The number of edges in a shortest walk from one vertex to another vertex of a connected graph G is known as the distance between them. For a vertex x and an edge e = a b in G, the minimum number from distances of x with a and b is said to be the distance between x and e. A vertex x is said to distinguish two distinct edges e 1 and e 2 if the distance between x and (...) e 1 is different from the distance between x and e 2. A set X of vertices in a connected graph G is an edge metric generator for G if every two edges of G are distinguished by some vertex in X. The number of vertices in such a smallest set X is known as the edge metric dimension of G. In this article, we solve the edge metric dimension problem for certain classes of planar graphs. (shrink)

Using a sample of Chinese listed firms for the period of 2004–2010, this study examines the impact of religion on corporate philanthropic giving. Based on hand-collected data of religion and corporate philanthropic giving, we provide strong and robust evidence that religion is significantly positively associated with Chinese listed firms’ philanthropic giving. This finding is consistent with the view that religiosity has remarkable effects on individual thinking and behavior, and can serve as social norms to influence corporate philanthropy. Moreover, religion and (...) corporate philanthropic giving have a significantly weaker (less pronounced) positive association for state-owned enterprises than for non-state-owned enterprises. The results are robust to a variety of sensitivity tests. Our results highlight religious influence on corporate philanthropic giving in contemporary China, an old traditional country with a typical communist economy. (shrink)

Using a sample of Chinese listed firms in polluting industries for the period of 2008–2010, we empirically investigate whether and how Buddhism, China’s most influential religion, affects corporate environmental responsibility (CER). In this study, we measure Buddhist variables as the number of Buddhist monasteries within a certain radius around Chinese listed firms’ registered addresses. In addition, we hand-collect corporate environmental disclosure scores based on the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) sustainability reporting guidelines. Using hand-collected Buddhism data and corporate environmental disclosure scores, (...) we provide strong and robust evidence that Buddhism is significantly positively associated with CER. This finding is consistent with the following view: Buddhism can serve as social norms to evoke the consciousness of social responsibility, and thereof strengthen CER. Our findings also reveal that the positive association between Buddhism and CER is attenuated for firms with higher law enforcement index. The results are robust to various measures of Buddhism and a variety of sensitivity tests. (shrink)

How to make use of the leaders’ psychological capital to improve the innovation behavior of employees is an important issue for the talent management of enterprises today, and it is also the goal that enterprises must pursue if they want to stand out in the fierce competition. Therefore, in this study, 154 enterprises in high-tech area were selected for questionnaire survey. The correlation between lead-member exchange (LMX) relationship (emotion, loyalty, contribution, professional respect), leaders' psychological capital (confidence, hope, optimism, tenacity), and (...) employees' innovation behaviors were analyzed by multivariate regression. Hierarchical regression method was used to examine the mediating effect of the LEX. It was found that confidence, toughness, and contribution were significantly positively correlated with employee innovation behavior (P<0.000). The positive correlation between hope, optimism, emotion, and loyalty with employees' innovation behavior was significant (P<0.05). Emotion, loyalty, and contribution had mediating effects on the leaders’ psychological capital and the innovation behavior of employees. In conclusion, the leaders’ psychological capital can have a significant positive effect on the innovation behavior of employees directly, and it can also have an indirect positive effect on the innovation behavior of employees by maintaining high quality LMX. (shrink)

Using a sample of 11,357 firm-year observations from the Chinese stock market for the period of 2001–2011, we investigate whether and how religion can mitigate earnings management. Specifically, based on geographic-proximity-based religion variables, we provide strong and robust evidence to show that religion is significantly negatively associated with the extent of earnings management, suggesting that religion can serve as a set of social norms to mitigate corporate unethical behavior such as earnings management. Our findings also reveal that the negative association (...) between religion and earnings management is less pronounced for firms with closer distance to the regulatory centers than for their counterparts, implying the substitutive effects between religion and the distance to regulators on mitigating earnings management. The above results are robust to different measures of earnings management, various religion variables, and a variety of sensitivity tests. (shrink)

