成都万佛寺遗址出土《南朝双观音造像碑》 中的佛寺园林研究

魏晋南北朝是佛教发展的重要时期,但这一时期的 佛寺园林极少有形象资料可为研究佐证。成都万佛寺遗址出土 的《南朝双观音造像碑》碑阴清晰描绘了一处佛寺园林,提供 了此时期佛寺园林的重要图像资料。通过对这一图像的分析 与复原研究,可探知南北朝佛寺园林的空间格局与山、池渠、 植物等组成内容的营造特征,如寺院入口的渠池-桥-莲花模 式,主体建筑集中于前院,以乔木、灌木组合为层次丰富的植 物景观,并以孤植、蕉石组合等方式创造景观焦点;寺院后部 筑山植树,营造自然山林之意趣。该图像反映出佛寺园林的组 成、格局和造景特征受到皇家苑囿和士人园林的影响,同时为 满足佛教活动的需求又形成了自身的特点。     

学术转型视角下传统佛寺园林国内 研究进展

佛寺园林是风景园林学科的重要研究方向。20世纪以来传统佛寺园林研究适逢当时学术转型及其史学流变思潮，相关态势与其时学科分化及研究方法之转变并行不悖，值得以此为切入点研究发展脉络。从20世纪初至今的时间分期入手梳理佛寺园林相关研究成果，总结发现：70年代末以前寺园研究成果数量较少，尚有佛教园林研究专门化倾向，主要领域集中于建筑史学和造园学；70年代末至今的佛寺园林研究主要呈现佛道一体的园林叙述语境，但仍有学者以佛教为叙述逻辑进行园林研究且数量逐渐增多，该阶段研究内容与方法更为多元，为未来宗教主导下的寺园专门化研究指明了方向。意欲从学术与史学流变角度寻找佛寺园林的研究脉络、发展路径与热点方向，对寺园研究成果、经验进行一定的评析与体认，以期理清研究思路，不足之处请诸学者指正。     

风雨小佛寺

为保护世界最小古代佛寺而建的遗址博物馆,近日在新疆和田策勒县落成开馆。小佛寺的发掘者、中国社会科学院考古研究所新疆考古队队长巫新华博士在考古调查报告中指出。小佛寺的发现,为研究古代西域、古代于阗佛教艺术提供了第一手材料,对研究古代新疆南部和田地区佛教、佛教文化和壁画向河西走廊、中原、西藏等地的传播和发展都具有十分重要的意义。     

浅谈城市园林绿化经济

随着市场经济体制化的形成,园林绿化事业也随着时代的发展而发生着变革.其对改善生态环境、发展旅游、改善投资环境、提高人民生活质量具有不可替代的作用,在国民经济中的重要性日益突出.因此,壮大做强城市园林事业,已成为城市园林建设工作者亟需探讨和解决的课题之一.本文结合城市园林绿化经济的发展形势展开探讨,提出如何创新城市园林经济发展机制.     

旅游可持续发展的指标体系构建及其评价——以青岛为例的实证研究

对旅游可持续发展的定量评价是发现和解决旅游地旅游系统整体运行中复杂问题的一个有效手段.文章构建了旅游可持续发展指标体系,尝试应用层次分析法对旅游可持续发展系统做了层次总排序,并对青岛的旅游可持续发展水平进行了综合评价.最后得出,旅游业的发展绝不能以破坏旅游资源和旅游环境为代价;考虑社区因素是实现旅游业可持续发展的必然要求;旅游业应与其他产业形成良好的产业联动;教育先行,完善旅游基础设施,积极挖掘旅游可持续发展潜力.     

周文敏与长安佛寺

终南山是汉传佛教的圣地，有“汉传佛教第二策源地”之称。位于终南山中段的西安市长安区，著名佛寺有40多处。汉传佛教八大宗派中有四大宗派的开山祖师或发源地在长安。周文敏退休后着手撰写《长安佛寺》。成书17年后，已79岁高龄的他又增订再版，以了赵朴初先生为他题写书名时对他寄予的那份期许。     

塔里木盆地佛教文化遗存现状及保护研究

新疆塔里木盆地是西域佛教文化覆盖的核心地带,散布着众多佛寺遗址、佛塔、石窟等文化遗存。目前塔里木盆地佛教文物被盗掘现象时有发生,自然、人为因素的破坏,使塔里木盆地佛教文化遗存的保护迫在眉睫。建议在修复、加固遗址的同时加强文物保护立法,强化文物保护部门管理,处理好文物保护与旅游开发和城市建设之间的关系。     

