We provide the first comprehensive and robust evidence on the relationship between CSR disclosure quality and the costs of corporate bonds in China. We find that firms with high CSR disclosure quality are associated with lower costs of corporate bonds. Our findings are robust to endogeneity issues arising from reverse causality, omitted variable bias, and the interdependencies between price and non-price terms. The negative relationship between CSR disclosure quality and the costs of corporate bonds is stronger in weak corporate governance (...) firms and in firms located in regions with weak institutional environments. We also find that firms’ misconduct significantly mitigates the influence of CSR disclosure quality. In the additional analyses, we provide evidence that CSR disclosure can offer incremental information beyond the credit ratings. Regarding non-price terms, we conclude that firms with higher quality of CSR information are less likely to be subject to collateral terms, but they tend to include more restrictive covenants. Further analyses also show that compared with low-quality or mandatory CSR disclosure firms, bond investors perceive firms with CSR disclosures rated above “A” categories or voluntary CSR disclosure as less likely to cause asymmetric information problems and thus charge lower risk premiums. Overall, this study demonstrates that CSR disclosure quality is an important determinant that affects both price and non-price bond contract terms. (shrink)

To investigate the phenomenon of patient–physician mistrust in China, a qualitative study involving 107 physicians, nurses and health officials in Guangdong Province, southern China, was conducted through semi-structured interviews and focus groups. In this paper we report the key findings of the empirical study and argue for the essential role of medical professionalism in rebuilding patient-physician trust. Health professionals are trapped in a vicious circle of mistrust. Mistrust leads to increased levels of fear and self-protection by doctors which exacerbate difficulties (...) in communication; in turn, this increases physician workloads, adding to a strong sense of injustice and victimization. These factors produce poorer healthcare outcomes and increasingly discontented and angry patients, escalate conflicts and disputes, and result in negative media coverage, all these ultimately contributing to even greater levels of mistrust. The vicious circle indicates not only the crisis of patient-physician relationship but the crisis of medicine as a profession and institution. Underlying the circle is the inherent conflict of interest in the healthcare system by which health professionals and hospitals have become profit-driven. This institutional conflict of interest seriously compromises the fundamental principle of medical professionalism—the primacy of patient welfare—as well as the traditional Chinese ideal of “medicine as the art of humanity”. Patient trust can be restored through rectifying this institutional conflict of interest and promoting medical professionalism via a series of recommended practical measures. (shrink)

This article investigates “impaired insight,” a controversial psychiatric category describing a mad person unable to know his or her madness. Like “moral insanity” and other concepts before it, impaired insight offers a way to link the disparate logics of human responsibility in psychiatry and the law. I attribute its development to changes wrought by deinstitutionalization, the rise of antipsychotic medication, and patient incarceration in penal settings. In a system that aims to govern psychiatric patients through their freedom, the logic of (...) impaired insight introduces a wrinkle: can a person make an informed choice to refuse treatment if madness itself impairs awareness of illness? Drawing on tools from the sociology of science, I trace the process by which researchers recast psychodynamic “denial” as a neurological and therefore non-volitional “impairment” in the 1990s. I then show how social movement actors mobilized the materialized form in the legal and policy fields in the 2000s, bringing insight science to bear upon the very questions of custodial management and patient rights that gave birth to it. At stake is this dilemma: how can societies that simultaneously privilege individual responsibility and somatic accounts of behavior govern those at the border of legal capacity, and with what justification? (shrink)

The complex characteristics of the gas turbine in a combined cycle unit have brought great difficulties in its control process. Meanwhile, the increasing emphasis on the efficiency, safety, and cleanliness of the power generation process also makes it significantly important to put forward advanced control strategies to satisfy the desired control demands of the gas turbine system. Therefore, aiming at higher control performance of the gas turbine in the gas-steam combined cycle process, a novel fuzzy model predictive control strategy based (...) on the fuzzy selection mechanism and simultaneous heat transfer search algorithm is presented in this paper. The objective function of rolling optimization in this novel FMPC consists of two parts which represent the state optimization and output optimization. In the weight coefficient selection of those two parts, the fuzzy selection mechanism is introduced to overcome the uncertainties existing in the system. Furthermore, on account of the rapidity of the control process, the SHTS algorithm is used to solve the optimization problem rather than the traditional quadratic programming method. The validity of the proposed method is confirmed through simulation experiments of the gas turbine in a combined power plant. The simulation results demonstrate the remarkable superiorities of the adopted algorithm with higher control precision and stronger disturbance rejection ability as well as less optimization time. (shrink)

