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Computer‐aided fragmented cultural relics repair is an effective method instead of manual repair. The purpose of this paper is to provide a 3D digital patching system for computer‐aided cultural relics repair through using the scanned 3D data of fragmented cultural relics. It includes processes and tools that can be effectively used for fragmented cultural relics repair.

An automatic 3D digital patching for fragmented culture relics repair is designed. The framework includes a surface segmentation based on region dilation, feature extraction based on height‐map, pair matching and multi‐block matching.

The paper finds that the proposed 3D data patching is an efficient method for fragmented cultural relics repair.

Early and effective planning and implementation of computer‐aided fragmented cultural relics repair can significantly improve the reliability and availability of fragmented cultural relics repair.

The paper presents a uniform framework of 3D digital patching for fragmented cultural relics repair.

The paper is aimed to avoid the situation that historical relics are encroached, isolated and fragmented because of cities in the rapid urban process. Taking the environment around the Qinglong Temple in Xi'an city as an example and based on the characteristics of urban patterns in the history, this paper explores the spatial connection relationship between historical relics and surrounding villages as well as the connection between metro traffic and commercial bodies. At the end of the paper, the improvement strategy is put forward, namely the design concepts of “stepwise style” and “landscape style”, which can be achieved by the demand of ecological restoration and the relationship between urban axis. To be noted, the research shows, by restructuring new connection space, the city can promote the urban memory to be restored, the urban appearance to be reshaped, and the urban patterns in the history to be respected and displayed.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss some of the main UNESCO sites in China. The cases under study offer some insight into the complexity of the management of Chinese cultural organizations, as well as the problem of the presentation of China's heritage in a new global context.

The paper is based on field research in 2008/2009 on the Chinese sites on UNESCO's World Heritage List (WHL). While details of the research will be provided in a later stage, some interesting findings and patterns are emerging.

Building on the evidence of several case studies, a preliminary evaluation of the costs, the benefits and the negative outcomes of the listing process is presented in the second section. In a nutshell, the process appears to be increasingly expensive for local government and, despite the expectations for successful inscription onto the WHL, results in terms of increased tourism income are not always guaranteed. On the one hand, being listed raises the awareness of heritage protection among the general public but, on the other, there are also risks connected to tourism overexploitation.

From a methodological point of view the study points out the scarce quality of basic data regarding visitors and financial issues among Chinese World Heritage sites. This is particularly critical for sustainable development if it is considered that a World Heritage site should be accountable to the international audience. In the final section of the paper some open questions concerning sites' management models are presented.

Many historical urban cultural landscapes are suffering the effect of rapid urban economic development. This paper integrally relates historical sites in dispersed and point-shape distributions in cities and proposes strategies and methods for constructing urban linear cultural landscapes. As such, our work aims to form urban cultural landscape communities with an organic and linear distribution. The urban linear cultural landscape is not only an important means for integrally protecting and utilizing historical sites in historical cities but is also a special type of urban cultural landscape. The urban linear cultural landscape’s extensive application can enrich the theory of cultural landscape and protection methods of urban cultural heritage.

This study aims to evaluate the characteristics of climate change in Yunnan minority areas and identify an effective path to promote sustainable livelihoods based on climate change.

Taking Yunnan Province as an example, based on the expansion of the traditional sustainable livelihood framework, the authors constructed a system dynamics (SD) model of sustainable livelihood from the six subsystems of natural, physical, financial, social, human and cultural and tested the accuracy and effectiveness of the model with data from Cangyuan County. By adjusting these parameters, five development paths are designed to simulate the future situation of the livelihood system and determine the optimal path.

Climate change has exacerbated the vulnerability of people’s livelihoods. In future, each of the five development paths will be advantageous for promoting sustainable livelihoods. However, compared with Path I (maintaining the status quo), Path III (path of giving priority to culture) and Path IV (path of giving priority to economic development) have more obvious advantages. Path II (path of giving priority to people’s lives) gradually increases the development rate by promoting people’s endogenous motivation, and Path V (path of coordinated development) is better than the other paths because of its more balanced consideration.

