Is the Christian teaching on sin a ‘stumbling block’ to Chinese accepting Christianity? This paper critiques the notion that Chinese have difficulty comprehending ‘sin’ because of the culture's long-standing belief in the humanistic potential for self-perfection without any reference to the divine. This view of Chinese culture has been too narrow and does not account for the fact that Chinese religious traditions have always had at their disposal a wide variety of resources to comprehend the Christian concept of sin. Incorporating a history-of-practice perspective can contribute to a more productive balance between the representation of Chinese culture and its actual practice and avoid the current tendency to posit Western theology against a narrowly constructed and idealised version of Chinese culture that is severed from both historical and present-day realities.

Few societies have experienced the pace of change that China has in the last half century. Massive ideological and socio-economic shifts, along with the more recent forces of globalization, have produced a culture that is now hybrid and fragmented. Thus, it is simply no longer viable, or even wise, to continue to think of Chinese culture primarily in terms of “traditional” or Confucian. Instead, concepts of hybridity, fractured narratives, and the expressive self offer us much more productive conceptual lenses both for understanding contemporary Chinese culture and for informing future missiological research.

In order to resolve the causality dilemma of which comes first, accurate design rules or real designs, this paper presents a flow for exploration of the layout design space to early identify problematic patterns that will negatively affect the yield.A new random layout generating method called Layout Schema Generator (LSG) is reported in this paper, this method generates realistic design-like layouts without any design rule violation. Lithography simulation is then used on the generated layout to discover the potentially problematic patterns (hotspots). These hotspot patterns are further explored by randomly inducing feature and context variations to these identified hotspots through a flow called Hotspot variation Flow (HSV). Simulation is then performed on these expanded set of layout clips to further identify more problematic patterns.These patterns are then classified into design forbidden patterns that should be included in the design rule checker and legal patterns that need better handling in the RET recipes and processes.

This paper explores how loss-framed incentives affect behavior in a multitasking environment in which participants have more than one way of recovering (expected) losses. In a real-effort laboratory experiment, we offer participants task incentives that are framed as either a reward (gain) or penalty (loss). We study their responses along three dimensions: performance in the incentivized task, theft, and voluntary provision of help. We find that framing incentives as a penalty rather than as a reward does not significantly improve task performance, but it increases theft and leads to a small and insignificant reduction in the share of participants willing to help the experimenter. Secondary analyses based on our theoretical framework help us pin down the mechanism at play and suggest that loss aversion drives participants’ response. Our findings have important implications for incentive design in practice. This paper was accepted by Axel Ockenfels, behavioral economics and decision analysis.

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