The influences of uptake technological innovation in Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF)

Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) is the oldest film festival in Hong Kong. At its inception, its program consisted of film screening only and then the festival opened a special section dedicated to Hong Kong movies in the second year. In 2009, the festival started to showcase restoration classics from America, Europe and China. Over the years, HKIFF was recognized as one of the important global film festivals, offering networking and investment opportunities for the global film industry. The festival produced a number of showcases on special film focus, retrospective on respectable filmmakers. Giving out a sense of the culture-making activity that happens in these spaces, HKIFF was instrumental in building a solid base of art film audience. Ever since the festival had gone independent from Urban Council, Leisure and Cultural Services Department (1977 to 2001) and Hong Kong Arts Development Council (2002 to 2004) in 2005, the festival provides nutrients to home grown film professionals such as film directors, film critics, historian and curators for several decades. Nowadays, HKIFF has developed a membership system. Except the International Film Festival held in March and April every year, it also organizes a number of events over the whole year. HKIFF not only attracts local audience, but also international filmmakers, producers and investors. HKIFF serves as a hub for the local film industry, so as to keep in touch with the worldwide film world. After Goddard declared the death of film in 2000, the movie industry and the world have taken up many technological innovations, including digital technology, the ubiquitous internet in 1990s, the arrival of 3D cinema in 2009, followed by the raise of video-on-demand and Youtube video, crowd funding and crowd authorship. This paper will look into how these innovations affect the practice and hence the operation, the curation and the marketing strategies of HKIFF. Furthermore, we will also discuss how these changes drive the film culture in HK.published_or_final_versionMedia, Culture and Creative CitiesMasterMaster of Social Sciences in Media, Culture and Creative Citie

Automobile Aesthetics: Humean Perspectives and Problems

Human relationships with cars are multifaceted and morally fraught. Cars serve multiple functions, and generate experiences characteristic of both fine art and everyday aesthetic experience – but they’re also the roots of dire eco-social ills. Recent theories tend to undermine the aesthetic aspects of human-automobile relationships in order to emphasize cars’ ethically problematic effects. But cars’ shameful consequences need not cancel out their beauty or their relevance to aesthetic theories. I suggest that David Hume’s aesthetic tenets demonstrate how and why cars are beautiful, foregrounding considerations that automobile aesthetics can’t afford to ignore but that risk being obscured by cars’ positively and negatively charged status. For instance, Hume underscores rational choice as an element of aesthetic experience: we can choose how and when to experience cars’ beauty or ugliness. According to Hume, utility tends to inspire sentiments of beauty; and what is ethically good is most useful to humanity at large. But tension arises from this principle, as Hume finds that even socially harmful phenomena are yet aesthetically interesting. This provocative tension is at the heart of the aesthetic appreciation of cars, and is part of what makes such appreciation worthwhile. Hume paves the way to a realistic aesthetics of automobiles that can account for their problematic effects while refusing to downplay their aesthetic potential. This paper was presented at the 2011 Meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics in Tampa, Florida

Hearing screening of school children

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, June 30, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 30-34).Also available in print.Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 2008.published_or_final_versionSpeech and Hearing SciencesBachelorBachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Science

System Integration - A Major Step toward Lab on a Chip

Microfluidics holds great promise to revolutionize various areas of biological engineering, such as single cell analysis, environmental monitoring, regenerative medicine, and point-of-care diagnostics. Despite the fact that intensive efforts have been devoted into the field in the past decades, microfluidics has not yet been adopted widely. It is increasingly realized that an effective system integration strategy that is low cost and broadly applicable to various biological engineering situations is required to fully realize the potential of microfluidics. In this article, we review several promising system integration approaches for microfluidics and discuss their advantages, limitations, and applications. Future advancements of these microfluidic strategies will lead toward translational lab-on-a-chip systems for a wide spectrum of biological engineering applications

High quality educators’ conceptualisation of children’s risk-taking in early childhood education: provoking educators to think more broadly

