A deep reinforcement learning-based computational guidance method is presented, which is used to identify and resolve the problem of collision avoidance for a variable number of fixed-wing UAVs in limited airspace. The cooperative guidance process is first analyzed for multiple aircraft by formulating flight scenarios using multiagent Markov game theory and solving it by machine learning algorithm. Furthermore, a self-learning framework is established by using the actor-critic model, which is proposed to train collision avoidance decision-making neural networks. To achieve higher (...) scalability, the neural network is customized to incorporate long short-term memory networks, and a coordination strategy is given. Additionally, a simulator suitable for multiagent high-density route scene is designed for validation, in which all UAVs run the proposed algorithm onboard. Simulated experiment results from several case studies show that the real-time guidance algorithm can reduce the collision probability of multiple UAVs in flight effectively even with a large number of aircraft. (shrink)

Most discussions of racial fetish center on the question of whether it is caused by negative racial stereotypes. In this paper I adopt a different strategy, one that begins with the experiences of those targeted by racial fetish rather than those who possess it; that is, I shift focus away from the origins of racial fetishes to their effects as a social phenomenon in a racially stratified world. I examine the case of preferences for Asian women, also known as ‘yellow (...) fever’, to argue against the claim that racial fetishes are unobjectionable if they are merely based on personal or aesthetic preference rather than racial stereotypes. I contend that even if this were so, yellow fever would still be morally objectionable because of the disproportionate psychological burdens it places on Asian and Asian-American women, along with the role it plays in a pernicious system of racial social meanings. (shrink)

This chapter distinguishes between two concepts of moral responsibility. We are responsible for our actions in the first sense only when those actions reflect our identities as moral agents, i.e. when they are attributable to us. We are responsible in the second sense when it is appropriate for others to enforce certain expectations and demands on those actions, i.e. to hold us accountable for them. This distinction allows for an account of moral responsibility for implicit bias, defended here, on which (...) people may lack attributability for actions caused by implicit bias but are still accountable for them. What this amounts to is leaving aside appraisal-based forms of moral criticism such as blame and punishment in favor of non-appraising forms of accountability. This account not only does more justice to our moral experience and agency, but will also lead to more effective practices for combating the harms of implicit bias. (shrink)

The virtual brand community has become an important marketing tool for companies. A successful brand community marketing strategy should attract a large number of consumers. Although past studies have revealed consumer motivations for participating in virtual brand communities, they fail to answer an important question: Why is it so easy for some virtual brand communities to attract users while others have such difficulty? In this study, product characteristics are hypothesized to be important factors that determine consumer motivation to participate in (...) brand communities. Product characteristics can directly affect how actively consumers participate in brand communities. The results of questionnaires show that product complexity, product symbolism, and product satisfaction have a positive influence on consumers’ willingness to participate in brand communities. Notably, the duration of product use has a regulating effect on the influence of product satisfaction and product symbolism. A long period of product use weakens the influence of product satisfaction on consumers’ willingness to participate in brand communities. On the contrary, a long period of product use strengthens the influence of product symbolism on consumers’ willingness to participate in brand communities. This study enriches the literature on brand community participation and has implications for companies that aim to utilize brand communities for marketing. (shrink)

Young children judge that violations of ordinary, causal constraints are impossible. Yet children’s religious beliefs typically include the assumption that such violations can occur via divine agency in the form of miracles. We conducted two studies to examine this potential conflict. In Study 1, we invited 5- and 6-year-old Colombian children attending either a secular or a religious school to judge what is and is not possible. Children made their judgments either following a minimal prompt or following a reminder of (...) God’s extraordinary powers. Irrespective of their education, and whether or not they had been reminded of God’s extraordinary powers, children systematically judged violations of ordinary, causal constraints to be impossible. In Study 2, we asked if more extensive reminders of God’s special powers would prompt religious children to say that the impossible can happen. Five- and 6-year-old Colombian children attending either a secular or a religious school were presented with narratives in which the protagonist desired an ordinarily impossible outcome. In half the stories, the protagonist prayed to God for the desired outcome. Irrespective of education and of whether the protagonist prayed, children systematically concluded that the desired outcome would not occur and justified that conclusion by reference to ordinary causal constraints. Nevertheless, in a minority of their replies children did assert that violations of ordinary causality are possible. Overall, irrespective of their religious education, young children judge that events rarely deviate from their natural course; only occasionally do they acknowledge exceptions. (shrink)

