This essay indicates that Confucian family-based ethics is by no means a stumbling block to organ donation in China. We contend that China should not change to an opt-out consent system in order to enhance donation because a “hard” opt-out system is unethical, and a “soft” opt-out system is unhelpful. We argue that the recently-introduced familist model of motivation for organ donation in mainland China can provide a proper incentive for donation. This model, and the family priority right that this (...) model supports, is ethically justifiable in terms of Confucian family-based ethics. (shrink)

In this article, we use a sample of Norwegian quoted companies in the period of 2001–2010 to explore whether the gender quota requiring 40 % female directors on corporate boards changes the likelihood of women being appointed to top leadership roles as board chairs or corporate CEOs. Our empirical results indicate that the gender quota and the resulting increased representation of female directors provide a fertile ground for women to take top leadership positions. The presence of female board chairs is (...) positively associated with female directors’ independence status, age and qualification, whilst the presence of female CEOs is positively related to the average qualification of female directors. Firms with older and better educated female directors are more likely to appoint female board chairs. The likelihood of female CEOs’ appointment increases with the percentage of independent directors and directors’ qualifications, especially those for female directors. Furthermore, the gender gaps with respect to qualification, board interlocks and nationality between female and male board chairs vanishes after Norwegian companies’ full compliance to the quota in January 2008. However, the gender quota has no significant impact on the gender gaps between female and male directors after its full compliance. Our article thereby contributes to understanding how gender quotas, presence of female directors, percentage of female directors on boards and other board characteristics can determine the gender of top leaders of organizations. (shrink)

The European Union Commission’s whitepaper on Artificial Intelligence proposes shaping the emerging AI market so that it better reflects common European values. It is a master plan that builds upon the EU AI High-Level Expert Group guidelines. This article reviews the masterplan, from a culture cycle perspective, to reflect on its potential clashes with current societal, technical, and methodological constraints. We identify two main obstacles in the implementation of this plan: the lack of a coherent EU vision to drive future (...) decision-making processes at state and local levels and the lack of methods to support a sustainable diffusion of AI in our society. The lack of a coherent vision stems from not considering societal differences across the EU member states. We suggest that these differences may lead to a fractured market and an AI crisis in which different members of the EU will adopt nation-centric strategies to exploit AI, thus preventing the development of a frictionless market as envisaged by the EU. Moreover, the Commission aims at changing the AI development culture proposing a human-centred and safety-first perspective that is not supported by methodological advancements, thus taking the risks of unforeseen social and societal impacts of AI. We discuss potential societal, technical, and methodological gaps that should be filled to avoid the risks of developing AI systems at the expense of society. Our analysis results in the recommendation that the EU regulators and policymakers consider how to complement the EC programme with rules and compensatory mechanisms to avoid market fragmentation due to local and global ambitions. Moreover, regulators should go beyond the human-centred approach establishing a research agenda seeking answers to the technical and methodological open questions regarding the development and assessment of human-AI co-action aiming for a sustainable AI diffusion in the society. (shrink)

BackgroundMedical disputes, medical disturbances, verbal and physical violence against physicians, and burnout have reached epidemic levels. They may negatively impact both physicians and the healthcare system. The experience of medical disputes, medical disturbances, verbal, and physical violence, and burnout and the correlates in physicians working in public hospitals in China needed to be investigated.MethodsA nationwide cross-sectional survey study was conducted between 18 and 31 March 2019. An anonymous online questionnaire was administered. The questionnaire included the 22-item Maslach Burnout Inventory-Human Services (...) Survey. We also collected data on demographic and job-related factors, as well as physicians’ experiences of medical disputes, medical disturbances, verbal and physical violence from patients and the patients’ family members.FindingsIn total, 22,213 physicians from 144 tertiary public hospitals in all of China’s 31 provinces completed the survey. The overall burnout rate among the surveyed physicians was 31.28%. Moreover, 33.48% of physicians experienced disputes, 20.86% experienced disturbances, 48.52% experienced verbal violence, and 5.84% experienced physical violence in the past 12 months. Factors found to be significantly associated with burnout included younger age, being divorced or widowed, having a lower educational background, working in internal medicine departments, longer working hours per day, working in general hospitals, being in East China, as well as having experienced disputes, disturbances, and physical and verbal violence.InterpretationClose to a third of the Chinese doctors working in the tertiary hospitals reportedly experienced burnout, and the problem is related to the unsafe working environment caused by the worsening doctor-patient relationship. (shrink)

