Metrics and their weaker forms are used to measure the difference between two data. There are many metrics that are available but not desired by a practitioner. This paper recommends in a plausible reasoning manner an easy-to-understand method to construct desired distance-like measures: to fuse easy-to-obtain pseudo-semi-metrics, pseudo-metrics, or metrics by making full use of well-known t-norms, t-conorms, aggregation operators, and similar operators. The simple reason to do this is that data for a real world problem are sometimes from multiagents. (...) A distance-like notion, called weak interval-valued pseudo-metrics, is defined by using known notions of pseudo-semi-metrics, pseudo-metrics, and metrics; this notion is topologically good and shows precision, flexibility, and compatibility than single pseudo-semi-metrics, pseudo-metrics, or metrics. Propositions and detailed examples are given to illustrate how to fabricate an expected or demanded WIVP-metric in practical problems, and WIVP-metric and its special cases are characterized by using axioms. Moreover, some WIVP-metrics pertinent to quantitative logic theory or interval-valued fuzzy graphs are constructed, and fixed point theorems and common fixed point theorems in weak interval-valued metric spaces are also presented. Topics and strategies for further study are also put forward concretely and clearly. (shrink)

With the assistance of the corpus analysis tool Wmatrix 4.0, this paper analyzes the semantic categories of the top 10 commercial banks of China and the United States to figure out their social-cultural behavior in the Internet business context. It is discovered that both common and distinctive identities were constructed: the common identities include the professional financial service provider, responsible corporation for employees, and relevant communities with environmental and social consciousness, while the distinctive identities are manifested in the communication strategy, (...) style, and persuasion mode: The Chinese Commercial Banks adopted the proactive strategy for corporate identity construction, are prone to take hierarchical and impersonal communication style, and more focused on the “credibility appeal” and “rational appeal” in persuasion mode; the commercial banks of the United States are more reactive in the communication strategy, position themselves in short distance with the putative audience in communication style, and conform to the typical “affective appeal” regarding the persuasion mode. From the intercultural perspective, the distinctions are the representation of the peculiar high-context culture and low-context culture based on Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory. Chinese banks should try to shorten the cultural gap by adopting communication strategy in conformity with the local cultural when going global rather than sticking to the domestic communication strategy. (shrink)

This article explores the connection between the Heng Xian and the Changes of Zhou tradition, especially the “Tuan” and “Attached Verbalizations” commentaries. Two important Heng Xian terms—heng 恆 and fu 復—are also Changes of Zhou hexagrams and possible connections are explored. Second, the Heng Xian account of the creation of names is compared with the “Attached Verbalizations” account of the creation of the Changes of Zhou system. Third, the roles played by knowing and desire in both (...) Heng Xian and the Changes of Zhou tradition are explored, with particular focus on potential points of similarity. Finally, insights gained through these comparisons are used to interpret the Heng Xian advice on initiating action. (shrink)

Laozi zhe xue -- Zhuangzi zhe xue za lun -- Xian Qin zhu zi yan jiu wen xian mu lu.

Riassunto: L’antico teatro della Casa Ufficiale è un antico teatro esistente nell’area Montuosa del Taihang nella Provincia dell’Henan Settentrionale, il quale nacque nel periodo centrale della Dinastia Qing. L’aspetto dell’antico teatro della Casa Ufficiale è legato all’ambiente naturale locale, alla cultura popolare e alla produttività agricola. Ci sono otto antiche fasi della casa ufficiale nell’area Montuosa del Taihang nella Provincia dell’Henan Settentrionale, che forniscono prove fisiche per lo studio del dramma teatrale popolare nell’area Montuosa del Taihang durante la dinastia Qing. (...) Le iscrizioni sulle stele e sul palcoscenico dell’opera tradizionale cinese riflettono alcune caratteristiche del dramma teatrale rappresentato dai funzionari fin dalla dinastia Qing in Cina. I tipi di opere eseguite sono opere locali, le quali rappresentano dei preziosi materiali per lo studio storico. In una certa misura, è possibile ricostruire il percorso lo sviluppo regionale della società, della cultura e della vita quotidiana locale. (shrink)

