Indoor plants can positively impact physical and mental health in daily life. However, the benefits of viewing indoor plants may be enhanced if the plants emit a fragrant aroma. In this crossover-design study, we measured the physiological and psychological effects of fragrant and non-fragrant Primula plants on 50 female college students, and explored whether aroma stimulation had additive benefits for this group. Non-fragrant Primula malacoides Franch was used as a control stimulus, and Primula forbesii Franch, which has a floral fragrance, (...) was used as an experimental stimulus. We measured blood pressure, pulse rate, and electroencephalogram to evaluate physiological responses, and used a mood state profile and the semantic differential method to evaluate psychological responses. We found that mean blood pressure and pulse rate decreased significantly after the experiment in both conditions. EEGs showed that the mean values of high alpha waves, high beta waves, and relaxation scores were significantly higher in the experimental vs. control condition. The average scores on each subscale of the psychological questionnaire improved after the experiment in both conditions, and the vitality subscale and total emotional state scores were significantly better in the experimental vs. control condition. The results of the SD method showed that the sense of relaxation and comfort were significantly higher in the experimental vs. control condition. Compared with the non-fragrant Primula, the fragrant Primula induced relatively better physiological and psychological effects. (shrink)

The question of what determines brain laterality for auditory cognitive processing is unresolved. Here, we demonstrate a swap of hemisphere dominance from right to left during semantic interpretation of Chinese lexical tones in native speakers using simultaneously recorded mismatch negativity response and behavioral reaction time during dichotic listening judgment. The mismatch negativity, which is a brain wave response and indexes auditory processing at an early stage, indicated right hemisphere dominance. In contrast, the behavioral reaction time, which reflects auditory processing at (...) a later stage, indicated a right ear listening advantage, or left hemisphere dominance. The observed swap of hemisphere dominance would not occur when the lexical tone was substituted with a meaningless pure tone. This swap reveals dependence of hemisphere labor division initially on acoustic and then on functional cues of auditory inputs in the processing from sound to meaning. (shrink)

Background and PurposeTranscranial direct current stimulation is an emerging non-invasive neuromodulation technique for focal epilepsy. Because epilepsy is a disease affecting the brain network, our study was aimed to evaluate and predict the treatment outcome of cathodal tDCS by analyzing the ctDCS-induced functional network alterations.MethodsEither the active 5-day, −1.0 mA, 20-min ctDCS or sham ctDCS targeting at the most active interictal epileptiform discharge regions was applied to 27 subjects suffering from focal epilepsy. The functional networks before and after ctDCS were (...) compared employing graph theoretical analysis based on the functional magnetic resonance imaging data. A support vector machine prediction model was built to predict the treatment outcome of ctDCS using the graph theoretical measures as markers.ResultsOur results revealed that the mean clustering coefficient and the global efficiency decreased significantly, as well as the characteristic path length and the mean shortest path length at the stimulation sites in the fMRI functional networks increased significantly after ctDCS only for the patients with response to the active ctDCS. Our prediction model achieved the mean prediction accuracy of 68.3% after the nested cross validation. The mean area under the receiver operating curve was 0.75, which showed good prediction performance.ConclusionThe study demonstrated that the response to ctDCS was related to the topological alterations in the functional networks of epilepsy patients detected by fMRI. The graph theoretical measures were promising for clinical prediction of ctDCS treatment outcome. (shrink)

Type 2 diabetes mellitus is associated with cognitive impairment in many domains. There are several pieces of evidence that changes in neuronal neuropathies and metabolism have been observed in T2DM. Structural and functional MRI shows that abnormal connections and synchronization occur in T2DM brain circuits and related networks. Neuroplasticity and energy metabolism appear to be principal effector systems, which may be related to amyloid beta deposition, although there is no unified explanation that includes the complex etiology of T2DM with cognitive (...) impairment. Herein, we assume that cognitive impairment in diabetes may lead to abnormalities in neuroplasticity and energy metabolism in the brain, and those reflected to MRI structural connectivity and functional connectivity, respectively. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to examine parent-child relationship as a moderator of the association between family educational involvement and the social skills of preschoolers. A total of 4,938 children were sampled from 18 preschools in Hebei province, China, and their parents completed a survey packet to collect demographic information, as well as ratings of parental involvement, relationships with their children, and child social skill development. The results of multivariate regression analysis suggested that: both home-based involvement and home-school conferencing (...) could significantly predict preschoolers’ social skills, there was stronger evidence for a relationship of home-based involvement and preschoolers’ social skills, closeness in parent-child relationship moderated the path from home-based involvement to preschoolers’ social skills, and there was no interactive effect between family educational involvement and parent-child conflict. These findings highlight the significance of the joint influences of family educational involvement and parent-child relationship in shaping children’s social skills. The impact of home-based involvement was boosted in the context of a close parent-child relationship. (shrink)

