ObjectiveWhen regaining consciousness, patients who emerge from a minimally conscious state (EMCS) present with different levels of functional disability, which pose great challenges for treatment. This study investigated the frontoparietal activity in EMCS patients and its effects on functional disability.Materials and methodsIn this preliminary study, 12 EMCS patients and 12 healthy controls were recruited. We recorded a resting-state scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) for at least 5 min for each participant. Each patient was assessed using the disability rating scale (DRS) to determine (...) the level of functional disability. We analyzed the EEG power spectral density and sensor-level functional connectivity in relation to the patient’s functional disability.ResultsIn the frontoparietal region, EMCS patients demonstrated lower relative beta power (P < 0.01) and higher weighted phase lag index (wPLI) values in the theta (P < 0.01) and gamma (P < 0.01) bands than healthy controls. The frontoparietal theta wPLI values of EMCS patients were positively correlated with the DRS scores (rs = 0.629, P = 0.029). At the whole-brain level, EMCS patients only had higher wPLI values in the theta band (P < 0.01) than healthy controls. The whole-brain theta wPLI values of EMCS patients were also positively correlated with the DRS scores (rs = 0.650, P = 0.022). No significant difference in the power and connectivity between the frontoparietal region and the whole brain in EMCS patients was observed.ConclusionEMCS patients still experience neural dysfunction, especially in the frontoparietal region. However, the theta connectivity in the frontoparietal region did not increase specifically. At the level of the whole brain, the same shift could also be seen. Theta functional connectivity in the whole brain may underlie different levels of functional disability. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, EarlyView.

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, Volume 33, Issue 3, Page 287-307, July 2024.

Few studies have examined the relationship between personality traits and social networking sites (SNSs) with a dominant concentration on the personality alterations under SNSs influence. The relationship between personality and privacy control was less focused and discussed. In order to figure out the internal mechanism of such link among youth SNSs users, the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) was extended by including Five-Factor Model of Personality to explore how personality traits interact with privacy control behavior on SNSs. The investigation using (...) the theoretical method mentioned led to several hypotheses which were later assessed by an online study conducted within randomly chosen college students (N = 201) from two randomly chosen universities in China. This sampling strategy was designed to mimic the situation of targeted research population in the most reasonable way. The results suggested neuroticism and openness predicted SNSs privacy. Neuroticism and openness predicted “networked privacy” was also found. Theoretical implications of these findings were addressed. (shrink)

Monoidal t-norm based logic $\mathbf {MTL}$ is the weakest t-norm based residuated fuzzy logic, which is a $[0,1]$ -valued propositional logical system having a t-norm and its residuum as truth function for conjunction and implication. Monadic fuzzy predicate logic $\mathbf {mMTL\forall }$ that consists of the formulas with unary predicates and just one object variable, is the monadic fragment of fuzzy predicate logic $\mathbf {MTL\forall }$, which is indeed the predicate version of monoidal t-norm based logic $\mathbf {MTL}$. The main (...) aim of this paper is to give an algebraic proof of the completeness theorem for monadic fuzzy predicate logic $\mathbf {mMTL\forall }$ and some of its axiomatic extensions. Firstly, we survey the axiomatic system of monadic algebras for t-norm based residuated fuzzy logic and amend some of them, thus showing that the relationships for these monadic algebras completely inherit those for corresponding algebras. Subsequently, using the equivalence between monadic fuzzy predicate logic $\mathbf {mMTL\forall }$ and S5-like fuzzy modal logic $\mathbf {S5(MTL)}$, we prove that the variety of monadic MTL-algebras is actually the equivalent algebraic semantics of the logic $\mathbf {mMTL\forall }$, giving an algebraic proof of the completeness theorem for this logic via functional monadic MTL-algebras. Finally, we further obtain the completeness theorem of some axiomatic extensions for the logic $\mathbf {mMTL\forall }$, and thus give a major application, namely, proving the strong completeness theorem for monadic fuzzy predicate logic based on involutive monoidal t-norm logic $\mathbf {mIMTL\forall }$ via functional representation of finitely subdirectly irreducible monadic IMTL-algebras. (shrink)

In 2022, the renowned historian Katja Guenther published “The Mirror and the Mind: A History of Self-Recognition in the Human Sciences.” Throughout the entirety of the book, Guenther meticulously t...

