The Prolonged Path of Indigenization: A Study on German Protestant Missionary Ernst Faber’s Chinese Literary Works

Ernst Faber’s 34 years of literary missionary works reveal his commitment to refining his approach to indigenizing Christianity in China. Employing three linguistic and cultural adaptation strategies—translation and commentary of the Bible, examination and analysis of missionary practical outcomes in Western society, and the revision and reinterpretation of Chinese classics incorporating Christian insights—Faber adapted his methods gradually into China’s specific conditions, indicating a prolonged path of indigenization. Despite expressing appreciation for Chinese culture, a critical examination reveals the preservation of his cultural biases and an unwavering commitment to Christianity as a means of purifying and enriching the spirit of the Chinese people. Rooted in the political context of his time and confidence in European historical world missions, Faber’s indigenization strategy in his Chinese literary works represents an interplay of cultural adaptation and resistance.The article processing charge was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)—491192747 and the Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu BerlinPeer Reviewe

The Study and Development of Transaction Subsystem of Data Center

Along with the rapid growth of the enterprise network services, the data center and its management system has been challenged to fulfill new requirements, which mainly deal with the rivalry between management and maintenance, including the server, though in a deluge of number, fails to reach the standard of business requirement of the busy time; low average utilization rate of the sever result in the increase of both sever quantity and management cost and the pressure imposed by their attendant onerous enterprise management and cost. Therefore, based on the prerequisite of the stable operation of the system, to improve the enterprise value by employing management system with higher efficiency and controlling data center is the wave of the future. This paper synthetically accounts for transaction system of data center’s status quo and problems. It analyzed and studied the transaction system of the deserved functions and systematic components date center, and a design of transaction system of data center of the education metropolitan area network was based on the study above. Key words: IDC; Information System; Day-to-day Transaction; File Managemen

Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graph Neural Network for Next POI

With the advancement of mobile technology, Point of Interest (POI) recommendation systems in Location-based Social Networks (LBSN) have brought numerous benefits to both users and companies. Many existing works employ Knowledge Graph (KG) to alleviate the data sparsity issue in LBSN. These approaches primarily focus on modeling the pair-wise relations in LBSN to enrich the semantics and thereby relieve the data sparsity issue. However, existing approaches seldom consider the hyper-relations in LBSN, such as the mobility relation (a 3-ary relation: user-POI-time). This makes the model hard to exploit the semantics accurately. In addition, prior works overlook the rich structural information inherent in KG, which consists of higher-order relations and can further alleviate the impact of data sparsity.To this end, we propose a Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graph Neural Network (HKGNN) model. In HKGNN, a Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graph (HKG) that models the LBSN data is constructed to maintain and exploit the rich semantics of hyper-relations. Then we proposed a Hypergraph Neural Network to utilize the structural information of HKG in a cohesive way. In addition, a self-attention network is used to leverage sequential information and make personalized recommendations. Furthermore, side information, essential in reducing data sparsity by providing background knowledge of POIs, is not fully utilized in current methods. In light of this, we extended the current dataset with available side information to further lessen the impact of data sparsity. Results of experiments on four real-world LBSN datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared to existing state-of-the-art methods

"Is Reporting Worth the Sacrifice of Revealing What I Have Sent?": Privacy Considerations When Reporting on End-to-End Encrypted Platforms

User reporting is an essential component of content moderation on many online platforms -- in particular, on end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging platforms where platform operators cannot proactively inspect message contents. However, users' privacy concerns when considering reporting may impede the effectiveness of this strategy in regulating online harassment. In this paper, we conduct interviews with 16 users of E2EE platforms to understand users' mental models of how reporting works and their resultant privacy concerns and considerations surrounding reporting. We find that users expect platforms to store rich longitudinal reporting datasets, recognizing both their promise for better abuse mitigation and the privacy risk that platforms may exploit or fail to protect them. We also find that users have preconceptions about the respective capabilities and risks of moderators at the platform versus community level -- for instance, users trust platform moderators more to not abuse their power but think community moderators have more time to attend to reports. These considerations, along with perceived effectiveness of reporting and how to provide sufficient evidence while maintaining privacy, shape how users decide whether, to whom, and how much to report. We conclude with design implications for a more privacy-preserving reporting system on E2EE messaging platforms.Comment: accepted to SOUPS 202