加强科学管理完善城市园林绿地系统规划

城市园林绿地作为城市基础设施,是城市市政公用事业和城市环境建设事业的重要组成部分。它与工农业生产、人民生活、城市的建筑、道路系统、地上地下管线布局都有密切关系,为了更好地发挥园林绿地的综合功能,必须科学管理,完善城市园林绿地规划建设,只有形成园林绿地系统．才能收到保护生态环境、发展旅游、完善投资环境、改善人民生活条件的实效。     

千僖年,深圳能否建一座千年祈福公园

一、深圳的旅游业与经济市委书记张高丽在市二届人大六次会议上,提出要“把深圳定位于花园式、园林式、现代化国际性城市”.副市长郑通扬在今年的全市旅游工作会议上强调,要下决心“把深圳建成中国最佳旅游城市和世界旅游名城”.建成国际旅游名城需要进一步发展深圳旅游业和提升深圳园林档次,形成规模优势,整体优势.经过20年的发展,深圳经济的发展充实了旅游业的元     

论旅游城市总体形象与综合环境的资源价值

城市总体形象与综合环境已成为一对重要的旅游资源,它体现了一个城市的活力及由此形成的旅游综合吸引力。文章从城市总体形象和综合环境这两个概念分析入手,以杭州为例,阐述了城市总体形象和综合环境对旅游城市发展的贡献,并提出了塑造城市形象、优化城市综合环境的途径。     

Pleasure and belief in Hume's Decision Process

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to introduce explicitly pleasure and belief in what aims at being a Humean theory of decision, like the one developed in Diaye and Lapidus (2005a). Although we support the idea that Hume was in some way a hedonist – evidently different from Bentham's or Jevons' way – we lay emphasis less on continuity than on the specific kind of hedonism encountered in Hume's writings (chiefly the Treatise, the second Enquiry, the Dissertation, or some of his Essays). Such hedonism clearly contrasts to its standard modern inheritance, expressed by the relation between preferences and utility.

The reason for such a difference with the usual approach lies in the mental process that Hume puts to the fore in order to explain the way pleasure determines desires and volition. Whereas pleasure is primarily, in Hume's words, an impression of sensation, it takes place in the birth of passions as reflecting an idea of pleasure, whose “force and vivacity” is precisely a “belief”, transferred to the direct passions of desire or volition that come immediately before action. As a result, from a Humean point of view, “belief” deals with decision under risk or uncertainty, as well as with intertemporal decision and indiscrimination problems.

The latter are explored within a formal framework, and it is shown that the relation of pleasure is transformed by belief into a non-empty class of relations of desire, among which at least one is a preorder.     

Globalization,Neoliberalism and the attack on social security

Neoliberal political movements advocate privatization of public pension systems. Globalization imposes pressure on nations to conform to neoliberal policy views with respect to the design and structure of social insurance, including public pension systems. The paper begins with an investigation of the economic, ethical and ideological dimensions of the privatization debates in the U.S.; it argues that privatization advocates may be largely moved by ideology, since the other reasons advanced appear weak or unfounded. The second part discusses the history of Social Security, the purposes for its creation, and some of its economic effects. Differences between public and private pension systems are considered. A brief international comparison of some aspects of public pension system finance and benefit structures is presented. The final section considers the ethical, macroeconomic and distributional implications of privatization, prefunding and payroll tax funding, and argues for a pay as you go system financed with income taxes. In order to promote equity, economic security, community, and social cohesion, public pension systems should be universal in coverage. In order to reduce the inequality, income insecurity, and aged poverty generated by market economies, public pension systems ought to be progressive: benefit/contribution ratios should be inversely proportional to income, and progressive income taxes should finance the system. To promote economic growth, the systems should be financed on a pay-as-you-go basis, and should not be prefunded except for an emergency reserve. The fiscal policy recommendations partially depend upon the theory developed by Abba Lerner in the 1940s, and recently advanced by Wynne Godley and Randy Wray: Lerner's “principle of functional finance.”     

Interest on reserves and inflation

The payment of interest on reserves has been a common practice in inflationary economies. This policy may seem paradoxical since it involves returning part of the seigniorage, generated by the inflation process, with the intention to finance the fiscal deficit. This paper argues that the motivation for this policy can be captured by the discretionary regime, where the policymaker pays interest on reserves because he is concerned with the erosion of real liquidity by inflation, which is in part beyond his control. However, this policy is an unlikely outcome in the commitment regime, where the policymaker is in full control of inflation.     

Bayesian estimation of duration models: An application of the multiperiod probit model

The multiperiod probit model is presented and Bayesian estimation using the Gibbs sampler with data augmentation is described. As an empirical illustration, the multiperiod probit model is then used to estimate a duration model using employment duration data for the Canadian province of New Brunswick. Bayesian estimation with unobserved heterogeneity is shown to be a simple extension of estimation of a duration model with no unobserved heterogeneity. More importantly, perhaps, some numerical problems encountered by other authors using Maximum Likelihood are avoided.I would like to thank M. Baker, G. Koop, A. Melino and D. Poirier for helpful comments and discussions. I would also like to thank M. Baker for providing his data.     