In this study, we attempt to explain the divergent results found in the relationships between supervisor–subordinate guanxi and employee work outcomes. Specifically, we propose that the relationships between supervisor–subordinate guanxi and participatory management, turnover intentions, and organizational commitment are mediated by job satisfaction. Based on the data collected from a sample of 196 employees of three local manufacturing firms in Zhejiang Province, China, we found that job satisfaction fully mediated the effects of supervisor–subordinate guanxi on participatory management and intentions to (...) leave, but partially mediated the relationship between supervisor–subordinate guanxi and organizational commitment. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

Recently, the pandemic caused by COVID-19 is severe in the entire world. The prevention and control of crimes associated with COVID-19 are critical for controlling the pandemic. Therefore, to provide efficient and convenient intelligent legal knowledge services during the pandemic, we develop an intelligent system for legal information retrieval on the WeChat platform in this paper. The data source we used for training our system is “The typical cases of national procuratorial authorities handling crimes against the prevention and control of (...) the new coronary pneumonia pandemic following the law”, which is published online by the Supreme People’s Procuratorate of the People’s Republic of China. We base our system on convolutional neural network and use the semantic matching mechanism to capture inter-sentence relationship information and make a prediction. Moreover, we introduce an auxiliary learning process to help the network better distinguish the relation between two sentences. Finally, the system uses the trained model to identify the information entered by a user and responds to the user with a reference case similar to the query case and gives the reference legal gist applicable to the query case. (shrink)

This study, which is based on survey data provided by 445 employees of a Chinese enterprise, examines the impact of authentic leadership on the proactive behavior of subordinates, in particular the mediating effect of subordinate psychological capital and the moderating effect of the compassion at work. The results of our structural equation model reveal that: (1) There is a significant positive correlation between authentic leadership and the proactive behavior of subordinates; (2) Psychological capital plays a full mediating role between authentic (...) leadership and subordinate proactive behavior; (3) Compassion at work has a moderating effect on the positive relationship between authentic leadership and subordinate psychological capital and proactive behavior. (shrink)

Neural markers, such as the mismatch negativity, have been used to examine the phonological underspecification of English feature contrasts using the Featurally Underspecified Lexicon model. However, neural indices have not been examined within the approximant phoneme class, even though there is evidence suggesting processing asymmetries between liquid and glide phonemes. The goal of this study was to determine whether glide phonemes elicit electrophysiological asymmetries related to [consonantal] underspecification when contrasted with liquid phonemes in adult English speakers. Specifically, /ɹɑ/ is categorized (...) as [+consonantal] while /wɑ/ is not specified [i.e., ]. Following the FUL framework, if /w/ is less specified than /ɹ/, the former phoneme should elicit a larger MMN response than the latter phoneme. Fifteen English-speaking adults were presented with two syllables, /ɹɑ/ and /wɑ/, in an event-related potential oddball paradigm in which both syllables served as the standard and deviant stimulus in opposite stimulus sets. Three types of analyses were used: traditional mean amplitude measurements; cluster-based permutation analyses; and event-related spectral perturbation analyses. The less specified /wɑ/ elicited a large MMN, while a much smaller MMN was elicited by the more specified /ɹɑ/. In the standard and deviant ERP waveforms, /wɑ/ elicited a significantly larger negative response than did /ɹɑ/. Theta activity elicited by /ɹɑ/ was significantly greater than that elicited by /wɑ/ in the 100–300 ms time window. Also, low gamma activation was significantly lower for /ɹɑ/ vs. /wɑ/ deviants over the left hemisphere, as compared to the right, in the 100–150 ms window. These outcomes suggest that the [consonantal] feature follows the underspecification predictions of FUL previously tested with the place of articulation and voicing features. Thus, this study provides new evidence for phonological underspecification. Moreover, as neural oscillation patterns have not previously been discussed in the underspecification literature, the ERSP analyses identified potential new indices of phonological underspecification. (shrink)

