Gods and Demons, Beauties and Zombies: through the pages of Chinese educational magazine “Cultural Heritage of China”

This work reviews the Chinese cultural and mass-educational magazine “Cultural Heritage of China” going through several issues of the magazine - those of 2016, 2017 and 2020 years. The brief history of how the magazine was established and structured is given in the first paragraphs. Following are the reviews of the magazine’s issues about the vestimental culture of China, the sensitive question of borrowing elements of Chinese culture into the Japanese oral tradition, the history of state examinations. In the last part of the review I analyze the contents of the special issue on Chinese spirits and demons.

Discrimination and the Church of England: To What Extent does the Equality Act 2010 Adequately Protect Church of England Clergy?

The extent to which members of the clergy are considered ‘employees’ for the purposes of secular employment and equality legislation has been the subject of much discussion, but essentially remains a fact sensitive question. The Equality Act 2010 (‘the 2010 Act’) seeks to prevent discrimination on the basis of nine ‘protected characteristics’. While recognizing that the application of the 2010 Act to the variety of clergy offices is ‘not straightforward’, the Church of England (‘the Church’) has opined that an equitable approach to clergy appointments is to proceed as if they were subject to the provisions of the 2010 Act. What follows is in`tended to be a thorough review of the eligibility criteria for clergy appointment in the Church to assess their compatibility with the requirements of the 2010 Act. In addition, particular consideration will be given to Schedule 9(2) to the 2010 Act which makes specific provision relating to religious requirements concerning the protected characteristics of sex, sexual orientation, and marriage and civil partnership. In short, where the employment is for the purposes of an organized religion, such as the Church, requirements which relate to these protected characteristics will not constitute discrimination where they engage the ‘compliance or non-conflict principle’. What these principles mean and how they might operate in practice is discussed below, taking into account the likely canonical and theological justifications for discriminating against certain individuals. Whether the law strikes the right balance between, on the one hand protecting clergy and, on the other, providing the Church with the autonomy to act in accordance with its established doctrine, will be explored in the final analysis.

Using local trust measures to form agent CoT groups1

IoT devices dealing with complex tasks usually require powerful hardware capabilities or, as a possible alternative, to get on the Cloud those resources they need. When an IoT device is “virtualized” on the Cloud, it can take benefit from relying on one or more software agents and their social skills to mutually interact and cooperate. In particular, in a Cloud of Things scenario, where agents cooperate to perform complex tasks, the choice of a partner is a sensitive question. In such a context, when an agent is not capable to perform a reliable choice then, like real social communities, it can ask information to other agents it considers as trustworthy. In order to support agents in their partner choices, we conceived a local trust model, based on reliability and reputation measures coming from its ego-network, adopted to partition the agents in groups by exploiting trust relationships to allow agents to be associated with the most reliable partners. To this aim, we designed an algorithm to form agent groups by exploiting available local trust measures and the results obtained in a simulated scenario confirmed the potential advantages of this approach.

Introduction: Indigeneity and Latin American Anarchism

The articles in this special issue frame the question of anarchism and indigeneity as historiography, but also as a commentary on the ways in which examining Latin American pasts can inform contemporary understandings of social movements in the region and beyond. In particular, our hope is that they will provoke further interest and research into how history reflects on the ongoing efforts by revolutionaries today, and by the diverse communities with which they engage, to imagine a future devoid of authoritarian and instrumentalist discourses and practices that continue to reproduce the inequities of state power, capitalist oppression, and colonial domination. The case can be made that while its historiography is in its early stages, anarchists in Latin America historically engaged the communities in which they immersed, in some localities more successfully than others. This issue of Anarchist Studies will show that Bolivia - largely ignored in the English-language literature on the subject - and Peru demonstrated early and ongoing efforts to approach indigeneity among Aymara and Quechua peoples in urban and rural settings (see de Laforcade and Hirsch). In Guatemala, however, which is at the heart of a vast regional geography of diverse Mayan peoples ranging from Honduras to Mexico, and in which the white and mestizo populations are a distinct minority, no such tradition emerged (see Monteflores). Raymond Craib has noted that in Chile, a country on the southern reaches of the Andes that produced a vibrant anarchist culture in the early 20th century, the anarchist archives show virtually no connection between the labour movement and the southern Mapuche peoples of Araucania. Beyond the simple question of whether anarchists acknowledged and engaged in solidarity with indigenous communities, however, there is the more sensitive question raised by Mexican sociologist Josué Sansón on the 'translatability' of anarchist ideas and practices among Peruvian rural communities, which he studied. Sansón argues that the transmission was not 'unidirectional', but rather a 'space of encounter in which some Aymara and Quechua communities received and appropriated them, reinterpreting and adapting them to them their own idioms of resistance in the creation of their own autonomous movements.'

Self-Administered Field Surveys on Sensitive Topics

Research on sensitive topics uses a variety of methods to combat response bias on in-person surveys. Increasingly, researchers allow respondents to self-administer responses using electronic devices as an alternative to more complicated experimental approaches. Using an experiment embedded in a survey in the rural Philippines, we test the effects of several such methods on response rates and falsification. We asked respondents a sensitive question about reporting insurgents to the police alongside a nonsensitive question about school completion. We randomly assigned respondents to answer these questions either verbally, through a “forced choice” experiment, or through self-enumeration. We find that self-enumeration significantly reduced nonresponse compared to direct questioning, but find little evidence of differential rates of falsification. Forced choice yielded highly unlikely estimates, which we attribute to nonstrategic falsification. These results suggest that self-administered surveys can be effective for measuring sensitive topics on surveys when response rates are a priority.

Material provision of the monasteries of the Vologda-Belozersk region in the XV-XVI centuries: source of economic growth and diminution of monastic ideals

Статья посвящена рассмотрению очень непростой темы, касающейся крайне болезненного вопроса для истории русского монашества XV-XVI вв.: быть или не быть материальным богатствам в монастыре? Этот вопрос породил на Руси в рассматриваемый период спор внутри монастырской среде: так называемых «стяжателей» и «нестяжателей». Не касаясь подробно спора этих двух партий, интересным представляется рассмотрение этого сложного процесса - наращивания мощи монастырского хозяйства, в среде известных монастырей Вологодско-Белозерского края: Успенского Кирилло-Белозерского, Покровского Дионисиево-Глушицкого и Введенского Корнилиево-Комельского. При этом показаны особенности подхода к монастырскому хозяйствованию на примере деятельности Кирилло-Белозерского и Дионисиево-Глушицкого монастырей. Несколько освещена взаимосвязь между ростом материального благополучия и снижением градуса подвижничества в северных русских монастырях. The article is devoted to a very difficult topic concerning an extremely sensitive question in the history of Russian monasticism in the 15th-16th centuries: to be or not to be material wealth in a monastery? This question gave rise in Russia at the period under consideration to a dispute within the monastic community: the so called moneyers and the nestorites. Without touching in detail the dispute between these two parties, it is interesting to consider this complex process - the increase in the power of the monastic economy - in the environment of the famous monasteries of the Vologda-Belozersk region: Assumption Kirillo-Belozersky, Pokrovsky Dionisyevo-Glushitsky and Vvedensky Kornilievo-Komelsky. The peculiarities of the approach to monastic management are shown on the example of the Kirillo-Belozersk and Dionisyevo-Glushitsy monasteries. The correlation between the growth of material well-being and the decline in the degree of asceticism in the northern Russian monasteries is somewhat illuminated.