This paper presents an adaptive fuzzy sliding-mode controller for multiple Euler–Lagrange systems communicated with directed topology. Based on the graph theory and Lyapunov–Krasovskii functions, a delay-dependent sufficient condition for the existence of sliding surfaces is given in terms of linear matrix inequalities. The asymptotic stability is analyzed by using the Lyapunov method in the presence of unknown parametric dynamics, actuator faults, and time-varying delays. The usage of adaptive techniques is to adapt the unknown parameters so that the objective of globally (...) asymptotic stability is achieved. Finally, simulation results are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme. (shrink)

The meshed control theory assumes that cognitive control and automatic processes work together in the natural attention of experts for superior performance. However, the methods adopted by previous studies limit their capacity to provide in-depth information on the neuromotor processes. This experiment tested the theory with an alternative approach. Twelve skilled golfers were recruited to perform a putting task under three conditions: (1) normal condition, with no focus instruction (NC), (2) external focus of attention condition (EC), and (3) internal focus (...) of attention condition (IC). Four blocks of 10 putts each were performed under each condition. The putting success rate and accuracy were measured and electroencephalographies (EEGs) were recorded. The behavioral results showed that the NC produced a higher putting success rate and accuracy than the EC and IC. The EEG data showed that the skilled golfers’ attentional processes in the NC initially resembled those in the EC and then moved toward those in the IC just before putting. This indicates a switch from more automatic processes to cognitive control processes while preparing to putt. The findings offer support for the meshed control theory and indicate the dynamic nature of neuromotor processes for the superior performance of athletes in challenging situations. (shrink)

Objectives: To quantify the use of do-not-resuscitate orders in a tertiary-care children’s hospital and to characterise the circumstances in which such orders are written.Design: Retrospective study conducted in a 500-bed children’s hospital in Taiwan.Patients: The course of 101 patients who died between January 2002 and December 2005 was reviewed. The following data were collected: age at death, gender, disease and its status, place of death and survival. There were 59 males and 42 females with a median age of 103 months (...) . 50 children had leukaemias, and 51 had malignancies other than leukaemia. The t test and the χ2 test were applied as appropriate.Results: The study found that 44% of patient deaths occurred in the paediatric oncology ward; 29% of patient deaths occurred in the intensive care unit; and 28% of patients died in their home or at another hospital. Other findings included the following: 46 of 101 patients died after attempted cardiopulmonary resuscitation and 55 died with a DNR order in effect. The mean age at death was 9.8 years in both groups with or without DNR orders.Conclusions: From the study of patient deaths in this tertiary-care children’s hospital, it was concluded that an explicit DNR order is now the rule rather than the exception, with more DNR orders being written for patients who have been ill longer, who have solid tumours, who are not in remission and who are in the ward. (shrink)

The preceding chapter listed the measures Ch'in Shih-huang took to consolidate the unification. Before all this, the state of Ch'in, through Shang Yang's reforms, had eliminated the hereditary privileges of the aristocracy, dealt a severe blow to the power of the slave-owning aristocracy, instituted the system of landownership by the landlords, established the system of commanderies, unified weights and measures, and carried out the policy of "emphasizing agriculture and restricting commerce," so as to enable the landlord economy to achieve (...) greater expansion in the state of Ch'in. Now Ch'in Shih-huang went a step further to propagate Shang Yang's Legalist policies, liquidated the aristocracy in the six states to the east, abolished the system of installing hereditary nobles to rule their domains throughout the country, and universally implemented the system of commanderies and prefectures. He also abolished the old aristocratic political structures maintained by the six states, established a centralized feudal system of dictatorship, and thus dealt a blow to the landownership system of the remnant slave-owning aristocracy. By means of laws and regulations, he established throughout the country the system of landownership by landlords and continued to adhere to the policy of "emphasizing agriculture and restricting commerce," promoted the development of the landlord economy, abolished the divergent laws and regulations of the six states, and put into effect throughout the country new laws and regulations representing the interests of the newly rising landlord class. He also standardized weights and measures, unified the written language, and fixed the length of axles of all carts. Generally speaking, during the first stage of the establishment of a unified, centralized feudal state, Ch'in Shih-huang, as the general representative of the newly rising landlord class, carried out a series of measures that "emphasized the present while slighting the past" and initiated a series of important political, economic, and cultural reforms. The "present" he "emphasized" was the newly rising landlord class, and the "past" he "slighted" was the declining old aristocracy. As a result, the Ch'in dynasty was able to exert a definite stimulating influence in the process of monumental historical transformation, to put an end to the prolonged period of division and rivalry among the feudal states, to unify our great multinational country, and to set up the largest centralized feudal state up to that time. To be sure, the Ch'in dynasty was after all a political regime of the landlord class. It was a machine of the landlord class to exploit and oppress the peasant masses. This is something we must recognize. (shrink)

