Mindfulness‐Based Design Practice (MBDP): A Novel Learning Framework in Support of Designers within Twenty‐First‐Century Higher Education

While the interconnected and technological nature of the twenty‐first century can bring about many positive global connections, the importance of prioritising the development of the ‘inner world’ of designers is receiving less attention; similarly, time for contemplation, reflection and stillness is becoming scarcer. This article discusses mindfulness training from the Buddhist perspective, and how it can act as a pathway to personal introspection and as a supportive method for mental illnesses. With a special focus on design education, it discusses a novel framework, Mindfulness‐Based Design Practice (MBDP), and how it can potentially offer opportunities for design students to foster positive mind qualities such as mindfulness, compassion, resilience, and recognising the true nature of phenomena for becoming more ethical designers. Therefore, this article looks to bridge the gap between the significant lack of contemplative mindfulness‐based methods within the higher design education sector and the increasing mental health crisis within that sector. Thus, the primary concern of the MBDP is to advance both the individual and the collective development of the contemporary designer’s mind. Referring to the mind of the designer as the ‘inner designer’, this article forms an unfolding dialogue of the novel framework MBDP in support of mindful learning within twenty‐first‐century design education.     

头孢哌酮/舒巴坦治疗呼吸系统感染175例临床观察

目的观察头孢哌酮/舒巴坦治疗呼吸系统感染的疗效及安全性。方法对2006年1月～2010年12月175例用头孢哌酮/舒巴坦治疗呼吸系统感染的情况进行回顾性研究,总结其疗效及毒副作用。结果头孢哌酮-舒巴坦的用量每日2g～4g,疗程5～18天;用药后3～6.5天体温下降,体温下降率92.0%;白细胞数升高者用药后85.4%降至正常范围,炎性X线征象52.6%消失或明显吸收好转,痰细菌培养阳性者细菌清除率为85.1%;总有效率为86.9%,无效者中有12例为严重粒细胞缺乏;有16例丙氨酸转氨酶短暂升高,余未见其它副作用。结论头孢哌酮/舒巴坦治疗呼吸系统感染安全有疗效。     

初创企业孵化器运营绩效评价的实证研究 ——创业生态系统视角

从创业生态系统视角,运用数据包络方法,对选取的12家初创企业孵化器运营效率进行评价,发现初创企业孵化器存在生态系统资源互补性差、开放共享性差、服务团队专业能力弱等问题,严重影响其效率的提升。从优化生态系统战略布局、优化生态系统能力结构、打造开放兼容的生态服务系统和建立专业品牌名声等方面提出改进措施。     

智能教学系统的自学习机制

本文主要介绍了智能教学系统中的机器自学习机制,研究如何提高智能教学系统的智能性和通用性等方面的问题。文章采用基于信息论的示例学习,改进了决策树学习算法,并建立了机器学习决策树。     

Playing with rules around routines: children making mealtimes meaningful and enjoyable

Children attending early childhood education and care centres spend a lot of time fitting in with institutional routines. This paper uses ethnographic methods and sociocultural activity theory to describe and analyse the processes whereby young children in an early childhood centre collectively created meaning and interest during potentially boring routine mealtimes. The research explores the relationship between rules and children's playful activity. Using their imaginations children negotiated and played with and within the rules around ‘eating‐together’ times. While physically constrained in chairs around tables children enjoyed the freedom of playing with word sounds and meanings. Children actively, collaboratively and at times subversively, created their peer community culture.     