Scenarios and creativity: Thinking in new boxes

To be creative and make change happen, leaders must do more than simply ‘think outside the box’, as the traditional business manuals suggest, using the popular American expression. After all, the space outside the box is infinitely expansive. Moreover, there can be no guarantee that a solution to the problem will be found. The answer: ‘Think in new boxes.’ This requires developing the right new box; in other words, useful new models, a helpful new approach to a problem. That is the real art of practical creativity. This short article outlines the approach (Thinking in New Boxes) and its application to classic scenario planning with a few examples. The authors also present the ‘Expressway to Scenarios’, an approach that wins in impact and practicality what it loses in deep analysis, by having top executives involved in key steps.     

Forecasting the price of gold

This article seeks to evaluate the appropriateness of a variety of existing forecasting techniques (17 methods) at providing accurate and statistically significant forecasts for gold price. We report the results from the nine most competitive techniques. Special consideration is given to the ability of these techniques to provide forecasts which outperforms the random walk (RW) as we noticed that certain multivariate models (which included prices of silver, platinum, palladium and rhodium, besides gold) were also unable to outperform the RW in this case. Interestingly, the results show that none of the forecasting techniques are able to outperform the RW at horizons of 1 and 9 steps ahead, and on average, the exponential smoothing model is seen providing the best forecasts in terms of the lowest root mean squared error over the 24-month forecasting horizons. Moreover, we find that the univariate models used in this article are able to outperform the Bayesian autoregression and Bayesian vector autoregressive models, with exponential smoothing reporting statistically significant results in comparison with the former models, and classical autoregressive and the vector autoregressive models in most cases.     

How chaebol restructuring after the 1997 crisis has affected corporate decision and performance in Korea: debt financing,ownership structure,and investment

ABSTRACT

Korean chaebol firms, characterized by excessive debt financing and overinvestment, experienced restructuring after the 1997 crisis. By reducing debt financing and thus overinvestment, they tried to reorganize financing structure and ownership structure. Chaebols’ debt reduction turns out to have improved performance. However, polarization between chaebol and non-chaebol firms has become more significant. Even after the crisis, firms that give higher cash flows to a controlling shareholder take more capital investment, indicating that agency problems still exist within chaebols. Chaebol-affiliated firms continue to be more active in R&D than non-chaebol firms. However, the pattern is limited to the group of top 10 chaebols after the crisis.

Abbreviations: KFTC: Korea Fair Trade Commission     

On the Role of Paradigms in Understanding Economic Globalization

Any adequate analysis of economic globalization necessarily requires fundamental understanding of the worldviews underlying the views expressed with respect to the nature and role of economic globalization. This paper is based on the premise that any worldview can be associated with one of the four basic paradigms: functionalist, interpretive, radical humanist, and radical structuralist. It argues that any view expressed with respect to economic globalization is based on one of the four paradigms or worldviews. It, therefore, discusses four views with respect to the nature and role of economic globalization which correspond to the four broad worldviews. The paper emphasizes that the four views expressed are equally scientific and informative; they look at the nature and role of economic globalization from a certain paradigmatic viewpoint. Emphasizing this example in the area of economic globalization, the paper concludes that there are opportunities for each paradigm to benefit from contributions coming from the other three paradigms.     

A Humean theory of choice of which rationality may be one consequence

For the reader who considers economic theory of choice as a special case of a more general theory of action, Hume's discussion of the determinants of action in the Treatise of Human Nature (1739?–?40), in the Enquiry on Human Understanding (1748) and in the Dissertation on Passions (1757) deserves attention. However, according to some modern commentators, Hume does not seem to have given any evidence that would favour what nowadays we would consider as the kind of rationality involved in modern theories of rational choice. On the contrary, this paper arrives at the conclusion that consistency between preferences and choice, like the usual properties of completeness and transitivity, may be considered as outcomes of a mental process, described by means of a decision algorithm that aims to represent Hume's theory of choice.     

The concept of freedom and its relation to economic development--a critical appreciation of the work of Amartya Sen

Following a brief review of the conception of freedom as employedin economic discourse, this paper focuses on the evolution ofthe concept of freedom in the work of Amartya Sen. It tracesthe development of Sen's thought from the capability analysisof the late 1970s to his more recent separation of freedom intoits opportunity and process aspects. While broadly appreciativeof Sen's development of the concept of positive freedom, thepaper identifies some difficulties arising from his definitionof capability as a set of options as well as from his separationof the opportunity and process aspects of freedom. Aspects ofthe relationship between Sen's conception of freedom and thatof Marx are discussed briefly in the context of Sen's recentdiscussion of the market as a source of freedom.