This article assumes that a profession is a number of individuals in the same occupation voluntarily organized to earn a living by openly serving a moral ideal in a morally-permissible way beyond what law, market, morality, and public opinion would otherwise require. Our question is whether the concept of profession may have a far wider range than the term, so that, for example, pointing out that a certain language lacks a word for “profession” in our sense, is not enough to (...) show that those who speak the language also lack the concept. We believe the survey of 71 Chinese reported here begins to answer that question. This article has four parts. The first describes who was interviewed, how, when, and so on. The second describes some important features of the survey’s questions, explaining how the questions track the concept of profession. The third part reports and interprets the results relevant to our question. The forth defends a tentative answer to the question with which we began—arguing the survey supports the claim that China has a profession of engineering. This article should serve as a “proof of concept”, that is, a model for similar studies around the world both of engineering and of other occupations thought to be professions. (shrink)

This book brings together leading scholars and practitioners from the United States, Europe, and Asia. The contributors come from different disciplines, including medicine, criminology, sociology, psychology, forensic sciences, and law. As a group, they have the background to discuss and conduct research in the area and to propose and critique theories and typologies of animal cruelty. In addition, they have the expertise to evaluate policy issues and to recommend best practices for protecting animals and intervening with those who abuse or (...) neglect them. (shrink)

In many countries where human embryo commercialization is banned, and no profit is allowed to be made directly from the transaction of frozen embryos between donor and recipient, there is still considerable opportunity for profiteering in medical fees arising from laboratory and clinical services rendered to the recipient. It is easy to disguise the 'sale' of altruistically donated human embryos through substantially increased medical fees, particularly in a private practice setting. The pertinent question that arises is what would constitute a (...) fair and honest profit margin for the medical professional and health institution in question? A suitable benchmark would obviously be the level of medical fees normally charged to patients for a self-freeze/thaw embryo transfer cycle, after initial failure at their first attempt in ART. This is because the level of medical expertise, clinical and laboratory services required for a donor- and self-freeze/thaw embryo transfer cycle should, in theory, be about the same, although slight variation in treatment can be expected owing to patients' respective medical histories, which results in varying predisposition to medical complications. In any case, the health authority should ensure that there is no gross disparity in the medical fees for both donor- and self-freeze/thaw embryo transfer cycle, as this could mask opportunistic profiteering by medical professionals and, in fact, be a covert form of embryo commercialization. (shrink)

The “Chu shuo” 儲說 chapters of the Hanfeizi 韓非 子, attributed to Han Fei 韓非, encompass an extensive collection of anecdotes. The jing 經 sections of these chapters are traditionally understood to be a set of “canonical” teachings, to be explicated by the anecdotes in the shuo 說 sections. Eschewing this assumption, my analysis substantiates an alternative hypothesis that sees many of the jing texts as later superimpositions intended to serve as paratexts to existing anecdotal collections. By interpreting the jing (...) and shuo sections as paratexts and main texts, respectively, this study reveals how early compilers sought to organize and inventory information, as well as to guide future users’ understanding and memorization of the anecdotal materials. This approach not only facilitates the reconstruction of early frameworks of information management and knowledge acquisition, but also places the “Chu shuo” chapters in a comparative context. It also proffers new answers to several long-standing philological debates, such as the meaning and function of the label yi yue 一曰. In its conclusion, this study draws attention to potential continuities between the pre-imperial and imperial periods’ textual and bibliographical practices. (shrink)

