What are the conditions under which suspension of belief—or suspension, for short—is justified? Process reliabilists hold that our beliefs are justified if and only if these are produced or sustained by reliable cognitive processes. But they have said relatively little about suspension. Perhaps they think that we may easily extend an account of justified belief to deal with justified suspension. But it's not immediately clear how we may do so; in which case, evidentialism has a distinct advantage over reliabilism. In (...) this paper, I consider some proposals as to how process reliabilists might seek to account for justified suspension. Although several of these proposals do not work, two are promising. The first such proposal appeals to the notion of propositional justification; the second involves weaving evidentialist elements into reliabilism. I'll argue that the second proposal is better than the first. (shrink)

As software piracy continues to be a threat to the growth of national and global economies, understanding why people continue to use pirated software and learning how to discourage the use of pirated software are urgent and important issues. In addition to applying the theory of planned behavior (TPB) perspective to capture behavioral intention to use pirated software, this paper considers perceived risk as a salient belief influencing attitude and intention toward using pirated software. Four perceived risk components related to (...) the use of pirated software (performance, social, prosecution and psychological risks) have been identified, measured and tested. Data were collected through an online survey of 305 participants. The results indicate that perceived prosecution risk has an impact on intention to use pirated software, and perceived psychological risk is a strong predictor of attitude toward using pirated software. In addition, attitude and perceived behavior control contribute significantly to the intended use of pirated software. However, the proposed direct relationship between subjective norm and intention to use pirated software is not supported. Implications for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

Physicalism is incompatible with what is known as the possibility of zombies, that is, the possibility of a world physically like ours, but in which there are no conscious experiences. But it is compatible with what is known as the possibility of ghosts, that is, the possibility of a world which is physically like ours, but in which there are additional nonphysical entities. In this paper we argue that a revision to the traditional definition of physicalism designed to accommodate the (...) possibility of ghosts inadvertently accommodates what is known as the possibility of inverted spectra, that is, the possibility of a world which is physically like ours, but in which colour experience is inverted. This consequence is unwelcome, because it is widely agreed that the possibility of inverted spectra is incompatible with physicalism. We argue for a revised definition of physicalism which resolves this problem. We then use our definition to argue that physicalism is not compatible with what is known as the possibility of blockers, that is, the possibility of a world which is physically like ours, but in which additional nonphysical entities have prevented the existence of conscious experience. This undermines Stephan Leuenberger's attempt to defend physicalism from arguments which purport to establish the possibility of zombies. (shrink)

Current COVID-19 pandemic and previous SARS/MERS outbreaks have caused a series of major crises to global public health. We must integrate the large and exponentially growing amount of heterogeneous coronavirus data to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechanisms, in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs. Ontologies have emerged to play an important role in standard knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. We have initiated the development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO). (...) As an Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) library ontology, CIDO is an open source and interoperable with other existing OBO ontologies. In this article, the general architecture and the design patterns of the CIDO are introduced, CIDO representation of coronaviruses, phenotypes, anti-coronavirus drugs and medical devices (e.g. ventilators) are illustrated, and an application of CIDO implemented to identify repurposable drug candidates for effective and safe COVID-19 treatment is presented. (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)

This study conducted a cross-sectional investigation of facial appearance dissatisfaction between patients before undergoing orthognathic surgery and a non-surgical sample to evaluate the potential influencing factors of facial appearance dissatisfaction. A sample of 354 participants completed a set of questionnaires concerning facial appearance dissatisfaction, interpersonal pressure, media pressure, and fear of negative appearance evaluation (112 patients, 242 controls). The patients reported higher facial appearance dissatisfaction, more media pressure, more interpersonal pressure, and a greater fear of negative appearance evaluation among others (...) than the control group. Moreover, regression analyses identified interpersonal pressure and fear of negative appearance evaluation as the main influencing factors on facial appearance dissatisfaction whether in the orthognathic patients or in the control groups. The associations between the perceptions of interpersonal pressure, fear of negative appearance evaluation, and facial appearance dissatisfaction support the possible utility of strengthening social experiences and psychological intervention in preventing and treating these appearance-concerns, especially for the orthognathic patients. (shrink)

