Chinese international students constitute the largest proportion of overseas students in several English-speaking countries such as the UK and New Zealand. Little research has been done concerning those undertaking doctoral study. This qualitative study explores how Chinese overseas doctoral students become involved in church communities and how some of them convert to Christianity in New Zealand. In-depth interviews were conducted with nine Chinese doctoral students from different social backgrounds. Five of these reported varying degrees of interest in and commitment to (...) Christianity. Their narratives revealed that their conversion was a gradual and complex process as a result of the interplay between habitus, agency and contextual factors. These findings from a New Zealand context provide insights into non-academic experience of Chinese international students, particularly their religious experience. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyzed the periodicity of discrete Logistic and Tent sequences with different computational precision in detail. Further, we found that the process of iterations of the Logistic and Tent mapping is composed of transient and periodic stages. Surprisingly, for the different initial iterative values, we first discovered that all periodic stages have the same periodic limit cycles. This phenomenon has seriously affected the security of chaotic cipher. To solve this problem, we designed a novel discrete chaotic sequence (...) generator based on m-sequence and discrete chaotic mapping. The experimental results indicated that the chaotic sequence generator can generate pseudorandom chaotic sequences with large periodicity and good performance under the condition of limited computational precision. (shrink)

Low-dimensional chaotic mappings are simple functions that have low computation cost and are easy to realize, but applying them in a cryptographic algorithm will lead to security vulnerabilities. To overcome this shortcoming, this paper proposes the coupled chaotic system, which coupled the piecewise and Henon mapping. Simulation results indicate that the novel mapping has better complexity and initial sensitivity and larger key space compared with the original mapping. Then, a new color image encryption algorithm is proposed based on the new (...) chaotic mapping. The algorithm has two processes: diffusion and confusion. In this scheme, the key is more than 2 216, and SSIM and PSNR are 0.009675 and 8.6767, respectively. The secret key is applied in the shuffling and diffusion. Security analysis indicates that the proposed scheme can resist cryptanalytic attacks. It has superior performance and has high security. (shrink)