With the rapid and unbalanced development of industry, a large amount of cultivated land is converted into industrial land with lower efficiency. The existing research is extensively concerned with industrial land use and industrial development in isolation, but little attention has been paid to the relationship between them. To help address this gap, the paper creates a new efficiency measure method for industrial land use combining Subvector Data Envelope Analysis with spatial analysis approach. The proposed model has been verified by (...) using the industrial land use data of 30 Chinese provinces from 2001 to 2013. The spatial autocorrelation relationship between industrial development and industrial land use efficiency is explored. Furthermore, this paper examines the effects of industrial development on industrial land use efficiency by spatial panel data model. The results indicate that the industrial land use efficiency and the industrial development level in the provinces of eastern region are higher than those of the western region. The spatial distribution of industrial land use efficiency shows remarkable positive spatial autocorrelation. However, the level of industrial development has obvious negative spatial autocorrelation since 2009. The improvement of industrial development has a significant positive impact on the industrial land use efficiency. (shrink)

This study conducts a bibliometric analysis of news discourse analysis using CiteSpace to sketch its scientific landscape based on journal articles in English in the Scopus database from 1988 through 2020. The statistical analysis provides evidence for the interdisciplinarity of this area, and shows an upward trend in general over these years as well as an accelerating growth rate in the past decade. Findings also indicate that the problem-oriented CDA has gained the most popularity in this area since its emergence, (...) and the appraisal framework, multimodality analysis, and discursive news values have become three hotspots of news discourse analysis. In addition, the authors in the West have contributed most in this area, but those from Chinese Mainland, Malaysia, South Africa, and Indonesia have gradually been an emerging powerhouse, which has added diversity in topics and will enhance equality and promote dialogue between different communities, ethnics, and races across the globe. (shrink)

This paper presents a bioinspired lower extremity exoskeleton robot. The proposed exoskeleton robot can be adjusted in structure to meet the wearer’s height of 150–185 cm and has a good gait stability. In the gait control part, a method of identifying different locomotion modes is proposed; five common locomotion modes are considered in this paper, including sitting down, standing up, level-ground walking, ascending stairs, and descending stairs. The identification is depended on angle information of the hip, knee, and ankle joints. (...) A deep locomotion mode identification model based on long-short term memory architecture is proposed in this paper for exploiting the angle data. We conducted two experiments to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the DLMIM is capable of learning inherent characteristics of joint angles and achieves more accurate identification than the other models. The last experiment demonstrates that the DLMIM can recognize transitions between different locomotion modes in time and the real-time performance varies with each individual. (shrink)

Two types of guanxi have a close association with auditor independence in China: firm-level connections derived from state ownership and personal connections developed through management affiliations with external auditors. This article examines the effects of these two types of connection and their joint effect on audit quality. We find that state ownership and management affiliations with the external auditor both increase the probability of receiving a clean audit opinion in China. Furthermore, the probability increment brought by management affiliations for non-state-owned (...) enterprises (NSOEs) is greater than that for state-owned enterprises (SOEs). These results suggest that state ownership and management affiliations are two important types of connection that impair auditor independence, and that management affiliations are of greater importance to private-sector firms than to SOEs. (shrink)

We provide conceptual and empirical support for the core tenet in pragmatic theory that speakers make their communicative intention about the pragmatic meaning of their utterances recognizable to hearers. First, we attribute skepticism about this tenet to conceptualizing communicative intentions as private cognitive states that hearers cannot reliably discern. We show it is more parsimonious to conceptualize communicative intention as arising from communally shared knowledge of discursive means to ends that is the basis for pragmatic reasoning about utterance meaning by (...) speaker and hearer alike. Second, we address skepticism based on experiments interpreted as finding an egocentric bias where people regard communicative intentions as more obvious to others than they are. We report two original experiments we carried out that found that participants as third party observers and as communicators routinely engaged in pragmatic reasoning about the meaning of utterances in context that took others’ perspectives into account. (shrink)

