Moral responsibility is one of the core concepts in engineering ethics and consequently in most engineering ethics education. Yet, despite a growing awareness that engineers should be trained to become more sensitive to cultural differences, most engineering ethics education is still based on Western approaches. In this article, we discuss the notion of responsibility in Confucianism and explore what a Confucian perspective could add to the existing engineering ethics literature. To do so, we analyse the Citicorp case, a widely discussed (...) case in the existing engineering ethics literature, from a Confucian perspective. Our comparison suggests the following. When compared to virtue ethics based on Aristotle, Confucianism focuses primarily on ethical virtues; there is no explicit reference to intellectual virtues. An important difference between Confucianism and most western approaches is that Confucianism does not define clear boundaries of where a person’s responsibility end. It also suggests that the gap between Western and at least one Eastern approach, namely Confucianism, can be bridged. Although there are differences, the Confucian view and a virtue-based Western view on moral responsibility have much in common, which allows for a promising base for culturally inclusive ethics education for engineers. (shrink)

This study examines the impact of culture on regulation and corruption. Our empirical results suggest that cultural values have significant effects on countries’ regulatory policies, levels of corruption, and economic development. Contrary to the conclusions drawn by others, this study shows no significant relationship between the regulatory policies of countries and their perceived levels of corruption. Thus, evidence of the “public choice view” toward entry regulation derived in related studies seems to be at least attenuated.

Eye-tracking technology has become a powerful tool for biomedical-related applications due to its simplicity of operation and low requirements on patient language skills. This study aims to use the machine-learning models and deep-learning networks to identify key features of eye movements in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) under specific visual tasks, thereby facilitating computer-aided diagnosis of AD. Firstly, a three-dimensional (3D) visuospatial memory task is designed to provide participants with visual stimuli while their eye-movement data are recorded and used to build an (...) eye-tracking dataset. Then, we propose a novel deep-learning-based model for identifying patients with Alzheimer's Disease (PwAD) and healthy controls (HCs) based on the collected eye-movement data. The proposed model utilizes a nested autoencoder network to extract the eye-movement features from the generated fixation heatmaps and a weight adaptive network layer for the feature fusion, which can preserve as much useful information as possible for the final binary classification. To fully verify the performance of the proposed model, we also design two types of models based on traditional machine-learning and typical deep-learning for comparison. Furthermore, we have also done ablation experiments to verify the effectiveness of each module of the proposed network. Finally, these models are evaluated by four-fold cross-validation on the built eye-tracking dataset. The proposed model shows 85% average accuracy in AD recognition, outperforming machine-learning methods and other typical deep-learning networks. (shrink)

In this study, we aimed to address three comments proposed by Ogihara on a recent study where we found that unique names in China have become increasingly popular from 1950 to 2009. Using a large representative sample of Chinese names, we replicated the increase in uniqueness of Chinese names from 1920 to 2005, especially since the 1970s, with multiple uniqueness indices based on name-character frequency and name-length deviation. Over the years, Chinese characters that are rare in daily life or naming (...) practice were more often used in given names, and the length of given names became more deviant from typical practice. Taken together, these findings not only reconfirmed the increasing prevalence of unique names but also demonstrated the validity of various indices in assessing name uniqueness in China. (shrink)

Electromechanical actuators are more and more widely used as actuation devices in flight control system of aircrafts and helicopters. The reliability of EMAs is vital because it will cause serious accidents if the malfunction of EMAs occurs, so it is significant to detect and diagnose the fault of EMAs timely. However, EMAs often run under variable conditions in realistic environment, and the vibration signals of EMAs are nonlinear and nonstationary, which make it difficult to effectively achieve fault diagnosis. This paper (...) proposed a fault diagnosis method of electromechanical actuators based on variational mode decomposition multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis and probabilistic neural network. First, the vibration signals were decomposed by VMD into a number of intrinsic mode functions. Second, the multifractal features hidden in IMFs were extracted by using MFDFA, and the generalized Hurst exponents were selected as the feature vectors. Then, the principal component analysis was introduced to realize dimension reduction of the extracted feature vectors. Finally, the probabilistic neural network was utilized to classify the fault modes. The experimental results show that this method can effectively achieve the fault diagnosis of EMAs even under diffident working conditions. Simultaneously, the diagnosis performance of the proposed method in this paper has an advantage over that of EMD-MFDFA method for feature extraction. (shrink)