A Dexterous Tip-extending Robot with Variable-length Shape-locking

Soft, tip-extending "vine" robots offer a unique mode of inspection and manipulation in highly constrained environments. For practicality, it is desirable that the distal end of the robot can be manipulated freely, while the body remains stationary. However, in previous vine robots, either the shape of the body was fixed after growth with no ability to manipulate the distal end, or the whole body moved together with the tip. Here, we present a concept for shape-locking that enables a vine robot to move only its distal tip, while the body is locked in place. This is achieved using two inextensible, pressurized, tip-extending, chambers that "grow" along the sides of the robot body, preserving curvature in the section where they have been deployed. The length of the locked and free sections can be varied by controlling the extension and retraction of these chambers. We present models describing this shape-locking mechanism and workspace of the robot in both free and constrained environments. We experimentally validate these models, showing an increased dexterous workspace compared to previous vine robots. Our shape-locking concept allows improved performance for vine robots, advancing the field of soft robotics for inspection and manipulation in highly constrained environments.Comment: 7 pages,10 figures. Accepted to IEEE International Conference on Rootics and Automation (ICRA) 202

A Systematic Survey of Prompt Engineering on Vision-Language Foundation Models

Prompt engineering is a technique that involves augmenting a large pre-trained model with task-specific hints, known as prompts, to adapt the model to new tasks. Prompts can be created manually as natural language instructions or generated automatically as either natural language instructions or vector representations. Prompt engineering enables the ability to perform predictions based solely on prompts without updating model parameters, and the easier application of large pre-trained models in real-world tasks. In past years, Prompt engineering has been well-studied in natural language processing. Recently, it has also been intensively studied in vision-language modeling. However, there is currently a lack of a systematic overview of prompt engineering on pre-trained vision-language models. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey of cutting-edge research in prompt engineering on three types of vision-language models: multimodal-to-text generation models (e.g. Flamingo), image-text matching models (e.g. CLIP), and text-to-image generation models (e.g. Stable Diffusion). For each type of model, a brief model summary, prompting methods, prompting-based applications, and the corresponding responsibility and integrity issues are summarized and discussed. Furthermore, the commonalities and differences between prompting on vision-language models, language models, and vision models are also discussed. The challenges, future directions, and research opportunities are summarized to foster future research on this topic

Nonlinear adaptive speed control of a permanent magnet synchronous motor: A perturbation estimation approach

This paper presents a nonlinear adaptive control (NAC) scheme for the speed regulation of a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) based on perturbation estimation and feedback linearizing control. All PMSM system’s unknown nonlinearities, parameter uncertainties, and external disturbances including unknown time-varying load torque disturbance, are defined as lumped perturbation terms, which are estimated by designing perturbation observers. The estimates are used to adaptively compensate the real perturbations and achieve adaptive feedback linearizing control of the original nonlinear system. The proposed control scheme does not require accurate system model and full state feedback. Stability of the close-loop system with proposed NAC is investigated via Lyapunov theory, and the effectiveness of proposed NAC scheme is verified through both simulation and experimental studies. Both simulation and experimental results show that the proposed NAC scheme can provide less regulation error in speed tracking, better dynamic performance and robustness against parameter uncertainties and load torque disturbance, compared with conventional vector control and load torque estimated based control

Genetic diversity and runs of homozygosity analysis of Hetian sheep populations revealed by Illumina Ovine SNP50K BeadChip