We provide conceptual and empirical support for the core tenet in pragmatic theory that speakers make their communicative intention about the pragmatic meaning of their utterances recognizable to hearers. First, we attribute skepticism about this tenet to conceptualizing communicative intentions as private cognitive states that hearers cannot reliably discern. We show it is more parsimonious to conceptualize communicative intention as arising from communally shared knowledge of discursive means to ends that is the basis for pragmatic reasoning about utterance meaning by (...) speaker and hearer alike. Second, we address skepticism based on experiments interpreted as finding an egocentric bias where people regard communicative intentions as more obvious to others than they are. We report two original experiments we carried out that found that participants as third party observers and as communicators routinely engaged in pragmatic reasoning about the meaning of utterances in context that took others’ perspectives into account. (shrink)

How do people pursue rewards in risky environments, where some outcomes should be avoided at all costs? We investigate how participant search for spatially correlated rewards in scenarios where one must avoid sampling rewards below a given threshold. This requires not only the balancing of exploration and exploitation, but also reasoning about how to avoid potentially risky areas of the search space. Within risky versions of the spatially correlated multi‐armed bandit task, we show that participants’ behavior is aligned well with (...) a Gaussian process function learning algorithm, which chooses points based on a safe optimization routine. Moreover, using leave‐one‐block‐out cross‐validation, we find that participants adapt their sampling behavior to the riskiness of the task, although the underlying function learning mechanism remains relatively unchanged. These results show that participants can adapt their search behavior to the adversity of the environment and enrich our understanding of adaptive behavior in the face of risk and uncertainty. (shrink)

The principal–principal perspective suggests that controlling shareholders have excessive influence on corporate philanthropy and may direct corporate funds to charitable causes to support their personal interests. Analysis of a sample of Chinese private firms listed on the Shenzhen or Shanghai stock exchange between 2004 and 2011 shows that there is a significant and negative relationship between corporate giving and the share held by the largest shareholders, suggesting that controlling shareholders are opportunistic in directing corporate charitable contributions; there is a significant (...) and positive relationship between corporate giving and the political connections of the largest shareholders and their agents, suggesting compatibility between corporate contributions and the personal interests of the controlling shareholders; there is a stronger negative relationship between corporate giving and the share of the company held by the largest shareholders in politically connected firms, suggesting that political connections contribute to increased opportunistic corporate giving. Overall, our study provides important evidence for the “one dominant controlling shareholder” phenomenon by testing and extending the principal–principal framework and showing that the largest shareholders of Chinese firms appear to donate to charitable causes that ultimately serve their personal interests at the expense of minority shareholders. (shrink)

Against the backdrop of frequent food safety problems, the importance of establishing food traceability systems has become increasingly important and urgent to address the contradiction between consumer information on safe food choices and the proliferation of problematic foods. The purpose of this study is to empirically study the influencing factors of Chinese consumers on the food traceability system in the food safety field. In this study, multiple models—push factor, pull factor, mooring factor, and switching intention—were integrated into the push-pulling-mooring theory (...) to form a conceptual PPM comprehensive model framework to study the switching intentions of two-dimensional code traceability technology for dairy products of Chinese consumers. By collecting the questionnaire survey, 305 valid questionnaires were collected from the consumers of middle- and high-end dairy products in China, and the influencing factors of thrust, pull, and mooring force were identified. The results showed that 10 of the 11 hypotheses were positive, but the impact of perceived risk on user satisfaction was negative. The important value of this study is to conduct a comprehensive empirical analysis of the key factors influencing consumer choice of traceable safe food through an integrated multi-model framework to help identify ways to establish and improve consumer willingness to use QR code traceable system products, to increase consumer confidence in the use of traceable and safe food choices. (shrink)

