Using Film to Teach about Compressed Modernity in East Asian Religions

Teaching about East Asian religions all too often presents them as artifacts of the premodern past. This can encourage students to assume that modernization has rendered the East Asian past, especially religious traditions, obsolete. Teaching with contemporary East Asian films is a way to remedy that oversight, challenge that assumption, and bring students into contact with East Asian religious cultures as living traditions in modern societies. Since contemporary East Asian societies have been shaped by what Chang Kyung-sup calls “compressed modernity” – a process by which “economic, political, social and/or cultural changes occur in an extremely condensed manner in respect to both time and space,” resulting in “the dynamic coexistence of mutually disparate historical and social elements” such as modernity and tradition (Chang 2010: 320) – films that explore the interplay between such “mutually disparate… elements” can be used as highly teachable “texts” in the classroom. Examples of such films include Jia Zhangke’s Tian zhuding (2013) and Shinkai Makoto’s Kimi no na wa (2016), which juxtapose traditions such as Confucianism, Chinese popular religion, and Shintō with critical views of social reality in contemporary China and Japan, respectively. These and other films depict the ways in which religious traditions continue to inform how contemporary East Asians negotiate and construct identity, memory, and power. Moreover, they show how these countries’ contrasting experiences of compressed modernity produced different kinds of interactions between modernity and tradition, which in turn explains why religion can look so different in these countries today. This paper was part of a panel on “Teaching Asian Religions Through Film” presented at the Association for Asian Studies conference in Honolulu, Hawaii, March 24­–27, 2022. The panel offered concrete examples on how to adopt cinema and TV to discuss Asian religions, culture, and modernity in the classroom and contributed to the developing analysis concerning the use of visual media in Asian studies pedagogy

Voices Obscured in Complex Environmental Settings (VOICES) corpus

This paper introduces the Voices Obscured In Complex Environmental Settings (VOICES) corpus, a freely available dataset under Creative Commons BY 4.0. This dataset will promote speech and signal processing research of speech recorded by far-field microphones in noisy room conditions. Publicly available speech corpora are mostly composed of isolated speech at close-range microphony. A typical approach to better represent realistic scenarios, is to convolve clean speech with noise and simulated room response for model training. Despite these efforts, model performance degrades when tested against uncurated speech in natural conditions. For this corpus, audio was recorded in furnished rooms with background noise played in conjunction with foreground speech selected from the LibriSpeech corpus. Multiple sessions were recorded in each room to accommodate for all foreground speech-background noise combinations. Audio was recorded using twelve microphones placed throughout the room, resulting in 120 hours of audio per microphone. This work is a multi-organizational effort led by SRI International and Lab41 with the intent to push forward state-of-the-art distant microphone approaches in signal processing and speech recognition.Comment: Submitted to Interspeech 201

Skunk River Review September 1989, vol 1 no 1

https://openspace.dmacc.edu/skunkriver/1004/thumbnail.jp

Astronomical Wavefront Sensing with Partially Coherent Beacons

Astronomical adaptive optics (AO) systems and wavefront sensors (WFS) have advanced significantly over the past three decades. However, WFS development has typically focused on coherent or incoherent sources. This work seeks to extend the design and optimization of astronomical WFS to partially spatially coherent sources, such as laser beacons with AO correction, to reduce the beacon size below the limit imposed by atmospheric turbulence. This work develops a theoretical foundation for partially coherent wavefront sensing using Hopkins' formula, leading to a discrete approximation of the Fisher information matrix for a generic class of astronomical WFSs. The derivation provides insight into the degradation in WFS sensitivity due to partial coherence and suggests an approach for mitigating the deleterious effects by limiting interference to include only coherent point pairs in the pupil. The derived numerical approximation also leads to a new technique for simulating partially coherence sources and linear WFSs using the coherent impulse response (CIR) of the WFS and the complex coherence factor of the source, evaluated at the entrance pupil. Because this new simulation approach more directly accounts for the effects of spatial coherence on the detector output, arbitrarily large source sizes can be quickly and accurately modeled. Insights gained by the theoretical work suggest two novel methods for optimizing WFS sensitivity with partially coherent sources: pupil segmentation (PS) and impulse response engineering (IRE). The former method takes the form of a hybrid WFS which pairs pupil subdivision with a high-sensitivity coherent wavefront sensing method to measure the wavefront over each subaperture. The latter method modifies the CIR of the WFS to match the coherence area of the source. Simulation results, using both the new CIR and more traditional Fresnel propagation methods, indicate a significant decrease in the photon-noise gain with each approach. The efficacy of the PS approach is demonstrated using a novel hybrid Shack-Hartmann pyramid WFS setup, while the IRE approach was explored using modifications to a Zernike WFS. The simulation results were further confirmed using a novel software-defined WFS installed on a bench top AO system and used to directly measure the sensitivity of various WFS configurations with an extended beacon simulating a partially coherent source. The bench-level results showed good agreement with the simulation results confirming the validity of the proposed optimization methods for increasing WFS sensitivity with a partially coherent source

Crop yield responses to climate change in the Huang-Huai-Hai Plain of China

Global climate change may impact grain production as atmospheric conditions and water supply change, particularly intensive cropping, such as double wheat-maize systems. The effects of climate change on grain production of a winter wheat-summer maize cropping system were investigated, corresponding to the temperature rising 2 and 5°C, precipitation increasing and decreasing by 15% and 30%, and atmospheric CO2 enriching to 500 and 700ppmv. The study focused on two typical counties in the Huang-Huai-Hai (3H) Plain (covering most of the North China Plain), Botou in the north and Huaiyuan in the south, considering irrigated and rain-fed conditions, respectively. Climate change scenarios, derived from available ensemble outputs from general circulation models and the historical trend from 1996 to 2004, were used as atmospheric forcing to a bio-geo-physically process-based dynamic crop model, Vegetation Interface Processes (VIP). VIP simulates full coupling between photosynthesis and stomatal conductance, and other energy and water transfer processes. The projected crop yields are significantly different from the baseline yield, with the minimum, mean (±standardized deviation, SD) and maximum changes being -46%, -10.3±20.3%, and 49%, respectively. The overall yield reduction of -18.5±22.8% for a 5°C increase is significantly greater than -2.3±13.2% for a 2°C increase. The negative effect of temperature rise on crop yield is partially mitigated by CO2 fertilization. The response of a C3 crop (wheat) to the temperature rise is significantly more sensitive to CO2 fertilization and less negative than the response of C4 (maize), implying a challenge to the present double wheat-maize systems. Increased precipitation significantly mitigated the loss and increased the projected gain of crop yield. Conversely, decreased precipitation significantly exacerbated the loss and reduced the projected gain of crop yield. Irrigation helps to mitigate the decreased crop yield, but CO2 enrichment blurs the role of irrigation. The crops in the wetter southern 3H Plain (Huaiyuan) are significantly more sensitive to climate change than crops in the drier north (Botou). Thus CO2 fertilization effects might be greater under drier conditions. The study provides suggestions for climate change adaptation and sound water resources management in the 3H Plain.Crop model VIP model Crop yield Climate change CO2 fertilization Irrigation Winter wheat Maize Huang-Huai-Hai Plain North China Plain