Journal articles: 'Kongo Free State' – Grafiati (2024)

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The Humanitarian Action of Leopold II in Congo Free State. The Antislavery-Conference of Brussels (1889-1890). Already from the time he was a crown prince Leopold II dreamt of acquiring a colony. He firmly believed in the economic importance for the motherland of overseas territories. However, when he appeared on the African scene he presented himself as a champion of the struggle against slave trade. This disinterested humanitarian image was meant as a means of bypassing Belgian indifference towards colonization and also the foreign rivalry. But in Africa he was forced into an opportunist policy. A total lack of means left him no other choice but resorting to political and economic collaboration with the Arabs, who played a major role in the slave trade. It was at the moment when the European colonization met the Arabic resistance in East-Africa that Cardinal Lavigerie’s campaign called for renewed public interest in the struggle against the Arabic slave trade. Great Britain asked Belgium to summon a diplomatic conference on the subject, In 1889 seventeen nations gathered to discuss a whole range of measures to limit slave trade on land and sea, arms trade and liquor traffic. The hottest issue on the agenda was the imposition of import duties in the Congo bassin. The main obstacle to the introduction of these taxes was the Dutch opposition against the changing of the terms of the Berlin Act (1885). The General Brussels Act did not include import tax regulations. These were the subject of a separate declaration, which Leopold however managed to connect to the General Act in such a way that neither could be ratified singly. Hence, the customs committee, convened after the Brussels negotiations to define more clearly the import duties, was an essential factor in the Antislavery Conference. It was not until 1892 that all obstacles were overcome and the final discussions rounded off. The Brussels Antislavery Conference did not induce Leopold to come to grips with slave trade and did not alter his Arabic policy. For the sovereign the conference was primarily a matter of economy and taxes. He wanted his colony to have more promising financial prospects. His attitude was conditioned by the precarious budget of the Congo Free State. The conference fitted in his new economic policy which consisted in carrying out his domanial projects.

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Vlaamse missionarissen publiceerden in koloniale tijden gezaghebbende en innoverende studies over de cultuur van de Centraal-Afrikaanse volkeren. Enkelen hebben daarbij gebruik gemaakt van het Nederlands als voertaal. Pater-scheutist Leo Bittremieux was een van de eerste want hij deed dat al in de jaren 1909-1914, de periode tussen Kongo Vrijstaat en eerste Wereldoorlog.Aan de hand van een aantal van zijn brieven uit deze periode, valt af te leiden hoezeer deze Vlaamsgezinde opstelling leidde tot een diep respect voor de taal en de cultuur van de zwarte bevolking. Dat ging zo ver dat hij er voor pleitte de inlandse talen te promoveren tot taal van onderwijs en bestuur. Het blijkt uit deze briefwisseling dat Bittremieux in zijn keuze vóór het Nederlands als wetenschappelijke communicatietaal naar westerlingen toe gesteund werd door zijn missieorde.Als zodanig betekenden zijn publicaties een promotie voor het Nederlands, maar ook voor het Yombe waarvan hij de rijkdom duidelijk maakte. Die optie was niet alleen het resultaat van zijn taalkundig onderzoek maar ook het gevolg van zijn Vlaamsgezinde overtuiging. Het was vanuit dezelfde overtuiging dat hij een diep respect opbracht voor de autochtone bevolking en haar cultuur. ________Scheutist, linguist and ethnologist Leo Bittremieux. His vision on the use of scientific language in 1910-1914During colonial times Flemish missionaries published authoritative and innovating studies about the culture of the Central-African peoples. A few of them used Dutch as their official language for these studies. Father-Scheutist Leo Bittremieux was one of the first for he already did so during 1909-1914, the period between the Congo Free State and the First World War.From a number of his letters dating from this period it can be concluded how this Pro-Flemish attitude brought about a deep respect for the language and culture of the black population. He went as far as to argue for the promotion of the autochthonous languages for education and government. This exchange of letters proves that Bittremieux’s choice for Dutch as the language for scientific communication addressed to Westerners was supported by his Mission Order.His publications therefore signified a promotion of the Dutch language, but also of the Yombe of which he exemplified the riches. That choice was not only the result of his linguistic research, but also the consequence of the Pro-Flemish persuasion. That same persuasion brought about his deep respect for the autochthonous population and its culture.

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AbstractThis article argues that effective co-operation between the antitrust authorities of Mainland China and Hong Kong in antitrust enforcement and the removal of anti-competitive state restraints is essential to the promotion of market competition in, as well as free trade and economic integration between, the two regions. This entails the careful design and conclusion of a bilateral co-operation agreement embracing not only comity co-peration in antitrust enforcement, but also the adoption of a diplomatic solution of mutual self-restraint for the removal of anti-competitive state restraints at the Mainland China-Hong Kong interface. This would also require the co-operation of Mainland Chinese and Hong Kong government authorities. Only with such bilateral cooperation can anti-competitive business practices and state restraints obstructing free trade and economic integration between the two regions be eliminated.

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This article studies the origins and development of the economic success of Hong Kong. After pointing out the problems of the free-market explanation and the authoritarian state explanation, this article turns to the world-system perspective for new insights. It is argued that the historical development of Hong Kong is shaped both by the capitalist world-system and by the interactions between socialist China and the capitalist power bloc between the 1950s and the 1970s. This article contributes by showing how these world-system dynamics have affected the Hong Kong political economy over the past three decades.

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City-regionalism plays an increasingly important role in China’s economic development. This paper analyses new forms of institutional arrangements that promote city-regional governance in the case of Hong Kong and Guangdong. Focusing on implementing the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA), we examine two research questions: Why are Guangdong and cities in the PRD strategically selected to implement CEPA and embed Hong Kong-based circulatory capital? How do governments at different scales build coordinated relationships to implement CEPA? Building upon the literature on state rescaling, we argue that governments have engaged in a scalar division of administration – a form of institutional infrastructure that aims to design and implement state strategies of urban and regional development. Within this division, the national government plays a role in steering and decision-making, Guangdong provincial government in coordination and facilitation, and urban governments in Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Zhuhai in actual implementation. CEPA implementation is built upon vertical linkages between governments at different levels in the Mainland and HKSAR government, and horizontal linkages between three free trade subzones (Qianhai, Nansha, and Hengqin) and Hong Kong-based firms and entrepreneurs.

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Spinless point defects in the CuO 2 planes of the cuprates have been shown for long to induce a magnetic response on the neighboring copper sites which behaves as a nearly free local moment in the under-doped case.1,2 In the case of Li + substitution on the Cu site, accurate 7 Li NMR shift data allow to evidence that the local moment susceptibility displays a ( T + T K ) -1 dependence, with a Kondo like temperature T K which increases abruptly near optimal doping.3 While a Curie paramagnetic response can be understood on general theoretical grounds in the case of undoped quantum spin systems, the Kondo screening of the moment might directly reflect the influence of charge carriers. This Kondo like behavior is also corroborated by measurements of the fluctuation time of the local moment deduced from 7 Li NMR spin lattice relaxation time.4 The local moment is found to survive in the superconducting state although a marked reduction of the screening is observed when T K > T c (see Ref. [5]), as might be expected from theoretical considerations. Correlatively it will be shown that the scattering of charge carriers by spinless defects can be studied accurately in single crystals in which such defects are created by electron irradiation. The low T upturns of the resistivity can be associated with a Kondo-like T dependence of the scattering in the under-doped case. In the over-doped case, T K being very high, the scattering becomes T-independent and 2D weak localization effects dominate.6

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Located immediately north of Hong Kong, Shenzhen is China's most successful special economic zone (SEZ). Commonly known as the “social laboratory” of reform and opening, Shenzhen was the foremost frontier for the People's Republic of China's adoption of market principles and entrance into the world economy in the late 1970s. This article looks at prototypes of the SEZ in Bao'an County, the precursor to Shenzhen during the Mao era (1949–76). Between 1949 and 1978, Bao'an was a liminal space where state endeavors to establish a socialist economy were challenged by capitalist influences from the adjacent British Crown colony of Hong Kong. To create an enclave of exception to socialism, Communist cadres in Bao'an promoted individualized, duty-free cross-border trade and informal foreign investment schemes as early as 1961. Although beholden to the inward-looking planned economy and stymied by radical leftist campaigns, these local improvisations formed the foundation for the SEZ—the hallmark of Deng Xiaoping's economic statecraft.

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A nearly free electron metal and a Mott insulating state can be thought of as opposite ends of the spectrum of possibilities for the motion of electrons in a solid. Understanding their interaction lies at the heart of the correlated electron problem. In the magnetic oxide metal PdCrO2, nearly free and Mott-localized electrons exist in alternating layers, forming natural heterostructures. Using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, quantitatively supported by a strong coupling analysis, we show that the coupling between these layers leads to an “intertwined” excitation that is a convolution of the charge spectrum of the metallic layer and the spin susceptibility of the Mott layer. Our findings establish PdCrO2 as a model system in which to probe Kondo lattice physics and also open new routes to use the a priori nonmagnetic probe of photoemission to gain insights into the spin susceptibility of correlated electron materials.

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In order to determine the most unfavorable condition of the steel box girder, ensure its stress and deformation in the safe state, the steel box girder bridge should apply the finite element analysis software to modeling analysis. At the same time, data calculation can provide the theoretical evidence for the factory manufacturing lines. The tender DB01 of the continuous bridge of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge provides the backdrop for this essay, using MIDAS/Civil 2012 to do numeral simulation analysis on the hoisting, and then analyzing the stress and deformation of the main beam at the different construction stages. The analysis reveals that the temporary maximum of a hinged steel box girder should be 47.5MPa in the process of construction which is allowed by the stress of the steel Q 345.And after the No.1 beam has been put in the right place and connected, the maximum displacement of the No.6 joint is 19.4mm downward. With the construction stage CS7 completed, the maximum downward displacement is 14.2mm. Making the stress free alignment is superposing the minus figure of the cumulative displacement on the basis of designed line. Each beam segment has been made according to the stress free alignment .Also, after field construction, the ideology of designed lines of the bridge will be brought into reality.

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Abstract Abstract 4894 Introduction Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBL) is the commonest type of lymphoma worldwide. The condition is the same in Hong Kong and it accounts for about 30–40% of lymphoma cases. CHOP (cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, vincristine and prednisolone) was used for treatment of DLBL for many years. Rituximab, a chimeric anti-CD20 monoclonal antibody was used for the treatment of DLBL for about 10 years. Previous studies have shown the better efficacy of rituximab plus CHOP over CHOP alone, including the remission rate, overall and event-free survival. No previous study compared the efficacy of rituximab plus CHOP with CHOP alone in Hong Kong Chinese. We conducted a study to compare the outcomes of CHOP chemotherapy alone with rituximab plus CHOP in a local hospital in Hong Kong. Method It was a retrospective study from January 1999 to December 2009. Hong Kong Chinese patients with newly diagnosed diffuse large B-cell lymphoma were recruited in the study. They were divided into two groups. One group of patients was given CHOP chemotherapy and the other group was given rituximab plus CHOP. The remission rate, overall survival and event-free survival were compared in the two groups. Results 62 patients were recruited in the study. Twenty-nine patients with median age of 55 (range 23–77) were given CHOP chemotherapy alone. Thirty-two patients with a median age of 53 (range 20–75) were given rituximab plus CHOP. The baseline characteristics were similar in both groups. There were 41% of male patients in each group. IPI (international prognostic index) score as well as the proportion of patients at stage III and IV disease were similar in both groups. The complete remission rate was 38% in CHOP alone group and 78% in rituximab plus CHOP group (p=0.002, Fisher's exact test). The 3-year overall survival rate was 47% in CHOP group and 74% in rituximab plus CHOP group (p=0.043). The 3-year event-free survival was also better in the rituximab plus CHOP group (p=0.026). 19 events (including relapse, progression and death) were observed in the CHOP alone group and 8 events were observed in the rituximab plus chemotherapy group. The side effects profile was similar in both groups and the rate of infection is comparable in both arms. Conclusion This study has shown that the use of rituximab plus CHOP was better than CHOP alone in Hong Kong Chinese patients with newly diagnosed diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. The complete remission rate, overall survival and event-free survival were significantly higher in the rituximab plus chemotherapy group. Disclosures: No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

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Background Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is endemic in Hong Kong with a skewed geographical and ethnic distribution. We performed an epidemiological study of NPC in Cheung Chau Island, a fishing village with very minimal residential mobility, and compared its demographics and survival with the rest of Hong Kong. Methods NPC data in Cheung Chau and non–Cheung Chau residents between 2006 and 2017 treated in our tertiary center were collected. The incidence, stage distribution, and mortality of Cheung Chau NPC residents were compared with those of their counterparts in the whole Hong Kong obtained from the Hong Kong Cancer Registry. Propensity score matching (PSM) was performed between Cheung Chau and non–Cheung Chau cases in a 1:4 ratio. Overall survival (OS), progression-free survival (PFS), and cancer-specific survival (CSS) were compared between these two cohorts by product limit estimation and log-rank tests. Results Sixty-one patients residing in Cheung Chau were identified between 2006 and 2017. There was a significantly higher NPC incidence ( P < .001) but an insignificant difference in the mortality rate in Cheung Chau compared to the whole Hong Kong data. After PSM with 237 non–Cheung Chau patients, the Cheung Chau cohort revealed a stronger NPC family history ( P < .001). However, there were no significant differences in OS ( P = .170), PFS ( P = .053), and CSS ( P = .160) between these two cohorts. Conclusion Our results revealed that Cheung Chau had a higher NPC incidence but similar survival outcomes compared to the whole of Hong Kong. Further prospective studies are warranted to verify this finding and to explore the possible underlying mechanisms.

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Hong Kong's commitment to free schooling in the 1970s led to a massification of its formerly elite education system. Analysis of census data reveals that, consequently, family background and gender have played smaller roles in determining which children go to secondary school. There was no concomitant increase in social selection at the postsecondary level Ironically, the colonial government owed little of its legitimacy to the provision of equal opportunities for individuals. In years past, social mobility was not central to the rationale for public education. However, with the pending transfer of sovereignty to China, the weakened authority of the government has generated a need for new bases of legitimacy. It may be that guarantees of equal opportunity will emerge in attempts to bolster state authority.

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Single layer low-dimensional materials are presently of emerging interest, including in the context of magnetism. In the present report, on-surface supramolecular architecturing was further developed and employed to create surface supported two-dimensional binary spin arrays on atomically clean non-magnetic Au(111). By chemical programming of the modules, different checkerboards were produced combining phthalocyanines containing metals of different oxidation and spin states, diamagnetic zinc, and a metal-free ‘spacer’. In an in-depth, spectro-microscopy and theoretical account, we correlate the structure and the magnetic properties of these tunable systems and discuss the emergence of 2D Kondo magnetism from the spin-bearing components and via the physico-chemical bonding to the underlying substrate. The contributions of the individual elements, as well as the role of the electronic surface state in the bottom substrate, are discussed, also looking towards further in-depth investigations.

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The views of scholars concerning the definition of «international financial center», which makes it possible to formulate the definition of international financial center essence are summarized in this paper. The factors influencing the formation of international financial center incluing: stable financial system, stable currency, exchange rate stability, political and social stability in the country, favorable geographical location, developed financial infrastructure, open economy for free movement of capital, etc. are identified. The role of international financial centers in increasing their global competitiveness, achieving higher levels of economic growth, prosperity and social progress is substantiated. The classification of international financial centers is investigated. The place of the Hong Kong Financial Center in the financial architecture of the world is determined. The main parameters of the current state of the Hong Kong Financial Center: the USD / HKD exchange rate, the effective exchange rate index weighted by trade, the Hang Seng index, market capitalization, etc. are diagnosed. SWOT-analysis of the Hong Kong Financia Cente is carried out in order to identify its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Based on the results of the problem of its functioning, a set of measures to improve competitiveness is also proposed. Hong Kong has favorable macroeconomic and institutional environment, qualified personnel, and is the fifth most competitive international financial center in the world. However, there is a low degree of international element in the domestic stock market, there is also risk of losing the status of «international financial center», other regional economies that have greater access to international investment opportunities in the stock market, such as Singapore, may be a threat. The financial center should focus on overcoming the effects of the coronavirus, promote the share of foreign investment in the economy, take a set of measures to overcome the country's recession, review legal, regulatory and tax requirements to promote development, improve quality of life and attractiveness, and become Asia's leading currency hub.

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Economic policy does not require a constitutional grounding. However, many constitutions expressly dedicate articles and chapters to the national economy while others produce comparable effects by indirectly privileging particular economic arrangements. The constitutions of the US, the People’s Republic of China and the Philippines and the Basic Law of Hong Kong can plausibly be invoked to justify State approaches to economic ordering. However, each of them essentially underdetermines the economic fundamentals of the polity, not merely by deferring their concretization to governments and judiciaries, but by eschewing to commit the State to an identifiable level of involvement. Underdeterminacy can result from a variety of structural features, such as omissions, the use of contested concepts, the dilution of overarching economic alignments through countervailing constitutional provisions or limitations by ordinary legislation and the assortment of amorphous constitutional repertoires that give free rein to policy. The fact that even constitutions that were in their drafting informed not least by economic considerations fail to set the basic parameters of the economic arena queries the extent to which they can be said to embody any such underpinnings. It further questions the significance of constitutions and formal institutions in the formation of liberal market economies in particular and emphasizes the role of experience.

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Abstract The Democratic Republic of the Congo holds important reserves of oil shale which is still under geological status. Herein, the characterization and pyrolysis kinetics of type I kerogen-rich oil shale of the western Central Kongo (CK) were investigated. X-ray diffraction, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy and thermal analysis (TG/DTA) showed that CK oil shale exhibits a siliceous mineral matrix with a consistent organic matter rich in aliphatic chains. The pyrolysis behavior of kerogen revealed the presence of a single mass loss between 300 and 550 °C, estimated at 12.5% and attributed to the oil production stage. Non-isothermal kinetics was performed by determining the activation energy using the iterative isoconversional model-free methods and exhibits a constant value with E = 211.5 ± 4.7 kJ mol−1. The most probable kinetic model describing the kerogen pyrolysis mechanism was obtained using the Coats–Redfern and Arrhenius plot methods. The results showed a unique kinetic triplet confirming the nature of kerogen, predominantly type I and reinforcing the previously reported geochemical characteristics of the CK oil shale. Besides, the calculation of thermodynamic parameters (ΔH*, ΔS* and ΔG*) corresponding to the pyrolysis of type I kerogen revealed that the process is non-spontaneous, in agreement with DTA experiments.

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Background: Peritoneal dialysis (PD) is the first-line renal replacement therapy for end-stage renal failure patients in Hong Kong. Abdominal wall hernia is a common mechanical complication of PD, and early surgical repair has been advocated to reduce complications. This study aims to review the outcomes of tension-free mesh repair of inguinal hernia in PD patients. Methods: All PD patients who underwent elective repair of inguinal hernia from 2009 to 2015 were identified from a single centre for retrospective analysis. Primary outcomes included surgical complications, perioperative dialysis technique and recurrence. Results: Twenty-one patients with a total of 26 inguinal hernia repairs were included in this 7-year retrospective study. All were males, and the mean age was 68 ± 10 years. Diabetic nephropathy ( n = 9, 42.9%) and glomerulonephritis ( n = 7, 33.3%) were the two most common causes of renal failure. All hernias were detected after the initiation of PD, and the mean duration of PD to hernia detection was 16 months (range 1–65 months). Lichtenstein open mesh repair was performed in all patients. Complications included seroma ( n = 3, 11.5%) and ischaemic orchitis ( n = 1, 3.8%). There were no mesh infection or recurrence. Twenty patients (95.2%) received intermittent peritoneal dialysis post-operatively and returned to continuous ambulatory PD in 15 to 30 days. Only one patient (4.8%) required bridging haemodialysis due to Tenckhoff catheter blockage. Conclusions: Tension-free mesh repair is associated with low morbidity and low recurrence rates in PD patients. Timely management and close collaboration with renal physicians are essential to continue PD after repair.

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AimsSebaceous gland carcinoma (SGC) of the eyelid is a rare but potentially deadly cancer. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) 7th Edition T category for SGC correlated with metastasis and survival in the Chinese population.MethodsThis was a retrospective, single-centre cohort study. Patients with surgically resected eyelid SGC between January 2001 and May 2015 at the Hong Kong Eye Hospital were reviewed. Tumours were staged using the AJCC criteria. The main outcome measures included local recurrence, metastasis and death. Disease-free survival (DFS) was measured from the completion of treatment; overall survival was measured from the date of initial diagnosis.ResultsThe study included 22 Chinese patients with a mean age of 65.4 years. The majority presented as a nodular lesion (91%) with 12 eyes (54.5%) initially misdiagnosed and a mean presentation time of 1 year. It was found that those with AJCC stage T2b or higher were significantly associated with lymph node metastasis (P=0.002) when compared with those with stage T2a. Older age at diagnosis (P=0.035) and no misdiagnosis (P=0.025) were associated with shorter DFS. Those with stage 3a or higher were associated with shorter DFS (P=0.007) and overall survival (P=0.024).ConclusionSimilar to previous reports, in this Chinese cohort, AJCC staging for SGC correlated with lymph node metastasis, DFS and overall survival. Those with stage 2b or higher on presentation will need closer surveillance for lymph node metastasis and may benefit from sentinel lymph node biopsy.

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Introduction Tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) therapy targets at epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene mutations in non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). We aimed to compare the EGFR mutation-guided target therapy versus empirical chemotherapy for first-line treatment of advanced NSCLC in the public healthcare setting of Hong Kong. Methods A Markov model was designed to simulate outcomes of a hypothetical cohort of advanced (stage IIIB/IV) NSCLC adult patients with un-tested EGFR-sensitizing mutation status. Four treatment strategies were evaluated: Empirical first-line chemotherapy with cisplatin-pemetrexed (empirical chemotherapy group), and EGFR mutation-guided use of a TKI (afatinib, erlotinib, and gefitinib). Model outcome measures were direct medical cost, progression-free survival, overall survival, and quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs). Incremental cost per QALY gained (ICER) was estimated. Sensitivity analyses were performed to examine robustness of model results. Results Empirical chemotherapy and EGFR mutation-guided gefitinib gained lower QALYs at higher costs than the erlotinib group. Comparing with EGFR mutation-guided erlotinib, the afatinib strategy gained additional QALYs with ICER (540,633 USD/QALY). In 10,000 Monte Carlo simulations for probabilistic sensitivity analysis, EGFR mutation-guided afatinib, erlotinib, gefitinib and empirical chemotherapy were preferred strategy in 0%, 98%, 0% and 2% of time at willingness-to-pay (WTP) 47,812 USD/QALY (1x gross domestic product (GDP) per capita), and in 30%, 68%, 2% and 0% of time at WTP 143,436 USD/QALY (3x GDP per capita), respectively. Conclusions EGFR mutation-guided erlotinib appears to be the cost-effective strategy from the perspective of Hong Kong public healthcare provider over a broad range of WTP.

