Sounding the Bromance: The Chopstick Brothers' 'Little Apple' music video, genre, gender and the search for meaning in Chinese popular music

This article analyses the music video of ‘Little Apple’ by Wang Taili and Xiao Yang, also known as the Chopstick Brothers, one of China’s most successful productions in 2014, and one that exemplifies certain emerging trends in Chinese popular music more generally. The music video draws on K-pop models but also on Western inspirations (biblical, historical and contemporary) and has proven hard to reduce to a single, definitive narrative or interpretation. The analysis proceeds by introducing the song and its video, in the context of the Chopstick Brothers’ wider work. Its musical structure is presented, leading to questions as to its particular retro aesthetic. This leads to a study of the emergent genre of shenqu (divine song), which is based on notions of virality, epic craziness and the earworm effect, and to which ‘Little Apple’ contributes. The final sections of the article look at the production of gendered positions within the music video— noting that it is a love song sung by one man to another—and examine the public square dance setting where this song has been so widely picked up. Finally, I suggest why it may be that ‘Little Apple’ particularly can open out a space temporarily in which participants can experience a warm sense of human collaboration

New Musicologies, Old Musicologies: Ethnomusicology and the Study of Western Music*

Ethnomusicology currently engages with the study of Western music in two principal ways. On the one hand, there are specific ethnomusicological studies that focus on aspects of Western musical traditions. Examples include Paul Berliner's analysis of improvisation in jazz (1994), Philip Bohlman's study of chamber music as ethnic music in contemporary Israel (1991), and the examinations of music schools and conservatories by Bruno Nettl (1995) and Henry Kingsbury (1988). These works, in and of themselves, offer explicit and direct indication of what an ethnomusicological approach to Western music involves and what manner of insights can be produced thereby. Second, and more diffusely, ethnomusicological research plays into the study of Western music through musicologists' adoption, adaptation, and application of ethnomusicological techniques and concepts: some musicologists have drawn from specific ethnographies of non Western musical traditions, and others have made recourse to the standard texts of ethnomusicological theory and practice (such as Merriam 1964 and Nettl 1983). This article discusses the recent diversification of traditional musicology and the serious consideration by musicologists of ethnomusicological theory and practice

Population history and ecology, in addition to climate, influence human stature and body proportions.

Worldwide variation in human stature and limb proportions is widely accepted to reflect thermal adaptation, but the contribution of population history to this variation is unknown. Furthermore, stature and relative lower limb length (LLL) show substantial plastic responses to environmental stressors, e.g., nutrition, pathogen load, which covary with climate. Thus ecogeographic patterns may go beyond temperature-based selection. We analysed global variation in stature, sitting height and absolute and relative LLL using large worldwide samples of published anthropometric data from adult male (n = 571) and female (n = 268) populations in relation to temperature, humidity, and net primary productivity (NPP). Population history was modeled using spatial eigenvector mapping based on geographic distances reflecting the hypothesized pattern for the spread of modern humans out of Africa. Regression models account for ~ 50% of variation in most morphological variables. Population history explains slightly more variation in stature, sitting height and LLL than the environmental/climatic variables. After adjusting for population history, associations between (usually maximum) temperature and LLL are consistent with Allen's "rule" and may drive similar relationships with stature. NPP is a consistent negative predictor of anthropometry, which may reflect the growth-limiting effects of lower environmental resource accessibility (inversely related to NPP) and/or pathogen load

A Hardware Platform for Wireless Beehive Monitoring

Traditional beehive monitoring systems suffer from many challenges. These monitoring devices are expensive to set up, difficult to implement, and lack cross compatibility with each other. Preexisting beehive monitoring solutions face all of these shortcomings. Our beehive monitoring platform aims to overcome these issues by using inexpensive, off-theshelf, open-source hardware paired with a computer vision machine learning model to accurately monitor the ingress and egress of bees into and out of the hive. This data is presented to the beekeeper in a simple GUI which allows them to track hive activity over time, and by extension, the overall health of the hive. All of the code in this project is open-source while still maintaining a professional look. This enables users to customize it to their needs. However, even if the user has no prior coding experience the proposed solution is easy to setup and run. The final product should alleviate many challenges that other beehive monitoring systems face and should hopefully create a disruption in the beehive monitoring market that would inspire other companies to utilize more cost efficient hardware and open-source software

A trade-off between cognitive and physical performance, with relative preservation of brain function.

Debate surrounds the issue of how the large, metabolically expensive brains of Homo sapiens can be energetically afforded. At the evolutionary level, decreased investment in muscularity, adiposity and the digestive tract allow for a larger brain. Developmentally, high neo-natal adiposity and preferential distribution of resources to the brain provide an energetic buffer during times of environmental stress. Through an experimental design, we investigated the hypothesis of a trade-off involving brain and muscle at the acute level in humans. Mental performance was measured by a free-recall test, and physical performance by power output on an indoor rowing ergometer. Sixty-two male student rowers performed the two tests in isolation, and then again simultaneously. Paired samples t-tests revealed that both power output and mental performance reduced when tested together compared to in isolation (t(61) = 9.699, p < 0.001 and t(61) = 8.975, p < 0.001). Furthermore, the decrease in physical performance was greater than the decrease in mental performance (t(61) = -2.069, p = 0.043). This is the first investigation to demonstrate an acute level trade-off between these two functions, and provides support for the selfish brain hypothesis due to the relative preservation of cognitive function over physical power output. The underlying mechanism is unclear, and requires further work

P2_2 Complexity in popular music

This paper looks at how self organisation can apply to the music industry. Two data sets, one of the 2010 UK top 100 and another of the UK top 60 ever are explored. These data sets are grouped by frequency, and plotted. It is found they largely obey a power law, and the reasons and implications of this relation are discussed

P2_8 How radioactive is a banana?

This paper assesses how radioactive a banana is and whether this is harmful. It is found that only a small percent of the total potassium in a banana is radioactive, and this small percent poses absolutely no risk to a person. It is found that a person would have to consume over 37 billion bananas to cause any risk of death, and that even surrounded by bananas, it would take over a billion to cause any harm

Human energetic stress associated with upregulation of spatial cognition

Objectives: Evolutionary life history theory has a unique potential to shed light on human adaptive capabilities. Ultra-endurance challenges are a valuable experimental model allowing the direct testing of phenotypic plasticity via physiological trade-offs in resource allocation. This enhances our understanding of how the body prioritizes different functions when energetically stressed. However, despite the central role played by the brain in both hominin evolution and metabolic budgeting, cognitive plasticity during energetic deficit remains unstudied. Materials: We considered human cognitive plasticity under conditions of energetic deficit by evaluating variability in performance in three key cognitive domains. To achieve this, cognitive performance in a sample of 48 athletes (m = 29, f = 19) was assessed before and after competing in multiday ultramarathons. Results: We demonstrate that under conditions of energetic deficit, performance in tasks of spatial working memory (which assessed ability to store location information, promoting landscape navigation and facilitating resource location and calorie acquisition) increased. In contrast, psychomotor speed (reaction time) remained unchanged and episodic memory performance (ability to recall information about specific events) decreased. Discussion: We propose that prioritization of spatial working memory performance during conditions of negative energy balance represents an adaptive response due to its role in facilitating calorie acquisition. We discuss these results with reference to a human evolutionary trajectory centred around encephalisation. Encephalisation affords great plasticity, facilitating rapid responses tailored to specific environmental conditions, and allowing humans to increase their capabilities as a phenotypically plastic species