Firms worldwide are increasingly required to disclose their carbon emissions due to the environmental damage associated with climate change. Because there has been no previous literature focusing on the determinants of corporate carbon disclosure integrating environmental legitimacy and green innovation, the present study attempted to develop an original framework to fill the research gap. This study explored the influence of environmental legitimacy on corporate carbon disclosure, and investigated the role of green innovation as a mediator. With the samples of Carbon (...) Disclosure Project in China from 2008 to 2012, the results demonstrate that environmental legitimacy significantly negatively influences the likelihood of corporate carbon disclosure, and that green process innovation mediates the relationship, while green product innovation has no significant mediating effect. It means that environmental legitimacy not only directly affects the likelihood of corporate carbon disclosure, but also indirectly affects it via green process innovation. Hence, companies must increase both informal and formal mechanisms, i.e., external environmental legitimacy and internal green process innovation, to engage in carbon information disclosure and ensure sustainability. (shrink)

This paper claims that palliative care is a suitable approach for offering comprehensive support to patients with life-threatening illness and unavoidable asthenia, to enhance their quality of life in aging and chronic illness. There are however some conceptual barriers to accessing that care on the Chinese Mainland: Death-denying culture and society; Misguidance and malpractice derived from the biomedical model; Prejudice against PC and certain deviant understandings of filial piety culture. To counter these obstacles, the study introduces the philosophy of Chinese (...) Taoist Chuang-tze to enlighten the public from ignorance and remove some illusions about death and dying; inspire people to face and accept illness and death calmly, and keep harmony and inner peace of mind to alleviate suffering, with the aim of providing wisdom and a shift of attitude toward life and death. Chuang-tze’s thoughts are consistent with the provision of palliative care, and to a certain degree, can promote its acceptability and delivery, and the conception of good death in practice. (shrink)

This article puts forward, from a Chinese and international perspective, a theoretical construction of world poetics, based on preliminary researches in the field. Its theoretical foundation mainly lies in three aspects: (1) World poetics is a theoretical sublimation of the research results of world literature and comparative poetics. (2) So far almost all the relatively universal literary interpretive theories are produced in the West, which can hardly cover all literary and theoretical categories and experiences. (3) Chinese literary theorists are always (...) concerned about the cutting-edge issues in international literary theory, and they have paid particular attention to comparative poetics. (shrink)

With the rapid development of sports science, human motion recognition technology, as a new biometric recognition technology, has many advantages, such as noncontact target, long recognition distance, secret recognition process, and so on. Traditional human motion recognition technology is affected by environmental factors such as motion background, which is prone to rough edges of the recognized objects and loss of motion tracking information, thus further reducing the recognition accuracy. In this paper, the traditional snake model will be improved and optimized (...) to improve the defect of human motion model contour extraction, so as to realize the accurate repair of image contour; in terms of algorithm running time, this paper innovatively improves the construction process of the snake model, further improves the running time of model evaluation, and solves the concave contour problem of corresponding moving objects in the snake model. In order to solve the problem of accurate convergence, this paper improves the snake model of the average moving algorithm and sets the corresponding weight coefficient to distinguish the corresponding moving target background, so as to achieve the convergence of the differential concave contour. In order to verify the superiority of the improved optimized snake model, experiments are carried out in the corresponding database. The experimental results show that the contour of the moving object extracted by the improved snake model algorithm is complete and the segmentation effect is obvious. At the same time, the running speed of the whole algorithm has been significantly improved. (shrink)

The object of this study was to investigate whether level of processing (LOP) modulates enhanced memory performance for emotional stimuli, and, if so, whether the LOP effects relate to their gist and details. During the study phase, participants were presented with colourful pictures with negative, neutral and positive valences and encoded the emotional pictures under either a semantic (living/non-living judgement) or a perceptual (left/right position judgement) condition. During the test phase, they judged whether the presented picture was old or new (...) in Experiments 1 and 2, and also judged whether a specific concept, labelled using words, had been studied in Experiment 2. The results showed that under both encoding conditions, the details of both negative and positive pictures were recognised better than those of neutral pictures. Also, the gist of negative pictures was recognised better than that of neutral pictures but only under the semantic condition. These data provide evidence that the LOP differentially modulates enhanced emotional memory for gist and details of pictures. (shrink)