Background: Nurses’ service behaviors have critical implications for hospitals. However, few studies had adequate ethical considerations of service behaviors and accounted for how organizational or individual antecedents can induce nurses to engage in service behaviors. In addition, they mainly focused on the one side of role-prescribed or extra-role service behavior. Objective: This study aims to explore the chained mediation effect of ethical climate and moral sensitivity on the relationship between organizational ethical leadership and nurses’ service behaviors and to examine the (...) relationship, from a comparative view, of the role-prescribed service behavior and extra-role service behavior. Methods: In all, 476 nurses from three tertiary hospitals were investigated with the Ethical Leadership Scale, Ethical Climate Scale, Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and Service Behavior Questionnaire. Structural equation modeling was adopted to analyze the data. SPSS and Mplus statistical software was used in the data analysis. Ethical considerations: Approval was obtained from the Ethics Committee at School of Nursing, Hebei Medical University. Data privacy and confidentiality were maintained and assured by obtaining subjects’ informed consent to participate in the research before data collection. Results: The effects of ethical leadership on nurses’ service behaviors are mediated by two variables in turn: ethical climate and nurses’ moral sensitivity. Ethical climate and moral sensitivity partially mediated the relationship between ethical leadership and nurses’ role-prescribed service behavior and fully mediated the relationship between ethical leadership and nurses’ extra-role service behavior. Conclusion: Organizational ethical leadership positively affected ethical climate, which positively affected nurses’ moral sensitivity and affected both their role-prescribed service behavior and extra-role service behavior. (shrink)

Visual search studies have shown that threatening facial expressions are more efficiently detected among a crowd of distractor faces than nonthreatening expressions, known as the anger superiority...

This note is devoted to the investigation of optimality conditions for robust approximate quasi weak efficient solutions to a nonsmooth uncertain multiobjective programming problem. Firstly, under the extended nonsmooth Mangasarian–Fromovitz constrained qualification assumption, the optimality necessary conditions of robust approximate quasi weak efficient solutions are given by using an alternative theorem. Secondly, a class of generalized convex functions is introduced to the problem, which is called the pseudoquasi-type-I function, and its existence is illustrated by a concrete example. Finally, under the (...) pseudopseudo-type-I generalized convexity hypothesis, the optimality sufficient conditions for robust approximate quasi weak efficient solutions to the problem are established. (shrink)

This empirical study concerns the authorship credit decision-making processes and outcomes that occur among coauthors in cases of multiauthored publications. The 2002 American Psychological Association (APA) Ethics Code offers standards for determining authorship order; however, little is known about how these decisions are made in actual practice. Results from a survey of 109 randomly selected authors indicated that most authors were satisfied with the decision-making process and outcome with few disagreements. Participants reported cases of both undeserved authorship being given and (...) omission of deserving contributors' names as coauthors. Some factors associated with authorship decisions included "sense of loyalty or obligation," "publish or perish pressures," and "power differentials." Authors who used APA standards were significantly more satisfied with both the process and outcome of authorship credit decisions. (shrink)

In this paper, we study several coordinated production-delivery scheduling problems with potential disruption motivated by a supply chain in the manufacturing industry. Both single-machine environment and identical parallel-machine environment are considered in the production part. The jobs finished on the machines are delivered to the same customer in batches. Each delivery batch has a capacity and incurs a delivery cost. There is a situation that a possible disruption in the production part may occur at some particular time and will last (...) for a period of time with a probability. We consider both resumable case and nonresumable case where a job does not need to restart if it is disrupted for a resumable case. The objective is to find a coordinated schedule of production and delivery that minimizes the expected total flow times plus the delivery costs. We first present some properties and analyze the NP-hard complexity for four various problems. For the corresponding single-machine and parallel-machine scheduling problems, pseudo-polynomial-time algorithms and fully polynomial-time approximation schemes are presented in this paper, respectively. (shrink)

In legislative texts, deontic modality helps define rights, privileges, obligations, and responsibilities. Based on a corpus of Chinese civil laws from 1949 to 2015, the study investigates the development of deontic modality in Chinese civil legislative discourse and examines the variations of deontic modality diachronically from a quantitative, functional perspective, thereby shedding lights on variations of legal text. This study shows that patterns of deontic modality manifest different features in different stages. The changes of linguistic forms of deontic modality show (...) evidence of the adaptive feature in legal language. From a quantitative perspective, the study suggests that a corpus-driven approach helps examine the development and evolution of deontic modality diachronically. It also contributes to an understanding of deontic modality mechanisms by providing both empirical evidence and theoretical insights. (shrink)

As humanoid social robots are developed rapidly in recent years and experimented in social situations, comparing them to humans provides insights into practical as well as philosophical concerns. This study uses the theoretical framework of communication constraints, derived in human–human communication research, to compare whether people apply social-oriented constraints and task-oriented constraints differently to human targets versus humanoid social robot targets. A total of 230 students from the University of Hawaii at Manoa participated in the study. The participants completed a (...) questionnaire, which determined their concern for the five communication constraints (feelings, non-imposition, disapproval, clarity, and effectiveness) in situations involving humans or robots. The results show people were more concerned with avoiding hurting the human’s feelings, avoiding inconveniencing the human interactive partner, and avoiding being disliked by the human and less concerned with avoiding hurting the robot’s feelings, avoiding inconveniencing the robot partner, and avoiding being disliked by the robot. But people did not differ in their concerns of the two task-oriented constraints (clarity and effectiveness) in response to humans versus humanoid robots. The results of the research suggest that people are more likely to emphasize the social-oriented constraints in communication with humans. (shrink)

Readability formulae have been used to predict text difficulty, but their construction has been challenged. Previous readability formula designers typically adopted correct responses to reading com...

