Looking beyond ‘buildings of chrome and glass’: Hong Kong’s ‘uncanny postcoloniality’ in photographs of Tin Shui Wai

Hong Kong has a unique postcolonial identity. After being colonised by Britain for over a century and a half, it was ceremoniously handed over to China in 1997, without necessitating any bloody wars or even skirmishes. Hong Kong has continued to enjoy a privileged status within China due to the doctrines enshrined in the ‘one country two systems’ policy. She has benefited from becoming part of a nation with the fastest growing economy in the world, and the people of Hong Kong have for the most part acquiesced to the reduction in levels of political freedom. However, recent events like the Umbrella Movement spearheaded mainly by student protesters has brought to the fore the cracks in Hong Kong’s postcolonial identity and the city finds itself once again precariously poised in a moment of transition.

Theorising a connection between Hong Kong’s postcolonial predicament and the city state’s physical landscape, I analyse Hong Kong photographer Derrick Chang’s photos of Tin Shui Wai, a remote new town located on Hong Kong’s northwestern edge. Tin Shui Wai is a failed new town – it was developed to house workers who would serve the industries that were projected to develop there in the 1990s. However, these labour-intensive industries never materialised due to the meteoric rise of Guangdong’s manufacturing industry. Instead Tin Shui Wai has now come to be known as the ‘city of sadness’, notorious for its gruesome murders, high rate of domestic abuse and tragic suicides. Through an analysis of Chang’s photographs of Tin Shui Wai depicting isolation, stagnation and urban detritus, this article argues that the uncanny, spectral spaces of encounter raise questions and provide an alternative and more disquieting narrative of Hong Kong’s postcolonial identity.     

Optimum Designs for Estimation of Parameters in a Quadratic Mixture-Amount Model

The authors propose a mixture-amount model, which is quadratic both in the proportions of mixing components and the amount of mixture. They attempt to find the A- and D-optimal designs for the estimation of the model parameters within a subclass of designs. The optimality of the derived designs in the entire class of competing designs has been investigated through equivalence theorem.     

Designs Robust Against the Presence of an Aberration in a Diallel Cross Design Setup

In this article, we find designs insensitive to the presence of an outlier in a diallel cross design setup for estimating a complete set of orthonormal contrasts among the effects of the general combining abilities of a set of parental lines. The criterion of robustness, suggested by Mandal (1989 Mandal , N. K. ( 1989 ). On robust designs . Cal. Stat. Assoc. Bull. 38 : 115 – 119 . [Google Scholar]) in block design setup and used by Biswas (2012 Biswas , A. ( 2012 ). Block designs robust against the presence of an aberration in a treatment-control setup . Commun. Statist. Theor. Meth. 41 : 920 – 933 .[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) in treatment-control setup, is adapted here. Complete diallel cross designs, suggested by Gupta and Kageyama (1994 Gupta , S. , Kageyama , S. ( 1994 ). Optimal complete diallel crosses . Biometrika 81 : 420 – 424 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), and partial diallel cross designs, suggested by Gupta et al. (1995 Gupta , S. , Das , A. , Kageyama , S. ( 1995 ). Single replicate orthogonal block designs for circulant partial diallel crosses . Commun. Statist. A 24 : 2601 – 2607 .[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) and Mukerjee (1997 Mukerjee , R. ( 1997 ). Optimal partial diallel crosses . Biometrika 84 : 939 – 948 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), are found to be robust under certain conditions.     

Nonverbal Communication in Humans

Nonverbal behavior includes all communicative acts except speech. Communication means conveying information through signals. We use body language without being aware of it, perceive and interpret other people's body language. Three classes of nonverbal behavior are the verbal-vocal, nonverbal-vocal, and nonverbal-nonvocal. Several gestures illustrate the relationship between verbal and nonverbal behavior. Nonverbal phenomena are most important in the structuring and occurrence of interpersonal communication and the movement-to-movement regulation of the interaction. Nonverbal signs help regulate the system, cueing hierarchy and priority among communicators, signaling the flow of interaction, and providing meta-communication and feedback. Experiences teach us unconsciously that space communicates.     

A-optimal designs for optimum mixture in an additive quadratic mixture model

In the analysis of experiments with mixtures, quadratic models have been widely used. The optimum designs for the estimation of optimum mixing proportions in a quadratic mixture model have been studied by Pal and Mandal [Optimum designs for optimum mixtures. Statist Probab Lett. 2006;76:1369–1379] and Mandal et al. [Optimum mixture designs: a pseudo-Bayesian approach. J Ind Soc Agric Stat. 2008;62(2):174–182; Optimum mixture designs under constraints on mixing components. Statist Appl. 2008;6(1&2) (New Series): 189–205], using a pseudo-Bayesian approach. In this paper, a similar approach has been employed to obtain the A-optimal designs for the estimation of optimum proportions in an additive quadratic mixture model, proposed by Darroch and Waller [Additivity and interaction in three-component experiments with mixture. Biometrika. 1985;72:153–163], when the number of components is 3, 4 and 5. It has been shown that the vertices of the simplex are necessarily the support points of the optimum design, and the other support points include barycentres of depth at most 2.     

Measures of non orthogonality in block designs

Orthogonality is an important concept in block design. Necessary and sufficient condition for a connected block design to be orthogonal is well known. However, when a design is not orthogonal, it is not clear how much it deviates from orthogonality. In this paper, an attempt has been made to first define the measures of or indices to non orthogonality in block design and then to characterize designs possessing minimum non orthogonality indices. It is shown that a Balanced Incomplete Block Design (BIBD) and a Balanced Block Design (BBD), if exist, possess this property.     

Gaussian proposal density using moment matching in SMC methods

In this article we introduce a new Gaussian proposal distribution to be used in conjunction with the sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method for solving non-linear filtering problems. The proposal, in line with the recent trend, incorporates the current observation. The introduced proposal is characterized by the exact moments obtained from the dynamical system. This is in contrast with recent works where the moments are approximated either numerically or by linearizing the observation model. We show further that the newly introduced proposal performs better than other similar proposal functions which also incorporate both state and observations. This work was supported by a research grant from THALES Nederland BV.     

On balanced incomplete Latin square designs

Recently, balanced incomplete Latin square designs are introduced in the literature. We propose three methods of constructions of balanced incomplete Latin square designs. Particular classes of Latin squares namely Knut Vik designs, semi Knut Vik designs, and crisscross Latin squares play a key role in the construction.     

Block designs robust against the presence of positional effects

The problem considered is to find optimum designs for treatment effects in a block design (BD) setup, when positional effects are also present besides treatment and block effects, but they are ignored while formulating the model. In the class of symmetric balanced incomplete block designs, the Youden square design is shown to be optimal in the sense of minimizing the bias term in the mean squared error (MSE) of the best linear unbiased estimators of the full set of orthonormal treatment contrasts, irrespective of the value of the positional effects.