Research has independently highlighted the roles of semantic memory and associative abilities in creative thinking. However, it remains unclear how these two capacities relate to each other, nor ho...

Relevance deprivation syndrome refers to feelings of incompetence among retired people caused by them leaving their high status or influential jobs. The question then arises: do people in positions of power, like Danwei leaders in China, have a lower life satisfaction post-retirement compared to other groups? This study investigated the influence of serving as a Danwei leader before retirement on retirees’ life satisfaction, as well as differences in this influence and the channels through which they are affected. Based on the (...) data of 5,873 respondents of the 2018 China Longitudinal Aging Social Survey, ordinary least-squares, ordered logistic regression, and propensity score matching models were used to investigate the influence, differences, and influential mechanisms of serving as a Danwei leader before retirement on retirees’ life satisfaction. We found that Danwei leaders experience a significantly positive impact on their life satisfaction post-retirement. Second, the positive impact of having served in this role on peoples’ post-retirement life satisfaction is related to the resulting higher income, social status, and better living habits. In contrast to the perspective of relevance deprivation syndrome, in China, having been a Danwei leader before retirement has a significantly positive impact on peoples’ life satisfaction post-retirement, with there being a significant difference observed among different types of retired Danwei leaders. (shrink)

COVID-19 often manifests with different outcomes in different patients, highlighting the complexity of the host-pathogen interactions involved in manifestations of the disease at the molecular and cellular levels. In this paper, we propose a set of postulates and a framework for systematically understanding complex molecular host-pathogen interaction networks. Specifically, we first propose four host-pathogen interaction (HPI) postulates as the basis for understanding molecular and cellular host-pathogen interactions and their relations to disease outcomes. These four postulates cover the evolutionary dispositions involved (...) in HPIs, the dynamic nature of HPI outcomes, roles that HPI components may occupy leading to such outcomes, and HPI checkpoints that are critical for specific disease outcomes. Based on these postulates, an HPI Postulate and Ontology (HPIPO) framework is proposed to apply interoperable ontologies to systematically model and represent various granular details and knowledge within the scope of the HPI postulates, in a way that will support AI-ready data standardization, sharing, integration, and analysis. As a demonstration, the HPI postulates and the HPIPO framework were applied to study COVID-19 with the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO), leading to a novel approach to rational design of drug/vaccine cocktails aimed at interrupting processes occurring at critical host-coronavirus interaction checkpoints. Furthermore, the host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) relevant to COVID-19 were predicted and evaluated based on prior knowledge of curated PPIs and domain-domain interactions, and how such studies can be further explored with the HPI postulates and the HPIPO framework is discussed. (shrink)

This paper uses an innovative way to screen stocks and analyzes the relationship between corporate environmental responsibility and long-run stock returns. By our definition, an environmentally responsible (green) company gives no environmental concern and shows environmental strength(s). Using 20 years’ data of 1992–2011, we find evidence that environmentally responsible company outperforms, in the 4th to 7th year after the screening year. An equal-weighted environmentally responsible portfolio earned an annual four-factor alpha of 4.06 % in the 4th year, 3.00 % above (...) industry benchmarks, and 3.87 % above characteristic benchmarks. The results are robust to alternative portfolio weighting methodologies, controlling for firm characteristics, and the removal of outliers. Testing using industry-adjusted Tobin’s Q, we find consistent evidence that environmental strength creates firm value. We argue that environmental responsibility is an intangible asset, likely to be undervalued by the market, especially in the long horizon, thereby causing environmentally responsible companies to exhibit long-horizon excess returns. (shrink)

The rapid popularity of mobile shopping makes people’s lives more convenient, but it also makes it easier for customers to change providers. How to use marketing stimulus to retain customers has become an urgent concern for mobile sales companies. However, the theoretical researches in this field are not enough. For this reason, this study used the methods of literature review and structural equation to explore the effects of mobile marketing design factors on the continual intention of consumers in mobile shopping (...) by using the S-O-R model and its extended theories. The conclusions of the research showed that interface quality of mobile sales terminal and integrity of mobile sales terminal had significant positive impacts on consumption emotion; sales promotion in mobile sales terminal had a significant positive impacts on continual intention of mobile shopping; consumption emotion had a significant positive effect on continual intention of consumers in mobile shopping; consumption emotion played a significant mediating role in the relationship between interface quality of mobile sales terminal and continual intention of mobile shopping and between integrity of mobile sales terminal and continual intention of mobile shopping. The conclusions could not only enrich the theories of mobile shopping behavior but also provide guidance for companies to carry out mobile marketing activities and allocate marketing resources rationally. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo investigate the attitudes of Chinese parents regarding the storage of dried blood spots collected for newborn screening (NBS) and their use in research.MethodsWe conducted a hospital-based survey of parents and examined parental attitudes regarding (a) allowing NBS sample storage, (b) permitting use of children’s NBS samples for research with parental permission, and (c) permitting use of children’s NBS samples for research without parental permission.ResultsThe response rate was 52 percent. Of parents surveyed, 68 percent would permit their infant’s NBS sample (...) to be stored for at least some length of time. If permission is obtained, 69 percent of parents “strongly agreed” or “agreed” to permit use of the NBS sample for research. If permission is not obtained, only 14 percent of parents “strongly agreed” or “agreed.” There was no significant association between permitting use of NBS samples for research and parental gender, education, household income, number of children, or site of residence.ConclusionsThis is the first survey of Chinese parents regarding the use of NBS samples for different types of research, with results indicating that most parents would permit their infant’s sample to be stored and would support the use of NBS dried blood spots for research purposes. (shrink)

