Collectibles Clean up

正CHINA’S rapid economic development has ignited a collection craze.Chinaware,jade articles,bronzeware,paintings and calligraphy,furniture,stamps,coins–all abound in the collectibles market these days.Prices of quality items at auctions constantly amaze.     

China Has the World’s Fastest Growth in Living Standards简

正ONE of the strangest claims about China that sometimes appear in the media is that it has a slow growth of consumption and living standards.In reality China has the fastest growth of consumption of any country in the world–whether this is measured only by household consumption or includes government consumption in areas vital for quality of life,such as education and health.Furthermore,indicators show that compared to other countries,China’s quality of life is better than would be expected from its present stage of economic development.First the facts regarding these issues are established and then they will be analyzed.     

Lu Xun at Home

正LU Xun(1881-1936)is widely considered as China’s greatest modern writer.Although he was a prolific essayist and translator,it is for his intense and often disturbing short stories that he is best known.In criticizing repressive social norms,he aimed for nothing less than the eradication of the nation’s spiritual ills.In the decades since his death editions of his works,translations and critical studies have surged,making Lu Xun an accessible writer in most major languages.But he can also be remembered through the homes in which he lived and worked.     

Household furniture tip-over deaths of young children

The potential for the injury or death of a child resulting from the tip-over of a piece of household furniture or a domestic appliance has not been previously well recognized. We reviewed nine accidental deaths of young children that resulted from avoidable residential hazards and/or lapses in supervision of the children by their caregivers. The offending household items included televisions, bedroom dressers, a kitchen stove, and a lounge chair. The causes of death were mechanical asphyxia, blunt trauma, and combined blunt head trauma and asphyxia. All of the deaths could have been prevented by appropriate anchoring of the piece of furniture and/or closer supervision of the child. A thorough multidisciplinary investigation is essential in establishing the cause and manner of death in such cases and in identifying risk factors that may aid in the prevention of future childhood deaths.     

关于我州家具生产和经营情况的调查

延边地区森林覆盖率高,木材产量大,使家具生产具备雄厚的物质基础,延边应以此为基础,大力发展家具业。     

A classification framework for out-of-home advertising media in South Africa

Abstract

Out-of-home (OOH) advertising media have expanded worldwide and the shape and format of these media globally, as well as in South Africa, have changed considerably. Until recently, the OOH advertising media landscape consisted primarily of outdoor advertising or billboards reaching vehicular traffic, but now has expanded to include a wide range of OOH advertising media types which aim to reach a mobile audience wherever they live, work, play, drive, shop or commute. Currently there is no coherent contemporary framework to compare and select the most effective media options to reach a selected target market in a specific OOH audience environment. This article draws from academic and practitioner sources to propose a classification framework for OOH advertising media in South Africa comprising four major platforms: outdoor advertising, transit media advertising, street-and-retail furniture advertising, and digital and ambient OOH media channels. The framework serves to inform marketers of viable and cost-effective traditional and contemporary OOH advertising media options. It also indicates what platforms are appropriate to reach specific audiences effectively in a variety of environments outside their homes. This is the first framework of its kind for the South African context that offers an orderly, integrated basis for future research.     

我国家具设计的传统文化特征

设计固然需要全球的视野。但是,中国数千年历史传统文化发展所形成、储存、沉淀下来的价值体系也是我们赖以继续发展的巨大财富。文中从中国传统哲学、美学观点出发,分析我国历史传统文化对家具设计的深远影响。     

Every Bag Counts

正Plastic. In these petroleum-based times, you can’t live with it, and you can’t live without it. Since this magical substance, with its plethora of manifestations, controls our city-dwelling lives to such a mas-sive degree, it pays to sit back and remember our day-to-day environmental responsibilities     

Indefinable Wang Jianwei

正"People are aware that artistically between the 1950s and the early 1980s China was closed to the outside world,but realistically,we were also closed internally."STANDING in the middle of Wang Jianwei’s main studio,an expansive 6,000-square-foot room with an arched ceiling that brings the structure to well over two stories in height,I feel as if I’m on the set of a science fiction movie.I’m surrounded by several molded white plastic     

Longing for the past: a semiotic reading of the role of nostalgia in present-day consumption trends

Coined in 1688 by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer to designate a pathological longing for distant homeland, the word “nostalgia” was soon rearticulated temporally, to refer to a lost epoch one yearns for as one's home. Nostalgia is not a new topic for semiotics. Emotion essentially stemming from absence, it epitomizes the semiotic mechanism: semiosis is the ontological result of something staying for something else, but nostalgia is the emotional result of it. Nostalgia – an essential figure in Greimas's structural outlook on passion, an umbrella concept in Baudrillard's mourning of reality behind the simulacra, and a key notion in Culler's and Frow's dissection of the semiotics of tourism – has become a buzz word in both critical and marketing studies, the former trying to unveil beneath it the foundations of ontology or the contradictions of postmodern society and the latter, seeking to exploit nostalgia as what critical theory could deem the last Trojan horse into the agency of the consumer. On the basis of a copious and manifold literature on nostalgia, the article hints at an unexplored direction: can one talk, today, of nostalgic trends of consumption in Europe? Where hipsters, vintage furniture, and retro TV channels are nothing but symptoms of an emerging mentality?