Traces of desire and fantasy : the government-generated discourse on technology in post-handover Hong Kong

Information technology almost became the savior for Hong Kong in the process of recovering from the Asian financial crisis immediately after the Handover. The claims to establish and further the development of information technology were made against a certain perception of Hong Kong, in which the place in past decades had indulged in the wrong direction of labour-intensive, cut-throat production in the manufacturing industries and bubble-like speculation in the real-estate sector, and against a certain vision of the future, with more and more competition in the age of globalization, neo-liberal economies, and so on. This thesis demonstrates, firstly, how the governance of Hong Kong can be seen from the perspective of contingent articulations of dissimilar elements rather than any step-by-step progression along any necessary, objective historical path. Secondly through analyses of the governmental discourses and the business trajectory of Pacific-Century CyberWorks, the flagship group for Hong Kong’s “new-economy”, the thesis depicts the complexity and nexus of knowledge, governance, bureaucratic and financial considerations of and within the project of information technology in Hong Kong, and the mechanism by which this particular discourse is produced and circulated. Finally, comparing the discourse of Hong Kong’s early industralisation in the early 1950s, the thesis identifies the desire-creating workings of ideology in this particular discourse of information technology in Hong Kong. Also, through theoretical prisms, the thesis provides examples of how the government’s trumpeted notions of (and, probably, people’s faith in) laissez-faire, positive non-intervention are able to coexist in apparent harmony with the highly active participation of the Hong Kong SAR government in society and industry

Experimental studies of phase conjugation with depleted pumps in photorefractive media

We describe the experimental measurement of phase-conjugate reflectivity versus various ratios of input-beam intensities in photorefractive barium titanate and strontium barium niobate crystals. The experimental results are compared with the theoretical prediction from the coupled-wave theory. Three different methods to measure the nonlinear coupling constant of the crystal are also presented and compared

A macroeconomic study of the major determinants of retail rents in Hong Kong

Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 2004.published_or_final_versio

漫長的八十年代 : 蔬菜、菜農與香港構成

流行說法與學術文獻裡，香港戰後農業發展得益於始自1946年的蔬菜統營系統，八十年代逐漸被國内進口菜打擊。無論同情與否，菜農都被描繪為受害／被動者，本研究嘗試超越這視角，提出殖民管治大計既無法馴化菜農，後者亦不能被簡化為内地進口菜的受害者。 借助文化研究的歷史知識論（historical epistemology，見Hall, 2003）、歷史資本主義（historical capitalism，見 Polanyi 1957 ; Braudel 1982）、社會史／庶民研究（social history/ subaltern studies，見 Guha 1997 ; Scott 2009）、行動者網絡理論（actor-network theory，見Latour 2005）等理論視野，本研究試圖開展以本地農業軌跡為本的批判進路，反思農業不斷重組的過程。 研究結果顯示：蔬菜業於殖民地年代並非馴服、被妥貼規管對象，業界積極在内地開設菜場，甚至一度可視為「中港融合」的「典範」，同時曝露出其限制。蔬菜業與市場競爭／發展並不矛盾，特大地理範圍裡的激進商品化，卻改寫了蔬菜、香港的性質與意義。 研究貢獻有三：首先為菜農及蔬菜提供了一種超越國族框架、發展主義的動態理解，補充香港研究、單一學科的狹隘視野；第二，文化研究、歷史資本主義、社會史／庶民研究、行動者網絡的交錯引用，與香港農業史對照和對話，亦豐富了這些潛藏互補可能性的理論傳統；第三，從庶民及蔬菜的角度，補充現存香港故事的某些空白。一方面鬆縛了關於農民及廣義香港人在論述上的被動性，另一方面攞脫人類中心的觀點，考察蔬菜的生產、消費、呈現、身份、規管等環節，如何局部地形構香港社會，及在更廣闊的尺度裡定位「香港」與其他地區的關係，提供一種將狹獈、簡化「本土」觀問題化的視角。 論文主要部份有五章，第一章介紹本研究所採用的方法，並闡釋有關的理論視野與本研究的相關之處及限制。第二章嘗試將新界「問題化」，指出「新界」與「内地」的區分，並非如官式文件般清晰和理所當然。第三章指出在政府統計數據裡「隱形」的農業部門，並不服務殖民地的國民經濟體系，有其自身邏輯與規律。第四章透過八十年代「毒菜心j的兩宗事件，重組所謂「香港農業式微」的社會及制度脈絡，並問題化「香港」和「内地」的對立。第五章分析近年成為本港「菜籃子」寧夏的供港菜場。筆者認為，與其說是「北進」，供港菜場自八十年代其實不斷向「北退」，是一個前境未見樂觀的「中港融合」故事

A Comparative Study of Ribonuclease From Two Winter Barley Cultivars Based Upon Separation, Purification and Partial Characterization of RNA-Degrading Enzymes

