1,651 research outputs found
Envisioning future bodies: Choy Ka Fai’s experimental practice at the interface of choreography, media art and archival processes
No full textBerlin-based Singaporean dance and multimedia artist Choy Ka Fai experiments with digital mapping, the storage and transmission of choreography and Asian spiritual dance practices. He has built a comprehensive and growing archive of recorded choreographies from artistic, spiritual, folkloric, and pop cultural contexts. It includes avatars of dancers, field and video recordings of dances and rituals and interviews with various protagonists. Choy Ka Fai explores altered and expanded corporeal states and the relationships between bodies and both worldly and spiritual phenomena. In his work, organic, material and data-based bodies appear side by side on an equal level and futuristic and queer potentials of human and digital bodies are made visible.
In conversation with Lucie Ortmann Choy Ka Fai emphasises the fundamental importance of the practise of archiving for his work. He talks about his methods of showing and sharing his extensive, collected and created material in constantly new formats, ranging from performance, video installation, lecture to digital games, and how he continues to develop it further. He also reflects on the challenging processes of transferring and translating spiritual practises and dance cultures to different contexts and audiences
Envisioning future bodies: Choy Ka Fai’s experimental practice at the interface of choreography, media art and archival processes
No full textBerlin-based Singaporean dance and multimedia artist Choy Ka Fai experiments with digital mapping, the storage and transmission of choreography and Asian spiritual dance practices. He has built a comprehensive and growing archive of recorded choreographies from artistic, spiritual, folkloric, and pop cultural contexts. It includes avatars of dancers, field and video recordings of dances and rituals and interviews with various protagonists. Choy Ka Fai explores altered and expanded corporeal states and the relationships between bodies and both worldly and spiritual phenomena. In his work, organic, material and data-based bodies appear side by side on an equal level and futuristic and queer potentials of human and digital bodies are made visible.
In conversation with Lucie Ortmann Choy Ka Fai emphasises the fundamental importance of the practise of archiving for his work. He talks about his methods of showing and sharing his extensive, collected and created material in constantly new formats, ranging from performance, video installation, lecture to digital games, and how he continues to develop it further. He also reflects on the challenging processes of transferring and translating spiritual practises and dance cultures to different contexts and audiences
Envisioning future bodies: Choy Ka Fai’s experimental practice at the interface of choreography, media art and archival processes
No full textBerlin-based Singaporean dance and multimedia artist Choy Ka Fai experiments with digital mapping, the storage and transmission of choreography and Asian spiritual dance practices. He has built a comprehensive and growing archive of recorded choreographies from artistic, spiritual, folkloric, and pop cultural contexts. It includes avatars of dancers, field and video recordings of dances and rituals and interviews with various protagonists. Choy Ka Fai explores altered and expanded corporeal states and the relationships between bodies and both worldly and spiritual phenomena. In his work, organic, material and data-based bodies appear side by side on an equal level and futuristic and queer potentials of human and digital bodies are made visible.
In conversation with Lucie Ortmann Choy Ka Fai emphasises the fundamental importance of the practise of archiving for his work. He talks about his methods of showing and sharing his extensive, collected and created material in constantly new formats, ranging from performance, video installation, lecture to digital games, and how he continues to develop it further. He also reflects on the challenging processes of transferring and translating spiritual practises and dance cultures to different contexts and audiences
On a real-time blind signal separation noise reduction system
No full textBlind signal separation has been studied extensively in order to tackle the cocktail party problem. It explores spatial diversity of the received mixtures of sources by different sensors. By using the kurtosis measure, it is possible to select the source of interest out of a number of separated BSS outputs. Further noise cancellation can be achieved by adding an adaptive noise canceller (ANC) as postprocessing. However, the computation is rather intensive and an online implementation of the overall system is not straightforward. This paper intends to fill the gap by developing an FPGA hardware architecture to implement the system. Subband processing is explored and detailed functional operations are profiled carefully. The final proposed FPGA system is able to handle signals with sample rate over 20000 samples per second.</p
Beyond Lesson Studies and Design Experiments: Using theoretical tools in practice and finding out how they work
No full textThis paper aims to illustrate how fruitful insights into the link between school teaching practice and student learning outcomes can be theoretically grounded by the variation theory from the field of phenomenography; and from this framework demonstrate how a 'pedagogy of awareness' can be implemented in the classroom. In this study, five teachers and 162 students at Primary Four level of school education in Hong Kong participated and the practice of the 'learning study' was adopted. By comparing the results of pre- and posttests, a significant gain was observed in the students learning outcomes.