The present study addresses language ostracism in intercultural communication, a phenomenon when someone speaks a language but some members of this language community don’t speak to him in this language. This phenomenon is illustrated by language behaviour towards visually distinct bilingual minorities in Taiwan. Visually distinct minorities in Taiwan reported that they had been spoken to in English by small children or people who did not believe and accept that they really understood Mandarin when they spoke it. They might be (...) spoken to in English despite actually speaking good Mandarin. Taiwanese people behave this way because of two conditions existing in Taiwan: an English-speaking foreigner stereotype where people assume that every foreign-looking person speaks English, and English privilege in Taiwanese society which leads to people being treated better if they can speak English. (shrink)

We investigated whether adults have attentional bias toward infant faces, whether it is moderated by infant facial expression, and the predictive effect of the adult attachment state on it. One hundred unmarried nulliparous college students [50 men and 50 women; aged 17–24 years ] were recruited. Each completed a self-report questionnaire—the Chinese version of the State Adult Attachment Measure, and a dot-probe task with a stimulus presentation duration of 500 ms, which used 192 black-and-white photographs of 64 people as the (...) experimental stimuli. The results showed that, at the duration of 500 ms, individuals' attentional bias toward infant faces disappeared, regardless of the facial expression. However, when the interaction between avoidant attachment state and face was controlled, the attentional bias was significant again, and the avoidant attachment state negatively predicted individuals' attentional bias toward infant faces. This indicates that at the suprathreshold stage, there are individual differences in the attentional bias toward infant faces, and high avoidant attachment will weaken individuals' attentional bias toward infant faces. This study advances previous studies that focused only on individuals' attention to infant faces occurring at the early processing stage of attention. The results provide direction for interventions; specifically, changing the attachment state of avoidant individuals can affect their attention to infants, which may promote the establishment of parent–child relationships. (shrink)

With the rapid expansion of parameters in large language models (LLMs) and the application of Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF), there has been a noticeable growth in the moral competence of LLMs. However, several questions warrant further exploration: Is it really possible for LLMs to fully align with human values through RLHF? How can the current moral growth be philosophically contextualized? We identify similarities between LLMs’ moral growth and Deweyan ethics in terms of the discourse of human moral development. (...) We then attempt to use Dewey’s theory on an experimental basis to examine and further explain the extent to which the current alignment pathway enables the development of LLMs. A beating experiment serves as the foundational case for analyzing LLMs’ moral competence across various parameters and stages, including basic moral cognition, moral dilemma judgment, and moral behavior. The results demonstrate that the moral competence of the GPT series has seen a significant improvement, and Dewey’s Impulse-Habit-Character theory of moral development can be used to explain this: the moral competence of LLMs has been enhanced through experience-based learning, supported by human feedback. Nevertheless, LLMs’ moral development through RLHF remains constrained and does not reach the character stage described by Dewey, possibly due to their lack of self-consciousness. This fundamental difference between humans and LLMs underscores both the limitations of LLMs’ moral growth and the challenges of applying RLHF for AI alignment. It also emphasizes the need for external societal governance and legal regulation. (shrink)

Extant studies on private regulation have not reached a sufficient understanding about the interplay between private and public regulations, due to underdeveloped theoretical framework and the lack of large-sample empirical investigations. Leveraging ISO 14001 adoption among Chinese firms as the research context, the current research draws on the institutional theory to examine how firm’s adoption of ISO 14001 standard, as a specific form of private regulation, affects the incidence of public environmental inspections. To test our arguments, we conduct two empirical (...) studies. Study 1 uses the first-hand data of a corporate social responsibility survey on Chinese manufacturing firms, whereas Study 2 deploys the second-hand longitudinal archival data of the government environmental inspections on Chinese listed firms. Both of the two studies reveal consistent findings that ISO 14001 adoption decreases the incidence of government environmental inspections, and that the effect of ISO 14001 adoption becomes stronger in state-owned enterprises and firms with top management team’s political ties. Our findings are suggestive of a complementary relationship between private and public regulations, in a sense that private regulations can compensate for the weaknesses of public regulations by offering faster, more flexible and cost-efficient means of enforcement, which allows the public authorities to economize on the deployment of public resources to monitor the rest non-compliant firms. (shrink)