Hemispherical Resonator Gyro is a new type gyro with high precision, high reliability, shock resistance, no need of preheating, short start time, and long life. It is a kind of vibrating gyro with standing wave rotating along the sensitive base of annular precession, has a unique application prospect in the field of high precision inertial sensors, and is widely used in unmanned aerial vehicle control in complex environments. Based on the theory of the structure characteristics of the hemispherical resonator, the (...) mathematical model of energy of the resonator is established to research the rule of resonant frequency when the hemispherical resonator is rotated around the central axis. In this paper, the influence of precession factor, which are the top angle, the bottom angle, and wall unevenness of the hemispherical resonator, are analyzed. A series of hemispherical resonator models are constructed by ANSYS software to prove the results of theoretical research. The simulation results show that precession factor of the hemispherical resonator is more sensitive of the top angle than the bottom angle, and the error of angular velocity which is caused by the change of the top angle is larger than that which is caused by the change of the bottom angle. (shrink)

A key challenge in the management of the public-private partnership project is to understand the critical factors for sustainability performance as well as their complex interaction. Majority of existing studies focus on identifying general factors without consideration of specific context of individual sector. To bridge the gap, unique characteristics of water PPP projects are taken into consideration in this study where the relationship among critical factors to achieve sustainable performance is analyzed from a network perspective. Stakeholder-associated factors and their interrelations (...) were identified via extensive literature review and structured interview, and the social network analysis method was employed to recognize the critical factors and their interactions in sustainability achievement of water PPP projects. As a result, seven stakeholder groups and 18 critical factor nodes were identified and further classified into four challenges when achieving sustainability. These challenges are promoting ecological awareness and responsible citizen behaviour; project construction quality; ecological designs and technology innovations; and project management capacity. These findings provide the stakeholders of water PPP projects with useful references for mitigating the risks and facilitating efforts to achieve better sustainability performance. (shrink)

Greenway is a kind of corridors in the city that takes natural elements as the main constituent foundation and connects open spaces with functions such as leisure and recreation. The assessment of the built greenway is a review of the past construction experiences, and it is also a supplement and improvement to the future greenway planning concept system, which has important academic and application value. This study will explore how greenway design factors influenced the local cyclists’ perception of the landscape (...) using on-site questionnaire and photo rating method. The results indicated that greenways with continuous cycling paths, high security awareness, open landscapes, and rich human activities evoke positive perceptions. Among the visual elements, natural elements such as plants and sky are more favorable than artificial elements. The research results show that the formation of greenway cyclists’ landscape imagery is affected by visual perception elements, which suggests that special consideration should be given to the laws of cyclists’ mental perception when designing greenways. (shrink)

With the arbitrariness of family business decision-making and the complexity of interests become increasingly prominent, the transformation and innovation of family business are imminent. Under the above background, via analysis of data from 259 valid questionnaires from more than ten family businesses in China as a sample and with the help of the SPSS and AMOS, this study explored the impacts of identification on creativity of the family business as well as the mediating role of family business support by constructing (...) a mediating model. The results show that the employee’s identification has a positive impact on the creativity of the family business. Besides, identification has a positive impact on family business support and family business support has a partial mediating role between identification and family business creativity. Especially, the emotional support does not have a mediating role, whereas the instrumental support has a complete mediating role between identification and family business creativity. (shrink)

