the rotation of items around the height axis, and the fixed loading (unloading) orders, must be considered for the real-life 3DCPP. In this paper, a sub-volume based simulated annealing meta-heuristic algorithm is proposed, which aims at generating flexible and efficient packing patterns and providing a high degree of inherent stability at the same time. Computational experiments on benchmark problems show its efficiency.

Memories of Tiananmen

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Lee ◽  
Joseph Man Chan
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Significant Degree ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Wide Range

This book analyzes how collective memory regarding the 1989 Beijing student movement and the Tiananmen crackdown was produced, contested, sustained, and transformed in Hong Kong between 1989 and 2019. Drawing on data gathered through multiple sources such as news reports, digital media content, vigil onsite surveys, population surveys, and in-depth interviews with activists, rally participants, and other stakeholders, it identifies six key processes in the dynamics of social remembering: memory formation, memory mobilization, memory institutionalization, intergenerational transfer, memory repair, and memory balkanization. Memories of Tiananmen demonstrates how a socially dominant collective memory, even one the state finds politically irritable, can be generated and maintained through constant negotiation and efforts by a wide range of actors. While the book mainly focuses on the interplay between political changes and Tiananmen commemoration in the historical period within which the society enjoyed a significant degree of civil liberties, it also discusses how the trajectory of the collective memory may take a drastic turn as Hong Kong's autonomy is abridged. The book promises to be a key reference for anyone interested in collective memory studies, social movement research, political communication, and China and Hong Kong studies.

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