Why Chinese Neo-Confucian Women Made a Fetish of Small Feet

Abstract for “Why Chinese Neo-Confucian Women Made a Fetish of Small Feet” This paper explores the source of the traditional practice of Chinese footbinding which first gained popularity at the end of the Tang dynasty and continued to flourish until the last half of the twentieth century.[1] Derived initially from court concubines whose feet were formed to represent an attractive “deer lady” from an Indian tale, footbinding became a wide-spread symbol among the Chinese of obedience, pecuniary reputability, and Confucianism, among other things.[2],[3] Drawing on the analyses of such scholars as Beverly Jackson, Valerie Steele and John S. Major as well as historical personal accounts, the article concludes that the underlying goal in engaging in the footbinding practice was to raise a girl’s chances of being married into a family of the highest social class possible. [1] Valerie Steele and John S. Major, China Chic: East Meets West (Singapore: Yale University Press, 1999), 37. [2] Wang Ping, Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 12. [3] Harold Koda, Extreme Beauty: The Body Transformed (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2001), 152

One Tier beyond Ramapo: Open Space Zoning and the Urban Reserve

This comment examines the problem of managing urban growth while simultaneously preserving open space through careful planning. Specifically the comment examines the planning for the temporary preservation of open space that is a byproduct of the successful management of urban growth. The author begins by discussing a method of regulating open space land by Professor Robert H. Freilich. The author uses this method as a model to examine techniques for the conservation of open space land through the establishment of an urban reserve. The author pays special attention to the taking issues that must be circumvented if the program is to be successful. The author concludes that the California open space legislation should be modified to be more like the approaches taken by court in both California and New York

Power-Ups in Digital Games: The Rewarding Effect of Phantom Game Elementson Player Experience

Power-ups are a type of game reward that allow the player tocustomise their experience by altering gameplay for a shortperiod of time. Despite the wide use of power-ups in videogames, little is known about their effect on gaming experiences.To explore this, we conducted an experimental study that compares the experiences of players depending on their exposureto power-ups in a recreational video game. The results show that players who collected power-ups felt significantly more immersed in the game, experienced more autonomy, but didnot feel more competent or challenged than those who played the game without these collectables. Interestingly, a similareffect was observed for those players who picked up ‘placebo ’power-ups, despite the items having no effect on the gameplay. We provide a discussion of these results and their implications both for games user researchers and game designers

Zero-temperature generalized phase diagram of the 4d transition metals under pressure

We use an accurate implementation of density functional theory (DFT) to calculate the zero-temperature generalized phase diagram of the 4$d$ series of transition metals from Y to Pd as a function of pressure $P$ and atomic number $Z$. The implementation used is full-potential linearized augmented plane waves (FP-LAPW), and we employ the exchange-correlation functional recently developed by Wu and Cohen. For each element, we obtain the ground-state energy for several crystal structures over a range of volumes, the energy being converged with respect to all technical parameters to within $\sim 1$ meV/atom. The calculated transition pressures for all the elements and all transitions we have found are compared with experiment wherever possible, and we discuss the origin of the significant discrepancies. Agreement with experiment for the zero-temperature equation of state is generally excellent. The generalized phase diagram of the 4$d$ series shows that the major boundaries slope towards lower $Z$ with increasing $P$ for the early elements, as expected from the pressure induced transfer of electrons from $sp$ states to $d$ states, but are almost independent of $P$ for the later elements. Our results for Mo indicate a transition from bcc to fcc, rather than the bcc-hcp transition expected from $sp$-$d$ transfer.Comment: 28 pages and 10 figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev.

The Peculiar Motions of Early-Type Galaxies in Two Distant Regions -- V. The Mg-- Relation, Age and Metallicity

We have examined the Mg—σ relation for early-type galaxies in the EFAR sample and its dependence on cluster properties. A comprehensive maximum likelihood treatment of the sample selection and measurement errors gives fits to the global Mg—σ relation of Mg b′=0.131 log σ −0.131 and Mg2=0.257 log σ −0.305. The slope of these relations is 25 per cent steeper than that obtained by most other authors owing to the reduced bias of our fitting method. The intrinsic scatter in the global Mg— σ relation is estimated to be 0.016 mag in Mg b′ and 0.023 mag in Mg2. The Mg— σ relation for cD galaxies has a higher zero-point than for E and S0 galaxies, implying that cDs are older and/or more metal-rich than other early-type galaxies with the same velocity dispersion. We investigate the variation in the zero-point of the Mg— σ relation between clusters. We find that it is consistent with the number of galaxies observed per cluster and the intrinsic scatter between galaxies in the global Mg—σ relation. We find no significant correlation between the Mg—σ zero-point and the cluster velocity dispersion, X-ray luminosity or X-ray temperature over a wide range in cluster mass. These results provide constraints for models of the formation of elliptical galaxies. However, the Mg—σ relation on its own does not place strong limits on systematic errors in Fundamental Plane (FP) distance estimates resulting from stellar population differences between clusters. We compare the intrinsic scatter in the Mg—σ and Fundamental Plane relations with stellar population models in order to constrain the dispersion in ages, metallicities and M/L ratios for early-type galaxies at fixed velocity dispersion. We find that variations in age or metallicity alone cannot explain the measured intrinsic scatter in both Mg— σ and the FP. We derive the joint constraints on the dispersion in age and metallicity implied by the scatter in the Mg—σ and FP relations for a simple Gaussian model. We find upper limits on the dispersions in age and metallicity at fixed velocity dispersion of 32 per cent in δ t/t and 38 per cent in δ Z/Z if the variations in age and metallicity are uncorrelated; only strongly anticorrelated variations lead to significantly higher upper limits. The joint distribution of residuals from the Mg— σ and FP relations is only marginally consistent with a model having no correlation between age and metallicity, and is better matched by a model in which age and metallicity variations are moderately anticorrelated (δ t/t ≈ 40 per cent, δ Z/Z ≈ 50 per cent and ρ≈ −0.5), with younger galaxies being more metal-rich

Mimesis stories: composing new nature music for the shakuhachi

Nature is a widespread theme in much new music for the shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute). This article explores the significance of such music within the contemporary shakuhachi scene, as the instrument travels internationally and so becomes rooted in landscapes outside Japan, taking on the voices of new creatures and natural phenomena. The article tells the stories of five compositions and one arrangement by non-Japanese composers, first to credit composers’ varied and personal responses to this common concern and, second, to discern broad, culturally syncretic traditions of nature mimesis and other, more abstract, ideas about the naturalness of sounds and creative processes (which I call musical naturalism). Setting these personal stories and longer histories side by side reveals that composition creates composers (as much as the other way around). Thus it hints at much broader terrain: the refashioning of human nature at the confluence between cosmopolitan cultural circulations and contemporary encounters with the more-than-human world