Presently, the State Grid Corporation of China has accumulated a large amount of maintenance records for power primary equipment. Unfortunately, most of these records are unstructured data which lead to difficultly analyze and utilize them. The emergence of natural language processing technology and deep learning methods provide a solution for unstructured text data. This paper proposes a progressive multitype feature fusion model to recognize Chinese named entity of unstructured maintenance records for power primary equipment. Firstly, the textual characteristics and word (...) separation difficulties of maintenance records are analyzed, then 7 main entity categories of power technical terms from unstructured maintenance records are chosen, and 3452 maintenance records are labeled by these categories, which is so called EPE-MR training dataset. Secondly, the standard test reports, standard maintenance, and fault analysis reports for three types of power primary equipment are employed as corpus to train character embedding in order to obtain certain words representation ability of maintenance records. After that, progressive multilevel radicals feature extraction module is designed to get detailed and fine semantic information in a hierarchical manner. Further, radicals feature representation and character embedding are concatenated and sent to BiLSTM module to extract contextual information in order to improve Chinese entity recognition ability. Moreover, CRF is introduced to handle the dependencies among prediction labels and to output the optimal prediction sequence, which can easily obtain structured data of maintenance records. Finally, comparative experiments on public MSRA dataset, China People’s Daily corpus, and EPE-MR dataset are implemented, respectively, which show the effectiveness of the proposed method. (shrink)

This study aimed to investigate the common predictive factors between social media addiction and eating disorder symptoms, in a group of Chinese female college students. A total of 216 students completed the behavioral assessments of cognitive flexibility and sustained attention, as well as the questionnaires on anxiety, social media dependence, and eating disorders. The results indicate that SMA is significantly correlated with EDS. Structural equation modeling was used to test the model in which state anxiety, cognitive flexibility, and sustained attention (...) predicted social gain and EDS. Additionally, the results confirmed the mediating role of cognitive flexibility and sustained attention between state anxiety and SMA/EDS in the participants. The findings revealed that in the sample group, state anxiety was related to SMA and EDS through cognitive flexibility and sustained attention. These proposals reflect the significance of improving cognitive flexibility/sustained attention and reducing state anxiety to prevent EDS and SMA in female college students. (shrink)

This study investigates the status quo and influencing factors of death attitudes and death anxiety among medical interns in China as measured by the Death Attitude Scale and Death Anxiety Scale following the outbreak of “Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia” in China in early 2020. Results of this study show that under the influence of COVID-19, in terms of death attitude, medical interns scored the highest in neutral acceptance and the lowest in escape acceptance. There were significant differences in death attitude and (...) anxiety among the groups with different backgrounds, including their families’ approaches to discussions of death, the number of funeral experiences, and other factors. There were two additional factors affecting attitudes that were related to the epidemic situation: whether the individual had participated in work to treat COVID-19 and whether their close friends or relatives had been diagnosed with COVID-19. The study reveals the ways that the epidemic had an impact on death attitude and death anxiety. (shrink)

Interval time-varying delay is common in control process, e.g., automatic robot control system, and its stability analysis is of great significance to ensure the reliable control of industrial processes. In order to improve the conservation of the existing robust stability analysis method, this paper considers a class of linear systems with norm-bounded uncertainty and interval time-varying delay as the research object. Less conservative robust stability criterion is put forward based on augmented Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional method and reciprocally convex combination. Firstly, the (...) delay interval is partitioned into multiple equidistant subintervals, and a new Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional comprising quadruple-integral term is introduced for each subinterval. Secondly, a novel delay-dependent stability criterion in terms of linear matrix inequalities is given by less conservative Wirtinger-based integral inequality approach. Three numerical comparative examples are given to verify the superiority of the proposed approach in reducing the conservation of conclusion. For the first example about closed-loop control systems with interval time-varying delays, the proposed robust stability criterion could get MADB about 0.3 more than the best results in the previous literature; and, for two other uncertain systems with interval time-varying delays, the MADB results obtained by the proposed method are better than those in the previous literature by about 0.045 and 0.054, respectively. All the example results obtained in this paper clearly show that our approach is better than other existing methods. (shrink)

As a result of the increasing public attention to environmental crises, corporate environmental actions and their effects are a current research hotspot. This study examines how two types of corporate environmental actions influence consumers’ perceptions of environmental legitimacy and subsequent purchase intentions. Using experimental method, this study finds that substantial environmental action induces significantly higher perceptions of environmental legitimacy than symbolic environmental action, this effect can be attenuated by corporate environmental reputation, and consumer-based environmental legitimacy has a significantly positive effect (...) on consumers’ purchase intentions. These findings have interesting implications for both researchers and practitioners involved in green marketing. (shrink)

Factory workers make up a large proportion of China’s internal migrants and may be highly susceptible to job and adaptation stress, negative affective states, and Internet gaming disorder. This cross-sectional study investigated the relationships between job stress, psychological adaptation, negative affective states and IGD among 1,805 factory workers recruited by stratified multi-stage sampling between October and December 2019. Structural equation modeling was conducted to test the proposed mediation model. Among the participants, 67.3% were male and 71.7% were aged 35 years (...) old or below. The prevalence of probable depression, probable anxiety, and IGD was 39.3, 28.7, and 7.5%. Being male, younger age, and shorter duration of living in Shenzhen were associated with higher IGD scores. Job stress was significantly associated with IGD but not with negative affective states. Psychological adaptation was significantly associated with negative affective states. Negative affective states were positively associated with IGD. The indirect effect of psychological adaptation but not job stress on IGD through negative affective states was statistically significant. The observed psychological correlates and mechanisms are modifiable, and can inform the design of evidence-based prevention programs for depression, anxiety, and IGD in this population. (shrink)

