Successful Treatment of a Noise Phobia in a Nine‐year‐old Girl with Systematic Desensitisation in vivo

A nine‐year‐old girl with a severe noise phobia was successfully treated in 10 sessions of in vivo desensitisation. Gains were maintained at three month follow‐up.     

Improving English and Chinese Ad-Hoc Retrieval: A Tipster Text Phase 3 Project Report

Both English and Chinese ad-hoc information retrieval were investigated in this Tipster 3 project. Part of our objectives is to study the use of various term level and phrasal level evidence to improve retrieval accuracy. For short queries, we studied five term level techniques that together can lead to good improvements over standard ad-hoc 2-stage retrieval for TREC5-8 experiments. For long queries, we studied the use of linguistic phrases to re-rank retrieval lists. Its effect is small but consistently positive.For Chinese IR, we investigated three simple representations for documents and queries: short-words, bigrams and characters. Both approximate short-word segmentation or bigrams, augmented with characters, give highly effective results. Accurate word segmentation appears not crucial for overall result of a query set. Character indexing by itself is not competitive. Additional improvements may be obtained using collection enrichment and combination of retrieval lists.Our PIRCS document-focused retrieval is also shown to have similarity with a simple language model approach to IR.     

Translation of ‘America’ during the early Cold War period: a comparative study on the history of popular music in South Korea and Taiwan

Abstract

The evaluation of the cold war influences played by the US on the rest of the world should not only be accounted economically and politically, but also culturally. In this paper we see the US influences on South Korea and Taiwan from the value‐laden concept of Americanization and through which we examine comparatively specific practices of domestic popular music development in these two countries. Setting this paper as a historical comparative study, we see the working of Americanization in relation to popular music as a value regime in which American is constructed as an ideal model imaginatively and discursively, which was made possible by economic, social and cultural forces in South Korea and Taiwan. Focusing on the Cold War period, circa 1950s to 1960s, levels and aspects of Americanization were therefore ways of translation, to use Said’s concept of traveling theory analogically; Anglo‐American music genres traveled to these countries to be incorporated contextually as new or trendy conventions of music‐making, which in turn helped form local music genres. The socio‐historical contexts of South Korea and Taiwan, with respect to the presence of American army forces, and similar postwar anti‐communist political forces, in nation‐building (north–south Korea, red China–free China antagonism respectively) are central to our understanding of the visibility of Americanization in different music cultures in these two countries. This paper will go into each country’s historical trajectory of music practices that took Japanese colonial influences up to the postwar time and then blending with Anglo‐American genres in indigenizing that eventually marked their different paths, as we comparatively reveal their institutional, political and national cultural conditions, which were necessary in shaping each country’s music‐making conventions, entertainment business, and consumption cultures of popular music – and that might implicitly inform tentatively the present rivalry between ‘offensive’ Korean Wave and ‘defensive’ Taiwanese ‘rockers’ in the globalization era.     

禮敬譯者悼英譯《紅樓夢》的霍克思

最早見到霍克思的大名David Hawkes是在他所譯的楚辭(Ch'u Tz'u;the Songs of the South,1959)上,在他所譯的杜詩(A Little Primer of Tu Fu,1967)上,最後才是企鵝版<紅樓夢>譯本,陳先生從香港寄到美國给我的.那是上世纪八十年代初.     

TaxoFolk: a hybrid taxonomy–folksonomy classification for enhanced knowledge navigation

Taxonomy is widely used in many of the website and directory navigation schemes for content/knowledge retrieval. However, information or content navigation support through taxonomy is often constrained due to its inability to take into account the full nomenclature and cultural nuances of knowledge seekers. The emergence and increasing adoption of collaborative tagging (social bookmarking) tools have provided lightweight and informal conceptual structures called folksonomies for knowledge retrieval. As for folksonomies, they reflect the vocabulary of the users. Hence, integrating folksonomies into a taxonomy combines the best of the two schemes as the resultant structure enhances taxonomy navigation with personsalisation for knowledge search and retrieval. This paper presents TaxoFolk, an algorithm for deriving hybrid taxonomy-folksonomy classification for enhanced knowledge navigation. The algorithm integrates folksonomy with a taxonomy through several unsupervised data mining techniques with augmented heuristics.     

Disavowing liberalism: recuperating socialist practices within global capitalism

In Liberalism Disavowed, Chua Beng Huat builds on his earlier work on Singapore as a “communitarian democracy” and analyzes three institutions that work coherently to buttress the legitimacy of the ruling People’s Action Party: first, the public housing program that requires the nationalization of land; second, the state capitalism that is profit-driven, market-oriented, professionally managed, and resistant to corruption; and third, the “state multiracialism” that governs an ethnically diverse population. Chua rejects the idea that Singapore’s success rests on authoritarianism and free-market capitalism, as much it has necessitated political repression and outward-oriented economic policies. The three institutions have roots in the Party’s socialist beginnings, shaping the Singapore system indelibly, and they are likely to sustain over generations. Singapore’s disavowal of liberalism is significant in light of the crisis of the Western liberal-democratic order and the rise of right-wing populist nationalism, as well as the political developments in East and Southeast Asia. Hence, its workings and contradictions, and the larger question of recuperating socialist practices within global capitalism, need to be critically evaluated. A salient concern is whether the critique of the liberal conception of the self also entails the avowal of an alternative conception of freedom.     

Demand intensity, market parameters and policy responses towards demand and supply of private supplementary tutoring in China

Based on some longitudinal studies of private tutoring in twelve cities, towns, municipalities and provinces of China, the paper endeavours to depict demand intensity, articulate market parameters and reflect on policy responses towards the demand-supply mechanism of the vast shadowy educational phenomena at primary and secondary levels. Such educational phenomena are so hidden that there is a complete lack of official statistical figures in measuring the full scale of tutoring and identifying tutors in some cases. In Hong Kong and Macao, parents and their schooling children take up responsibilities to consume various types of tutoring without state intervention into quality assurance. In Mainland China, local ministries of education prohibit home tutoring delivered by daytime teachers to their daytime students whilst take a laissez-faire approach towards mass tutorials that run in private business sphere. Lastly, a multi-level societal movement framework is recommended with strategic action plans in school practitioners’ and policy-makers’ perspectives for effectively monitoring or hampering the growth of such shadowy educational phenomena in China.     

Droplet based microfluidic fabrication of designer microparticles for encapsulation applications

Developing carriers of active ingredients with pre-determined release kinetics is a main challenge in the field of controlled release. In this work, we fabricate designer microparticles as carriers of active ingredients using droplet microfluidics. We show that monodisperse droplet templates do not necessarily produce monodisperse particles. Magnetic stirring, which is often used to enhance the droplet solidification rate, can promote breakup of the resultant microparticles into fragments; with an increase in the stirring time, microparticles become smaller in average size and more irregular in shape. Thus, the droplet solidification conditions affect the size, size distribution and morphology of the fabricated particles, and these attributes of the microparticles strongly influence their release kinetics. The smaller the average size of the microparticles is, the higher the initial release rate is. The release kinetics of drug carriers is strongly related to their characteristics. The understanding of this relationship enables the fabrication of tailor-designed carriers with a specified release rate, and even programmed release to meet the needs of applications that require a complex release profile of the active ingredients.