Is there life? Is there spirit? Debating belief and being a good Christian in Watchman Nee’s ‘Little Flock’ : Religions

Funding: This research was funded by the Shanghai Social Science Innovation Research Base, for ‘Research on Transitional Sociology with Chinese Characteristics’.Christian, especially Protestant, identity is often framed through the lens of belief, particularly belief understood as an interior orientation. Through an examination of the non-denominational Protestant group, the ‘Little Flock’, founded by Watchman Nee in the early 20th century, we trace enduring aspects of Little Flock theology in contemporary Chinese Protestant practice. In particular, we attend to conceptions of and debates surrounding belief and how to determine the quality of one’s faith—whether or not one might be considered not just a Christian, but a ‘good’ one.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Exploring the Syntax-phonology Interface: The Effect of Freestanding Form

This paper examines a case of Mandarin Tone 3 sandhi, where not being a free-standing form changes the sandhi pattern. It argues that phonological evaluation takes the type of boundaries into account, i.e. a syntactic boundary will map onto prosody only when it is a boundary of a free-standing form. This paper also shows that Mandarin Tone 3 sandhi, which was believed to be a cyclic application, can instead be derived with an output-output constraint

Religious atmosphere, seismic impact, and corporate charitable donations in China

This study examines the external socio-cultural and natural environment factors that driving corporate philanthropy in China. We focus on two predominant influences: religiosity, specifically the traditional Three-Teachings (Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism), and seismic activities. Using a large sample of 31,673 firm-year observations from Chinese listed firms from 2009 to 2020, our findings reveal that (a) firms immersed in more pronounced religious-cultural presence have higher donation incentives, and (b) firms experiencing higher seismic impacts or are located in high seismic risk areas show heightened corporate philanthropic tendencies. Our multidisciplinary approach bridges various academic disciplines, presenting an innovative framework for understanding the intersection of corporate philanthropy, socio-cultural environments, and natural disasters in China. Overall, we highlight the importance of external environmental factors in shaping corporate charitable behaviours

Herbal Medicine Cordyceps sinensis

Moderate-to-severe asthma has a substantial impact on the health-related quality of life (HR-QOL) of the patients. Cordyceps sinensis is a traditional Chinese medicine that is evaluated clinically for the treatment of many diseases, such as chronic allograft nephropathy, diabetic kidney disease, and lung fibrosis. In order to investigate the effects of Cordyceps sinensis on patients with moderate-to-severe persistent asthma, 120 subjects were randomized to receive Corbin capsule containing Cordyceps sinensis for 3 months (treatment group, n=60), whereas the control group (n=60) did not receive treatment with Corbin capsule. Inhaled corticosteroid and as-needed β-agonists were used in the treatment of both groups. HR-QOL was measured with the Juniper’s Asthma Quality of Life Questionnaire (AQLQ). The incidence of asthma exacerbation, pulmonary function testing, and serum measurements of inflammatory mediators were also evaluated. The results showed that the treatment group indicated a significant increase in AQLQ scores and lung function compared with the control group. The expression levels of the inflammation markers IgE, ICAM-1, IL-4, and MMP-9 in the serum were decreased and IgG increased in the treatment group compared with the control group. Therefore, the conclusion was reached that a formulation of Cordyceps sinensis improved the HR-QOL, asthma symptoms, lung function, and inflammatory profile of the patients with moderate-to-severe asthma. This trial is registered with ChiCTR-IPC-16008730

Real-Time FPGA/CPU-Based Simulation of a Full-Electric Vehicle Integrated with a High-Fidelity Electric Drive Model

