Asianism in Korea’s politics of identity

Abstract

This article examines Korea’s politics of identity in the form of Asianism in the modern period, especially since Korea’s incorporation into the modern world system in the late nineteenth century. Asianism, and regionalism generally, has become a salient policy strategy for the current South Korean government. However, Asianism has been a primary ideological current in modern Korea whose most recent incarnation should be understood in the larger historical context. This study traces the development of Asianism in four different periods: precolonial, colonial, Cold War, and post‐Cold War. Initially emerging as a bulwark against Western encroachment, the Asianism narrative became irrelevant upon Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910 and only survived as a discourse about a glorified cultural past during colonial rule. Upon liberation, Asianism rescinded as the Japan‐centered regional order was replaced by a new Cold War alignment, capitalist (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) versus communist (China and North Korea). Although discussion about Asianism and a new East Asian regional order have recently resurfaced, the historical legacy of colonialism, war, and national division has added much complexity to the debate. Explicating how the Asianism narrative emerged and evolved through these various historical contexts sheds light on the complexities and difficulties inherent in the current attempt to forge an Asian regional order. By looking at Asianism from a historical perspective, we can also better appreciate the continuity and discontinuity in Korea’s politics of identity. While it is still uncertain what the foundation of a new Asianism will be, it is equally obvious that regional interactions will continue to be an important part of the global world order. This study concludes with policy implications of how a historically sensitive understanding of the development of an Asian regional identity can further interaction and integration of East Asian nations.     

The construction of national identity in South Korea and the tradition of masculinity in Korean Abstract Painting

ABSTRACT

Korean Modern Art History began to be produced in the 1970s, when Western Modernist Art History, based on Formalism, was introduced as a matrix to map the ‘evolution’ of 20th century Korean Art. Korean modern art history is based in the same paradigm as the West, beginning with Impressionism and ‘ending’ with Abstract Expressionism. First introduced to the country from the West immediately after the Korean War, Korean Abstract Expressionism is now deemed as South Korea’s ultimate ‘progressive’ and ‘modern’ art form, a ‘Korean’ painting style combining the Western art form with traditional artistic concepts of ‘Scholarly Painting’ (muninhwa). Japanese‐influenced painting styles originating in the colonial period (1910–45) are rejected as ‘non‐authentic.’ The problem is that Scholarly Painting was a gender and class specific art born from the rigid Confucian culture of pre‐modern Korea, and thus its revival as an ‘ultimate modern’ and ‘Korean’ form has the consequence of locating traditionally‐gendered notions of art and artist at the core of the South’s modern art. This essay uses a Semiotic approach to deconstruct this gendered modernist rhetoric by tracing the emergence of the sign ‘Koreaness’ in South Korean modern art, showing how it is defined within Korean Abstract Painting as an ‘ultimate Korean sign’ and how its use of anti‐Japanese rhetoric covers up the traumatic history of the Korean War.     

Estimation fusion of nonlinear cost functions with application to multisensory Kalman filtering

This paper focuses on four fusion algorithms for the estimation of nonlinear cost function (NCF) in a multisensory environment. In multisensory filtering and control problems, NCF represents a nonlinear multivariate functional of state variables, which can indicate useful information of the target systems for automatic control. To estimate the NCF using multisensory information, we propose one centralized and three decentralized estimation fusion algorithms. For multivariate polynomial NCFs, we propose a simple closed-form computation procedure. For general NCFs, the most popular procedure for the evaluation of their estimates is based on the unscented transformation. The effectiveness and estimation accuracy of the proposed fusion algorithms are demonstrated with theoretical and numerical examples.     

Schema and constraints-based matching and merging of Topic Maps

In this paper, we propose a multi-strategic matching and merging approach to find correspondences between ontologies based on the syntactic or semantic characteristics and constraints of the Topic Maps. Our multi-strategic matching approach consists of a linguistic module and a Topic Map constraints-based module. A linguistic module computes similarities between concepts using morphological analysis, string normalization and tokenization and language-dependent heuristics. A Topic Map constraints-based module takes advantage of several Topic Maps-dependent techniques such as a topic property-based matching, a hierarchy-based matching, and an association-based matching. This is a composite matching procedure and need not generate a cross-pair of all topics from the ontologies because unmatched pairs of topics can be removed by characteristics and constraints of the Topic Maps. Merging between Topic Maps follows the matching operations. We set up the MERGE function to integrate two Topic Maps into a new Topic Map, which satisfies such merge requirements as entity preservation, property preservation, relation preservation, and conflict resolution. For our experiments, we used oriental philosophy ontologies, western philosophy ontologies, Yahoo western philosophy dictionary, and Wikipedia philosophy ontology as input ontologies. Our experiments show that the automatically generated matching results conform to the outputs generated manually by domain experts and can be of great benefit to the following merging operations.     

