The music industry and popular song in 1930s and 1940s Shanghai, a historial and stylistic analysis

In 1930s and 1940s Shanghai, musicians and artists from different cultures and varied backgrounds joined and made the golden age of Shanghai popular song which suggests the beginnings of Chinese popular music in modern times. However, Shanghai popular song has long been neglected in most works about the modern history of Chinese music and remains an unexplored area in Shanghai studies. This study aims to reconstruct a historical view of the Shanghai popular music industry and make a stylistic analysis of its musical products. The research is undertaken at two levels: first, understanding the operating mechanism of the ‘platform’ and second, investigating the components of the ‘products’. By contrasting the hypothetical flowchart of the Shanghai popular music industry, details of the producing, selling and consuming processes are retrieved from various historical sources to reconstruct the industry platform. Through the first level of research, it is found that the rising new media and the flourishing entertainment industry profoundly influenced the development of Shanghai popular song. In addition, social and political changes and changes in business practices and the organisational structure of foreign record companies also contributed to the vast production, popularity and commercial success of Shanghai popular song. From the composition-performance view of song creation, the second level of research reveals that Chinese and Western musical elements both existed in the musical products. The Chinese vocal technique, Western bel canto and instruments from both musical traditions were all found in historical recordings. When ignoring the distinctive nature of pentatonicism but treating Chinese melodies as those on Western scales, Chinese-style tunes could be easily accompanied by chordal harmony. However, the Chinese heterophonic feature was lost in the Western accompaniment texture. Moreover, it is also found that the traditional rules governing the relationship between words and the melody was dismissed in Shanghai popular songwriting. The findings of this study fill in the neglected part in modern history of Chinese music and add to the literature on the under-explored musical area in Shanghai studies. Moreover, this study also demonstrates that against a map illustrating how musical products moved from record companies to consumers along with all other involved participants, the history of popular music can be rediscovered systematically by using songs as evidence, treating media material carefully and tracking down archives and surviving participants

Liquid biopsy genotyping in lung cancer: ready for clinical utility?

Liquid biopsy is a blood test that detects evidence of cancer cells or tumor DNA in the circulation. Despite complicated collection methods and the requirement for technique-dependent platforms, it has generated substantial interest due, in part, to its potential to detect driver oncogenes such as epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutants in lung cancer. This technology is advancing rapidly and is being incorporated into numerous EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor (EGFR-TKI) development programs. It appears ready for integration into clinical care. Recent studies have demonstrated that biological fluids such as saliva and urine can also be used for detecting EGFR mutant DNA through application other user-friendly techniques. This review focuses on the clinical application of liquid biopsies to lung cancer genotyping, including EGFR and other targets of genotype-directed therapy and compares multiple platforms used for liquid biopsy

Using Type-2 Fuzzy Models to Detect Fall Incidents and Abnormal Gaits Among Elderly

— June 2012, 11% of the overall population in Taiwan was over the age of 65. This ratio is higher than the average figure for the United Nations (8%) . Critical issues concerning elderly in healthcare include fall detection, loneliness prevention and retard of obliviousness. In this study we design type-2 fuzzy models that utilize smart phone tri-axial accelerometer signals to detect fall incidents and identify abnormal gaits among elderly. Once a fall incident is detected an alarm is sent to notify the medical staff for taking any necessary treatment. When the proposed system is used as a pedometer, all the tri-axial accelerometer signals are used to identify the gaits during walking. Based on the proposed type-2 fuzzy models, the walking gaits can be identified as normal, left-tilted, and right-tilted. Experimental results from type-2 fuzzy models reveal that the accuracy rates in identifying normal walking and fall over are 92.3% and 100%, respectively, exceeding what are obtained using type-1 fuzzy models

Counteracting Phishing Page Polymorphism: An Image Layout Analysis Approach

Abstract. Many visual similarity-based phishing page detectors have been developed to detect phishing webpages, however, scammers now cre-ate polymorphic phishing pages to breach the defense of those detectors. We call this kind of countermeasure phishing page polymorphism. Poly-morphic pages are visually similar to genuine pages they try to mimic, but they use different representation techniques. It increases the level of difficulty to detect phishing pages. In this paper, we propose an effective detection mechanism to detect polymorphic phishing pages. In contrast to existing approaches, we analyze the layout of webpages rather than the HTML codes, colors, or content. Specifically, we compute the sim-ilarity degree of a suspect page and an authentic page through image processing techniques. Then, the degrees of similarity are ranked by a classifier trained to detect phishing pages. To verify the efficacy of our phishing detection mechanism, we collected 6, 750 phishing pages and 312 mimicked targets for the performance evaluation. The results show that our method achieves an excellent detection rate of 99.6%.

A Blueprint for Applications in Enterprise Information Portals

Electronic Commerce (E-Commerce, EC) is thoroughly changing business models of organizations (governments, corporations, and communities) and individuals the way of living and working. However, the major success will accrue to those companies that are willing to transform their organizations and business processes, which is the scope of e-Business. An Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) provides real time information and integrated applications to knowledge workers, employees, customers, business partners and the general public as well. Effective applications of EIP facilitate high quality strategic decisions. That is, an EIP can enhance an organization’s productivity, improve the collaboration to facilitate E-Commerce and gain competitive advantages. However, the EIP solutions are usually too expensive to small businesses. With Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) approach, this paper presents an economic way to design a low-cost EIP that leverages existing systems. Moreover, a prototype is implemented to show the feasibility. For the external data access, the web mining technology is utilized to mine some relevant and valuable web contents from the Internet and put these contents into the document warehouse. By combining the textual information inside the document warehouse and the numeric data from the data warehouse, competitive advantages can be provided over those who work with just the numbers