Sin in Tiantai Buddhism and Christianity: A Comparison Between Chih-i and Pope Gregory I

Buddhism and Christianity are two of the major religions in the world. This paper is going to compare sin in Medieval Tiantai Buddhism with Medieval Catholicism, with examples of Chih-i (Zhiyi) and Gregory’s teaching on sin. This article investigates sin from the aspects of pride, greed and sources of sin, cardinal sins, and practice of contemplation in the two religions. The two religions share common ground in the question of sin, yet there are differences in the source of sins and the definition of cardinal sins. In addition, the teachings of Chih-i and Gregory the Great on the practice of contemplation revealed that contemplation played dissimilar roles in two religions. Finally, it concludes that there are resemblances in two religions that connect East Asia and the West, which calls for future cooperation that brings a message of salvation to all human beings

Sin in Tiantai Buddhism and Christianity: A Comparison Between Chih-i and Pope Gregory I

Buddhism and Christianity are two of the major religions in the world. This paper is going to compare sin in Medieval Tiantai Buddhism with Medieval Catholicism, with examples of Chih-i (Zhiyi) and Gregory’s teaching on sin. This article investigates sin from the aspects of pride, greed and sources of sin, cardinal sins, and practice of contemplation in the two religions. The two religions share common ground in the question of sin, yet there are differences in the source of sins and the definition of cardinal sins. In addition, the teachings of Chih-i and Gregory the Great on the practice of contemplation revealed that contemplation played dissimilar roles in two religions. Finally, it concludes that there are resemblances in two religions that connect East Asia and the West, which calls for future cooperation that brings a message of salvation to all human beings

Guided mesh normal filtering

The joint bilateral filter is a variant of the standard bilateral filter, where the range kernel is evaluated using a guidance signal instead of the original signal. It has been successfully applied to various image processing problems, where it provides more flexibility than the standard bilateral filter to achieve high quality results. On the other hand, its success is heavily dependent on the guidance signal, which should ideally provide a robust estimation about the features of the output signal. Such a guidance signal is not always easy to construct. In this paper, we propose a novel mesh normal filtering framework based on the joint bilateral filter, with applications in mesh denoising. Our framework is designed as a two-stage process: first, we apply joint bilateral filtering to the face normals, using a properly constructed normal field as the guidance; afterwards, the vertex positions are updated according to the filtered face normals. We compute the guidance normal on a face using a neighboring patch with the most consistent normal orientations, which provides a reliable estimation of the true normal even with a high-level of noise. The effectiveness of our approach is validated by extensive experimental results

GPT-Prompt Controlled Diffusion for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS), aiming to train segmentation models solely using image-level labels, has received significant attention. Existing approaches mainly concentrate on creating high-quality pseudo labels by utilizing existing images and their corresponding image-level labels. However, the quality of pseudo labels degrades significantly when the size of available dataset is limited. Thus, in this paper, we tackle this problem from a different view by introducing a novel approach called GPT-Prompt Controlled Diffusion (GPCD) for data augmentation. This approach enhances the current labeled datasets by augmenting with a variety of images, achieved through controlled diffusion guided by GPT prompts. In this process, the existing images and image-level labels provide the necessary control information, where GPT is employed to enrich the prompts, leading to the generation of diverse backgrounds. Moreover, we integrate data source information as tokens into the Vision Transformer (ViT) framework. These tokens are specifically designed to improve the ability of downstream WSSS framework to recognize the origins of augmented images. Our proposed GPCD approach clearly surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods. This effect is more obvious when the amount of available data is small, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method

Thermodynamic Properties of Nano-Silver and Alloy Particles

Non

The effectiveness of negotiated agreements and its inspirations for Chinese knowledge mangement

Negotiated agreements have become a widely used management model with respective covenants for different social network context in European countries. Negotiated agreements between government and industry in which industry obliges to take 'voluntary' action to help realizing regional management objectives. This paper describes and analyses development of the use of such covenant model in European public administration practice. After an extensive evaluation of the effects of the covenants in the European social network context, the paper conducts a comparable study of the Chinese knowledge management also in social network context, and expose that Chinese knowledge management policy and knowledge management practice is still in the first stage of Europe public administration evolution. As a conclusion, the paper explores the possible application of covenants model in Chinese knowledge management

Structural performance and sustainability assessment of cold central-plant and in-place recycled asphalt pavements: A case study

This paper aimed at assessing the structural performance and sustainability of cold recycled asphalt pavements. Four cold recycling technologies were investigated, including the cold central-plant recycling with emulsified and foamed asphalt binders (i.e., CCPR-E and CCPR-F), and the cold in-place recycling with emulsified and foamed asphalt binders (i.e., CIR-E and CIR-F). Firstly, the laboratory tests were conducted to comprehensively evaluate the dynamic modulus, rutting, and cracking performance of cold recycled asphalt mixtures. Subsequently, these laboratory results were used to determine the inputs of cold recycled asphalt mixtures for the Pavement ME Design program, which was employed to predict the pavement performance. Meanwhile, the National Center for Asphalt Technology also constructed four cold recycled pavement sections in the field. The monitored and predicted pavement performance showed similar trends in the first two years, but the Pavement ME Design program over predicted the rut depth of these sections. The pavement performance results confirmed that the bottom-up fatigue cracking was a negligible distress mode for cold recycled asphalt pavements. In the following, the life cycle cost analysis and life cycle assessment were conducted to evaluate the four different cold recycling projects. The life cycle cost analysis results demonstrated that all of the four cold recycling projects yielded less net present values than the HMA project. The life cycle assessment data indicated that the cold recycling technologies reduced the energy consumption by 56–64%, and decreased the greenhouse gas emissions by 39–46%. Finally, this study found that the overlay and asphalt treated base thicknesses and climatic conditions had significant impact on the performance of cold recycled asphalt pavements