This article systematically surveys the history of Anglo-American philosophy in Taiwan since the late nineteenth century. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it argues that pragmatism remained influential given the dominance of continental philosophy in Japanese colonized Taiwan, where the universal values assumed by pragmatists were used to resist the Empire’s ideology, after WWII, immigrated Chinese scholars brought in more novelty to Taiwanese philosophy than the Vienna circle diasporas brought to their Anglo-American counterparts, in which liberal scholars’ emphasis on science and democracy (...) challenged Chiang’s dictatorship and Chinese nationalism, and analytic philosophy thrived with the advance of democratizing in the 1980s, which, in turn, diversified the philosophy in 1990s Taiwan. Accordingly, Anglo-American philosophy was never confined to the academic ivory tower but had positive impacts on Taiwan’s centennial social transformation. (shrink)

This volume explores the cross-linguistic diversity, and possibly inconsistency, of the span of linguistic means that signal reported speech and thought. The integration of broad linguistic (viewpoint in conversation and narrative) and cognitive (theory of mind and understanding the inner life and thought of others) strategies for handling mixed points of view will be considered.

Errors are inevitable in an increasingly risky and dynamic entrepreneurial environment. The error management and the error climate perceived by the members are crucial to the subsequent innovation behaviors. Maintaining and improving the psychological capital of entrepreneurs under errors is not only the psychological activities of entrepreneurs themselves but also a critical management process in which an organization can influence the psychological factors and behaviors of entrepreneurs through error management climate. In the context of Chinese culture, this study explores the (...) influence of error management climate on entrepreneurial self-efficacy and innovation behavior under the boundary condition of Zhongyong thinking. Two hundred ninety samples of Chinese entrepreneurs are empirically analyzed in this study, and results show that: error management climate and entrepreneurial self-efficacy have significant positive effects on entrepreneurs’ innovation behavior; entrepreneurial self-efficacy mediates the relationship between error management climate and innovation behavior; and Zhongyong thinking plays moderating roles in the process of error management climate influencing innovation behavior. This study complements the entrepreneurship literature with its focus on error management climate as an essential antecedent of entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and promotes an understanding of how Chinese practitioners promote innovative behavior from a cultural perspective. (shrink)

Despite intensive debates regarding action imitation and sentence imitation, few studies have examined their relationship. In this paper, we argue that the mechanism of action imitation is necessary and in some cases sufficient to describe sentence imitation. We first develop a framework for action imitation in which key ideas of Hurley’s shared circuits model are integrated with Wolpert et al.’s motor selection mechanism and its extensions. We then explain how this action-based framework clarifies sentence imitation without a language-specific faculty. Finally, (...) we discuss the empirical support for and philosophical significance of this perspective. (shrink)

To solve the financing problem of the food producers, we consider a two-echelon contract food supply chain composed of a family farm with capital constraints and a food processing enterprise. With no capital constraints as the benchmark model, we analyze optimal decisions of the family farm and the food processing enterprise in the case of bank financing with bank participation only and bank financing with “government, bank, and insurance” coparticipation. Then, we discuss how the risk of yield uncertainty influences the (...) optimal decisions and profits of the family farm and the food processing enterprise under different financing situation. Meanwhile, the reason why the government subsidizes agriculture is explored, and the policy of minimum purchase price of the food is initiated when the market price is too low. Finally, the numerical examples and sensitivity analysis are presented. The results show that the bank financing with “government, bank, and insurance” coparticipation improves the welfare of supply chain members more obviously than the bank financing with bank participation only; when the rice price is too low, the policy of minimum purchase price of food is initiated, which increases the revenue and the growing enthusiasm of the family farm; the profits of the family farm and the food processing enterprise will decrease as the risk of yield uncertainty increases in the case of bank financing, and the risk of yield uncertainty will be reduced for the family farm when bank financing with “government, bank, and insurance” coparticipation. (shrink)