According to the Body‐Specificity Hypothesis (BSH), people implicitly associate positive ideas with the side of space on which they are able to act more fluently with their dominant hand. Though this hypothesis has been rigorously tested across a variety of populations and tasks, the studies thus far have only been conducted in linguistic and cultural communities which favor the right over the left. Here, we tested the effect of handedness on implicit space‐valence mappings in Tibetan practitioners of Bön who show (...) a strong religious preference for the left, in comparison to an English group. Results showed that Bön right‐handers tended to implicitly associate positive valence more strongly with their dominant side of space despite strong explicit associations between the left and goodness in their religion. This pattern of results found in Bön participants was indistinguishable from that found in English speakers. The findings of the present study support the BSH, demonstrating that space‐valence mappings in people's minds are shaped by their bodily experience, which appears to be independent of space‐valence mappings enshrined in cultural conventions. (shrink)

This paper uses the Process Dissociation Procedure to explore whether people can acquire unconscious knowledge in the serial reaction time task [Destrebecqz, A., & Cleeremans, A. . Can sequence learning be implicit? New evidence with the Process Dissociation Procedure. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8, 343–350; Wilkinson, L., & Shanks, D. R. . Intentional control and implicit sequence learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30, 354–369]. Experiment 1 showed that people generated legal sequences above baseline levels under exclusion (...) instructions. Reward moved exclusion performance towards baseline, indicating that the extent of motivation in the test phase influenced the expression of unconscious knowledge. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed that even with reward, adding noise to the sequences or shortening training led to above-baseline exclusion performance, suggesting that task difficulty and the amount of training also affected the expression of unconscious knowledge. The results help resolve some current debates about the role of conscious awareness in sequence learning. (shrink)

According to the Temporal Focus Hypothesis, space–time mappings in people’s minds are shaped by their attentional focus. Previous research has shown that numerous cultural and individual factors underpinning temporal focus may contribute to the direction of space–time mappings in people’s mental models. However, the role of time of day in shaping spatial conceptions of time has not been investigated. In a series of three experiments, Chinese participants, who were more likely to be future-focused in the morning than afternoon, were also (...) more likely to produce a future-in-front mapping. However, this morning future-minded effect can only be found in morning people, suggesting a mediating role of chronotype processes. Taken together, the findings across studies suggest that people’s representations of time may arise from an interaction between a person’s chronotype and time-of-day, a phenomenon that we refer to as the chronotype future-minded effect. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

We investigate how short and long-range word length correlations evolve in Chinese narrative texts. The results show that, for short-range word length correlations, no significant linear evolutionary trend was found. But for long-range correlations, there are two opposite tendencies for two different regimes: the Hurst exponent of small-scale word length correlations decreases over time, and the exponent of large-scale shows an increasing tendency. The increase of word length is corroborated as an essential regularity of word evolution in written Chinese. Further (...) analyses show that a significant correlation coefficient is obtained between Hurst exponents from the small-scale correlations and mean word length across time. These indicate that word length correlation evolution possesses different self-adaptive mechanisms in terms of different scales of distances between words. We speculate that the increase of word length and sentence length in written Chinese may account for this phenomenon, in terms of both the social-cultural aspects and the self-adapting properties of language structures. (shrink)

Previous research suggests that both patterns in orthography and cultural-specific associations of space-time affect how people map space onto time. In the current study, we focused on Chinese Buddhists, an understudied population, investigating how religious experiences influence their mental representations of time. Results showed that Chinese Buddhists could represent time spatially corresponding to left-to-right, right-to-left and top-to-bottom orientations in their religious scripts. Specifically, they associated earlier events with the starting point of the reading and later times with the endpoint. We (...) also found that Chinese Buddhists were more likely to represent time in a clockwise way than Chinese atheists. This is because Buddhism regards time as cyclic and consisting of repeating ages (i.e. Wheel of Time). Taken together, we provide first psychological evidence that Chinese Buddhists’ spatial representations of time are different from atheists’, due to their religious experiences, namely, both the reading direction in Buddhist texts and Buddhist concepts of time. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

