Carrots, not sticks: a historical analysis of Beijing's economic statecraft towards Hong Kong

This analysis offers a historical assessment of "economic statecraft" in Beijing's approach to Hong Kong from 1997 to 2020. It discusses how the concept of "economic statecraft" can be applied to Beijing-Hong Kong relations given the nature of the "one country, two systems" framework, and looks at some differing perceptions about economic statecraft in Hong Kong. It argues that, during this period, economic tools were in general used by Beijing relatively sparingly, and in the form of inducements rather than coercion. In conclusion, the analysis suggests that the contested interpretations of Beijing-Hong Kong economic relations demonstrate that "economic statecraft" is to a certain extent in the eye of the beholder

Music, Play, Games and Education

A significant body of recent music scholarship has sought to emphasize the playfulness of music. Many of these discussions have occurred with reference to music in digital video games. This chapter investigates how an awareness of music and play, particularly informed by the findings from the context of video games, might inflect teaching. By considering the fundamental aspects of play – the components of rules, creativity and fun aesthetics, fusing ludus and paidia – we not only recognize elements that motivate and reward engaging with music generally, but we can turn some of these qualities to educational ends. The chapter considers three dimensions of music, video games and play: i) the role of interfaces in scaffolding musical creative processes, ii) interactivity and musical-dialogic teaching and iii) participatory culture as a type of informal learning that provides musical specialization and technical expertise. The chapter concludes with an outline of planned lessons for a term’s music teaching. This overview suggests just some of the ways that these ideas might be implemented in a school music curriculum

Theory and data for area summation of contrast with and without uncertainty:evidence for a noisy energy model

Contrast sensitivity improves with the area of a sine-wave grating, but why? Here we assess this phenomenon against contemporary models involving spatial summation, probability summation, uncertainty, and stochastic noise. Using a two-interval forced-choice procedure we measured contrast sensitivity for circular patches of sine-wave gratings with various diameters that were blocked or interleaved across trials to produce low and high extrinsic uncertainty, respectively. Summation curves were steep initially, becoming shallower thereafter. For the smaller stimuli, sensitivity was slightly worse for the interleaved design than for the blocked design. Neither area nor blocking affected the slope of the psychometric function. We derived model predictions for noisy mechanisms and extrinsic uncertainty that was either low or high. The contrast transducer was either linear (c1.0) or nonlinear (c2.0), and pooling was either linear or a MAX operation. There was either no intrinsic uncertainty, or it was fixed or proportional to stimulus size. Of these 10 canonical models, only the nonlinear transducer with linear pooling (the noisy energy model) described the main forms of the data for both experimental designs. We also show how a cross-correlator can be modified to fit our results and provide a contemporary presentation of the relation between summation and the slope of the psychometric function

Television, Musical Register, and the Franchise: Continuity and Change

This chapter proposes a model for understanding television music within a broader franchise space, exploring how continuity and change operates both within, and across, television series. Specifically, this framework proposes the concept of a musical register for analysing such musical intertextuality in television and beyond. More specific than genre, a musical register serves as a coherent, but ever-developing musical identity for a franchise. Our concept of register identifies musical practice which is flexible enough to evolve over time but remains sufficiently consistent to serve as a musical thread between fragmented elements of a franchise. This adaptable sonic language can develop alongside changing televisual aesthetics, even traversing media boundaries to film and video games, whilst satisfying fan expectations. Our model accounts for musical connections that are broader and more complex than explicit musical recapitulation, but remain distinctive enough to link texts. As franchises continue to be central to mass-market corporate entertainment strategies, this model illuminates how music serves as part of that creative and business agenda, as well as the implications of franchise music for producers, composers and fans. While this approach is applicable to a wide range of franchise contexts, this chapter will use the case study of the Star Trek television series to illustrate our model of a franchise’s musical register. <br/

La Chine et la région du Mékong

Cet article examine comment la région du grand Mékong, qui englobe plusieurs pays, se construit et s’autonomise par le biais de coopérations interétatiques et régionales. Il s’intéresse plus particulièrement à la manière dont la Chine s’insère dans la construction de cette région du Mékong et fait apparaître des différences notables entre le gouvernement central à Pékin et les gouvernements provinciaux, notamment du Yunnan, dans la manière de concevoir et de s’intégrer dans cette nouvelle construction régionale. Est également examiné comment la Chine privilégie la coopération économique comme axe de construction pour la région du grand Mékong. Enfin, les limites que pose la Chine dans sa participation à la construction de cette région sont analysées

China and the Mekong Region

This paper looks at constructions of the Mekong region with a particular focus on Chinese views. It draws out the differences between central and provincial Chinese perspectives, shows Chinese privileging of Greater Mekong Subregion economic cooperation in constructing the region, and outlines tensions between Chinese participation in and differentiation from the region