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From mid-1970s, Asian societies have experienced unprecedented economic growth, and have invested in the development of their own welfare regimes, which offers support to the individual even though public funding is limited. Welfare development received growing attention in Asia. The financial crisis that began in 1997 signified a drastic change in the policy context. The future of Asian economy and employment is bleak, and governments must face the risk of shrinking public resources in response to increasing social demands. The paper discussed the risks of our welfare system, and the weaknesses of public sector, community and private welfare in meeting these increasing social demands after the financial crisis, as observed in Hong Kong and other Asian societies. Although work income and occupational welfare will still be the primary protection systems of individuals and families, partly due to the dominance of neo-liberalism in the global economy and the free market system in this region. However, given the possibility of increasing vulnerability to unemployment in the future, it is also necessary to install a stronger collective system of social security and policies to pool resources together to share the risks. Of course, these initiatives will require a redefinition of the notion of citizenship and the contract that exist among individuals, and between the state and its citizens.

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As a result of the new economic policy, fourteen Economic and Technological Development Zones (ETDZs) were established in twelve coastal cities between 1984 and 1988. The first ETDZs were Dalian, Yantai, Qingdao, Lianyungang, Nantong, Minhang (Shanghai), Hongqiao (Shanghai), Caohejing (Shanghai), Ningbo, Fuzhou, Guangzhou and Zhanjiang. Unlike Special Economic Zone (SEZ), an ETDZ is located in the suburban area of a major city. Special policies are adopted within the ETDZ. An administrative committee, normally selected by the local government, oversees economic and social management in the zones on behalf of the local government. The category ‘SEZ’ covers a broad range of more specific zone types, including Free Trade Zones (FTZ), Export Processing Zones (EPZ), Free Zones (FZ), Industrial Estates (IE), Free Ports, Urban Enterprise Zones and others. The second wave of expansion of ETDZs was led by the establishment of Pudong New District in Shanghai in 1990. This decision was aimed at elevating the status of Shanghai, making it the “Dragon Head” of the Yangtze River Delta Region, which comprises of Shanghai and parts of Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Prior to the establishment of this new district, the Pearl River Delta Region – comprising nine cities in Guangdong – was the forerunner of China’s open door policy. However, unlike Guangdong, which lies at the south-eastern coast of China, Shanghai’s economic development will have more impact on China’s vast hinterland. Between 1992 and 1993, a total of eighteen state-level ETDZs were established – Yingkou, Changchun, Shenyang, Harbin, Weihai, Kunshan, Hangzhou, Xiaoshan, Wenzhou, Rongqiao, Dongshan, Guangzhou Nansha, Huizhou Daya Bay, Wuhu, Wuhan, Chongqing, Beijing and Urumchi. Two special projects were added later. Founded in 1993, the Ningbo Daxie Development Zone is an investment by China International Trust and Investment Corporation (CITIC), and comes under its management. The other special project is the Suzhou Industrial Park, which was founded in 1994, and is a joint cooperation between the governments of China and Singapore. After 2000, in an effort to fuel the development of the Central and Western regions, the central government also endorsed the establishment of a further eleven national ETDZs in inland regions. Up till now, China has a total of fifty-four state-level ETDZs – thirty-two in coastal regions, and twenty-two in the hinterland. The region of Hong Kong has a role and status of innovation. The planners in this unique part of East Asia expect that some new concepts can help the former British colony to embrace a new economic model: a model in which design, marketing and branding play the crucial role in economy.

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Objectives: We aimed to conduct a retrospective analysis of patients treated with radiotherapy for laryngeal carcinoma at a single institution.Methods: We analysed data from 202 consecutive patients treated with primary or post-operative radiotherapy for laryngeal carcinoma over a 10-year period.Results: Sixty-nine patients had a T1, 65 a T2, 39 a T3 and 29 a T4 lesion. Forty-one patients were node-positive. The clinical stage was I in 67 patients, II in 53, III in 36 and IV in 46. Primary radiotherapy was given to 152 patients. The median follow up was 60 months. The five-year overall local control rate was 86 per cent, the ultimate local control rate was 93 per cent, the five-year regional control rate was 96 per cent, the five-year relapse-free survival rate was 82 per cent and the five-year overall survival rate was 69 per cent.Conclusions: Patients with laryngeal carcinoma treated with primary or post-operative radiotherapy had a five-year overall survival rate of 69 per cent.

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Background. Cytogenetically normal acute myeloid leukaemia (CN-AML) occurs in 50% adult AML and is a group of diseases with diverse mutations and distinct clinical outcome. CEBPα, NPM1 and FLT3 mutations that are commonly seen in CN-AML have been incorporated into risk stratification. However, prognostic impacts of other gene mutations and their combinations in this AML subtype have remained unclear. In this study, we examined a cohort of young adults with de novo CN-AML who have received uniform treatment protocol in Hong Kong and identified a mutation pentad that might define their clinical outcome. Methodology. Young adults (18-60 years old) with de novo CN-AML, diagnosed from 1st August 2003 to 7th August 2018 in 8 regional hospitals in Hong Kong, were included. They received standard "7+3" induction (Daunorubicin 60-90 mg/m2 and Cytarabine 100 mg/m2) followed by up to 4 courses of high dose cytarabine consolidation (Cytarabine 3 gram/m2 for 4-6 doses). Decision on allogeneic haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) was based on clinical grounds and gene mutations according to ELN recommendations. Next generation sequencing (NGS) was performed in diagnostic bone marrow (BM) in 362 patients for 36 recurrent mutated genes and analyzed by in-house bioinformatics pipelines. Relapse-free survival (RFS) was defined by the time from first complete remission (CR) to relapse or death and overall survival (OS) by the time from diagnosis to death. Patients were censored at last follow up. Survivals were evaluated by Kaplan-Meier analysis and compared by log-rank test. Multivariate analyses of clinical and genetic parameters were analyzed by Cox-regression. P-values of &lt;0.05 were considered statistically significant. Results. A total of 436 patients (Male=189; Female=247) were recruited. Their median age of onset was 49 years old (Range 18-60); median presenting white cell counts (WCC) was 21.85x109/L (range 0.25-411x109/L), median circulating blast % was 46% (range 1-99). 416 patients received induction of whom 90.1% achieved CR or CRi (N=375) after 1 (N=268), 2 (N=78) or ≥ 3 courses of induction (N=29). One hundred and sixty three patients received allogeneic HSCT at CR1 (N=102), CR2 (N=51), ≥ CR3 (N=2) and relapsed state (N=8). Eight mutations with ≥ 10% prevalence occurred in 79.8% patients (Figure 1). Univariate analyses showed that mutations of CEBPα, TET2, IDH2-R172K and RAS were not associated with treatment outcome and survival. Five genetic subgroups based on NPM1, FLT3 and DNMT3A mutations could be identified: NPM1 mutation only; NPM1 mutation and FLT3-ITD; All wildtype; FLT3-ITD only; DNMT3A irrespective of NPM1 and FLT3-ITD status. These subgroups showed distinct RFS and OS (Figure 2). Impacts of IDH1-R132 and IDH2-R140Q mutations were evaluated in these 5 subgroups. Interestingly, adverse impacts of IDH1-R132 on RFS and OS were only significant in the all wildtype subgroup and the adverse impact of IDH2-R140Q was only significant for RFS in the NPM1 mutation only subgroup. Conclusion. A mutation pentad comprising NPM1, FLT3, DNMT3A, IDH1-R132 and IDH2-R140Q seemed to define distinct prognostic subgroups in young adults with de novo CN-AML. A limited gene panel based on this pentad using conventional PCR may provide a practical and cost-effective means to guide post-remission therapy in these patients, especially in places where NGS may not be readily available. Acknowledgements: SK Yee Medical Foundation; Li Shu Fan Medical Foundation, LKS Faculty of Medicine, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Blood Cancer Foundation Disclosures Leung: Curegenix: Research Funding; Servier: Research Funding; Merck: Research Funding; Pfizer: Research Funding.

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11019 Background: Breast cancer risk categories were revised by the St Gallen international expert consensus meeting in 2005. This study was to validate their application in Hong Kong. Methods: The clinical outcomes of female breast cancer patients presented from 1994 to 2002 were retrospectively analyzed. Patients with non-invasive cancers, unknown HER-2 status, unclear primary (T) or nodal (N) stage, distant metastases at presentation, induction chemotherapy or no definitive surgery were excluded. Results: 902 breast cancers were eligible for further analysis. Adjuvant radiotherapy, hormonal therapy and chemotherapy were given in 74%, 68% and 56% of patients respectively. The median follow-up was 5.4 years (range 0.3- 12.5 years). The risk categories were highly predictive of all survival outcome parameters (p<0.00005; Table). In the intermediate risk category, node-negative patients with endocrine responsive/ responsiveness uncertain tumors had better 5-year distant failure-free survival (DFFS) than the rest with either 1–3 positive nodes or endocrine non-responsive tumors (95% vs 89%, p=0.005). Patients with 1–3 positive nodes and HER-2 overexpressed tumors were classified as high risk but their 5-year DFFS was similar to that in the worse subgroup of intermediate risk and significantly better than those with ≥4 positive nodes (89% vs 65%, p=0.0001). Further analysis showed that HER-2 overexpression had adverse impact on DFFS of patients with ≥4 positive nodes (hazard ratios (HR) 1.78; 95% CI, 1.12 - 2.84; p=0.015) but not on those with ≤ 3 positive nodes (HR 1.15; 95% CI, 0.67 - 1.97; p= 0.61). Conclusions: The 2005 St Gallen risk category is a useful clinical tool but we cannot confirm the adverse impact of HER-2 overexpression in our patients with ≤ 3 positive nodes. [Table: see text] No significant financial relationships to disclose.

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272 Background: Atezolizumab-bevacizumab is the new standard of care for first-line treatment of advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). However, the optimal sequence of therapy after disease progression on atezolizumab-bevacizumab is unclear. Methods: This multinational, multicenter, retrospective study assessed clinical outcomes of patients with advanced HCC who received subsequent systemic therapy after progression on atezolizumab-bevacizumab in Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore between July 2016 and April 2019. Results: A total of 49 patients were included; the median age was 60 years (range, 3780) and 73.5% were male. All patients were classified as Child-Pugh A and Barcelona-Clinic Liver Cancer stage C. Multikinase inhibitors (MKIs), including sorafenib (n = 29), lenvatinib (n = 19), and cabozantinib (n = 1), were used as second-line therapy for all patients. The objective response rate (ORR) and disease control rate (DCR) were 6.1% and 63.3%, respectively, in all patients. With a median follow-up duration of 11.0 months, median progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) were 3.4 months (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.84.9) and 14.7 months (95% CI 8.121.2) in all patients. Median PFS with lenvatinib was significantly longer than that with sorafenib (6.1 months vs. 2.5 months; P= 0.004), although there was no significant difference in median OS (16.6 months vs. 11.2 months; P= 0.347). Treatment-related adverse events (TRAEs) of any grade and grade 3 occurred in 42 (85.7%) and 8 (16.3%) of patients. Common TRAEs included hand-foot syndrome (HFS) (n = 26, 53.1%), fatigue (n = 14, 28.6%), hypertension (n = 14, 28.6%), and diarrhea (n = 12, 24.5%). Conclusions: Second-line treatment with MKIs, mostly sorafenib and lenvatinib, showed comparable efficacy and manageable toxicities in patients with advanced HCC after disease progression on atezolizumab-bevacizumab.

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4117 Background: This is a single arm, multi-center, phase II study to assess the efficacy and tolerability of sorafenib, oxaliplatin and capecitabine combination for the treatment of advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients. Methods: Eligible patients received SECOX regime—sorafenib 400 mg bid (Day one-fourteen), oxaliplatin 85 mg/m2 (Day one) and capecitabine 1700 mg/m2(Day one-seven) every two weeks. Response assessment was based on RECIST 1.0 criteria. The primary endpoint was time-to-progression (TTP) and the secondary endpoints were tumor response rate (RR), progression-free survival (PFS), overall survival (OS) and tolerability. Results: A total of 51 patients were enrolled in the trial.The median age was 58 years (range, 28-81) and 84% of patients were chronic hepatitis B carriers. Ninety percent of recruited patients belonged to BCLC stage C disease and 41 (80%) patients had extra-hepatic metastasis. The best RR was 16% and they were all partial response. Another 62% of patients achieved stable disease for at least eight weeks. The median TTP was 5.29 months (95% CI 3.81-5.88 months), PFS 5.26 months (95% CI 3.75-5.88 months) and OS was 11.73 months (95% CI 8.87- 15.38 months). Diarrhea (75%), Hand-foot-skin reaction (73%) and transient liver function derangement were the most commonly encountered adverse events, with the majority of patients having grade one or two. No treatment-related death was reported. Conclusions: The SECOX regime indicates preliminary promising activity and safety in Asian population with advanced HCC. Our data support a randomized trial comparing SECOX versus sorafenib alone for treatment of advanced HCC. Clinical trial information: NCT00752063.

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Christoph Antons (ed.); Law and development in East and South-East Asia (Adriaan Bedner) David B. Dewitt, Carolina G. Hernandez (eds); Development and security in Southeast Asia (vol. 1 & 2) (Freek Colombijn) Lily Kong, Brenda S.A. Yeoh; The politics of landscape in Singapore; Constructions of ‘nation’ (Ben Derudder) Andrew Hardy; Red hills; Migrants and the state in the highlands of Vietnam (Hans Hägerdal) Hanneman Samuel, Henk Schulte Nordholt (eds); Indonesia in transition; Rethinking ‘civil society’, ‘region’, and ‘crisis’ (david Henley) S. Margana; Pujangga Jawa dan bayang-bayang kolonial (Mason Hoadley) Karel E.M. Bongenaar; De ontwikkeling van het zelfbesturend landschap in Nederlandsch-Indie: 1855-1942 (Gerry van Klinken) Pamela J. Stewart, Andrew Strathern; Humors and substances; Ideas of the body in New Guinea (Michael Lieber) Wu Xiao An; Chinese business in the making of a Malay state, 1882-1941 (Loh Wei Leng) Mikihiro Moriyama; Sundanese print culture and modernity in 19th-century West Java (Julian Millie) Yunita T. Winarto; Seeds of knowledge; The beginning of integrated pest management in Java (Simon Platten) Jelle Miedema, Ger Reesink; One head, many faces; New perspectives on the Bird’s Head Peninsula of New Guinea (Anton Ploeg) Christopher R. Duncan (ed.); Civilizing the margins; Southeast Asian government policies for the development of minorities (Nathan Porath) Rosario Mendoza Cortes, Celestina Puyal Boncan, Ricardo Trota Jose; The Filipino saga; History as social change (Portia L. Reyes) Stephen Dobbs; The Singapore River; A social history, 1819-2002 (Victor R. Savage) Michael Wood; Official history in modern Indonesia; New Order perceptions and counterviews (Henk Schulte Nordholt) Claudio O. Delang (ed.); Living at the edge of Thai society; The Karen in the highlands of northern Thailand (Nicholas Tapp) Andrew C. Willford, Kenneth M. George (eds); Spirited politics: Religion and public life in contemporary Southeast Asia (Bryan S. Turner) Hans Straver, Chris van Fraassen, Jan van der Putten (eds); Ridjali: Historie van Hitu; Een Ambonse geschiedenis uit de zeventiende eeuw (Edwin Wieringa) Z.J. Manusama; Historie en sociale structuur van Hitu tot het midden der zeventiende eeuw (Edwin Wieringa) Edwin Jurriëns; Cultural travel and migrancy; The artistic representation of globalization in the electronic media of West Java (Tim Winter) In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (BKI), no. 162 (2006), no: 1, Leiden

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6037 Background: The current standard treatment for locally advanced NPC is chemoradiation (CRT) ± adjuvant chemotherapy. However, adjuvant chemotherapy is often poorly tolerated after intensive CRT. Our previous study of neoadjuvant chemotherapy followed by CRT showed encouraging toxicity profile and disease control in advanced NPC (JCO 2004: 22: 3053–60). The current study compared the safety and efficacy of neoadjuvant chemotherapy (neoadj) followed by CRT. Methods: Newly diagnosed patients (pts) with stage III to IVB NPC were randomized (stratified by stage III vs IV) to: (1) Neoadj-CRT: docetaxel 75 mg/m2 D1, cisplatin 75 mg/m2 D1, q3w × 2 cycles, followed by cisplatin 40 mg/m2 weekly × 6–8 cycles concurrent with RT (= 66 Gy in 2-Gy fractions), or (2) CRT: cisplatin-RT (same as arm 1) without neoadj. The primary endpoint was toxicity. Secondary endpoints included survival and quality of life. Planned accrual was 30 pts per arm to detect a 20% difference in toxicity on one side of a 95% confidence interval (CI). Results: From 11/2002 to 11/2004, 65 pts were recruited. Five pts were excluded after randomization but before treatment started (three pts were subsequently found ineligible, and two pts withdrew consent). There was a higher rate of G3–4 neutropenia (100% vs 16%, p<0.001), but not neutropenic fever (3% vs 4%) or other non-hematologic toxicity in the neoadj-CRT vs CRT arm. The proportion of pts progressing at 2-yrs by group was compared by Fisher’s Exact Test (p=0.158). At median follow-up of 2.74 yrs, there were 10 deaths and 13 progressions. The 2-yr progression free survival for neoadj-CRT vs CRT was 80% vs 71% (hazard ratio 0.42; CI 0.14− 1.27; p=0.11). The 2-yr overall survival was 93% vs 76% (hazard ratio 0.17; CI 0.037–0.82; p=0.013). Conclusions: Neoadjuvant docetaxel and cisplatin followed by CRT was well tolerated with a manageable toxicity profile and allowed subsequent delivery of full dose CRT. Preliminary result suggested improved survival. A phase 3 study to definitively test this strategy is warranted. Acknowledgement: Sanofi-Aventis Hong Kong Ltd supported this study in part. No significant financial relationships to disclose.

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768 Background: This single institution retrospective study evaluates the reason for delay in Time To Adjuvant Chemotherapy (TTAC) from curative resection surgery to start of adjuvant therapy in CRC. The reason for this study was to determine if type of surgery (laparoscopic versus open) increased TTAC of which evidence indicates poorer disease free survival and overall survival (Biagi J, Raphael M, Mackillop W, Kong W, King W, Booth C. Association between time to initiation of adjuvant chemotherapy and survival in colorectal cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA, 305(22):2335-42. doi: 10.1001/jama.2011.749.) Methods: CRC patients treated at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Canada were included if diagnosed with stage II or III disease, underwent curative resection surgery between January 1, 2006, and December 31, 2012, and either received systemic adjuvant chemotherapy or surveillance protocol. Results: Among 259 patients, 92 patients (35.7%) underwent curative laparoscopic resection and 166 open resection (64.3%). Intraoperative and/or postoperative complications were experienced in 73 patients. Complications were less prevalent among patients who underwent laparoscopic surgery versus open resection (11.9% vs. 36.8%; p<0.0001). Of these 73 complications, wound infection (39.7%), intraoperative procedural complication (14.3%), and postoperative gastrointestinal complications (6.4%) were most prevalent. After adjusting for complication and clustering within the operating surgeon, there were no statistical differences in TTAC between open (51.310 ± 1.7 days) and laparoscopic (49.2 ± 1.6 days) resection surgeries (p=0.1996). However, presence of a complication was associated with delay in TTAC (HR 0.501; 95% CI, 0.43-0.58; p<0.001). Conclusions: TTAC in CRC patients does not differ statically for each type of resection surgery. However, presence of a complication is associated with delays in TTAC and is over three-fold more prevalent in open than laparoscopic resections. Therefore, there is an increased risk of delay in TTAC for open resection surgeries than laparoscopic resections due to a higher prevalence of surgical complications.

