The netherworld marriage or the wedding for dead persons is a folk religious ritual in ancientChina. It is based on ancient Chinese folk belief of afterlife in the netherworld. Through a textual research and investigation based on relevant historical records and other ancient documents, as well as some archeological discoveries, this paper tries to give a brief account of the origin and development of netherworld marriage and its cultural and ideological background in ancient China. It finds that netherworld marriage might (...) originate from human sacrifice in early ancient times, and its name varies in different periods. It has gone through its prevailing in the Tang Dynasty, declining in the Song and Yuan Dynasties, and reviving again in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. During the long history, this custom was generally criticized and condemned by orthodoxy Confucian intellectuals, yet it was practiced and sometimes even prevailed among both noble class and common people, due to its deep root in the folk belief. The paper also intends to clarify some misconceptions and misunderstandings concerning the study of this unique cultural phenomenon. (shrink)

This paper critically compares the philosophy of Günther Anders and the contemporary transhumanists, like Julian Savulescu, Ingmar Persson, or Thomas Douglas. The Andersian concepts of moral blindness, promethean gap, and promethean shame will be discussed in order to understand human beings’ outdatedness; parallel to this, we will also expose the transhumanist analysis on the unfitness of human beings in evolutive and cognitive terms. We will show that much of the transhumanist analysis is a reformulation of the Andersian thesis, now under (...) scientific terminology. Finally, we will approach the transhumanist proposal of moral enhancement, explaining and confronting some critics raised on the grounds of freedom and moral responsibility. (shrink)

The reasons conception is the most prominent account of the nature of critical thinking. It consists in responding appropriately to reasons. Responding to reasons can be following a rule, it can be making an exception to a rule, it can be responding to a situation that is unique. It depends on the context each time what is the appropriate response. Critical thinking is the educational cognate of rationality and is a sine qua non for a reasonable life in a modern (...) democratic society. Reasons are generally normative. If this is true then it is to be expected that critical thinking is normative and also rationality. Critical thinking consists in being appropriately moved by reasons. The normative element of reasons moves us to beliefs or actions. It depends on our character how reasons move us. This indicates that our character must be well formed to enable us to be appropriately moved. (shrink)

This article discusses the experience of an Icelandic woman with intellectual disabilities who was sterilized and how she has dealt with it. It also reflects on some ethical and methodological issues that arise during inclusive life history research. The article is based on cooperation between two women, Eygló Ebba Hreinsdóttir, who was labelled with intellectual disabilities when she moved to an institution in Iceland in the 1970s, and the researcher Gu?rún V. Stefánsdóttir. Since 2003 we have worked closely together on (...) an inclusive life history project. The article is based on a recorded conversation between Ebba and Gudrun and the work of the Icelandic women's history group in which both participated for three years. Ebba was sterilized when she was 14 years old but didn't know about the sterilization until she was 27. The article describes the deep emotional impact and how she came to terms with it. (shrink)

In this article, drawing from a relational perspective, we explore the relationship between moral leadership and employee creativity, treat employee identification with leader and leader–member exchange as two mediators, and develop a new theoretical model of employee creativity. Our data collected from 160 supervisor–subordinate dyads in the People’s Republic of China demonstrate that moral leadership is positively related to both employee identification with leader and LMX. Further, employee identification with leader partially mediates the relationship between moral leadership and LMX. In (...) particular, employee identification with leader greatly enhances LMX which leads to high creativity. Overall, the relationship between moral leadership and employee creativity is mediated by not only employee identification with leader but also LMX. Our findings offer a new theoretical framework for future theory development and testing on creativity as well as practical implications for researchers and managers in business ethics. (shrink)

