4,180 research outputs found
The politics of fashion: perceptions of power in female clothing and ornamentation as reflected in the sixteenth-century Chinese novel Jin Ping Mei
No full textThis thesis examines issues of female power and influence in sixteenth-century China focusing on how women and their roles were perceived in the changing social environment of the mid-late Ming dynasty. Using aspects of a New Historicist approach, information from contemporary literary and historical sources are analysed alongside each other. With its emphasis on the lives of women and preoccupation with the description of material objects, the late Ming novel Jin Ping Mei forms an important element in the thesis. China in the sixteenth century saw expanding urbanisation, the emergence of a new wealthy merchant class, increasing visibility of women and a questioning of traditional morality. Fashion consciousness, as one of the most conspicuous aspects of the new material culture, is a possible indicator of these trends. Traditional Western theories contend that fashion began in the particular context of Renaissance Europe. However, this study argues that a similar fashion awareness existed in China too, and was manifested in a competitive striving for social status, in this case specifically among women. In contrast to previous studies which downplayed the impact women had on defining traditional Chinese culture, this thesis demonstrates how women and their sartorial choices began to redefine the boundaries of material culture, influencing literati discourse which, in turn, re- influenced female behaviour
The Poetry of Ping-Pong
No full textIn this chapter, the author looks at the poetry of Ping-Pong, his favorite sport. According to Marty Reisman, the game of Ping-Pong died in Bombay, India, in 1952. Reisman, nicknamed “The Needle,” was favored to win the World Table Tennis Championship that day. The author says he has always loved Ping-Pong because you can get into a rhythm, hit the ball back and forth across the net for hours, with any racquet, and simply talk. Ping-Pong, like poetry, is a players' sport, not ideal for spectators. Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, claims that there is palpable humor in the game. With Ping-Pong, the author insists that we are all capable of attuning ourselves to the hidden life of sports, a relationship that is about kinesthesia and embodiment.</p
Ping-Pong-Pang Instrumentation Amplifier
No full textThis thesis describes the implementation of a Precision Instrumentation Amplifier using a Current Feedback Instrumentation Amplifier topology (CFIA). CFIAs are attractive for sensor readout, because of their high CMRR and their ability to interface with ground-referenced sensors. Several chopping and auto-zeroing techniques have been developed to reduce the offset and 1/f noise of such amplifiers to the ?V level. As a result, their dominant source of error is now gain error, which is limited by mismatch to at best 0.1%. This paper describes a CFIA that applies dynamic element matching (DEM) to achieve a gain error of less than 0.04%. Moreover, it presents the first silicon implementation of the ping-pong-pang (PPP) auto-zeroing scheme, which enables a 3.5× reduction in power consumption and 2.5× improvement in gain error as compared to state-of-the-art ping-pong auto-zeroed CFIAs.Electronic InstrumentationMicroelectronics & Computer EngineeringElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc
[[alternative]]Stories, Memories, and Identity－－A Cultural Study of Chia-Yi He-Ping Judo Dojo
No full text[[abstract]]Established in 1961, He-Ping Judo Dojo in Chia-Yi has been a place where outstanding Judo players practice and stay. It has also consecutively achieved seven years championship of the Taiwan Provincial Athletic Games. However, following the death of Mr. Chen Wu-in, who has run He-Ping Judo Dojo for thirty years, the Dojo has stumbled into its low tide. In recent years, pupils of He-Ping have endeavored to search for another place in Chia-Yi to relocate the training hall and to continue its Judo training and popularizing works. As a result, He-Ping Judo Dojo has gradually retained its prosperity.
Basic Judo trainings have always been difficult. However, keen in reviving the honor and achievements of He-Ping Judo Dojo, the pupils willingly undertook the mission of the trainings. This revealed that, in He-Ping Judo Dojo, ‘training’ is not merely a physical matter, but rather, it represents an embodiment of He-Ping’s past dreams and ideals.
There were ‘stories’ filling the spaces of He-Ping Judo Dojo. Some stories belonged to the space itself, and the others were told and spread by people. Nowadays, these stories are also a collective memory of the pupils. The collective memory of the pupils became a platform for identifying themselves and each others. By this, an ‘imagined community’ was formed in spite of the death of Mr. Chen and the disuse of the previous training hall. Collective memories enhance cohesion within the members of He-Ping Judo Dojo. Therefore, members bear in mind the task of preserving He-Ping’s tradition, and the great mission of the revival of its highest peak.
This essay adopted the method of interview to sort out the formation and operation of the culture of He-Ping Judo Dojo in its early days. It also applied the method of ethnography to examine how, after Mr. Chen has passed away, the members of He-Ping ‘recollect the past’ and form a shared memory by eulogizing the stories of the Dojo. Furthermore, the researcher scrutinizes how the ‘identity’, engendered by the collective memory, brings the members together and, at the same time, creates/represents the tradition of He-Ping Judo Dojo in the regenerated training hall. Rituals and ongoing storytelling in He-Ping Judo Dojo connect its new members with past memories. This allows the imagined community of He-Ping to last and exist as they wish.