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ABSTRAK Meskipun telah dilakukan berbagai upaya, Indonesia kembali dinilai sebagai negara paling terkorup di Asia. Sejak awal tahun 2004 dan 2005 berdasarkan hasil survei dikalangan para pengusaha dan pebisnis oleh lembaga konsultan Political and Economic Risk Consultancy (PERC). Hasil survei lembaga konsultan PERC yang berbasis di Hong Kong menyatakan bahwa Indonesia merupakan negara yang paling korup di antara 12 negara Asia. Predikat negara terkorup diberikan karena nilai Indonesia hampir menyentuh angka mutlak 10 dengan skor 9,25 (nilai 10 merupakan nilai tertinggi atau terkorup). Pada tahun 2005, Indonesia masih termasuk dalam tiga teratas negara terkorup di Asia. Ini seharusnya mampu membangkitkan suatu pemahaman baru, bahwa diperlukan suatu sistem yang mampu menyadarkan semua elemen bangsa untuk sama-sama bergerak memberantas korupsi yang telah menggurita.Cara yang paling efektif adalah melalui media pendidikan. Belajar dari pengalaman negara lain yang relatif berhasil memberantas korupsi, selain aspek penegakan hukum (law enforcement) yang tidak kalah pentingnya adalah Aspek pencegahan dalam bentuk Pendidikan Anti Korupsi (PAK). Program kampanye anti korupsi ini menerapkan pendekatan yang menumbuhkan kesadaran untuk menjadi agen perubahan dengan menerapkan sembilan nilai integritas yaitu Jujur, Peduli, Sederhana, Tanggung Jawab, Kerja Keras, Mandiri, Disiplin, Berani dan Adil. Melalui abdimas ini para remaja diajak untuk mulai berkomitmen untuk menyebarkan konsep integritas melalui perilaku kehidupan sehari-hari dan melakukan kampanye anti korupsi melalui sosial media untuk Indonesia yang lebih bersih. Katakunci: Anti Korupsi, Integritas, Change-Maker, Area of Control, Area of Influence ABSTRACT Despite various efforts, Indonesia was again rated as the most corrupt country in Asia in early 2004 and 2005 based on the results of a survey among entrepreneurs and business people by the Political and Economic Risk Consultancy (PERC) consultancy. The results of a survey by the Hong Kong-based consulting agency PERC stated that Indonesia was the most corrupt country among 12 Asian countries. The predicate of the most corrupt country was given because Indonesia's score almost touched the absolute number 10 with a score of 9.25 (10 is the highest or most corrupt score). In 2005, Indonesia was still among the top three most corrupt countries in Asia. This should be able to generate a new understanding, that we need a system capable of awakening all elements of the nation to jointly move to eradicate corruption that has plagued us.The most effective way is through the media of education. Learning from the experiences of other countries that have been relatively successful in eradicating corruption, apart from the aspect of law enforcement which is no less important is the aspect of prevention in the form of Anti-Corruption Education (PAK). This anti-corruption campaign program applies an approach to raise awareness to become an agent of change by applying the values of integrity, through characters namely Honest, Caring, Humble, Responsibile, Hard Work, Independent, Discipline, Courageous and Fair. Through this community engagement, teenagers began to commit to spreading the concept of integrity through their daily life behavior and carrying out anti-corruption campaigns through social media for the future corruption-free Indonesia.Keywords: presentation skill, moment of truth, empathy, assertiveness

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LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.本文的重點是從女性主義的角度思考墮胎問題。女性主義的貢獻，並不在於高舉女性的墮胎權比胎兒的生存權重要，而是讓我們跳出傳統倫理非此則彼的二元框架。女性主義確立女性是有能力作道德思考的主體，提倡透過聆聽女性的聲音，發展一套新的倫理觀——關懷倫理。本文的第一部分將會介紹關懷倫理的特色，包括考慮特殊處境的因素而非純粹應用普遍性原則﹔著眼於相互關係、而非個人權利。關懷倫理的重點並不在於平衡一己和他人之利益﹔更準確的說法，是不把各方利益對立，把自己和他人（包括胎兒）視作互為倚賴、相輔相承的整體。女性主義倫理主張從婦女的具體經驗出發，反對以抽象思維或假設性問題來探討墮胎。第二部分將會從婦女的實存處境來思考墮胎背後的問題。女性為何需要墮胎？甚麼原因造成意外懷孕？因姦成孕對女性有何影響？為何墮胎之中胎兒的性別多是女性？這一連串問題，讓我們超越墮胎的對與錯，進一步反思婦女所受的種種壓迫。最後的第三部分，將會把女性主義倫理結連到香港社會的處境，關注本地女性面對的壓迫﹔透過女性的經驗，揭示醫護人員、社工、傳媒等如何歧視尋求墮胎的女性，及對女性身體和情慾進行家長式操控。This paper aims to discuss the issue of abortion from a feminist perspective. It argues that the strength of feminism does not lie in its defense of women’s rights vis-a-vis fetal rights, but rather in providing a way for us to think beyond the either/or framework of traditional ethics. Feminism affirms women’s agency in moral reasoning. It develops and advocates a new kind of ethics – an ethics of care – by listening to the moral voices of women. The ethics of care is characterized by consideration more of the factors in a specific context than of universalizing principles, and an emphasis on the entirety of relations than on individual rights. In contrast to traditional ethics which presupposes an opposition between self and others, the ethics of care sees self and others as interdependent. It is not so much about balancing the interests of oneself and others. Rather, it concerns recognizing the falsehood of this polarity and the truth of one's and others' ( including the fetus') interconnectedness.This paper will be divided into three parts. The first part introduces the ethics of care and shows how women can transcend the framework of selfishness and self-sacrifice in their moral consideration of abortion. Feminism values women's lived experiences and opposes to discuss abortion in an abstract or hypothetical way. It directs us to look at the link between women's needs for abortion and the social practices that oppress women. The second part of the paper will situate the issue of abortion in a wider context of oppression that are faced by women, and hence exposes the problems of limiting the discussion of abortion to the standard questions about the moral status of the fetus. The last part of the paper is an attempt to discuss the issue of abortion in the context of Hong Kong through a feminist lens.One should not equate feminist ethics with liberal defenses of women's right to choose abortion. Feminist ethics yields a different analysis of the moral questions surrounding abortion than that usually offered by the more familiar liberal approaches. In the discourse of rights, the relationship between women and the fetus is understood as adversarial. An examination of the process of women's moral reasoning allows us to see that their decision whether to have an abortion is often based on considerations of the entire relationship which involves their responsibilities to the fetus and other parties (including their other children), rather than a problem about abstract deontology. Their experience points towards an ethics of care which may help us reconstruct the notion of right.To conceive abortion from a feminist ethics is to view the issue not as singular but as a set of inter-related issues. The question whether abortion is right or wrong cannot be answered in isolation from other questions which probe into women's experiences of abortion. Why do women need to pursue abortion? What are the causes of unwanted pregnancies and why are they so common across different age groups of women? Why do many women find it difficult to refuse sexual requests? What is the impact of rape on women and why did some victims fail to seek an abortion in an early stage of pregnancy? How would women's lives be affected if they are not allowed to pursue abortion? How shall we explain the phenomenon that most of the aborted fetuses are female? These questions demand us to go beyond focusing exclusively on the moral or legal permissibility of abortion that has preoccupied traditional ethics. Only by reflecting on the actual experiences of women and the conditions of domination and subordination that govern the relationships between men and women can we come to an adequate understanding of the moral issue of abortion.In Hong Kong, it is legal to perform abortion in private and public hospitals or at the Family Planning Association of Hong Kong. However, local women are not free from oppression or prejudice when they pursue abortion. Women's experiences reveal the existence of social agents in the perpetuation of an institutional power which restricts women's autonomy over reproduction and sexuality. Many medical professionals and social workers discriminate against those who choose to have an abortion. They usually impose their moral judgments and carry out a form of moral policing towards these women. Such discrimination leads women to try very hard in hiding the fact that they have an abortion. It is still a long road ahead to promote a real sense of understanding of and respect for women's choice in abortion. Public education often presents an over-simplified picture and misleading messages. Many women have yet to face the challenge of how to think beyond the framework of selfishness and self-sacrifice. This paper concludes by urging those who truly cares about the issue of abortion in Hong Kong to work hard to eliminate discrimination, to promote an understanding of women's decisions, to advocate women's sexual autonomy, to encourage equality and mutual respect in sexual relationship, and to fight for provision of more affordable quality child care services.DOWNLOAD HISTORY | This article has been downloaded 1753 times in Digital Commons before migrating into this platform.

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Objective Internal tandem duplication (ITD) of fms-like tyrosine kinase 3 (FLT3) is one of the most common mutations in acute myeloid leukemia (AML), occurring in nearly 30% of cases. FLT3-ITD involves in-frame duplication of 3-400 base-pairs at the juxta-membrane domain, resulting in ligand-independent activation of FLT3 signaling. Downstream effectors include activation of ERK/STAT5 via SRC kinase, activation of PI3K/AKT, phosphorylation of FOXO3A, down-regulation of equilibrative nucleoside transporter 1 (ENT1) for cytarabine, and induction of reactive oxygen species (ROS) that may lead to increased DNA damage and defective repair. The present study investigated if the latter can be effectively targeted for the treatment of this AML subtype. Methods Primary samples from patients with FLT3-ITD AML, human cell line carrying FLT3-ITD (MOLM-13) as well as mouse B-lymphoid Ba/F3 cells transduced with human FLT3-ITD were used in this study. Traffic Light Reporter (TLR) assay was used to measure fidelity of double-strand breaks (DSB) repair, either via error-free hom*ologous recombination (HR) or error-prone non-hom*ologous end joining (NHEJ). Percentage of repair events by HR or NHEJ were quantified by flow cytometry. DNA DSB were examined by γ-H2AX foci staining using confocal microscopy. Single-cell DSB were quantified by neutral comet assay and analysed by OpenComet software. The tail moment was calculated as the length of comet tail multiplied by the tail DNA %. MOLM-13 was transplanted into NOD/SCID/IL2Rg-/- (NSG) mice by tail vein injection. Treatment comprised cytarabine (25mg/kg, i.p., day 1-5) and doxorubicin (1.5mg/kg, i.v., day 1-3), with or without olaparib (25mg/kg, i.p., day 1-5). Comparisons between groups of numerical data were evaluated using Student's t-test. P-values less than 0.05 were considered statistically significant. Results To investigate the link between FLT3-ITD AML and DNA damage response (DDR), expression of critical DDR genes in primary AML samples was examined by real-time quantitative PCR. The panel of genes included apical kinase ATM, ATR and DNA-PKcs; DNA damage mediators BRCA1,BRCA2 and PARP1; downstream response kinase CHEK1 and CHEK2 and effectors TP53. Among them, BRCA2 was significantly down-regulated in FLT3-ITD AML(Wild-type FLT3=18 samples; FLT3-ITD=13 samples; Average dCt 9.7 in WT vs. 10.6 in ITD; p<0.05). Down-regulation of BRCA2 in FLT3-ITD AML was further validated in a microarray database GSE15434 from a multicenter study investigating gene expression profiles of normal karyotype AML( FLT3-WT=148; FL3-ITD=86; ; log2 gene expression 5.61 in WT vs 5.45 in ITD; p<0.001). As BRCA2 is an important protein mediating HR, a DSB DNA repair TLR assay was performed. HR was significantly down-regulated in Ba/F3-FLT3-ITD as compared with parental Ba/F3 line by flow cytometry(1.21% HR repair in control vs. 0.44% in ITD; p<0.05) while NHEJ was unaffected (1.90% NHEJ repair in control vs. 2.38% in ITD; p=0.50). Down-regulation of BRCA2 expression and defective HR in FLT3-ITD AML was reminiscent of BRCA mutant breast and ovarian cancers. Therefore, the effects of poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitor (PARPi) olaparib were examined. Ba/F3-FLT3-ITD were more sensitive to olaparib than parental line. Olaparib inhibited base excision repair and increased DSB as indicated by increased number of γ-H2AX foci and increased tail moment in Ba/F3-FLT3-ITD cells when compared to parental line. Olaparib-induced DSB in Ba/F3-FLT3-ITD cells was mainly repaired by NHEJ as shown by colocalization of γ-H2AX foci with 53BP1. Combination of chemotherapy (cytarabine and doxorubicin) and olaparib synergistically reduced leukemic cell growth of MOLM-13 in NSG murine xenograft model. Conclusion Results from the present study supported the use of PARPi in the treatment of FLT3-ITD AML. Its therapeutic benefits in combination with chemotherapy would have to be further evaluated. Acknowledgements: Health and Medical Research Fund (Project number: 04152326) and Li Shu Fan Medical Foundation, LKS Faculty of Medicine, University of Hong Kong. Disclosures No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

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Background. Stroke is a major cause of severe disability. Working capacity is restored only in 10-20 % of stroke survivors. Stroke mortality in Ukraine is twice as high as in Western Europe. About 87 % of all strokes are ischemic strokes (II). Leading risk factors for stroke include hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, smoking, obesity, and diabetes. Objective. To describe the management of acute IS (AIS) in the practice of an anesthesiologist. Materials and methods. Analysis of literature data on this issue. Results and discussion. The ideal therapeutic approach for AIS should include reperfusion, inhibition of inflammatory processes, cytoprotection, prevention of complications and their treatment. Extreme caution should be exercised during thrombolytic therapy, as thrombolysis increases the risk of intracerebral hemorrhage. However, a meta-analysis by Y. Shoujiang et al. (2018) found that symptomatic intracerebral hemorrhage occurs in 1.9 % of patients who had received intravenous recombinant tissue plasminogen activator. These hemorrhages did not increase mortality. Excellent treatment results were observed in 74.8 % of patients with AIS. According to the analysis of the VISTA database, the end result of thrombolytic therapy can be predicted based on the initial severity of stroke on the NIHHS scale. Interestingly, hemorrhagic transformation after thrombolysis is associated with lower serum calcium. Lower blood calcium levels are associated with an increased incidence of cerebral hemorrhage in patients with AIS due to atrial fibrillation or rheumatic heart disease. In the treatment of patients with AIS it is advisable to use Neurocytin (“Yuria-Pharm”), which contains citicoline and a balanced isotonic electrolyte solution. Neurocytin helps to avoid hypocalcemia and, consequently, brain hemorrhages. Citicoline is a multimodal agent with neuroprotective and neuroregenerative properties. Citicoline has a wide therapeutic window, as this substance is effective at different time and biochemical stages of the ischemic cascade. The maximum effect of citicoline is observed in cases when it is administered as early as possible after AIS in patients who cannot undergo reperfusion therapy. Citicoline is able to reduce the size of the ischemic focus in the brain. Intensive blood pressure (BP) control also reduces the risk of intracranial hemorrhages without increasing mortality, although previous studies have suggested that a rapid decrease in BP may exacerbate cerebral ischemia. Endovascular treatment of AIS in the most acute phase involves selective thrombolysis, or mechanical thrombextraction, or thromboaspiration. The therapeutic window for the last two procedures for vessels of the carotid pool is 6 hours. When deciding to perform thromboaspiration, it is mandatory to perform and evaluate computed tomography-perfusiography of the brain. About 80-85 % of patients with AIS do not meet the selection criteria for revascularization therapy. There is also no effective therapy for such patients in the acute period. In recent years, it has been proposed to replace the term “neuroprotection” with the term “brain cell cytoprotection”, as the former does not reflect the direction of the impact on all components of the neurovascular unit and white matter. A separate aspect of brain cytoprotection is protection against ischemic reperfusion injury. For this purpose, edaravon (Ksavron, “Yuria-Pharm”) is used, which eliminates free radicals, reduces calcium flow into the cells, prevents cell adhesion to the endothelium, enhances the release of nitric oxide and inhibits the inflammatory response, neutralizing all stages and consequences of ischemic stroke. In Japan, edaravon has been included into AIS treatment guidelines since 2009. T. Yamaguchi et al. (2017) found that co-administration of edaravon and recombinant tissue plasminogen activator within 4.5 hours after AIS led to less intracranial hemorrhages and better treatment outcomes. Early use of edaravon also reduces mortality. S. Kono et al. (2013) also state that edaravon may be a good adjunct to alteplase to enhance recanalization and reduce the likelihood of hemorrhagic transformation. With the administration of edaravon within the first 24 hours after stroke, one in three patients has no post-stroke sequelae, and 70 % of patients have a significant improvement in general neurological status. If edaravon is prescribed within the first 72 hours after AIS, the general condition improves significantly in half of the patients. Edaravon (Ksavron) increases the frequency of early recanalization during thrombolysis. Conclusions. 1. Citicoline is a multimodal agent with neuroprotective and neuroregenerative properties. 2. Edaravon (Ksavron) is an ischemic cascade blocker for the empirical treatment of AIS or transient ischemic attacks. 3. The combination of edaravon (Ksavron) and citicoline (Neurocytin) as part of comprehensive therapy allows to each the advanced protection of the neurovascular unit in AIS.

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Abstract:

Introduction: Recent studies suggest that incidence of multiple myeloma (MM) is increasing in Asian countries. Prevalence is also expected to rise due to ageing populations and advances in treatment. Therapeutic options continue to expand as new, targeted agents enter the market. However, despite advances in therapy and supportive care, MM remains incurable. Most patients receive care outside the setting of clinical trials. Therefore, the generation of Real-World Evidence (RWE) on practice, including long-term monitoring and evaluation of current and future treatment strategies, is important in informing optimal therapies for MM and enable benchmarking to improve outcomes, quality of life (QoL), and cost-effectiveness of care for patients. Some country-specific data are available in Asia, but few at regional level. We established the Asia-Pacific (APAC) Myeloma and Related Diseases Registry (MRDR) in 2018, as a regional collaboration and sister registry to the Australian and New Zealand MRDR (ACTRN12618000659202). The aims are collection of a standardised APAC dataset for analysis and benchmarking. Key opinion leaders from the participating countries were invited to form the steering committee to provide local clinical context and oversight of the registry. Early in the process, ethics committees and legal counsel were consulted to assist with challenges presented by the diversity in data privacy and ethical regulations across the APAC region. Participating hospitals are responsible for obtaining local ethics approval, patient recruitment, and data collection. Participants provide written informed consent before data collection. Methods: The APAC MRDR prospectively collects observational data on patient characteristics, diagnosis, medical history, treatment (including supportive therapies), and outcomes (overall and progression-free survival, and QoL using the EQ-5D-5L) on newly diagnosed MM (NDMM), plasma cell leukaemia, plasmacytoma, and MGUS patients via a secure, country-specific web-based database. Whilst the core dataset is standardised across countries to ensure comparability, regional differences such as units of measurements and local privacy laws were accommodated in the design of each country's database. Participants are reviewed 4-monthly for a minimum of 2 years. Longer-term outcomes will be collected through linkage with local cancer and death registries. Six-monthly hospital reports, providing de-identified, risk-adjusted outcome data at hospital- and country-level, will be provided to contributing hospitals. Preliminary APAC MRDR data from October 2018 to June 2019 were analysed. Results: Eleven hospitals now have Institutional Review Board approval to participate and patient recruitment has commenced at 6 hospitals in Korea and Singapore. Sites in Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, and Malaysia are in progress. To date, 182 patients have been enrolled and data collection on these patients is in progress. At the time of analysis, 85% (96/113) were NDMM. Median age was 66 years (IQR: 59-73) and 54% were male. Median EQ5D VAS Health State score at diagnosis was 70 (IQR: 50-80; self-report: 100=best health imaginable, 0=the worst). Comorbidities were present in 47%. Proportion of patients with main paraprotein type IgG: 64%, IgA: 17%, light chain only Kappa: 13%, light chain only Lambda: 6%. Median number of days from diagnosis to chemotherapy was 9.5 (IQR: 3-15). The top two most frequently used first-line regimens for NDMM patients in Korea and Singapore were: Korea: 1. bortezomib/thalidomide/dexamethasone (VTd: 39%), 2. lenalidomide/dexamethasone (Rd: 27%), and Singapore: 1. VTd: 41%, 2. bortezomib/cyclophosphamide/dexamethasone (VCD): 25%. Overall response rate to first-line chemotherapy (≥PR) was 86% (44/51). Conclusion: The APAC MRDR database is expanding and, as data mature and feedback is provided to participating sites, will provide RWE that will contribute to our understanding on current myeloma treatment strategies and patient outcomes in the Asia-Pacific region. Future plans include expansion to additional sites and countries, and linkage with local cancer and death registries. The registry can also serve as a regional resource by providing infrastructure and identifying eligible participants for clinical trials and other research. Disclosures Aoki: Janssen Asia-Pacific: Research Funding. Moore:Takeda: Research Funding; Gilead: Research Funding. Wood:Bristol-Myers Squibb: Research Funding; Novartis: Research Funding; Alexion: Research Funding; Roche: Research Funding; Takeda: Research Funding; Gilead: Research Funding; Janssen-Cilag: Research Funding; Amgen: Research Funding; CSL Behring: Research Funding; Sanofi: Research Funding; Celgene: Research Funding; Abbvie: Research Funding. McQuilten:Gilead Sciences: Research Funding; CSL Biotherapies: Research Funding; Celgene: Research Funding; AbbVie: Research Funding; Takeda Pharmaceuticals: Research Funding; Janssen-Cilag: Research Funding. Spencer:Takeda: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Haemalogix: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Celgene: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Janssen Oncology: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; AbbVie: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Amgen: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Specialised Therapeutics Australia: Consultancy, Honoraria; Sanofi: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Secura Bio: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Servier: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees.