This study investigates affective meanings expressed in facial expressions and bodily gestures from a semiotic perspective. Particularly, the study focuses on disentangling relations of affective meanings and exploring the meaning potential of facial expressions and bodily gestures. Based on the analysis of over three hundred screenshots from two films (one animation and one live-action film), this study proposes a system of visual affect, as well as a system of visual resources involved in the expression of visual affect. The system of (...) visual affect makes a further step in the investigation of affective meanings afforded by facial expressions and bodily gestures, and can provide methodological insights into the examination of affective meanings expressed visually. The system of visual resources provides a more meaning-motivated framework for systematic tracking of the visual resources, which may be applied to the analysis of other visual media apart from films. (shrink)

Since Leibniz first put forward the sufficient reason law in his philosophical work "The Monadology" (1914), the issue of the law of sufficient reason has aroused heated discussions in the field of logic in our country. The question of whether the law of sufficient reason is the basic law of formal logic was particularly heated in the domestic logic circle in 1978-1980. Since then, there has been little discussion, but from the newly compiled formal logic textbooks published one after another, (...) no consensus has been reached. Although they didn't agree on the question of "whether or not", the two sides elaborated their arguments in detail and put forward some new opinions, thus creating new conditions for solving this problem scientifically. Firstly, this paper analyzes the different viewpoints of both sides of the argument. Secondly, it analyzes whether the law of sufficient reason is the basic law of formal logic from whether Leibniz put forward the law of sufficient reason. Finally, on this basis, a new transformation method is put forward. After this transformation, the law of sufficient reason is an important basic law of deductive logic, which can be juxtaposed with the other three logical laws, such as identity, and coordinated with the "three laws" and complement each other. (shrink)

Although lean search is seen as an important action in lean startup, previous studies have less knowledge on how to realize it, especially in the face of traditional plans that cannot cope with sudden changes in the environment. To fill the research gap, this study investigates the effects of improvisation on lean search. Meanwhile, this research also discusses the moderating effects of entrepreneurial team heterogeneity and the environmental uncertainty to identify the boundary conditions of this relationship. Supported by the cross-sectional (...) data from 203 Chinese startups, the results show that explorative and ambidextrous improvisation are positively associated with lean search. However, the effect of exploitative improvisation on lean search is unsupported. Additionally, technology uncertainty positively moderates the relationship between exploitative improvisation and lean search. Market uncertainty positively moderates the relationship between explorative improvisation and lean search. However, the entrepreneurial team heterogeneity negatively moderates the relationship between ambidextrous improvisation and lean search. These findings contribute to understanding how startups could conduct lean search in a rapidly changing environment, which provides theoretical guidance for improving the success rate of startups. (shrink)

Drawing on the theory of engagement, the present study aims to examine the outcomes of the co-creation experience in a realistic co-creation setting, a hotpot restaurant. To this end, the current research links the relationship marketing literature to hospitality and tourism research and formulates a novel framework by incorporating tourists’ co-creation experience, brand evangelism, brand trust, and brand passion in an integrated conceptual model. Using a quantitative research design, a total of 453 international tourists were surveyed in China. The findings (...) revealed that co-creation experience dimensions positively impact brand evangelism, trust, and passion. Additionally, we found that brand trust and brand passion positively affect brand evangelism. We also confirmed the mediating effect of brand trust and brand passion in bridging the co-creation experience and brand evangelism. This study offers valuable insights for restaurant brand managers regarding attracting and engaging foreign travelers with their service businesses. (shrink)