Urban inclusive green growth (UIGG) refers to the synergetic enhancement of the economy, the environment, and the society in a city. Achieving such enhancement requires addressing a series of problems in the development of urbanization, such as unemployment, lack of access to education, insufficient medical resources, inequity, and environmental pollution. As firms are critical to city development and urbanization, whether they practice corporate social responsibility (CSR) plays a crucial part in UIGG. In this study, we focus on Chinese cities as (...) examples of UIGG and Chinese listed companies as CSR engagers, employing matched data on Chinese listed companies and cities to investigate how CSR affects UIGG. Specifically, the empirical results of a high-dimensional fixed effect model indicate that CSR significantly promotes UIGG. This finding remains valid after a set of robustness checks, including instrumental variable (IV) regression. CSR can promote UIGG by positively influencing enterprises’ economic performance, innovation, and employment. To promote firms’ substantive CSR actions, the government of Jiangsu Province, China, launched a pilot policy for CSR promotion by issuing an official guidance document, which can be considered a quasi-natural experiment to test the causality between CSR and UIGG. We find that the CSR pilot significantly promoted UIGG. The heterogeneity test results indicate that the influence of CSR on UIGG varies based on the audit company, the nature of the enterprise, and the structure of corporate leadership. (shrink)

The prediction of the secondary structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence is an important step towards the prediction of its three-dimensional structure. However, the accuracy of ab initio secondary structure prediction from sequence is about 80 % currently, which is still far from satisfactory. In this study, we proposed a novel method that uses binomial distribution to optimize tetrapeptide structural words and increment of diversity with quadratic discriminant to perform prediction for protein three-state secondary structure. A benchmark (...) dataset including 2,640 proteins with sequence identity of less than 25 % was used to train and test the proposed method. The results indicate that overall accuracy of 87.8 % was achieved in secondary structure prediction by using ten-fold cross-validation. Moreover, the accuracy of predicted secondary structures ranges from 84 to 89 % at the level of residue. These results suggest that the feature selection technique can detect the optimized tetrapeptide structural words which affect the accuracy of predicted secondary structures. (shrink)

In order to explore the correlation between students’ seat choice and interaction preference in the open gamification scenario, an experiment has been carried out on the platform of provincial virtual simulation experiment teaching center of a university, and tested the relationship between absolute distance, seat type, workstation type, and students’ interaction preference. The results show that in the virtual-reality fusion gamification scenario where students can move freely: The inner circle students can stimulate the outer circle students’ willingness to invest in (...) learning. The task attribute and the seat distribution of the group may lead to the difference of students’ interaction preference. Students are more likely to learn knowledge and skills by interacting with “people” rather than “object.” Gender and major influence students’ experience of participating in gamified teaching. The results confirm that the interactive engagement effect of location does exist in immersive virtual-reality fusion gamification teaching scenario, and suggestions are put forward to adjust the effect of location through instructional design and teacher intervention. (shrink)

Meiotic defects cause abnormal chromosome segregation leading to aneuploidy in mammalian oocytes. Chromosome segregation is particularly error‐prone in human oocytes, but the mechanisms behind such errors remain unclear. To explain the frequent chromosome segregation errors, recent investigations have identified multiple meiotic defects and explained how these defects occur in female meiosis. In particular, we review the causes of cohesin exhaustion, leaky spindle assembly checkpoint (SAC), inherently unstable meiotic spindle, fragmented kinetochores or centromeres, abnormal aurora kinases (AURK), and clinical genetic variants (...) in human oocytes. We mainly focus on meiotic defects in human oocytes, but also refer to the potential defects of female meiosis in mouse models. (shrink)

本辑五篇论文从不同方面涉及逻辑与形而上学。编辑之初衷,并非务多求全,成一系列之论述;而是采撷英华,以期引研究之注意.