This article takes its retrospective lead from the oppressive schooling years during the Chinese Cultural Revolution to reflect on the educational significance of artistic activities through considering aesthetic virtues and moral agency cultivated in these activities. Describing an unconventional educational milieu where schooling was deliberately ‘dismantled’, I emphasize the important role that artistic endeavours can play in building a person’s aesthetic strength and moral power to overcome the adversity of life, hence for the fuller human development. By blending philosophical discussion (...) with historical manifestation, I stress the less articulated educational discourse that makes dance relevant to the educational formation of epistemic virtues and moral sensibilities. Joining in the emerging efforts to improving the worlds of schools, curricula, and pedagogies, I argue that the contingent integration of different histories, life conditions, and social and cultural discourses are ‘transformative’ sites for pedagogy. Thus, I seek to shed historically fresh light on the ways of thinking of schooling, education, and the arts for hope and possibility to ultimately argue for ways that can speak to the diversity of global societies today. (shrink)

The environmental quality and subjective environmental evaluations in urban open spaces are essential. In this study, the effects of building, green, and water landscapes, which are typical visual landscapes, on the subjective environmental evaluations in different seasons were analyzed by conducting questionnaire surveys and field measurements in a severely cold city. It was found that the visual landscapes significantly affected subjective environmental evaluations in winter and summer, but there were no effects in the transitional season. In summer, compared with the (...) building and green landscape, the thermal sensation vote in the water landscape was the lowest at 0.4, and the differences were 0.3∼1.0. However, the thermal comfort vote in the water landscape was found to be 0.6 times higher. In winter, the thermal sensation and comfort votes in the water landscape were the lowest, the average evaluation under different UTCI was –2.2, and the results were similar for the overall comfort evaluation. In addition, the subjects believed that green and water landscapes improved thermal comfort and had more significant effects on improving the environmental temperature in the three seasons. Additionally, visual landscape evaluations significantly affect subjective environmental evaluations in summer than in the winter and transitional season; the higher the visual landscape evaluation, the better the thermal and overall comfort. (shrink)

In the field of the philosophy of history of the 20th century, Collingwoods contributions stand above the rest. He was truly one of the most profoundly influential thinkers of his time. He was a philosopher, historian and archaeologist that combined the unique perspectives of all three disciplines. This volume cuts to the core of Collingwoods work, closely elucidating how inter-subjective the process of re-enactment in history is for Collingwood and how structurally constitutive question and answer is of re-enactment across time (...) between us today and past experiences ages ago. (shrink)

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis, the public keeps getting epidemic-related information on the media. News reports on the increasing number of fatalities have exposed individuals to death, which causes negative emotional experiences such as tension, anxiety, and fear. This study aimed to investigate whether creativity could serve as an anxiety-buffer when mortality is salient. Based on previous findings, the present study utilized type of creative task and personal search for meaning as moderators. In Study 1, a 2 × (...) 2 between-subject design was utilized, and 168 subjects were randomly assigned to four experimental conditions. In Study 2, 221 subjects were recruited. The experimental procedure was similar to Study 1, except that the priming paradigm of mortality was changed and search for meaning was included as an additional moderating variable. State anxiety was measured as the dependent variable in both studies. Results of Study 1 showed that, while the benevolent creative task could buffer anxiety in the mortality salience condition, the malevolent creative task did not have the same effect. Furthermore, there was a significant interaction between mortality salience, type of creative task, and search for meaning in life on anxiety. In Study 2, the buffering function of benevolent creativity was more intense for participants with a higher level of search for meaning. Together, these findings reveal the influence of different types of creative tasks on individual anxiety levels under death priming conditions and the moderating effect of search for meaning in this relationship. Further, they suggest the need to focus on the role of creativity in terror management. (shrink)

Compared with the large number of studies on reading of children with hearing loss in alphabetic languages, there are only a very limited number of studies on reading of Chinese-speaking children with HL. It remains unclear how phonological, orthographic, and semantic skills contribute to reading fluency of Chinese school-age children with HL. The present study explored this issue by examining the performances of children with HL on reading fluency and three linguistic skills compared with matched controls with normal hearing. Specifically, (...) twenty-eight children with HL and 28 chronological-age-matched children with NH were tested on word/sentence reading fluency, phonological awareness which was composed of onset/vowel/lexical tone awareness, orthographic knowledge, and semantic competence which comprised animal word identification, pseudo-homophone detection, and word segmentation. Results showed that children with HL lagged behind their peers with NH in WRF/SRF and most of the phonological, orthographic, and semantic subskills except onset awareness and pseudo-homophone detection. Furthermore, the significant contributors to WRF differed between the two groups with PA being the significant contributor in the children with NH while OK being the significant contributor in the children with HL. However, the significant contributor to SRF did not differ between the two groups with SC being the only significant contributor. These results revealed not only between-group differences but also similarities in the relative contributions of PA, OK, and SC to reading fluency at both word and sentence levels, which has practical implications for developing better training programs to improve reading for children with HL. (shrink)