This article draws out the subtle connections among the various sorts of categories— sheng 生 (reproduction), qin 亲 (familiarity), ai 爱 (love), and ren 仁 (humaneness) —focusing on the following: Confucius found the original significance of reproduction to be sympathy between males and females, and upon further study he found it extended to the.affinity of blood relations, namely familiarity. From familiarity he came to understand love that one generates and has for people and things beyond one’s blood relations, in other (...) words, the empathic heart or the feeling of empathy itself. From here he anticipated rende 仁德 (the humane and virtuous) level of fan’ai zhong 泛爱众 (universal love for all people) or fan’ai wanwu 泛爱万物 (universal love for all creatures). The article further makes the point that in order to meet the conditions for the perfection of humaneness which has neither any excesses nor any deficiencies, Confucius ultimately developed a means, that is, the golden mean, which indicates that his ancient understanding of life and growth produced in Confucius a profound shift in the focus of human concern from ming 命 (fate) to Dao 道 (the Way). (shrink)

Question order effects are commonly observed in self-report measures of judgment and attitude. This article develops a quantum question order model (the QQ model) to account for four types of question order effects observed in literature. First, the postulates of the QQ model are presented. Second, an a priori, parameter-free, and precise prediction, called the QQ equality, is derived from these mathematical principles, and six empirical data sets are used to test the prediction. Third, a new index is derived from (...) the model to measure similarity between questions. Fourth, we show that in contrast to the QQ model, Bayesian and Markov models do not generally satisfy the QQ equality and thus cannot account for the reported empirical data that support this equality. Finally, we describe the conditions under which order effects are predicted to occur, and we review a broader range of findings that are encompassed by these very same quantum principles. We conclude that quantum probability theory, initially invented to explain order effects on measurements in physics, appears to be a powerful natural explanation for order effects of self-report measures in social and behavioral sciences, too. (shrink)

Prominent memeticists like Daniel Dennett and Susan Blackmore have made claims far more radical than those included in Dawkins’ original proposal, which provoked increasingly heated debates and arguments over the theoretical significance as well as limits or flaws of the entire memetic enterprise. In this paper, I examine closely some of the critical points taken by Kate Distin in her penetrating engagement with those radical claims, which include such ideas as the thought that we are meme machines as much as (...) gene machines, the thesis that there is no conscious self inside those machines, and the claim that a complex interplay of replicators and environment is all there is to life (Blackmore 1999: 241). It is hoped that a viable thesis concerning a deep-seated normativity emerges from my discussion. (shrink)

We investigate a possible universal constraint on spatial meaning. It has been proposed that people attend preferentially to the endpoints of spatial motion events, and that languages may therefore make finer semantic distinctions at event endpoints than at event beginnings. We test this proposal. In Experiment 1, we show that people discriminate the endpoints of spatial motion events more readily than they do event beginnings—suggesting a non-linguistic attentional bias toward endpoints. In Experiment 2, speakers of Arabic, Chinese, and English each (...) described a set of spatial events displayed in video clips. Although the spatial systems of these languages differ, speakers of all three languages made finer semantic distinctions at event endpoints, compared to event beginnings. These findings are consistent with the proposal that event endpoints are privileged over event beginnings, in both language and perception. (shrink)

This anthology investigates how Searle’s philosophy and Chinese philosophy can jointly contribute to the common philosophical enterprise and shows how such comparative methodology of constructive engagement is important in philosophical inquiry.

Now that society is in a period of transition, the lack of norms for moral values is becoming an increasingly serious issue. People in commerce talk about commerce, and those "going out to sea" talk about the sea.