This paper endeavors to appraise scholarly works from the 1940s to the contemporary era, examining the scientific quest to transpose human cognition and consciousness into a digital surrogate, while contemplating the potential ramifications should humanity attain such an abstract level of intellect. The discourse commences with an explication of theories concerning consciousness, progressing to the Turing Test apparatus, and intersecting with Damasio’s research on the human cerebrum, particularly in relation to consciousness, thereby establishing congruence between the Turing Test and Damasio’s (...) notions of consciousness. Subsequently, the narrative traverses the evolutionary chronology of transmuting human cognition into machine sapience, and delves into the fervent endeavors to metamorphose human minds into synthetic counterparts. Additionally, theoretical perspectives from the domains of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience provide insight into the constraints intrinsic to AI implementations, contentious hypotheses, the perils concealed within artificial networks, and the ethical considerations necessitated by AI frameworks. Furthermore, contemplation of prospective repercussions facilitates the refinement of strategic approaches to safeguard our future Augmented Age Realities within AI, circumventing the prospect of inhabiting an intimidating technopolis where a mere 30% monopolize the intellect and ingenuity of the remaining 70% of human minds. (shrink)

Safeguarding GenAI models against threats and aligning them with security requirements is imperative yet challenging. This chapter provides an overview of the security landscape for generative models. It begins by elucidating common vulnerabilities and attack vectors, including adversarial attacks, model inversion, backdoors, data extraction, and algorithmic bias. The practical implications of these threats are discussed, spanning domains like finance, healthcare, and content creation. The narrative then shifts to exploring mitigation strategies and innovative security paradigms. Differential privacy, blockchain-based provenance, quantum-resistant algorithms, (...) and human-guided reinforcement learning are analyzed as potential techniques to harden generative models. Broader ethical concerns surrounding transparency, accountability, deepfakes, and model interpretability are also addressed. The chapter aims to establish a conceptual foundation encompassing both the technical and ethical dimensions of security for generative AI. It highlights open challenges and lays the groundwork for developing robust, trustworthy, and human-centric solutions. The multifaceted perspective spanning vulnerabilities, implications, and solutions is intended to further discourse on securing society’s growing reliance on generative models. Frontier model security is discussed using Anthropic proposed approach. (shrink)

Background Performance evaluation is vital for IRB operations. As the number of IRBs and their responsibilities in reviewing and supervising clinical research grow in China, there is a significant need to evaluate their performances. To date, little research has examined IRB performance within China. The aim of this study was to ascertain the perspectives and experiences of IRB employees and researchers to understand the current status of IRBs; compare collected results with those of other countries; and identify shortcomings to improve (...) IRB performance. Methods This study was conducted in China from October 2020 to September 2021, using an online survey with the IRB-researcher assessment tool-Chinese version. Results 757 respondents were included in the analysis and classified into IRB employees, researchers, or those who are both IRB employees and researchers. Overall, the score for an ideal IRB was significantly higher than that of an actual IRB. Compared to the US National Validation study, Chinese participants and American participants both agree and differ in their perspectives on the most and least important ideal items. Conclusion This investigation provides a benchmark of the perceived performance of actual IRBs in China. IRBs in China can be precisely adjusted by targeting identified areas of weakness to improve their performances. (shrink)

This study aimed to analyze the relations between class competition and primary school students’ academic achievement, considering the possible mediating roles of learning anxiety and learning engagement. Participants were 1,479 primary school students from four primary schools in Zhejiang, China. We analyzed participants’ scores for class competition, learning anxiety, and learning engagement and their last two final exam scores. Class competition did not directly predict academic achievement, but indirectly affected academic achievement through learning anxiety and learning engagement. There were three (...) effect paths: class competition negatively predicted academic achievement by increasing learning anxiety; class competition positively predicted academic achievement by promoting learning engagement; and class competition affected academic achievement through multiple mediating effects of learning anxiety and learning engagement. This study highlights the important roles of learning anxiety and learning engagement in class competition and academic achievement, which have theoretical and practical significance. (shrink)

