Zhenfang Zhao’s Widow Xianglin [xianglin sao] and New Directions in Modern Huai Opera

Huai Opera, a category of Chinese opera performed in Shanghai as well as the Jiangsu and Anhui Provinces, has been a popular type of entertainment ever since its creation sometime in the nineteenth century. With the beginning of the twenty-first, the art form has begun to lose audiences, in part due to the changed economic circumstances, which no longer made it feasible to attend three- to four-hour performances, in part due to problems inherent in the genre, such as old-fashioned plots, the common, unrefined style of the libretto, and the inflexible use of role types, modes, and metrical types. Zhenfang Zhao’s Widow Xianglin (2002) has begun to address these problems. The opera lasts only about two hours and the libretto (by Liancheng Yuan) is no longer based on folklore or history but on a short story addressing pressing social issues in feudal China (such as the position of the woman in general and of the widowed woman in particular). In addition, the opera reforms long-standing musico-dramatic traditions by mixing modes and role types, liberating the metrical types from their conventional functions, and introducing the Western concept of leitmotives. The success of Widow Xianglin appears to have struck a chord with Chinese audiences, as it won several prestigious awards at the Fourth Huai Opera Festival, including the ones for best opera, best libretto, best performance, and best costume design. The success also rekindles hope for the survival of Huai Opera in particular and Chinese opera in general. By investigating the historical significance of Widow Xianglin from a scholarly perspective, this thesis seeks to make a contribution to the survival of a musical tradition protected as an Intangible Cultural Heritage

Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism in China: The Construction of the Chinese Identity on Television Show Singer

Even though the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is known as a culturally unified state with a nationalism propensity, it has a long multicultural history, 56 ethnic groups, a globalized economy, and a modern and cosmopolitan lifestyle. China demonstrates the qualities of a cosmopolitan country in naturalizing the cultural variety and digesting social and cultural conflicts within the nation-state. Firstly, the cultural differences in China come from not only ethnic groups but also customs from various regions. Hence, the emphasis on Chinese history and traditional culture, especially Confucius ideology, are critical factors in constructing a unified Chinese identity. Moreover, Greater China and the pan-Chinese nation are used to include people from Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and all ethnic Chinese around the globe. Meanwhile, under the influence of globalization, China becomes home to people who are not ethnic Chinese. The modern Chinese community represents the value of cosmopolitanism, naturalizing the existence of foreign visitors and multiracial Chinese. As one of the most popular programs on Chinese television, under the direction of the National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA), the production of winners on Singer (also known as I am a Singer) reflects the construction of an imaginary modern Chinese community. Through analysis on performances, interviews and comments related to the finals of three key winners (the Mongols Chinese winner Han Lei, the Chinese American winner Coco Lee, and the British winner Jessie J), this paper will discuss the confluence of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the construction of an imagined Chinese identity. The representation of Singer depicts an open, modern, and diversified cultural sphere, in which multiethnic, multinational, and multiracial appearances are naturalized

The bond behaviour between concrete and corroded reinforcement: state of the art

The corrosion of reinforcing steel bar embedded in concrete leads to the bond deterioration. This literature review summarises the influence of corrosion on bond strength and bond-slip behaviour. The influence of corrosion on bond strength has been intensively investigated and the main influencing parameters, including the corrosion conditions of steel bars, the geometry and the corrosive environment, have been well recognized. Based on the previous investigations and the author’s experimental work, an improved bond strength model, which can account for various parameters and is proved to agree well with experimental results in the literature, is developed. The literature survey also indicates that the surface crack width is appropriate to be the governing parameter for the evaluation of bond strength. For the bond-slip behaviour of corroded RC, the published experimental results indicate that the bond-slip mechanism is similar to that of non-corroded RC, however, the researchers have different views regarding the influence of corrosion on some of the parameters that shape the bond-slip curves. A comprehensive bond-slip model for corroded RC has been developed by the authors considering various parameters, such as the confinements and the corrosion conditions of stirrups. This paper also reviews the bond behaviour of corroded RC under repeated loading. The research by the authors suggests that the repeated loading shows no significant influence on the bond strength of corroded RC, and the bond-slip behaviour is characterized by the progressive increase of residual slip, which is the same to that of non-corroded RC. To better understand the bond behaviour of corroded RC, the further studies are needed with respect to the influence of environment on the bond deterioration, the correlations between the bond behaviour and the surface crack width, and the bond-slip behaviour of corroded RC under repeated loading with various loading scenarios

Investigation on the Influence of Concrete Pores on Steel Corrosion Process

Concrete pores on the steel/concrete interface have a great influence on the corrosion process of steel bars. The effects of these pores on the corrosion of steel bars are observed and explored in this paper. The specimens which are in the same size and concrete proportion but have a different curing and exposure history are compared and investigated. This paper mainly observes the process of corrosion products filling into macro pores (10-4-10-2m in diameter) which including compaction pores (10-3-10-2m in diameter) and air voids (10-4-10-3 m in diameter). These pores have different effect on the steel corrosion process, and these influences in both natural environment and artificial environment are discussed in this paper