This article theoretically proposes and empirically verifies an understudied issue in the business ethics and corporate social responsibility literature—how moral degradation in a society influences the relationship between BE or CSR and firm performance. Building on strategic choice theory, we propose that both BE and CSR become more important in enhancing business success when the perceived MD is heightened. Our analysis of 300 firms operating in China statistically confirms our hypotheses: first, under high MD, firms’ engagement in CSR results in (...) higher corporate legitimacy and competitive advantage, and second, their adherence to ethical business codes leads to higher corporate legitimacy. We conclude the article by outlining the implications for both theory and practice. (shrink)

The green development level reflected in the green finance index and the evaluation of the degree of green development in smart cities have important practical effects on economic transformation. For promoting the transformation and upgrading of finance, we select 2013–2019 data and construct a distributed lag model to analyse the important role played by green finance and financial technology in the construction of smart cities. In the paper, we find green finance promotes the construction of smart cities, and only it (...) will not appear until nine months late. Financial technology has an opposite impact on the construction of smart cities, this is mainly because the research and marketization of financial technology are higher, and the cost is also higher. This influence will appear in the next 14 months. (shrink)

Using Least Square Residual Minimization techniques, this paper develops an optimal reserve model, known as the OPREM model, which is essential in optimizing the costs of reserve holding. The paper also sets-out to test and compare the relative predictions of economic trends of the OPREM model as well as the predictions of alternative models in literature. Establishing the predictive accuracy of economic trends of these models are crucial for the gradual and cost-effective accumulation of reserves. The research concludes that, the (...) decision to optimize the cost of reserves under a stable currency environment is reliant on the gold impact factor and not on inflation or interest rates. We also found on further analysis of the OPREM that the OPREM model is better positioned to eliminate the procyclicality and perverse rush in reserve build-ups experienced in developing and emerging countries by effectively setting the reserve stock against economic trends. The research fixes the optimal reserves around a benchmark of 0.7–1.2 of previous year's optimal value. However, in the absence of past optimal values, a benchmark between 2 and 6 times of average inflows for short-term analysis or analysis with small data observations. However, for long-term analysis or analysis with large data frequency, the reserve stock should be fixed on a benchmark of 2–9 times of the average inflows. (shrink)

Recurrent neural network has been widely applied to many sequential tagging tasks such as natural language process and time series analysis, and it has been proved that RNN works well in those areas. In this paper, we propose using RNN with long short-term memory units for server load and performance prediction. Classical methods for performance prediction focus on building relation between performance and time domain, which makes a lot of unrealistic hypotheses. Our model is built based on events, which is (...) the root cause of server performance. We predict the performance of the servers using RNN-LSTM by analyzing the log of servers in data center which contains user’s access sequence. Previous work for workload prediction could not generate detailed simulated workload, which is useful in testing the working condition of servers. Our method provides a new way to reproduce user request sequence to solve this problem by using RNN-LSTM. Experiment result shows that our models get a good performance in generating load and predicting performance on the data set which has been logged in online service. We did experiments with nginx web server and mysql database server, and our methods can been easily applied to other servers in data center. (shrink)

The present study set out to examine the role of cross-linguistic differences as a source of potential difficulty in the acceptance and online interpretation of the English singular they by Chinese English as a Foreign Language learners across two levels of second-language proficiency. Experiment 1 operationalized performance through an untimed acceptability judgment test and Experiment 2 through a self-paced reading task. Statistical analyses yielded an asymmetric pattern of results. Experiment 1 indicated that unlike native English speakers who generally accepted the (...) singular they with all antecedent types, two Chinese EFL groups consisting of English majors and non-English majors both rated it as the least acceptable pronoun regardless of their proficiency level. In contrast, Experiment 2 demonstrated that like native English speakers, both Chinese EFL groups were not disrupted in their reading by the use of the singular they most of the time, although its online interpretation was modulated by L2 proficiency levels of the participants. While the English majors were not affected by the use of the singular they, the non-English majors spent a significantly longer time reading the latter region of the sentences where the singular they was used. In short, the results of the two experiments seem to indicate that under no time constraint, L2 speakers showed a heightened degree of grammar sensitivity, whereas when there was a time constraint, their grammatical sensitivity was reduced by a greater need to focus on meaning. The difficulty for Chinese EFL learners to acquire the singular they may be located at the restructuring of their existing knowledge of the plural feature of they [−PLURAL] in their mental lexicon and the adaptation to the sociocultural norms of the target language. The pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed. (shrink)