Hyper-parameterization of sparse reconstruction for speech enhancement
No full textThe regularized least squares for sparse reconstruction is gaining popularity as it has the ability to reconstruct speech signal from a noisy observation. The reconstruction relies on the sparsity of speech, which provides the demarcation from noise. However, there is no measure incorporated in the sparse reconstruction to optimize on the overall speech quality. This paper proposes a two-level optimization strategy to incorporate the quality design attributes in the sparse solution in compressive speech enhancement by hyper-parameterizing the tuning parameter. The first level involves the compression of the big data and the second level optimizes the tuning parameter by using different optimization criteria (such as Gini index, the Akaike information criterion (AIC) and Bayesian information criterion (BIC)). The set of solutions can then be measured against the desired design attributes to achieve the best trade-off between suppression and distortion. Numerical results show the proposed approach can effectively fuse the trade-offs in the solutions for different noise profile in a wide range of signal to noise ratios (SNR).</p
Conventional radiographs to assess femoroacetabular impingement
No full textFemoroacetabular impingement (FAI) is a pathologic condition of the hip joint in young adults that, if untreated, leads to end-stage osteoarthritis. It is characterized by early pathologic contact between primary osseous prominences of the acetabular rim (so-called pincer FAI) and/or the femoral head-neck junction (cam FAI). Conventional radiographs are often considered normal because classic radiographic signs of osteoarthritis are not present initially. The physician should be aware of the radiographic features for both types of impingement to recognize subtle pathologies
TOM: Why Isn’t Price Enough?
No full textIn an efficient market, differences in quality should be fully reflected in differences in price. This paper examines a highly active residential property market and verifies whether housing attributes can explain time on the market (TOM) in addition to prices. In contrast to the previous literature, only the price ratio and inflation factor are found to be critical in affecting TOM. An interpretation of the results is suggested, along with some directions for future research.TOM, price ratio, inflation factor, physical attribute, time aggregation
Sexlessness among Married Chinese Adults in Hong Kong: Prevalence and Associated Factors
No full textIntroduction. Despite recent media coverage in the topic of sexless marriages in East Asia, population-based studies examining the absence of sexual activity among nonelderly married individuals are scant. Previous studies have not simultaneously examined sociodemographic, physiological, and lifestyle predictors of sexless marriages. Aims. To determine the prevalence of past-year sexlessness and the associated factors among the married Chinese adults in Hong Kong. Methods. An anonymous, population-based telephone survey was conducted on 2,846 married Chinese men and women between the ages of 25 and 59 in Hong Kong. Main Outcome Measures. The prevalence of past-year sexlessness and the associated factors and mental health symptoms were examined. Results. The prevalence of past-year sexlessness between the ages of 25-34 years, 35-44 years and 45-59 years was 5.5, 5.1, and 17.0%, respectively, among married males, and 8.3, 12.4, and 31.6%, respectively, among married females. Older age and poor spousal relationship were associated with sexlessness for females, whereas lack of interest in sex, older age, and lower education were significant factors for males. Married women demonstrated statistically significant associations between sexlessness and poorer mental health indicators, such as lower quality of life and being bothered by the unavailability of a sex partner. Conclusions. Sexlessness is prevalent among certain subgroups of urban Chinese couples in Hong Kong, and the large discrepancy in sexlessness between married men and women in each age strata suggests a high prevalence of extramarital relationships. Contrary to commonly held beliefs, there was a stronger association between sexlessness and poorer psychosocial symptoms among married females than males. Sexless marriages are an underappreciated phenomenon among urban Chinese individuals.</p
A decision-directed adaptive gain equalizer for assistive hearing instruments
No full textAssistive hearing instruments have a significant impact on speech enhancement when the signal-to-noise ratio is low. These instruments are usually developed using the conventional adaptive gain equalizer (AGE), which has low computational complexity and low distortion in real-time speech enhancement. The conventional AGEs are intended to boost the speech segments of speech signals but they are incapable of suppressing noise segments. The overall speech quality of the assistive hearing instruments may be reduced, as the noise segments still cannot be filtered out. In this paper, a decision-directed AGE is proposed for assistive hearing instruments. It aims to overcome the limitation of the conventional AGE, which is capable only of boosting speech segments in noisy speech but incapable of suppressing noise segments. The proposed approach simultaneously boosts the speech segments and suppresses noise segments in noisy speech. Experimental results with different types of real-world noise indicate that the proposed method achieves better speech quality than does the conventional AGE. The resulting method provides an improved functionality for assistive hearing instruments
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