A major challenge in global sales research is helping managers understand sales ethics across countries. Addressing this challenge, our research investigates whether a few demographic variables and psychographic variables reduce unethical sales behaviors (USBs) in Canada, Mexico, and the USA. Further, using literatures associated with business ethics, national culture, and customer orientation advocacy, we hypothesize why sales managers should expect similarities and differences in USBs between countries. We tested hypotheses using a sales contest scenario and six USBs, examining survey responses (...) from 948 business-to-business salespeople of a multinational company’s sales force in Canada, Mexico, and the USA. The results reveal that several psychographic variables (such as commitment, relationship to sales manager, and achievement need) affect salespeople’s tendency to engage in USBs differently in each country. In addition, business ethics, individualism, and customer orientation advocacy associated with each country can be used to anticipate similarities and differences in USBs between countries. This research offers important theoretical contributions and implications for more effectively managing sales forces and reducing USBs across countries. (shrink)

According to the theory of internal organs in traditional Chinese medicine, the gallbladder has the function of making judgments and decisions in mental processes and activities, and it also determines one's degree of courage. This culturally constructed medical characterization of the gallbladder forms the base of the cultural model for the concept of courage. In the core of this cultural model is a pair of conceptual metaphors: (a) "GALLBLADDER IS CONTAINTER OF COURAGE," and (b) "COURAGE IS QI (GASEOUS VITAL ENERGY) (...) IN GALLBLADDER," which partly constitutive of the understanding of the gallbladder and courage in Chinese culture. A description and analysis of the data from the Chinese language show that numerous conventional expressions are systematically tied to each other and contributive to the underlying conceptual metaphors. The study presents a case in which an abstract concept (courage) is understood in part via a conceptual metaphor grounded in the body, but shaped by a culture-specific metaphorical understanding of an internal organ (gallbladder) inside the body. Although the human body is a potentially universal source domain for metaphors structuring abstract concepts, cultural models set up specific perspectives from which certain aspects of bodily experience or certain parts of the body are viewed as especially salient and meaningful in the understanding of those abstract concepts. (shrink)

Neutrosophic set is a new mathematical tool for handling problems involving imprecise, indetermi nacy and inconsistent data. Pseudo-BCI algebra is a kind of non-classical logic algebra in close connection with various non-commutative fuzzy logics. Recently, we applied neutrosophic set theory to pseudo-BCI al gebras. In this paper, we study neutrosophic filters in pseudo-BCI algebras. The concepts of neutrosophic regular filter, neutrosophic closed filter and fuzzy regular filter in pseudo-BCI algebras are introduced, and some basic properties are discussed. Moreover, the relationships (...) among neutrosophic regular filter, fuzzy filters and anti-grouped neutrosophic filters are prese nted, and the results are proved: a neutrosophic filter (fuzzy filter) is a neutrosophic regular filter (fuzzy regular filter), if and only if it is both a neutrosophic closed filter (fuzzy closed filter) and an anti-grouped neutrosophic filter (fuzzy anti-grouped filter). (shrink)

With the rise of the “humanitarian drone” in recent years, drones have become one of the most controversial public interest technologies that have gained increasing media attention. It is worth noting that, although there is a perception in the aid sector that drones hold the promise to reinvent the health supply logistics, to date, routine drone delivery is still relatively new and largely unproven. This paper presents a recent field study conducted in 2019, where drones were deployed in Malawi to (...) help address the last mile challenge in medical supply delivery, and where a noticeable mentality of “killing two birds with one stone” around the attempt of using drones in resource-poor settings is observed. The objective of the paper is to shed light, through a real-world case study and from the ethical perspective, on the impacts of implementing such a systemic change in the existing health supply chain systems. As conclusion, a call for more reflexive approaches for the critical examination, as well as more structured guidance for the responsible evaluation, of medical cargo drones is raised. (shrink)