Different writing systems in the world select different units of spoken language for mapping. Do these writing system differences influence how first language (L1) literacy experiences affect cognitive processes in learning to read a second language (L2)? Two groups of college students who were learning to read English as a second language (ESL) were examined for their relative reliance on phonological and orthographic processing in English word identification: Korean students with an alphabetic L1 literacy background, and Chinese students with a (...) nonalphabetic L1 literacy background. In a semantic category judgment task, Korean ESL learners made more false positive errors in judging stimuli that were homophones to category exemplars than they did in judging spelling controls. However, there were no significant differences in responses to stimuli in these two conditions for Chinese ESL learners. Chinese ESL learners, on the other hand, made more accurate responses to stimuli that were less similar in spelling to category exemplars than those that were more similar. Chinese ESL learners may rely less on phonological information and more on orthographic information in identifying English words than their Korean counterparts. Further evidence supporting this argument came from a phoneme deletion task in which Chinese subjects performed more poorly overall than their Korean counterparts and made more errors that were phonologically incorrect but orthographically acceptable. We suggest that cross-writing system differences in L1s and L1 reading skills transfer could be responsible for these ESL performance differences. (shrink)

This essay argues that the Chinese Mental Health Act of 2013 is overly individualistic and fails to give proper moral weight to the role of Chinese families in directing the process of decision-making for hospitalizing and treating the mentally ill patients. We present three types of reactions within the medical community to the Act, each illustrated with a case and discussion. In the first two types of cases, we argue that these reactions are problematic either because they comply with the (...) law but undermine the patient’s interests by refusing the family’s request to have the patient hospitalized, or violate the law by hospitalizing patients in response to the real concerns of their families. In the third type of situation, psychiatrists inappropriately encourage families to produce evidence of the patient’s behavior that is harmful to self or others in order legally to commit the patient. Each of these problems, we conclude, should be tackled by supplementing Article 30 of the Act with the stipulation that a psychiatrist may authorize the involuntary hospitalization of a patient, who is not at risk of causing physical harm to self or others, with the consent of all major family members. Drawing on the deeply culturally embedded moral traditions of Confucian medical familism, this proposal would facilitate the proper treatment of a significant number of Chinese mentally ill patients under the care of their families. (shrink)

The pandemic in 2020 made online learning the widely used modality of teaching in several countries and it has also entered the spotlight of educational research. However, online learning has always been a challenge for disciplines that require hands-on practice. For art teaching or training, online learning has many advantages and disadvantages. How art teachers embrace and adapt their teaching for online delivery remains an unanswered question. This research examines 892 art teachers' attitudes toward online learning, using learning environment, need (...) satisfaction, mental engagement, and behavior as predictors. Structural equation modeling was used to explore the relationship between these four dimensions during these teachers' participation in an online learning program. The results reveal significant correlations between the learning environment, need satisfaction, mental engagement, and behavior. Moreover, this study reveals the group characteristics of art teachers, which can actually be supported by online learning programs. These findings provide insights into how art teachers view and use online learning, and thus can shed lights on their professional development. (shrink)

A dynamic learning method is developed for an uncertain n-link robot with unknown system dynamics, achieving predefined performance attributes on the link angular position and velocity tracking errors. For a known nonsingular initial robotic condition, performance functions and unconstrained transformation errors are employed to prevent the violation of the full-state tracking error constraints. By combining two independent Lyapunov functions and radial basis function neural network approximator, a novel and simple adaptive neural control scheme is proposed for the dynamics of the (...) unconstrained transformation errors, which guarantees uniformly ultimate boundedness of all the signals in the closed-loop system. In the steady-state control process, RBF NNs are verified to satisfy the partial persistent excitation condition. Subsequently, an appropriate state transformation is adopted to achieve the accurate convergence of neural weight estimates. The corresponding experienced knowledge on unknown robotic dynamics is stored in NNs with constant neural weight values. Using the stored knowledge, a static neural learning controller is developed to improve the full-state tracking performance. A comparative simulation study on a 2-link robot illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. (shrink)