This study explores the dark side of leadership, treats creative self-efficacy as a mediator, and frames supervisor bullying and employee creativity in the context of social cognition and social comparison. We theorize that with a high social comparison orientation, the combination of high supervisory abuse toward themselves and low supervisory abuse toward other team members leads to a double whammy effect: When employees are “singled out” for abuse, these victims suffer from not only low creative self-efficacy due to supervisory abuse (...) but also low supervisory creativity ratings. Results based on our two-wave data collected from multiple sources—253 employees and their 77 immediate supervisors—support our theory. The significant three-way interaction effect reveals that when social comparison orientation is high and peer abusive supervision is low, own abusive supervision creates the strongest negative impact on creative self-efficacy, which is significantly related to supervisory low creativity rating. Our discoveries of egregious bullying offer provocative theoretical, empirical, and practical implications to the fields of leadership, abusive supervision, creativity, and business ethics. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe pragmatist reform and opening-up in 1978 has revolutionised the way China communicates internally and engages with the outside world. Firmly embedded within this broader historical context, the interpreter-mediated and televised Premier-Meets-the-Press conferences are a high-profile institutional event in China. At this discursive event, the Chinese premier – ranked second in China’s political hierarchy – is put in the international media limelight, answering journalists’ questions on a range of topics. The section involving the interpreters’ rendering of journalists’ questions is triadic (...) and dynamic and represents a particularly interesting site of ideological contestation, which can be conceptualised profitably using Bakhtin’s concept dialogised heteroglossia. Drawing on a corpus containing 20 years’ press conference data between 1998 and 2017, this CDA study interrogates the interpreters’ agency, particularly in constructing the Chinese government’s image when rendering journalists’ questions. Despite the commonplace assumptions of interpreters being impartial with little agency, the government-affiliated interpreters are found to actively engage in facework and image construction. This leads to a discursive pattern described in Van Dijk’s ideological square, which involves further emphasising and foregrounding the positive elements yet de-emphasising and mitigating the negative elements about Beijing. (shrink)

The marine shale in South China has great gas exploration potential, and exploration in the Sichuan Basin has been successful, but the degree of exploration remains low in the Guizhou Province. We used organic geochemical analyses, scanning electron microscopy, field emission SEM, nuclear magnetic resonance, X-ray diffraction analysis, and low-temperature [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] adsorption experimental methods to study the micropore types and pore structures and their effects on the methane adsorption capacity of organic-rich shales found in (...) the Fenggang block in northern Guizhou Province. The results indicate that the microscopic surface porosity of the lower Cambrian Niutitang Formation ranges from 2.88% to 5.34%, with an average value of 3.86%. Based on nitrogen adsorption methods, the range of the average pore size distribution is 4.6–9.491 nm, with an average value of 6.68 nm. All of the samples exhibit significant unimodal distributions. The main pore size is less than 10 nm, and these pores account for most of the mesopore volume, which is generally consistent with the NMR results. The methane adsorption capacity of the shale samples gradually increases in the range of 0–8 MPa at 30°C and reaches a maximum at approximately 10 MPa. Positive correlations were found between the gas content and specific surface area, total pore volume, and micropore volume. These strong correlations indicate that the Niutitang Shale has a high specific surface area, a high pore volume, and narrow-diameter pores, demonstrating that it has a high gas adsorption capacity. The results of this study provide valuable information regarding the adsorption characteristics of marine shales and the factors that affect those characteristics. (shrink)

In their article, Char et al. have created a model intended to tidy up the messy landscape of ethical concerns arising from machine-learning health care applications. The novel con...

The marine shale in South China has great gas exploration potential, and exploration in the Sichuan Basin has been successful, but the degree of exploration remains low in the Guizhou Province. We used organic geochemical analyses, scanning electron microscopy, field emission SEM, nuclear magnetic resonance, X-ray diffraction analysis, and low-temperature [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] adsorption experimental methods to study the micropore types and pore structures and their effects on the methane adsorption capacity of organic-rich shales found in (...) the Fenggang block in northern Guizhou Province. The results indicate that the microscopic surface porosity of the lower Cambrian Niutitang Formation ranges from 2.88% to 5.34%, with an average value of 3.86%. Based on nitrogen adsorption methods, the range of the average pore size distribution is 4.6–9.491 nm, with an average value of 6.68 nm. All of the samples exhibit significant unimodal distributions. The main pore size is less than 10 nm, and these pores account for most of the mesopore volume, which is generally consistent with the NMR results. The methane adsorption capacity of the shale samples gradually increases in the range of 0–8 MPa at 30°C and reaches a maximum at approximately 10 MPa. Positive correlations were found between the gas content and specific surface area, total pore volume, and micropore volume. These strong correlations indicate that the Niutitang Shale has a high specific surface area, a high pore volume, and narrow-diameter pores, demonstrating that it has a high gas adsorption capacity. The results of this study provide valuable information regarding the adsorption characteristics of marine shales and the factors that affect those characteristics. (shrink)