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This article provides the review of the medical use of pH- and temperature-sensitive polymer hydrogels. Such polymers are characterised by their thermal and pH sensitivity in aqueous solutions at the functioning temperature of living organisms and can react to the slightest changes in environmental conditions. Due to these properties, they are called stimuli-sensitive polymers. This response to an external stimulus occurs due to the amphiphilicity (diphilicity) of these (co)polymers. The term hydrogels includes several concepts of macrogels and microgels. Microgels, unlike macrogels, are polymer particles dispersed in a liquid and are nano- or micro-objects. The review presents studies reflecting the main methods of obtainingsuch polymeric materials, including precipitation polymerisation, as the main, simplest, and most accessible method for mini-emulsion polymerisation, microfluidics, and layer-by-layer adsorption of polyelectrolytes. Such systems will undoubtedly be promising for use in biotechnology and medicine due to the fact that they are liquid-swollen particles capable of binding and carrying various low to high molecular weight substances. It is also important that slight heating and cooling or a slight change in the pH of the medium shifts the system from a hom*ogeneous to a heterogeneous state and vice versa. This providesthe opportunity to use these polymers as a means of targeted drug delivery, thereby reducing the negative effect of toxic substances used for treatment on the entire body and directing the action to a specific point. In addition, such polymers can be used to create smart coatings of implanted materials, as well as an artificial matrix for cell and tissue regeneration, contributing to a significant increase in the survival rate and regeneration rate of cells and tissues. References 1. Gisser K. R. C., Geselbracht M. J., Cappellari A.,Hunsberger L., Ellis A. B., Perepezko J., et al. 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Covid 19 – living the experience As I sit at my desk at home in suburban Brisbane, following the dictates on self-isolation shared with so many around the world, I am forced to contemplate the limits of human prediction. I look out on a world which few could have predicted six months ago. My thoughts at that time were all about 2020 as a metaphor for perfect vision and a plea for it to herald a new period of clarity which would arm us in resolving the whole host of false divisions that surrounded us. False, because so many appear to be generated by the use of polarised labelling strategies which sought to categorise humans by a whole range of identities, while losing the essential humanity and individuality which we all share. This was a troublesome trend and one which seemed reminiscent of the biblical tale concerning the tower of Babel, when a single unified language was what we needed to create harmony in a globalising world. However, yesterday’s concerns have, at least for the moment, been overshadowed by a more urgent and unifying concern with humanity’s health and wellbeing. For now, this concern has created a world which we would not have recognised in 2019. We rely more than ever on our various forms of electronic media to beam instant shots of the streets of London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Hong Kong etc. These centres of our worldly activity normally characterised by hustle and bustle, are now serenely peaceful and ordered. Their magnificent buildings have become foregrounded, assuming a dignity and presence that is more commonly overshadowed by the mad ceaseless scramble of humanity all around them. From there however the cameras can jump to some of the less fortunate areas of the globe. These streets are still teeming with people in close confined areas. There is little hope here of following frequent extended hand washing practices, let alone achieving the social distance prescribed to those of us in the global North. From this desk top perspective, it has been interesting to chart the mood as the crisis has unfolded. It has moved from a slightly distant sense of superiority as the news slowly unfolded about events in remote Wuhan. The explanation that the origins were from a live market, where customs unfamiliar to our hygienic pre-packaged approach to food consumption were practised, added to this sense of separateness and exoticism surrounding the source and initial development of the virus. However, this changed to a growing sense of concern as its growth and transmission slowly began to reveal the vulnerability of all cultures to its spread. At this early stage, countries who took steps to limit travel from infected areas seemed to gain some advantage. Australia, as just one example banned flights from China and required all Chinese students coming to study in Australia to self-isolate for two weeks in a third intermediate port. It was a step that had considerable economic costs associated with it. One that was vociferously resisted at the time by the university sector increasingly dependent on the revenue generated by servicing Chinese students. But it was when the epicentre moved to northern Italy, that the entire messaging around the event began to change internationally. At this time the tone became increasingly fearful, anxious and urgent as reports of overwhelmed hospitals and mass burials began to dominate the news. Consequently, governments attracted little criticism but were rather widely supported in the action of radically closing down their countries in order to limit human interaction. The debate had become one around the choice between health and economic wellbeing. The fact that the decision has been overwhelmingly for health, has been encouraging. It has not however stopped the pressure from those who believe that economic well-being is a determinant of human well-being, questioning the decisions of politicians and the advice of public health scientists that have dominated the responses to date. At this stage, the lives versus livelihoods debate has a long way still to run. Of some particular interest has been the musings of the opinion writers who have predicted that the events of these last months will change our world forever. Some of these predictions have included the idea that rather than piling into common office spaces working remotely from home and other advantageous locations will be here to stay. Schools and universities will become centres of learning more conveniently accessed on-line rather than face to face. Many shopping centres will become redundant and goods will increasingly be delivered via collection centres or couriers direct to the home. Social distancing will impact our consumption of entertainment at common venues and lifestyle events such as dining out. At the macro level, it has been predicted that globalisation in its present form will be reversed. The pandemic has led to actions being taken at national levels and movement being controlled by the strengthening and increased control of physical borders. Tourism has ground to a halt and may not resume on its current scale or in its present form as unnecessary travel, at least across borders, will become permanently reduced. Advocates of change have pointed to some of the unpredicted benefits that have been occurring. These include a drop in air pollution: increased interaction within families; more reading undertaken by younger adults; more systematic incorporation of exercise into daily life, and; a rediscovered sense of community with many initiatives paying tribute to the health and essential services workers who have been placed at the forefront of this latest struggle with nature. Of course, for all those who point to benefits in the forced lifestyle changes we have been experiencing, there are those who would tell a contrary tale. Demonstrations in the US have led the push by those who just want things to get back to normal as quickly as possible. For this group, confinement at home creates more problems. These may be a function of the proximity of modern cramped living quarters, today’s crowded city life, dysfunctional relationships, the boredom of self-entertainment or simply the anxiety that comes with an insecure livelihood and an unclear future. Personally however, I am left with two significant questions about our future stimulated by the events that have been ushered in by 2020. The first is how is it that the world has been caught so unprepared by this pandemic? The second is to what extent do we have the ability to recalibrate our current practices and view an alternative future? In considering the first, it has been enlightening to observe the extent to which politicians have turned to scientific expertise in order to determine their actions. Terms like ‘flattening the curve’, ‘community transmission rates’, have become part of our daily lexicon as the statistical modellers advance their predictions as to how the disease will spread and impact on our health systems. The fact that scientists are presented as the acceptable and credible authority and the basis for our actions reflects a growing dependency on data and modelling that has infused our society generally. This acceptance has been used to strengthen the actions on behalf of the human lives first and foremost position. For those who pursue the livelihoods argument even bigger figures are available to be thrown about. These relate to concepts such as numbers of jobless, increase in national debt, growth in domestic violence, rise in mental illness etc. However, given that they are more clearly estimates and based on less certain assumptions and variables, they do not at this stage seem to carry the impact of the data produced by public health experts. This is not surprising but perhaps not justifiable when we consider the failure of the public health lobby to adequately prepare or forewarn us of the current crisis in the first place. Statistical predictive models are built around historical data, yet their accuracy depends upon the quality of those data. Their robustness for extrapolation to new settings for example will differ as these differ in a multitude of subtle ways from the contexts in which they were initially gathered. Our often uncritical dependence upon ‘scientific’ processes has become worrying, given that as humans, even when guided by such useful tools, we still tend to repeat mistakes or ignore warnings. At such a time it is an opportunity for us to return to the reservoir of human wisdom to be found in places such as our great literature. Works such as The Plague by Albert Camus make fascinating and educative reading for us at this time. As the writer observes Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world, yet somehow, we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise. So it is that we constantly fail to study let alone learn the lessons of history. Yet 2020 mirrors 1919, as at that time the world was reeling with the impact of the Spanish ‘Flu, which infected 500 million people and killed an estimated 50 million. This was more than the 40 million casualties of the four years of the preceding Great War. There have of course been other pestilences since then and much more recently. Is our stubborn failure to learn because we fail to value history and the knowledge of our forebears? Yet we can accept with so little question the accuracy of predictions based on numbers, even with varying and unquestioned levels of validity and reliability. As to the second question, many writers have been observing some beneficial changes in our behaviour and our environment, which have emerged in association with this sudden break in our normal patterns of activity. It has given us the excuse to reevaluate some of our practices and identify some clear benefits that have been occurring. As Australian newspaper columnist Bernard Salt observes in an article titled “the end of narcissism?” I think we’ve been re-evaluating the entire contribution/reward equation since the summer bushfires and now, with the added experience of the pandemic, we can see the shallowness of the so-called glamour professions – the celebrities, the influencers. We appreciate the selflessness of volunteer firefighters, of healthcare workers and supermarket staff. From the pandemic’s earliest days, glib forays into social media by celebrities seeking attention and yet further adulation have been met with stony disapproval. Perhaps it is best that they stay offline while our real heroes do the heavy lifting. To this sad unquestioning adherence to both scientism and narcissism, we can add and stir the framing of the climate rebellion and a myriad of familiar ‘first world’ problems which have caused dissension and disharmony in our communities. Now with an external threat on which to focus our attention, there has been a short lull in the endless bickering and petty point scoring that has characterised our western liberal democracies in the last decade. As Camus observed: The one way of making people hang together is to give ‘em a spell of the plague. So, the ceaseless din of the topics that have driven us apart has miraculously paused for at least a moment. Does this then provide a unique opportunity for us together to review our habitual postures and adopt a more conciliatory and harmonious communication style, take stock, critically evaluate and retune our approach to life – as individuals, as nations, as a species? It is not too difficult to hypothesise futures driven by the major issues that have driven us apart. Now, in our attempts to resist the virus, we have given ourselves a glimpse of some of the very things the climate change activists have wished to happen. With few planes in the air and the majority of cars off the roads, we have already witnessed clearer and cleaner air. Working at home has freed up the commuter driven traffic and left many people with more time to spend with their family. Freed from the continuing throng of tourists, cities like Venice are regenerating and cleansing themselves. This small preview of what a less travelled world might start to look like surely has some attraction. But of course, it does not come without cost. With the lack of tourism and the need to work at home, jobs and livelihoods have started to change. As with any revolution there are both winners and losers. The lockdown has distinguished starkly between essential and non-essential workers. That represents a useful starting point from which to assess what is truly of value in our way of life and what is peripheral as Salt made clear. This is a question that I would encourage readers to explore and to take forward with them through the resolution of the current situation. However, on the basis that educators are seen as providing essential services, now is the time to turn to the content of our current volume. Once again, I direct you to the truly international range of our contributors. They come from five different continents yet share a common focus on one of the most popular of shared cultural experiences – sport. Unsurprisingly three of our reviewed papers bring different insights to the world’s most widely shared sport of all – football, or as it would be more easily recognised in some parts of the globe - soccer. Leading these offerings is a comparison of fandom in Australia and China. The story presented by Knijnk highlights the rise of the fanatical supporters known as the ultras. The origin of the movement is traced to Italy, but it is one that claims allegiances now around the world. Kniijnk identifies the movement’s progression into Australia and China and, in pointing to its stance against the commercialisation of their sport by the scions of big business, argues for its deeper political significance and its commitment to the democratic ownership of sport. Reflecting the increasing availability and use of data in our modern societies, Karadog, Parim and Cene apply some of the immense data collected on and around the FIFA World Cup to the task of selecting the best team from the 2018 tournament held in Russia, a task more usually undertaken by panels of experts. Mindful of the value of using data in ways that can assist future decision making, rather than just in terms of summarising past events, they also use the statistics available to undertake a second task. The second task was the selection of the team with the greatest future potential by limiting eligibility to those at an early stage in their careers, namely younger than 28 and who arguably had still to attain their prime as well as having a longer career still ahead of them. The results for both selections confirm how membership of the wealthy European based teams holds the path to success and recognition at the global level no matter what the national origins of players might be. Thirdly, taking links between the sport and the world of finance a step further, Gomez-Martinez, Marques-Bogliani and Paule-Vianez report on an interesting study designed to test the hypothesis that sporting success within a community is reflected in positive economic outcomes for members of that community. They make a bold attempt to test their hypothesis by examining the relationship of the performance of three world leading clubs in Europe - Bayern Munich, Juventus and Paris Saint Germain and the performance of their local stock markets. Their findings make for some interesting thoughts about the significance of sport in the global economy and beyond into the political landscape of our interconnected world. Our final paper comes from Africa but for its subject matter looks to a different sport, one that rules the subcontinent of India - cricket. Norrbhai questions the traditional coaching of batting in cricket by examining the backlift techniques of the top players in the Indian Premier league. His findings suggest that even in this most traditional of sports, technique will develop and change in response to the changing context provided by the game itself. In this case the context is the short form of the game, introduced to provide faster paced entertainment in an easily consumable time span. It provides a useful reminder how in sport, techniques will not be static but will continue to evolve as the game that provides the context for the skilled performance also evolves. To conclude our pages, I must apologise that our usual book review has fallen prey to the current world disruption. In its place I would like to draw your attention to the announcement of a new publication which would make a worthy addition to the bookshelf of any international sports scholar. “Softpower, Soccer, Supremacy – The Chinese Dream” represents a unique and timely analysis of the movement of the most popular and influential game in the world – Association Football, commonly abbreviated to soccer - into the mainstream of Chinese national policy. The editorial team led by one of sports histories most recognised scholars, Professor J A Mangan, has assembled a who’s who of current scholars in sport in Asia. Together they provide a perspective that takes in, not just the Chinese view of these important current developments but also, the view of others in the geographical region. From Japan, Korea and Australia, they bring with them significant experience to not just the beautiful game, but sport in general in that dynamic and fast-growing part of the world. Particularly in the light of the European dominance identified in the Karog, Parim and Cene paper this work raises the question as to whether we can expect to see a change in the world order sooner rather than later. It remains for me to make one important acknowledgement. In my last editorial I alerted you to the sorts of decisions we as an editorial and publication team were facing with regard to ensuring the future of the journal. Debates as to how best to proceed while staying true to our vision and goals are still proceeding. However, I am pleased to acknowledge the sponsorship provided by The University of Macao for volume 42 and recognise the invaluable contribution made by ISCPES former president Walter Ho to this process. Sponsorship can provide an important input to the ongoing existence and strength of this journal and we would be interested in talking to other institutions or groups who might also be interested in supporting our work, particularly where their goals align closely with ours. May I therefore commend to you the works of our international scholars and encourage your future involvement in sharing your interest in and expertise with others in the world of comparative and international sport studies, John Saunders, Brisbane, May 2020

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BackgroundHepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a rare hepatic malignancy in children. Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection is a key predisposing factor in endemic regions but its impact on outcome has not been studied. We aim to evaluate the prognostic implication of HBV seropositivity and role of cancer surveillance in children with HCC from East Asian populations with national HBV vaccination.MethodsReview of population-based databases for patients (&lt; 18 years old) diagnosed with HCC from 1993 to 2017 in two Southeast Asian regions with universal HBV vaccination (instituted since 1988 and 1987 in Hong Kong and Singapore, respectively).ResultsThirty-nine patients were identified (Hong Kong, 28; Singapore, 11). Thirty were male; median age at diagnosis was 10.8 years (range, 0.98–16.6). Abdominal pain was the commonest presentation while five patients were diagnosed through surveillance for underlying condition. Alpha-fetoprotein was raised in 36 patients (mean, 500,598 ng/ml). Nineteen had bilobar involvement, among the patients in whom pretreatment extent of disease (PRETEXT) staging could retrospectively be assigned, 3 had stage I, 13 had stage II, 4 had stage III, and 11 had stage IV disease. Seventeen had distant metastasis. HBsAg was positive in 19 of 38 patients. Two patients had fibrolamellar HCC. Upfront management involved tumor resection in 16 (liver transplantation, 2), systemic chemotherapy in 21, interventional procedures in 6 [transarterial chemoembolization (TACE), 5, radiofrequency ablation (RFA), 1], and radiotherapy in 4 (selective internal radiation, 3, external beam radiation, 1). Five-year event-free survival (EFS) and overall survival (OS) were 15.4 ± 6.0 and 26.1 ± 7.2%, respectively. Patient’s HBsAg positivity, metastatic disease and inability to undergo definitive resection represent poor prognostic factors in univariate and multivariable analyses. Patients diagnosed by surveillance had significantly better outcome.ConclusionPediatric HCC has poor outcome. HBV status remains relevant in the era of universal HBV vaccination. HBV carrier has inferior outcome and use of surveillance may mitigate disease course.

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Find your black holes and white walls, know them … it is the only way you will be able to dismantle them and draw your lines of flight.—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Defined by originator David Belle as “an art to help you pass any obstacle”, the practice of “parkour” or “free running” constitutes both a mode of movement and a new way of interacting with the urban environment. Parkour was created by Belle (partly in collaboration with his childhood friend Sébastien Foucan) in France in the late 1980s. As seen in the following short video “Rush Hour”, a trailer for BBC One featuring Belle, parkour practitioners (known as “traceurs”), leap, spring, and vault from objects in the urban milieu that are intended to limit movement (walls, curbs, railings, fences) or that unintentionally hamper passage (lampposts, street signs, benches) through the space. “Rush Hour” was among the first media representations of parkour, and it had a significant role in introducing and popularizing the practice in Britain. Parkour has subsequently been widely disseminated via news reports, Nike and Toyota ads, the documentaries Jump London (2003) and Jump Britain (2005), and feature films, including Luc Besson’s Yamakasi – Les Samouraïs des Temps Modernes (2001) and Banlieu 13 (2004; just released in the U.S. as District B13), starring David Belle as Leto and Cyril Raffaelli as Damien. Sébastien Foucan will appear in the upcoming James Bond film Casino Royale as Mollaka, a terrorist who is chased (parkour-style) and then killed by Bond. (Foucan can also be seen in the film’s trailer, currently available at both SonyPictures.com and AOL.com; the film itself is scheduled for release in November 2006). Madonna’s current “Confessions” tour features an extended parkour sequence (accompanying the song “Jump”), albeit one limited to the confines of a scaffold erected over the stage. Perhaps most important in the rapid development of parkour into a world-wide youth movement, however, has been the proliferation of parkour websites featuring amateur videos, photos, tutorials, and blogs. The word “parkour” is derived from the French “parcours” (as the sport is known in France): a line, course, circuit, road, way or route, and the verb “parcourir”: to travel through, to run over or through, to traverse. As a physical discipline, parkour might be said to have a “poetics” — first, in general, in the Aristotelian sense of constructing through its various techniques (tekhnē) the drama of each parkour event. Secondly, one can consider parkour following Aristotle’s model of four-cause analysis as regards its specific materials (the body and the city), form or “vocabulary” of movements (drawn primarily from gymnastics, the martial arts, and modern dance), genre (as against, say, gymnastics), and purpose, including its effects upon its audience and the traceurs themselves. The existing literature on parkour (at this point, mostly news reports or websites) tends to emphasize the elements of form or movement, such as parkour’s various climbs, leaps, vaults, and drops, and the question of genre, particularly the ongoing, heated disputes among traceurs as to what is or is not true parkour. By contrast, my argument in this essay will focus principally on the materials and purpose of parkour: on the nature of the city and the body as they relate to parkour, and on the ways in which parkour can be seen to “remap” urban space and to demonstrate a resistance to its disciplinary functions, particularly as manifest in the urban street “grid.” The institution of the street “grid” (or variations upon it such as Haussmann’s Parisian star-configuration) facilitates both the intelligibility — in terms of both navigation and surveillance — and control of space in the city. It situates people in urban spaces in determinate ways and channels the flow of pedestrian and vehicular traffic. The “grid” thus carries a number of normalizing and disciplinary functions, creating in effect what the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari refer to as a “striation” of urban space. This striation constitutes “a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities or commerce, money or capital, etc.” within a field of determinate spatial coordinates (Deleuze and Guattari 386). It establishes “fixed paths in well-defined directions, which restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativize movement, and measure in detail the relative movements of subjects and objects” (Deleuze and Guattari 386). Many of these aspects of striation can be seen in the ways urban space is depicted in the “Rush Hour” video: in the gridlocked traffic, the flashing tail-lights, the “STOP” light and “WAIT” sign, the sign indicating the proper directional flow of traffic, and the grim, bundled-up pedestrians trudging home en masse along the congested streets. Against these images of conformity, regulation, and confinement, the video presents the parkour ethos of originality, “reach,” escape, and freedom. Belle’s (shirtless) aerial traversal of the urban space between his office and his flat — a swift, improvisational flow across the open rooftops (and the voids between them), off walls, and finally down the sloping roof into his apartment window — cuts across the striated space of the streets below and positions him, for that time, beyond the constrictions of the social realm and its “concrete” manifestations. Though parkour necessarily involves obstacles that must be “overcome,” the goal of parkour is to do this as smoothly and efficiently as possible, or, in the language of its practitioners, for the movement to be “fluid like water.” The experience of parkour might, then, be said to transform the urban landscape into “smooth space,” in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of “a field without conduits or channels” (371), and thus into a space of uninhibited movement, at least in certain ideal moments. Parkour seems to trace a path of desire (even if the desire is simply to avoid the crowds and get home in time to watch BBC One) that moves along a Deleuzean “line of flight,” a potential avenue of escape from the forces of striation and repression. Here the body is propelled over or through (most parkour movement actually takes place at ground level) the strata of urban space, perhaps with the hope that, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “one will bolster oneself directly on a line of flight enabling one to blow apart strata, cut roots, and make new connections” (15). In the process, parkour becomes “an art of displacement,” appropriating urban space in ways that temporarily disrupt their controlling logics and even imply the possibility of a smooth space of desire. One might see parkour as an overcoming of social space (and its various constrictions and inhibitions of desire, its “stop” and “wait” signs) through the interplay of body and material barriers. The body becomes an instrument of freedom. This, again, is graphically conveyed in “Rush Hour” through the opening scene in which Belle strips off his business suit and through the subsequent repeated contrasts of his limber, revealed body to the rigid, swathed figures of the pedestrians below. In part an effect of the various camera angles from which it is shot, there is also an element of the “heroic” in this depiction of the body. This aspect of the representation appears to be knowingly acknowledged in the video’s opening sequence. The first frame is a close-up, tightly focused on a model of a ninja-like figure with a Japanese sword who first appears to be contemplating a building (with an out-of-focus Belle in the background contemplating it from the opposite direction), but then, in the next, full shot, is revealed to be scaling it — in the manner of superheroes and King Kong. The model remains in the frame as Belle undresses (inevitably evoking images of Clark Kent stripping down to his Superman costume) and, in the final shot of that sequence, the figure mirrors Belle’s as he climbs through the window and ascends the building wall outside. In the next sequence, Belle executes a breath-taking handstand on a guard railing on the edge of the roof with the panorama of the city behind him, his upper body spanning the space from the street to the edge of the city skyline, his lower body set against the darkening sky. Through the practice of parkour, the relation between body and space is made dynamic, two reality principles in concert, interacting amid a suspension of the social strata. One might even say that the urban space is re-embodied — its rigid strata effectively “liquified.” In Jump London, the traceur Jerome Ben Aoues speaks of a Zen-like “harmony between you and the obstacle,” an idealization of what is sometimes described as a state of “flow,” a seemingly effortless immersion in an activity with a concomitant loss of self-consciousness. It suggests a different way of knowing the city, a knowledge of experience as opposed to abstract knowledge: parkour is, Jaclyn Law argues, “about curiosity and seeing possibilities — looking at a lamppost or bus shelter as an extension of the sidewalk” (np.). “You just have to look,” Sébastien Foucan insists in Jump London, “you just have to think like children….” Parkour effectively remaps urban space, creating a parallel, “ludic” city, a city of movement and free play within and against the city of obstacles and inhibitions. It reminds us that, in the words of the philosopher of urban space Henri Lefebvre, “the space of play has coexisted and still coexists with spaces of exchange and circulation, political space and cultural space” (172). Parkour tells us that in order to enter this space of play, we only need to make the leap. References Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Jump London (2003). Mike Christie, director. Mike Smith, producer. Featuring Jerome Ben Aoues, Sébastien Foucan, and Johann Vigroux. Law, Jaclyn. “PK and Fly.” This Magazine May/June 2005 http://www.thismagazine.ca/issues/2005/05/>. Lefebvre, Henri. “Perspective or Prospective?” Writings on Cities. Trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Rush Hour (2002). BBC One promotion trailer. Tom Carty, dir. Edel Erickson, pro. Produced by BBC Broadcast. See also: Wikipedia on parkour: http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkour> Parkour Worldwide Association: http://www.pawa.fr/> Parkour Net (multilingual): http://parkour.net/> NYParkour: http://www.nyparkour.com/> PKLondon.com: http://www.pklondon.com/> Nike’s “The Angry Chicken” (featuring Sébastien Foucan): http://video.google.com/videoplay? docid=-6571575392378784144&q=nike+chicken> There is an extensive collection of parkour videos available at YouTube A rehearsal clip featuring Sébastien Foucan coaching the dancers for Madonna’s Confessions tour can be seen at YouTube Citation reference for this article MLA Style Geyh, Paula. "Urban Free Flow: A Poetics of Parkour." M/C Journal 9.3 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/06-geyh.php>. APA Style Geyh, P. (Jul. 2006) "Urban Free Flow: A Poetics of Parkour," M/C Journal, 9(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/06-geyh.php>.