This study provides an attributional perspective to the ethical leadership literature by examining the role of attributed altruistic motives and perceptions of organizational politics in a moderated mediation model. Path analytic tests from two field studies were used for analyses. The results support our hypotheses that attributed altruistic motives would mediate the relationship between perceived ethical leadership and affective organizational commitment. Moreover, the relationship between perceived ethical leadership and attributed altruistic motives was stronger when perceptions of organizational politics were high (...) but weaker when these perceptions were low. The study concludes with a discussion of future research implications as well as managerial implications. (shrink)

In 2003, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) determine those network development years and released a policy document. This indicates that management is aware of the importance of pay TV and digital TV and hoping to promote the development of network services and system integration, and change the business model of the radio and television industry has long rely solely on advertising. As of July 2009, approved by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television to set (...) up a pay TV channel has 142 units, divided into two categories broadcast on nationwide broadcast and province. In 7 years, the national digital pay TV channels from scratch, from small to large, from more than 20 of the initial development to the current level of 142, the number increased by 7 times. Judging from the number of digital pay channels have begun to take shape, the categories covered very rich. But from the overall development situation of Chinese digital TV, pay-TV channels, the number of users is far less than the (wired) digital TV subscribers, the development is very optimistic. 2010 cable industry revenues constitute the revenue of the premium channels is also very small. At present, China has a number of pay-TV channels integrated operating agencies, the premium channels transmission operators institutions user access and pay channels, operations, CCTV and local TV stations to form a pay channels. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate whether independent directors’ attendance at board meetings enhances investor protection using a difference-in-difference approach. We find that independent directors’ attendance alleviates tunneling. This effect is more pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises than in state-owned enterprises. The reinforcement of external supervision substitutes for the role of independent directors’ attendance and this substitution effect is more significant in non-SOEs. Together, these results imply that independent directors’ attendance at board meetings can play an important role in protecting investors, especially (...) in non-SOEs and when external supervision is weak. This paper sheds new light on independent directors’ function in corporate governance, and has implications for institutional improvements. (shrink)

Transcranial Photobiomodulation has demonstrated its ability to alter electrophysiological activity in the human brain. However, it is unclear how tPBM modulates brain electroencephalogram networks and is related to human cognition. In this study, we recorded 64-channel EEG from 44 healthy humans before, during, and after 8-min, right-forehead, 1,064-nm tPBM or sham stimulation with an irradiance of 257 mW/cm2. In data processing, a novel methodology by combining group singular value decomposition with the exact low-resolution brain electromagnetic tomography was implemented and performed (...) on the 64-channel noise-free EEG time series. The gSVD+eLORETA algorithm produced 11 gSVD-derived principal components projected in the 2D sensor and 3D source domain/space. These 11 PCs took more than 70% weight of the entire EEG signals and were justified as 11 EEG brain networks. Finally, baseline-normalized power changes of each EEG brain network in each EEG frequency band were quantified during the first 4-min, second 4-min, and post tPBM/sham periods, followed by comparisons of frequency-specific power changes between tPBM and sham conditions. Our results showed that tPBM-induced increases in alpha powers occurred at default mode network, executive control network, frontal parietal network and lateral visual network. Moreover, the ability to decompose EEG signals into individual, independent brain networks facilitated to better visualize significant decreases in gamma power by tPBM. Many similarities were found between the cortical locations of SVD-revealed EEG networks and fMRI-identified resting-state networks. This consistency may shed light on mechanistic associations between tPBM-modulated brain networks and improved cognition outcomes. (shrink)