Research in second language pragmatics has paid increasing attention to learners’ individual differences, but few studies have examined the relationship between learners’ willingness to communicate in L2 and their pragmatic competence. To this end, this study investigates the association between WTC and pragmatic awareness and comprehension of Chinese as a second language learners. A total of 80 CSL learners studying abroad in three universities in China participated in this study. Data were collected through a WTC questionnaire, a self-perceived communication competence (...) questionnaire, a pragmatic awareness judgment task, and a multiple-choice test for pragmatic comprehension. Statistical analyses were conducted to explore the relationship between the learners’ pragmatic awareness and pragmatic comprehension on the one hand and their WTC and SPCC in L2 on the other. The findings indicated that SPCC correlated positively with the learners’ L2 pragmatic comprehension, but not with their L2 pragmatic awareness. No correlation was found between WTC and pragmatic awareness and comprehension. The results suggest that SPCC may contribute to learners’ L2 pragmatic comprehension; some implications for teaching and future research directions are also discussed. (shrink)

This paper examines the success of corporate communication in voluntary sustainability reporting. Existing studies have focused on the perspective of the communicators but lack an understanding of the perspective of information recipients to clearly evaluate this interactive communication process. This paper looks at the issue of a credibility gap perceived by external stakeholders when they doubt the authenticity of communicated information due to the reporting company’s governance structure. The paper uses family businesses to exemplify the emergence of such a gap (...) when outsiders become concerned about the potential agency problem of the integrated ownership and management controlled by a few members of the same family. Following source credibility theory, these concerns raise a credibility gap associated with a family firm’s trustworthiness and goodwill, even if the family has the expertise to carry out sustainability reporting. The findings of two experimental studies indicate that family businesses suffer a greater credibility gap than non-family businesses. An external and independent assurance service can mitigate such gaps, especially when the service is comprehensive and targets family businesses. The paper provides a complete view evaluating corporate communication by looking at the interaction between the communicating company and the information recipients. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore job performance, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) from an ethical perceptive. A great number of studies have extensively discussed the link between M&A and performance; however, most focused on the financial functions and strategy selections. Although ethical issues emerge in the M&A process, it is a less studied area. This study adopted the structural equation modeling approach to empirically test our hypotheses. Based on 264 samples from financial companies, data analyses indicated that ethical (...) conduct in M&A is significantly correlated with employee job performance. Ensuring employment security and caring practices can significantly explain organizational commitment. Organizational commitment also plays a significant mediating role between a company’s ethical conduct and employee job performance. Managerial implications are also provided. (shrink)

BackgroundImportant sex and gender differences have been found in research on diabetes complications and treatment. Reporting on whether and how sex and gender impact research findings is crucial for developing tailored diabetes care strategies. To analyze the extent to which this information is available in current diabetes research, we examined original investigations on diabetes for the integration of sex and gender in study reporting.MethodsWe examined original investigations on diabetes published between January 1 and December 31, 2015, in the top five (...) general medicine journals and top five diabetes-specific journals (by 2015 impact factor). Data were extracted on sex and gender integration across seven article sections: title, abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, and limitations.ResultsWe identified 155 original investigations on diabetes, including 115 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and 40 observational studies. Sex and gender were rarely incorporated in article titles, abstracts and introductions. Most methods sections did not describe plans for sex/gender analyses; 47 (30.3%) articles described plans to control for sex/gender in the analysis and 12 (7.7%) described plans to stratify results by sex/gender. While most articles (151, 97.4%) reported the sex/gender of study participants, only 10 (6.5%) of all articles reported all study outcomes separately by sex/gender. Discussion of sex-related issues was incorporated into 21 (13.5%) original investigations; however, just 1 (0.6%) discussed gender-related issues. Comparison by journal type (general medicine vs. diabetes specific) yielded only minor differences from the overall integration results. In contrast, RCTs performed more poorly on multiple sex/gender assessment metrics compared to observational studies.ConclusionsSex and gender are poorly integrated in current diabetes original investigations, suggesting that substantial improvements in sex and gender data reporting are needed to inform the evidence to support sex- and gender-specific diabetes care. (shrink)

