Shifting place identities in a post-conflict society : irony and multiculturality in Quemoy, Taiwan

ABSTRACT Quemoy is a small island with an area of fifty-eight square miles at the mouth of Xiamen Bay on the southeast coast of China. As a Cold-War front of Taiwan shelled by the Chinese artillery for twenty years, Quemoy is becoming a heritage tourism destination attracting mainland Chinese to sightsee in its military structures. In this study, I examine landscape change in the post-conflict society through the interplay of three social dynamics—reconciliation, demilitarization, and touristification—exploring the cultural mechanism of landscape change and its meaning. Through a review of Quemoy’s history, I identify Quemoy’s geographical characteristics—marginality, cultural hybridity, and islandness—formed and articulated in a repetitive process that I term as the reversal of geographical coordinate system. The reversal coincides with a change of social concerns in the marginal society, whose negotiations with terrestrial and maritime powers direct its engaging front toward the land or the sea, and stimulates distinct human inscriptions in the landscape. Militarization of Quemoy as Chinese Nationalists’ Cold-War front initiated the last reversal, which turned its front toward the mainland China in 1949 and brought forth a military landscape characterized by its rigidity, hierarchy, and pragmatism. Simultaneously, the militarization incurred biopolitical production through militia duty, everyday regulation, combat economy, and battlefield knowledge. As the 1949-reversal is now dissolving under current demilitarization, from reinvention and destruction of military structures I reveal irony in the landscape as a way of cultural demilitarization subverting the significance of the past anticommunist conflicts. Furthermore, by reconstruction of historical landscapes and reinterpretation of symbolic landscapes, Quemoyans (re)localize landscape and jointly engage in a process of homeland construction. The juxtaposition of historical simulacra and reinvented military relics produces heterotopias of a museum island for heritage tourism. Consequently, the production of irony and heterotopias together serves as the cultural mechanism of the current identity reformulation from a battlefield to a heritage tourism destination. Uncovering the mechanism, I then demonstrate that ambiguity and multiculturality emerging from this irony’s multivocality and heterotopia’s multilocality is a cultural strategy of the border island society to negotiate with the post-conflict situation

Using site-specific art as an alternative for interpreting Port Hudson State Historic Park, Louisiana

This study investigates the use of site-specific art as a means of enhancing and interpreting an historic battlefield. The finding of this study are demonstrated in a series of designs for interpretive installations for the Port Hudson State Historic Site, a Civil War battlefield located in Louisiana. The interpretive methods commonly used in historic battlefields today, as identified in chapter two of this thesis, tend to produce remote relationship between visitors of the current generation and the site. To help visitors understand the meaning of historic battlefields batter, site-specific art is introduced in this thesis as an instrument to retrieve the subtle relationship between humans and their land. To employ art as an interpretive in an historic battlefield is a novel experiment in the United States. This study therefore conducts a review of the genre of site-specific art in order to inform readers of its nature. Notable works by contemporary land artists are described, and certain landscape architects\u27 adaptation of site-specific art in historical commemorating are discussed as well. After modes of application of site-specific art are identified, I survey the local history of the study site in order to explore the site specificity of the place through its past patterns of human occupation. The settlements and the Civil War military deployments are both found to have been closely related to local geographic characteristics, demonstrating a high degree of material site-specificity. An ethnography of the Historic Site follows to discover the meanings that the Site\u27s staff and visitors routinely attach to it (immaterial site-specificity). Combing the results of these two studies, the sense of place and the fundamental interpretive subjects of the Site emerge. Several significant spots in the historic site are then selected to demonstrate site-specific art. Through a series of rehabilitative designs, this kind of creative interpretation is shown to be an effective means of conveying the meaning of an historic place to visitors. Applied in conjunction with the existing traditional interpretive methods, site-specific art is thus shown to be effective in bringing a close relationship between the current generation and their legacy of historic battlefields

Smoothed Boundary Method for Solving Partial Differential Equations with General Boundary Conditions on Complex Boundaries

In this article, we describe an approach for solving partial differential equations with general boundary conditions imposed on arbitrarily shaped boundaries. A function that has a prescribed value on the domain in which a differential equation is valid and smoothly but rapidly varying values on the boundary where boundary conditions are imposed is used to modify the original differential equations. The mathematical derivations are straight forward, and generically applicable to a wide variety of partial differential equations. To demonstrate the general applicability of the approach, we provide four examples: (1) the diffusion equation with both Neumann and Dirichlet boundary conditions, (2) the diffusion equation with surface diffusion, (3) the mechanical equilibrium equation, and (4) the equation for phase transformation with additional boundaries. The solutions for a few of these cases are validated against corresponding analytical and semi-analytical solutions. The potential of the approach is demonstrated with five applications: surface-reaction diffusion kinetics with a complex geometry, Kirkendall-effect-induced deformation, thermal stress in a complex geometry, phase transformations affected by substrate surfaces, and a self-propelling droplet.Comment: A better smooth algorithm has been developed and tested, will soon replace Eq. 58 in page 16. We have also developed a level-set moving boundary SBM method, and it will replace the Navier-Stokes-Cahn-Hilliard type domain parameter tracking method in Section 5.

Revisiting the problem of audio-based hit song prediction using convolutional neural networks

Being able to predict whether a song can be a hit has impor- tant applications in the music industry. Although it is true that the popularity of a song can be greatly affected by exter- nal factors such as social and commercial influences, to which degree audio features computed from musical signals (whom we regard as internal factors) can predict song popularity is an interesting research question on its own. Motivated by the recent success of deep learning techniques, we attempt to ex- tend previous work on hit song prediction by jointly learning the audio features and prediction models using deep learning. Specifically, we experiment with a convolutional neural net- work model that takes the primitive mel-spectrogram as the input for feature learning, a more advanced JYnet model that uses an external song dataset for supervised pre-training and auto-tagging, and the combination of these two models. We also consider the inception model to characterize audio infor- mation in different scales. Our experiments suggest that deep structures are indeed more accurate than shallow structures in predicting the popularity of either Chinese or Western Pop songs in Taiwan. We also use the tags predicted by JYnet to gain insights into the result of different models.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of 2017 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP

How does Organic Agriculture Contribute to Sustainable Development? Organic Agriculture in Taiwan

Sustainability issues in agrifood chains are receiving increasing attention. However, few studies have demonstrated the dynamic interrelationships between economic, environmental, and social indicators. Regarding these indicators as components of sustainable development, through sensitivity simulations, we found that (1) organic farming techniques as key to environmental and economic improvement by indirect sales and (2) direct sales channels can strengthen environmental and social benefits. The findings suggest that developing diversified production and sales channels is essential for the sustainable development of organic agriculture to maintain economic, social, and environmental sustainability