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04–573 Akker, Evelien (Nijmegen U., The Netherlands; Email: e.akker@nici.kun.nl) and Cutler, Anne. Prosodic cues to semantic structure in native and non-native listening. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (Cambridge, UK), 6, 2 (2003), 81–96.04–574 Allen, Heather W. (University of Pittsburgh) and Herron, Carol A. mixed-methodology investigation of the linguistic and affective outcomes of summer study abroad. Foreign Language Annals (New York, USA), 36, 3 (2003), 370–385.04–575 Barcroft, Joe (Washington U., MO, USA; Email: barcroft@artsci.wustl.edu). Effects of questions about word meaning during L2 Spanish lexical learning. The Modern Language Journal (Madison, WI, USA), 87, 4 (2003), 546–561.04–576 Boehlke, Olaf (Creighton U., USA; Email: bohlke@creighton.edu). A comparison of student participation levels by group size and language stages during chatroom and face-to-face discussions in German. Calico Journal (Texas, USA), 21, 1 (2003), 67–87.04–577 Brandford, Verna and Wilson, Rebecca (Institute of Education, U. of London). Using PowerPoint to develop pupils' oral skills in modern foreign languages. Francophonie (London, UK), 28 (2003), 18–24.04–578 Brouwer, Catherine E. (U. of Southern Denmark, Denmark; Email: rineke@language.sdu.dk). Word searches in NNS-NS interaction: opportunities for language learning?The Modern Language Journal (Madison, WI, USA), 87, 4 (2003), 534–545.04–579 Carr, Jo (Queensland U. of Technology, Australia; Email: j.carr@qut.edu.au). Why boys into languages won't go: the problematic gender agenda in languages education. Babel, (Adelaide, Australia), 37, 2 (2002), 4–9.04–580 Chalhoub-Deville, Micheline (U. of Iowa, USA; Email: m-chalhoub-deville@uiowa.edu). Second language interaction: current perspectives and future trends. Language Testing (London, UK), 20, 4 (2003), 369–383.04–581 Chan, Victoria, Spratt, Mary and Humphreys, Gillian (Hong Kong Polytechnic U., Hong Kong). Autonomous language learning: Hong Kong tertiary students' attitudes and behaviours. Evaluation and Research in Education (Clevedon, UK), 16, 1 (2002), 1–16.04–582 Dam Jensen, Eva and Vinther, Thora (University of Copenhagen, Denmark; Email: dam@hum.ku.dk.). Exact repetition as input enhancement in second language acquisition. Language Learning (University of Michigan, USA), 53, 3 (2003), 373–428.04–583 De Carlo, Maddalena (Université de Cassino, Italy). Affectivité et acquisition du langage. [Affectivity and Language Acquisition.] Études de linguistique appliquée (Paris, France), 13, 1 (2003), 275–290.04–584 Derwing, Tracey M. (Alberta U., Canada) and Rossiter, Marian J. The effects of pronunciation instruction on the accuracy, fluency and complexity of L2 accented speech. Applied Language Learning (Monterey, CA, USA), 13, 1 (2003), 1–18.04–585 Dykstra-Pruim, Pennylyn (Calvin College, MI, USA). L2 acquisition of German plurals: how students form them and textbooks teach them. Die Unterrichtspraxis (Cherry Hill, NJ, USA), 36, 1 (2003), 43–55.04–586 Eckman, Fred (University of Wisconsin, USA; Email: eckman@uwm.edu), Elreyes, Abdullah and Iverson, Gregory. Some principles of second language phonology. Second Language Research (London, UK), 19, 3 (2003), 169–208.04–587 Egbert, Joy (Washington State U., USA; Email: jegbert@wsu.edu). A study of flow theory in the foreign language classroom. The Modern Language Journal (Madison, WI, USA), 87, 4 (2003), 499–518.04–588 Ehrman, Madeline (Foreign Service Institute, US Dept of State, Washington DC, USA; Email: ehrmann@aol.com) and Leaver, Betty Lou. Cognitive styles in the service of language learning. System, 31, 3 (2003), (Oxford), 393–415.04–589 Felser, Claudia (U. of Essex, UK; Email: felsec@essex.ac.uk), Roberts, Leah, Gross, Rebecca and Marinis, Theodore. The processing of ambiguous sentences by first and second language learners of English. Applied Psycholinguistics (Cambridge, UK), 24, 3 (2003), 453–490.04–590 Gass, Susan (Michigan State University, USA; Email: gass@msu.edu) and Svetics, Ildikó. Differential effects of attention. Language Learning (Michigan, USA), 53, 3 (2003), 497–545.04–591 Griffiths, Carol (Auckland Institute of Studies, Auckland, New Zealand; Email: carolg@ais.ac.nz). Patterns of language learning strategy use. System, (Oxford, UK), 31, 3 (2003), 367–383.04–592 Hertel, Tammy J. (Department of World Languages and Cultures, Juniata College, USA; Email: hertel@juniata.edu) Lexical and discourse factors in the second language acquisition of Spanish word order. Second Language Research (London, England), 19, 4 (2003), 273–304.04–593 Hertel, Tammy J. (Juniata College). Using an e-mail exchange to promote cultural learning. Foreign Language Annals (New York, USA), 36, 3 (2003), 386–396.04–594 Hu, Chieh-Fang (Taipei Municipal Teachers College, Taiwan; Email: cfhu@mail1.tmtc.edu.tw). Phonological memory, phonological awareness and foreign language word learning. Language Learning (University of Michigan, USA), 53, 3 (2003), 429–462.04–595 Izumi, Shinichi (Sophia University, Japan; Email: s-izumi@sophia.ac.jp). Processing difficulty in comprehension and production of relative clauses by learners of English as a second language. Language Learning (Michigan, USA), 53, 2 (2003), 285–323.04–596 Jones, Linda, J. (U. of Arkansas, USA; Email: lcjones@uark.edu). Supporting listening comprehension and vocabulary acquisition with multimedia annotation: the students' voice. Calico Journal (San Marcos Tex. USA), 21, 1 (2003), 41–65.04–597 Jung, Euen Hyuk (Sarah) (Yonsei U., South Korea; Email: jungehs@hotmail.com). The role of discourse signaling cues in second language listening comprehension. The Modern Language Journal (Madison, WI, USA), 87, 4 (2003), 562–577.04–598 Knutson, Sonja (Memorial U., Newfoundland, Canada). Experiential learning in second-language classrooms. TESL Canada Journal (Burnaby, B.C., Canada), 20, 2 (2003), 53–64.04–599 Littlemore, Jeannette (U. of Birmingham, UK). The communicative effectiveness of different types of communication strategy. System, (Oxford, UK), 31, 3 (2003), 331–34704–600 McCollum, Daniel L. (Pennsylvania State U., USA). Utilizing non-cognitive predictors of foreign language achievement. Applied Language Learning (Monterey, CA, USA), 13, 1 (2003), 19–32.04–601 Morris, Frank (University of Miami, USA; Email: fmorris@miami.edu.) and Tarone, Elaine. Impact of classroom dynamics on the effectiveness of recasts in second language acquisition. Language Learning (University of Michigan, USA), 53, 2 (2003), 325–368.04–602 Ntirampeba, Pascal (Université de Montréal, Québec, Canada). La progression en didactique du texte argumentatif écrit. [Progressive approach to written argumentative text.] Révue Canadienne de Linguistique Appliquée, 6, 2 (2003), 159–169.04–603 Parkinson, Brian, Benson, Cathy and Jenkins, Michael (U. of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK). Learner diary research with ‘Cambridge' examination candidates. Edinburgh Working Papers in Applied Linguistics (Edinburgh, Scotland, UK), 12 (2003), 45–63.04–604 Pérez, Luisa, C. (Emporia State U., USA; Email: perezlui@emporia.edu). Foreign language productivity in synchronous versus asynchronous computer-mediated communication. Calico Journal (Texas, USA), 21, 1 (2003), 89–104.04–605 Pulido, Diana (Washington State University, USA; Email: dpulido@wsu.edu.). Modeling the role of second language proficiency and topic familiarity in second language incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading. Language Learning (University of Michigan, USA), 53, 2 (2003), 233–284.04–606 Sasaki, Yoshinori (Ochanomizu U., Japan) and Hayakawa, Harumi. Does a quiz facilitate or spoil language learning? Instructional effects of lesson review quizzes. Applied Language Learning (Monterey, CA, USA), 13, 1 (2003), 33–56.04–607 Seus-Walker, Katia (IUT-Université de Toulouse III, France). Pour développer l'autonomie des apprenants. [Developing learner autonomy.] Les Cahiers de l'APLIUT, XXII, 2 (2003), 43–58.04–608 Sparks, Richard L. (College of Mount St. Joseph, Cincinnati, Ohio) Philips, Lois and Javorsky, James. College students classified as having learning disabilities and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and the foreign language requirement. Foreign Language Annals (New York, USA), 36, 3 (2003), 325–337.04–609 Stotz, Daniel and Meuter, Tessa (Zürcher Hochschule Winterthur, Switzerland; Email: daniel.stotz@zhwin.ch). Embedded English: integrating content and language learning in a Swiss primary school project. Bulletin suisse de linguistique appliquée (Neuchâtel, Switzerland), 77 (2003), 83–101.04–610 Takeuchi, Osamu (Kansai U., Osaka, Japan; Email: takeuchi@ipcku.kansai-u.ac.jp). What can we learn from good foreign language learners? A qualitative study in the Japanese foreign language context. System, (Oxford, UK), 31, 3 (2003), 385–392.04–611 Vandergrift, Larry (University of Ottawa, Canada; Email: lvdgrift@uottawa.ca). Orchestrating strategy use: toward a model of the skilled second language listener. Language Learning (University of Michigan, USA), 53, 3 (2003), 463–496.04–612 Vann, Roberta J. (Iowa State U., USA) and Fairbairn, Shelley B. Linking our worlds: a collaborative academic literacy project. TESOL Journal (Alexandria, VA, USA), 12, 3 (2003), 11–16.04–613 Verspoor, Marjolijn and Lowie, Wander (University of Groningen, The Netherlands). Making sense of polysemous words. Language Learning (University of Michigan, USA), 53, 3 (2003), 547–586.04–614 Weldon, A. and Trautmann, G. (U. of North Carolina-Asheville, USA). Spanish and service-learning: pedagogy and praxis. Hispania (Ann Arbor, USA), 86, 3 (2003), 574–585.04–615 Wen, W. P. (Xiangtan U., Hunan, P.R. of China lw@xtu.edu.com) and Clément, R. A Chinese conceptualisation of willingness to communicate in ESL. Language, Culture and Curriculum, (Clevedon, UK) 16, 1 (2003), 18–38.04–616 Yeh, Yuli and Wang, Chai-wei. (National Tsing Hua U., Taiwan; Email: ylyeh@mx.nthu.edu.tw). Effects of multimedia vocabulary annotations and learning styles on vocabulary learning. Calico Journal (Texas, USA), 21, 1 (2003), 131–144.04–617 Yuet Hung Chan, C. (City U. of Hong Kong; Email: ctcych@cityu.edu.hk). Cultural content and reading proficiency: a comparison of mainland Chinese and Hong Kong learners of English. Language, Culture and Curriculum, (Clevedon, UK) 16, 1 (2003), 60–69.04–618 Zsiga, Elizabeth (Georgetown University, USA; Email: zsigae@georgetown.edu). Articulatory timing in a second language – evidence from Russian and English. Studies in Second Language Acquisition (New York, USA), 25, 3 (2003), 399–432.04–619 Zughoul, Muhammed Raji and Abdul-Fattah, Hussein (Yarmouk U., Jordan). Translational collocational strategies of Arab learners of English: a study in lexical semantics. Babel (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), 49, 1 (2003), 59–81.

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04–314 Alloway, N., Gilbert, P., Gilbert, R., and Henderson, R. (James Cook University, Australia Email: Nola.Alloway@jcu.edu.au). Boys Performing English. Gender and Education (Abingdon, UK), 15, 4 (2003), 351–364.04–315 Barcroft, Joe (Washington U., USA; Email: barcroft@wustl.edu). Distinctiveness and bidirectional effects in input enhancement for vocabulary learning. Applied Language Learning (Monterey, CA, USA), 13, 2 (2003), 133–159.04–316 Berman, Ruth, A. and Katzenberger, Irit (Tel Aviv U., Israel; Email: rberman@post.tau.ac.il). Form and function in introducing narrative and expository texts: a developmental perspective. Discourse Processes (New York, USA), 38, 1 (2004), 57–94.04–317 Byon, Andrew Sangpil (State University of New York at Albany, USA; Email: abyon@albany.edu). Language socialisation and Korean as a heritage language: a study of Hawaiian classrooms. Language, Culture and Curriculum (Clevedon, UK), 16, 3 (2003), 269–283.04–318 Chambers, Angela (University of Limerick, Ireland; Email: Angela.Chambers@ul.ie) and O'Sullivan, Íde. Corpus consultation and advanced learners' writing skills in French. ReCALL (Cambridge, UK), 16, 1 (2004), 158–172.04–319 Chan, Alice Y. W. (City U. of Hong Kong; Email: enalice@cityu.edu.hk). Noun phrases in Chinese and English: a study of English structural problems encountered by Chinese ESL students in Hong Kong. Language, Culture and Curriculum (Clevedon, UK), 17, 1 (2004), 33–47.04–320 Choi, Y-J. (U. of Durham, UK; Email: yoonjeongchoi723@hotmail.com). Intercultural communication through drama in teaching English as an international language. English Teaching (Anseonggun, South Korea), 58, 4 (2003), 127–156.04–321 Chun, Eunsil (Ewha Womens U., South Korea; Email: aceunsil@hananet.net). Effects of text types and tasks on Korean college students' reading comprehension. English Teaching (Anseonggun, South Korea), 59, 2 (2004), 75–100.04–322 Collentine, Joseph (Northern Arizona U., USA; Email: Joseph.Collentine@nau.edu). The effects of learning contexts on morphosyntactic and lexical development. Studies in Second Language Acquisition (New York, USA), 26 (2004), 227–248.04–323 Davies, Beatrice (Oxford Brookes U., UK). The gender gap in modern languages: a comparison of attitude and performance in year 7 and 10. Language Learning Journal (Oxford, UK), 29 (2004), 53–58.04–324 Díaz-Campos, Manuel (Indiana U., USA; Email: mdiazcam@indiana.edu). Context of learning in the acquisition of Spanish second language phonology. Studies in Second Language Acquisition (New York, USA), 26 (2004), 249–273.04–325 Donato, Richard. Aspects of collaboration in pedagogical discourse. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (Cambridge, UK), 24 (2004), 284–302.04–326 Felix, Uschi (Monash U., Australia; Email: Uschi.Felix@arts.monash.edu.au). A multivariate analysis of secondary students' experience of web-based language acquisition. ReCALL (Cambridge, UK), 16, 1 (2004), 237–249.04–327 Feuerhake, Evelyn, Fieseler, Caroline, Ohntrup, Joy-Sarah and Riemer, Claudia (U. of Bielefeld, Germany). Motivation und Sprachverlust in der L2 Französisch: eine retrospektive Übungsstudie. [Motivation and language attrition in French as a second language (L2): a retrospective research exercise.] Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht (Alberta, Canada), 9, 2 (2004), 29.04–328 Field, John (U. of Leeds & Reading, UK; Email: jcf1000@dircon.co.uk). An insight into listeners' problems: too much bottom-up or too much top-down?System (Oxford, UK), 32, 3 (2004) 363–377.04–329 Freed, Barbara F., Segalowitz, Norman, and Dewey, Dan D. (Carnegie Mellon, U., USA; Email: bf0u+@andrew.cmu.edu). Context of learning and second language fluency in French. Studies in Second Language Acquisition (New York, USA), 26 (2004), 275–301.04–330 Grotjahn, Rüdiger (U. of Bochum, Germany). Test and Attitudes Scale for the Year Abroad (TESTATT): Sprachlernmotivation und Einstellungen gegenüber Sprechern der eigenen und der fremden Sprache. [Test and Attitudes Scale for the Year Abroad (TESTATT): Motivation to learn foreign languages and attitudes toward speakers of one's own and foreign language.] Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht (Alberta, Canada), 9, 2 (2004), 23.04–331 Helbig-Reuter, Beate. Das Europäische Portfolio der Sprache (I). [The European Language Portfolio (I).] Deutsch als Fremdsprache (Leipzig, Germany), 2 (2004), 104–110.04–332 Hopp, Marsha A. and Hopp, Theodore H. (ZigZag, Inc., USA; Email: marsha.hopp@newSLATE.com). NewSLATE: building a web-based infrastructure for learning non-Roman script languages. Calico Journal (Texas, USA), 21, 3 (2004), 541–555.04–333 Jun Zhang, Lawrence (Nanyang Tech. U., Singapore; Email: izhang@nie.edu.sg). Research into Chinese EFL learner strategies: methods, findings and instructional issues. RELC Journal (Singapore), 34, 3 (2003), 284–322.04–334 Kim, H-D. (The Catholic U. of Korea, Korea). Individual Differences in Motivation with Regard to Reactions to ELT Materials. English Teaching (Anseonggun, South Korea), 58, 4 (2003), 177–203.04–335 Kirchner, Katharina (University of Hamburg, Germany). Motivation beim Fremdsprachenerwerb. Eine qualitative Pilotstudie zur Motivation schwedischer Deutschlerner. [Motivation in foreign language acquisition. A qualitative pilot study on motivation of Swedish learners of German.] Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht (Alberta, Canada), 9, 2 (2004), 32.04–336 Kleppin, Karin (U. of Leipzig, Germany). ‘Bei dem Lehrer kann man ja nichts lernen”. Zur Unterstützung der Motivation durch Sprachlernberatung. [‘You cannot learn anything from the teacher”: counselling in foreign language learning and its role as motivational support.] Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht (Alberta, Canada), 9, 2 (2004), 16.04–337 Kormos, Judith (Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary) and Dörnyei, Zoltán. The interaction of linguistics and motivational variables in second language task performance. Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht (Alberta, Canada), 9, 2 (2004), 19.04–338 Lafford, Barbara A. (Arizona State U., USA; Email: blafford@asu.edu). The effect of the context of learning on the use of communication strategies by learners of Spanish as a foreign language. Studies in Second Language Acquisition (New York, USA), 26 (2004), 201–225.04–339 Leahy, Christine (Nottingham Trent U., UK; Email: echristine.leahy@ntu.ac.uk). Observations in the computer room: L2 output and learner behaviour. ReCALL (Cambridge, UK), 16, 1 (2004), 124–144.04–340 Lee, Cynthia F. K. (Hong Kong Baptist U.; Email: cfklee@hkbu.edu.hk). Written requests in emails sent by adult Chinese learners of English. Language, Culture and Curriculum (Clevedon, UK), 17, 1 (2004) 58–72.04–341 Leow, Ronald P. (Georgetown U., USA; Email: RLEOW@guvax.georgetown.edu), Egi, Takako, Nuevo, Ana María and Tsai, Ya-Chin. The roles of textual enhancement and type of linguistic item in adult L2 learners' comprehension and intake. Applied Language Learning (California, USA), 13, 2 (2003), 93–108.04–342 Lund, Randall J. Erwerbssequenzen im Klassenraum. [Order of acquisition in the classroom.]. Deutsch als Fremdsprache (Leipzig, Germany), 2 (2004), 99–103.04–343 McBride, Nicole (London Metropolitan University, UK; Email: n.mcbride@londonmet.ac.uk). The role of the target language in cultural studies: two surveys in UK universities. Language, Culture and Curriculum (Clevedon, UK), 16, 3 (2003), 298–311.04–344 McIntosh, N. Cameron and Noels, A. Kimberly (U. of Alberta, Canada). Self-Determined Motivation for Language Learning: The Role of Need for Cognition and Language Learning Strategies. Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht (Alberta, Canada), 9, 2 (2004), 28.04–345 Montrul, Silvina (U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA; Email: montrul@uiuc.edu). Psycholinguistic evidence for split intransitivity in Spanish second language acquisition. Applied Psycholinguistics (Cambridge, UK), 25 (2004), 239–267.04–346 Orsini-Jones, Marina (Coventry U., UK; Email: m.orsini@coventry.ac.uk). Supporting a course in new literacies and skills for linguists with a Virtual Learning Environment. ReCALL (Cambridge, UK), 16, 1 (2004), 189–209.04–347 Philip, William (Utrecht U., Netherlands; Email: bill.philip@let.uu.nl) and Botschuijver, Sabine. Discourse integration and indefinite subjects in child English. IRAL (Berlin, Germany), 42, 2 (2004), 189–201.04–348 Rivalland, Judith (Edith Cowan U., Australia). Oral language development and access to school discourses. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy (Norwood, South Australia), 27, 2 (2004), 142–158.04–349 Rosa, Elena, M. and Leow, Ronald, P. (Georgetown U., USA). Awareness, different learning conditions, and second language development. Applied Psycholinguistics (Cambridge, UK), 25 (2004), 269–292.04–350 Schwarz-Friesel, Monika. Kognitive Linguistik heute – Metaphernverstehen als Fallbeispiel. [Cognitive Linguistics today – the case of understanding metaphors.] Deutsch als Fremdsprache (Leipzig, Germany), 2 (2004), 83–89.04–351 Segalowitz, Norman and Freed, Barbara, F. (Concordia U., USA; Email: sgalow@vax2.concordia.ca). Context, contact, and cognition in oral fluency acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition (New York, USA), 26 (2004), 173–199.04–352 Sleeman, Petra (U. of Amsterdam, Netherlands; Email: A.P.Sleeman@uva.nl). Guided learners of French and the acquisition of emphatic constructions. IRAL (Berlin, Germany), 42, 2 (2004), 129–151.04–353 Takanashi, Yoshiri (f*ckuoka U. of Education, Japan; Email: yt0917@f*ckuoka-edu.ac.jp). TEFL and communication styles in Japanese culture. Language, Culture and Curriculum (Clevedon, UK), 17, 1 (2004), 1–14.04–354 Wang, Judy Huei-Yu (Georgetown U., USA; Email: jw235@Georgetown.edu) and Guthrie, John T. Modeling the effects of intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, amount of reading, and past reading achievement on text comprehension between U.S. and Chinese students. Reading Research Quarterly (Newark, USA), 39, 2 (2004), 162–186.04–355 Watts, Catherine (U. of Brighton, UK). Some reasons for the decline in numbers of MFL students at degree level. Language Learning Journal (Oxford, UK), 29 (2004), 59–67.04–356 Wingate, Ursula (Oxford U., UK). Dictionary use – the need to teach strategies. Language Learning Journal (Oxford, UK), 29 (2004), 5–11.04–357 Wong, Wynne (Ohio State U., USA; Email: wong.240@osu.edu). Textual enhancement and simplified input effects on L2 comprehension and acquisition of non-meaningful grammatical form. Applied Language Learning (Monterey, CA, USA), 13, 2 (2003), 109–132.

