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Abstract
This paper presents the history of the gramophone industry and Chinese records in pre-war Singapore, through exploring the position of Singapore in the global commercial networks of transnational gramophone enterprises, and the local consumption of Chinese music records. At the turn of the twentieth century, the emergence of gramophone companies in the United States and European countries enabled Chinese opera and music in different regional languages to be manufactured into records, and consumed as commodities by Chinese communities all around the globe. Shaped by multiple routes of trade and cultural connections, the Chinese records sold in Singapore were of diverse historical origins and regional languages that catered to the different Chinese dialect groups. By the 1920s and 1930s, the popularization of gramophones and Chinese records had engendered an unprecedented sonic experience in Singapore.

Chapter 1. Introduction: The Significance and Research Path of Theory of Foreign Policy -- Chapter 2. The Existing Research on Foreign Policy and Their Limitation -- Chapter 3. Position Realism as a Theory of Foreign Policy -- Chapter 4. International Structure and Order in the 19 Century -- Chapter 5. Defending Hegemonic Interest: British Foreign Policy -- Chapter 6. Germany and Russia: Contending States or Potential Contending States? -- Chapter 7. America and France: The Foreign Policies of Potential Contending States -- Chapter 8. The Foreign Policy of The Austro-Hungarian Empire as a Non-contending State -- Chapter 9. Conclusion: The Summary and Prospect of Positional Realism.

Abstract
Leslie Marmon Silko, a Native American female writer, includes many photos about family and land in her autobiography Storyteller. The relations of images and words in her book are analyzed from the perspective of semiotics, particularly from Roland Barthes's image rhetoric. The linguistic message and the coded and non-coded iconic message of the photos help in understanding the Laguna Pueblo concept of time and place. Photos about family show the cyclical time expanse of the family history and the change of traditions in Laguna. Photos about land and the stories behind pass on their ancestral culture to the next and the next generation. Photos, as a sign to be against linear time and against humans' violence to nature, help the indigenous reshape their history and re-envision their subjectivity.

This book adopts the rationalist research path to bring forward an innovative theory of foreign policy, and the central question is: How can we define the overall national interests of great powers appropriately and thus help states make consistent and rational grand strategies? The answer can't be found among existing Foreign Policy Analysis and other theoretical research. In this book, Positional Realism is proposed as a new theory to define the overall national interests from the power position and order position perspectives and specify the four kinds of positional interests of hegemonic states, contending states, potential contending states, and non-contending states. Different great powers have different positional power and order objectives. Based on these positional interests, Positional Realism brings different foreign policy hypotheses and suggestions. The book also examines the six great powers in the nineteenth century to verify these hypotheses and finds that Positional Realism can not only convincingly explain the success or failure of their acts, but also give useful and important directions for strategy making of great powers.

As the "Third Pole", the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is threatened by environmental changes. Ecosystem vulnerability refers to the sensitivity and resilience of ecosystems to external disturbances. However, there is a lack of relevant studies on the driving factors of ecosystem vulnerability. Therefore, based on spatial principal components analysis and geographic detectors methods, this paper evaluates the ecosystem vulnerability and its driving factors on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau from the years 2005 to 2015. The results were as follows: (1) The ecosystem vulnerability index (EVI) of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is mainly heavy and extreme, showing a gradually increasing trend from southeast to northwest. (2) The spatial heterogeneity of the EVI is significant in the southeast and northwest, but not in the southwest and central parts. (3) Analysis of influencing factors shows that environmental factors have more significant effects on EVI than socioeconomic variables, facilitating the proposal of adequate policy implications. More efforts should be devoted to ecological protection and restoration to prevent grassland degradation and desertification in the high-EVI areas in northwest. The government is also urged to improve the ecological compensation mechanisms and balance ecological protection and residents' development needs in the southeast.

Accurate spatial data regarding rural settlements provides the basis for analyses of spatial evolution. Decrypted KeyHole military satellite images were used as a spatial data source in this study in order to assess historical rural settlements at high precision. The spatial data acquisition process used in this work involved three stages, interpretation from rural settlements, validation of results, and then resampling. We describe a new method to confirm validation samples in this article and use a confusion matrix to verify data accuracy. The Kappa value yielded in this approach was 0.97; the method described here can be used in the future for the acquisition of high-precision spatial data from historical rural settlements. • Decrypted KeyHole military satellite images were used as a data source to obtain high-precision information regarding historical rural settlements. • The new method proposed in this article was used to verify the accuracy of sample data and to solve the ongoing problem that historical image land use often cannot be verified. • Result accuracy was verified using functions in ArcGIS 10.4 to create accuracy assessment points, update them, and compute a confusion matrix.