This article examines the mediation effect of brand identification and the moderating effect of service quality (SQ) on the effects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) association on service brand performance. A survey of customers of mobile telecommunications services was conducted. The study finds, first, that both CSR and SQ have direct effects on brand identification and customer satisfaction and indirect effects on customer satisfaction (via brand identification) and on service brand loyalty (via customer satisfaction and via "brand identification/customer satisfaction"). Second, (...) SQ enhances the effect of CSR on brand identification. This study contributes to the literature by incorporating three perspectives of service brand performance — CSR association, SQ, and brand identification - into one general framework that stresses (a) the mediating role of brand identification in predicting customer satisfaction and service brand loyalty; and (b) the interactive effect of CSR and SQ in predicting brand identification. (shrink)

A stuyd of the philosophy of the Chinese philosopher Thome Fang 方东美。.

Stem cell tourism—the flow of patients from home countries to destination countries to obtain stem cell treatment—is a growing business in China. Many concerns have been raised regarding fraudsters that operate unsafe stem cell therapies and an officialdom that turns a blind eye to the questionable technology. The Chinese regulatory approach to stem cell research is based on Guidelines and Administrative Measures, rather than legislation, and may have no binding force on certain institutions, such as military hospitals. There is no (...) liability and traceability system and no visible set of penalties for non-compliance in the stem cell legal framework. In addition to the lack of safety and efficacy systems in the regulations, no specific expert authority has been established to monitor stem cell therapy to date. Recognizing the global nature of stem cell tourism, this article argues that resolving stem cell tourism issues may require not only the Chinese government but also an international mechanism for transparency and ethical oversight. A stringent set of international regulations that govern stem cell therapies can encourage China to improve stem cell regulation and enforcement to fulfill its obligations. Through an international consensus, a minimum standard for clinical stem cell research and a central enforcement system will be provided. As a result, rogue clinics that conduct unauthorized stem cell therapies can be penalized, and countries that are reluctant to implement the reconciled regulations should be sanctioned. (shrink)

In order for higher education to provide students with up-to-date knowledge and relevant skillsets for their continued learning, it needs to keep pace with innovative pedagogy and cognitive sciences to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education for all. An adequate implementation of flipped learning, which can offer undergraduates education that is appropriate in a knowledge-based society, requires moving from traditional educational models to innovative pedagogy integrated with a playful learning environment (PLE) supported by information and communications technologies (ICTs). In this (...) paper, based on the design-based research, a task-driven instructional approach in the flipped classroom (TDIAFC) was designed and implemented for two groups of participants in an undergraduate hands-on making course in a PLE. One group consisting of 81 students as the experimental group (EG) received flipped learning instruction, and another group of 79 students as the control group (CG) received lecture-centered instruction. The EG students experienced a three-round study, with results from the first round informing the customized design of the second round and the second round informing the third round. The experimental results demonstrated that students in the EG got higher scores of summative tests and final scores than those in the CG. In particular, students’ learning performance in three domains (i.e., cognitive, affective, and psychomotor) differ significantly between the two groups. (shrink)

This study comparatively examines the dividends behavior in state-controlled firms versus family-controlled firms. With the sample of large industrial firms listed on the Main Board of Hong Kong Stock Exchange, we investigate the dividends payment rates, stability of dividends payment, the effects of firm size, profitability and growth opportunity on likelihood to pay dividends, as well as the concentration of dividend in state-controlled versus family-controlled firms. Based on the findings, we derive some ethical implications of dividends policy regarding the differences (...) in business ethical behavior, corporate social responsibility, corporate governance, business sustainability, and shareholder activism in state-controlled versus family-controlled firms, as well as the improvement in these respects through cross-listing in Hong Kong. (shrink)

This paper explores how English language has gradually become a linguistic form of cultural capital in China’s zigzag journey to modernization. It situates English’s status in flux in historical context, with an analysis at both the international and intra-national level. It showcases the necessity to embed cultural capital within Bourdieu’s full framework, and evidences the arbitrary nature of this form of cultural capital for its intimate tie to power and politics. By revealing how English has been officially consecrated as a (...) global lingua franca and then socially recognized for material and symbolic benefits, this paper implicitly problematizes the officially validated cultural hierarchy, argues that the value of a cultural capital is context-dependent, politically and socially constructed, inseparable from the field where it is produced. The present-day English manifests its symbolic power in classification and social stratification, entrenching the already entrenched inequality within and without the national state. (shrink)