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04–164Aronin, Larissa (U. of Haifa, Israel; Email: Larisa@research.haifa.ac.il) and Ó Laorie, Muiris. Multilingual students' awareness of their language teacher's other languages. Language Awareness (Clevedon, UK), 12, 3&4 (2003), 204–19.04–165Beatty, Ken (City U., Hong Kong; Email: Isken@cityu.edu.hk) and Nunan, David. Computer-mediated collaborative learning. System (Oxford, UK), 32, 2 (2004), 165–83.04–166Berry, Roger (Lingnan U., Hong Kong; Email: rogerb@ln.edu.hk). Awareness of metalanguage. Language Awareness (Clevedon, UK), 13, 1 (2004), 1–16.04–167Chang, Jin-Tae (Woosong University, Korea; Email: jtchang@lion.woosong.ac.kr). Quasi-spoken interactions in CMC: email and chatting content analysis. English Teaching (Anseonggun, South Korea), 58, 3 (2003), 95–122.04–168Chung, Hyun-Sook (International Graduate School of English, South Korea; Email: sook@igse.ac.kr). Does subject knowledge make a significant contribution beyond that of L2 listening ability to L2 listening?English Teaching (Anseonggun, South Korea), 58, 3 (2003), 21–40.04–169Cunico, Sonia (Leicester U., UK). Translation as a purposeful activity in the language classroom. Tuttitalia (Rugby, UK), 29 (2004), 4–12.04–170Dodigovic, Marina (Zayed U., Dubai, UAE; Email: Marina.Dodigovic@zu.ac.ae). Natural language processing (NLP) as an instrument of raising the language awareness of learners of English as a second language. Language Awareness (Clevedon, UK), 12, 3&4 (2003), 187–203.04–171El-Dib, M. A. (Zagazig U., Egypt). Language Learning strategies in Kuwait: links to gender, language level, and culture in a hybrid context. Foreign Language Annals (Alexandria, Virginia, USA), 37, 1 (2004), 85–95.04–172García Mayo, María del Pilar (U. of the Basque Country, Spain; Email: fipgamap@lg.ehu.es). Interaction in advanced EFL pedagogy: a comparison of form-focused activities. International Journal of Educational Research (Abingdon, UK), 37 (2002), 323–41.04–173Ghaith, Ghazi (American U. of Beirut, Lebanon). Effects of the Learning Together model of co-operative learning on English as a Foreign Language reading achievement, academic self-esteem, and feelings of social alienation. Bilingual Research Journal (Arizona, USA), 27, 3 (2003), 451–74.04–174Hansen, Jette G. (U. of Arizona, USA; Email: jhansen@u.arizona.edu). Developmental sequences in the acquisition of English L2 syllable codas – a preliminary study. Studies in Second Language Acquisition (New York, USA), 26, 1 (2004), 85–124.04–175Havranek, Gertraud (U. of Klagenfurt, Austria; Email: gertraud.havranek@uni-klu.ac.at). When is corrective feedback most likely to succeed?International Journal of Educational Research (Abingdon, UK), 37 (2002), 255–70.04–176Hegelheimer, Volker (Iowa State U., USA; Email: volkerh@iastate.edu) and Tower, Dustin. Using CALL in the classroom: Analyzing student interactions in an authentic classroom. System (Oxford, UK), 32, 2 (2004), 185–205.04–177Hester, Elizabeth (Wichita State U., USA; Email: hestere@newpaltz.edu) and Hodson, Barbara Williams. The role of phonological representation in decoding skills of young readers. Child Language Teaching and Therapy (London, UK), 20, 2 (2004), 115–33.04–178Kim, Haeyoung (Catholic U. of Korea, South Korea; Email: haeyoungkim@catholic.ac.kr). Effects of free reading on vocabulary competence in the first and second language. English Teaching (Anseonggun South Korea), 58, 4 (2003), 273–92.04–179Klapper, John and Rees, Jonathan (Birmingham U., UK; Email: j.i.rees@bham.ac.uk). Marks, get set, go: an evaluation of entry levels and progress rates on a university foreign language programme. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education (London, UK), 29, 1 (2004), 21–39.04–180Kuiken, Folkert (U. of Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Email: f.kuiken@uva.nl) and Vedder, Ineke. The effect of interaction in acquiring the grammar of a second language. International Journal of Educational Research (Abingdon, UK), 37 (2002), 343–58.04–181Letao, S. and Fletcher, J. (U. of Western Australia, Australia). Literacy outcomes for students with speech impairment: long-term follow-up. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders (Abingdon, UK), 39, 2 (2004), 245–56.04–182Lindberg, Inger (Göteborg U., Sweden; Email: inger.lundberg@svenska.gu.se). Second language awareness: for what and for whom?Language Awareness (Clevedon, UK), 12, 3&4 (2003), 157–71.04–183Lyster, Roy (McGill U., Canada; Email: roy.lyster@mcgill.ca). Negotiation in immersion teacher-student interaction. International Journal of Educational Research (Abingdon, UK), 37 (2002), 237–53.04–184Martino, W. Boys, masculinities and literacy: addressing the issues. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy (Adelaide, Australia), 26, 3 (2003), 9–27.04–185McDonough, Kim (U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA; Email: mcdonokr@uiuc.edu). Learner-learner interaction during pair and small group activities in a Thai EFL context. System (Oxford, UK), 32, 2 (2004), 207–24.04–186Meara, P. (U. of Wales Swansea, UK). Modelling vocabulary loss. Applied Linguistics (Oxford, UK), 25, 2 (2004), 137–55.04–187Mori, Reiko (f*ckuoka Prefectural U., Japan; Email: mori@f*ckuoka-pu.ac.jp). Staying-in-English rule revisited. System (Oxford, UK), 32, 2 (2004), 225–36.04–188Roche, Jörg and Scheller, Julija (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany). Zur Effizienz von Grammatikanimationen beim Spracherwerb [The efficiency of grammar animations in the process of learning foreign languages]. Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht, Online Journal, 9, 1 (2004), 15 pp.04–189Saito, H. & Eisenstein Ebsworth, M. (Queens College, City U. of New York, USA). Seeing English language teaching and learning through the eyes of Japanese EFL and ESL students. Foreign Language Annals (New York, USA), 37, 1 (2004), 111–24.04–190Schwarzer, D. (U. of Texas at Austin, USA). Student and teacher strategies for communicating through dialogue journals in Hebrew: a teacher research project. Foreign Language Annals (New York, USA), 37, 1 (2004), 77–84.04–191Simard, D. & Wong, W. (U. du Québec, Montréal). Language awareness and its multiple possibilities for the L2 classroom. Foreign Language Annals (New York, USA), 37, 1 (2004), 96–110.04–192Soh, Yoon-Hee (Pochon CHA University, South Korea; Email: yhsoh@cha.ac.kr). Students' preparation, participation and attitudes toward an oral class presentation. 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Perfume is a Japanese “techno-pop” idol trio formed in 2000 consisting of three women–Ayano Omoto, Yuka Kashino, and Ayaka Nishiwaki. Since 2007, when one of their songs was selected for a recycling awareness campaign by Japan's national public broadcaster, Perfume has been a consistent fixture in the Japanese pop music charts. They have been involved in the full gamut of typical idol activities, from television and radio shows to commercials for clothing brands, candy, and drinks. Their success reflects Japanese pop culture's long-standing obsession with pop idols, who once breaking into the mainstream, become ubiquitous cross-media presences. Perfume’s fame in Japan is due in large part to their masterful performance of traditional female idol roles, through which they assume the kaleidoscopic positions of daughter, sister, platonic friend, and heterosexual romantic partner depending on the standpoint of the beholder. In the lyrical content of their songs, they play the various parts of the cute but shy girl who loves from a distance, the strong compatriot that pushes the listener to keep striving for their dreams, and the kindred spirit with whom the listener can face life's ordinary challenges. Like other successful idols, their extensive lines of Perfume-branded merchandise and product endorsem*nts make the exercise of consumer spending power by their fans a vehicle for them to approach the ideals and experiences that Perfume embodies. Yet, Perfume's videos, music, and stage performances are also replete with subversive images of machines, virtual cities and landscapes, and computer generated apparitions. In their works, the traditional idol as an object of consumer desire co-exists with images of the fragmentation of identity, distrust in the world and the senses, and the desire to escape from illusion, all presented in terms of encounters with technology. In what their fans call the "Near Future Trilogy", a set of three singles released soon after their major label debut (2005-06), lyrics refer to the artificiality and transience of virtual worlds ("Nothing I see or touch has any reality" from "Electro-World," or "I want to escape. I want to destroy this city created by immaculate computation" from "Computer City"). In their later work, explicit lyrical references to virtual worlds and machines largely disappear, but they are replaced with images and bodily performances of Perfume with robotic machinery and electronic information. Perfume is an idol group augmented by technology. In this paper, I explore the significance of these images of technological augmentation of the human body in the work of Perfume. I suggest that the ways these bodily encounters of the human body and technology are articulated in their work reflect broader social and economic anxieties and hopes in Japan. I focus in the first section of this paper on describing some of the recurring technological motifs in their works. Next, I show how their recent work is an experiment with the emergent possibilities of human-technology relationships for imagining Japan's future development. Not only in their visual and performance style, but in their modes of engagement with their fans through new media, I suggest that Perfume itself is attempting to seek out new forms of value creation, which hold the promise of pushing Japan out of the extended economic and social stagnation of its 1990s post-bubble "Lost Decade,” particularly by articulating how they connect with the world. The idol's technologically augmented body becomes both icon and experiment for rethinking Japan and staking out a new global position for it. Though I have referred above to Perfume as its three members, I also use the term to signify the broader group of managers and collaborating artists that surrounds them. Perfume is a creation of corporate media companies and the output of development institutions designed to train multi-talented entertainers from a young age. In addition to the three women who form the public face of Perfume, main figures include music producer Yasutaka Nakata, producer and choreographer MIKIKO, and more recently, the new media artist Daito Manabe and his company, Rhizomatiks. Though Perfume very rarely appear on stage or in their videos with any other identifiable human performers, every production is an effort involving dozens of professional staff. In this respect, Perfume is a very conventional pop idol unit. The attraction of these idols for their fans is not primarily their originality, creativity, or musicality, but their professionalism and image as striving servants (Yano 336). Idols are beloved because they "are well-polished, are trained to sing and act, maintain the mask of stardom, and are extremely skillful at entertaining the audience" (Iwabuchi 561). Moreover, their charisma is based on a relationship of omoiyari or mutual empathy and service. As Christine Yano has argued for Japanese Enka music, the singer must maintain the image of service to his or her fans and reach out to them as if engaged in a personal relationship with each (337). Fans reciprocate by caring for the singer, and making his or her needs their own, not the least of which are financial. The omoiyari relationship of mutual empathy and care is essential to the singer’s charismatic appeal (Yano 347). Thus it does not matter to their fans that Perfume do not play their own instruments or write their own songs. These are jobs for other professionals. However, mirroring the role of the employee in the Japanese company-as-family (see Kondo), their devotion to their jobs as entertainers, and their care and respect for their fans must be evident at all times. The tarnishing of this image, for instance through revelations of underage smoking or drinking, can be fatal, and has resulted in banishment from the media spotlight for some former stars. A large part of Japanese stars' conventional appeal is based on their appearance as devoted workers, consummate professionals, and partners in mutual empathy. As charismatic figures that exchange cultural ideals for fans’ disposable income, it is not surprising that many authors have tied the emergence of the pop idol to the height of Japan's economic prosperity in the 1970s and 1980s, when the social contract between labor and corporations that provided both lifelong employment and social identity had yet to be seriously threatened. Aoyagi suggests (82) that the idol system is tied to post-war consumerism and the increased importance of young adults, particularly women, as consumers. As this correlation between the health of idols and the economy might imply, there is a strong popular connection between concerns of social fission and discontent and economic stagnation. Koichi Iwabuchi writes that Japanese media accounts in the 1990s connected the health of the idol system to the "vigor of society" (555). As Iwabuchi describes, some Japanese fans have looked for their idols abroad in places such as Hong Kong, with a sense of nostalgia for a kind of stardom that has waned in Japan and because of "a deep sense of disillusionment and discontent with Japanese society" (Iwabuchi 561) following the collapse of Japan's bubble economy in the early 1990s. In reaction to the same conditions, some Japanese idols have attempted to exploit this nostalgia. During a brief period of fin-de-siècle optimism that coincided with neoliberal structural reforms under the government of Junichiro Koizumi, Morning Musume, the most popular female idol group at the time, had a hit single entitled "Love Machine" that ended the 1990s in Japan. The song's lyrics tie together dreams of life-long employment, romantic love, stable traditional families, and national resurgence, linking Japan's prosperity in the world at large to its internal social, emotional, and economic health. The song’s chorus declares, "The world will be envious of Japan's future!", although that future still has yet to materialize. In its place has appeared the "near-future" imaginary of Perfume. As mentioned above, the lyrics of some of their early songs referenced illusory virtual worlds that need to be destroyed or transcended. In their later works, these themes are continued in images of the bodies of the three performers augmented by technology in various ways, depicting the performers themselves as robots. Images of the three performers as robots are first introduced in the music video for their single "Secret Secret" (2007). At the outset of the video, three mannequins resembling Perfume are frozen on a futuristic TV soundstage being dressed by masked attendants who march off screen in lock step. The camera fades in and out, and the mannequins are replaced with the human members frozen in the same poses. Other attendants raise pieces of chocolate-covered ice cream (the music video also served as an advertisem*nt for the ice cream) to the performers' mouths, which when consumed, activate them, launching them into a dance consisting of stilted, mechanical steps, and orthogonal arm positions. Later, one of the performers falls on stairs and appears to malfunction, becoming frozen in place until she receives another piece of ice cream. They are later more explicitly made into robots in the video for "Spring of Life" (2012), in which each of the three members are shown with sections of skin lifted back to reveal shiny, metallic parts inside. Throughout this video, their backs are connected to coiled cables hanging from the ceiling, which serve as a further visual sign of their robotic characters. In the same video, they are also shown in states of distress, each sitting on the floor with parts exposed, limbs rigid and performing repetitive motions, as though their control systems have failed. In their live shows, themes of augmentation are much more apparent. At a 2010 performance at the Tokyo Dome, which was awarded the jury selection prize in the 15th Japan Media Arts Festival by the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs, the centerpiece was a special performance entitled "Perfume no Okite" or "The Laws of Perfume." Like "Secret Secret," the performance begins with the emergence of three mannequins posed at the center of the stadium. During the introductory sequence, the members rise out of a different stage to the side. They begin to dance, synchronized to massively magnified, computer generated projections of themselves. The projections fluctuate between photorealistic representations of each member and ghostly CG figures consisting of oscillating lines and shimmering particles that perform the same movements. At the midpoint, the members each face their own images, and state their names and dates of birth before uttering a series of commands: "The right hand and right leg are together. The height of the hands must be precise. Check the motion of the fingers. The movement of the legs must be smooth. The palms of the hands must be here." With each command, the members move their own bodies mechanically, mirrored by the CG figures. After more dancing with their avatars, the performance ends with Perfume slowly lowered down on the platform at the center of the stage, frozen in the same poses and positions as the mannequins, which have now disappeared. These performances cleverly use images of robotic machinery in order to subvert Perfume's idol personas. The robotic augmentations are portrayed as vectors for control by some unseen external party, and each of the members must have their life injected into them through cables, ice cream, or external command, before they can begin to dance and sing as pop idols. Pop idols have always been manufactured products, but through such technological imagery Perfume make their own artificiality explicit, revealing to the audience that it is not the performers they love, but the emergent and contingently human forms of a social, technological, and commercial system that they desire. In this way, these images subvert the performers' charisma and idol fans' own feelings of adoration, revealing the premise of the idol system to have been manufactured to manipulate consumer affect and desire. If, as Iwabuchi suggests, some fans of idols are attracted to their stars by a sense of nostalgia for an age of economic prosperity, then Perfume's robotic augmentations offer a reflexive critique of this industrial form. In "The Laws of Perfume", the commands that comport their bodies may be stated in their own voices, yet they issue not from the members themselves, but their magnified and processed avatars. It is Perfume the commercial entity speaking. The malfunctioning bodies of Perfume depicted in "Secret Secret" and "Spring of Life" do not detract from their charisma as idols as an incident of public drunkenness might, because the represented breakdowns in their performances are linked not to the moral purity or professionalism of the humans, but to failures of the technological and economic systems that have supported them. If idols of a past age were defined by their seamless and idealized personas as entertainers and employees, then it is fitting that in an age of much greater economic and social uncertainty that they should acknowledge the cracks in the social and commercial mechanisms from which their carefully designed personas emerge. In these videos and performances, the visual trope of technological body augmentation serves as a means for representing both the dependence of the idol persona on consumer capitalism, and the fracturing of that system. However, they do not provide an answer to the question of what might lie beyond the fracturing. The only suggestions provided are the disappearance of that world, as in the end of "Computer City," or in the reproduction of the same structure, as when the members of Perfume become mannequins in "The Laws of Perfume" and "Secret Secret." Interestingly, it was with Perfume's management's decision to switch record labels and market Perfume to an international audience that Perfume became newly augmented, and a suggestion of an answer became visible. Perfume began their international push in 2012 with the release of a compilation album, "Love the World," and live shows and new media works in Asia and Europe. The album made their music available for purchase outside of Japan for the first time. Its cover depicts three posed figures computer rendered as clouds of colored dots produced from 3D scans of the members. The same scans were used to create 3D-printed plastic figures, whose fabrication process is shown in the Japanese television ad for the album. The robotic images of bodily augmentation have been replaced by a more powerful form of augmentation–digital information. The website which accompanied their international debut received the Grand Prix of the 17th Japan Media Arts Prize. Developed by Daito Manabe and Rhizomatiks, visitors to the Perfume Global website were greeted by a video of three figures composed of pulsating clouds of triangles, dancing to a heavy, glitch-laden electronic track produced by Nakata. Behind them, dozens of tweets about Perfume collected in real-time scroll across the background. Controls to the side let visitors change not only the volume of the music, but also the angle of their perspective, and the number and responsiveness of the pulsating polygons. The citation for the site's prize refers to the innovative participatory features of the website. Motion capture data from Perfume, music, and programming examples used to render the digital performance were made available for free to visitors, who were encouraged to create their own versions. This resulted in hundreds of fan-produced videos showing various figures, from animals and cartoon characters to swooshing multi-colored lines, dancing the same routine. Several of these were selected to be featured on the website, and were later integrated into the stage performance of the piece during Perfume's Asia tour. A later project extended this idea in a different direction, letting website visitors paint animations on computer representations of the members, and use a simple programming language to control the images. Many of these user creations were integrated into Perfume's 2013 performance at the Cannes Lions International Festival as advertising. Their Cannes performance begins with rapidly shifting computer graphics projected onto their costumes as they speak in unison, as though they are visitors from another realm: "We are Perfume. We have come. Japan is far to the east. To encounter the world, the three of us and everyone stand before you: to connect you with Japan, and to communicate with you, the world." The user-contributed designs were projected on to the members' costumes as they danced. This new mode of augmentation–through information rather than machinery–shows Perfume to be more than a representation of Japan's socio-economic transitions, but a live experiment in effecting these transitions. In their international performances, their bodies are synthesized in real-time from the performers' motions and the informatic layer generated from tweets and user-generated creations. This creates the conditions for fans to inscribe their own marks on to Perfume, transforming the emotional engagement between fan and idol into a technological linkage through which the idols’ bodies can be modified. Perfume’s augmented bodies are not just seen and desired, but made by their fans. The value added by this new mode of connection is imagined as the critical difference needed to transform Perfume from a local Japanese idol group into an entity capable of moving around the world, embodying the promise of a new global position for Japan enabled through information. In Perfume, augmentation suggests a possible answer to Japan’s economic stagnation and social fragmentation. It points past a longing for the past towards new values produced in encounters with the world beyond Japan. Augmentations newly connect Perfume and Japan with the world economically and culturally. 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Introduction Many destinations promote culinary encounters. Foods and beverages, and especially how these will taste in situ, are being marketed as niche travel motivators and used in destination brand building across the globe. While initial usage of the term culinary tourism focused on experiencing exotic cultures of foreign destinations by sampling unfamiliar food and drinks, the term has expanded to embrace a range of leisure travel experiences where the aim is to locate and taste local specialities as part of a pleasurable, and hopefully notable, culinary encounter (Wolf). Long’s foundational work was central in developing the idea of culinary tourism as an active endeavor, suggesting that via consumption, individuals construct unique experiences. Ignatov and Smith’s literature review-inspired definition confirms the nature of activity as participatory, and adds consuming food production skills—from observing agriculture and local processors to visiting food markets and attending cooking schools—to culinary purchases. Despite importing almost all of its foodstuffs and beverages, including some of its water, Singapore is an acknowledged global leader in culinary tourism. Horng and Tsai note that culinary tourism conceptually implies that a transferal of “local or special knowledge and information that represent local culture and identities” (41) occurs via these experiences. This article adds the act of reading to these participatory activities and suggests that, because food writing forms an important component of Singapore’s suite of culinary tourism offerings, taste contributes to the cultural experience offered to both visitors and locals. While Singapore foodways have attracted significant scholarship (see, for instance, work by Bishop; Duruz; Huat & Rajah; Tarulevicz, Eating), Singapore food writing, like many artefacts of popular culture, has attracted less notice. Yet, this writing is an increasingly visible component of cultural production of, and about, Singapore, and performs a range of functions for locals, tourists and visitors before they arrive. Although many languages are spoken in Singapore, English is the national language (Alsagoff) and this study focuses on food writing in English. Background Tourism comprises a major part of Singapore’s economy, with recent figures detailing that food and beverage sales contribute over 10 per cent of this revenue, with spend on culinary tours and cookery classes, home wares such as tea-sets and cookbooks, food magazines and food memoirs additional to this (Singapore Government). This may be related to the fact that Singapore not only promotes food as a tourist attraction, but also actively promotes itself as an exceptional culinary destination. The Singapore Tourism Board (STB) includes food in its general information brochures and websites, and its print, television and cinema commercials (Huat and Rajah). It also mounts information-rich campaigns both abroad and inside Singapore. The 2007 ‘Singapore Seasons’ campaign, for instance, promoted Singaporean cuisine alongside films, design, books and other cultural products in London, New York and Beijing. Touring cities identified as key tourist markets in 2011, the ‘Singapore Takeout’ pop-up restaurant brought the taste of Singaporean foods into closer focus. Singaporean chefs worked with high profile locals in its kitchen in a custom-fabricated shipping container to create and demonstrate Singaporean dishes, attracting public and media interest. In country, the STB similarly actively promotes the tastes of Singaporean foods, hosting the annual World Gourmet Summit (Chaney and Ryan) and Pacific Food Expo, both attracting international culinary professionals to work alongside local leaders. The Singapore Food Festival each July is marketed to both locals and visitors. In these ways, the STB, as well as providing events for visitors, is actively urging Singaporeans to proud of their food culture and heritage, so that each Singaporean becomes a proactive ambassador of their cuisine. Singapore Food Writing Popular print guidebooks and online guides to Singapore pay significantly more attention to Singaporean food than they do for many other destinations. Sections on food in such publications discuss at relative length the taste of Singaporean food (always delicious) as well as how varied, authentic, hygienic and suited-to-all-budgets it is. These texts also recommend hawker stalls and food courts alongside cafés and restaurants (Henderson et al.), and a range of other culinary experiences such as city and farm food tours and cookery classes. This writing describes not only what can be seen or learned during these experiences, but also what foods can be sampled, and how these might taste. This focus on taste is reflected in the printed materials that greet the in-bound tourist at the airport. On a visit in October 2013, arrival banners featuring mouth-watering images of local specialities such as chicken rice and chilli crab marked the route from arrival to immigration and baggage collection. Even advertising for a bank was illustrated with photographs of luscious-looking fruits. The free maps and guidebooks available featured food-focused tours and restaurant locations, and there were also substantial free booklets dedicated solely to discussing local delicacies and their flavours, plus recommended locations to sample them. A website and free mobile app were available that contain practical information about dishes, ingredients, cookery methods, and places to eat, as well as historical and cultural information. These resources are also freely distributed to many hotels and popular tourist destinations. Alongside organising food walks, bus tours and cookery classes, the STB also recommends the work of a number of Singaporean food writers—principally prominent Singapore food bloggers, reviewers and a number of memoirists—as authentic guides to what are described as unique Singaporean flavours. The strategies at the heart of this promotion are linking advertising to useful information. At a number of food centres, for instance, STB information panels provide details about both specific dishes and Singapore’s food culture more generally (Henderson et al.). This focus is apparent at many tourist destinations, many of which are also popular local attractions. In historic Fort Canning Park, for instance, there is a recreation of Raffles’ experimental garden, established in 1822, where he grew the nutmeg, clove and other plants that were intended to form the foundation for spice plantations but were largely unsuccessful (Reisz). Today, information panels not only indicate the food plants’ names and how to grow them, but also their culinary and medicinal uses, recipes featuring them and the related food memories of famous Singaporeans. The Singapore Botanic Gardens similarly houses the Ginger Garden displaying several hundred species of ginger and information, and an Eco(-nomic/logical) Garden featuring many food plants and their stories. In Chinatown, panels mounted outside prominent heritage brands (often still quite small shops) add content to the shopping experience. A number of museums profile Singapore’s food culture in more depth. The National Museum of Singapore has a permanent Living History gallery that focuses on Singapore’s street food from the 1950s to 1970s. This display includes food-related artefacts, interactive aromatic displays of spices, films of dishes being made and eaten, and oral histories about food vendors, all supported by text panels and booklets. Here food is used to convey messages about the value of Singapore’s ethnic diversity and cross-cultural exchanges. Versions of some of these dishes can then be sampled in the museum café (Time Out Singapore). The Peranakan Museum—which profiles the unique hybrid culture of the descendants of the Chinese and South Indian traders who married local Malay women—shares this focus, with reconstructed kitchens and dining rooms, exhibits of cooking and eating utensils and displays on food’s ceremonial role in weddings and funerals all supported with significant textual information. The Chinatown Heritage Centre not only recreates food preparation areas as a vivid indicator of poor Chinese immigrants’ living conditions, but also houses The National Restaurant of Singapore, which translates this research directly into meals that recreate the heritage kopi tiam (traditional coffee shop) cuisine of Singapore in the 1930s, purposefully bringing taste into the service of education, as its descriptive menu states, “educationally delighting the palate” (Chinatown Heritage Centre). These museums recognise that shopping is a core tourist activity in Singapore (Chang; Yeung et al.). Their gift- and bookshops cater to the culinary tourist by featuring quality culinary products for sale (including, for instance, teapots and cups, teas, spices and traditional sweets, and other foods) many of which are accompanied by informative tags or brochures. At the centre of these curated, purchasable collections are a range written materials: culinary magazines, cookbooks, food histories and memoirs, as well as postcards and stationery printed with recipes. Food Magazines Locally produced food magazines cater to a range of readerships and serve to extend the culinary experience both in, and outside, Singapore. These include high-end gourmet, luxury lifestyle publications like venerable monthly Wine & Dine: The Art of Good Living, which, in in print for almost thirty years, targets an affluent readership (Wine & Dine). The magazine runs features on local dining, gourmet products and trends, as well as international epicurean locations and products. Beautifully illustrated recipes also feature, as the magazine declares, “we’ve recognised that sharing more recipes should be in the DNA of Wine & Dine’s editorial” (Wine & Dine). Appetite magazine, launched in 2006, targets the “new and emerging generation of gourmets—foodies with a discerning and cosmopolitan outlook, broad horizons and a insatiable appetite” (Edipresse Asia) and is reminiscent in much of its styling of New Zealand’s award-winning Cuisine magazine. Its focus is to present a fresh approach to both cooking at home and dining out, as readers are invited to “Whip up the perfect soufflé or feast with us at the finest restaurants in Singapore and around the region” (Edipresse Asia). Chefs from leading local restaurants are interviewed, and the voices of “fellow foodies and industry watchers” offer an “insider track” on food-related news: “what’s good and what’s new” (Edipresse Asia). In between these publications sits Epicure: Life’s Refinements, which features local dishes, chefs, and restaurants as well as an overseas travel section and a food memories column by a featured author. Locally available ingredients are also highlighted, such as abalone (Cheng) and an interesting range of mushrooms (Epicure). While there is a focus on an epicurean experience, this is presented slightly more casually than in Wine & Dine. Food & Travel focuses more on home cookery, but each issue also includes reviews of Singapore restaurants. The bimonthly bilingual (Chinese and English) Gourmet Living features recipes alongside a notable focus on food culture—with food history columns, restaurant reviews and profiles of celebrated chefs. An extensive range of imported international food magazines are also available, with those from nearby Malaysia and Indonesia regularly including articles on Singapore. Cookbooks These magazines all include reviews of cookery books including Singaporean examples – and some feature other food writing such as food histories, memoirs and blogs. These reviews draw attention to how many Singaporean cookbooks include a focus on food history alongside recipes. Cookery teacher Yee Soo Leong’s 1976 Singaporean Cooking was an early example of cookbook as heritage preservation. This 1976 book takes an unusual view of ‘Singaporean’ flavours. Beginning with sweet foods—Nonya/Singaporean and western cakes, biscuits, pies, pastries, bread, desserts and icings—it also focuses on both Singaporean and Western dishes. This text is also unusual as there are only 6 lines of direct authorial address in the author’s acknowledgements section. Expatriate food writer Wendy Hutton’s Singapore Food, first published in 1979, reprinted many times after and revised in 2007, has long been recognised as one of the most authoritative titles on Singapore’s food heritage. Providing an socio-historical map of Singapore’s culinary traditions, some one third of the first edition was devoted to information about Singaporean multi-cultural food history, including detailed profiles of a number of home cooks alongside its recipes. Published in 1980, Kenneth Mitchell’s A Taste of Singapore is clearly aimed at a foreign readership, noting the variety of foods available due to the racial origins of its inhabitants. The more modest, but equally educational in intent, Hawkers Flavour: A Guide to Hawkers Gourmet in Malaysia and Singapore (in its fourth printing in 1998) contains a detailed introductory essay outlining local food culture, favourite foods and drinks and times these might be served, festivals and festive foods, Indian, Indian Muslim, Chinese, Nyonya (Chinese-Malay), Malay and Halal foods and customs, followed with a selection of recipes from each. More contemporary examples of such information-rich cookbooks, such as those published in the frequently reprinted Periplus Mini Cookbook series, are sold at tourist attractions. Each of these modestly priced, 64-page, mouthwateringly illustrated booklets offer framing information, such as about a specific food culture as in the Nonya kitchen in Nonya Favourites (Boi), and explanatory glossaries of ingredients, as in Homestyle Malay Cooking (Jelani). Most recipes include a boxed paragraph detailing cookery or ingredient information that adds cultural nuance, as well as trying to describe tastes that the (obviously foreign) intended reader may not have encountered. Malaysian-born Violet Oon, who has been called the Julia Child of Singapore (Bergman), writes for both local and visiting readers. The FOOD Paper, published monthly for a decade from January 1987 was, she has stated, then “Singapore’s only monthly publication dedicated to the CSF—Certified Singapore Foodie” (Oon, Violet Oon Cooks 7). Under its auspices, Oon promoted her version of Singaporean cuisine to both locals and visitors, as well as running cookery classes and culinary events, hosting her own television cooking series on the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation, and touring internationally for the STB as a ‘Singapore Food Ambassador’ (Ahmad; Kraal). Taking this representation of flavor further, Oon has also produced a branded range of curry powders, spices, and biscuits, and set up a number of food outlets. Her first cookbook, World Peranakan Cookbook, was published in 1978. Her Singapore: 101 Meals of 1986 was commissioned by the STB, then known as the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board. Violet Oon Cooks, a compilation of recipes from The FOOD Paper, published in 1992, attracted a range of major international as well as Singaporean food sponsors, and her Timeless Recipes, published in 1997, similarly aimed to show how manufactured products could be incorporated into classic Singaporean dishes cooked at home. In 1998, Oon produced A Singapore Family Cookbook featuring 100 dishes. Many were from Nonya cuisine and her following books continued to focus on preserving heritage Singaporean recipes, as do a number of other nationally-cuisine focused collections such as Joyceline Tully and Christopher Tan’s Heritage Feasts: A Collection of Singapore Family Recipes. Sylvia Tan’s Singapore Heritage Food: Yesterday’s Recipes for Today’s Cooks, published in 2004, provides “a tentative account of Singapore’s food history” (5). It does this by mapping the various taste profiles of six thematically-arranged chronologically-overlapping sections, from the heritage of British colonialism, to the uptake of American and Russia foods in the Snackbar era of the 1960s and the use of convenience flavoring ingredients such as curry pastes, sauces, dried and frozen supermarket products from the 1970s. Other Volumes Other food-themed volumes focus on specific historical periods. Cecilia Leong-Salobir’s Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire discusses the “unique hybrid” (1) cuisine of British expatriates in Singapore from 1858 to 1963. In 2009, the National Museum of Singapore produced the moving Wong Hong Suen’s Wartime Kitchen: Food and Eating in Singapore 1942–1950. This details the resilience and adaptability of both diners and cooks during the Japanese Occupation and in post-war Singapore, when shortages stimulated creativity. There is a centenary history of the Cold Storage company which shipped frozen foods all over south east Asia (Boon) and location-based studies such as Annette Tan’s Savour Chinatown: Stories Memories & Recipes. Tan interviewed hawkers, chefs and restaurant owners, working from this information to write both the book’s recipes and reflect on Chinatown’s culinary history. Food culture also features in (although it is not the main focus) more general book-length studies such as educational texts such as Chew Yen f*ck’s The Magic of Singapore and Melanie Guile’s Culture in Singapore (2000). Works that navigate both spaces (of Singaporean culture more generally and its foodways) such Lily Kong’s Singapore Hawker Centres: People, Places, Food, provide an consistent narrative of food in Singapore, stressing its multicultural flavours that can be enjoyed from eateries ranging from hawker stalls to high-end restaurants that, interestingly, that agrees with that promulgated in the food writing discussed above. Food Memoirs and Blogs Many of these narratives include personal material, drawing on the author’s own food experiences and taste memories. This approach is fully developed in the food memoir, a growing sub-genre of Singapore food writing. While memoirs by expatriate Singaporeans such as Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan’s A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family, produced by major publisher Hyperion in New York, has attracted considerable international attention, it presents a story of Singapore cuisine that agrees with such locally produced texts as television chef and food writer Terry Tan’s Stir-fried and Not Shaken: A Nostalgic Trip Down Singapore’s Memory Lane and the food memoir of the Singaporean chef credited with introducing fine Malay dining to Singapore, Aziza Ali’s Sambal Days, Kampong Cuisine, published in Singapore in 2013 with the support of the National Heritage Board. All these memoirs are currently available in Singapore in both bookshops and a number of museums and other attractions. While underscoring the historical and cultural value of these foods, all describe the unique flavours of Singaporean cuisine and its deliciousness. A number of prominent Singapore food bloggers are featured in general guidebooks and promoted by the STB as useful resources to dining out in Singapore. One of the most prominent of these is Leslie Tay, a medical doctor and “passionate foodie” (Knipp) whose awardwinning ieatŸishootŸipost is currently attracting some 90,000 unique visitors every month and has had over 20,000 million hits since its launch in 2006. An online diary of Tay’s visits to hundreds of Singaporean hawker stalls, it includes descriptions and photographs of meals consumed, creating accumulative oral culinary histories of these dishes and those who prepared them. These narratives have been reorganised and reshaped in Tay’s first book The End of Char Kway Teow and Other Hawker Mysteries, where each chapter tells the story of one particular dish, including recommended hawker stalls where it can be enjoyed. Ladyironchef.com is a popular food and travel site that began as a blog in 2007. An edited collection of reviews of eateries and travel information, many by the editor himself, the site features lists of, for example, the best cafes (LadyIronChef “Best Cafes”), eateries at the airport (LadyIronChef “Guide to Dining”), and hawker stalls (Lim). While attesting to the cultural value of these foods, many articles also discuss flavour, as in Lim’s musings on: ‘how good can chicken on rice taste? … The glistening grains of rice perfumed by fresh chicken stock and a whiff of ginger is so good you can even eat it on its own’. Conclusion Recent Singapore food publishing reflects this focus on taste. Tay’s publisher, Epigram, growing Singaporean food list includes the recently released Heritage Cookbooks Series. This highlights specialist Singaporean recipes and cookery techniques, with the stated aim of preserving tastes and foodways that continue to influence Singaporean food culture today. Volumes published to date on Peranakan, South Indian, Cantonese, Eurasian, and Teochew (from the Chaoshan region in the east of China’s Guangdong province) cuisines offer both cultural and practical guides to the quintessential dishes and flavours of each cuisine, featuring simple family dishes alongside more elaborate special occasion meals. In common with the food writing discussed above, the books in this series, although dealing with very different styles of cookery, contribute to an overall impression of the taste of Singapore food that is highly consistent and extremely persuasive. This food writing narrates that Singapore has a delicious as well as distinctive and interesting food culture that plays a significant role in Singaporean life both currently and historically. It also posits that this food culture is, at the same time, easily accessible and also worthy of detailed consideration and discussion. 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“As the old technologies become automatic and invisible, we find ourselves more concerned with fighting or embracing what’s new”—Dennis Baron, From Pencils to Pixels: The Stage of Literacy Technologies What constitutes a computer, as we have come to expect it? Are they necessarily monolithic “beige boxes”, connected to computer monitors, sitting on computer desks, located in computer rooms or computer labs? In order for a device to be considered a true computer, does it need to have a keyboard and mouse? If this were 1991 or earlier, our collective perception of what computers are and are not would largely be framed by this “beige box” model: computers are stationary, slab-like, and heavy, and their natural habitats must be in rooms specifically designated for that purpose. In 1992, when Apple introduced the first PowerBook, our perception began to change. Certainly there had been other portable computers prior to that, such as the Osborne 1, but these were more luggable than portable, weighing just slightly less than a typical sewing machine. The PowerBook and subsequent waves of laptops, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and so-called smart phones from numerous other companies have steadily forced us to rethink and redefine what a computer is and is not, how we interact with them, and the manner in which these tools might be used in the classroom. However, this reconceptualization of computers is far from over, and is in fact steadily evolving as new devices are introduced, adopted, and subsequently adapted for uses beyond of their original purpose. Pat Crowe’s Book Reader project, for example, has morphed Nintendo’s GameBoy and GameBoy Advance into a viable electronic book platform, complete with images, sound, and multi-language support. (Crowe, 2003) His goal was to take this existing technology previously framed only within the context of proprietary adolescent entertainment, and repurpose it for open, flexible uses typically associated with learning and literacy. Similar efforts are underway to repurpose Microsoft’s Xbox, perhaps the ultimate symbol of “closed” technology given Microsoft’s propensity for proprietary code, in order to make it a viable platform for Open Source Software (OSS). However, these efforts are not forgone conclusions, and are in fact typical of the ongoing battle over who controls the technology we own in our homes, and how open source solutions are often at odds with a largely proprietary world. In late 2001, Microsoft launched the Xbox with a multimillion dollar publicity drive featuring events, commercials, live models, and statements claiming this new console gaming platform would “change video games the way MTV changed music”. (Chan, 2001) The Xbox launched with the following technical specifications: 733mhz Pentium III 64mb RAM, 8 or 10gb internal hard disk drive CD/DVD ROM drive (speed unknown) Nvidia graphics processor, with HDTV support 4 USB 1.1 ports (adapter required), AC3 audio 10/100 ethernet port, Optional 56k modem (TechTV, 2001) While current computers dwarf these specifications in virtually all areas now, for 2001 these were roughly on par with many desktop systems. The retail price at the time was $299, but steadily dropped to nearly half that with additional price cuts anticipated. Based on these features, the preponderance of “off the shelf” parts and components used, and the relatively reasonable price, numerous programmers quickly became interested in seeing it if was possible to run Linux and additional OSS on the Xbox. In each case, the goal has been similar: exceed the original purpose of the Xbox, to determine if and how well it might be used for basic computing tasks. If these attempts prove to be successful, the Xbox could allow institutions to dramatically increase the student-to-computer ratio in select environments, or allow individuals who could not otherwise afford a computer to instead buy and Xbox, download and install Linux, and use this new device to write, create, and innovate . This drive to literally and metaphorically “open” the Xbox comes from many directions. Such efforts include Andrew Huang’s self-published “Hacking the Xbox” book in which, under the auspices of reverse engineering, Huang analyzes the architecture of the Xbox, detailing step-by-step instructions for flashing the ROM, upgrading the hard drive and/or RAM, and generally prepping the device for use as an information appliance. Additional initiatives include Lindows CEO Michael Robertson’s $200,000 prize to encourage Linux development on the Xbox, and the Xbox Linux Project at SourceForge. What is Linux? Linux is an alternative operating system initially developed in 1991 by Linus Benedict Torvalds. Linux was based off a derivative of the MINIX operating system, which in turn was a derivative of UNIX. (Hasan 2003) Linux is currently available for Intel-based systems that would normally run versions of Windows, PowerPC-based systems that would normally run Apple’s Mac OS, and a host of other handheld, cell phone, or so-called “embedded” systems. Linux distributions are based almost exclusively on open source software, graphic user interfaces, and middleware components. While there are commercial Linux distributions available, these mainly just package the freely available operating system with bundled technical support, manuals, some exclusive or proprietary commercial applications, and related services. Anyone can still download and install numerous Linux distributions at no cost, provided they do not need technical support beyond the community / enthusiast level. Typical Linux distributions come with open source web browsers, word processors and related productivity applications (such as those found in OpenOffice.org), and related tools for accessing email, organizing schedules and contacts, etc. Certain Linux distributions are more or less designed for network administrators, system engineers, and similar “power users” somewhat distanced from that of our students. However, several distributions including Lycoris, Mandrake, LindowsOS, and other are specifically tailored as regular, desktop operating systems, with regular, everyday computer users in mind. As Linux has no draconian “product activation key” method of authentication, or digital rights management-laden features associated with installation and implementation on typical desktop and laptop systems, Linux is becoming an ideal choice both individually and institutionally. It still faces an uphill battle in terms of achieving widespread acceptance as a desktop operating system. As Finnie points out in Desktop Linux Edges Into The Mainstream: “to attract users, you need ease of installation, ease of device configuration, and intuitive, full-featured desktop user controls. It’s all coming, but slowly. With each new version, desktop Linux comes closer to entering the mainstream. It’s anyone’s guess as to when critical mass will be reached, but you can feel the inevitability: There’s pent-up demand for something different.” (Finnie 2003) Linux is already spreading rapidly in numerous capacities, in numerous countries. Linux has “taken hold wherever computer users desire freedom, and wherever there is demand for inexpensive software.” Reports from technology research company IDG indicate that roughly a third of computers in Central and South America run Linux. Several countries, including Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, have all but mandated that state-owned institutions adopt open source software whenever possible to “give their people the tools and education to compete with the rest of the world.” (Hills 2001) The Goal Less than a year after Microsoft introduced the The Xbox, the Xbox Linux project formed. The Xbox Linux Project has a goal of developing and distributing Linux for the Xbox gaming console, “so that it can be used for many tasks that Microsoft don’t want you to be able to do. ...as a desktop computer, for email and browsing the web from your TV, as a (web) server” (Xbox Linux Project 2002). Since the Linux operating system is open source, meaning it can freely be tinkered with and distributed, those who opt to download and install Linux on their Xbox can do so with relatively little overhead in terms of cost or time. Additionally, Linux itself looks very “windows-like”, making for fairly low learning curve. To help increase overall awareness of this project and assist in diffusing it, the Xbox Linux Project offers step-by-step installation instructions, with the end result being a system capable of using common peripherals such as a keyboard and mouse, scanner, printer, a “webcam and a DVD burner, connected to a VGA monitor; 100% compatible with a standard Linux PC, all PC (USB) hardware and PC software that works with Linux.” (Xbox Linux Project 2002) Such a system could have tremendous potential for technology literacy. Pairing an Xbox with Linux and OpenOffice.org, for example, would provide our students essentially the same capability any of them would expect from a regular desktop computer. They could send and receive email, communicate using instant messaging IRC, or newsgroup clients, and browse Internet sites just as they normally would. In fact, the overall browsing experience for Linux users is substantially better than that for most Windows users. Internet Explorer, the default browser on all systems running Windows-base operating systems, lacks basic features standard in virtually all competing browsers. Native blocking of “pop-up” advertisem*nts is still not yet possible in Internet Explorer without the aid of a third-party utility. Tabbed browsing, which involves the ability to easily open and sort through multiple Web pages in the same window, often with a single mouse click, is also missing from Internet Explorer. The same can be said for a robust download manager, “find as you type”, and a variety of additional features. Mozilla, Netscape, Firefox, Konqueror, and essentially all other OSS browsers for Linux have these features. Of course, most of these browsers are also available for Windows, but Internet Explorer is still considered the standard browser for the platform. If the Xbox Linux Project becomes widely diffused, our students could edit and save Microsoft Word files in OpenOffice.org’s Writer program, and do the same with PowerPoint and Excel files in similar OpenOffice.org components. They could access instructor comments originally created in Microsoft Word documents, and in turn could add their own comments and send the documents back to their instructors. They could even perform many functions not yet capable in Microsoft Office, including saving files in PDF or Flash format without needing Adobe’s Acrobat product or Macromedia’s Flash Studio MX. Additionally, by way of this project, the Xbox can also serve as “a Linux server for HTTP/FTP/SMB/NFS, serving data such as MP3/MPEG4/DivX, or a router, or both; without a monitor or keyboard or mouse connected.” (Xbox Linux Project 2003) In a very real sense, our students could use these inexpensive systems previously framed only within the context of entertainment, for educational purposes typically associated with computer-mediated learning. Problems: Control and Access The existing rhetoric of technological control surrounding current and emerging technologies appears to be stifling many of these efforts before they can even be brought to the public. This rhetoric of control is largely typified by overly-restrictive digital rights management (DRM) schemes antithetical to education, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Combined,both are currently being used as technical and legal clubs against these efforts. Microsoft, for example, has taken a dim view of any efforts to adapt the Xbox to Linux. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who has repeatedly referred to Linux as a cancer and has equated OSS as being un-American, stated, “Given the way the economic model works - and that is a subsidy followed, essentially, by fees for every piece of software sold - our license framework has to do that.” (Becker 2003) Since the Xbox is based on a subsidy model, meaning that Microsoft actually sells the hardware at a loss and instead generates revenue off software sales, Ballmer launched a series of concerted legal attacks against the Xbox Linux Project and similar efforts. In 2002, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft simultaneously sued Lik Sang, Inc., a Hong Kong-based company that produces programmable cartridges and “mod chips” for the PlayStation II, Xbox, and Game Cube. Nintendo states that its company alone loses over $650 million each year due to piracy of their console gaming titles, which typically originate in China, Paraguay, and Mexico. (GameIndustry.biz) Currently, many attempts to “mod” the Xbox required the use of such chips. As Lik Sang is one of the only suppliers, initial efforts to adapt the Xbox to Linux slowed considerably. Despite that fact that such chips can still be ordered and shipped here by less conventional means, it does not change that fact that the chips themselves would be illegal in the U.S. due to the anticircumvention clause in the DMCA itself, which is designed specifically to protect any DRM-wrapped content, regardless of context. The Xbox Linux Project then attempted to get Microsoft to officially sanction their efforts. They were not only rebuffed, but Microsoft then opted to hire programmers specifically to create technological countermeasures for the Xbox, to defeat additional attempts at installing OSS on it. Undeterred, the Xbox Linux Project eventually arrived at a method of installing and booting Linux without the use of mod chips, and have taken a more defiant tone now with Microsoft regarding their circumvention efforts. (Lettice 2002) They state that “Microsoft does not want you to use the Xbox as a Linux computer, therefore it has some anti-Linux-protection built in, but it can be circumvented easily, so that an Xbox can be used as what it is: an IBM PC.” (Xbox Linux Project 2003) Problems: Learning Curves and Usability In spite of the difficulties imposed by the combined technological and legal attacks on this project, it has succeeded at infiltrating this closed system with OSS. It has done so beyond the mere prototype level, too, as evidenced by the Xbox Linux Project now having both complete, step-by-step instructions available for users to modify their own Xbox systems, and an alternate plan catering to those who have the interest in modifying their systems, but not the time or technical inclinations. Specifically, this option involves users mailing their Xbox systems to community volunteers within the Xbox Linux Project, and basically having these volunteers perform the necessary software preparation or actually do the full Linux installation for them, free of charge (presumably not including shipping). This particular aspect of the project, dubbed “Users Help Users”, appears to be fairly new. Yet, it already lists over sixty volunteers capable and willing to perform this service, since “Many users don’t have the possibility, expertise or hardware” to perform these modifications. Amazingly enough, in some cases these volunteers are barely out of junior high school. One such volunteer stipulates that those seeking his assistance keep in mind that he is “just 14” and that when performing these modifications he “...will not always be finished by the next day”. (Steil 2003) In addition to this interesting if somewhat unusual level of community-driven support, there are currently several Linux-based options available for the Xbox. The two that are perhaps the most developed are GentooX, which is based of the popular Gentoo Linux distribution, and Ed’s Debian, based off the Debian GNU / Linux distribution. Both Gentoo and Debian are “seasoned” distributions that have been available for some time now, though Daniel Robbins, Chief Architect of Gentoo, refers to the product as actually being a “metadistribution” of Linux, due to its high degree of adaptability and configurability. (Gentoo 2004) Specifically, the Robbins asserts that Gentoo is capable of being “customized for just about any application or need. ...an ideal secure server, development workstation, professional desktop, gaming system, embedded solution or something else—whatever you need it to be.” (Robbins 2004) He further states that the whole point of Gentoo is to provide a better, more usable Linux experience than that found in many other distributions. Robbins states that: “The goal of Gentoo is to design tools and systems that allow a user to do their work pleasantly and efficiently as possible, as they see fit. Our tools should be a joy to use, and should help the user to appreciate the richness of the Linux and free software community, and the flexibility of free software. ...Put another way, the Gentoo philosophy is to create better tools. When a tool is doing its job perfectly, you might not even be very aware of its presence, because it does not interfere and make its presence known, nor does it force you to interact with it when you don’t want it to. The tool serves the user rather than the user serving the tool.” (Robbins 2004) There is also a so-called “live CD” Linux distribution suitable for the Xbox, called dyne:bolic, and an in-progress release of Slackware Linux, as well. According to the Xbox Linux Project, the only difference between the standard releases of these distributions and their Xbox counterparts is that “...the install process – and naturally the bootloader, the kernel and the kernel modules – are all customized for the Xbox.” (Xbox Linux Project, 2003) Of course, even if Gentoo is as user-friendly as Robbins purports, even if the Linux kernel itself has become significantly more robust and efficient, and even if Microsoft again drops the retail price of the Xbox, is this really a feasible solution in the classroom? Does the Xbox Linux Project have an army of 14 year olds willing to modify dozens, perhaps hundreds of these systems for use in secondary schools and higher education? Of course not. If such an institutional rollout were to be undertaken, it would require significant support from not only faculty, but Department Chairs, Deans, IT staff, and quite possible Chief Information Officers. Disk images would need to be customized for each institution to reflect their respective needs, ranging from setting specific home pages on web browsers, to bookmarks, to custom back-up and / or disk re-imaging scripts, to network authentication. This would be no small task. Yet, the steps mentioned above are essentially no different than what would be required of any IT staff when creating a new disk image for a computer lab, be it one for a Windows-based system or a Mac OS X-based one. The primary difference would be Linux itself—nothing more, nothing less. The institutional difficulties in undertaking such an effort would likely be encountered prior to even purchasing a single Xbox, in that they would involve the same difficulties associated with any new hardware or software initiative: staffing, budget, and support. If the institutional in question is either unwilling or unable to address these three factors, it would not matter if the Xbox itself was as free as Linux. An Open Future, or a Closed one? It is unclear how far the Xbox Linux Project will be allowed to go in their efforts to invade an essentially a proprietary system with OSS. Unlike Sony, which has made deliberate steps to commercialize similar efforts for their PlayStation 2 console, Microsoft appears resolute in fighting OSS on the Xbox by any means necessary. They will continue to crack down on any companies selling so-called mod chips, and will continue to employ technological protections to keep the Xbox “closed”. Despite clear evidence to the contrary, in all likelihood Microsoft continue to equate any OSS efforts directed at the Xbox with piracy-related motivations. Additionally, Microsoft’s successor to the Xbox would likely include additional anticircumvention technologies incorporated into it that could set the Xbox Linux Project back by months, years, or could stop it cold. Of course, it is difficult to say with any degree of certainty how this “Xbox 2” (perhaps a more appropriate name might be “Nextbox”) will impact this project. Regardless of how this device evolves, there can be little doubt of the value of Linux, OpenOffice.org, and other OSS to teaching and learning with technology. This value exists not only in terms of price, but in increased freedom from policies and technologies of control. New Linux distributions from Gentoo, Mandrake, Lycoris, Lindows, and other companies are just now starting to focus their efforts on Linux as user-friendly, easy to use desktop operating systems, rather than just server or “techno-geek” environments suitable for advanced programmers and computer operators. While metaphorically opening the Xbox may not be for everyone, and may not be a suitable computing solution for all, I believe we as educators must promote and encourage such efforts whenever possible. I suggest this because I believe we need to exercise our professional influence and ultimately shape the future of technology literacy, either individually as faculty and collectively as departments, colleges, or institutions. Moran and Fitzsimmons-Hunter argue this very point in Writing Teachers, Schools, Access, and Change. One of their fundamental provisions they use to define “access” asserts that there must be a willingness for teachers and students to “fight for the technologies that they need to pursue their goals for their own teaching and learning.” (Taylor / Ward 160) Regardless of whether or not this debate is grounded in the “beige boxes” of the past, or the Xboxes of the present, much is at stake. Private corporations should not be in a position to control the manner in which we use legally-purchased technologies, regardless of whether or not these technologies are then repurposed for literacy uses. I believe the exigency associated with this control, and the ongoing evolution of what is and is not a computer, dictates that we assert ourselves more actively into this discussion. We must take steps to provide our students with the best possible computer-mediated learning experience, however seemingly unorthodox the technological means might be, so that they may think critically, communicate effectively, and participate actively in society and in their future careers. About the Author Paul Cesarini is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Communication & Technology Education, Bowling Green State University, Ohio Email: pcesari@bgnet.bgsu.edu Works Cited http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/docs/debian.php>.Baron, Denis. “From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies.” Passions Pedagogies and 21st Century Technologies. Hawisher, Gail E., and Cynthia L. Selfe, Eds. Utah: Utah State University Press, 1999. 15 – 33. Becker, David. “Ballmer: Mod Chips Threaten Xbox”. News.com. 21 Oct 2002. http://news.com.com/2100-1040-962797.php>. http://news.com.com/2100-1040-978957.html?tag=nl>. http://archive.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/08/13/020813hnchina.xml>. http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/1062/>. http://www.bookreader.co.uk>.Finni, Scott. “Desktop Linux Edges Into The Mainstream”. TechWeb. 8 Apr 2003. http://www.techweb.com/tech/software/20030408_software. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/29439.html http://gentoox.shallax.com/. http://ragib.hypermart.net/linux/. http://www.itworld.com/Comp/2362/LWD010424latinlinux/pfindex.html. http://www.xbox-linux.sourceforge.net. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/27487.html. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/26078.html. http://www.us.playstation.com/peripherals.aspx?id=SCPH-97047. http://www.techtv.com/extendedplay/reviews/story/0,24330,3356862,00.html. http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,61984,00.html. http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/about.xml http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/philosophy.xml http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2869075,00.html. http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/docs/usershelpusers.html http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/fun.games/12/16/gamers.liksang/. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Cesarini, Paul. "“Opening” the Xbox" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/08_Cesarini.php>. APA Style Cesarini, P. (2004, Jul1). “Opening” the Xbox. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/08_Cesarini.php>