The differences in the response to KCl of the RNA-degrading enzymes of two barley cultivars, “Dicktoo” (a hardy type) and Tennessee Winter” (a non-hardy type), were investigated. Two types of enzymes, ribonuclease (RNase) and nuclease, were separated from crude extracts by disc electrophoresis. The electrophoretic gels were assayed for RNA-degrading activity in the presence and absence of EDTA (EDTA is a nuclease inhibitor). By means of density gradient isoelectric focusing, the nuclease preparation from Tennessee Winter was shown to have an isoelectric point between 5.3 and 5.5, while the nuclease preparation from Dicktoo has three isoelectric points of 4.9, 5.5 and 6.0. The RNase preparation from Tennessee Winter has isoelectric points of 4.5, 5.8 and a trace of activity at 5.3, while the RNase from Dicktoo has isoelectric points of 4.9, 5.8 and 6.1. In the presence of KCl, nuclease activity obtained from both cultivars was diminished, while RNase activity from Tennessee Winter showed increased activity, when compared with the RNase from Dicktoo. Preparative electrophoresis was employed in order to separate larger quantities of enzymes from the two cultivars. In the RNase preparation from Dicktoo, two distinct activity peaks were found and they were processed as two separate samples for further purification. The RNase preparation from Tennessee Winter was processed as one sample. A purification scheme consisting of Sephadex G-25, Sephadex DEAE A-50, preparative electrophoresis and Bio-Gel P-100 was employed. The contaminating acid phosphomonoesterase activity was removed from the RNase in the final step of purification using Bio-Gel P-100. The purified enzyme from Tennessee Winter and the two enzymes from Dicktoo had the same pH optima of 5.8 and showed lowered pH optima in the presence of KCl. For all three enzymes, maximum RNA-degrading activity was obtained at pH 5.4 with 0.19 M KCl. Substrate specificities of the three purified enzymes were determined by noting the rates at which they cleaved 14 dinucleoside monophosphates. The two enzymes from Dicktoo were not significantly different with respect to cleavage of the dinucleoside monophosphates in this experiment. The major difference between the enzymes from Tennessee Winter and Dicktoo was their cleavage rates for ApC and ApU. Tennessee Winter RNase had a faster rate of cleavage of the phosphodiester bond between adenosine and a pyrimidine. The RNases from the two cultivars were inferred as being the plant RNase I type of enzyme

Spontaneous Subtle Expression Detection and Recognition based on Facial Strain

Optical strain is an extension of optical flow that is capable of quantifying subtle changes on faces and representing the minute facial motion intensities at the pixel level. This is computationally essential for the relatively new field of spontaneous micro-expression, where subtle expressions can be technically challenging to pinpoint. In this paper, we present a novel method for detecting and recognizing micro-expressions by utilizing facial optical strain magnitudes to construct optical strain features and optical strain weighted features. The two sets of features are then concatenated to form the resultant feature histogram. Experiments were performed on the CASME II and SMIC databases. We demonstrate on both databases, the usefulness of optical strain information and more importantly, that our best approaches are able to outperform the original baseline results for both detection and recognition tasks. A comparison of the proposed method with other existing spatio-temporal feature extraction approaches is also presented.Comment: 21 pages (including references), single column format, accepted to Signal Processing: Image Communication journa

The opportunity recognition framework in the Hong Kong SMEs context

This paper presents a preliminary framework of opportunity recognition in the Hong Kong small and medium enterprises (SMEs) context. Guanxi and four trait variables, namely self-monitoring, extroversion, selfefficacy and creativity are the independent variables while the number of opportunity recognized by entrepreneurs is the dependent variable in the framework. The model indicates a mediation effect of guanxi between self-monitoring and the number of opportunities recognized, and between extroversion and the number of opportunities recognized. Meanwhile, SMEs marketing characteristics are determined by personalities and behaviour of the entrepreneurs as they do not conform to the traditional marketing theories (Gilmore et al., 2001). This paper provides new research directions to the field of SMEs marketing

Degrading Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals fromWastewater by TiO2 Photocatalysis: A Review

Widespread concerns continue to be raised about the impacts of exposure to chemical compounds with endocrine disrupting activities. To date, the percolation of endocrine disrupting chemical (EDC) effluent into the aquatic system remains an intricate challenge abroad the nations. With the innovation of advanced oxidation processes (AOPs), there has been a consistent growing interest in this research field. Hence, the aim of this paper is to focus one such method within the AOPs, namely, heterogeneous photocatalysis and how it is used on the abatement of EDCs, phthalates, bisphenol A and chlorophenols in particular, using TiO2-based catalysts. Degradation mechanisms, pathways, and intermediate products of various EDCs for TiO2 photocatalysis are described in detail. The effect of key operational parameters on TiO2 photocatalytic degradation of various EDCs is then specifically covered. Finally, the future prospects together with the challenges for the TiO2 photocatalysis on EDCs degradation are summarized and discussed

Adversarial Deep Network Embedding for Cross-network Node Classification

In this paper, the task of cross-network node classification, which leverages the abundant labeled nodes from a source network to help classify unlabeled nodes in a target network, is studied. The existing domain adaptation algorithms generally fail to model the network structural information, and the current network embedding models mainly focus on single-network applications. Thus, both of them cannot be directly applied to solve the cross-network node classification problem. This motivates us to propose an adversarial cross-network deep network embedding (ACDNE) model to integrate adversarial domain adaptation with deep network embedding so as to learn network-invariant node representations that can also well preserve the network structural information. In ACDNE, the deep network embedding module utilizes two feature extractors to jointly preserve attributed affinity and topological proximities between nodes. In addition, a node classifier is incorporated to make node representations label-discriminative. Moreover, an adversarial domain adaptation technique is employed to make node representations network-invariant. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed ACDNE model achieves the state-of-the-art performance in cross-network node classification