The Effect of the Most-Attractive-Distractor Location on Multiple-Choice Item Difficulty

Abstract

The arrangement of response options in multiple-choice (MC) items, especially the location of the most attractive distractor, is considered critical in constructing high-quality MC items. In the current study, a sample of 496 undergraduate students taking an educational assessment course was given three test forms consisting of the same items but the positions of the most attractive distractor varied across the forms. Using a multiple-indicators–multiple-causes (MIMIC) approach, the effects of the most attractive distractor's positions on item difficulty were investigated. The results indicated that the relative placement of the most attractive distractor and the distance between the most attractive distractor and the keyed option affected students’ response behaviors. Moreover, low-achieving students were more susceptible to response-position changes than high-achieving students.     

Incremental Beliefs,STEM Efficacy and STEM Interest Among First-Year Undergraduate Students

Journal of Science Education and Technology - Low retention rates of undergraduate students in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields are a persistent problem in the USA....     

Orthographic consistency and individual learner differences in second language literacy acquisition

This study investigated whether orthographic consistency and individual learner differences including working memory (WM), first language (L1) background, and second language (L2) proficiency affect Chinese L2 learners’ literacy acquisition. Seventy American college students in beginning or intermediate Chinese classes participated in a character learning-and-reading experiment, and completed WM tasks and an L2 proficiency test. In the learning phase of the experiment, participants were asked to master 18 unfamiliar Chinese characters of three levels of consistency—consistent, semi-consistent, and inconsistent. Then in the transfer test of the experiment, participants read 60 novel, artificial characters analogous to the learned characters. Significant consistency effects for learning and reading new characters were found, with no effects of WM and L1. In particular, an interaction effect between consistency and L2 proficiency found in the learning phase indicated that participants with higher L2 proficiency learned the fully consistent characters better and faster than those with lower proficiency. These results suggest that L2 proficiency facilitates awareness of consistency, enabling learners to learn novel characters faster and more accurately. The findings of this study are compared with the character acquisition of beginning L1 Chinese readers and with L2 learners’ acquisition of other types of characters.     

Parent-, teacher-, and self-rated motivational styles in ADHD subtypes

The motivational styles of 25 children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, combined type (ADHD/C), 13 children with ADHD, inattentive type (ADHD/IA), and 25 nondiagnosed controls (NC) were compared using parent, teacher, and self-ratings. Both ADHD subtypes demonstrated motivational impairment characterized by a preference for easy work, less enjoyment of learning, less persistence, and a greater reliance on external than on internal standards to judge their performance relative to NC. Some motivational style differences between ADHD subtypes were also revealed, with the ADHD/C group more motivated by competitiveness and a desire to be perceived as superior to others and the ADHD/IA group less uncooperative and possibly more passive in their learning styles. When IQ was statistically controlled, these results were generally unchanged. The contributing role of motivational deficits to the generally poor academic functioning of children with ADHD is discussed, along with potential intervention implications of the divergent motivational styles of different ADHD subtypes.     

Metacognitive development and moving away

It is now largely accepted that social and cultural factors have a significant impact on cognitive development in children. Piaget acknowledged the impact of social factors and peer interaction on cognitive development. However, there has been relatively little work on the impact of social and cultural factors on the development of metacognition in first‐year university students. Using the Learning and study strategies inventory (LASSI) as a measure of metacognition, this study samples first‐year undergraduates in Hong Kong (N = 1815) and identifies significant differences in metacognitive abilities between students living in their home environment and those who have moved away from their family and, in some cases, culture, to pursue undergraduate education.     

Using relief texture for interactive and tangible virtual environments

This paper first introduces a way to improve interactivity with high polygon count virtual objects through the ＂mixed＂ use of image-based representation within one object. That is, both 3D polygonal and image-based representations are maintained for an object, and switched for rendering depending on the functional requirement of the object. Furthermore, in order to reduce the popping effect and provide smooth and gradual transition during the object representation switch, the object is subdivided with the subdivided parts possibly represented differently, i.e., using 3D models or images. As for the image-based representation, the relief texture （RT） method is used. In particular, through the use of the mixed representation, a new way called TangibleScreen is proposed to provide object tangibility by associating the image-based representation with a physical prop （projecting the RTs） in a selective and flexible way. Overall, the proposed method provides a way to maintain an interactive frame rate with selective perceptual details in a large-scale virtual environment, while allowing the user to interact with virtual objects in a tangible way.