Increasingly, humanitarian organizations across the globe have been implementing innovative technologies in their practice as they respond to the needs of communities affected by conflicts, disasters, and public health emergencies. However, technological innovation may intersect with moral values, norms, and commitments, and may challenge humanitarian imperatives. Through the examination of an empirical case study on drone mapping, this paper aims to explore three questions: (1) What are the dynamics between aid delivery and technological innovation in the humanitarian enterprise? (2) How (...) are structural problems addressed in an environment in which technology is being portrayed as a force for change? (3) What moral responsibilities towards vulnerable populations should humanitarian stakeholders bear when introducing innovative technologies in humanitarian action. Discussion revolves around the ideology of “technological utopia”, and the normative role of technology in the aid sector - to make substantive impacts, or to produce “success stories”. In conclusion, a call for rigorous ethical analysis to help foster value sensitive humanitarian innovation (VSHI) is made. (shrink)

本书从回忆母亲中医治病开始,一路写来,有中医的神奇、有中医的道理、有中医与西医的区别、有人生的智慧、有豁达的胸襟、有现代人常常忽略的东西、有不少值得深思的问题.

As literary scholars, we are often puzzled by these questions raised from among the reading public: What is the meaning of this literary work? How does the author express his/her intention to portray the characters or narrate the story? How shall we as literary critics interpret the meaning of the literary work? Can a certain literary work have only one meaning? Obviously this is not the case. In order to answer the above questions, we present this special cluster of articles (...) to readers.Péter Hajdu says pertinently in his essay, "We may suppose that the meaning of a literary text comes from somewhere, but we should not imagine that there is only one source it comes from." Thus, to Hajdu, meaning can have many... (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche has emerged as one of the most important and influential modern philosophers. For several decades, the book series Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung (MTNF) has set the agenda in a rapidly growing and changing field of Nietzsche scholarship. The scope of the series is interdisciplinary and international in orientation reflects the entire spectrum of research on Nietzsche, from philosophy to literary studies and political theory. The series publishes monographs and edited volumes that undergo a strict peer-review process. The (...) book series is led by an international team of editors, whose work represents the full range of current Nietzsche scholarship. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis is a linguistic study of two primary metaphors with the same target concept, “DIFFICULTY IS WEIGHT” and “DIFFICULTY IS SOLIDITY,” in English and Chinese. The study employs both lexical...

One challenge that globalization has brought to business is that firms, as they expand their market globally through cross-border alliances, need to deal with partner firms from countries of different religious background. The impact of a country’s dominant religion on its firms’ international market entry mode choices has not been examined in traditional approaches. Focusing on hypothesizing the influence of Christian beliefs and atheism (i.e., the absence of belief in any deities), this research aims to fill the gap by exploring (...) religion’s role in providing moral restraint on managers’ propensity for opportunism, which in turn affects these managers’ choices of their firms’ international market entry via non-equity alliances or joint ventures. A study of 22,156 cross-border alliances formed in 48 industries world-wide over 9 years provides new insight toward understanding religion’s influence on firms’ international market entry mode decisions through the ethical dimension of strategic leadership. (shrink)

Since 2016, drones have been deployed in various development projects in sub-Saharan Africa, where trials, tests, and studies have been rolled out in countries, including Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi, Ghana, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The use cases of drones vary, ranging from imagery collection to transportation of vaccines, lab samples, blood products, and other medical supplies. A wide range of stakeholders is involved, including governments, international organizations, educational institutions, as well as industry. Based on a field study (...) conducted in 2019, this article investigates how drones are used for medical supply delivery in Malawi-a country where the community is underserved for healthcare and related infrastructure underdeveloped, while airspace is largely open and regulations generally relaxed. The objective of presenting this case study is to contribute to the evidence regarding the rapid deployment of medical cargo drones across the African continent, and to spark critical reflections over the utility, suitability, and impacts of incorporating drones in the existing health supply chain systems in resource-poor settings. The discussion revolves around two aspects: 1) the emergent “African Drone Rise”-is it ok “as it is Africa”? and 2) the normative role of technology in the aid sector-is it “a solution looking for a problem”? In conclusion, a call for more structured guidance for the systematic examination and evaluation of the medical cargo drone case is raised. (shrink)

