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This study investigates the regulatory-operational dynamics of the premium market in Macau casinos using a constructivist grounded theory approach. Qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted with 25 participants from three stakeholder groups. The grounded theory analysis identifies seven core categories illustrating the impact of the new regulatory system on the premium direct and premium mass segments in casinos. These categories include regulatory changes and operational challenges, decline of gaming promoters, premiumization of the gaming market, new player retention strategies, cross-border player acquisition risks, presence of unauthorized agents in casinos, and non-gaming development amid international competition. These insights highlight four major regulatory impacts on the industry themes and operational trends, i.e., industry regularization, market premiumization, product diversification, and criminal fragmentation. This study also identifies specific regulatory mechanisms and operational management in premium gaming, such as premium player identification, enhanced operational procedures, multi-tiered market segmentation, and the provision of personalized services. Additionally, stakeholder perceptions of the new gaming regulatory system are explored, with casino and expert groups considering it necessary and junket participants finding it restrictive. From these findings, a conceptual model structured around regulatory functions, compliance, and improvement is developed to provide a theoretical regulatory framework that aligns with the characteristics of the gaming industry in Macau and possibly other gaming jurisdictions.

A very important yet little known front in the Russian Civil War existed in neighbouring Xinjiang, a region in China's northwest, that was at that time self-governing. In Xinjiang, Russian White Commanders and their troops gained sanctuary, financial assistance, food and shelter from Chinese provincial leaders, and then used those sanctuaries to launch operations against Soviet forces. However, by 1921, Red Army troops destroyed any remaining organised White forces, which then melted into the Chinese landscape. The ramifications of the Russian Civil War in Xinjiang had important impacts on the people of Xinjiang, and on Russia and China as well.

The Trinity, i.e., one God in three persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), is the core doctrine of Christianity. It confesses that God truly exists as one, and the three persons truly exist each in themselves. The seemingly paradoxical doctrine was from the beginning of the Church imprinted on the popular faith witnessed in the New Testament, the liturgy, especially the rite of baptism, and the catechetical practice. (Kelly, 1960/1968, pp. 88-90) Yet it took four centuries of controversies and synods to transform the initial faith into a doctrine. The main achievements were made in the 4th century: first, the Ecumenical Council of Nicaea I in 325 acknowledged the common substance of the Trinitarian persons by accepting the Greek term homoouios (homo means same, and ousios means being, substance, or essence); second, in the decades after Nicaea I, the common substance of the three and the distinctiveness of each person are expressed as “mia ousia, treis hypostaseis” (one substance, three persons). 三一论,即一体三位,是基督教的核心教义。它意味着天主为一、真实存在,同时天主拥有三个真实存在的位格,即圣父、圣子、圣神。这一看似自相矛盾的教义从教会建立之初就蕴含在《新约圣经》、礼仪(尤其是圣洗圣事)和信仰实践中。然而,这一原初的信仰要经过四个世纪的理论争辩和教会会议才被转化为教会教义。其中至关重要的是325年的尼西亚大公会议通过接受希腊词“同一体性(homoouios)”一词来表述圣父和圣子之间的关系,认定了天主圣三的共同体性;以及尼西亚大公会议之后,卡帕多西亚教父用希腊语中两个同为表示存在、体质的近义词ousia和hypostasis分别指代天主的同一体性和三位各自的独特存在,由此提出了“mia ousia, treis hypostaseis”(一体三位)这一三一论的经典表述。本文将根据哲学所提供的术语框架,阐述卡帕多西亚教父在三一论神学中对ousia和hypostasis的区分,然后阐释这种区分的神学意义。

With the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, we find ourselves living in a time of crisis. Our cultural and technological developments are being largely challenged. The pandemic tells us that the ultimate solution for all the problems we face is not in our own hands. God is where we find the final hope and salvation. In this regard, the present crisis may not be totally negative for our lives. To read the situation positively and even spiritually, we turn to the 4th-century Church Father Gregory of Nyssa, who is famous for his apophatic Mysticism. Viewing through the apophatic lens, the crisis has reminded us of the limitations of human intellectual power, which may turn our eyes to the final cause of the world, the ultimate meaning of life, and eventually what is essential for our final salvation. That is where we start our spiritual transformation anew.

內容摘要:古羅馬的普羅提諾作為新柏拉圖主義的開創者,針對亞里斯多德對柏拉圖理念論中無限逆推問題的批判,以第一原則太一作為世界的第一本原建構起自太一逐級向下生成各級存在的宇宙生成模式。在這個宇宙模式中,太一對理智的的生成決定了各級存在的生模式,並成為了普羅提諾理論體系的特點之一。本文對太一生成學說進行梳理,重點澄清作為太一生成的前提的太一的特性、太一生成中的核心概念「動能」和「雙重活動」,從而總結普羅提諾的生成觀的特色。

本文透過教父尼薩的額我略的早期著作《真福八端講道集》，探討其神學體系中天主的恩寵和人的自由之間的關係。作者著眼於天主的恩寵和人的自由在聖化過程中的動態關係，首先闡釋額我略對人的聖化即是回歸本性的縱向旅程的理解；其後具體分析該講道集中額我略對天主的恩寵（外在恩寵、內在恩寵）和人的自由（選擇的自由和自主性的自由）的理解；最後分析兩種恩寵和兩種自由在靈性旅程中本質上是並行發展、相容互惠的關係。

This article reports a case study of older adults learning English in China. It indicates how, founded on consequentialist ethics, risk analysis, and safeguarding, it was decided to use covert research, drawing on the confluence of risk analysis, risk evaluation, risk management, safeguarding, research ethics, and important contextual and cultural features. Ethical principles of nonmaleficence, beneficence, safeguarding, and protection were addressed, and account was taken of the strength, likelihood, and consequences of risks, safeguards, and benefits, informed by Chinese cultural contexts, values, behaviors, and features of teaching and learning based on andragogy and geragogy. Implications are drawn for teaching and learning with older adults, advocating significant account to be taken of contextual factors.

<jats:p>Personalized recommendation plays an important role in many online service fields. In the field of tourism recommendation, tourist attractions contain rich context and content information. These implicit features include not only text, but also images and videos. In order to make better use of these features, researchers usually introduce richer feature information or more efficient feature representation methods, but the unrestricted introduction of a large amount of feature information will undoubtedly reduce the performance of the recommendation system. We propose a novel heterogeneous multimodal representation learning method for tourism recommendation. The proposed model is based on two-tower architecture, in which the item tower handles multimodal latent features: Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) is used to extract the text features of items, and an External Attention Transformer (EANet) is used to extract image features of items, and connect these feature vectors with item IDs to enrich the feature representation of items. In order to increase the expressiveness of the model, we introduce a deep fully connected stack layer to fuse multimodal feature vectors and capture the hidden relationship between them. The model is tested on the three different datasets, our model is better than the baseline models in NDCG and precision.</jats:p>