Investor recommendation is a critical and challenging task for startups, which can assist startups in locating suitable investors and enhancing the possibility of obtaining investment. While some efforts have been made for investor recommendation, few of them explore the impact of startups’ features, including partners, rounds, and fields, to investor recommendation performance. Along this line, in this paper, with the help of the heterogeneous information network, we propose a FEatures’ COntribution Measurement approach of startups on investor recommendation, named FECOM. Specifically, (...) we construct the venture capital heterogeneous information network at first. Then, we define six venture capital metapaths to represent the features of startups that we focus on. In this way, we can measure the contribution of startups’ features on the investor recommendation task by validating the recommendation performance based on different metapaths. Finally, we extract four practical rules to assist in further investment tasks by using our proposed FECOM approach. (shrink)

Background Moral courage is a recognized virtue. Researchers have focused on various aspects of nursing moral courage, such as its conceptualization and influencing factors. Within these studies, various literature reviews have been conducted, but to our knowledge, bibliometric mapping has not been utilized. Aim This article aims to analyze the production of literature within nursing moral courage research. Research Design To investigate publication patterns, we employed VOSviewer and CiteSpace software, focusing on publication dynamics, prolific research entities, and most cited articles. (...) Additionally, we forecasted future research trends. Ethical considerations In our study, ethical review was not required. Results A total of 105 information sources were identified in the WoS database. Overall, there has been a significant increase in research volume after 2020. The most prolific countries are the United States, Finland, and China, while the most prolific source title is “Nursing Ethics.” Keywords are also related to moral dilemmas and ethics. However, there are further improvements needed in international cooperation. Conclusions The results proposed in this paper can serve as a starting point for comprehensive or systematic literature reviews and seek more detailed data, information, and knowledge in the field of nursing moral courage. It can enable outsiders to quickly understand research on nursing moral courage, whether for in-depth exploration or simply to facilitate more effective collaboration with nursing ethics experts. (shrink)

This paper investigates the applicability of reliabilism to scientific knowledge, and especially focuses on two doubts about the applicability: one about its difficulty in accounting for the epistemological role of scientific instruments, and the other about scientific theories. To respond to the two doubts, we extend virtue reliabilism, a reliabilist-based virtue epistemology, with a distinction of two types of epistemic virtues and the extended mind thesis from Clark and Chalmers (Analysis 58:7–19, 1998 ). We also present a case study on (...) the quantitative research methodology of social sciences to show that the methodology is actually an extended virtue reliabilism on how social science instruments and theories contribute to the formation of social scientific knowledge. (shrink)

With the continuous development of the stock market, designing a reasonable risk identification tool will help to solve the irrational problem of investors. This paper first selects the stocks with the most valuable investment value in the future through the random forest algorithm in the nine-factor model and then analyzes them by using the higher-order moment model to find that different investors’ preferences will make the weight of the portfolio change accordingly, which will eventually make the optimal return and risk (...) set of the composition of the portfolio change. The risk identification system designed in this paper can provide an effective risk identification tool for investors and help them make rational judgments. (shrink)

Proper and regular physical activity plays an important role in improving people’s health. With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has posed a serious threat to individual health, residents’ PA has aroused deep concern. Based on the theory of planned behavior, this study examines the impact of residents’ PA intention and behavior in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were collected from a sample of 961 residents in Wuhan in China using a questionnaire survey. The results show that residents’ (...) PA intention and behavior have been affected significantly by residents’ PA attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. The COVID-19 pandemic has a significant impact on both residents’ PA intention and behavior. In addition, there were gender and region differences in this impact. The findings are of great significance in promoting residents’ PA intention and PA behavior, which are of positive significance to the development of residents’ physical and mental health in the period of global serious health crisis. (shrink)

全书共介绍了马克思、恩格斯、列宁、斯大林、毛泽东等哲学著作138部,对有关的名词、术语等4000个辞条均详加阐释。.