In the name of safeguarding public interests and ethical principles, China’s National Health Commission bans unmarried women from using assisted reproductive technology (ART), including egg freezing. Supported by local governments, the ban has restricted single women’s reproductive rights nationwide. Although some courts bypassed the ban to allow widowed single women to use ART, they have not adopted a position in favour of single women’s reproductive autonomy, but quite the contrary. Faced with calls to relax the ban and allow single women (...) to freeze eggs electively, the National Health Commission refused to amend their policy, partly to protect women’s well-being paternalistically and partly to implement the central government’s policies to boost the birthrate and maintain traditional family structures. While the government’s concerns about elective egg freezing are not entirely unfounded, they have failed to demonstrate that banning single women’s egg freezing is a suitable, necessary and proportionate means to safeguard societal interests and ethical principles. The authority’s assumptions that women cannot make rational decisions for their health even with adequate informed consent procedures, that banning egg freezing by single women promotes a culture of having children ‘at a proper age’, and that egg freezing by single women offends China’s public moralities have not been substantiated. (shrink)

The issue of how to identify the liability of subjects after a traffic accident takes place remains a puzzle regarding the SAE classification system. The SAE system is not good at dealing with the problem of responsibility evaluation; therefore, building a new classification system for self-driving cars from the perspective of the subject's liability is a possible way to solve this problem. This new system divides automated driving into three levels: i) assisted driving based on the will of drivers, ii) (...) automated driving based on the will of the manufacturers, and iii) fully automated driving based on social will. The corresponding responsible subjects for level one, level two, and level three are the drivers, the manufacturers, and society, respectively. (shrink)

In both political science and political theory, democratization has largely been considered a problem for non-liberal democratic countries. Drawing on Chinese political thinker Jiwei Ci’s writings on freedom, democracy, agency, plausibility, and legitimacy, I critically reconstruct Ci’s theory of democratization and his method of theorizing. I argue that a normative account of democratization is embedded in Ci’s political thought, which is based upon a philosophical anthropology of the modern man and focuses on broadening political possibilities in a given society. Ci’s (...) theory allows us to think about democratization beyond the binary of democracy and authoritarianism, as his theory places democratization as an inherent and persistent challenge for all political communities. (shrink)

Ben shu jie shao le gong zi zhen, wei yuan, yan fu, kang you wei, tan si tong, liang qi chao, chen tian hua, zhang bing lin deng wan qing si xiang jia de zhe xue si xiang.

In this paper I argue that Leibniz's ethics is a kind of virtue ethics where virtues of the agent are explanatorily primary. I first examine how Leibniz obtained his conception of justice as a kind of love in an early text, Elements of Natural Law. I show that in this text Leibniz's goal was to find a satisfactory definition of justice that could reconcile egoism with altruism, and that this was achieved through the Aristotelian virtue of friendship where friends treat (...) each other as “other selves.” Following this decisive moment, Leibniz adopted an Aristotle‐inspired ethical framework where the virtuous agent is central for moral evaluations. I then show that, despite certain developments, Leibniz's ethics retained this essential feature throughout his career. In Leibniz's later writings, God constitutes the foundation of the moral realm, and the fundamental moral endeavor of human beings consists in the imitation of God. (shrink)

Noted logician and philosopher addresses various forms of mathematical logic, discussing both theoretical underpinnings and practical applications. After historical survey, lucid treatment of set theory, model theory, recursion theory and constructivism and proof theory. Place of problems in development of theories of logic, logic’s relationship to computer science, more. Suitable for readers at many levels of mathematical sophistication. 3 appendixes. Bibliography. 1981 edition.

The introduction of digital technologies in collective actions seems to have transformed the dynamics of movement organizing and enabled divergent forms of protest organizing. While some studies emphasize “organizationless” organizing in which traditional organizational forms—social movements organizations and formal-bureaucratic structures—have been pushed into the margins, other studies showcase how traditional forms have assumed alternative features, for example, connective leadership and organizations with fluid boundaries. While existing research correctly points out the evolving organizing dynamics and forms in digital activism, few studies (...) have accounted for why digitally enabled protests take certain organizing forms over others among multiple modes of interaction between protesters and digital technologies. Using a case study of a protest campaign organized by Chinese American immigrants, this study illustrates why immigrant activists struggled to keep the campaign “organizationless” on WeChat, a China-based digital platform that afforded other forms of organizing over such an organizing mode. Building on the mechanism-based approach in social movement studies, the findings show that immigrant activists’ emotional–cognitive responses to the changing digital environments became the driving force behind the relational choices to maintain the protest “organizationless.” The study, therefore, may not only inform future studies to explore why certain structures of protest networks emerge and develop but also contribute to the mechanism-based approach by foregrounding emotional–cognitive mechanisms, which mediate environmental and relational mechanisms. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there is a structural parallelism between law and physics in Leibniz since his early years, which has significant influence on the formation of his views. I start by examining Leibniz's early physical system and an analogy with juridical laws that he uses to explain the structure of physical laws. Then, I argue that this analogy stems from an envisioned parallelism between law and physics. Finally, I illustrate the significance of this legal-physical parallelism by arguing (...) that it underlies some of Leibniz's mature views. Most importantly, I argue that the parallelism explains the origin of architectonic principles or optimality principles in Leibniz's mature physics. (shrink)