An effective approach is introduced to predict the magnitude of reservoir-triggered earthquake, based on support vector machines and fuzzy support vector machines methods. The main influence factors on RTE, including lithology, rock mass integrity, fault features, tectonic stress state, and seismic activity background in reservoir area, are categorized into 11 parameters and quantified by using analytical hierarchy process. Dataset on 100 reservoirs in China, including the 48 well-documented cases of RTE, are collected and used to train and validate the prediction (...) models established with SVM and FSVM, respectively. Through numerical tests, it is found that both the SVM and FSVM models are effective in the prediction of the magnitude of RTE with high accuracy, provided that sufficient samples are collected. While the results of FSVM which is extended from SVM by introducing a fuzzy membership to reduce the influence of noises or outliers are found to be slightly less accurate than those of SVM in the current analysis of RTE cases. The reason might be attributed to the high discreteness of the sample data in the current study. (shrink)

This paper focuses on neural learning from adaptive neural control for a class of flexible joint manipulator under the output tracking constraint. To facilitate the design, a new transformed function is introduced to convert the constrained tracking error into unconstrained error variable. Then, a novel adaptive neural dynamic surface control scheme is proposed by combining the neural universal approximation. The proposed control scheme not only decreases the dimension of neural inputs but also reduces the number of neural approximators. Moreover, it (...) can be verified that all the closed-loop signals are uniformly ultimately bounded and the constrained tracking error converges to a small neighborhood around zero in a finite time. Particularly, the reduction of the number of neural input variables simplifies the verification of persistent excitation condition for neural networks. Subsequently, the proposed ANC scheme is verified recursively to be capable of acquiring and storing knowledge of unknown system dynamics in constant neural weights. By reusing the stored knowledge, a neural learning controller is developed for better control performance. Simulation results on a single-link flexible joint manipulator and experiment results on Baxter robot are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. (shrink)

The present study examined the relationship between emotion malleability beliefs and daily positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) in adolescents. 639 participants provided information about emotion malleability beliefs and emotion regulation strategies on the first day of the study and six daily measurements of PA and NA. Emotion malleability beliefs had a positive relationship with PA and a negative relationship with NA. Higher emotion malleability beliefs predicted lower carryover effects of PA and NA across assessment days. We also found (...) that cognitive reappraisal might affect the relationship between emotion malleability beliefs and daily affect, such that those who held high levels of malleability beliefs were more likely to engage in cognitive reappraisal and report lower NA and higher PA. The findings of the present study suggest that emotion malleability beliefs could predicate daily emotions and emotion dynamics across days in adolescents. (shrink)

本书分为理性/疯癫、话语/知识、权力/身体、伦理学/美学四章,包括疯癫与空间,医学的语法,人的诞生和死亡,考古学和陈述,权力和理性,生活的艺术等内容。.

本书以教师与学生对话的方式就科学发展的社会背景和影响科技发挥作用的社会因素,科学技术进步对社会经济发展的影响,科学与社会相互关系的调节控制等一系列重大事件和问题展开讨论。.

本书包括:尼采体验的永恒回归、基督教道德与愤恨、尼采对意志的拒拆、查拉图斯特拉的戏剧、游牧思想、尼采的形而上学等内容。.

本书收录的10篇讲稿,是作者于1994年至1998年间记录下来的。其中7篇以“文化格局与人的表述”为名于1997年结集出版,8年后在此改版,补充了3篇而成本书。.

本书收录《荀子》中经典语句,并配有中英译文,包括“劝学篇”、“修身篇”、“不苟篇”、“荣辱篇”、“非相篇”、“仲尼篇”等。.

The whale optimization algorithm is a powerful swarm intelligence method which has been widely used in various fields such as parameter identification of solar cells and PV modules. In order to better balance the exploration and exploitation of WOA, we propose a novel modified WOA in which both the mutation strategy based on Levy flight and a local search mechanism of pattern search are introduced. On the one hand, Levy flight can make the algorithm get rid of the local optimum (...) and avoid stagnation; thus, it is able to prevent the algorithm from losing diversity and to increase the global search capability. On the other hand, pattern search, a direct search method, has not only high convergence rate but also good stability, which can boost the local optimization ability of the WOA. Therefore, the combination of these two mechanisms can greatly improve the capability of WOA to obtain the best solution. In addition, MWOA may be employed to estimate parameters in single diode model, double diode model, and PV modules and to identify unknown parameters of two different types of PV modules under diverse light irradiance and temperature conditions. The analytical results demonstrate the validity and the practicality of MWOA for estimating parameters of solar cells and PV modules. (shrink)