The essays on aesthetics in recent publications, beginning with the criticisms of Chu Kuang-ch'ien's point of view in aesthetics and continuing down to his article "How Can Aesthetics be Materialistic and Dialectic?" [Mei-hsüeh tsen-yang ts'ai neng shih wei-wu ti yu shih pien-cheng ti?"], have focused on the problem of the relationship between the subjective and the objective in beauty and in sense of beauty. This is a fundamental problem in aesthetics, and only when we have solved this problem can (...) we answer the questions of what beauty is and wherein beauty lies. Some people have presented their own tentative answers to these questions, and these have been discussed by our comrades. (shrink)

_A wide ranging consideration of the work of contemporary ethicist David Wong._.

Tu Weiming Tu Weiming is one of the most famous Chinese Confucian thinkers of the 20th and 21st centuries. As a prominent member of the third generation of “New Confucians,” Tu stressed the significance of religiosity within Confucianism. Inspired by his teacher Mou Zongsan as well as his decades of study … Continue reading Tu Weiming →.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1898 Edition.

The article presents a methodological update on the lexical profile of informal spoken English with the emphasis on movies, television programs, and soap operas. The study analyzed Mark Davies’s mega-corpora with data containing approximately 625 million words and employed Paul Nation’s comprehensive and up-to-date British National Corpus/Corpus of Contemporary American English wordlists. Data from the analyses showed that viewers would need a vocabulary knowledge at 3,000 and 5,000 words frequency levels to understand 95 and 98% of the words in scripted (...) dialogs, respectively. Soap operas were found to be less lexically demanding compared to TV programs and movies. Findings are expected to fill in the methodological gaps between vocabulary assessment and vocabulary profiling research. (shrink)

Local item dependence is one of the most critical assumption in the Rasch model when it comes to the validity of a test. As the field of vocabulary assessment is calling for more clarity and validity for vocabulary tests, such assumption becomes more important than ever. The article offers a Rasch-based investigation into the issue of LID with the focus on the two popular formats of Vocabulary Levels Tests : multiple-choice and matching. A Listening Vocabulary Levels Test and an Updated (...) Vocabulary Levels Test were given to a single cohort of 311 university students in an English as a Foreign Language context. The analyses of raw score and standardized residuals correlations were conducted. The findings found no relationship between the 4-option, multiple-choice format of the LVLT and item local dependence. However, results from score and standardized residuals correlations analyses showed a strong link between the 3-item-per-cluster, matching format and item local dependence. The study calls for greater attention to the format of future vocabulary tests and support the use of meaning-recall formats in vocabulary testing. (shrink)

It is not uncommon for business institutions to position themselves as stakeholder-caring companies or organizations. However, there is little research on conceptualizing stakeholder-caring as a component of brand image. Through a theoretical lens of brand-consumer interactions, this paper introduces a new construct—stakeholder-caring image—and proposes a model that examines stakeholder-caring’s antecedents (integrity and courtesy) and its consequence (customer satisfaction). The two antecedents—integrity and courtesy—capture intrinsic and extrinsic aspects of brand-consumer interaction practice, respectively, while the consequence (customer satisfaction) is one important behavioral (...) outcome in marketing. The proposed model was tested with Hong Kong customers (n = 296) via a systematic survey. The data were analyzed using LISREL. Several measurement and structural models were constructed to test the proposed hypotheses. The findings reveal that the effect of integrity on customer satisfaction is mediated by a stakeholder-caring image. However, contrary to the conventional wisdom, we surprisingly find that courtesy is not effective to build a stakeholder-caring image. Managerially, this research offers guidance on how to develop stakeholder-caring image and subsequently increase customer satisfaction. In addition, we discuss the nuanced distinction between a stakeholder-caring image and related brand constructs, such as “sincerity” in Aaker’s (1997) brand personality framework. (shrink)

What am I? There are a number of possible answers: I am a person, a mind, a human animal, a soul, part of a human being (e.g., a brain), I do not exist, and even more. Philosophers have been asking this for thousands of years and were not satisfied. In the contemporary analytic tradition, philosophers are attracted to a naturalistic, scientific ontology hence a materialistic personal ontology that matches the huge success in scientific discoveries. They think that we are material (...) objects. However, their views do not match our intuition about some cases regarding our survival. Also, the possibility of an afterlife is eliminated. In my thesis, I explain the shortcomings of current philosophical theories, and develop a better account. I propose the Conscious Subject View, according to which (1) I am a subject of experience, a mental entity whose essential property is to be conscious, and (2) Subjects have haecceities, a property that makes an object a different object from other objects even if they are qualitatively identical with it. I provide two arguments for the claim that we are essentially subjects. The first is the Essentiality Argument. I first define an egoistic concern as one such that necessarily, my concern about X can be egoistic if and only if I exist and persist as X. Furthermore, I argue that necessarily, I can be egoistically concerned with an entity E if and only if E is numerically identical with my subject of experience. I then conclude that we are essentially subjects of experience. My second argument, which I call the Argument of Persistence, is that we have the intuition that we persist only when there is the gradual replacement of the brain. I argue that the best candidate to explain this intuition is that we persist as subjects of experience. I further offer a conceivability argument for the claim that haecceity of the subject determines its persistence. I defend a mentally-oriented proposal regarding our nature by examining the essential properties of our existence. It solves most of the problems with the materialistic personal ontology and shows the theoretical advantages of a long-neglected approach. (shrink)

This paper aims at revealing the various meanings of schools as more than built physical environments from a geographical‐phenomenological (or ‘geo‐phenomenological’) perspective. This paper consists of five sections: the first explicates the meaning of ‘geo‐phenomenology’; the second reveals the meaning of ‘environment’ and a dialectics of strangeness and intimacy through geo‐phenomenological analysis; the third examines the meanings of environment as ‘space’ and ‘place’ and the act of naming as the process of constructing meaning between humans and environment; the fourth section (...) attempts to explore the meaning of conceiving school as a particular environment; and the final is the conclusion. (shrink)

Insanity is identified with irrationality, while rationality is considered to be the mark of sanity. Yet we want to say that rationality could be the cause of insanity. We can see a subtle kind of insanity inherent in an institution believed to be highly rational. Rationality in an ideological belief also turns into rational insanity when the ideology itself works for the interest of the advantaged as a tool of deception. We believe in the rationality of open communication. We believe (...) that information technology has given us the most rational means for open communication. The Internet revolution or Internet democracy is expected to become the most rational means for the institutional goal of democracy. However the rationality of Internet communication has demonstrated a serious tendency to cause Internet insanity. We have been proud of being 'rational animals'. But now we are concerned because 'rational animal' could mean 'rational but animal-like' or 'rational but impulsive', which in turn could mean 'rational but violent' or 'rational but mad and insane'. Perhaps it is time for us to think seriously about the possibility of mass insanity through rational insanity, and seek the way beyond such rational insanity. (shrink)

Hawking, in his book, A Brief History of Time, concludes with a conditional remark: If we find a complete theory to explain the physical world, then we will come to understand God’s mind. With Goedel in mind, we can raise questions about the completeness of our scientific understanding and the nature of our understanding with regard to God’s mind. We need to ask about the higher order of our understanding when we move to knowing God’s mind. We go onto develop (...) these problems with Nietzsche’s thoughts on the death of God, and the emergence of super human intelligences. Then, we come to Buddha, a logical genius, to see how the Buddhistic enlightenment exemplifies the super human intelligence, as well as the higher order understanding in our knowledge of God’s mind. (shrink)

In epistemic logic, the beliefs of an agent are modeled in a way very similar to knowledge, except that they are fallible. Thus, the pattern of an agent’s true beliefs is an interesting subject to study. In this paper, we conduct a systematic study on a novel modal logic with the bundled operator ⊡ϕ:=□ϕ∧ϕ as the only primitive modality, where ⊡ captures the notion of true belief. With the help of a novel notion of ⊡-bisimulation, we characterize the expressivity of (...) this new language on relational models, and offer various completeness results. We also discuss some interesting connections between our work and previous works on reflexive-insensitive logics and the so-called boxdot conjecture. Finally, we study two generalizations of the ⊡-operator: one is the iterated true belief operator □nϕ:=ϕ∧□ϕ∧⋯∧□nϕ, the other is the neighborhood semantics for the ⊡-operator. (shrink)

本书透过数十部原典的资料,对于印度民族,历史和宗教,有简要的介绍,而对各宗各派的哲学思想,则有详尽的分析和讨论.

The modal account of luck has become very popular and influential in the past decade. More recently, some of its proponents have also put forth a modal account of risk and argued that we ought to apply it to problems both in and out of philosophy. This paper tries to show that modal conceptions of luck and risk are mistaken.

本书内容涉及刑法属性论,刑事责任基本范畴研究,死刑论,我国对犯罪的惩办与宽大相结合的政策,中国的青少年犯罪和治理对策等方面。.

The present study analyzed the vocabulary profile of the News on the Web corpus, which contained 12 billion words from online newspapers and magazines in 20 countries to determine the vocabulary knowledge needed to reasonably understand online newspaper and magazine articles. The results showed that, in general, knowledge of the most frequent 4,000 word families in the British National Corpus/Corpus of Contemporary American English wordlist plus proper nouns, marginal words, transparent compounds and acronyms was necessary to gain 95% coverage for (...) the NOW corpus. However, when it came to the 98% coverage, online newspaper and magazine articles from different countries had relatively distinct lexical demands. In-depth analyses were carried out and the findings offered comprehensive insights into the issue. Implications for teaching and learning were also provided. (shrink)

In _On Human Action and Practical Wisdom_, Yang Guorong offers a description of wisdom and action based on his “concrete metaphysics.” Yang attempts to go beyond the excessively linguistic, logical, and abstract focus found in the American analytic tradition.

Samuel Phillips Huntington was an influential American political scientist. He was also a consultant to various America government agencies. He upholds the idea of conservative realism in politics. His research covers several areas of political science, such as civil-military relations, modernization and political development, comparative politics, and international relations. Regarding the role of military, he argues for autonomous military professionalism. In discussing about modernization of developing countries, he emphasizes the priority of political order over democracy. In the case of America, (...) as well as other democratizing countries, he worries that the excess of political participation would diminish the authority and effectiveness of state governance, enhancing political instability, and, at worst, leading to the reverse of democratization. After the end of the Cold War, Huntington characterizes the international order as multicivilizational, in which the clash of civilizations will direct the development of global politics. In such a multicultural situation, Huntington urges Americans to affirm their unique national identity by revitalizing Anglo-Protestant culture and its religiosity which has defined America since its founding. (shrink)

In today’s global higher education environment, international students represent not only an important source of external income for universities: the degree of cross-border student mobility also reflects the internationalization of higher education sector. Universities have engaged in efforts to sell themselves to prospective students and promotional videos are among the most widely used marketing tools for this purpose. This study reports the results of a study analyzing the content of 140 higher education promotional videos from 14 countries available on YouTube. (...) The results reveal that while the pattern of use of YouTube for two-waycommunication with viewers, information contents and appeal messages among sampled universities is fairly homogenous, some marked differences emerge when cultural background and global position ranking of the university are taken into account. The implications of these findings are that, although, transnational higher education has been profoundly globalized, culture still plays a significant role in marketing practice for the recruitment of mobile students. In addition, different universities have various student-targeted segments. These findings provide the basis of a series of recommendations for universities looking to optimize their use of YouTube and promotional video design to market to international students. (shrink)

This study proposed and examined a conceptual framework on the influence of real estate brokers’ personalities, psychological empowerment, social capital, and knowledge sharing on their innovation performance, and used moral hazard as a moderating variable. We used structural equation modeling for data analysis and estimation. The participants were real estate brokers in Kaohsiung City. A total of 1,000 questionnaires were administered to 100 branch offices of real estate companies, 571 of which were later recovered from 80 branch offices. After removing (...) 52 for being invalid, we were left with 519 valid questionnaires, indicating a 51.9% recovery rate. The empirical results suggest that the real estate brokers’ personalities and psychological empowerment positively and significantly influence social capital; personality and psychological empowerment also positively and significantly influence their innovation performance; and social capital significantly influences knowledge sharing, which in turn positively and significantly influences the brokers’ innovation performance. In environments with higher levels of moral hazard, the influence of social capital on the brokers’ knowledge sharing is significantly diminished. (shrink)