Your search

In 2014 Macao Baptist Church celebrated it’s 110th anniversary. How did the Baptist church come to be established in the Portuguese, predominantly Catholic and Buddhist city of Macao? Through careful examination of letters and reports from the main protagonists, John Laurels and Lilian Reeves Todd Galloway, the process of establishing the Baptist church can be revealed and understood within the greater context of the Baptist missionary work in China. The Galloway’s work will be evaluated through a framework of missions eras presented by Dr. Ralph D. Winter. This work looks at the material in two major sections; first, the lives of the Galloways in Macao from 1908 to 1968, and second, the missionary methods of the Galloways over the same period. Using missiological methods of the Kingdom Mission era, the Galloways stood firmly in the Church Mission era focusing their efforts on Personal rather than Social Transformation efforts. Their work laid the foundation for a century of Baptist work in Macao by local Christians as well as foreign missionaries.

Skip to Next Section Group-living animals must adjust the expression of their social behaviour to changes in their social environment and to transitions between life-history stages, and this social plasticity can be seen as an adaptive trait that can be under positive selection when changes in the environment outpace the rate of genetic evolutionary change. Here, we propose a conceptual framework for understanding the neuromolecular mechanisms of social plasticity. According to this framework, social plasticity is achieved by rewiring or by biochemically switching nodes of a neural network underlying social behaviour in response to perceived social information. Therefore, at the molecular level, it depends on the social regulation of gene expression, so that different genomic and epigenetic states of this brain network correspond to different behavioural states, and the switches between states are orchestrated by signalling pathways that interface the social environment and the genotype. Different types of social plasticity can be recognized based on the observed patterns of inter- versus intra-individual occurrence, time scale and reversibility. It is proposed that these different types of social plasticity rely on different proximate mechanisms at the physiological, neural and genomic level.

The pathophysiological mechanisms of arterial hypertension during hemodialysis (HD) in patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) are still poorly understood. The aim of this study is to investigate physiological, cardiovascular and neuroendocrine changes in patients with ESRD and its correlation with changes in blood pressure (BP) during the HD session. The present study included 21 patients with ESRD undergoing chronic HD treatment. Group A (study) consisted of patients who had BP increase and group B (control) consisted of those who had BP reduction during HD session. Echocardiograms were performed during the HD session to evaluate cardiac output (CO) and systemic vascular resistance (SVR). Before and after the HD session, blood samples were collected to measure brain natriuretic peptide (BNP), catecholamines, endothelin-1 (ET-1), nitric oxide (NO), electrolytes, hematocrit, albumin and nitrogen substances. The mean age of the studied patients was 43±4.9 years, and 54.6% were males. SVR significantly increased in group A (P<0.001). There were no differences in the values of BNP, NO, adrenalin, dopamin and noradrenalin, before and after dialysis, between the two groups. The mean value of ET-1, post HD, was 25.9 pg ml−1 in group A and 13.3 pg ml−1 in group B (P=<0.001). Patients with ESRD showed different hemodynamic patterns during the HD session, with significant BP increase in group A, caused by an increase in SVR possibly due to endothelial dysfunction, evidenced by an increase in serum ET-1 levels.