‘Second death’, or revival of the ‘third world’ in the context of neo‐liberal globalization

Abstract

This paper tries to analyze the historical change in the Third World in its emergent stage, in the authoritarian stage and in the current democratic stage and, thereafter, find a way to revive the Bandung spirit in the current globalization context. I define the Bandung spirit as one of a ‘non‐aligned self‐helped “organization against” the dominant powerful countries’; that is, spirit of ‘anti‐predominance’. This spirit has emerged on the base of such domestic orientation and realities as economic self‐reliance, nationally integrated political regime, convergence of the state and civil society around anti‐colonialism. However, according to intensification of the Cold War confrontation on the international level and its centrifugal influence, the early Third World changed to a ‘new’ authoritarian Third World. The Third World in this stage could be characterized by an exclusive authoritarian political regime, dependent‐developmentalist economic orientation and coercively repressed and mobilized, in the top‐down way, civil society. This authoritarian Third World began to be confronted with a strong struggle from the bottom for democratization. In order for democratization of the Third World to become its true revival in the context of globalization, the following tasks should be considered. First, the democratic Third World should be a great driving force for the institutionalization of the transnational public regulatory mechanism. Second, the democratic Third World countries try to go over a kind of ‘transformed’ dependent development strategy. Third, democratization should go along with recovery of political inclusiveness and openness of the state to civil society’s demands. Thereafter, I tried to construct globalist re‐interpretation of the Bandung, by way of conceptualizing the current globalization as imperial globalization, unlike the imperialist globalization which the historical Bandung wanted to confront. I argue that the Bandung spirit of collective self‐help organizations against the newly emerging dominant order should be revived in this worse imperial globalization context. In addition, I argue that a nationalist resistance is also one component of the multiple resistances in the current imperial globalization.     

Made in China: the cultural logic of OEMs and the manufacture of low‐cost technology

Abstract

This paper investigates the conditions of the manufacture of low‐cost technology in China with the examples of ‘pirated’ VCD players, ‘no‐name’ DVD players, and Shenzhen’s development as a techno‐urban city. It emphasizes the significance of the cultural logic of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and argues that the various transformations and deflections that are derived from ubiquitous OEM experiences have gone beyond the original model of an authorized OEM, experiences that are to some extent embodied in the transgression of brand name and patent hegemonies, which are mainly controlled by high technology companies. OEMs have been associated with China’s current imperative and uninhibited development of low‐cost technology capitalism. ‘Made in China’ signifies the production of any product, legal or illegal, for transnational high technology giants or domestic technology manufacturers. Learning to ‘become an OEM’ in China has partly resulted in excessive technological mimesis that may be part of an unauthorized, underground economy that is based on low‐cost technology. Based on the Shenzhen experience, part of this study will show industrial production‐oriented OEM cultures in which illegal operations and counterfeit trade are incorporated, even in city projects that are shared by municipal governments and Chinese technological companies, and undergo spatial restructuring in the development of the economy, consumerism, and urbanism.     

Conceptualizing an East Asian popular culture

Since the 1980s, popular cultural products have criss‐crossed the national borders of East Asian countries, enabling a discursive construction of an ‘East Asian Popular Culture’ as an object of analysis. The present essay is a preliminary attempt to provide some conceptual and analytic shape to this object, delineated by its three constitutive elements of production, distribution and consumption. Each East Asian location participates in different and unequal levels in each of these component processes. Production can either be located entirely in a single geographic location or, alternatively, each of the necessary constituent sub‐processes can be executed from different locations; preference for either arrangement tends to reflect the relative dominance of the production location in exporting its finished products. Consumption and thus consumers are geographically located within cultural spaces in which they are embedded. Meanings and viewing pleasures are generated within the local cultures of specific audience. Conceptually, among the several possible consumption positions, the one in which an audience watches an imported programme is most intriguing. In this viewing position, differences between the cultures of the location of consumption and that of the production location become most apparent. The audience member has to bring his or her own cultural context to bear on the content of the imported product and read it accordingly. In this sense, the cultural product may be said to have crossed a ‘cultural’ boundary, beyond the simple fact of its having been exported/imported into a different location as an economic activity. Such an audience position requires the consumer to transcend his or her grounded nationality to forge abstract identification with the foreign characters on screen, a foreignness that is, in turn, potentially reabsorbed into an idea of (East) ‘Asia’; a potential ‘East Asian identity’, emerging from consumption of popular cultural products, is thus imaginable.