Paper folding is a common activity in East Asian kindergartens, but its potential value to early spatial skills have not been empirically explored. This study aims to investigate whether and how paper folding skills can predict spatial ability in the early years. Altogether 101 preschoolers were randomly sampled from two Hong Kong kindergartens and invited to complete the map-use and the paper folding tasks. The paper folding task taps two levels of children’s paper folding skills: Basic Folding Skill and Advanced (...) Folding Skill. The parents reported the demographic information and their involvement in spatial activities at home. The results indicated the following: there was a significant age-related increase in the paper folding performance; child age could significantly predict both BFS and AFS, while parental involvement could only predict BFS ; after controlling for confounders, paper folding skills could significantly predict SA as measured by the map-use task; BFS was found to mediate the relationship between parental involvement and SA. The educational implications of these findings are also discussed. (shrink)

As liberal democracies, what can the United States, Europe, and Japan be expected to embrace as “democratic” solutions to global environmental problems such as climate change? It is our argument that contradictions in liberal democratic politics lead these states to advocate solutions that are nature-as-commodity oriented and that idealize the notion of “managed nature.” In the case of climate change, we specifically argue that liberal democracies can be expected to pursue a policy regime of “efficient global warming.”.

Han Wei liang Jin Nan Bei chao fo jiao shi -- Wei Jin xuan xue lun gao -- Ping jin ren zhi wen hua yan jiu -- Wen hua si xiang zhi chong tu yu tiao he.

An energy efficiency scenario (Joint Institute for a Sustainable Energy and Environmental Future) demonstrates that an energy future built on the use of cost-effective, high-efficiency technologies is clearly within the grasp of South Korea and would justify a nuclear power moratorium with significantly lower carbon dioxide emissions. This is a promising result, especially because applications of other sustainable energy options, such as renewables, decentralized technologies, material recycling/reuse, ecologically based land use planning, forest conservation, sustainable agriculture, and redirection of economic development (...) toward an environment-friendly industrial base, are not included in the analysis. Here lies one of the most fundamental policy choices of the newcentury: Will we build a sustainable energy and environmental future, or will we send forward the burdens and risks of a policy regime that is unwilling to value the future beyond the satisfaction of short-term interests and convenience? It is a critical time for South Korean policy making. (shrink)

Previous literature has demonstrated that ethical leadership could predict employees’ voice behavior. However, it’s not clear how to heighten these positive effects of ethical leadership on employees’ voice behavior. Building on the AET and moral disengagement studies, we developed an integrated model. A three-wave field study investigated the relationship between ethical leadership and voice behavior by focusing on the mediating role of employees’ affective commitment and the moderating role of employees’ moral disengagement. Our matched data analysis results indicated that: employees’ (...) affective commitment partly mediated the relationship between ethical leadership and employees’ voice behavior. In addition, employees’ moral disengagement moderated the effect of ethical leadership on employees’ affective commitment and the effect of employees’ affective commitment on voice behavior, similarly, the indirect effect of ethical leadership on employees’ voice behavior via employees’ affective commitment. Theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed. (shrink)

Fisher, Jin, and Scott push a central assumption of syntactic bootstrapping: that learners have a universal bias to map each noun in a sentence onto a participant role (i.e., argument of the verb). They propose two enrichments: First, that children use both semantic and syntactic information in representing nouns that accompany a verb; second, that children expect continuity across a discourse. They provide evidence for both learning mechanisms among young children, further spelling out the precise mechanisms underlying syntactic bootstrapping.

Despite the prevailing discourses on the importance of top management ethical leadership, related theoretical and empirical developments are lacking. Drawing on institutional theory, we propose that top management ethical leadership contributes to organizational outcomes by promoting firm-level ethical and procedural justice climates. This theoretical framework was empirically tested using multi-source data obtained from 4,468 employees of 147 Korean companies from various industries. The firm-level analysis shows that top management ethical leadership significantly predicts ethical climate, which then results in procedural justice (...) climate that fully mediates the effects of top management ethical leadership on two organizational outcomes, namely, firm-level organizational citizenship behavior and firm financial performance. The present study provides a plausible theoretical account and empirical validation of a mechanism through which top management ethical leadership enhances organizational performance. (shrink)