Nowadays, many university students (in Macau) are required to attend computer literacy courses to develop their basic skill levels and knowledge as part of their literacy foundation requirements. To be effective, such courses, which are very staff intensive and require access to expensive equipment and software, necessitate high levels of individual teaching. Evidence gathered at two study sites during this research, strongly suggests that many students may not be benefiting sufficiently from their computer literacy courses. Teachers frequently complain about the weak IT skills of many course graduates. This research proposes an innovative model for designing and delivering computer literacy courses based on constructivist principles, using peer-tutoring and blended learning to increase cost effectiveness and to improve student outcomes. Central to the model being proposed is the training and deployment of former course graduates as peer instructors and assessors. Constructivist principles provide a conceptual framework to ensure that the curriculum content, teaching strategies, learning styles and assessment procedures are properly aligned and fully understood by both the instructors and students to achieve high quality learning outcomes. An action research approach was used during the pilot and trail phases of the research to monitor the implementation of the model and evaluate its effectiveness using mixed methods. The planned two–phase action evaluation used a questionnaire to investigate the effectiveness of knowledge and skill transfer to students, and tutors’ learning progress; in-depth semi-structured interviews were used to survey, interpret and evaluate students’ and tutors’ perceptions of the new teaching and learning approach. Most respondents had a Confucian Heritage Cultural Background. For the first time, the research provides new insights into ways in which Confucian Heritage Cultural factors, interact with constructive principles in developing peer-tutoring methods in a university setting inMacau, and more widely

Hong Kong and Macau were politically reunified with Mainland China in 1997 and 1999, respectively. These two cities culturally originated from Mainland China, but due to their own colonial experiences, the Chinese cultural identities within Hong Kong, Macau, and Mainland China became different. The nature of Chinese cultural identities within Hong Kong and Macau were hybridized, and they have formed their own Chinese cultural identities with their own peculiarities. The Internet is a popular communication medium and it facilitates cultural communication inside and outside of these three places. The high-speed development of modern technology leads to the variety of services that emerge in the Internet, such as discussion forum, Blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc. These new and open spaces serve as a platform for ordinary people to express themselves in different ways. General observations in the Internet reveal that the discussion on Chinese cultural identity among Hong Kong, Macau, and Mainland China exists. The combination of self-identity and reconstruction of self-cultural identity are happening in these differently colonized places. Some local Chinese people in Macau, and Taiwanese in Taiwan, share this kind of experience as well. Meanings in different issues via different symbols are formed and they can be seen from the photos that circulate in the Internet using threads posted in Blogs or discussion forums. All these kinds of images or contexts become symbols of recognizable identities. Internet use, therefore, has facilitated the cultural communication between Hong Kong, Macau, Mainland China, and Taiwan. It has also intensified the enlightenment of Chinese cultural identity, showing and highlighting in effect the remnants of recognizable traits in these territories that were once colonized by different states. In essence, they may arguably have formed heterogeneous Chinese cultural identities. This study presents the uniqueness of the formation of Macau identity in comparison to Hong Kong, and how different it was from Hong Kong after the end of the colonial period. This ‘awakening process’, it is argued, provides a new perspective for understanding the attendant connotations and evaluations of cultural identities, and the different perspectives used to understand how the Internet is reshaping the social world. The reconstruction of cultural identity is a global issue and cultural hybridity is an essential element for reconstruction of self-cultural identity in the postcolonial period. This study employs postcolonial theory, along with observation, in-depth interview and online data collection and content analysis that were adapted during the course of the research, in order to discuss this phenomenon

The argument is raised that, in an age of the networked, connected society in an information-rich environment with communication possibilities as never before experienced or made possible, the displacement of educational virtues of morality, ethics and the development of all-round human beings, by those of money, labour, power and work are speeding apace, and the disconnect between system and lifeworld is increasing. Drawing initially on the work of Habermas, in which the colonization of the lifeworld occurs by system imperatives of rationalization, labour, money and power, the paper argues that such moves are manifested starkly in discourses of the relation between education and work, and five areas are introduced in which the links operate. The marketization and commodification of education, together with its incorporation into the service of capital and labour, are attested through a short worked example of one small territory within the larger context of China. Then, taking a lead from Sertillanges and Habermas’s later work, the paper argues for: (a) a reaffirmation of the importance of moral, ethical and spiritual dimensions of education; (b) the breaking of a narrowly instrumental, capital-acquisitive view of education as serving the jobs market and social control and towards a liberating view of education as communicative action and the development of being rather than simply behaving; (c) the importance of transcendence and immanence; and, thereby, (d) moves towards the re-integration of system and lifeworld in participating subjects.