Slagging-off is an important preprocessing operation of steel-making to improve the purity of iron. Current manual-operated slag removal schemes are inefficient and labor-intensive. Automatic slagging-off is desirable but challenging as the reliable recognition of iron and slag is difficult. This work focuses on realizing an efficient and accurate recognition algorithm of iron and slag, which is conducive to realize automatic slagging-off operation. Motivated by the recent success of deep learning techniques in smart manufacturing, we introduce deep learning methods to this (...) field for the first time. The monotonous gray value of industry images, poor image quality, and nonrigid feature of iron and slag challenge the existing fully convolutional networks. To this end, we propose a novel spatial and feature graph convolutional network module. SFGCN module can be easily inserted in FCNs to improve the reasoning ability of global contextual information, which is helpful to enhance the segmentation accuracy of small objects and isolated areas. To verify the validity of the SFGCN module, we create an industrial dataset and conduct extensive experiments. Finally, the results show that our SFGCN module brings a consistent performance boost for a wide range of FCNs. Moreover, by adopting a lightweight network as backbone, our method achieves real-time iron and slag segmentation. In the future work, we will dedicate our efforts to the weakly supervised learning for quick annotation of big data stream to improve the generalization ability of current models. (shrink)

Working speed as a latent variable reflects a respondent’s efficiency to apply a specific skill, or a piece of knowledge to solve a problem. In this study, the common assumption of many response time models is relaxed in which respondents work with a constant speed across all test items. It is more likely that respondents work with different speed levels across items, in specific when these items measure different dimensions of ability in a multidimensional test. Multiple speed factors are used (...) to model the speed process by allowing speed to vary across different domains of ability. A joint model for multidimensional abilities and multifactor speed is proposed. Real response time data are analyzed with an exploratory factor analysis as an example to uncover the complex structure of working speed. The feasibility of the proposed model is examined using simulation data. An empirical example with responses and response times is presented to illustrate the proposed model’s applicability and rationality. (shrink)

洪耀勳是誰？是否有臺灣哲學？何謂臺灣哲學？何以洪耀勳的思想與實存哲學、日本哲學有深刻的關聯？哲學在東亞的接受與發展脈絡和洪耀勳的哲學思想有何關聯？洪耀勳的哲學思想能以何種形式和東亞的哲學發展產生關聯？ 其哲學思想有何種當代性意義？ 本書收錄洪耀勳日治時期的八篇哲學文章，撰寫年代在1934至1943十年之間，其中或隱或顯地援用日本京都學派哲學作為其哲學思索的資源。洪耀勳援引西田幾多郎「我和你」的理論，針對當時哲學發展的脈動，提出貼 近當代哲學需求的歷史實存概念。此外，他在探索臺灣文學創作的哲學理論時，亦以實存概念出發，主張新康德學派的價值哲學應與歷史實存形成呼應，藉以超越形而上學的價值世界。實存概念經洪耀勳的哲學探索，使得和辻哲 郎的風土論、務臺理作「表現世界的邏輯」、田邊元的「種的邏輯」等哲學資源，以一種「個別、特殊、普遍」的臺灣歷史實存姿態出現，並在異文化的臺灣，得到特殊性的發展。 Who is Hung Yao-hsün? Is there Taiwanese philosophy? What is Taiwanese philosophy? Why is Hung Yao-hsün’s thought deeply related to philosophy of existence and Japanese philosophy? What is the relationship between the reception and development of philosophy in East Asia and Hung Yao-hsün’s philosophical thought? In what form can Hung Yao-hsün’s philosophical thoughts be related to the development of philosophy in East Asia? What is the contemporary significance of his philosophical thinking? This book contains eight philosophical articles written (...) by Hung Yao-hsün between1934-1943, when Taiwan was under Japanese rule. These papers show implicit and explicit references to Kyoto School philosophy, which is a resource for his philosophical thinking. In response to the philosophical development at that time, Hung develops the notion of historical existence by citing Nishida’s theory of I and Thou. Besides, he explores the concept of existence as the philosophical foundation of Taiwanese literature, and argues the philosophy of value of Neo-Kantianism should echo the historical reality in order to overcome the metaphysical world of value. Hung’s philosophy deepens the concept of existence, and transforms the philosophical resources of Watsuji’s theory of Fūdo, Mutai Risaku’s logic of world expression and Tanabe’s logic of species into Taiwan’s historical reality of “individuality, particularity and universality;” these philosophies developed into a new dimension in Taiwan, a culture alien to Japan. (shrink)