Transcranial magnetic stimulation, as a relatively new type of treatment, is a safe and non-invasive method for pain therapy. Here, we used CiteSpace software to visually analyze 440 studies concerning transcranial magnetic stimulation in pain research from 2010 to 2021, indexed by Web of Science, to clarify the research hotspots in different periods and characterize the process of discovery in this field. The United States ranked first in this field. Lefaucheur JP, Fregni F, and Andrade ACD made great contributions to (...) this field of study. The most prolific institution was University of São Paulo. The four main hot keywords were neuropathic pain, motor cortex, connectivity, and non-invasive brain stimulation. There were three main points that were generally accepted: definite analgesic effect of high-frequency rTMS of M1 contralateral to pain side in neuropathic pain; there are inconclusive recommendations regarding rTMS of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in fibromyalgia and neuropathic pain; there is low-quality evidence that single doses of high-frequency rTMS of the motor cortex may have short-term effects on chronic pain. This bibliometric analysis indicated that prospective, multi-center, large-sample, randomized controlled trials are still needed to further verify the effectiveness of various transcranial magnetic stimulation parameters in pain research. (shrink)

Antibiotic resistance in bacteria has become a great threat to global public health. Tigecycline is a next‐generation tetracycline that is the final line of defense against severe infections by pan‐drug‐resistant bacterial pathogens. Unfortunately, this last‐resort antibiotic has been challenged by the recent emergence of the mobile Tet(X) orthologs that can confer high‐level tigecycline resistance. As it is reviewed here, these novel tetracycline destructases represent a growing threat to the next‐generation tetracyclines, and a basic framework for understanding the molecular epidemiology and (...) resistance mechanisms of them is presented. However, further large‐scale epidemiological and functional studies are urgently needed to better understand the prevalence and dissemination of these newly discovered Tet(X) orthologs among Gram‐negative bacteria in both human and veterinary medicine. (shrink)

With the increasing scale of e-commerce, the complexity of image content makes commodity image classification face great challenges. Image feature extraction often determines the quality of the final classification results. At present, the image feature extraction part mainly includes the underlying visual feature and the intermediate semantic feature. The intermediate semantics of the image acts as a bridge between the underlying features and the advanced semantics of the image, which can make up for the semantic gap to a certain extent (...) and has strong robustness. As a typical intermediate semantic representation method, the bag-of-visual-words model has received extensive attention in image classification. However, the traditional BoVW model loses the location information of local features, and its local feature descriptors mainly focus on the texture shape information of local regions but lack the expression of color information. Therefore, in this paper, the improved bag-of-visual-words model is presented, which contains three aspects of improvement: multiscale local region extraction; local feature description by speeded up robust features and color vector angle histogram ; and diagonal concentric rectangular pattern. Experimental results show that the three aspects of improvement to the BoVW model are complementary, while compared with the traditional BoVW and the BoVW adopting SURF + SPM, the classification accuracy of the improved BoVW is increased by 3.60% and 2.33%, respectively. (shrink)

Through the recognition of ocean sediment sonar images, the texture in the image can be classified, which provides an important basis for the classification of ocean sediment. Aiming at the problems of low efficiency, waste of human resources, and low accuracy in the traditional manual side-scan sonar image discrimination, this paper studies the application of image recognition technology in sonar image substrate texture discrimination, which is popular in many fields. At the same time, considering the scale complexity, diversity, multisources, and (...) small sample characteristics of the marine sediment sonar image texture, the transfer learning is introduced into the image recognition, and the K-means clustering algorithm is used to reset the prior frame parameters to improve the speed and accuracy of image recognition. Through the experimental comparison between the original model and the new model based on transfer learning, the AP value of the yolov3 model based on transfer learning can reach 84.39%, which is 0.97% higher than that of the original model, with considerable accuracy and room for improvement; it takes less than 0.2 seconds. This shows the applicability and development of image recognition technology in texture discrimination of bottom sonar images. (shrink)

Background: Infectious disease outbreaks such as COVID-19 and MERS pose a major threat to healthcare workers' physical and mental health. Studies exploring the positive changes gained from adapting to traumatic events, known as post-traumatic growth, have attracted much attention. However, it is unclear which factors or experiences lead to PTG among HCWs. The purpose of this mixed-method study was to investigate factors associated with PTG among HCWs who experienced the MERS outbreak in South Korea, and fully describe their experience of (...) developing PTG.Methods: Quantitative data from 78 participants were collected using psychometric tools for Psychological distress, Resilience, and Support for coping, and Post-traumatic growth. Qualitative interviews were conducted with seven nurses. Data were analyzed using the qualitative content analysis method according to the sub-themes of resilience, which was the main factor associated with PTG.Results: We found resilience to have a significant impact on PTG. Thus the qualitative interviews were analyzed using the core concepts of resilience. Qualitative interviews with nurses illustrated how participants experienced the development of resilience in terms of its sub-factors: hardiness, persistence, optimism, and support.Conclusion: HCWs who endured the MERS outbreak showed high levels of PTG, and the analysis of the interview data provided a fuller understanding on the experience of remaining resilient and developing PTG. These results provide practical and pragmatic information helpful for developing intervention strategies and protocols that can help HCWs transform adversity into growth and development. (shrink)

Background and ObjectiveThere is a paucity of research that has explored “False Alarm” mechanisms. In order to remedy this deficiency in knowledge, the present study used event-related potential technology to reveal the mechanisms underlying False Alarm in response to fear stimuli.MethodsThis study selected snakes as experimental materials and the “oddball paradigm” was used to simulate the conditions of False Alarm. The mechanism underlying False Alarm was revealed by comparing cognitive processing similarities and differences between real snakes and toy snakes.ResultsEvent-related potential (...) findings demonstrated that there was no significant difference between N1 and P2 components induced by real and toy snakes in the early processing stage. Compared with toy snakes, real snakes induced smaller N2 amplitude, larger P3 amplitude, and a shorter P3 latency at the late processing stage. The results of brain topographic mapping analysis showed that the brain regions activated by a real or toy snake were basically the same within the time windows of 110–150 and 220–270 ms, respectively. In the time window of 300–360 and 400–500 ms, the degree of brain regions activation with a real snake was significantly greater than that induced by a toy snake.ConclusionFalse Alarm is caused by the brain’s inability to distinguish, in the early stage of cognitive processing, stimulus objects with similar appearances. When the brain is able to distinguish the differences between different stimulus objects in the late stage of cognitive processing, False Alarm disappears. (shrink)

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has changed the healthcare landscape drastically. Stricken by sharp surges in morbidity and mortality with resource and manpower shortages confounding their efforts, the medical community has witnessed high rates of burnout and post-traumatic stress amongst themselves. Whilst the prevailing literature has offered glimpses into their professional war, no review thus far has collated the deeply personal reflections of physicians and ascertained how their self-concept, self-esteem and perceived self-worth has altered during this crisis. Without adequate intervention, this may (...) have profound effects on their mental and physical health, personal relationships and professional efficacy.MethodsWith mentions of the coronavirus pervading social media by the millions, this paper set out to collate and thematically analyse social media posts containing first-person physician reflections on how COVID-19 affected their lives and their coping mechanisms. A consistent search strategy was employed and a PRISMA flowchart was used to map out the inclusion/exclusion criteria.ResultsA total of 590 social media posts were screened, 511 evaluated, and 108 included for analysis. Salient themes identified include Disruptions to Personal Psycho-Emotional State, Disruptions to Professional Care Delivery, Concern for Family, Response from Institution, Response from Society and Coping Mechanisms.ConclusionIt is evident that the distress experienced by physicians during this time has been manifold, multi-faceted and dominantly negative. Self-concepts were distorted with weakened self-esteem and perceived self-worth observed. The Ring Theory of Personhood (RToP) was adopted to explain COVID-19’s impact on physician personhood as it considers existential, individual, relational and social concepts of the self. These entwined self-concepts serve as ‘compensatory’ to one another, with coping mechanisms buffering and fortifying the physician’s overall personhood. With healthcare institutions playing a vital role in providing timely and targeted support, it was further proposed that a comprehensive assessment tool based on the RToP could be developed to detect at-risk physicians and evaluate the presence and effectiveness of established support structures. (shrink)

Speech disfluencies can signal that a speaker is about to refer to something difficult to name. In two experiments, we found evidence that 4-year-olds, like adults, flexibly interpret a particular partner’s disfluency based on their estimate of that partner’s knowledge, derived from the preceding conversation. In entrainment trials, children established partner-specific shared knowledge of names for tangram pictures with one or two adult interlocutors. In each test trial, an adult named one of two visible tangrams either fluently or disfluently while (...) children’s eye-movements were monitored. We manipulated speaker knowledge in the test trials. In Experiment 1, the test-trial speaker was the same speaker from entrainment or a naïve experimenter; in Experiment 2, the test-trial speaker had been one of the child’s partners in entrainment and had seen half of the tangrams. When hearing disfluent expressions, children looked more at a tangram that was unfamiliar from the speaker’s perspective; this systematic disfluency effect disappeared in Experiment 1 when the speaker was entirely naïve, and depended on each speaker’s entrainment experience in Experiment 2. These findings show that 4-year-olds can keep track of two different partners’ knowledge states, and use this information to determine what should be difficult for a particular partner to name, doing so efficiently enough to guide online interpretation of disfluent speech. (shrink)

As a worldwide epidemic in the digital age, cyberbullying is a pertinent but understudied concern—especially from the perspective of language. Elucidating the linguistic features of cyberbullying is critical both to preventing it and to cultivating ethical and responsible digital citizens. In this study, a mixed-method approach integrating lexical feature analysis, sentiment polarity analysis, and semantic network analysis was adopted to develop a deeper understanding of cyberbullying language. Five cyberbullying cases on Chinese social media were analyzed to uncover explicit and implicit (...) linguistic features. Results indicated that cyberbullying comments had significantly different linguistic profiles than non-bullying comments and that explicit and implicit bullying were distinct. The content of cases further suggested that cyberbullying language varied in the use of words, types of cyberbullying, and sentiment polarity. These findings offer useful insight for designing automatic cyberbullying detection tools for Chinese social networking platforms. Implications also offer guidance for regulating cyberbullying and fostering ethical and responsible digital citizens. (shrink)

When individuals interact with others, perceived information is transmitted among their brains. The EEG-based hyperscanning technique, which provides an approach to explore dynamic brain activities between two or more interactive individuals and their underlying neural mechanisms, has been applied to study different aspects of social interactions since 2010. Recently there has been an increase in research on EEG-based hyperscanning of social interactions. This paper summarizes the application of EEG-based hyperscanning on the dynamic brain activities during social interactions according to the (...) experimental designs and contents, discusses the possibility of applying inter-brain synchrony to social communication systems and analyzes the contributions and the limitations of these investigations. Furthermore, this paper sheds light on some new challenges to future EEG-based hyperscanning studies and the emerging field of EEG-based hyperscanning for pursuing the broader research field of social interactions. (shrink)

We clarify different definitions of the density matrix by proposing the use of different names, the full density matrix for a single-closed quantum system, the compressed density matrix for the averaged single molecule state from an ensemble of molecules, and the reduced density matrix for a part of an entangled quantum system, respectively. We show that ensembles with the same compressed density matrix can be physically distinguished by observing fluctuations of various observables. This is in contrast to a general belief (...) that ensembles with the same compressed density matrix are identical. Explicit expression for the fluctuation of an observable in a specified ensemble is given. We have discussed the nature of nuclear magnetic resonance quantum computing. We show that the conclusion that there is no quantum entanglement in the current nuclear magnetic resonance quantum computing experiment is based on the unjustified belief that ensembles having the same compressed density matrix are identical physically. Related issues in quantum communication are also discussed. (shrink)

With the growing amount of clinical research, regulations and research ethics are becoming more stringent. This trend introduces a need for quality assurance measures for ensuring adherence to research ethics and human research protection beyond Institutional Review Board approval. Audits, one of the most effective tools for assessing quality assurance, are measures used to evaluate Good Clinical Practice and protocol compliance in clinical research. However, they are laborious, time consuming, and require expertise. Therefore, we developed a simple auditing process and (...) evaluated its feasibility and effectiveness. The screening audit was developed using a routine audit checklist based on the Severance Hospital’s Human Research Protection Program policies and procedures. The measure includes 20 questions, and results are summarized in five categories of audit findings. We analyzed 462 studies that were reviewed by the Severance Hospital Human Research Protection Center between 2013 and 2017. We retrospectively analyzed research characteristics, reply rate, audit findings, associated factors and post-screening audit compliance, etc. Investigator reply rates gradually increased, except for the first year. The studies were graded as “critical,” “major,” “minor,” and “not a finding”, based on findings and number of deficiencies. The auditors’ decisions showed fair agreement with weighted kappa values of 0.316, 0.339, and 0.373. Low-risk level studies, single center studies, and non-phase clinical research showed more prevalent frequencies of being “major” or “critical”. Inappropriateness of documents, failure to obtain informed consent, inappropriateness of informed consent process, and failure to protect participants’ personal information were associated with higher audit grade. We were able to observe critical GCP violations in the routine internal audit results of post-screening audit compliance checks in “non-responding” and “critical” studies upon applying the screening audit. Our screening audit is a simple and effective way to assess overall GCP compliance by institutions and to ensure medical ethics. The tool also provides useful selection criteria for conducting routine audits. (shrink)

BackgroundAttention deficit hyperactivity disorder is clinically diagnosed; however, quantitative analysis to statistically analyze the symptom severity of children with ADHD via the measurement of head movement is still in progress. Studies focusing on the cues that may influence the attention of children with ADHD in classroom settings, where children spend a considerable amount of time, are relatively scarce. Virtual reality allows real-life simulation of classroom environments and thus provides an opportunity to test a range of theories in a naturalistic and (...) controlled manner. The objective of this study was to investigate the correlation between participants’ head movements and their reports of inattention and hyperactivity, and to investigate how their head movements are affected by different social cues of different sensory modalities.MethodsThirty-seven children and adolescents with and without ADHD were recruited for this study. All participants were assessed for diagnoses, clinical symptoms, and self-reported symptoms. A virtual reality-continuous performance test was conducted under four conditions: control, no-cue, visual cue, and visual/audio cue. A quantitativecomparison of the participants’ head movements was conducted in three dimensions using a head-mounted display in a VR classroom environment. Task-irrelevant head movements were analyzed separately, considering the dimension of movement needed to perform the VR-CPT.ResultsThe magnitude of head movement, especially task-irrelevant head movement, significantly correlated with the current standard of clinical assessment in the ADHD group. Regarding the four conditions, head movement showed changes according to the complexity of social cues in both the ADHD and healthy control groups.ConclusionChildren and adolescents with ADHD showed decreasing task-irrelevant movements in the presence of social stimuli toward the intended orientation. As a proof-of-concept study, this study preliminarily identifies the potential of VR as a tool to understand and investigate the classroom behavior of children with ADHD in a controlled, systematic manner. (shrink)

Growth mindset refers to our core belief that our talents can be developed through practice, which may influence our thoughts and behaviors. Growth mindset has been studied in a variety of fields, including education, sports, and management. However, few studies have explored whether differences in individuals’ growth mindsets influence college students’ self-reported mental health. Using the Growth Mindset Scale, Adolescent Self-rating Life Events Checklist, and SCL-90 Scale, data was collected from 2,505 freshmen in a University in China. Findings revealed that (...) the students within the growth mindset group scored significantly lower on “mental health issues” and “stress due to life events” than the students in the fixed mindset group. Our findings suggest that individuals with a growth mindset are less prone to mental health problems than individuals with a fixed mindset. (shrink)

In 1997, Louisa Schein published her famous article "Gender and Internal Orientalism in China," in which she modified Edward Said's theory of orientalism and transplanted it into the study of ethnicity in contemporary China. According to Schein, Chinese society develops an orientalist view of non-Han people and consumes their ethnic cultures as cultural commodities, which clearly denotes the power of the center over the periphery. While fully acknowledging internal orientalism as a problem, I realize that Schein's theoretical framework, without paying (...) much attention to the specific cultural and economic condition of urban China, cannot satisfactorily explain why... (shrink)