A major challenge for The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) Project is solving the high level of genetic and epigenetic heterogeneity of cancer. For the majority of solid tumors, evolution patterns are stochastic and the end products are unpredictable, in contrast to the relatively predictable stepwise patterns classically described in many hematological cancers. Further, it is genome aberrations, rather than gene mutations, that are the dominant factor in generating abnormal levels of system heterogeneity in cancers. These features of cancer could significantly (...) reduce the impact of the sequencing approach, as it is only when mutated genes are the main cause of cancer that directly sequencing them is justified. Many biological factors (genetic and epigenetic variations, metabolic processes) and environmental influences can increase the probability of cancer formation, depending on the given circumstances. The common link between these factors is the stochastic genome variations that provide the driving force behind the cancer evolutionary process within multiple levels of a biological system. This analysis suggests that cancer is a disease of probability and the most‐challenging issue to the TCGA project, as well as the development of general strategies for fighting cancer, lie at the conceptual level. BioEssays 29:783–794, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This paper discusses Eastern European Marxists’ consideration of science and technology concerning aesthetic dimensions. Different from most of Western Marxists who take negative or dystopian attitudes towards modern science and technology from the aesthetic utopian perspective, those Marxists who come from countries such as Hungary, Yugoslav, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria or Romania, which once belonged to the socialist camp, under the influence of Soviet and Western culture, pay attention to the complicated tension between science-technology and aesthetics. In this paper, (...) I probe into these notions by reading György Lukács, Budapest School, Romanian theorists and the Yugoslav Praxis Group, which are divided into four key points: basic nature of science in contrast with arts; modern tension of culture between science and arts; the possibility of scientific aesthetics; and development of arts in the world of technology. There is a dialectical understanding of science and technology here which contributes to contemporary recognition of science and technology from the point of view of neo-humanism, not only in aesthetics but also human existence. This is relevant to theoretical reflection on the present and future Chinese socialist aesthetics. (shrink)

《傅玄〈傅子〉校读》是一部关于傅玄遗文的校释性著作。属于傅玄研究中的基础性研究.

本书内容包括:儒家与人际关系的改善;谈儒家与心灵生活;谈孟子与成功之道;感悟老子的人生大智慧等。.

There is limited knowledge of the prevalence and nature of risky sexual behavior (RSB) among young adults in Hong Kong. This cross-sectional study explored the psychosocial risk factors of RSB with a sample of 1,171 Hong Kong university students (aged 18–40 years). Grounded in the theoretical propositions of several criminological theories (i.e., the theories of self-control, general strain, social learning, social control, and routine activity), engagement in three types of RSB (i.e., general, penetrative, and non-penetrative) was studied alongside a range (...) of psychosocial risk factors. Relative to female participants, male participants reported significantly higher mean levels of general, penetrative, and non-penetrative RSB. Male participants also reported significantly higher mean levels of negative temperament, use of alcohol and other drugs, and paraphilic interests than female participants, who reported significantly higher mean levels of self-control and social bonds than their male counterparts. The results of multivariate analyses (i.e., OLS regressions) revealed that, to a large extent, the male and female participants shared a similar set of psychosocial risk factors (i.e., use of alcohol and other drugs, and paraphilic interest) for their involvement in general, penetrative, and non-penetrative RSB. Furthermore, a high level of negative temperament was significantly associated with penetrative RSB for both genders, while a high level of perceived neighborhood disorganization was found to be an important factor in the participation of females in general, penetrative, and non-penetrative RSB. The findings of this study may have important implications for practice in regard to reducing, if not entirely preventing, the tendency to engage in RSB. (shrink)

Modern biology has been heavily influenced by the gene‐centric concept. Paradoxically, this very concept – on which bioresearch is based – is challenged by the success of gene‐based research in terms of explaining evolutionary theory. To overcome this major roadblock, it is essential to establish new theories, to not only solve the key puzzles presented by the gene‐centric concept, but also to provide a conceptual framework that allows the field to grow. This paper discusses a number of paradoxes and illustrates (...) how they can be addressed by the genome‐centric concept in order to further resynthesize evolutionary theory. In particular, methodological breakthroughs that analyze genome evolution are discussed. The multiple interactions among different levels of a complex system provide the key to understanding the relationship between self‐organization and natural selection. Darwinian natural selection applies to the biological level due to its unique genetic and heterogeneous features, but does not simply or directly apply to either the lower non‐living level or higher intellectual society level. At the complex bio‐system level, the genome context (the entire package of genes and their genomic physical relationship or genomic topology), not the individual genes, defines the system and serves as the principle selection platform for evolution. (shrink)

