No book to call one’s own: Perspectives on translation and literary creation in Francesca Duranti’s The House on Moon Lake

Francesca Duranti ’s prize-winning novel The House on Moon Lake (La casa sul lago della luna, 1984) has been hailed by various critics as an intriguing concoction of reality and illusion. However , the story ’s main dichotomy seems to be between translation as frustrated desire for possession, and original writing as more fulfilling ownership of the text. The fact that even the possession of a text on the part of its author ultimately proves to be ephemeral does not chan ge the image of translation with which Duranti presents the reader: a mechanical transfer of words, a cowardly, unimagi-native anta gonist to ‘true’ literary creation. This essay examines the ways in which this portrayal is carried out in the text, and its implications in a per-spective on translation that perpetuates notions of weakness and passivity as its defining characteristics.

Sustainable Sports Tourism Performance Assessment Using Grey-Based Hybrid Model

The development of sports tourism is gaining momentum around the world, with many tourism industries combining sports events and programs to attract more domestic and overseas customers to promote economic and culture. Sustainability awareness has been gaining attention from many international organizations, resulting in the rise of sports tourism that incorporates sustainability. Therefore, the development of a valid and applicable sustainable sports tourism (SST) assessment model is an important task. In this study, a hybrid Multiple Attribute Decision-Making (MADM) model is proposed to measure the development performance of SST. The aims of this study include developing a SST assessment framework, identifying the mutual influential relationships among attributes, generating attribute influence weights, and calculating the performance of the evaluated items. The proposed model is divided into three stages. First, a cause-and-effect diagram is generated using the Grey Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (GDEMATEL) to describe the interactions and feedback among the attributes. Then, the GDEMATEL-based Analytic Network Process (GDANP) is applied to generate the influence weights of the attributes and their rankings. Finally, the expanded Probability-based Grey Relational Analysis (expanded PGRA) was applied to calculate the performance of the evaluated items and to determine the gap between evaluated items and the aspiration level. This study improves the original PGRA technique by introducing the concept of aspiration level into the PGRA calculation process, thereby replacing the traditional concept of “relative satisfaction” with “aspiration level”. In addition, the expanded PGRA can assess a single rated item without being limited to at least two items. We used the Sun Moon Lake Scenic Area in Taiwan as a model demonstration. The results show that the top three attributes that need to be strengthened are disease prevention and treatment, local social welfare and protection, and sports diversity. In the Sun Moon Lake, intersection control should be set up to ensure the health status of visitors and local residents. In addition to epidemic prevention, more measures and behaviors should be developed to deal with tourism diseases. We suggested that subsidies be provided to local residents to rebuild the fences around their homes to avoid disturbances caused by the influx of tourists. Moreover, the local government can create more sports events with special characteristics that can attract tourists to come again and again.

High-resolution records of anthropogenic activity and geohazards from the reservoir of Sun Moon Lake, Central Taiwan

Sun Moon Lake is the first dam reservoir constructed in Taiwan with the capability of generating hydroelectricity satisfying the whole Taiwan need during the Japanese colonial period since 1934 CE. Now, the Sun Moon Lake is one of the biggest hydropower stations in Taiwan and has become an important touring area. During World War II (1944–1945 CE), the hydroelectric power plant at Sun Moon Lake was bombed by the U.S. air force, which caused severe damage to the dam structure. More recently, the dam structure was also damaged during the 1999 CE Chi-Chi earthquake whose epicenter is nearby in the Nantou County. A suite of cores were taken from both Sun Lake and Moon Lake, and two selected cores, Sun 2–1 and SM 16 4–3, from Sun Lake were detailed studied with multiple analyses, including X-ray imaging, magnetic susceptibility, visible spectrophotometry, X-ray fluorescence (XRF) scanning, and mineral analysis. We discovered that the increase of Ca content in the sediments not only clearly indicates when the dam was constructed at Sun Moon Lake but also records evidence of structure repairs after both the World War II bombing and the Chi-Chi earthquake. Additionally, the yellow turbidite, X-ray image, and low-Ca signals in Core Sun 2–1 strongly correlate to the typhoon events that caused severe floods in the watershed of Zhuoshui River. The turbidite layers caused by the 1963 Gloria Typhoon are also characterized by conspicuous high peak of Fe/Mn in both cores. This study shows that XRF scanning results are useful for recognition of human activity and for high precipitation event correlation. Moreover, the appearance of charcoal layers shows evidence of forest burning and slash-and-burn activities by humans during the past 4,000 years back to the Middle Neolithic Age.

Estimation of Hourly Rainfall during Typhoons Using Radar Mosaic-Based Convolutional Neural Networks

Taiwan is located at the junction of the tropical and subtropical climate zones adjacent to the Eurasian continent and Pacific Ocean. The island frequently experiences typhoons that engender severe natural disasters and damage. Therefore, efficiently estimating typhoon rainfall in Taiwan is essential. This study examined the efficacy of typhoon rainfall estimation. Radar images released by the Central Weather Bureau were used to estimate instantaneous rainfall. Additionally, two proposed neural network-based architectures, namely a radar mosaic-based convolutional neural network (RMCNN) and a radar mosaic-based multilayer perceptron (RMMLP), were used to estimate typhoon rainfall, and the commonly applied Marshall–Palmer Z-R relationship (Z-R_MP) and a reformulated Z-R relationship at each site (Z-R_station) were adopted to construct benchmark models. Monitoring stations in Hualien, Sun Moon Lake, and Taichung were selected as the experimental stations in Eastern, Central, and Western Taiwan, respectively. This study compared the performance of the models in predicting rainfall at the three stations, and the results are outlined as follows: at the Hualien station, the estimations of the RMCNN, RMMLP, Z-R_MP, and Z-R_station models were mostly identical to the observed rainfall, and all models estimated an increase during peak rainfall on the hyetographs, but the peak values were underestimated. At the Sun Moon Lake and Taichung stations, however, the estimations of the four models were considerably inconsistent in terms of overall rainfall rates, peak rainfall, and peak rainfall arrival times on the hyetographs. The relative root mean squared error for overall rainfall rates of all stations was smallest when computed using RMCNN (0.713), followed by those computed using RMMLP (0.848), Z-R_MP (1.030), and Z-R_station (1.392). Moreover, RMCNN yielded the smallest relative error for peak rainfall (0.316), followed by RMMLP (0.379), Z-R_MP (0.402), and Z-R_station (0.688). RMCNN computed the smallest relative error for the peak rainfall arrival time (1.507 h), followed by RMMLP (2.673 h), Z-R_MP (2.917 h), and Z-R_station (3.250 h). The results revealed that the RMCNN model in combination with radar images could efficiently estimate typhoon rainfall.

Moon Lake’s Orphans and “The Other Way to Live”

This essay examines the roles the character Easter in “Moon Lake” plays in the context of early-twentieth-century debates about the roots of poverty and society’s level of responsibility to poor children. By placing the focus of the story not on Easter but on the genteel Morgana girls’ shifting attitudes about her, Welty illustrates the ways child welfare policy was shaped by conflicting attitudes, whereby sympathy for innocent children coexisted with scorn for their parents. Assuming that Easter lives outside the boundaries that mark their own places in Morgana’s gendered, class-bound, and racially-segregated society, Jinny Love Stark and Nina Carmichael imagine the “orphan” to embody a womanhood untethered by race or rank, one, perhaps, more representative of American democracy. Ultimately, though, the girls come to see that Easter’s status as an orphan makes her more marked by and vulnerable to the violence and oppression that shape the South’s racial patriarchy.