The cultural politics of introducing popular music into China's music education

Since embarking on its course of economic reform and opening up to the world in the late 1970s, China has moved from a planned economy to a socialist-market economy; the resulting social and cultural changes have been many, and are reflected in the country's school music curriculum. This paper first introduces the historical background of popular music in the community and in school music in China in the 20th century. Second, it explores the reformation of music education that has, from the turn of the millennium, included popular music in school music education. This is followed by a discussion of the integration of popular music into the school curriculum in terms of how music education and cultural politics are shaped by the social and political relationships between (1) contemporary cultural and social values and traditional Chinese ideologies; (2) collectivism and individualism; and (3) nationalism and globalism. It is argued that, despite the introduction of popular music and the emphasis put on it in some areas of school music education, the Chinese state still uses traditional Chinese culture and values to enhance its legitimacy and consolidate its authority. © 2012 Taylor & Francis.postprin

Inductance calculations of printed windings of power transformers using partial inductance method

The method of printed windings of transformer-windings are printed on a printed circuit board (PCB) and all windings are embedded in a stack of these PCBs is a promising way in controlling the windings' shape and air spacing in a fixed pattern; it eliminates the parameter variations in a great deal. The partial inductance method gives an easy and accurate approach to calculate loop inductance by the generalised partial inductance, which is derived from dividing the whole loop into finite length of elements. Self and mutual inductance are the summation of inductance contributed from individual elements. This is useful in predicting the leakage inductance which has been the most undesirable parameter in PWM converter. And this method can also be applied to transformers in resonant converters in which inductances have to be accurately controlled.published_or_final_versio

Design and analysis of discontinuous mode series resonant converter

This paper aims at designing a low power, off-line, high efficiency, complex in size, twin-capacitors half-bridge series resonant converter. It gives steps by steps design procedures of the discontinuous mode series resonant converter starting from power stage circuit design to feedback loop control design. The small signal analysis is based on the injected-absorbed current method.published_or_final_versio

Challenges to globalisation, localisation, and Sinophilia in music education: a comparative study of Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Taipei

In the past, the music curricula of Hong Kong (HK), Mainland China and Taiwan have focused on Western music, but with the advent of music technology and the new tripartite paradigm of globalisation, localisation and Sinophilia this has begun to change. Hong Kong, Shanghai and Taipei share a common historical culture and their populations are mainly Chinese, but their recent socio-political experiences have been diverse. This paper aims to explore the secondary school cultures of Hong Kong, Shanghai and Taipei by examining the similarities and differences between their musical practices and the ways in which they have delineated this tripartite paradigm. Data are drawn from questionnaires completed by 5,133 students (1,750 from HK, 1,741 from Shanghai, and 1,642 from Taipei) attending grades 7 to 9 and interviews with their 46 music teachers between March and August 2004. The survey data show that students from the three communities much prefer Western classical and popular music to their respective forms of local traditional music and to traditional Chinese styles. Though most music teachers recognise the importance of teaching traditional Chinese music, local traditional music, and other world music in schools, they believe that it is difficult to teach different types of music in the classroom. This article argues that globalisation is leading to a common cosmopolitan culture of Western musical learning in school; the emergence of traditional Chinese music, local music, and socio-political movements challenge globalisation in school music education.published_or_final_versio

Music education in China: In search of social harmony and Chinese nationalism

This article critically examines how interactions between social changes, social harmony, and historical memory shape school music education in China. As a historical review and documentary analysis, it traces the historical development of music education and examines the Chinese government's role in such interactions over time. The article argues that the Chinese government uses music and music education as an influential nation-building system to enrich the politics of memory. In particular, it adapts the nation's past for political ends, and passes on state-prescribed values to its citizens with a view to legitimising its power. The dynamics and dilemmas that challenge school education result from two divergent aims: (1) to combine the functional education of Confucianism and nationalism so as to encourage social harmony and maintain national myths; and (2) to encourage popular and other world music with traditional Chinese music by using multicultural teaching strategies in music lessons. The question remains how to balance ideas of social harmony, musical cultures and nationalism in school music education in the contexts of current Chinese education policies, teacher education and the globally oriented economics of China today. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011.published_or_final_versio

A visual model for subband image coding

In this paper, we propose a visual model for the general subband coding system. This model is a generalization of Watson's visual model for DCT. Based on this model, a new perceptual distortion is proposed which can be used together with an efficient bit allocation algorithm to determine the quantizer stepsizes of subband coders. Simulation results and subjective viewing tests demonstrate that the proposed approach is very effective in improving the subjective quality of the encoded image at low bit rate.published_or_final_versio

Domestic violence against pregnant women: The role of healthcare professionals

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Designing JPEG quantization matrix using rate-distortion approach and human visual system model

Towards the Knowledge Millennium, IEEE International Conference on Communications Proceedings, Montreal, Canada, 8-12 June 1997JPEG is an international standard for still image compression. The JPEG baseline algorithm allows users to supply the custom quantization table and Huffman table to control the compression ratio and the quality of the encoded image. Methods for determining the quantization matrix are usually based on i) rate-distortion theory and ii) spatial masking effects of the human visual system. In [2], Wu and Gersho proposed a recursive algorithm for generating picture-adaptive quantization tables based on rate-distortion approach but the complexity of the encoding algorithm is rather high. In this paper, we propose improvements to the Wu-Gersho's algorithm and a new bit allocation algorithm. Simulation results show that our new algorithm is superior to the Wu-Gersho's algorithm in terms of speed and peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR). Moreover, by incorporating the Human Visual System (HVS), our proposed coder can encode images with better visual quality.published_or_final_versio

A novel soft-switching double modulation converter (DMC)

This paper introduces a new and simple power converter topology by which both the amplitude and the duty cycle are modulated to achieve soft switching characteristic in a standard half bridge configuration. This novel double modulation power converter (DMC) is able to provide zero voltage switching and nonpulsating input ripple current. Constant switching frequency, simple control and gate drive circuit makes the DMC an ideal power converter to fill the low to medium power application gap in which the soft switching phase modulation method is costly to apply. The DMC is also applicable to full bridge circuits for higher power output. An offline 1 MHz 50 W DMC is built which demonstrates the high efficiency and the compactness of the power converter.published_or_final_versio

Determination of the visibility thresholds for subband image coding

IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, Hong Kong, China, 9-12 June 1997In this paper, a method to determine the visibility thresholds for a given subband system is introduced. Our approach identifies the important worse case combination of the quantization error in each basis function and determine the corresponding visibility thresholds using results previously measured in the DCT domain. Using the proposed method, it is relatively simple to determine the visibility thresholds for any subband system in the YCrCb domain. Simulation results on the Lapped Orthogonal Transform (LOT) show that the visibility thresholds are useful in visually lossless coding and perceptual weighted quantization.published_or_final_versio