La Chine et la région du Mékong

Cet article examine comment la région du grand Mékong, qui englobe plusieurs pays, se construit et s’autonomise par le biais de coopérations interétatiques et régionales. Il s’intéresse plus particulièrement à la manière dont la Chine s’insère dans la construction de cette région du Mékong et fait apparaître des différences notables entre le gouvernement central à Pékin et les gouvernements provinciaux, notamment du Yunnan, dans la manière de concevoir et de s’intégrer dans cette nouvelle construction régionale. Est également examiné comment la Chine privilégie la coopération économique comme axe de construction pour la région du grand Mékong. Enfin, les limites que pose la Chine dans sa participation à la construction de cette région sont analysées

Area summation of first- and second-order modulations of luminance

To extend our understanding of the early visual hierarchy, we investigated the long-range integration of first- and second-order signals in spatial vision. In our first experiment we performed a conventional area summation experiment where we varied the diameter of (a) luminance-modulated (LM) noise and (b) contrastmodulated (CM) noise. Results from the LM condition replicated previous findings with sine-wave gratings in the absence of noise, consistent with long-range integration of signal contrast over space. For CM, the summation function was much shallower than for LM suggesting, at first glance, that the signal integration process was spatially less extensive than for LM. However, an alternative possibility was that the high spatial frequency noise carrier for the CM signal was attenuated by peripheral retina (or cortex), thereby impeding our ability to observe area summation of CM in the conventional way. To test this, we developed the ''Swiss cheese'' stimulus of Meese and Summers (2007) in which signal area can be varied without changing the stimulus diameter, providing some protection against inhomogeneity of the retinal field. Using this technique and a two-component subthreshold summation paradigm we found that (a) CM is spatially integrated over at least five stimulus cycles (possibly more), (b) spatial integration follows square-law signal transduction for both LM and CM and (c) the summing device integrates over spatially-interdigitated LM and CM signals when they are co-oriented, but not when crossoriented. The spatial pooling mechanism that we have identified would be a good candidate component for amodule involved in representing visual textures, including their spatial extent

A common contrast pooling rule for suppression within and between the eyes

Recent work has revealed multiple pathways for cross-orientation suppression in cat and human vision. In particular, ipsiocular and interocular pathways appear to assert their influence before binocular summation in human but have different (1) spatial tuning, (2) temporal dependencies, and (3) adaptation after-effects. Here we use mask components that fall outside the excitatory passband of the detecting mechanism to investigate the rules for pooling multiple mask components within these pathways. We measured psychophysical contrast masking functions for vertical 1 cycle/deg sine-wave gratings in the presence of left or right oblique (645 deg) 3 cycles/deg mask gratings with contrast C%, or a plaid made from their sum, where each component (i) had contrast 0.5Ci%. Masks and targets were presented to two eyes (binocular), one eye (monoptic), or different eyes (dichoptic). Binocular-masking functions superimposed when plotted against C, but in the monoptic and dichoptic conditions, the grating produced slightly more suppression than the plaid when Ci $ 16%. We tested contrast gain control models involving two types of contrast combination on the denominator: (1) spatial pooling of the mask after a local nonlinearity (to calculate either root mean square contrast or energy) and (2) "linear suppression" (Holmes & Meese, 2004, Journal of Vision 4, 1080–1089), involving the linear sum of the mask component contrasts. Monoptic and dichoptic masking were typically better fit by the spatial pooling models, but binocular masking was not: it demanded strict linear summation of the Michelson contrast across mask orientation. Another scheme, in which suppressive pooling followed compressive contrast responses to the mask components (e.g., oriented cortical cells), was ruled out by all of our data. We conclude that the different processes that underlie monoptic and dichoptic masking use the same type of contrast pooling within their respective suppressive fields, but the effects do not sum to predict the binocular case

A psychophysical performance-based approach to the quality assessment of image processing algorithms

Image processing algorithms are used to improve digital image representations in either their appearance or storage efficiency. The merit of these algorithms depends, in part, on visual perception by human observers. However, in practice, most are assessed numerically, and the perceptual metrics that do exist are criterion sensitive with several shortcomings. Here we propose an objective performance-based perceptual measure of image quality and demonstrate this by comparing the efficacy of a denoising algorithm for a variety of filters. For baseline, we measured detection thresholds for a white noise signal added to one of a pair of natural images in a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) paradigm where each image was selected randomly from a set of n = 308 on each trial. In a series of experimental conditions, the stimulus image pairs were passed through various configurations of a denoising algorithm. The differences in noise detection thresholds with and without denoising are objective perceptual measures of the ability of the algorithm to render noise invisible. This was a factor of two (6dB) in our experiment and consistent across a range of filter bandwidths and types. We also found that thresholds in all conditions converged on a common value of PSNR, offering support for this metric. We discuss how the 2AFC approach might be used for other algorithms including compression, deblurring and edge-detection. Finally, we provide a derivation for our Cartesian-separable log-Gabor filters, with polar parameters. For the biological vision community this has some advantages over the more typical (i) polar-separable variety and (ii) Cartesian-separable variety with Cartesian parameters