Customer citizenship behavior has attracted widespread attention from scholars due to its capacity of enabling enterprises to gain competitive advantages of low costs and high efficiency by giving full play to the initiative of customers. Based on the S-O-R Model, we have established the theoretical model to study the influence imposed by social support of online travel platform enterprises on customer citizenship behavior against the backdrop of the sharing economy. This research tests the fitting of the theoretical model and its (...) fundamental hypotheses using 626 samples acquired from the investigation with SPSS26.0 and AMOS25.0. Results indicate that the social support has a positive influence on customer citizenship behavior. Social support could have a positive influence on positive emotions. Social support has no significant negative effect on negative emotions. Positive emotions have a positive influence on customer citizenship behavior. Negative emotions have a negative influence on customer citizenship behavior. Positive emotions play a mediating effect in the positive influence of social support on customer citizenship behavior. Social support could have a positive influence on customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction has a positive influence on customer citizenship behavior. Customer satisfaction plays a mediating effect in the positive effect of social support on customer citizenship behavior. Positive emotions and customer satisfaction play a chain mediating effect in the positive effect of social support on customer citizenship behavior. (shrink)

本书内容包括: 南宋湖湘学派概述、胡安国文学思想及其文学作品、胡寅文学思想及其文学作品、胡宏文学思想及其文学作品、湖湘学派的文学总论等.

This book introduces the notions and methods of formal logic from a computer science standpoint, covering propositional logic, predicate logic, and foundations ...

The noticeable turn to technology in humanitarian action raises issues related to humanitarianism, sovereignty, as well as equality and access for at-risk populations in disaster zones or remote areas lacking sufficient healthcare services. On a technical level, practical challenges include heightened risks of data safety and security, and the potential malicious use of technology. On a societal level, humanitarian innovation may disrupt relations between different stakeholders, may widen inequality between those with access and those without, and may threaten privacy, disproportionately (...) affecting the vulnerable population. Drawing on the empirical findings of a case study of the 2015 Nepal earthquake, this paper presents an in-depth normative analysis to identify contextualised ethical considerations, and illuminate the wider debate about how technological innovation in the aid sector should be operationalised. In conclusion, on the normative level, a prudent attitude in adopting novel technology in the aid sector is required; while on the operational level, proposals for actionable ethical standards to guide and safeguard sector-wide innovation practices are needed. (shrink)

Cognitive semantic studies have shown that our conceptualization of morality is at least partially metaphorical and that our moral cognition is grounded in some fundamental contrastive categories of our embodied experience in the physical environment. It is argued that our moral cognition is built on a moral metaphor system. Within the framework of conceptual metaphor theory, this study aims to examine the spatial subsystem of moral metaphors in English. We set out with five pairs of moral metaphors that involve the (...) following spatial source concepts: HIGH and LOW, UPRIGHT and TILTED, LEVEL and UNLEVEL, STRAIGHT and CROOKED, and BIG and SMALL. These metaphors were found to constitute the spatial subsystem of moral metaphors in Chinese. Our primary goal is to find out if the five pairs of moral–spatial metaphors are manifested in English as well. To that end we collected linguistic data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and searched Google Images for multimodal evidence. Our finding is that the five pairs of moral–spatial metaphors are applicable in English as they are in Chinese. We also discuss issues related to conceptual metaphor theory. (shrink)

Mencius, who often spoke of ming in different senses among which only one can be taken as fate, upheld two doctrines of fate--moral determinism and blind, unalterable fate--but he was prone to apply the former to collective entities, and the latter to individual persons. This bi-level distinction, which is at variance with the non-distinction in both Moism and Taoism, exercised a profound influence upon the minds of later Confucians.