BackgroundTinnitus is a common disease, and sound therapy is an effective method to alleviate it. Previous studies have shown that notched sound not only changes levels of cortical blood oxygen, but affects blood oxygen in specific cerebral cortical areas, such as Brodmann area 46, which is associated with emotion. Extensive evidence has confirmed that tinnitus is closely related to emotion. Whether notched sound plays a role in regulating the emotional center is still unclear.MethodsThis study included 29 patients with newly diagnosed (...) chronic tinnitus who were treated with notched sound. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy was conducted before and after treatment to observe bilateral changes in cortical blood oxygen in the cerebral hemispheres. We compared the changes in connectivity between the two regions of interest, as wells as other cortical regions before and after treatment.ResultsThe results showed That global connectivity between the bilateral auditory cortex of the superior temporal sulcus and the ipsilateral cortex did not change significantly between baseline and the completion of treatment, and That the connectivity between channel 14 and the right superior temporal sulcus decreased after treatment. The overall connectivity between the right BA46 region and the right cortex decreased after treatment, and decreases in connectivity after treatment were specifically found for channels 10 and 14 in the right parietal lobe and channels 16, 20, 21, and 22 in the frontal lobe, while there was no significant change on the left side. There were no significant changes in the questionnaire measures of tinnitus, anxiety, or depression before and after treatment.ConclusionThe results of the study indicate that cerebral cortex reorganization occurs in tinnitus patients after submitted to treatment with notched sound for 1 month, and that notched sound decreases the connectivity between the auditory cortex and specific brain regions.SignificanceNotched sound not only regulates the auditory center through lateral inhibition, but also alleviates tinnitus by reorganizing the emotional control center. (shrink)

Comparative syllogism is a type of scientific reasoning widely used, explicitly or implicitly, for inferences from observations to conclusions about effectiveness, but its philosophical significance has not been fully elaborated or appreciated. In its simplest form, the comparative syllogism derives a conclusion about the effectiveness of a factor (e.g. a treatment or an exposure) on a certain property via an experiment design using a test (experimental) group and a comparison (control) group. Our objective is to show that the comparative syllogism (...) can be understood as encoding a simulation view of counterfactuals, in that counterfactual situations are conceptual constructs that can be correctly simulated by homogeneous comparison groups. In this simulation view, the empirical data from the comparison groups play an evidential role in the evaluation of counterfactuals and in obtaining counterfactual knowledge. We further indicate how successful experimental designs can help us to obtain correct simulations, and thus to bring us to scientifically-empirically based counterfactual knowledge. (shrink)

The language parasite approach refers to the view that language, like a parasite, is an adaptive system that evolves to fit its human hosts. Supported by recent computer simulations, LPA proponents claim that the reason that humans can use languages with ease is not because we have evolved with genetically specified linguistic instincts but because languages have adapted to the preexisting brain structures of humans. This article examines the LPA. It argues that, while the LPA has advantages over its rival, (...) Chomskyan nativism, there are additional factors that may limit linguistic variety that have yet to be identified by its insightful proponents. This article suggests abandoning the search for a decisive cause of language capacity and argues that language evolution is more likely to arise from balancing multiple engineering constraints. (shrink)

There is a prevalent view against the disquotational and the minimal theories of truth, that the most sensible solution to the Liar—that is, the gappy solution—is not available to them. I would like to argue that, though this solution is unavailable to the two theories, the prevailing argument and the reasoning behind this view are wrong. This paper mainly focuses on Simmons’ “Deflationary Truth and the Liar” (1999), within which the idea that disquotationalism can take the Liar in its stridein (...) terms of the gappy option is thoroughly criticised. Albeit Simmons’ account is about disquotationalism, it is in fact about truth theories with the disquotational feature. For Horwich’s minimal theory of truth to be feasible, it is in need of providing an account of which the primary truth bearers are utterances or sentences. The reasoning behind Simmons’ account and his argument is a widely accepted but in my opinion mistaken reading of deflationary theories, reading the deflationary axiom schemata as emphasising the redundant feature of the true predicate only. By analysing and criticising this reasoning the mistakes of this interpretation of the deflationary theories of truth are revealed. Simmons bases his argument on two premises: taking disquotational theory of truth asdefinitional theory and considering the main feature of the disquotational truth predicate as eliminability. In terms of the notion of parasitic liar, I will argue that Simmons fails to show the plausibility of one crucial premise of his argument—that is, the paradoxical or the pathological feature is missing from the disquotational mirrors of the Liar. I will further show what deflationary feature is misunderstood by those accounts similar to Simmons’. (shrink)