Reviving musical indigeneity : institutionalization, transmission, and revival of Taiwan’s aboriginal music

This dissertation studies the revival of Taiwan’s Aboriginal music motivated by the emergence of a strong Aboriginal consciousness during the last three decades. This revivalism has been stimulated in part by government initiatives to foster diversity in the national arts, by the changing economies of Aboriginal musical performance, and by the Aboriginal communities’ emerging commitment to musical-cultural preservation. Instead of framing revival as a mere counterhegemonic move of returning to an “authentic tradition” with a long history, this research argues that Aboriginal music revival is a contemporary phenomenon of constructing or reimagining the musical past enacted in discursive, performative, and institutional efforts. By emphasizing the articulation of musical indigeneity, this dissertation teases out the processes and multiple ways practitioners respond to the state and engage in the specific aspects of revived music in relation to their adaptations, interpretations, and cultural choices. My dissertation links the study of Aboriginal music revival to recent literature related to affect, critical organology, and language revitalization, focusing on several essential phenomena of Aboriginal music revival: (1) the institutionalization and the state’s heritage projects of Paiwan nose flutes (lalingedan) and mouth flutes (pakulalu) that have reinforced a particular thoughtful sorrow as a core aesthetic symbol of the Paiwan; (2) the craftsmanship of Paiwan flute making and playing that are central to the transformation of the Paiwan soundscape and changing state’s heritage projects, and; (3) the emerging movement of Aboriginal mother-tongue songwriting that participated in a wider revalorization of the “local” in Taiwan’s music industry, with a particular focus on Paiwan songwriters. Through a close examination of affective, material, and vocal dimensions of Aboriginal Paiwan music, this study aims to provide an alternative mode to reexamine the naturalized connections to the ancient past and bounded reification of identities occurring in music revival. I argue that the examination of these dimensions of music contributes to the understanding of diverse manifestations of Aboriginal music and how certain aspects of local musical practices attain new importance as core values for revival.Musi

Project RISE: Recognizing Industrial Smoke Emissions

Industrial smoke emissions pose a significant concern to human health. Prior works have shown that using Computer Vision (CV) techniques to identify smoke as visual evidence can influence the attitude of regulators and empower citizens to pursue environmental justice. However, existing datasets are not of sufficient quality nor quantity to train the robust CV models needed to support air quality advocacy. We introduce RISE, the first large-scale video dataset for Recognizing Industrial Smoke Emissions. We adopted a citizen science approach to collaborate with local community members to annotate whether a video clip has smoke emissions. Our dataset contains 12,567 clips from 19 distinct views from cameras that monitored three industrial facilities. These daytime clips span 30 days over two years, including all four seasons. We ran experiments using deep neural networks to establish a strong performance baseline and reveal smoke recognition challenges. Our survey study discussed community feedback, and our data analysis displayed opportunities for integrating citizen scientists and crowd workers into the application of Artificial Intelligence for social good.Comment: Technical repor

Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Field of Orthopedics

During the COVID-19 pandemic, countries all over the world suffered from different kinds of service disruption or reduction in the field of orthopedics with or without lockdowns. The consequences include no restriction, partial disruption, overburden of medical services and complete shutdown of clinical practices. This chapter systematically reviews the current published literature on the global impact of COVID-19 on the field of orthopedics through multiple aspects, including educational impact, service volume impact, workload impact, personal practice change, psychological impact, and impact on orthopedic research. The rates of all surgeries and elective surgeries decreased by 15.6%–49.4% and 43.5–100%, respectively. The overall impact was attributable to the staff redeployment in response to the pandemic. Therefore, it is important to maintain a flexible allocation of manpower and more sufficient and reservable staffing measures in case of emergency staff shortages. Orthopedic surgeons are suggested to prepare proper preventive strategies and set up special equipment and places for regular telemedicine for virtual consultations or virtual teaching. It can be expected that the integration of the different experiences of global countries from the impact of COVID-19 may help us to face possible similar impacts in the future

Disordered Fe vacancies and superconductivity in potassium-intercalated iron selenide (K2-xFe4+ySe5)

The parent compound of an unconventional superconductor must contain unusual correlated electronic and magnetic properties of its own. In the high-Tc potassium intercalated FeSe, there has been significant debate regarding what the exact parent compound is. Our studies unambiguously show that the Fe-vacancy ordered K2Fe4Se5 is the magnetic, Mott insulating parent compound of the superconducting state. Non-superconducting K2Fe4Se5 becomes a superconductor after high temperature annealing, and the overall picture indicates that superconductivity in K2-xFe4+ySe5 originates from the Fe-vacancy order to disorder transition. Thus, the long pending question whether magnetic and superconducting state are competing or cooperating for cuprate superconductors may also apply to the Fe-chalcogenide superconductors. It is believed that the iron selenides and related compounds will provide essential information to understand the origin of superconductivity in the iron-based superconductors, and possibly to the superconducting cuprates

Major interventions are associated with survival of out of hospital cardiac arrest patients - a population based survey

Background. The overall survival rate of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) in Taiwan or even in the whole of Asia is relatively low. Major interventions, such as target temperature management (TTM), coronary artery angiography, and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), have been associated with better patient outcome. However, studies in Taiwan revealing evidence of the benefits of these interventions are limited. Methods. A population-based study used an 8-year database to analyze overall survival and risk factors ˝among OHCA patients. All adult non-trauma OHCA patients were identified through diagnostic and procedure codes. Hospital survival and return of spontaneous circulation (ROSC) were primary and secondary outcomes. Logistic regression and Cox regression analyses were conducted. Results. There was a relationship between major interventions (including TTM, coronary artery angiography, and ECMO) and better hospital survival. Age, income, major interventions, and acute myocardial infarction history were associated with hospital survival. The adjusted hazard ratios (HRs) were 0.406 (95% CI, 0.295 to 0.558), 1.109 (95% CI, 1.027 to 1.197), 1.075 (95% CI, 1.002 to 1.154), 1.097 (95% CI, 1.02 to 1.181) and 0.799(95% CI, 0.677 to 0.942) for patients with major interventions, age≥50, medium low and low income, middle income, and acute myocardial infarction history, respectively. Conclusion. This population-based study in Taiwan revealed that older age (≥50), medium low and low income were associated with a lower rate of survival. Major interventions, including TTM, coronary angiography, and ECMO, were related to better survival

Knowledge-Enriched Visual Storytelling

Stories are diverse and highly personalized, resulting in a large possible output space for story generation. Existing end-to-end approaches produce monotonous stories because they are limited to the vocabulary and knowledge in a single training dataset. This paper introduces KG-Story, a three-stage framework that allows the story generation model to take advantage of external Knowledge Graphs to produce interesting stories. KG-Story distills a set of representative words from the input prompts, enriches the word set by using external knowledge graphs, and finally generates stories based on the enriched word set. This distill-enrich-generate framework allows the use of external resources not only for the enrichment phase, but also for the distillation and generation phases. In this paper, we show the superiority of KG-Story for visual storytelling, where the input prompt is a sequence of five photos and the output is a short story. Per the human ranking evaluation, stories generated by KG-Story are on average ranked better than that of the state-of-the-art systems. Our code and output stories are available at https://github.com/zychen423/KE-VIST.Comment: AAAI 202