This paper offers a short history of Agnes Heller’s relationship to China through three aspects: imaginative aesthetic enjoyment, real encounters with Chinese cultural spectacles and actual audiences, and the construction of an academic community through creative dialogue. These discussions suggest that Heller felt at home in China. Although Heller has passed away, a home for us remains in her work through remembering her and engaging further with her writings.

People implicitly associate the “past” and “future” with “front” and “back” in their minds according to their cultural attitudes toward time. As the temporal focus hypothesis proposes, future-oriented people tend to think about time according to the future-in-front mapping, whereas past-oriented people tend to think about time according to the past-in-front mapping. Whereas previous studies have demonstrated that culture exerts an important influence on people's implicit spatializations of time, we focus specifically on religion, a prominent layer of culture, as potential (...) additional influence on space-time mappings. In Experiment 1 and 2, we observed a difference between the two religious groups, with Buddhists being more past-focused and more frequently conceptualizing the past as ahead of them and the future as behind them, and Taoists more future-focused and exhibiting the opposite space-time mapping. In Experiment 3, we administered a religion prime, in which Buddhists were randomly assigned to visualize the picture of the Buddhas of the Past or the Future. Results showed that the pictorial icon of Dipamkara increased participants' tendency to conceptualize the past as in front of them. In contrast, the pictorial icon of Maitreya caused a dramatic increase in the rate of future-in-front responses. In Experiment 4, the causal effect of religion on implicit space-time mappings was replicated in atheists. Taken together, these findings provide converging evidence for the hypothesized causal role of religion for temporal focus in determining space-time mappings. (shrink)

Past research suggests that spiritual leadership plays a pivotal role in enhancing employee job performance, yet we have little understanding of how and when spiritual leadership enhances employee job performance. The present study explores how and when spiritual leadership promotes job performance by examining relational energy as a mediator and leader integrity and relational energy differentiation as boundary conditions. We tested the theoretical model with data gathered across three phases over 12 months from 497 employees and their supervisors in 108 (...) groups. Results showed that the positive relationship between spiritual leadership and job performance was mediated by relational energy. Moreover, we found that leader integrity amplified the mediated relationship between spiritual leadership and employee job performance via relational energy. In contrast, relational energy differentiation weakened this mediated relationship. (shrink)

The conceptual and methodological contributions of Marxist aesthetics from Eastern European countries like Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and East Germany were productive and significant despite various hurdles faced concerning institutionalization, legitimization and differing theoretical abuses. In its mode of inquiry and discursive practices, Eastern European Marxist aesthetics is both similar and dissimilar to its Western, Soviet, Russian and Chinese counterparts. The specificity here is the function of a unique geographical and socio-historical context, as well as interaction with other (...) contemporary paradigms of thought. The innovative impulses of Eastern European Marxist aesthetics affected six scholarly domains: aesthetics of praxis, theory of realism, critique of modernity, semiotics, theory of genre and cultural theory. This paper provides a general survey of the intellectual achievements of Eastern European Marxist aesthetics across these six domains and will show how this theoretical tradition has influenced the modern history of ideas. (shrink)

本书分为“后现代:历史、政治和伦理”、“书评”、“评论”、“书目索引”四部分,收录了15篇文章。.

本辑编入19篇论文,分别分为“柯林武德论历史哲学”、“柯林武德的历史思想”以及“历史哲学”三大部分。包括“历史循环理论”、“历史知识的界限”、“克里齐的历史哲学”、“纳粹究竟残害了多少犹太人”等文章。 .