Hetian sheep have a long history and a wide distribution. They are renowned for their carpet-grade wool, which makes them a valuable genetic resource in China. The survey revealed that Hetian sheep primarily inhabit three distinct ecological environments: mountains (MTS), mountain–grasslands (MGTS), and grasslands (GTS). To understand the evolutionary relationships and germplasm characteristics of Hetian sheep in these diverse environments, we randomly selected 84 healthy adult ewes from each of these ecological regions. We obtained the Illumina Ovine SNP50K BeadChip by extracting DNA from Hetian sheep ear tissue using the phenol-chloroform method. Afterward, we conducted a population genetic structure and genetic diversity analysis of Hetian sheep using the Illumina Ovine SNP50K Beadchip. Principal component analysis (PCA) and neighbor-joining (NJ) phylogenetic analysis indicated that Hetian sheep in three different ecological environments exhibit distinct genetic distances. Admixture analysis indicated that MGTS and GTS share a common ancestral origins. Additionally, the linkage disequilibrium (LD) analysis indicated that M had the highest decay rate, while MG had the lowest decay rate. Furthermore, we identified the overlapping homozygous genomic regions of Hetian sheep in the three ecological environments through runs of homozygosity (ROH) analysis. We subsequently performed gene annotation and enrichment analysis on these overlapping genomic regions. In the MTS environment, we identified 31 candidate genes associated with high-altitude environmental adaptation. These genes are involved in bone cell generation, differentiation, and the maintenance of bone homeostasis (WNT6, WNT10A, and CHSY1); tooth and tongue development (LEF1, TP63, and PRDM16); and hearing and visual functions (RBP4, ATF6, and JAG1). In the GTS environment, we identified 22 candidate genes related to economic traits, including those associated with reproduction (PLA2G4F, ACVR1, and ADCY2) and growth (CAPN3, YAP1, and FGF9). Research indicates that Hetian sheep can be divided at the genomic level into three subtypes: MTS, MGTS, and GTS. This enhances the genetic diversity of Hetian sheep germplasm resources and provides guidance for the conservation of Hetian sheep breeds. Additionally, we have identified genes related to multiparous traits in MGTS and GTS, offering insights for the selection and breeding of multiparous Hetian sheep

Effectiveness and potential mechanism of Jiawei-Xiaoyao-San for hyperthyroidism: a systematic review

Objectives: To evaluate the effectiveness and potential mechanism of traditional Chinese medicine Jiawei-Xiaoyao-San (JWXYS) as an adjunct or mono- therapy for antithyroid drugs (ATDs) in the treatment of hyperthyroidism. Methods: Eight databases and three trial registries were searched from inception until May 2023. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) were included and meta-analysis was conducted using RevMan 5.4 and Stata 14.0. The Cochrane risk of bias (ROB) tool 1.0 and GRADE tool was used for quality appraisal. The findings from case reports using mono-JWXYS and pharmacological studies were summarized in tables. Results: Thirteen RCTs with 979 participants were included. The majority of the included studies were assessed as high risk of bias in one ROB domain. Compared with ATDs, JWXYS plus ATDs resulted in lower free triiodothyronine (FT3) (MD = -1.31 pmol/L, 95% CI [-1.85, -0.76]; low-certainty), lower free thyroxine (MD = -3.24 pmol/L, 95% CI [-5.06, -1.42]; low-certainty), higher thyroid stimulating hormone (MD = 0.42 mIU/L, 95% CI [0.26, 0.59]; low-certainty), higher effectiveness rate of traditional Chinese medicine syndrome (RR = 1.28, 95% CI [1.08, 1.52]; low-certainty), lower goiter score (MD = -0.66, 95% CI [-1.04, -0.29]; very low-certainty), lower thyrotrophin receptor antibody (SMD = -0.44, 95% CI [-0.73, -0.16]; low-certainty) and fewer adverse events (AEs) (RR = 0.34, 95% CI [0.18, 0.67]; moderate-certainty). Compared with regular dosage of ATDs, JWXYS plus half-dose ATDs resulted in fewer AEs (RR = 0.24, 95% CI [0.10, 0.59]; low-certainty). Compared with ATDs in 1 trial, JWXYS resulted in higher FT3, lower goiter score and fewer AEs. Three case reports showed that the reasons patients sought TCM-only treatment include severe AEs and multiple relapses. Three pharmacological studies demonstrated that JWXYS restored Th17/Treg balance, lowered deiodinases activity, regulated thyroid cell proliferation and apoptosis, and alleviated liver oxidative stress in mouse or rat models. Conclusion: JWXYS may enhance the effectiveness of ATDs for hyperthyroidism, particularly in relieving symptoms and reducing AEs. Mono-JWXYS is not recommended except in patients intolerant to ATDs. The findings should be interpreted with caution due to overall high risk of bias. Further pharmacological studies with more reliable models are needed