Alcohol use disorder is one of the most common substance use disorders contributing to both behavioral and cognitive impairments in patients with AUD. Recent neuroimaging studies point out that AUD is a typical disorder featured by altered functional connectivity. However, the details about how voxel-wise functional coordination remain unknown. Here, we adopted a newly proposed method named functional connectivity density to depict altered voxel-wise functional coordination in AUD. The novel functional imaging technique, FCD, provides a comprehensive analytical method for brain's (...) “scale-free” networks. We applied resting-state functional MRI toward subjects to obtain their FCD, including global FCD, local FCD, and long-range FCD. Sixty-one patients with AUD and 29 healthy controls were recruited, and patients with AUD were further divided into alcohol-related cognitive impairment group and non-cognitive impairment group. All subjects were asked to stay stationary during the scan in order to calculate the resting-state gFCD, lFCD, and lrFCD values, and further investigate the abnormal connectivity alterations among AUD-NCI, ARCI, and HC. Compared to HC, both AUD groups exhibited significantly altered gFCD in the left inferior occipital lobe, left calcarine, altered lFCD in right lingual, and altered lrFCD in ventromedial frontal gyrus. It is notable that gFCD of the ARCI group was found to be significantly deviated from AUD-NCI and HC in left medial frontal gyrus, which changes probably contributed by the impairment in cognition. In addition, no significant differences in gFCD were found between ARCI and HC in left parahippocampal, while ARCI and HC were profoundly deviated from AUD-NCI, possibly reflecting a compensation of cognition impairment. Further analysis showed that within patients with AUD, gFCD values in left medial frontal gyrus are negatively correlated with MMSE scores, while lFCD values in left inferior occipital lobe are positively related to ADS scores. In conclusion, patients with AUD exhibited significantly altered functional connectivity patterns mainly in several left hemisphere brain regions, while patients with AUD with or without cognitive impairment also demonstrated intergroup FCD differences which correlated with symptom severity, and patients with AUD cognitive impairment would suffer less severe alcohol dependence. This difference in symptom severity probably served as a compensation for cognitive impairment, suggesting a difference in pathological pathways. These findings assisted future AUD studies by providing insight into possible pathological mechanisms. (shrink)

This paper is aimed at the problems of low accuracy, long recognition time, and low recognition efficiency in English speech recognition. In order to improve the accuracy and efficiency of English speech recognition, an improved ant colony algorithm is used to deal with the dynamic time planning problem. The core is to adopt an adaptive volatilization coefficient and dynamic pheromone update strategy for the basic ant colony algorithm. Using new state transition rules and optimal ant parameter selection and other improved (...) methods, the best path can be found in a shorter time and the execution efficiency can be improved. Simulation experiments tested the recognition rates of traditional ant colony algorithm and improved ant colony algorithm. The results show that the global search ability and accuracy of improved ant colony algorithm are better than traditional algorithms, which can effectively improve the efficiency of English speech recognition system. (shrink)

Distant brand extension as an essential strategy of obtaining benefits was highly focused on the normal marketing practice and academic research. In the current study, we aim to recognize that how individuals with different levels of empathy respond to distant extensions under corporate social responsibility and corporate competence associations to explore the corresponding neural mechanisms using event-related potentials. We divided subjects into two groups involving a high empathy group and a low empathy group according to an empathy measure questionnaire. The (...) subjects first faced a brand name following the CSR or CC association descriptions, and then, they were asked to evaluate the new product of brand by a five-point scale. Current results revealed that the participants of the HE group were more apt to accept the distant extension products than those of the LE group. Additionally, in the HE group, products from a brand with CSR associations were more acceptable than CC associations. Moreover, a larger N2 amplitude was elicited in the LE group than in the HE group. For the LE group, an augment N2 was found under CSR than CC associations, reflecting that LE consumers might perceive conflict when evaluating distant extensions and allocate more cognitive resources to deal with CSR information. At the later stage, the HE group showed a greater P3 than the LE group. For the HE group, an increased P3 was elicited under CSR than CC associations, suggesting that empathic individuals might show motivational salience and helping willingness toward distant extension products, especially under the CSR scenario. These results provide potential electrophysiological evidence for the positive impact of brand associations on the evaluation of distant brand extension in the case of subdividing different empathic individuals. (shrink)