Keywords: judo, He-Ping Judo Dojo, memory, identity, cultural studies
Sediment Transport Characteristic of the Ping River Basin, Thailand
No full textAbstractThis study examined the river sediment transport characteristics of the Ping River basin, which is one of the major river basins in Thailand. River surveys of the Ping River were carried out nine times between 2011 and 2013. Survey data included river cross sections, flow velocities, suspended sediment concentration, and bed load transport in the river. Analyzes of these data indicated that suspended transport rates in the Ping River during normal flow conditions in 2012-2013 ranged between 107 and 9,562 metric tons/day (mt/d), but increased to 35,300 mt/d during high flooding conditions (Thailand's Great Flood of 2011). The rate of bed load transport was 1,401 mt/d during the Flood of 2011. However, the measured bed load in 2012-2013 varied between 0 and 482 mt/d. The bed-to-suspended load ratio in the Ping River fluctuated in the broad range of 0-2.0. Estimates of total sediment transport in the Ping River were made using some of the classic equations from the hydrologic literature. The results obtained from the different methods show that the Laursen-Copeland formula gives the best estimate of total sediment transport rate of the Ping River compared to other methods. Results from this study also reveal that the Bhumibol Dam, constructed in 1964, has had a significant effect on suspended sediment load reduction downstream of the dam
Author Biographies
No full textAuthor Biographies A-W
Ping-Ann Addo
Filiz Adıgüzel
Jeni Allenby
Philis Alvic...
Wendy Weiss
Lauren Whitley
Michelle Willar
Author Biographies
No full textAuthor Biographies A-W
Ping-Ann Addo
Filiz Adıgüzel
Jeni Allenby
Philis Alvic...
Wendy Weiss
Lauren Whitley
Michelle Willar
Significant Revision Identification between Revised Texts in a Multi-Author Environment
No full text© 2019 Ping Ping TanDespite advancement in collaborative writing tools, the track changes capability remains limited to highlighting syntactic changes, with authors still required to manually read through each of the revisions. We envision a collaborative authoring system where an author could accept all minor edits first and then focus on the substantial changes. The primary goal of this thesis is to develop a computational framework for significant revision identification where paraphrase approaches cannot fully support such identification. An existing taxonomy of revision analysis categorises revisions to surface (i.e. no meaning) and text-base (i.e. meaning) changes, with further categorisation of surface change to formal changes and meaning preserving changes, while textbase change is sub-divided to micro-structure and macro-structure changes. However, the taxonomy lacks details for computational modelling. Through examination of the works in the domain of psycho-linguistics, introspective analysis and feedback from both authors and non-authors on what constitute significant revisions, a conceptual framework for significant revision identification is proposed. An inter-rater agreement of alpha Krippendorff = 0.745 was obtained for the annotation between the authors and non-authors. The core concept of our proposed approach is bi-directional textual entailment assessment. We demonstrated that this concept is computationally feasible by relying on existing textual entailment systems. Our proposed approach is more accurate (micro-averaged F1 = 0.541) compared to several baseline approaches based on edit distance, which are similar to the current track changes capability built in most of the word processors. Computationally identifying significant revisions between two versions of a text document has the potential to improve the revision process in a multi-author environment when multiple revisions are done by different authors
The Hsiang-ping 鄕兵 at the Close of the Northern Dynasty
No full textThe fu-ping 府兵 or provincial guards created in the middle of the sixth century by Western Wei constitute a good material for studying the nature of the Sui and T'ang Dynasties. There are not a few studies on the origin of the fu-ping system. One of the theories is that the fu-ping system sprang up from the provincial guards or militia organized under the leadership of the gentry, i.e., hsiang-ping, and this theory has been causing controversy. The present author, who is inclined to support the hsiang-ping origin of the fu-ping system, discusses the structure of hsiang-ping bands in their historical development. In the critical period of the Northern Wei Dynasty the gentry of north China, who were facing a crisis as a social class, picked up strong people from among the fellow-provincials, and organized them into military organization. Consequently, the relations between the leader and the soldiers were rather free as compared with those in the older ping-hu 兵戸 (military household) system. The hsiang-ping were given certain official ranks according to their capabilities as prescribed by the Northen Wei Government, and this principle was also applied to the lowly who were under the rule of the gentry, leading to a change in a status-bound society where lineage predominated. The gentry who came largely from the clans of noble lineage conceded the increasing demand of the people for lifting social discrimination. This concession on the part of the genntry in turn, resulted in consolidating their own power and paved the way to the birth of the Sui and T'ang aristocracy
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