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.     

Attention-based long short-term memory network using sentiment lexicon embedding for aspect-level sentiment analysis in Korean

Although deep learning breakthroughs in NLP are based on learning distributed word representations by neural language models, these methods suffer from a classic drawback of unsupervised learning techniques. Furthermore, the performance of general-word embedding has been shown to be heavily task-dependent. To tackle this issue, recent researches have been proposed to learn the sentiment-enhanced word vectors for sentiment analysis. However, the common limitation of these approaches is that they require external sentiment lexicon sources and the construction and maintenance of these resources involve a set of complexing, time-consuming, and error-prone tasks. In this regard, this paper proposes a method of sentiment lexicon embedding that better represents sentiment word's semantic relationships than existing word embedding techniques without manually-annotated sentiment corpus. The major distinguishing factor of the proposed framework was that joint encoding morphemes and their POS tags, and training only important lexical morphemes in the embedding space. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted experiments comparing with two baseline models. As a result, the revised embedding approach mitigated the problem of conventional context-based word embedding method and, in turn, improved the performance of sentiment classification.     

Expectation and degrees of freedom for sample variance

Computer simulation can be used to demonstrate why the unbiased sample variance uses degrees of freedom (n−1). This is first demonstrated for sampling from a normal random variable, and in additional simulations for some selected non-normal random variables, namely, chi-square and binomial.     

Using Math Journals to Enhance Second Graders’ Communication of Mathematical Thinking

As an action research project, using mixed methodology, this study investigated how the use of math journals affected second grade students’ communication of mathematical thinking. For this study, math journal instruction was provided. The data gathering included pre- and post- math assessment, students’ math journals, interviews with the students, and teacher’s reflective journal. Findings of the study indicated that the use of math journals positively influenced the students’ communication of mathematical thinking and the use of math vocabulary. Additionally, math journals served as a communication tool between the students and teacher and an assessment tool for the teacher. The implications of this study regarding students’ writing ability and time constraints issues were also discussed.     

Multi-postpath-based lookahead multiconstraint QoS routing

Multiconstraint QoS (quality of service) routing is an essential mechanism for QoS-guaranteed services. Unfortunately, the multiconstraint QoS routing problem is NP-complete. In this paper, we propose a heuristic multiconstraint QoS routing scheme, MPLMR (multi-postpath-based lookahead multiconstraint routing). MPLMR is a routing scheme using an extended shortest-path algorithm. As in previous schemes such as TAMCRA and H_MCOP, MPLMR stores a limited number of subpaths between the source node and each intermediate node, and extends these subpaths toward the destination node. However, MPLMR uses an improved “lookahead” method to estimate the path length of the full path to which each subpath is extended. MPLMR then selects and stores the subpaths that have higher likelihood than other subpaths to be extended to feasible paths. We show via simulation that MPLMR has a smaller probability of missing a feasible path than competing schemes in the literature.     

The effects of message source and fear appeal on young adults’ response to Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) messages in Singapore

This study examines the psychological processes that determine how fear appeal and sponsor type impact young adults’ responses to public campaigns against Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) in Singapore. The results showed that fear appeal in the STD messages increased the level of anger arousal, while the STD messages sponsored by a commercial company versus a government agency increased the level of negative cognitions among participants. The interaction between fear appeal and sponsor type was found in both affective and cognitive responses of psychological reactance against the STD messages.     

Issue competition and presidential debates in multiparty systems: evidence from the 2002, 2007, and 2012 Korean presidential elections

Which issues do political parties emphasize in campaigns? Selecting the issues to emphasize in campaigns is treated with the same importance as policy positioning. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to understanding parties’ strategies of issue competition in presidential elections under multiparty systems. By analyzing statements of presidential candidates in the 2002, 2007, and 2012 Korean presidential debates, we find that presidential candidates use their issue emphasis strategies differently in presidential elections according to party size and ideological relationships with other parties. Specifically, a small party’s candidates have been more likely than mainstream parties’ candidates to pursue their issue ownership advantage. In addition, a mainstream party’s candidates have emphasized the issues of a small party more than those of his own party when the two parties have had a similar ideological foundation, whereas, when there were no such ideological similarities, a mainstream party’s candidate has only focused on issues of the mainstream party. Our results imply that the political communication used by political parties and candidates is conditioned not only by political contexts such as electoral systems or party systems but also by the size and ideology of parties.     

Environmental Education Course Development for Preservice Secondary School Science Teachers in the Republic of Korea

Abstract

In Summer 1996, an opinionnaire survey was used to evaluate the opinions of Korean professors, in earth science education and geology departments, about the science concepts related to environmental issues that might be important for secondary preservice earth science teachers in the Republic of Korea. The opinionnaire contained 63 items within the 14 major topics being considered. It used a 4-choice, Likert-type scale and was completed by 47 professors (response rate = 51%). There was a good coincidence in opinions on major topics to be included. Respondents favored an environmental earth science course that emphasized the “human impact on the environment” rather than “natural environmental hazards.” Also, they favored study of natural hazards that commonly occur in Korea within a context of worldwide natural hazards.