Children’s risk-taking is increasingly acknowledged as an important part of early childhood education. Previous research has predominantly focussed on children’s engagement with, and educators’ perspectives on, children’s risk-taking in outdoor physical play. However, little attention has been paid to how educators conceptualise children’s risk-taking more broadly. Our study addresses this research gap. A three-site case study, the research gathered data from educators in high quality early childhood services through observations and interviews. Findings show that educators predominantly framed children’s risk-taking as taking place in physical and outdoor play. However, with minimal provocation, educators extended their conceptualisations of risk to encompass a broader range of children’s experiences. Data suggests that participation in the research provoked many participants to think more broadly about children’s risk-taking

Landfill extension developments in Hong Kong : a study of agenda setting and policy dynamics

published_or_final_versionPolitics and Public AdministrationMasterMaster of Public Administratio

Factors associated with grade 1 hypertension: implications for hypertension care based on the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) in primary care settings

Background: A Reference Framework for Hypertension Care was recently developed by Hong Kong government to emphasise the importance of primary care for subjects with high blood pressure (BP). The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) interventional regime was recommended for patients aged 40–70 years with grade 1 hypertension (having systolic BP of 140-159 mmHg and/or diastolic BP of 90-99 mmHg). This study explored factors associated with grade 1 hypertension among subjects screened in primary care settings. Methods: The study sample consisted of community dwellers (N = 10,693) enrolled in a primary care programme in which participants overall had similar characteristics when compared to the Hong Kong population census. Invitation phone calls were given by trained researchers to a randomly selected subjects (N = 2,673, [50% of total subjects aged 40–70 years]) between January and June 2013. BP and body mass index (BMI) were measured by trained clinical professionals according to a standard protocol. Interviewer-administered survey questionnaires were used to collect self-report information on socio-demographics, family history, and lifestyle characteristics. Multiple logistic regression analysis was performed to explore factors associated with grade 1 hypertension. Adjusted odds ratios (aORs) were estimated with 95% confidence intervals (CI). Results A total of 679 out of 2,673 subjects agreed to participate in the screening and completed the baseline assessment (100% completion rate), among which, 320 subjects (47.1%, [320/679]) were grade 1 hypertensive. Unhealthy diet (aOR = 2.19, 95%CI 1.04-4.62), irregular meals (aOR = 1.47, 95%CI 1.11-1.95), BMI >27.5 kg/m2 (aOR = 1.87, 95%CI 1.53-2.27), duration of cigarette smoking (aOR = 1.83 per year), increased daily cigarette consumption (aOR = 1.59 per pack [20 cigarettes per pack]), duration of alcohol drinking (aOR = 1.65 per year), and higher frequency of weekly binge drinking (aOR = 1.87 per occasion) were independently associated with grade 1 hypertension. The increase in the number of risk factors combined significantly correlated with higher predicted probability of grade 1 hypertension. Conclusions: Dietary-intake factors were significantly associated with grade 1 hypertension, echoing the recommendation in the Reference Framework on incorporating dietary-related intervention based on the DASH approach for hypertension care in primary care settings. The association between aggregate risk factors and grade 1 hypertension should also be taken into consideration in long-term preventive strategy

Empirical variance component regression for sequence-function relationships

Contemporary high-throughput mutagenesis experiments are providing an increasingly detailed view of the complex patterns of genetic interaction that occur between multiple mutations within a single protein or regulatory element. By simultaneously measuring the effects of thousands of combinations of mutations, these experiments have revealed that the genotype-phenotype relationship typically reflects genetic interactions not only between pairs of sites, but also higher-order interactions between larger numbers of sites. However, modeling and understanding these higher-order interactions remains challenging. Here, we present a method for reconstructing sequence-to-function mappings from partially observed data that can accommodate all orders of genetic interaction. The main idea is to make predictions for unobserved genotypes that match the type and extent of epistasis found in the observed data. This information on the type and extent of epistasis can be extracted by considering how phenotypic correlations change as a function of mutational distance, which is equivalent to estimating the fraction of phenotypic variance due to each order of genetic interaction (additive, pairwise, three-way, etc.). Based on these estimated variance components, we then define an empirical Bayes prior that in expectation matches the observed pattern of epistasis, and reconstruct the sequence-function mapping by conducting Gaussian process regression under this prior. To demonstrate the power of this approach, we present an application to the antibody-binding domain GB1 and provide a detailed exploration of a dataset consisting of high-throughput measurements for the splicing efficiency of human pre-mRNA 5′ splice sites for which we also validate our model predictions via additional low-throughput experiments