Theories of grounded and embodied cognition offer a range of accounts of how reasoning and body‐based processes are related to each other. To advance theories of grounded and embodied cognition, we explore the cognitive relevance of particular body states to associated math concepts. We test competing models of action‐cognition transduction to investigate the cognitive relevance of directed actions to students’ mathematical reasoning in the area of geometry. The hypotheses we test include (1) that cognitively relevant directed actions have a direct (...) effect on performance (direct cognitive relevance hypothesis), (2) that cognitively relevant directed actions lead to more frequent production of gestures during explanations, which leads to improved performance (mediated cognitive relevance hypothesis), and (3) that performance effects of directed actions are influenced by the presence or absence of gesture production during mathematical explanations (moderated cognitive relevance hypothesis). We explore these hypotheses in an experiment where high school students (N = 85) evaluated the truth of geometry conjectures after performing cognitively relevant or cognitively irrelevant directed actions while playing a movement‐based video game. Contrary to the direct and mediated cognitive relevance hypotheses, we found no overall differences in performance or gesture production between relevant and irrelevant conditions. Consistent with the moderated cognitive relevance hypothesis, cognitive relevance influenced mathematical performance, as measured by the accuracy of students’ intuitions, insights, and the validity of their proofs, provided that students produced certain kinds of gestures during mathematical explanations (i.e., with explanatory gestures as the moderator). Implications for theories of grounded and embodied cognition and the design of embodied forms of educational interventions are discussed. (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)

To cope with the water deficit resulting from saline environment, plant cells accumulate three kinds of osmotica: salts, small organic solutes and hydrophillic, glycine-rich proteins. Salts such as NaCl are cheap and available but has ion toxicity in high concentrations. Small organic solutes are assistant osmotica, their main function is to protect cytoplasmic enzymes from ionic toxicity and maintain the integrity of cellular membranes. Hydrophillic, glycine-rich proteins are the most effective osmotica, they have some characteristics to avoid crystallization even in (...) high concentration, but because they are expensive they are not as commonly used as salts or organic solutes. In addition there is the question of whether the genetic information for growth in saline environment is present in all kinds of plants, both halophytes and nonhalophytes. (shrink)

It is widespread that the consumers browse relevant reviews for reference before purchasing the products when online shopping. Some stores or users may write deceptive reviews to mislead consumers into making risky purchase decisions. Existing methods of deceptive review detection did not consider the valid product review sets and classification probability of feature weights. In this research, we propose a deceptive review detection algorithm based on the target product identification and the calculation of the Metapath feature weight, noted as TM-DRD. (...) The review dataset of target product is modeled as a heterogeneous review information network with the feature nodes. The classification method of graph is used to detect the deceptive reviews, which can improve the efficiency and accuracy of deceptive review detection due to the sparsity, imbalance of deceptive reviews, and the absence of category probability of feature weight calculation. The TM-DRD algorithm we proposed is validated on the real review dataset Yelp and compared with the SpEagle, NFC, and NetSpam algorithm. The experiment results demonstrate that the TM-DRD algorithm performs better than the other method with regard to the accuracy and efficiency. (shrink)

Low‐molecular‐weight (LMW) thiols are extensively involved in the maintenance of cellular redox potentials and the protection of cells from a variety of reactive chemical and electrophilic species. However, we recently found that the metabolic coupling of two LMW thiols – mycothiol (MSH) and ergothioneine (EGT) – programs the biosynthesis of the anti‐infective agent lincomycin A. Remarkably, such a constructive role of the thiols in the biosynthesis of natural products has so far received relatively little attention. We speculate that the unusual (...) thiol EGT might function as a chiral thiolation carrier (for modification) and a novel activator (for glycosylation) of sugar. Additionally, we examine recent evidence for LMW thiols (MSH and others) as sulfur donors of sulfur‐containing natural products. Clearly, the LMW thiols have more diverse activities beyond cell protection, and more attention should be paid to the correlation of their functions with thiol‐dependent enzymes. (shrink)