International Interfaith Centre Annual Lecture 1996: From Conflict to Harmony the Confucian response to interfaith dialogue

From Conflict to Harmony the Confucian response to interfaith dialogueIt is true that unlike other living faiths, Confucianism has lost its organisational and institutional mechanism. However, organisation and institution are never taken to be the sole foundation of Confucianism. Rather, the power and force of Confucianism lies in its values and ideals, the essentials of which have become part of the ways of the Chinese life. In this sense, we may say that Confucianism as a value system is still functioning in today's world and as a living force Confucianism holds not only the motives of social integration but also the solutions and resolutions of inter-religious conflict

An Immersive Telepresence System using RGB-D Sensors and Head Mounted Display

We present a tele-immersive system that enables people to interact with each other in a virtual world using body gestures in addition to verbal communication. Beyond the obvious applications, including general online conversations and gaming, we hypothesize that our proposed system would be particularly beneficial to education by offering rich visual contents and interactivity. One distinct feature is the integration of egocentric pose recognition that allows participants to use their gestures to demonstrate and manipulate virtual objects simultaneously. This functionality enables the instructor to ef- fectively and efficiently explain and illustrate complex concepts or sophisticated problems in an intuitive manner. The highly interactive and flexible environment can capture and sustain more student attention than the traditional classroom setting and, thus, delivers a compelling experience to the students. Our main focus here is to investigate possible solutions for the system design and implementation and devise strategies for fast, efficient computation suitable for visual data processing and network transmission. We describe the technique and experiments in details and provide quantitative performance results, demonstrating our system can be run comfortably and reliably for different application scenarios. Our preliminary results are promising and demonstrate the potential for more compelling directions in cyberlearning.Comment: IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia 201

An empirical analysis of the influence of financial development on export trade: evidence from Jiangsu province, China

In the past 30 years, Jiangsu Province in China has achieved great feats regarding its export trade; however, its export trade growth rate has not only been showing a recent downward trend but also great fluctuations. Hence, the competitiveness of Jiangsu Province’s export products seems to have weakened. Through an empirical analysis, we demonstrate the relationship between financial development and export trade in Jiangsu Province, showing that the influence of financial development on the growth and the structure of provincial export trade is relatively weak. Thus, we believe that provincial financial development lacks coordination with export trade, requiring further efforts from actors at coordinating both. This paper puts forward relevant suggestions that may facilitate stakeholders to promote the steady development, transformation, and improvement of Jiangsu Province’s export trade

'Self-power' and 'other power' in Chinese spirituality

What is Chinese spirituality? There is no ready answer for us to give. The difficulty of defining Chinese spirituality is threefold. Firstly, the diversity of religion in China is much greater than in many other cultures, which manifests itself in several religious traditions such as Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism and folk religion. This phenomenon of a single environment, locality and culture encompassing a number of diverse spiritual beliefs and practices has added enormous difficulties to the formation of a single form of spirituality. Secondly, to each tradition many streams are attached that develop in different directions. Although sharing the basic principles, these streams or strings do not always converge towards one set of spiritual pursuits, which have placed more weight on divergence rather than convergence. Thirdly, since the very beginning there have been two layers of religious life in China, one at the level of the intellectuals or upper classes, and the other of ordinary people. People living at these two levels do not always think in the same way in terms of religious faiths and practices. What appeals to ordinary peasants, manual workers and artisans would probably have been simply brushed aside as superstitions or ignorant beliefs by the educated. Fully aware of the problems in defining Chinese spirituality precisely, this paper attempts to examine the most representative aspects of religious practices concerning the approaches that have been taken in Chinese religions in order to attain the spiritual goal and the implications that each of these approaches would have for religious followers