PurposesThis paper aims to discuss the relationship between college students’ sports participation, school bullying, emotional intelligence and self-esteem. At the same time, it explores the intrinsic mechanisms of school bullying, in order to provide a reference for reducing bullying phenomenon among college students, and pave the way for college students to lead happy, healthy and confident lives.MethodsA total of 1,317 students from four universities in Southwest China were selected as subjects for this survey. They were selected by stratified random sampling, (...) and the data needed was obtained using a structured questionnaire. The data was subsequently processed with statistical software SPSS19.0 and AMOS21.0.Results Sports participation has a significant and positive correlation with emotional intelligence and self-esteem, likewise, it has a significant negative correlation with school bullying. Emotional intelligence has a marked positive correlation with self-esteem, at the same time it has a significant negative correlation with school bullying. In addition, self-esteem is strongly negative correlated with school bullying. Sports participation has a direct effect on school bullying. Emotional intelligence and self-esteem also play a significant mediating role between sports participation and school bullying, and the chain mediating force of emotional intelligence—self-esteem also reaches a significant level.ConclusionSports participation affects school bullying among college students not only directly but also indirectly, such as through emotional intelligence, the mediating role of self-esteem, and the chain mediating role of emotional intelligence to self-esteem. Apart from sports participation, emotional intelligence is another key factor that affects college students’ school bullying. Therefore, while attaching great importance to college students’ sport participation, schools should also provide courses aimed at developing students’ emotional intelligence. (shrink)

The volitional theory of human action has formed a basis for a prominent account of voluntary behavior since at least Aquinas. But in the twentieth century the notions of will and volition lost much of their popularity in both philosophy and psychology. Gilbert Ryle’s devastating attack on the concept of will, and especially the doctrine of volition, has had lingering effects evident in the widespread hostility and skepticism towards the will and volition. Since the 1970s, however, the volitional theory has (...) received some renewed interest in the philosophy of action. Some philosophers even consider that ‘in current philosophy of action it is perhaps the most widely held view, at least regarding the immediate antecedents of action.’. (shrink)

In studies investigating the property value enhancements along metro lines, study ranges in most cases are measured in Euclidean distance. However, city roads are not always straight, and Euclidean distance sometimes does not equal to actual distance the passenger travels from the public transport station to their home or a commercial spot. To solve this problem, this study analyzed the indicators affecting commercial property value in metro station accessible area in Xi’an, using walking time consumption in measuring the study range. (...) Following a conceptual framework, considering empirical evidences in related studies, information in city structure, and metro distribution, the initial indicator set is built. Using hedonic price model, spatial autoregressive model, and error term, significant indicators affecting commercial property value are investigated. In this study, 14 significant indicators are determined and quantified. Threshold distance equals to 900 m is found to be appropriate in addressing the autocorrelation problem with the weighted decision matrix tool. Compared to HPM and SEM, SAR is found to perform the best in evaluating the significant indicators with the largest R2 and the lowest Akaike Info Criterion. Besides, it is discovered that the value of the commercial property lies in the study range of 20 min walking time and is obviously influenced by the metro station. The results discovered in this study could provide some empirical evidences to commercial property planning in Xi’an. (shrink)

The safety of the transmission lines maintains the stable and efficient operation of the smart grid. Therefore, it is very important and highly desirable to diagnose the health status of transmission lines by developing an efficient prediction model in the grid sensor network. However, the traditional methods have limitations caused by the characteristics of high dimensions, multimodality, nonlinearity, and heterogeneity of the data collected by sensors. In this paper, a novel model called LPR-MLP is proposed to predict the health status (...) of the power grid sensor network. The LPR-MLP model consists of two parts: local binary pattern, principal component analysis, and ReliefF are used to process image data and meteorological and mechanical data and the multilayer perceptron method is then applied to build the prediction model. The results obtained from extensive experiments on the real-world data collected from the online system of China Southern Power Grid demonstrate that this new LPR-MLP model can achieve higher prediction accuracy and precision of 86.31% and 85.3%, compared with four traditional methods. (shrink)