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Abstract:

A new device, sure to inspire technological bedazzlement, has been installed in Hong Kong shopping malls. Called simply The Love Machine, it functions like a photo booth, dispensing on-the-spot portraits1. But rather than one subject, it requires a couple, in fact the couple, in order to do its work of digital reproduction. For the output of this imaging machine is none other than a picture of the combined features of the two sitters, 'morphed' together by computer software to produce a technological child. Its Japanese manufacturers, while obviously cashing in on the novelty value, nevertheless list the advantage it allows for future matrimonial selection based around the production of a suitable aesthetic. Needless to say, the good citizens of Hong Kong have not allowed any rigid criteria for genetic engineering to get in the way of the progeny such a machine allows, creating such monstrous couplings as the baby 'cat-human', achieved by a sitter coupling with their pet. Rather than being the object of love here, technology acts as the conduit of emotion, or stronger still, it is the love relation itself, bringing the two together as one. What I want to touch upon is the sense in which a desire for oneness inhabits our relations to and through the technological. There is already an abundance of literature around the erotics of cyberspace, documenting and detailing encounters of virtual sex fantasies and romance. As well, there are more theoretical attempts to come to terms with what Michael Heim describes as the "erotic ontology of cyberspace" (59). Heim depicts these encounters not as a ravaging desire gone wild, sprouting up in odd places or producing monstrous offspring, but in homely and familial terms. Finally with the computer as incarnation of the machine, our love for technology can cease its restless and previously unfulfilled wanderings and find a comfortable place. What is worth pausing over here is the sense in which the sexual is subjugated to a conjugal and familial metaphor, at the same time as desire is modelled according to a metaphysics of fullness and lack. I would argue that in advancing this kind of love relation with the computer and the digital, the possibility of a relation is actually short-circuited. For a relation assumes the existence of at least two terms, and in these representations, technology does not figure as a second term. It is either marked as the other, where desire finds a soul mate to fill its lack. Or the technological becomes invisible, subsumed in a spiritual instrumentalism that sees it merely forging the union of cybernetic souls. I would suggest that an erotic relation with the technological is occluded in most accounts of the sexual in cyberspace and in many engagements with digital technologies. Instead we are left with a non-relational meeting of the same with itself. We might describe the dominant utilisation of the technological as onanistic. Relations of difference could be a productive effect of the technological, but are instead culturally caught up within an operational logic which sees the relational erotic possibilities of the machinic eliminated as sameness touches itself. I want to point towards some different models for theorising technology by briefly drawing upon the texts of Félix Guattari and Avital Ronell. These may lead to the production of a desiring relation with technology by coupling the machine with alterity. One of several climatic scenes from the 'virtual sex' movie Strange Days, directed by Katherine Bigelow, graphically illustrates the onanistic encounter. Set on the eve of the new millennium, the temporality of the film sets up a feeling of dis-ease: it is both futuristic and yet only too close. The narrative centres on the blackmarket in ultimate VR: purchasing software which allows the user, donning special headgear, to re-experience recorded memories in other peoples' lives. An evil abuser of this technology, known until the end of the film as an anonymous male junkie, is addicted to increasingly frequent hits of another's apperception. In his quest to score above his tolerance level, the cyber-junkie rapes a prostitute, but instead of wearing the headgear used to record his own perception of the rape, he forces the woman to put it on making her annex her subjectivity to his experience of desire. He records her reaction to becoming an appendage to him. The effect of watching this scene is deeply unsettling: the camera-work sets up a point-of-view shot from the position of the male subject but plays it to the audience as one might see through a video view-finder, thus sedimenting an assumed cultural association between masculinity and the male gaze. What we see is the violence produced by the annihilation of another's desire; what we hear is the soundtrack of the woman mimicking the male's enjoyment of his own desire. Put simply, what we watch is a feedback loop of a particular formation of technological desire, one in which the desire of or for the other is audio-visually impeded. Ultimately the experience can be stored and replayed as a p*rn movie solely for future masturbation. The scene in Strange Days quite adequately summarises the obstructed and obstructive desire to go no further than masturbation caught in the defiles of feedback. Feedback is also the term used in both video and sound production when a recording device is aimed at or switched onto a device playing back the same recording. The result, in the case of video, is to create an infinite abyss of the same image playing back into itself on the monitor; in the case of sound a high-pitched signal is created which impedes further transmission. By naming the desire to fuse with the technological a feedback loop, I am suggesting that manifestations of this desire are neither productive nor connective, in that any relation to exterior or heterogeneous elements are shut out. They stamp out the flow of other desires and replay the same looping desire based around notions of fullness and lack, completion and incompletion, and of course masculinity and femininity. Mark Dery makes this association between the desire for the technological, the elision of matter and phallic modes of masculinity: This, to the masculinist technophile, is the weirdly alchemical end point of cyberculture: the distillation of pure mind from base matter. Sex, in such a context, would be purged of feminine contact -- removed, in fact, from all notions of physicality -- and reduced to mental masturbation. (121) Dery's point is a corollary to mine; in discarding the need for an embodied sexual experience, the literature and representations of cyberspace, both theoretical and fictional, endorse only a touching of the sublimated self, no other bodies or even the bodily is brought into contact. There is no shortage of evidence for the disregard embodiment holds among the doyens of cyber-architecture. Hans Moravec and Marvin Minsky, writing about Artificial Intelligence, promote a future in which pure consciousness, freed from its entanglement with the flesh, merges with the machine (Mind Children; The Society of Mind). Here the reverence shown towards digital technology enters the sublime point of a coalition where the mind is supported by some sophisticated hardware, ultimately capable of adapting and reproducing itself. There are now enough feminist critics of this kind of cyberspeak to have noticed in this fantasy of machinic fusion a replay of the old Cartesian mind/body dualism. My point, however, is that this desire is not simply put in place by a failure to rethink the body in the realm of the digital. It is augmented by the fact that this disregard for theorising an embodied experience feeds into an inability to encounter any other within the realm of the technological. We should note that this is perpetuated not just by those seeking future solace in the digital, but also by its most ardent cultural critics. Baudrillard, as one who seemingly fits this latter category, eager to disperse the notion that writers such as Moravec and Minsky propound regarding AI, is driven to making rather overarching ontological remarks about machines in general. In attempting to forestall the notion that the machine could ever become the complement to the human, Baudrillard cancels the relation of the machine to desire by cutting off its ability to produce anything in excess of itself. The machine, on his account, can be reduced to the production of itself alone; there is nothing supplementary, exterior to or differential in the machinic circuit (53). For Baudrillard, the pleasures of the interface do not even extend to the solitary vice of masturbation. Celibate machines are paralleled by celibate digital subjects each alone with themselves, forming a non-relational system. While Baudrillard offers a fair account of the solitary lack of relation produced in and by digital technologies, he nevertheless participates in reinforcing the transformation of what he calls "the process of relating into a process of communication between One and the Same" (58). He catches himself within the circulation of the very desire he finds problematic. But whether onanistic or celibate, the erotics of our present or possible relations to technology do not become any more enticing in many actual engagements with emerging technologies. Popular modes of interfacing our desires with the digital favor a particular assemblage of body and machine where a kind of furtive one-handed masturbation may be the only option left to us. I will call this the operational assemblage, borrowing from Baudrillard and his description of Virtual Man, operating and communicating across computer cables and networks while being simultaneously immobilised in front of the glare of the computer screen. An operational assemblage, whilst being efficacious, inhibits movement and ties the body to the machine. Far from the body being discarded by information technologies, the operational assemblage sees certain parts of the body privileged and territorialised. The most obvious instance of this is VR, which, in its most technologically advanced state, still only selects the eyes and the hand as its points of bodily interface. In so-called fully immersive VR experience, it is the hand, wearing a data glove, which propels the subject into movement in the virtual world, but it is a hand propelled by the subject's field of vision, computer monitors mounted in the enveloping headset. Thus the hand operates by being subjected to the gaze2. In VR, then, the real body is not somehow left behind as the subject enters a new state of electronic consciousness; rather there is a re-organisation and reterritorialisation of the hand under the operative guidance of the eye and scopic desire. This is attested to by the experience one has of the postural body schema during immersion in VR. The 'non-operational' body remaining in physical space often feels awkward and clumsy as if it is too large or cumbersome to drag around and interact in the virtual world, as if it were made virtually non-functional. The operational assemblage of a distanced eye territorialising the hand to create a loop of identity through the machine produces a desiring body which is blocked in its relational capacities. It can only touch itself as self; it cannot find itself an other or as other. Rather than encouraging the hand to break connections with the circuit of the gaze, to develop speeds, capabilities and potentials of its own, these encounters are perpetually returned to the screen and the domain of the eye. They feed back into a loop where relations to other desires, other kinds of bodies, other machines are circumvented. Looping back and returning to the aesthetic reduction performed by the Love Machine, a more lo-tech version of the two technologically contracted to one might point to the possibility of alterity that current digital machines seem keen to circumvent. At San Fransisco's Exploratorium museum one of the public points of interface with the Human Genome Project can be found3. The Exploratorium has a display set up which introduces the public to the bioinformation technology involved as well as soliciting responses to bio-ethical issues surrounding the question of genetic engineering. In the midst of this display a simple piece of glass hangs as a divider between two sides of a table. By sitting on one side of the table with a light shining from behind, one could see both a self-reflection and through the glass to whomever was sitting on the other side. The text accompanying the display encourages couples to occupy either side of the glass. What is produced for the sitter on the light side is a combination of their own reflection 'mapped' onto the features of the sitter on the other side. The text for the display encourages a judgement of the probable aesthetic outcome of combining one's genes with those of the other. I tested this display with my partner, crossing both sides of the mirror/glass. Our reactions were similar; a sensation approaching horror arose as we each faced our distorted, mirrored features as possible future progeny, a sensation akin to encountering the uncanny4. While suggesting the familiar, it also indicates what is concealed, becoming a thing not known and thus terrifying. For what was decidedly spooky in viewing a morphing of my image onto that of the other's, in the context of the surrounding bioinformatic technologies, was the sense in which a familiarity with the homely features of the self was dislocated by a haunting, marking the claim of a double utterly different. Recalling the assertion made by Heim that in the computer we find an intellectual and emotional resting point, we could question whether the familiarity of a resting place provides a satisfactory erotic encounter with the technological. We could ask whether the dream of the homely, of finding in the computer a kinship which sanctions the love machine relation, operates at the expense of dispelling that other, unfamiliar double through a controlling device which adjusts differences until they reach a point of homeostasis. What of a reading of the technological which might instaurate rather than diffuse the question of the unfamiliar double? I will gesture towards both Guattari's text Chaosmosis and Ronell's The Telephone Book, for the importance both give to the double in producing a different relation with the technological. For Guattari, the machine's ghost is exorcised by the predominant view that sees particular machines, such as the computer, as a subset of technology, a view given credence at the level of hype in the marketing of AI, virtual reality and so forth as part of the great technological future. It also gains credibility theoretically through the Heideggerian perspective. Instead Guattari insists that technology is dependent upon the machinic (33). The machinic is prior to and a condition of any actual technology, it is a movement rather than a ground; the movement through which heterogeneous elements such as bodies, sciences, information come to form the interrelated yet specific fields of a particular assemblage we might term technological. It is also the movement through which these components retain their singularity. Borrowing from modern biology, Guattari labels this movement "autopoietic" (39). Rather than the cybernetic model which sees the outside integrated into the structure of the machinic by an adjustment towards hom*ogeneity cutting off flow, Guattari underlines a continual machinic movement towards the outside, towards alterity, which transforms the interrelations of the technological ensemble. The machinic is doubled not by the reproduction of itself, but by the possibility of its own replacement, its own annihilation and transformation into something different: Its emergence is doubled with breakdown, catastrophe -- the menace of death. It possesses a supplement: a dimension of alterity which it develops in different forms. (37) Here, we can adjoin Guattari with Ronell's historical reading of the metaphorics of the telephone in attempts to think through technology. Always shadowed by the possibility Heidegger wishes to stake out for a beyond to or an overcoming of the technological, Ronell is both critical of the technologising of desire in the cybernetic loop and insistent upon the difference produced by technology's doubling desire. Using the telephone as a synecdoche for technology -- and this strategy is itself ambiguous: does the telephone represent part of the technological or is it a more comprehensive summary of a less comprehensive system? -- Ronell argues that it can only be thought of as irreducibly two, a pair (5). This differentiates itself from the couple which notoriously contracts into one. She argues that the two are not reducible to each other, that sender and receiver do not always connect, are not reducible to equal end points in the flow of information. For Ronell, what we find when we are not at home, on unfamiliar ground, is -- the machine. The telephone in fact maintains its relation to the machinic and to the doubling this implies, via the uncanny in Ronell's text. It relates to a not-being-at-home for the self, precisely when it becomes machine -- the answering machine. The answering machine disconnects the speaker from the listener and inserts itself not as controlling device in the loop, but as delay, the deferral of union. Loosely soldering this with Guattari's notion that the machine introduces a "dimension of alterity", Ronell reads the technological via the telephone line as that relation to the outside, to the machinic difference that makes the self always unfamiliar (84). I would suggest then that pursuing a love relation with technology or through the technological leads us to deploy an entire metaphorics of the familial, where the self is ultimately home alone and only has itself to play with. In this metaphorics, technology as double and technology's doubling desire become a conduit that returns only to itself through the circuitous mechanism of the feedback loop. Rather than opening onto heterogeneous relations to bodies or allowing bodies to develop different relational capacities, the body here is immobilised by an operational and scopic territorialisation. To be excited by an encounter with the technological something unfamiliar is preferable, some sense of an alternating current in the midst of all this homeliness, an external perturbation rubbing up against the tired hand of a short-circuiting onanism. Footnotes 1. The Love Machine is also the title of a digital still image and sound installation commenting upon the Hong Kong booth produced by myself and Michele Barker and last exhibited at the Viruses and Mutations exhibition for the Melbourne Festival, The Aikenhead Conference Centre, St. Vincent's Hospital, October, 1998. 2. For an articulation of the way in which this maps onto perspectival vision, see Simon Penny, "Virtual Reality as the Completion of the Enlightenment Project." Culture on the Brink. Eds. G. Bender and T. Druckery. Seattle: Bay Press, 1994. 3. Funded by the US Government, the project's goal is to develop maps for the 23 paired human chromosomes and to unravel the sequence of bases that make up the DNA of these chromosomes. 4. This is what Freud described in his paper "The Uncanny". Tracing the etymology of the German word for the uncanny, unheimlich, which in English translates literally as 'unhomely', Freud notes that heimlich, or 'homely', in fact contains the ambiguity of its opposite, in one instance. References Baudrillard, Jean. "Xerox and Infinity." The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena. Trans J. Benedict. London: Verso, 1993. 51-9. Dery, Mark. Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. New York: Grove Press, 1996. Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 17. Trans. and ed. J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Sydney: Power Publications, 1995. Heim, Michael. "The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace." Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1994.59-80. Minsky, Marvin. The Society of Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. Moravec, Hans. Mind Children. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1988. Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Anna Munster. "Love Machines." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.6 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/love.php>. Chicago style: Anna Munster, "Love Machines," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 6 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/love.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Anna Munster. (1999) Love machines. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(6). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/love.php> ([your date of access]).