Panel 5 Paper 5.3 Rural Intangible Cultural Heritage and Ethnic Tourism: Experiences of Yunnan, China

China is an active player in the international arena of intangible cultural heritage (ICH). While China is transforming from an agricultural country to an industrial country, rural heritage, either tangible or intangible, is facing tremendous challenges and opportunities. Among Chinese provinces, Yunnan in Southwest of China can be regarded as the best case to investigate the issues of protection, use and transmission of rural heritage as Yunnan is a unique province of China because of its ethnic cultural diversity and geographic diversity. Based on literary studies and fieldworks, this paper illustrates history, cases, theories and practices in the protection and use of ICH in ethnic tourism development in the past 20 years. Yunnan has long been regarded as a “peripheral” part of China and ethnic cultures were treated as “primitive” that needs transformation. However, after China’s reform in 1978, the ethnic culture in rural areas in Yunnan has been changed into traditional and folk culture, cultural heritage (ICH, World Heritage, protected traditional villages and towns, etc) and ethnic tourism attractions. Meanwhile, several rural areas in Yunnan have evolved from a backward area into a popular tourism destination recognised home and abroad. With specific cases in terms of performing arts (dance, music, etc), handicrafts (metal, ceramics, textile, wood carving, etc), festivals and ICH related to cultural spaces (traditional villages, towns, landscapes, etc) in Yunnan, the paper will elaborate how rural ICH is transmitted, and/or re-created in a matrix of tourism commodification with participation of the local governments, entrepreneurs, local elites, community members and tourists. As well as advancing theoretical discussions in regard to authenticity, commodification and continuity, this paper also reflects on the practical strategies in commodifying rural ICH in ethnic tourism

Interpreting The 750 GeV Diphoton Excess Within Topflavor Seesaw Model

We propose to interpret the 750 GeV diphoton excess in a typical topflavor seesaw model. The new resonance X can be identified as a CP-even scalar emerging from a certain bi-doublet Higgs field. Such a scalar can couple to charged scalars, fermions as well as heavy gauge bosons predicted by the model, and consequently all of the particles contribute to the diphoton decay mode of the X. Numerical analysis indicates that the model can predict the central value of the diphoton excess without contradicting any constraints from 8 TeV LHC, and among the constraints, the tightest one comes from the Z \gamma channel, \sigma_{8 {\rm TeV}}^{Z \gamma} \lesssim 3.6 {\rm fb}, which requires \sigma_{13 {\rm TeV}}^{\gamma \gamma} \lesssim 6 {\rm fb} in most of the favored parameter space.Comment: Major changes, 17 pages, 4 figure, typos corrected, calculation details adde

Interpreting the 750 GeV diphoton excess by the singlet extension of the Manohar-Wise Model

The evidence of a new scalar particle $X$ from the 750 GeV diphoton excess, and the absence of any other signal of new physics at the LHC so far suggest the existence of new colored scalars, which may be moderately light and thus can induce sizable $X g g$ and $X \gamma \gamma$ couplings without resorting to very strong interactions. Motivated by this speculation, we extend the Manohar-Wise model by adding one gauge singlet scalar field. The resulting theory then predicts one singlet dominated scalar $\phi$ as well as three kinds of color-octet scalars, which can mediate through loops the $\phi gg$ and $\phi \gamma \gamma$ interactions. After fitting the model to the diphoton data at the LHC, we find that in reasonable parameter regions the excess can be explained at $1\sigma$ level by the process $g g \to \phi \to \gamma \gamma$, and the best points predict the central value of the excess rate with $\chi_{min}^2=2.32$, which corresponds to a $p$-value of $0.68$. We also consider the constraints from various LHC Run I signals, and we conclude that, although these constraints are powerful in excluding the parameter space of the model, the best points are still experimentally allowed.Comment: 19 pages, 3 figure

Intangible cultural heritage safeguarding in the context of tourism: a case study of Lijiang, China

The thesis investigated relations between intangible heritage and tourism in China, through a case study on Lijiang. As well as problematizing conventional understandings of intangible heritage, heritage protection practices and tourism commodification, the thesis also revealed the diversity of understandings and dynamics between government officials, heritage experts and heritage practitioners.<br /

Accurate and Reliable Cancer Classi cation Based on Pathway-Markers and Subnetwork-Markers

Finding reliable gene markers for accurate disease classification is very challenging due to a number of reasons, including the small sample size of typical clinical data, high noise in gene expression measurements, and the heterogeneity across patients. In fact, gene markers identified in independent studies often do not coincide with each other, suggesting that many of the predicted markers may have no biological significance and may be simply artifacts of the analyzed dataset. To nd more reliable and reproducible diagnostic markers, several studies proposed to analyze the gene expression data at the level of groups of functionally related genes, such as pathways. Given a set of known pathways, these methods estimate the activity level of each pathway by summarizing the expression values of its member genes and using the pathway activities for classification. One practical problem of the pathway-based approach is the limited coverage of genes by currently known pathways. As a result, potentially important genes that play critical roles in cancer development may be excluded. In this thesis, we first propose a probabilistic model to infer pathway/subnetwork activities. After that, we developed a novel method for identifying reliable subnetwork markers in a human protein-protein interaction (PPI) network based on probabilistic inference of subnetwork activities. We tested the proposed methods based on two independent breast cancer datasets. The proposed method can efficiently find reliable subnetwork markers that outperform the gene-based and pathway-based markers in terms of discriminative power, reproducibility and classification performance. The identified subnetwork markers are highly enriched in common GO terms, and they can more accurately classify breast cancer metastasis compared to markers found by a previous method

Hopf bifurcations in a reaction-diffusion population model with delay effect

A reaction-diffusion population model with a general time-delayed growth rate per capita is considered. The growth rate per capita can be logistic or weak Allee effect type. From a careful analysis of the characteristic equation, the stability of the positive steady state solution and the existence of forward Hopf bifurcation from the positive steady state solution are obtained via the implicit function theorem, where the time delay is used as the bifurcation parameter. The general results are applied to a food-limited population model with diffusion and delay effects as well as a weak Allee effect population model. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved