As software piracy continues to be a threat to the growth of national and global economies, understanding why people continue to use pirated software and learning how to discourage the use of pirated software are urgent and important issues. In addition to applying the theory of planned behavior (TPB) perspective to capture behavioral intention to use pirated software, this paper considers perceived risk as a salient belief influencing attitude and intention toward using pirated software. Four perceived risk components related to (...) the use of pirated software (performance, social, prosecution and psychological risks) have been identified, measured and tested. Data were collected through an online survey of 305 participants. The results indicate that perceived prosecution risk has an impact on intention to use pirated software, and perceived psychological risk is a strong predictor of attitude toward using pirated software. In addition, attitude and perceived behavior control contribute significantly to the intended use of pirated software. However, the proposed direct relationship between subjective norm and intention to use pirated software is not supported. Implications for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)
The biotech revolution profoundly changes and reconstructs the Foucaultian concept of biopolitics from different dimensions. It declares the coming of the Age of Biocapitalism, which opens a new pattern of modern power allocation of life governance and shows people two prospects simultaneously: utopian hopes and dystopian desperation. Biocapitalism has not only produced ethical degeneration and cultural shock, but more importantly, has opened new areas for political hegemony and economic aggression through the reconstruction of biopolitics, and the enhancement of capital’s comprehensive (...) dominance on nature and the human society. Therefore, it has become an area of serious, scholarly research in the biotech era to explore the implications of contemporary biopolitics, to take precautions against, and reduce the real risks of technocapitalism. This paper investigates the new biopolitics supported by the manipulation of modern biotechnology, especially genetic engineering, and unveils the possible hazards and deep contradictions inherent in this capital-controlled science, within the context of biocapitalism. It also seeks ways to prevent technological alienation and to reconstruct political rationality. It argues that entrepreneurs, scientists, companies and universities of developed countries must realize the limits of capital expansion and the self―regulatory capability of the market, and, then, assume ethical responsibilities as biocapital holders. (shrink)
We investigate the extent to which perceptions of the authenticity of supervisor’s personal integrity and character (ASPIRE) moderate the relationship between people’s love of money (LOM) and propensity to engage in unethical behavior (PUB) among 266 part-time employees who were also business students in a five-wave panel study. We found that a high level of ASPIRE perceptions was related to high love-of-money orientation, high self-esteem, but low unethical behavior intention (PUB). Unethical behavior intention (PUB) was significantly correlated with their high (...) Machiavellianism, low self-esteem, and low intrinsic religiosity. Our counterintuitive results revealed that the main effect of LOM on PUB was not significant, but the main effect of ASPIRE on PUB was significant. Further, the significant interaction effect between LOM and ASPIRE on unethical behavior intention provided profoundly interesting findings: High LOM was related to high unethical behavior intention for people with low ASPIRE, but was related to low unethical intention for those with high ASPIRE. People with high LOM and low ASPIRE had the highest unethical behavior intention; whereas those with high LOM and high ASPIRE had the lowest. We discuss results in light of individual differences, ethical environment, and perceived demand characteristics. (shrink)
Studies of Sir William Temple usually associate him with the English Battle of the Books. Since his defense of the old against the new in European arts and sciences was known even in his day to be inadequate, his role in the literary history of England has so far been largely trivialized. Challenging this conventional reading, this essay strives to show that the innovation and significance of Temple's aesthetics was closely connected with his somewhat known—but hitherto insufficiently scrutinized—longstanding interest in (...) the cultural tradition of the Far East. (shrink)
We have refined entropy theory to explore the meaning of the increasing sequence data on nucleic acids and proteins more conveniently. The concept of selection constraint was not introduced, only the analyzed sequences themselves were considered. The refined theory serves as a basis for deriving a method to analyze non-coding regions (NCRs) as well as coding regions. Positions with maximal entropy might play the most important role in genome functions as opposed to positions with minimal entropy. This method was tested (...) in the well-characterized coding regions of 12 strains of Classical Swine Fever Virus (CSFV) and non-coding regions of 20 strains of CSFV. It is suitable to analyze nucleic acid sequences of a complete genome and to detect sensitive positions for mutagenesis. As such, the method serves to formulate the basis for elucidating the functional mechanism. (shrink)
Though more connected today than ever before, the Far East and the West are still divided by an issue which first arose more than 400 years ago: the complaint of the West that its ideology has never been fully adopted by China. To provide a useful conceptual framework for a discussion of this intriguing situation, this essay invokes the instructive give-and-take of market exchange on the famed Silk Road in the long ancient past and takes a careful and close look (...) at the analogous enactment of the same principle in the quiet but consequential transplantation of Chinese horticultural and related philosophical ideas to England and continental Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in the initially skeptical but eventually appreciative reception of many Western political and technological ideas in China in the last two centuries. (shrink)
Kant’s notion of genius and the related idea of exemplary originality in the Critique of Judgment have been read by Paul Guyer and Timothy Gould as implying azero-sum game in which all creative artists are willy-nilly patricidal in relation to their predecessors and suicidal in relation to their successors. By way of challenging this interesting but ultimately repugnant reading, and especially its modernist and postmodernist frame of reference, this essay takes a close look at Kant’s sustained interest in the monumental (...) change of English garden design in the early eighteenth century and at the provocative implication of this hitherto generally overlooked interest for a radically different reading of Kant’s thoughts on the exemplary originality of genius. (shrink)