This paper examines whether appealing to learners’ moral identity makes a significant contribution to improving their ethical decision making beyond traditional, rule-based teaching. In response to criticisms leveled at rule-based ethics teaching by alternative approaches, we identify moral identity theory and experiments in moral psychology as useful sources to draw on for the creation of a new, identity-based ethics teaching approach. We develop and apply a set of regular self-reflection focused writing tasks added to the traditional teaching program over a (...) one-semester period, and assess the outcomes of an overall sample of 149 postgraduate business school students, who were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: exposure to both identity-based tasks and rule-based teaching, exposure to rule-based teaching only, and the control condition. Our findings show that, while the three groups reported the same level of ethical decision making at the beginning of the semester, at the end of the semester the students who were exposed to both identity-based and rule-based teaching reported higher level of ethical decision making compared to those who were only exposed to rule-based education. In addition, the students who received rule-based teaching reported higher ethical decision making compared to those in the control condition. These results suggest that a teaching approach which appeals to the learner’s moral identity can act as an effective leverage point when complementing rule-based teaching. This simple approach should be widely adopted as common practice in graduate business schools. (shrink)

Based on in-depth interview data and popular culture texts, the current study has explored the politics of reproduction revolving around women’s age in contemporary China. Conceptualizing reproduction as a site of contestation and politics between different, and often contradictory, sets of discourses and power structures, I pursue a feminist and social constructivist analysis of the politics of reproduction in the lives of a group of urban professional women who are yet to enter motherhood at their late 20s and 30s. I (...) engage with Inhorn’s concept of ‘disrupted reproduction’ to highlight the politically, morally and emotionally charged contestations in the ‘problematized’ reproductive lives of these women. I unveil how Chinese professional women beyond their ‘reproductive prime’ are discursively constructed as ‘disrupters’, who fail their femininity test tied to a motherhood identity within the family context, challenge the ‘natural’ biological law regulating their reproductive bodies, and face a doomed reproductive future fraught with medical, physical and emotional traumas which ART cannot alleviate. Such a discourse renders invisible the structural causes of problems and challenges professional women face in negotiating parenthood, social norms and selfhood, which systematically put them under pervasive social surveillance and discipline. (shrink)

In this paper, we derive analytical solutions of the -dimensional Kadomtsev-Petviashvili equation by two different systematic methods. Using the exp⁡)-expansion method, exact solutions of the mentioned equation including hyperbolic, exponential, trigonometric, and rational function solutions have been obtained. Based on the work of Yuan et al., we proposed the extended complex method to seek exact solutions of the -dimensional KP equation. The results demonstrate that the applied methods are efficient and direct methods to solve the complex nonlinear systems.

This paper presents a multi-innovation stochastic gradient parameter estimation algorithm for dual-rate sampled state-space systems with d-step time delay by the multi-innovation identification theory. Considering the stochastic disturbance in industrial process and using the gradient search, a multi-innovation stochastic gradient algorithm is proposed through expanding the scalar innovation into an innovation vector in order to obtain more accurate parameter estimates. The difficulty of identification is that the information vector in the identification model contains the unknown states. The proposed algorithm uses (...) the state estimates of the observer instead of the state variables to realize the parameter estimation. The simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm works well. (shrink)

RGBD camera-based VSLAM algorithm is usually applied to assist robots with real-time mapping. However, due to the limited measuring principle, accuracy, and distance of the equipped camera, this algorithm has typical disadvantages in the large and dynamic scenes with complex lightings, such as poor mapping accuracy, easy loss of robot position, and much cost on computing resources. Regarding these issues, this paper proposes a new method of 3D interior construction, which combines laser radar and an RGBD camera. Meanwhile, it is (...) developed based on the Cartographer laser SLAM algorithm. The proposed method mainly takes two steps. The first step is to do the 3D reconstruction using the Cartographer algorithm and RGBD camera. It firstly applies the Cartographer algorithm to calculate the pose of the RGBD camera and to generate a submap. Then, a real-time 3D point cloud generated by using the RGBD camera is inserted into the submap, and the real-time interior construction is finished. The second step is to improve Cartographer loop-closure quality by the visual loop-closure for the sake of correcting the generated map. Compared with traditional methods in large-scale indoor scenes, the proposed algorithm in this paper shows higher precision, faster speed, and stronger robustness in such contexts, especially with complex light and dynamic objects, respectively. (shrink)