The analytical framework of sustainable livelihoods based on the characteristics of minority areas is broadened. By constructing a SD model of the livelihood system, the limitations of traditional static analysis have been overcome and a development path for promoting sustainable livelihoods through simulation is proposed. This study offers a theoretical framework and reference method for livelihood research against the backdrop of climate change and a decision-making basis for enhancing climate adaptability and realizing sustainable livelihoods.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

This paper aims to explore some initial and necessarily broad ideas about the effects of the world wide web on our methods of understanding and trusting, online and off.

The paper considers the idea of trust via some of the revolutionary meanings inherent in the world wide web at its public conception in 1994, and some of its different meanings now. It does so in the context of the collaborative reader‐writer Web2.0 (of today), and also through a brief exploration of our relationship to the grand narratives (and some histories) of the post‐war West. It uses a variety of formal approaches taken from information science, literary criticism, philosophy, history, and journalism studies – together with some practical analysis based on 15 years as a web practitioner and content creator. It is a starting point.

This paper suggests that a pronounced effect of the world wide web is the further atomising of many once‐shared Western post‐war narratives, and the global democratising of doubt as a powerful though not necessarily helpful epistemological tool. The world wide web is the place that most actively demonstrates contemporary doubt.

This is the starting place for a piece of larger cross‐faculty (and cross‐platform) research into the arena of trust and doubt. In particular, the relationship of concepts such as news, event, history and myth with the myriad content platforms of new media, the idea of the digital consumer, and the impact of geography on knowledge that is enshrined in the virtual. This paper attempts to frame a few of the initial issues inherent in the idea of “trust” in the digital age and argues that without some kind of shared aesthetics of narrative judgment brought about through a far broader public understanding of (rather than an interpretation of) oral, visual, literary and multi‐media narratives, stories and plots, we cannot be said to trust many types of knowledge – not just in philosophical terms but also in our daily actions and behaviours.

This paper initiates debate about whether the creation of a new academic “space” in which cross‐faculty collaborations into the nature of modern narrative (in terms of production and consumption; producers and consumers) might be able to help us to understand more of the social implications of the collaborative content produced for consumption on the world wide web.

Recognizing the significant impact of guanxi (the Chinese network of reciprocal business relations) and its influence on everyday dealings in China is important for Western firms. Researchers argue that social capital has limits and is not a commodity that has a place in China aspiring to be a global business hub. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to deal with the question of whether guanxi still matters in the Chinese business arena, and if so, to what extent.

To illustrate the evolutional direction of the Chinese institutional system, the authors compare it to a similar system that went through the evolutionary cycle from a social to a rational institutional base of exchange and discuss what one can learn from the institutional evolution process of the global diamond industry and its implications for the current evolution of Chinese institutions. The authors compare two similar cultures/religions, Judaism and Confucianism.

This study found parallels between the evolution of the Israeli diamond industry, dominated by Orthodox Jews, from a social exchange mechanism to a transactional mechanism and the present ongoing rationalization of the Chinese economy, dominated by the Confucianism culture from a social to a transactional business mechanism.

Despite the vast efforts of researchers in the area of guanxi, there is very little published knowledge about its limitations and its usefulness in today's changing business environment. This paper contributes to the existing literature on the future aspects of guanxi from a unique perspective – the evolution of the Israeli diamond industry.

Those of us who look back on a lifetime of work in librarianship, documentation and education—what is nowadays called communication—are often tempted to try to define our terms. Subconsciously we are probably trying to separate the sheep from the goats. Precision in terminology is necessary, especially in the sciences. But what I am going to talk about is more akin to the arts. I would like to take a more general, broader view of our function, our stake in the continuity and the quality of civilization as a whole.

Presents the scientific methodology from the enlarged cybernetical perspective that recognizes the anisotropy of time, the probabilistic character of natural laws, and the entry that the incomplete determinism in Nature opens to the occurrence of innovation, growth, organization, teleology communication, control, contest and freedom. The new tier to the methodological edifice that cybernetics provides stands on the earlier tiers, which go back to the Ionians (c. 500 BC). However, the new insights reveal flaws in the earlier tiers, and their removal strengthens the entire edifice. The new concepts of teleological activity and contest allow the clear demarcation of the military sciences as those whose subject matter is teleological activity involving contest. The paramount question “what ought to be done”, outside the empirical realm, is embraced by the scientific methodology. It also embraces the cognitive sciences that ask how the human mind is able to discover, and how the sequence of discoveries might converge to a true description of reality.