Temporary international mobility is an increasingly relevant practice amongst academics. However, current literature lacks understanding on whether such mobility influences the individual academics’ entrepreneurial knowledge. This paper hypothesizes that temporary international academic mobility is conducive to the academic’s entrepreneurial knowledge and that interpersonal social networks play a crucial role in the transfer of this knowledge through their strength and size properties. We perform a Partial Least Squares - Structural Equation Model and build upon an original survey data set collected amongst (...) 281 Chinese academics. We find that the size of one’s interpersonal social network fully mediates the relationship between international academic mobility and entrepreneurial knowledge. This result points to the importance of a structurally broad - rather than a relationally strong - international social network in the academic’s accumulation of entrepreneurial knowledge abroad. (shrink)

This paper proposes the modified generalization of the HSS to solve a large and sparse continuous Sylvester equation, improving the efficiency and robustness. The analysis shows that the MGHSS converges to the unique solution of AX + XB = C unconditionally. We also propose an inexact variant of the MGHSS and prove its convergence under certain conditions. Numerical experiments verify the efficiency of the proposed methods.

Ten Western scholars respond to essays by Professor Yang Huilin on global theological, religious, and cultural debates.

Turning couplets into a weapon of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is also a creation by the masses in a revolutionary movement.

Auxin is a key regulator of plant developmental processes. Its effects on transcription are mediated by the AUXIN RESPONSE FACTOR (ARF) family of transcription factors. ARFs tightly control specific auxin responses necessary for proper plant growth and development. Recent research has revealed that regulated ARF protein accumulation and ARF nucleo‐cytoplasmic partitioning can determine auxin transcriptional outputs. In this review, we explore these recent findings and consider the potential for regulated ARF accumulation in driving auxin responses in plants.

In recent years, with the development of society and the rapid development of the animation industry, people are paying more and more attention to and requirements for animation production. As an indispensable part of animation production, picture composition plays a major role in animation production. It can give full play to the application of color matching and light and shadow design and enhance the depth and space of the animation screen. Tone space conversion refers to the conversion or representation of (...) color data in one color space into corresponding data in another color space. Its purpose is to distinguish and process color components such as hue and saturation in an image. This article first introduces the domestic and foreign research status of digital image preprocessing and analyzes the basic principles of several color space conversions in detail. Then, several color space conversion algorithms are studied, and the performance of the algorithms is compared and analyzed. The paper focuses on the hardware implementation and optimization of the algorithm for converting RGB color space into HSI color space to meet the real-time requirements. This article focuses on the mutual conversion between the RGB tone space and the HSI tone space and describes in detail how each color component in the HSI tone space is converted from the three RGB color components from a geometric perspective, and then the conversion is derived, and several general conversion methods of RGB to HSI tone space are introduced; two conversion methods of geometric derivation method and standard modulus algorithm are implemented in the software, and the comparison verification is carried out, and the comparison is made from the perspective of hardware implementation. The pros and cons of the two methods are discussed. Finally, the paper summarizes the shortcomings in the design and proposes further research directions in the future. (shrink)

本书不仅从理论和现实、宏观与微观等方面,对信仰问题进行了多维度、多层面的研究和探索,从而在理论上系统地呈现了信仰本质论、信仰类型论、信仰机制论等信仰理论扇面,而且还从方法论上探讨了信仰的研究视野、框架 和方法,从学科建构上开启了马克思主义信仰学的构建等。.

Hengxian, one of the bamboo books of the Chu State during the Warring States Period that is kept in the Shanghai Museum, was collected by the museum in 1994, and is an important piece of literature that discusses cosmic issues prior to Huainanzi. Based on Li Ling's work on the text, as well as hermeneutic work by some other scholars, this essay represents another attempt to determine the words and meanings of the Hengxian, with a focus on its cosmological commentary. (...) /// "恒先" 是上海博物馆藏战国楚竹书中的一篇， 1994年入藏上海博物馆。该 文是 "淮南子" 之前讨论宇宙问题的重要文献。依据李零整理的本子与其他学者的 释读，可以对 "恒先" 文义重新加以梳理，并从宇宙论的角度进行新的思想阐释。. (shrink)

本书主要内容有知识与智慧:教育的性格、知识与智慧:教育的历史、知识与智慧:教育的型态等。.