Experimental investigation on shear strengthening of corroded reinforced concrete columns by pet fibers with large fracturing strain

The seismic strengthening of the concrete columns improperly designed or constructed is in an urgent need. There has been an enormous interest in the research and application of conventional fiber reinforced polymers (FRPs) in RC column seismic retrofitting. However, due to low fracturing strain capacity of conventional FRPs, the fiber materials tend to fail sooner due to fiber breakage. New fiber materials such as polyacetal fiber (PAF), polyethylene naphthalate (PEN) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) have properties of large fracturing strain and low stiffness in comparison to aramid, carbon, and glass fibers. In this paper, an experimental study is presented on the influence of PET warping on shear capacity, ductility and energy absorptivity of RC columns with stirrup corrosion before strengthening. The experimental program involved an electrochemical process to accelerate the migration of chlorides from an external electrolyte into the tested columns, a wetting–drying cycle process with a controlled current to speed up the corrosion of the stirrup in the tested columns, the strengthening of corroded columns with PET warping, and a Pseudo static test to determine the shear capacity of the tested beams. The shear performance of PET wrapped RC columns with different corrosion levels in stirrups, including the yield strength, the peak strength, the ductility ratio and the energy dissipation ability was examined and the related mechanism was discussed

Effects of Stirrups on Bond Behavior Between Concrete and Corroded Steel Bars

Steel corrosion leads to the deterioration of bond between concrete and steel bars. The serviceability and ultimate strength of concrete elements within RC structures are hence affected. Many researchers have studied the bond behavior of corroded steel bars. However, very few studies have investigated the effects of confinements on the degradation of bond strength. The present paper proposed a new kind of beam specimen based on which the effects of stirrups on degradation of bond were investigated. The test results proved that stirrups can effectively increase the bond strength between concrete and corroded steel bars

Get Out of the Valley: Power-Efficient Address Mapping for GPUs

GPU memory systems adopt a multi-dimensional hardware structure to provide the bandwidth necessary to support 100s to 1000s of concurrent threads. On the software side, GPU-compute workloads also use multi-dimensional structures to organize the threads. We observe that these structures can combine unfavorably and create significant resource imbalance in the memory subsystem causing low performance and poor power-efficiency. The key issue is that it is highly application-dependent which memory address bits exhibit high variability. To solve this problem, we first provide an entropy analysis approach tailored for the highly concurrent memory request behavior in GPU-compute workloads. Our window-based entropy metric captures the information content of each address bit of the memory requests that are likely to co-exist in the memory system at runtime. Using this metric, we find that GPU-compute workloads exhibit entropy valleys distributed throughout the lower order address bits. This indicates that efficient GPU-address mapping schemes need to harvest entropy from broad address-bit ranges and concentrate the entropy into the bits used for channel and bank selection in the memory subsystem. This insight leads us to propose the Page Address Entropy (PAE) mapping scheme which concentrates the entropy of the row, channel and bank bits of the input address into the bank and channel bits of the output address. PAE maps straightforwardly to hardware and can be implemented with a tree of XOR-gates. PAE improves performance by 1.31 x and power-efficiency by 1.25 x compared to state-of-the-art permutation-based address mapping

Chloride Penetration in Surface-Treated Concrete in Natural and Accelerated Environments

This study investigated the chloride penetration of surface-treated concrete in natural and accelerated environments. A part of a real concrete port, including the beams and the columns, was investigated. Concrete specimens cast together with the concrete port were transported to the lab and subjected to wetting and drying cycles for accelerating the ingression of chloride ion. Chloride concentration of the specimens in the lab and the components in situ was tested. The results show that the surface treatments obviously slow down the chloride penetration into the concrete in both lab and in situ. The chloride penetration in situ is more severe than that in specimens under wetting and drying cycles. For the components of the real concrete port, the chloride concentration tested in summer is found higher than that in winter and the chloride concentration in the tensile region of bending beam is higher than that in the column

Effect of PET Wrapping on Shear Performance of Corroded Reinforced Concrete Columns

In this paper, an experimental study is presented on the influence of PET warping on shear performance, such as diagonal shear cracking load, peak load, and energy dissipation of RC columns with stirrup corrosion before strengthening. The experimental program involved an electrochemical process to accelerate the migration of chlorides from an external electrolyte into the tested columns, a wetting–drying cycle process with a controlled current to speed up the corrosion of the stirrup in the tested columns, the strengthening of corroded columns with PET warping, and a pseudostatic test to determine the shear capacity of the tested beams. The shear performance of PET wrapped RC columns with different corrosion levels in stirrups, including the diagonal cracking strength, the peak strength, the ductility ratio, and the energy dissipation ability, was examined and compared