This paper studies the theme of civilization and barbarism in El Sur, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. Focusing on the historical perspective, it analyzes the political-geographical discourse of the Argentine elite on the Indians and the geopolitical imaginary of "the South" in the second half of the nineteenth century. The protagonist of the story, Juan Dalhmann, identifies himself as heir to this discourse based on European values as the only pattern of a universal civilization. Dalhmann interprets the difference (...) in geography he encounters on his journey to the South as an anachronism in the temporal order, practicing the "denial of coevalness". The South is for him the space of the Other. The duel at the end of the story between Dalhmann and the man with indian face is a manifestation of the inescapable contradiction when Dalhmann becomes the new civilizer of modernity. (shrink)

Subgraph matching on a large graph has become a popular research topic in the field of graph analysis, which has a wide range of applications including question answering and community detection. However, traditional edge-cutting strategy destroys the structure of indivisible knowledge in a large RDF graph. On the premise of load-balancing on subgraph division, a dominance-partitioned strategy is proposed to divide a large RDF graph without compromising the knowledge structure. Firstly, a dominance-connected pattern graph is extracted from a pattern graph (...) to construct a dominance-partitioned pattern hypergraph, which divides a pattern graph as multiple fish-shaped pattern subgraphs. Secondly, a dominance-driven spectrum clustering strategy is used to gather the pattern subgraphs into multiple clusters. Thirdly, the dominance-partitioned subgraph matching algorithm is designed to conduct all isomorphic subgraphs on a cluster-partitioned RDF graph. Finally, experimental evaluation verifies that our strategy has higher time-efficiency of complex queries, and it has a better scalability on multiple machines and different data scales. (shrink)

Epicurus famously argued that death cannot be bad for a person because only painful experiences or something that brings about them can be bad for people, but when a person dies, she cannot experience anything at all, let alone pain. If, as Epicurus argued, death is not something bad for us, then presumably, we have no reason to fear it. In contrast with Epicurus, however, contemporary philosophers of death generally subscribe to the deprivation account of the badness of death, which (...) allows that death can be comparatively bad for the one who dies. Still, many deprivation theorists believe that death, as merely comparatively bad, is not a fitting object of fear. Some of them argue that our attitudes would be unfitting if they respond to comparative value; while others contend that fear is not the kind of attitude that tracks comparative value. In this paper, I critically assess these arguments by deprivation theorists, and argue that, contrary to what these theorists claim, their arguments do not entail that death does not merit fear. (shrink)

This book is a cognitive semantic study of the Chinese conceptualization of the heart, traditionally seen as the central faculty of cognition. The Chinese word xin, which primarily denotes the heart organ, covers the meanings of both "heart" and "mind" as understood in English, which upholds a heart-head dichotomy. In contrast to the Western dualist view, Chinese takes on a more holistic view that sees the heart as the center of both emotions and thought. The contrast characterizes two cultural traditions (...) that have developed different conceptualizations of person, self, and agent of cognition. The concept of "heart" lies at the core of Chinese thought and medicine, and its importance to Chinese culture is extensively manifested in the Chinese language. Diachronically, this book traces the roots of its conception in ancient Chinese philosophy and traditional Chinese medicine. Along the synchronic dimension, it not only makes a systematic analysis of conventionalized expressions that reflect the underlying cultural models and conceptualizations, as well as underlying conceptual metaphors and metonymies, but also attempts a textual analysis of an essay and a number of poems for their metaphoric and metonymic images and imports contributing to the cultural models and conceptualizations. It also takes up a comparative perspective that sheds light on similarities and differences between Western and Chinese cultures in the understanding of the heart, brain, body, mind, self, and person. The book contributes to the understanding of the embodied nature of human cognition situated in its cultural context, and the relationship between language, culture, and cognition. (shrink)