According to the reports in the past decade, some Asian subcontractors, mainly Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea transnational corporations, tend to be labor abusive in their overseas investment destinations like China or Southeast Asia. Taking Vietnam as an example, this paper raises questions as to why Taiwanese transnational companies can control workplace unions in a trade-union-supportive regime. Given the government s constraint of political rights, and the individualized workplace unions, the function of trade unions in Vietnam is destined to (...) be limited. The trade unions turn out be an arm of management, rather than representing workers interests in these transnational companies. This article also explores the influence of the newly developed codes of conducts from Western buyers. In the survey of three companies which are required to follow the codes of conduct by buyers, trade unions had no more freedom than those in companies without codes of conduct. The paper discusses the implications of this research, offering strategies for labor rights improvements. (shrink)

Recent research suggests there may be a link between religiousness and business ethics. This study seeks to add to the understanding of the relationship through a questionnaire survey on Malaysian Christians in business. The questionnaire taps into three different constructs. The religiousness construct is reflected in the level of participation in various common religious activities. The love of money construct is captured through the Love of Money Scale as used in Luna-Arocas and Tang [Journal of Business Ethics 50 (2004) 329]. (...) Response to 25 business vignettes taken from Conroy and Emerson [Journal of Business Ethics 50 (2004) 383] would surface ethical attitudes. A convenience sample of 300 was drawn from three large churches in the Kuala Lumpur area each with a congregation exceeding 1000 together with some representation from the smaller churches. The study finds some differences in the ethical attitudes of Malaysian Christians in business with different levels of religiousness. The study also finds that those longer in the faith are less accepting of unethical behavior. As such it can be concluded that there are ethical attitude differences between Christians in business with different levels of religiousness. This lends support to the claim of a positive relationship between religion and business ethics. The more significant finding is that even within a somewhat homogenous religious group there are different love of money profiles resulting in significant differences in ethical attitudes. This suggests that moderating money attitudes can contribute towards stronger ethical attitudes. (shrink)

It has been contended that ostracism is prevalent in the workplace, and there has been increasing research interest in its potential effects. This paper extends the theoretical framework of workplace ostracism by linking it with affective commitment and intention to leave from the perspective of job embeddedness. Using time-lagged data from China, we apply job embeddedness theory to confirm that workplace ostracism decreases the cultivation of job embeddedness, which in turn undermines affective commitment and induces intention to leave. We also (...) find that intrinsic work motivation strengthens the detrimental effects of workplace ostracism on job embeddedness such that the negative relationship is stronger when intrinsic motivation is high rather than low. We further discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings and offer future research directions. (shrink)

Due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, colleges and universities have implemented network teaching. E-learning engagement is the most important concern of educators and parents because this will directly affect student academic performance. Hence, this study focuses on students’ perceived family support and their e-learning engagement and analyses the effects of e-learning normative consciousness and behaviours and self-efficacy on the relationship between family support and e-learning engagement in college students. Prior to this study, the relationship between these variables was unknown. Four (...) structural equation models revealed the multiple mediating roles of e-learning normative consciousness and behaviours and self-efficacy in the relationship between family support and e-learning engagement. A total of 1317 college students (mean age = 19.51; 52.2% freshman) voluntarily participated in our study. The results showed that e-learning normative consciousness and behaviours and self-efficacy played significant and mediating roles between students’ perceived family support and their e-learning engagement. Specifically, these two individual variables fully mediated the relationship between students’ perceived family support and their e-learning engagement. The multiple mediation model showed that family members can increase family support of their children by creating a household environment conducive to learning, displaying positive emotions, demonstrating the capability to assist their children, advocating the significance of learning normative consciousness and behaviours and encouraging dedicated and efficient learning. The findings complement and extend the understanding of factors influencing student e-learning engagement. (shrink)

The following framework of theses, roughly hewn, shapes contemporary discussion of the problem of mental causation: (1) Non-Identity of the Mental and the Physical Mental properties and states cannot be identified with specific physical properties and states. (2) Causal Closure (Completeness) of the Physical The objective probability of every physical event is fixed by prior physical events and laws alone. (This thesis is sometimes expressed in terms of explanation: In tracing the causal history of any physical event, one need not (...) advert to any non-physical events or laws. To the extent that there is any explanation available for a physical event, there is a complete explanation available couched entirely in physical vocabulary. We prefer the probability formulation, as it should be acceptable to any physicalist, though some reject the explanation formulation.) (3) Causal Exclusion There is at most one complete and wholly independent explanation for any given event or sequence of events. (shrink)