This paper aims both to tackle the technical issue of deciphering Hobbes’s derivation of the sine law of refraction and to throw some light to the broader issue of Hobbes’s mechanical philosophy. I start by recapitulating the polemics between Hobbes and Descartes concerning Descartes’ optics. I argue that, first, Hobbes’s criticisms do expose certain shortcomings of Descartes’ optics which presupposes a twofold distinction between real motion and inclination to motion, and between motion itself and determination of motion; second, Hobbes’s optical (...) theory presented in Tractatus Opticus I constitutes a more economical alternative, which eliminates the twofold distinction and only admits actual local motion, and Hobbes’s derivation of the sine law presented therein, which I call “the early model” and which was retained in Tractatus Opticus II and First Draught, is mathematically consistent and physically meaningful. These two points give Hobbes’s early optics some theoretical advantage over that of Descartes. However, an issue that has baffled commentators is that, in De Corpore Hobbes’s derivation of the sine law seems to be completely different from that presented in his earlier works, furthermore, it does not make any intuitive sense. I argue that the derivation of the sine law in De Corpore does make sense mathematically if we read it as a simplification of the early model, and Hobbes has already hinted toward it in the last proposition of Tractatus Opticus I. But now the question becomes, why does Hobbes take himself to be entitled to present this simplified, seemingly question-begging form without having presented all the previous results? My conjecture is that the switch from the early model to the late model is symptomatic of Hobbes’s changing views on the relation between physics and mathematics. (shrink)

Resumo: Sendo um dos tesouros da cultura chinesa, a música tradicional chinesa tem carregado ricos pensamentos morais desde os tempos antigos. sendo uma parte importante do sistema de valores da cultura tradicional chinesa. No entanto, com o desenvolvimento da sociedade e a diversificação da cultura, o rápido ritmo social e a popularidade da música popular trouxeram grande impacto à música tradicional, que foi gradualmente esquecida devido ao seu abandono. Ao explorar a aplicação e o valor da música tradicional chinesa na (...) educação moral e no cultivo da virtude neste artigo, combinamos a cultura musical tradicional com os hábitos de vida dos residentes modernos, tais como educação, eventos sociais de grande escala, competições e festivais de música. Através da educação escolar e de atividades comunitárias regulares, buscamos fornecer novas ideias e experiências práticas para a herança e inovação da cultura tradicional. Através da integração dos meios de comunicação modernos e das formas de arte, o conceito moral da música tradicional está ligado à sociedade moderna, formando uma nova ecologia cultural mais moderna e inclusiva. Ao fazer uso dos ricos recursos de pensamento moral da música tradicional chinesa, mostramos que o seu papel e valor insubstituíveis na educação moral e no cultivo da virtude. (shrink)

Computer vision is widely used in manufacturing, sports, medical diagnosis, and other fields. In this article, a multifeature fusion error action expression method based on silhouette and optical flow information is proposed to overcome the shortcomings in the effectiveness of a single error action expression method based on the fusion of features for human body error action recognition. We analyse and discuss the human error action recognition method based on the idea of template matching to analyse the key issues that (...) affect the overall expression of the error action sequences, and then, we propose a motion energy model based on the direct motion energy decomposition of the video clips of human error actions in the 3 Deron action sequence space through the filter group. The method can avoid preprocessing operations such as target localization and segmentation; then, we use MET features and combine with SVM to test the human body error database and compare the experimental results obtained by using different feature reduction and classification methods, and the results show that the method has the obvious comparative advantage in the recognition rate and is suitable for other dynamic scenes. (shrink)