Real-time simulations refer to the simulations of a physical system where model equations for one time-step are solved within the same time period as in reality. An FPGA/CPU-based real-time simulation platform is presented in this paper, with a full-electric vehicle model implemented in a central processing unit (CPU) board and an electric drive model implemented in a field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) board. It has been a challenge to interface two models solved with two different processors. In this paper, one open-loop and three closed-loop interfaces are proposed. Real-time simulation results show that the best method is to transmit electric machine speed from the vehicle model to the electric derive model, with feedback electric machine torque calculated in FPGA. In addition, a virtual vehicle testing tool (CarMaker) is used when building the vehicle model, achieving more accurate modeling of vehicle subsystems. The presented platform can be used to verify advanced vehicle control functions during hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing. Vehicle anti-slip control is used as an example here. Finally, experiments were performed by connecting the real-time platform with a back-to-back electric machine test bench. Results of torque, rotor speed, and d&q axis currents are all in good agreement between simulations and experiments

An adaptive power split strategy with a load disturbance compensator for fuel cell/supercapacitor powertrains

Electric vehicles powered by fuel cell and supercapacitor hybrid power sources are of great interest. However, the power allocation between each power source is challenging and the DC bus voltage fluctuation is relatively significant in cascaded PI control schemes. This paper develops a power control strategy with an adjustable cut-off frequency, using an artificial potential field, to adaptively split the load current between the fuel cell and the supercapacitor under various load conditions. The adaptive cut-off frequency is calculated by cutting the load frequency spectrum with an allocation ratio that changes with the supercapacitor state of charge. Therefore, the relatively lower frequency portion of the load current is provided by the fuel cell and the supercapacitor handles the higher frequency portion. To enhance the control performance of the DC bus voltage regulation against the load disturbance, a load disturbance compensator is introduced to suppress the DC bus voltage fluctuation when the load variation occurs, which is implemented by a feed-forward controller that can compensate the load current variation in advance. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is validated by extensive experiments

Some puzzling findings regarding the acquisition of verbs

On the whole, children acquire frequent words earlier than less frequent words. However, there are other factors at play, such as an early "noun bias" (relative to input frequency, toddlers learn nouns faster than verbs) and a "content-word bias" (content words are acquired disproportionately to function words). This paper follows up reports of a puzzling phenomenon within verb-learning, where "experiencer-object" emotion verbs (A frightened/angered/delighted B) are lower frequency but learned earlier than "experiencer-subject" emotion verbs (A feared/hated/loved B). In addition to the possibility that the aforementioned results are a fluke or due to some confound, prior work has suggested several possible explanations: experiencer-object ("frighten-type") verbs have higher type frequency, encode a causal agent as the sentential subject, and perhaps describe a more salient perspective on the described event. In three experiments, we cast doubt on all three possible explanations. The first experiment replicates and extends the prior findings regarding emotion verbs, ruling out several possible confounds and concerns. The second and third experiments investigate acquisition of chase/flee verbs and give/get verbs, which reveal surprising findings that are not explained by the aforementioned hypotheses. We conclude that these findings indicate a significant hole in our theories of language learning, and that the path forward likely requires a great deal more empirical investigation of the order of acquisition of verbs

The complete chloroplast genome sequence of Gentiana triflora and comparative analysis with its congeneric species

Gentiana triflora is an important medicinal plant in China with economic and medicinal value. Here, we report the complete chloroplastsequences of G. trifloral. The cp genome of G. triflora of 149, 125 bp contains 130 unique genes, including 85 protein-coding genes,8 rRNA genes, and 37 tRNA genes. The analysis of repeat showed that palindromic had the highest frequency. Besides, a total numberof 45 SSR were identified, most of which were mononucleotide adenine-thymine. Comparative genome analysis of Gentiana speciesrevealed that the pair of the inverted repeat was more conserved than the single-copy region. This analysis resulted in identification of 8 hypervariable regions (trnH-GUG, trnG-UCC-intron, atpI, trnD-GUC, trnL-UAA, rpl32-trnL-UAG, petA and ycf1). Phylogenetic analysis revealed that G. triflora was most closely related to Gentiana manshurica. In conclusion, this study enriched the genomic resources of the Gentiana genus and provided a basis for evolution and phylogeny analyses