According to the randomness of the spatial distribution and shape of the internal cells of closed-cell foam aluminum and based on the Voronoi algorithm, we use ABAQUS to model the random polyhedrons of pore cells firstly. Then, the algorithm of generating aluminum foam with random pore size and random wall thickness is written by Python and Fortran, and the mesh model of random polyhedral particles and random wall thickness was established by the algorithm read in by TrueGrid software. Finally, the (...) mesh model is impo rted into the LS-DYNA software to remove the random polyhedron part of the pore cell. Compared with the results of scanning electron microscopy and antiknock test, the morphology and properties of the model are close to those of the real aluminum foam material, and the coincidence degree is more than 91.4%. By means of numerical simulation, the mechanism of the wall deformation, destruction of closed-cell aluminum foams, and the rapid attenuation of explosion stress wave after the interference of reflection and transmission of bubbles were studied and revealed. It is found that aluminum foam deformation can be divided into four areas: collapse area, fracture area, plastic deformation area, and elastic deformation region. Therefore, the explosion resistance is directly related to the cell wall thickness and bubble size, and there is an optimal porosity rule for aluminum foam antiknock performance. (shrink)

Traditional portfolio selection models mainly obtain the optimized portfolio ratio by focusing on the prices of financial products. However, investors’ multiple preferences and risk appetites are also significant factors that should be taken into account. In consideration of these two factors simultaneously, we propose a double-hierarchy model in this paper. Specifically, the first hierarchy quantifies investors’ risk appetite based on a historical simulation method and probabilistic preference theory. This hierarchy can be utilized to describe investors’ variable risk appetites and ensure (...) the obtained investment ratios meet investors’ immediate risk requirements. Then, using the cross-efficiency evaluation principle, the optimal investment ratios can be derived by fusing investors’ multiple preferences and risk appetites in the second hierarchy. Lastly, an illustrative example about evaluating the 10 largest capitalized stocks on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange is given to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of our newly proposed model. We make the theoretical contribution to improve the traditional portfolio selection model, especially considering investors’ subjective preferences and risk appetite. Moreover, the proposed model can be practical for assisting investors with their investment strategies in real life. (shrink)

Wenqi 文氣 (literary pneuma) is a foundational idea in Chinese aesthetics. It has remained elusive since its initial formulation, however. This is so largely because previous scholars did not examine its ontological and epistemological conditions in analytic terms, still less explore its implications in a conceptual framework of artistic creation. Here, it is proposed to explore its general as well as specific implications against the larger background of Chinese intellectual thought and in relation to contemporary theories of literature and aesthetics. (...) Through a philosophical inquiry, wenqi is here reconceived as an integration of the primal energy of the universe, the creative energy of human beings, and the totalizing force that animates an artistic work. Wenqi is viewed not as a substance or a product but as a creative and shaping force that flows from the writer into his writing, gives it a distinct shape, and makes it different from any other writing. The theory of wenqi is a system of aesthetic principles that govern the creative and shaping force operating in the space of three intertwined entities: the macrocosm of the universe including human society, the microcosm of the writer, and the microcosm of his writing. (shrink)

Zen/Chan, which used to be a Far Eastern philosophy-cum-religion, has evolved into a global cultural phenomenon. Despite the many views expressed by numerous thinkers in the world, the consensus on Chan and Chan enlightenment remains an agnostic Oriental mysticism. By exploring Chan and enlightenment from a combined perspective of history, philosophy, psychology, religion and linguistics, this article proposes a hitherto unexpressed view. Chan enlightenment is a prenatal physico-psychological existence, which grows out of a fetal subject’s perception of the womb. Although (...) this primordial mode of perception is unconscious, it is cosmic in nature because for the fetal subject the womb is the whole world with which it feels to be at one. This unconscious oneness may be termed the ‘cosmic unconscious’. Once born, no one can return to the prenatal mental state, but through personal cultivation and Chan practice one can experience a fleeting moment of the cosmic unconscious. In the final analysis, the essence o.. (shrink)