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表演可觀未掩瑕: 粵劇《章臺柳》觀後
No full text談戲論文之前，先請大家做一個心理測驗：若是生逢亂世，未婚妻被人擄去，自己無力救援，嘆恨不已。其後未婚妻逃回相見，你會怎樣？ 喜極而泣，重修舊好？不顧一切，帶她遠走高飛？慨嘆有緣無分，覆水難收？抑或責難對方忘情負義？
上市公司如何應對負面消息: 中國閩中食品與中國西部水泥的比較 How does listed company handles negative news? China Minzhong Food vs West China Cement
No full text針對上市公司的負面消息可構成公司股價數百萬元計的損失，甚至影響上市公司的生死存亡。本章將比較兩家上市公司對危機的不同應對所得出天淵之別的後果
The excitement of conducting research and the practical implications
Get PDFProf Halpern is a Medical Doctor in Internal Medicine & Allergy/Immunology, a Commander in the French National Order of the Mérite Agricole, and an outside consultant for the World Health Organisation. He is an expert of environment public health issues, psychopharmacology and positive role of pleasure. In his keynote speech, Prof Halpern will share his experience of conducting applied research in the past decades
New energy efficient routing algorithm for Wireless Sensor Network
Get PDFEnergy efficiency is the most challenging topic in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Because of the increasing demands of various applications, and the constraints of energy, memory and computational power of the WSN nodes, many studies have focused on these areas in recent years. Researchers have proposed a variety of protocols such as LEACH, PEGASIS, HEED, TEEN, etc.
In this paper, we will discuss how energy efficiency is affected by scaling, i.e. different network sizes, and by different routing algorithms. With the increasing applications of large scale WSNs, such as smart grid and environmental monitoring. We will propose a new routing algorithm to optimize the energy efficiency by reducing the number and total transmissions distance in order to save energy. Simulations suggest that the proposed algorithm will be more energy efficient in medium to large scale wireless sensor networks
Educational affordances of a Facebook group: a user survey of Hong Kong undergraduate students
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War and peace: perceptions of Confucius Institutes in China and USA
No full textThis paper presents perceptions of China’s Confucius Institute project held by different stakeholders in China and the USA. A number of studies have been published in each place since the first establishment of Confucius Institutes in 2004, but there has not been a comparative study to date. The study, which draws on media reports related to significant milestones in the development of Confucius Institutes, shows that, in the USA, the institutes are viewed with a considerable degree of ambivalence. They are attractive for universities seeking engagement with China, but also seen as a threat to academic freedom. Domestically, Confucius Institutes are perceived as a way to soften China’s international image and to promote the Chinese language and culture, although some concerns have been raised about the cost and transparency of the initiative. The paper highlights the controversial aspects of the institutes and outlines some of the challenges facing China in making the strategy effective
Nineteenth-century Canton gardens and the east-west plant trade
No full textWhile much scholarship has focused on the impact of Chinese gardens and garden philosophy in the West during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the reverse -- the influence of Western garden concepts and practices in China -- has been little studied. Yet, as a result of growing trade in Chinese plants and botanical images from East to West, ideas about the value of plants and the role of gardens in China also changed. This can be seen most clearly in the port city of Canton (now Guangzhou), which served as the center of East-West trade from the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century.
Before the so-called Canton trade system (1757-1842), gardens in China were invariably private places for cultivation of the mind, reflecting the gentlemanly interest in shanshui (landscape). But following extensive East-West trade and dialogue on plants and gardens, early-nineteenth-century Canton saw the rise of the new type of garden, public rather than private, a site of fashionable entertainment where people strolled and shopped amid beds of indigenous plants from across China and exotic plants from other countries. At the same time, with the rise of the merchant class in Canton during the nineteenth century, concepts of private gardens also changed from places of scholarly retreat to social sites connected to the outside world.
In this essay, I first discuss the growing commercial exchange of plants, botanical knowledge, and garden imagery between East and West, focusing on how Western ideas about gardens came to China. I then address the growing commoditization of plants and the resulting new conception of gardens as public sites of popular entertainment and mercantile activity. Finally, I draw attention to the increased openness of private gardens in Canton, where the preferred garden vista became a mercantile scene rather than the rural, agrarian landscapes favored by the Chinese literati..
Book review: Breaking with the past: the maritime customs service and the global origins of modernity in China
No full textBreaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China by Hans van de Ven does indeed break with the past. It breaks with past approaches to modern Chinese history. It breaks with scholarship that neatly compartmentalizes Chinese, British Imperial and Treaty Port history. Instead, it offers an interconnected narrative that addresses the big present-day questions about the origins of China’s new position as a global power. This is answered through a long overdue reinterpretation of the significance of the often overlooked foreign-led state agency, the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (1854–1949).
The book comprises seven chapters, together with an introduction and an epilogue. The introduction explains the significance of the Customs Service as a middle house for Chinese and foreign contact. The author states that the “aim of this study is to write the Customs Service back into the history of modern China and modern globalisation and so, more generally, to bring the foreign back” (5). Its approach to modernity attempts to be alert to its patchwork nature, to its improvisational aspects, and to the fact that what we might see as typically European or Chinese, in reality came about as the two met. He states his argument that the Customs Service was a chameleon because of the hybrid quality personnel it employed. As a “frontier regime” it gave commercial opportunities for advancement not just to reputable merchants, but also to adventurers, arms dealers, speculators, mercenaries, and sailors.
This book does really break with the past. This break is most noticeable in the author’s treatment of John King Fairbank’s notion of “synarchy.” While acknowledging Fairbank’s status in the historiography of this period, van de Ven does nonetheless revise the overly Orientalist and imperialist perspective that Fairbank had on Chinese history. He writes, Fairbank was naïve about the political context in which the Customs Service operated and did not do what is an imperative for historians: follow the money. He failed to pay sufficient attention to conflicts among foreigners as well as between Chinese officials and Manchu aristocrats. Nor was he sufficiently alert to China’s long history of commercialisation and overseas trade, or of the fact that its officials and merchants often collaborated or that the weak, too, often have some sort of power..