Empirical research has shown that maladaptive perfectionism may lead to lower life satisfaction. However, the relationship between maladaptive perfectionism and life satisfaction among medical students and the mechanism underlying this relationship still need to be further explored. The present study used a large sample of undergraduate medical students to examine the associations between maladaptive perfectionism and life satisfaction and to explore the mechanism underlying the associations. Specifically, the present study tried to probe the mediating role of academic burnout and the (...) moderating role of self-esteem in the relationship between maladaptive perfectionism and life satisfaction in medical students. We invited 1628 undergraduate medical students from two medical universities in Northeastern China to participate in the survey. Among the students recruited, 1377 medical students completed questionnaires including the Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale maladaptive perfectionism subscales, the Chinese College Student Academic Burnout Inventory, the Satisfaction With Life Scale, the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale and demographic information. Results show that maladaptive perfectionism was significantly negatively related to life satisfaction among medical students and academic burnout played a significant mediating role in this relationship. Moderated mediation analyses reveal that the mediating effect of maladaptive perfectionism on life satisfaction via academic burnout was moderated by self-esteem. Maladaptive perfectionism exerted a stronger effect on life satisfaction via the mediating role of academic burnout for medical students with high self-esteem [β = −0.026, SE = 0.009, 95%CI = ] than for medical students with low self-esteem [β = −0.019, SE = 0.009, 95%CI = ]. Medical institutions can implement effective interventions to decrease medical students’ maladaptive perfectionism levels and academic burnout levels, and increase their self-esteem levels in order to enhance their life satisfaction. (shrink)

This article puts forward a novel class of Bézier smooth semi-supervised support vector machines(BS4VMs) for classification. As is well known, semi-supervised support vector machine is introduced for dealing with quantities of unlabeled data in the real world. Labeled data is utilized to train the algorithm and then adapting it to classify the unlabeled data. However, the objective semi-supervised function is not differentiable globally. It is required to endure heavy burden in solving two quadratic programming problems with inversion matrix operation. To (...) solve this problem, the interpolation Bézier functions for replacing the non-smooth term have been investigated. Firstly, the development of the novel BS4VMs classifier is introduced. Then, the non-linear model and convergence analysis are presented. To show how the BS4VMs can be practically implemented, experiments on synthetic and real data sets are offered. The theoretical analysis and experiments comparisons clearly illustrate the BS4VMs are superior to the proposed methods in both cross-validation classification accuracy and calculating time. (shrink)

The relationship between bilingual language control and domain-general cognitive control has been a hot topic in the research field of bilingualism. Previous studies mostly examined the correlation between performances of bilinguals in language control tasks and that in domain-general cognitive control tasks and came to the conclusions that they overlap, partially overlap, or are qualitatively different. These contradictory conclusions are possibly due to the neglect of the moderating effect of second language proficiency, that is, the relationship between bilingual language control (...) and domain-general cognitive control might vary with the L2 proficiency of bilinguals. To examine this hypothesis, we recruited 36 unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals to perform the Simon task, Oxford Placement Test, and picture naming tasks in single-and dual-language contexts. We find that Simon scores positively predicted switching costs in bilinguals with low L2 proficiency, but not in bilinguals with high L2 proficiency. Furthermore, Simon scores positively predicted mixing costs in bilinguals with high L2 proficiency, but not in bilinguals with low L2 proficiency. These results verify the moderating effect of L2 proficiency on the relationship between bilingual language control and domain-general cognitive control, that is, bilinguals with more proficient L2 rely on domain-general cognitive control less for local language control and more for global language control. This may imply a shift from local to global for the dependency of bilingual language control on domain-general cognitive control during the L2 development of bilinguals. (shrink)

In China, the increasing traffic pressure has created traffic policing problems such as the heavy workloads of traffic police, as well as more conflicts between traffic police and road users. The treatment of traffic policing as a semiotic practice provides both a new perspective in and a helpful approach to dealing with these problems, yet few studies have investigated how semiotic resources are used in traffic policing interactions. This article examines the supportive role of semiotic resources in traffic policing, and (...) draws upon genre and exchanges involved as an illustration. The data include three audio recordings of traffic accident handling cases in Shanghai, China. Through qualitative analysis of the data from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics, this article identifies the genre stages in traffic accident handling and their logico-semantic relations, and situates the typical exchanges and moves used by traffic police in different stages. It also discusses the usefulness of semiotic resources for traffic policing and the implications of these resources in tackling the existing problems of traffic policing in China. (shrink)