Non-Centricity and Apathy: An Introduction to Hong Kong Literature

Hong Kong literature, with particular historical and social factors, can be regarded as a non-centric literary form. While the majority of Hong Kong people speaks Cantonese as their mother tongue, they are required to write in Mandarin. Additionally, Hong Kong literature struggles to attract attention from an apathetic audience, to produce local writers, and to resonate with foreign readers. As serious literature continues to lose its purchase, more and more writers attempt to break out from this predicament and inject new blood into this fading industry. Efforts include circumventing traditional constraints and incorporating more colloquial Cantonese into various publications, as well as a mushrooming of internet novels. Unfortunately, Chinese education remains rigid and inflexible, hindering students’ ability to use writing as a creative outlet. Literature is also heavily commodified. In light of this, I suggest that reading be encouraged and literature be de-commodified. Hong Kong literature, with its distinctive features and strengths, have the potential to thrive. All it needs is sufficient support from the government, the private sector and the general public.         &nbsp

Prediction Markets: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Prediction markets (PM) have drawn considerable attention in recent years as a tool for forecasting events. Studies surveying and examining relevant the trends of PM using traditional approaches have been reported in the literature. However, research using meta-analysis to review Prediction markets systems is very limited in Management Information System (MIS). This paper aimed to fill this gap by using Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) method to study Prediction markets trends over the past decades. Our results are as follows. First, we find that shows that more than 64% of academic studies on Prediction markets are published in top journals such as Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Journal of Consumer Research and Information Systems Research. Second, we showed that Prediction markets applications can be can be divided into two groups: internal use PMS and general public usage. Finally, our significant meta-analysis result show that on average prediction markets is 79% more accurate than alternative forecast methods based

Ambient Sound Helps: Audiovisual Crowd Counting in Extreme Conditions

Visual crowd counting has been recently studied as a way to enable people counting in crowd scenes from images. Albeit successful, vision-based crowd counting approaches could fail to capture informative features in extreme conditions, e.g., imaging at night and occlusion. In this work, we introduce a novel task of audiovisual crowd counting, in which visual and auditory information are integrated for counting purposes. We collect a large-scale benchmark, named auDiovISual Crowd cOunting (DISCO) dataset, consisting of 1,935 images and the corresponding audio clips, and 170,270 annotated instances. In order to fuse the two modalities, we make use of a linear feature-wise fusion module that carries out an affine transformation on visual and auditory features. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments using the proposed dataset and approach. Experimental results show that introducing auditory information can benefit crowd counting under different illumination, noise, and occlusion conditions. The dataset and code will be released. Code and data have been made availabl

Bauhinia Rhapsody : the literary journal of Lingnan University 2018-2019

Editor\u27s Note The Lingnan Literary Journal itself, the book you have now in your hands, is a work of Lingnan University students. That which we write and leave behind is how we communicate with the future, and it is in this way that the students of Lingnan, here during the 2018-2019 academic year, will continue to have impact long after they have left the campus here in Tuen Mun, nestled against the foothills of Hong Kong’s mountains. The work you see here is that of my own students, from either of my two classes, Arts, Creative Writing & Journalism, taught in the Fall and Spring of my time here, and Journalism Principles & Social Media, taught only in the Spring. Save for Mary Garcia who designed the covers, the editorial team came from my Fall class. There is also the writing and visual efforts of students I have never met in person, but which spoke to all of us. Others I met along the way at numerous events on campus, engaging them in conversation and asking them to submit their work. The team also recruited, through passive means like posters, and through setting up tables on campus. Still other constributions came from Professor Ingham’s class, gifting us with interesting intertextual work based on songs and poems, a favorite method of his for inspiring his students’ creativity. Mike’s deep desire to engage with his students, in and out of the classroom, was also something that inspired me to always try to give more and reach out to students across the spectrum at Lingnan. I believe through my efforts and the efforts of so many others, the journal as you see it now represents a broad range of Lingnan’s diverse student body, locals and exchange students alike.https://commons.ln.edu.hk/eng_studentjournal/1003/thumbnail.jp

Adaptive reuse of heritage architecture and its external effects on sustainable built environment—Hedonic pricing model and case studies in Hong Kong

The integration of the sustainable development perspective into the discussion of heritage conservation by UNESCO in 2015 represents an acknowledgement of the values of heritage conservation in the agenda of sustainable development. This paper aims to provide empirical evidence regarding how heritage conservation fits into the overall sustainable development in Hong Kong by examining the external effects generated by architectural heritage conservation onto their adjacent neighborhood. By two adaptive reuse heritage case studies with respective hedonic pricing analysis on their adjacent property prices, this paper presents the results of how residential property prices have been increased as a result of heritage adaptive reuse. The analysis suggests that an established heritage grading mechanism along with a socially inclusive conservation approach with community stakeholders not only maintains the authenticity of the cultural heritage, but also brings substantial social and economic benefits to the neighboring communities. The research findings add new knowledge

(Ultra)Minor Comics? Opening Up the History of (Post-)Yugoslav and Bulgarian Comics to Outsiders

The last decade saw the publication of more and more monographs (partially) devoted to the history of comics (and/or graphic novels) in smaller or larger geographical/cultural areas around our globe. In this article I first focus on what – if anything – (the relevant chapters in) several of these books tell their readers about the history of comics in the former Republic of Yugoslavia and its successor states, and in Bulgaria, the other Slavic country on the Balkan Peninsula. In doing so, I discuss a (‘Cold War’) misperception about East European comics. In the second part, I probe the usefulness of extending the application range of the terms ‘minor [literatures]’ and ‘ultraminor [literatures]’ to the field of comics, whereupon I put forward some suggestions on how future contributions – scholarly and other – to the cultural transmission or opening up of the history of (post-)Yugoslav and Bulgarian comics, as well as those of countries/nations/language areas with comparable traditions, could look like

VCGAN: Video Colorization with Hybrid Generative Adversarial Network

We propose a hybrid recurrent Video Colorization with Hybrid Generative Adversarial Network (VCGAN), an improved approach to video colorization using end-to-end learning. The VCGAN addresses two prevalent issues in the video colorization domain: Temporal consistency and unification of colorization network and refinement network into a single architecture. To enhance colorization quality and spatiotemporal consistency, the mainstream of generator in VCGAN is assisted by two additional networks, i.e., global feature extractor and placeholder feature extractor, respectively. The global feature extractor encodes the global semantics of grayscale input to enhance colorization quality, whereas the placeholder feature extractor acts as a feedback connection to encode the semantics of the previous colorized frame in order to maintain spatiotemporal consistency. If changing the input for placeholder feature extractor as grayscale input, the hybrid VCGAN also has the potential to perform image colorization. To improve the consistency of far frames, we propose a dense long-term loss that smooths the temporal disparity of every two remote frames. Trained with colorization and temporal losses jointly, VCGAN strikes a good balance between color vividness and video continuity. Experimental results demonstrate that VCGAN produces higher-quality and temporally more consistent colorful videos than existing approaches.Comment: Submitted Major Revision Manuscript of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM