Search Results (25)

In the pursuit of sustainable urban development, construction land development (CLD) not only carries the important mission of promoting economic growth but also needs to actively respond to the environmental requirements of reducing carbon emissions. However, there is a tension and balance between these two objectives. This study explores the evolution characteristics and influencing mechanisms of the synergistic relationship between carbon emission efficiency and economic benefits of CLD based on the undesirable slacks-based measurement, coupling coordination degree (CCD) model, Tapio decoupling model, spatial convergence model, and interpretable machine learning techniques. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) The CCR between CEE and economic benefits of CLD in China shows the characteristic of “improvement-stability-local decline”, and it is higher in the eastern region than in the central and western regions. (2) The decoupling of carbon emission efficiency (CEE) and economic benefits of CLD between 2003 and 2023 shows diverse trends in different provinces and time scales in China. (3) China’s eastern region are consistent with σ-convergence and β-convergence, and the gap in the level of inter-regional coupling co-ordination has narrowed. On the contrary, the central and western regions do not pass the σ and β-convergence tests, and the regional equilibrium needs to be improved. (4) In descending order of influence on CCR, they are ownership structure, urban construction land per capita, energy consumption per unit of gross domestic product, energy structure, industrial structure, and foreign trade investment intensity. Full article

The Franciscan presence in China is one of the first expressions of the Chinese encounter with Christianity. Despite the significant number of preserved documents and archives, research on the Franciscans in China is still limited. Furthermore, previous studies have predominantly focused on the texts and activities of foreign missionaries, often neglecting the role of their Chinese collaborators and converts. The purpose of this paper is to examine the interactions between Franciscans and Chinese people from a diachronic perspective, starting from the first phases of the Franciscan presence in China during the Yuan dynasty and tracing its development through the centuries up to the 20th century. Analyzing the transformation of these interactions, this paper will outline the long and gradual evolution of Franciscan foreign missions into expressions of a local church, detecting unexplored issues such as the establishment of institutes for the local clergy or the shift in the assignment of significant tasks in the Order to Chinese members. The preliminary findings of this research underscore the necessity for further studies to fully address these complex dynamics. Full article

Although the Middle East is often perceived as politically, economically, and socially unstable, Saudi Arabia offers a different narrative. Inspired by the country’s vision (Vision 2030) and the growing body of research exploring its socio-economic transformation, this article examines how organizational strategy theories and practices can be advanced by inviting researchers to focus on Saudi Arabia’s evolving context. To achieve this, the article addresses three pivotal questions: (a) Why should academics consider conducting research in Saudi Arabia? (b) What research topics could significantly advance organizational strategy theories and practices? (c) What are the primary barriers to conducting research in Saudi Arabia? Using a comprehensive review of existing literature, socio-economic analysis, and an evaluation of Vision 2030 targets, the article identifies three key themes: (1) socio-cultural dynamics and their influence on organizational strategies, (2) economic diversification and its impact on strategic resilience, and (3) the strategic alignment of foreign direct investment (FDI) with expatriate mission success. These findings lead to distinct research agendas linked to relevant theoretical frameworks, including Cross-Cultural Theory, Institutional Theory, and the Resource-Based View. The article concludes by inviting scholars to explore these themes and generate findings that contribute to existing organizational strategy theories and practical solutions, fostering a deeper understanding of organizational strategy within Saudi Arabia and the broader global landscape. Full article

Lidar technology plays a pivotal role in lunar exploration, particularly in terrain mapping, 3D topographic surveying, and velocity measurement, which are crucial for guidance, navigation, and control. This paper reviews the current global research and applications of lidar technology in lunar missions, noting that existing efforts are primarily focused on 3D terrain mapping and velocity measurement. The paper also discusses the detailed system design and key results of the laser altimeter, laser ranging sensor, laser 3D imaging sensor, and laser velocity sensor used in the Chang’E lunar missions. By comparing and analyzing similar foreign technologies, this paper identifies future development directions for lunar laser payloads. The evolution towards multi-beam single-photon detection technology aims to enhance the point cloud density and detection efficiency. This manuscript advocates that China actively advance new technologies and conduct space application research in areas such as multi-beam single-photon 3D terrain mapping, lunar surface water ice measurement, and material composition analysis, to elevate the use of laser pay-loads in lunar and space exploration. Full article

Wenshi Ziliao (Cultural and Historical Materials) are spaces where contemporary Chinese official discourse and local self-expression are coordinated. But these spaces are extremely limited on religious issues. The Pingli missionary case in the Shaanxi Wenshi Ziliao is seen as an anti-imperialist patriotic movement. However, by re-examining this conflict through the analysis of other materials, this article finds that the outbreak of the Pingli case is closely related to local power structures, the conditions of missionaries and Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (P.I.M.E.), and the socio-cultural atmosphere. These hidden stories, although overlooked by the compilers of Wenshi Ziliao, are re-emphasized by priests of the local church, revealing attempts by Christians to continually adjust their self-expression in response to official discourse under the contemporary Chinese church–state relationship. Full article

This paper explores the elements of support and development of entrepreneurship in Ukraine. It suggests that digitalization is an important organizational component in the development of the business sector in the knowledge economy. The authors present a comprehensive study of the most advanced domestic business ecosystems (Diia, UNIT.CITY, Genesis) and highlight their key characteristics, i.e., type of ownership, structure, mission and vision, services for entrepreneurs, investment fund availability, and areas and types of investment. The paper concludes that support for entrepreneurship in Ukraine is based on the principles of efficiency, accessibility, social security, openness, and transparency. Entrepreneurship support is considered as a set of measures of the state-funded and private institutions and organizations aimed at ensuring the sustainable functioning of small and medium-sized business entities and stimulating their development by creating the following favorable conditions: building a competitive environment and increasing competitiveness; fostering investment and innovation efforts; promoting manufactured goods (works, services) or knowledge-based products in domestic and foreign markets; ensuring employment by supporting the citizens’ entrepreneurial initiatives. Areas of public and private support of domestic entrepreneurship include provision of information, consultancy, and special services. Moreover, the paper pays special attention to the forms and methods of supporting businesses and entrepreneurship under martial law in Ukraine in 2022. Full article

Robert Morrison 馬禮遜, the first Protestant missionary to China, came to Guangdong as an employee of the East India Company and with the support of the London Missionary Society in 1807. Amongst his path-breaking translation work, he published the first Chinese Bible (Shen Tian Shengshu 神天聖書) in 1823. As many foreigners in Guangdong could not speak Cantonese, Morrison compiled a three-volume Cantonese learning aid, A Vocabulary of the Canton Dialect (1828), using specifically Cantonese Chinese characters and his Cantonese romanization system. In consequence, missionaries translated Christian literature and the Bible into Cantonese, for they realized that proficiency in Cantonese was essential for proselytization among ordinary people. Over the past twenty years, we have collected and identified around 260 Cantonese works written and translated by Western Protestant missionaries, and these Cantonese writings can be categorized as follows: 1. dictionaries; 2. textbooks; 3. Christian literature; 4. Bibles; and 5. miscellanea. In the study of the Western Protestant missions, their linguistic contribution is relatively under-represented. Through analyzing the phonological, lexical, and grammatical features of early Cantonese expressions in these selected missionary works, we strive to highlight the missionaries’ contributions to the diachronic study of the Cantonese language in modern southern China. Full article

Climate change and rising global average temperatures across the year may strongly affect olive fruits’ development process and their oil yield and quality. There is therefore an urgency to take immediate actions to characterize the wide variability of cultivars in order to identify those with a stable response to high temperatures, particularly in areas like the west of Iran, which is characterized by a warm summer continental climate. The objective of this study is to investigate the process of fruit development and oil accumulation in response to high summer temperature conditions in a set of four Iranian olive cultivars (Shengeh, Roughani, Zard Aliabad, and Dezful) in comparison with four foreign olive cultivars (Konservolia, Sevillana, Manzanilla, and Mission) in seven various harvesting times (20 July, 5 and 20 August, 5 and 20 September, 6 and 21 October). The obtained results evidence a significant positive correlation between fruit dry matter and oil content. High temperatures reduced the oil and dry matter accumulation in the second half of the summer, with severe thermal conditions adversely affecting oil synthesis. Paramount variations were observed among the cultivars regarding oil accumulation, dry matter, and pomological attributes. All of them showed the highest oil content at the last harvest. Among all analyzed varieties, Roughani showed the highest tolerance and adaptive capacity to high temperatures as it accumulated the greatest amount of dry matter as well as oil content in all of the harvesting times, demonstrating a positive correlation between these two traits. Although Shengeh showed the lowest oil content on a dry and fresh weight basis at the first harvesting time, this cultivar generally presented higher fruit development attributes than the other cultivars, highlighting that it benefits from a high temperature. Full article

In the context of the many movements with a strong female presence promoting peace in the Middle East, the movement Women Wage Peace (WWP) currently represents the largest and most impactful organization in the country. Founded in the aftermath of the 50-day Gaza War/Operation Protective Edge of 2014, Women Wage Peace has grown to 45,000 Israeli members, the most significant grassroots peace movement in Israel today. WWP’s theory of change refracts the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and its resolution, through a gendered lens. The movement is non-partisan and does not support any specific solution to the conflict. Instead, it empowers women from diverse communities to build trust across divides, leading to a unified demand for diplomatic negotiation, with full representation of women, to end the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. WWP enables very diverse women to unite with the aim of taking their own and their children’s futures into their own hands: women from the left, center, and right, young and old, from the center and periphery of the country, religious and secular, Jewish, Arab, Druze, and Bedouin. The movement continues to refine its non-hierarchical structure, distributing its work among thousands of volunteers who serve on regional and/or mission-specific teams, including Government Engagement, Foreign Affairs, Digital Communication, Special Projects, and Strategy. Full article

The following case study clarifies how these three different functions of mission are discursively entangled with one another. Mission as a bridge-builder (between people, cultures, and religions of different origin), as a traitor (cooperating with corrupt colonial and imperial powers), and as a victim (finding misery and death on the mission field). Each of these three terms (bridge-builder, traitor, victim) is, to an extent, applicable to the events that took place during the night of 19–20 October 1896 in Akeri on the slopes of Mount Meru (former German East Africa, today Tanzania). Using the concept of entanglement history, I will analyze the death of two young German missionaries of the Lutheran Leipzig Mission, “caught in the crossfire” between the African community to be outreached and the German colonial military. We will see how various symbolic systems collide in the year 1896 at Akeri. The systems are represented by: (1) German Lutheran missions activities; (2) A German colonial and military expedition; and (3) The resistance of African Maasai societies’ leadership. “Akeri 1896” (I will continue to refer to this event specifically as “Akeri 1896” throughout the article) had become in the following 100 years a complex entanglement of metaphoric meanings. The same event can be a placeholder for victory, for defeat, for disaster, for martyrdom, for Christ-centredness (of the missionaries in their own perception), as well as for evil-centredness (the Africans in their perception of the Western foreigners). Full article

The Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society (WFMS) (1897–1909) and the Woman’s Missionary Council (WMC) (1910–1940) of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS) worked in Korea from 1897 to 1940. Their work used a distinctive mission philosophy, hermeneutics, and implementation of strategies in their encounters with Korean women. Over the course of their years in Korea, Southern Methodist missionary women initiated the Great Korea Revival, established the first social evangelistic centers, educated the first indigenous female church historian, and ordained women for the first time in Korea. This article argues that, even though the missionary activities of the single female missionaries occurred in the context of “Christian civilization” as a mission theory, their holistic Wesleyan missiology departed from the colonial theory of mission as civilization. The first section of the article offers background information regarding the single female missionaries to help understand them. What motivated these females to venture in foreign lands with the Gospel? What was their preparation? The second section presents the religious, cultural, social, and political background of Korea during the time the missionaries arrived. The third section describes and analyzes the evangelistic and social ministries of the female missionaries in the nascent Korean mission. The final section describes and analyzes the appropriation and reinterpretation of the Bible and Christianity by Korean women, especially the work of Korean Bible women and Methodist female Christians in the quest for independence from Japanese control in the Independence Movement of 1919. Full article

As a great practice of building a community of shared future for mankind, the Belt and Road Initiative is facing geopolitical risk brought by great power games, regional conflicts and terrorism. It is an important mission of geopolitical research to scientifically deal with the geopolitical risk along the Belt and Road. This study systematically constructs the geopolitical risk assessment index system and analyzes the spatiotemporal evolution, obstacle factors and risk types of geopolitical risk of countries along the Belt and Road by using the entropy weight TOPSIS model, obstacle degree model and minimum variance method. The research results showed that: (1) From 2005 to 2020, the polarization of geopolitical risk in countries along the Belt and Road was very significant, and the overall trend of geopolitical risk tended to deteriorate. (2) The Middle East and Eastern Europe were the most important geopolitical risk zones along the Belt and Road, and Afghanistan, Iraq, Russia and Ukraine were the main high geopolitical risk centers, with significant risk spillover effects from these centers. (3) Terrorism and close relations with the United States were the most important obstacle factors for geopolitical risk in countries along the Belt and Road, and military intervention politics, trade dependence degree and foreign debt burden were important obstacle factors for geopolitical risk in countries along the Belt and Road. (4) Geopolitical risk along the Belt and Road can be divided into sovereign risk dominant type, sovereign and military risk dominant type, sovereign and major power intervention risk dominant type, and sovereign and military and major power intervention risk jointly dominated type, among which sovereign and military and major power intervention risk jointly dominated type was the most important geopolitical risk type. In order to scientifically deal with geopolitical risk in countries along the Belt and Road, it is necessary to strengthen geopolitical risk awareness, pay attention to the dominant geopolitical risk factors, strengthen the control of regional geopolitical risk spillover and formulate reasonable risk prevention and control scheme based on geopolitical risk types. Full article

Protective and Thermal Barrier Coatings (TBC) applied on gas-turbine blades gradually degrade due to oxidation, aluminum depletion and impacts of environmental particles. Among various non-destructive coating testing methods (NDT), visual inspection can be undertaken regularly in service, but it provides little quantitative information, and only surface defects can be detected. This work aims at in-service monitoring of turbine blades with multilayer coatings applied by atmospheric plasma spraying (APS) in a few variants. They were validated during a series of accelerated mission tests of a retired military turbofan engine in a test cell together with five other technologies. The fifty-hour rainbow test focused on assessing coating durability. Between engine runs, 12 borescope inspections were conducted to monitor the health of the blades. Finally, the blades were disassembled and examined using computed tomography (CT) and metallographic methods. Throughout the testing, 31 newly-coated blades (66%) withstood the tests, producing results comparable to the reference blades. However, 16 blades suffered intolerable failures observed as increased roughness, gradual loss of the topcoat, spallation and minor foreign object damage. Visual inspection results were generally in agreement with subsequent laboratory tests. Full article

In this article, we present the case of a patient who hid the real reason for which he came to the emergency room. This patient in this case is a 61-year-old man, who presented to the emergency department for symptoms relevant to respiratory disease. However, the initial diagnosis turned out to be only the “tip of the iceberg” in the evolution and treatment of this patient. Fournier gangrene is a fulminant form of infectious necrotizing fasciitis of the perineal, genital, or perianal regions, which frequently affects men, but can also occur in women and children. It is a rare but life-threatening disease. Due to potential complications, it is important to diagnose Fournier gangrene as early as possible. Although antibiotics and aggressive debridement have been widely accepted as standard treatment, the mortality rate remains high. In many cases, the doctor’s mission is much more difficult than it first seems. The challenges to which the doctor is subjected, especially in the emergency room, are immense. In establishing a diagnosis and emergency treatment, all parties involved—medical staff, on the one hand, and patients and relatives, on the other hand—must collaborate so that the outcome is a positive one. The overall conclusion of the medical team was that Fournier gangrene in the patient was the consequence of both the presence of an intrarectal foreign body, as well as excessive alcohol consumption. The case of our patient with Fournier gangrene and an intrarectal foreign body had a positive outcome due to quick, aggressive, and adequate medical and surgical management, as well as the fact that the patient had no other associated pathologies beyond alcohol “passion.” Our patient’s case is an example of the exceptional situations we sometimes encounter in medical practice. Full article

From the end of the 1980s, when foreign workers poured into Korea, until 1995, when there was a significant increase in international marriages, a multicultural situation has slowly been developing in Korea. However, because the traditional emphasis has been on a single-race nation, the Korean Church has not shown much concern for the multicultural situation. Apart from some megachurches and missionary groups, the Korean Church has not been concerned with inviting immigrants and receiving them as full church members. Recently, due to a rapidly aging Korean society and the influx of immigrants entering the workforce, Korea has abruptly changed into a multicultural society. Catching up with this change, the church has started to study building a multicultural church and shifting a congregation to a multicultural church; however, almost all of these studies focus on mission strategy, leadership, or working through conflicts in the church. Currently, there are a lack of studies on worship, specifically, how to facilitate worship among people from different cultural backgrounds and how worship can draw a multicultural congregation together as one body. This chapter will study how a multicultural church can plan its Sunday public worship from a liturgical and theological perspective. Additionally, I will research how a congregation made up of people whose cultural and theological backgrounds are different can become one body in worship. For this purpose, I will examine a multicultural church in Korea, mainly focusing on how the order and elements of worship can develop understanding and unity among the people. Based on this study, I will suggest some liturgical ideas and valuable strategies for multicultural worship in Korea with a sample liturgy of multicultural worship. Full article