Yong‐fen Ran, Guang‐chi Xiong, Shi‐sheng Li and Liao‐yuan Ye
The purpose of this paper is to improve back propagation neural network (BPNN) modeling in order to promote the forecast calculation precision of landslide deformation.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to improve back propagation neural network (BPNN) modeling in order to promote the forecast calculation precision of landslide deformation.
Design/methodology/approach
The genetic algorithm is adopted to optimize the architectural parameter of BPNN so as to avoided errors occurrence while using the trial‐and‐error method. Furthermore, the Sigmoid function is improved and revised to expand the output range of change‐over function from unipolar (only positive) to ambipolar (may be positive or negative), then the convergence time is reduced and the neural network can express more artificial intelligence.
Findings
The modeling can effectively reduce the probability to get into the local minima while employing neural networks to forecast the landslide deformation. It significantly promotes the forecast precision.
Research limitations/implications
The improved BPNN modeling, which is very good in learning and processing information, can work out the complex non‐linear relation by learning model and using the present data or reciprocity of surroundings.
Practical implications
The revised BPNN modeling in this paper can be used to predict and calculate landslide deformation.
Originality/value
The paper demonstrates that the modeling can meet the demand of calculation precision.
Details
Keywords
In today’s Taiwan, sha-cha sauce is an indispensable ingredient for beef hot pot and stir-fried dishes. The purpose of this paper contextualizes the history of sha-cha sauce in…
Abstract
Purpose
In today’s Taiwan, sha-cha sauce is an indispensable ingredient for beef hot pot and stir-fried dishes. The purpose of this paper contextualizes the history of sha-cha sauce in Tainan, the oldest city in Taiwan, and argues that sha-cha sauce, introduced by Chaoshan immigrants, has contributed to new styles and habits of beef consumption tastes and habits in the post-1949 Tainan and beyond.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper uses documentary materials, oral interviews and diaries to explore the relationship between beef consumption and sha-cha sauce. It begins with an historical overview of Taiwan’s beef consumption during the Japanese colonial era (1895-1945). Then, it focuses on two Chaoshan business enterprises: the Bull-Head, which makes the world’s largest “canned sha-cha sauce,” and the Xiao Haozhou, a Tainan restaurant specializing in sha-cha beef hot pot. Finally, this study analyzes Xinrong Wu, a Tainan gentry whose diary entries from 1933 to 1967 documented the changing dietary habits of beef consumption among Taiwanese.
Findings
The Chaoshan migrants played an important role in introducing the sha-cha sauce to postcolonial Tainan, and this input bolstered the beef consumption among Taiwanese. The production of sha-cha provided a reliable source of income for these migrants in Tainan, and major businesses like the Bull-Head became the international brands of Taiwanese food products.
Research limitations/implications
The study, though limited to Tainan, reveals the symbiosis between popularization of sha-cha sauce and widespread beef consumption in Taiwan.
Practical implications
This study helps researchers examine the connection between Chinese migrations and food culture.
Originality/value
This paper is an original scholarly investigation of the relationship between food diet and Chaoshan migration in postcolonial Tainan.
From the sixteenth to eighteenth century, China underwent a commercial revolution similar to the one in contemporaneous Europe. The rise of market did foster the rise of a nascent…
Abstract
From the sixteenth to eighteenth century, China underwent a commercial revolution similar to the one in contemporaneous Europe. The rise of market did foster the rise of a nascent bourgeois and the concomitant rise of a liberal, populist version of Confucianism, which advocated a more decentralized and less authoritarian political system in the last few decades of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). But after the collapse of the Ming Empire and the establishment of the Qing Empire (1644–1911) by the Manchu conquerors, the new rulers designated the late-Ming liberal ideologies as heretics, and they resurrected the most conservative form of Confucianism as the political orthodoxy. Under the principle of filial piety given by this orthodoxy, the whole empire was imagined as a fictitious family with the emperor as the grand patriarch and the civil bureaucrats and subjects as children or grandchildren. Under the highly centralized administrative and communicative apparatus of the Qing state, this ideology of the fictitious patrimonial state penetrated into the lowest level of the society. The subsequent paternalist, authoritarian, and moralizing politics of the Qing state contributed to China’s nontransition to capitalism despite its advanced market economy, and helped explain the peculiar form and trajectory of China’s popular contention in the eighteenth century. I also argue that this tradition of fictitious patrimonial politics continued to shape the state-making processes in twentieth-century China and beyond.