In the present research, based on the game research paradigm, the research tools are the dictator game and the trust game, and the research objects are Chinese university students. We adopt 2 × 2 between-subjects design experiment to investigate the influence of social class on university students’ prosocial behavior. Across the experimental study, we find that in the two situations of dictator game and trust game, self-social class has no significant influence on university students’ prosocial behavior; in the situation of (...) dictator game, target social class has a significant influence on university students’ prosocial behavior, and it is regulated by self-social class. Under the condition of low self-social class, the higher the target social class, the more prosocial behavior of university students, which confirms the perspective of status and negates “if you are poor, you will be good for yourself.” Under the condition of high self-social class, the lower the target social class, the more prosocial the behavior of university students, which confirms the perspective of fairness and echoes “if you are good, you will be good at the world”; in the context of the trust game, target social class has a significant influence on university students’ prosocial behavior, and there is no interaction effect with self-social class. (shrink)

Since the rise of modern natural science there has been deep tension between the conceptual and the natural. Wittgenstein's discussion of how we learn a sensation-language contains important resources that can help us relieve this tension. The key here, I propose, is to focus our attention on animal nature, conceived as partially re-enchanted. To see how nature, so conceived, helps us relieve the tension in question, it is crucial to gain a firm and detailed appreciation of how the primitive-instinctive, a (...) central part of animal nature, actually serves the conceptual. I offer such an appreciation by closely examining §244 of the Philosophical Investigations and Peter Winch's discussion of it. The general aim is to bring out a certain kind of Wittgensteinian “naturalism”, a “naturalism” that is fully alive to the rootedness of conceptuality in nature. A concomitant aim is to illustrate the truth of Wittgenstein's saying that in philosophy one often has to pay close attention to details. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's Tractatus contains an insubstantial form of transcendental idealism. It is insubstantial because it rejects the substantial a priori. Yet despite this, the Tractatus still contains two fundamental transcendental idealist insights, (a) the identity of form between thought and reality, and (b) the transcendental unity of apperception. I argue for (a) by connecting general themes in the Tractatus and in Kant, and for (b) by giving a detailed interpretation of Tractatus 5.6ff., where Wittgenstein talks about solipsism and the metaphysical subject. (...) Tractarian solipsism, on this interpretation, is a special, insubstantial form of transcendental idealism. (shrink)

This paper corrects a mistake in John McDowell’s influential reading of Wittgenstein’s attack on the idea of private sensations. McDowell rightly identifies a primary target of Wittgenstein’s attack to be the Myth of the Given. But he also suggests that Wittgenstein, in the ferocity of his battles with this myth, sometimes goes into overkill, which manifests itself in seemingly behavioristic denials about sensations. But this criticism of Wittgenstein is a mistake. The mistake is made over two important but notoriously difficult (...) sections in the so-called Private Language Argument, namely §304 and §293 of the Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein, maximally charitably read, commits no overkill in these two sections. This correction strengthens McDowell’s overall reading, but it is only a first step toward fully bringing out the deep but obscurely expressed insights in §304 and §293, the full treatment of which must await another occasion. (shrink)

This article proposes an interpretation of the ‘Thesis that Things do not Shift’ (_Wu bu qian lun,_ 物不遷論) of the early Chinese Buddhist philosopher Sengzhao. We understand Sengzhao to be proposing a version of the philosophy of time found in Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma, and then interpreting statements about time from Mahāyāna texts in light of that account. But whatever his limitations as a cross-cultural interpreter, we find Sengzhao surprisingly impressive philosophically, as he proposes a view that is noticeably more advanced towards (...) a modern conception of time than the accounts found in South Asian Buddhist sources. Ironically, his earnest efforts to present his view as falling within the Mahāyāna may have functioned to conceal Sengzhao’s true philosophical achievement. (shrink)

A dualism characteristic of modern philosophy is the conception of the inner and the outer as two independently intelligible domains. Wittgenstein’s attack on this dualism contains deep insights. The main insight (excavated from §304 and §293 of the Philosophical Investigations) is this: our sensory consciousness is deeply shaped by language and this shaping plays a fundamental role in the etiology of the dualism. I locate this role in the learning of a sensation-language (as described in §244), by showing that this (...) learning is, under another aspect, the incision of language, namely the infliction of cuts upon certain natural-primitive unities between the inner and the outer. These cuts, driven by powerful forces, eventually harden into an entrenched division between the inner and the outer, thereby providing a constant soil for the dualism. That this dualism is rooted in the very learning of a language is cause for ambivalence about language. (shrink)