ObjectiveTo investigate the attitudes of Chinese parents regarding the storage of dried blood spots collected for newborn screening (NBS) and their use in research.MethodsWe conducted a hospital-based survey of parents and examined parental attitudes regarding (a) allowing NBS sample storage, (b) permitting use of children’s NBS samples for research with parental permission, and (c) permitting use of children’s NBS samples for research without parental permission.ResultsThe response rate was 52 percent. Of parents surveyed, 68 percent would permit their infant’s NBS sample (...) to be stored for at least some length of time. If permission is obtained, 69 percent of parents “strongly agreed” or “agreed” to permit use of the NBS sample for research. If permission is not obtained, only 14 percent of parents “strongly agreed” or “agreed.” There was no significant association between permitting use of NBS samples for research and parental gender, education, household income, number of children, or site of residence.ConclusionsThis is the first survey of Chinese parents regarding the use of NBS samples for different types of research, with results indicating that most parents would permit their infant’s sample to be stored and would support the use of NBS dried blood spots for research purposes. (shrink)

When a widely reused ontology appears in a new version which is not compatible with older versions, the ontologies reusing it need to be updated accordingly. Ontobull has been developed to automatically update ontologies with new term IRI(s) and associated metadata to take account of such version changes. To use the Ontobull web interface a user is required to (i) upload one or more ontology OWL source files; (ii) input an ontology term IRI mapping; and (where needed) (iii) provide update (...) settings for ontology headers and XML namespace IDs. Using this information, the backend Ontobull Java program automatically updates the OWL ontology files with desired term IRIs and ontology metadata. The Ontobull subprogram BFOConvert supports the conversion of an ontology that imports a previous version of BFO. A use case is provided to demonstrate the features of Ontobull and BFOConvert. (shrink)

Quasiperiodic signal is ubiquitous and entrenched in neuronal networks, and thus taking it into consideration is necessary. The Wiener process with the intensity of σ is used here to model randomly fluctuated phase in external weak quasiperiodic signal. The departure from the normal periodicity can be governed by the parameter σ. Then, the effects of randomly fluctuated phase of signal and time-periodic coupling intensity of synaptic junctions between neurons on propagation of weak quasiperiodic signal through feed-forward Hodgkin–Huxley network are explored (...) in detail. Increasing σ makes more neurons fire simultaneously, and better synchronous state is observed. Consequently, the external weak quasiperiodic signal introduced into all neurons in the first layer can be effectively transmitted through the whole feed-forward network via synchronization mechanism. In the case of time-periodic synaptic coupling intensity, when oscillatory frequency of synaptic coupling intensity is equal precisely to average frequency of external quasiperiodic signal, the propagation of weak quasiperiodic signal is optimal. Additionally, rapid oscillation of synaptic coupling intensity hinders or even kills the propagation of quasiperiodic signal to great depths of neuronal network, provided σ is not large enough. (shrink)

The majority of the extant languages have one of three dominant basic word orders: SVO, SOV or VSO. Various hypotheses have been proposed to explain this word order bias, including the existence of a universal grammar, the learnability imposed by cognitive constraints, the descent of modern languages from an ancestral protolanguage, and the constraints from functional principles. We run simulations using a multi-agent computational model to study this bias. Following a local order approach, the model simulates individual language processing mechanisms (...) in production and comprehension. The simulation results demonstrate that the semantic structures that a language encodes can constrain the global syntax, and that local syntax can help trigger bias towards the global order SOV/SVO. (shrink)

The majority of the extant languages have one of three dominant basic word orders: SVO, SOV or VSO. Various hypotheses have been proposed to explain this word order bias, including the existence of a universal grammar, the learnability imposed by cognitive constraints, the descent of modern languages from an ancestral protolanguage, and the constraints from functional principles. We run simulations using a multi-agent computational model to study this bias. Following a local order approach, the model simulates individual language processing mechanisms (...) in production and comprehension. The simulation results demonstrate that the semantic structures that a language encodes can constrain the global syntax, and that local syntax can help trigger bias towards the global order SOV/SVO. (shrink)

Following Smaldino's definition, we claim that language is also an emergent group-level trait, and propose two facets to verify this statement, both of which also provide a general framework to address the future work about group-level traits.

Individual health savings accounts are an important part of the current basic medical insurance system for urban workers in China. Since 1998 when the system of personal medical insurance accounts was first implemented, there has been considerable controversy over its function and significance within different social communities. This paper analyzes the main problems in the practical implementation of individual medical insurance accounts and discusses the social and cultural foundations for the establishment of family health savings accounts from the perspective of (...) Chinese Confucian familism. Accordingly, it addresses the direction of the reform and the development of the current system of individual health insurance accounts in China. (shrink)