"New Songs of the Battlefield": Songs and Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

This dissertation focuses on a five-volume anthology of songs published from 1972 to 1976 known as "Zhandi Xinge," literally "New Songs of the Battlefield." The songs represent a significant portion of the limited musical expression during a period in China known as the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Published and approved by the Chinese Communist Party, the anthology appeared at a time when artistic and musical activities were extremely restricted. The government utilized this particular musical form for multiple goals, including the propagation of political ideologies, stimulation of party support, and education of the masses. Based upon original research and personal interviews, the dissertation provides the first documentation and analysis of the anthology in any language. Analysis focuses on the official ideology as situated in its socio-historical context, and an examination of individual reception and memory. The study begins with an introduction to the Cultural Revolution period, followed by an investigation of the composition, editing, compilation, themes, texts, and musical characteristics of the anthology. The dissertation concludes with an analysis of the contemporary memory of Cultural Revolution songs while considering concepts of music, memory, and nostalgia. The analysis reveals that the major factors influencing how the music is remembered and who remembers it, is dependent upon a combination of features including music and memory, generational imprinting and changes in contemporary Chinese society

An Empirical Study of the Determinants of Consumer Price Sensitivity for the Health and Fitness Club Industry

Ouyang, Lei. An Empirical Study of the Determinants of Consumer Price Sensitivity forthe Health and Fitness Club Industry. Published Doctor of Philosophydissertation, University of Northern Colorado, 2020. The primary purpose of this study was to propose and test a general model todescribe the extent to which customer price sensitivity is influenced by perceived value, service quality, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and switching costs. Additionally, the study also sought to examine if there is a significant difference in consumer price sensitivity among gender and household income groups. Finally, the study was designed to examine the congruency of the hypothesized model and to test the invariance of the model across male and female groups. There were 507 participants in the study. A convenient sampling approach was used to recruit members from five health and fitness clubs in Colorado and West Virginia. The participants’ age ranged from18 to 79 years (M = 36, SD = 13.9). The sample consisted of slightly more males (54.2% males compared to 45.5% females). The majority of the participants were Caucasian (64.5%) and had a membership length less than one year (71.1%). The significant research findings obtained from the data analysis included the following: 1. The results of structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis revealed that thehypothesized model provided a reasonably well fit to the health and fitness club member sample. 2. The results of the SEM analysis also demonstrated that ten of the 13 hypotheses were supported. Switching cost (β = -.91, p \u3c .01), customer satisfaction (β = -.85, p \u3c .01), perceived value (γ = -.58, p \u3c .01), and service quality (γ = -.42, p \u3c .01) were significant predictors of consumer price sensitivity. However, customer loyalty had a non-significant impact on price sensitivity. The SEM results also indicated that switching cost (β=.21, p\u3c.01) and customer satisfaction (β=.63, p\u3c.01) had a significant positive impact on customer loyalty. Service quality and perceived value positively influence switching costs (γ=.31, p\u3c.01; γ=.49, p\u3c.01) and customer satisfaction (γ=.51, p\u3c.01; γ=.49, p\u3c.01). 3. The results of the two-group SEM analysis revealed that the baseline model showed a good fit for both female and male participants. The results of invariance tests of the price sensitivity model indicated that it had configural and scalar invariance, but not metric invariance (partial invariance) across male and female groups. 4. The results of ANOVA analysis showed that the interaction effect between gender and household income groups did not reach statistical significance. The main effect for both gender and household income were statistically significant. Male members reported significantly lower price sensitivity levels compared to female counterparts. Low-household income members reported a significant higher price sensitivity level than middle-household income and high- household income members. Middle- household income members also reported a significant higher price sensitivity level than high- household income members. In summary, this study not only contributed to future theoretical research, but also guides practitioners in the development of marketing strategies. Through empirical study, the research results can help fitness and health club managers to better understand factors that associate with customer price sensitivity, which would allow them to develop more efficient marketing strategies. The theoretical contribution of this paper was the proposition of an integrated theoretical framework, and the use of survey data to validate effects of service quality, customer loyalty, switching costs, consumer participation, and customer satisfaction on consumers’ price sensitivity

Prompt Optimization of Large Language Model for Interactive Tasks without Gradient and Demonstrations

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable language proficiency, but they face challenges when solving interactive tasks independently. Existing methods either rely on gradient access, which is often inaccessible in state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-4, or necessitate diverse and high-quality in-context demonstrations. In this study, we propose LLM-PO, a novel approach that enables LLMs to address these tasks without gradient access or extensive demonstrations. The key idea is to maintain a text-based plan and ask LLMs to reflect on pros and cons of the current plan based on experience collected with it, to update the plan, and to collect more experiences with the new plan. Experiments on HotpotQA demonstrate that LLM-PO achieves higher or on par success rates compared to in-context learning (ICL) baselines while requiring less inference cost.Comment: Draft. Work in Progres

WACO: Word-Aligned Contrastive Learning for Speech Translation

End-to-end Speech Translation (E2E ST) aims to directly translate source speech into target text. Existing ST methods perform poorly when only extremely small speech-text data are available for training. We observe that an ST model's performance closely correlates with its embedding similarity between speech and source transcript. In this paper, we propose Word-Aligned COntrastive learning (WACO), a simple and effective method for extremely low-resource speech-to-text translation. Our key idea is bridging word-level representations for both speech and text modalities via contrastive learning. We evaluate WACO and other methods on the MuST-C dataset, a widely used ST benchmark, and on a low-resource direction Maltese-English from IWSLT 2023. Our experiments demonstrate that WACO outperforms the best baseline by 9+ BLEU points with only 1-hour parallel ST data. Code is available at https://github.com/owaski/WACO.Comment: ACL 2023 Poste

Understanding Chinese students’ college choice to increase Chinese student recruitment: A focus on music majors

The focus of this study was to understand why 20 Chinese students selected a rural, regionally focused research university. The research sought to (1) offer new, nuanced understanding of how Chinese students selected a university not well-known to international students and (2) advance how an institution of this type could meet its goal of improving and increasing Chinese student recruitment. As a majority of the Chinese students who selected this institution were majoring in music, this study offers implications for niche marketing and recruitment. In addition to the knowledge produced, this study models academic and student affairs collaboration where the research findings directly inform practice

An Unexpected Deamination Reaction after Hydrolysis of the Pyrimidine (6-4) Pyrimidone Photoproduct

Pyrimidine (6-4) pyrimidone photoproduct (6-4PP), a common DNA photolesion formed under solar irradiation, was indicated to hydrolyze under strong basic conditions, breaking the N3–C4 bond at the 5′-thymine. The reanalysis of this reaction revealed that the resulting water adduct may not be stable as previously proposed; it readily undergoes an esterification reaction induced by the 5-OH group at 6-4PP to form a five-membered ring, eliminating a molecule of ammonia

Precision Target Guide Strategy for Applying SERS into Environmental Monitoring

Surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) is a promising analytical technique that exhibits various applications in trace detection and identification. When it is applied into environmental monitoring, we should concern several key points to improve detection sensitivity and selectivity for the detection in complex matrix. In this tutorial review, we mainly focus on the strategies for improving the use of SERS into environmental application. The strategies are summarized for enhancing the ability of the substrate to selectively capture specific targets, and for achieving separation and concentration of the analytes from the matrix and the assembly structures for multiple phase detection. We have also introduced several newly developed detection systems using portable instruments and miniaturized devices that are more suitable for infield applications. In addition, we discuss the present challenges that hide it from wide real application and give the outlook for the future development in applying SERS in environmental monitoring