Computerized relaxation training has been suggested as an effective and easily accessible intervention for individuals with psychological distress. To better elucidate the neural mechanism that underpins the effects of relaxation training, we investigated whether a 10-session computerized relaxation training program changed prefrontal gamma-aminobutyric acid levels and cerebral blood flow in women with psychological distress. We specifically focused on women since they were reported to be more vulnerable to develop stress-related disorders than men. Nineteen women with psychological distress but without a (...) diagnosis of psychiatric disorders received the 10-day computerized relaxation training program that consisted of 30-min cognitive-relaxation training and 10-min breathing-relaxation training per day. At baseline and post-intervention, perceived stress levels, anxiety, fatigue, and sleep quality were assessed by self-report questionnaires. Brain magnetic resonance spectroscopy and arterial spin labeling scans were also performed before and after the intervention to evaluate GABA levels and relative CBF in the prefrontal region. Levels of perceived stress, anxiety, fatigue, and sleep quality improved following 10 sessions of computerized relaxation training, resulting in a significant relief in composite scores of stress-related symptoms. The prefrontal GABA levels decreased, while relative CBF increased after the intervention. In addition, a greater increase in relative prefrontal CBF was associated with better composite scores of stress-related symptoms following the intervention. The current findings suggest that computerized relaxation training may improve stress-related symptoms through modulating the prefrontal GABA levels and CBF in women with psychological distress. (shrink)

The multicultural experience offers the intriguing possibility for an empirical examination of how free-energy principles explain dynamic cultural behaviors and pragmatic cultural phenomena and a challenging but decisive test of thinking through other minds predictions. We highlight that TTOM needs to treat individuals as active cultural agents instead of passive learners.

Bimanual robots have been studied for decades and regulation on internal force of the being held object by two manipulators becomes a research interest in recent years. In this paper, based on impedance model, a method to obtain the optimal target position for bimanual robots to hold an object is proposed. We introduce a cost function combining the errors of the force and the position and manage to minimize its value to gain the optimal coordinates for the robot end effectors. (...) To implement this method, two necessary algorithms are presented, which are the closed-loop inverse kinematics method to work out joint positions from desired EE pose and the generalized-momentum-based external force observer to measure the subjected force acting on the EE so as to properly compensate for the joint torques. To verify the effectiveness, practicality, and adaptivity of the proposed scheme, in the simulation, a bimanual robot system with three degrees of freedom in every manipulator was constructed and employed to hold an object, where the results are satisfactory. (shrink)

The Chinese have a 5000 years history and with it goes its Chinese philosophy. However, Chinese philosophy differs from western philosophy in more than one way. Western philosophy's famous “why” questions and free thinking were not part of Chinese philosophy. Acceptance was the rule and Confucius is known to be the source for this philosophy. The 20th century brought changes both in thinking generally as well as how sports were perceived. The main reasons for this were the opening to the (...) west and improving economic situations for the general population. This led to research in the field of sport philosophy on academic levels both in Taiwan and China. This article tries to put the achievements in this field in on the map. (shrink)

Machine learning has been proven useful for solving the bottlenecks in building expert systems. Noise in the training instances will, however, confuse a learning mechanism. Two main steps are adopted here to solve this problem. The first step is to appropriately arrange the training order of the instances. It is well known from Psychology that different orders of presentation of the same set of training instances to a human may cause different learning results. This idea is used here for machine (...) learning and an order arrangement scheme is proposed. The second step is to modify a conventional noise-free learning algorithm, thus making it suitable for noisy environment. The generalized version space learning algorithm is then adopted to process the training instances for deriving good concepts. Finally, experiments on the Iris Flower problem show that the new scheme can produce a good training order, allowing the generalized version space algorithm to have a satisfactory learning result. (shrink)

In September 2008, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) scientists successfully switched on the historic biggest physics device, the Large ...

<2020 Buddhist Book Award (2nd place), Korea> <2020 Sejong Book Award, Korea> The book discusses and provides solutions for the philosophical issues of Aristotelian essentialist biology, Darwin’s evolutionary theory, and contemporary molecular biology in light of Buddhist concepts of dependent arising and emptiness. CONTENT 1. Buddhist Teachings from the perspective of Bioscience 2. Bioscience from the Perspective of Buddhist Teachings 3. Enlightenment, Compassion and Bioscientific Phenomena 4. Enlightenment, Revolutionary Change of Worldview 5. The Buddhist Understanding of Development in Biology 1 (...) 6. The Buddhist Understanding of Development in Biology 2 7. The Buddhist Understanding of Development 1 8. The Buddhist Understanding of Development 2 9. The Buddhist Understanding of Aging 10. The Buddhist Understanding of Sickness 11. The Buddhist Understanding of Death 1 12. The Buddhist Understanding of Death 2 13. The Buddhist Understanding of Species 1 14. The Buddhist Understanding of Species 2 15. The Concept of Gene and its History 16. Genetic Dualism and Buddhist Criticism 17. The Buddhist Understanding of the Gene 1 18. The Buddhist Understanding of the Gene 2 19. Evolution is not Progress but Changes 20. Evolution is neither Deterministic nor Indeterministic. It is the Process of Interdependent Arising 21. Reconsidering Chance and Necessity 22. What Darwin Left Us 23. The Evolution of Buddhism 1 24. The Evolution of Buddhism 2 . (shrink)

This article suggests a new field of curriculum studies called “Curriculum Studies as Post Oriental Text” as an emerging inquiry of the global postcolonial curriculum studies. Based on readings of postcolonial theories, analysis of empirical studies of Asian curriculum practices, and author’s longtime postcolonial observation of South Korean curriculum scholarship, the article discusses five topics in details with a hope that more diverse and transgressive inquiry of Asian postcolonial curriculum studies will be developed and expanded among scholars of education in (...) Asia. (shrink)

A series of our experimental studies show that some actions which consequentialists would treat as morally right or wrong were not regarded by ordinary people as a matter of morality. These results...

ABSTRACT Most scholars' comprehension on labour are ambiguous because of the variety of philosophical contradictions embedded in their plausible theories being not explicitly stated but irrationally taken for granted. We, therefore, inquisitively direct sole attention to social spacetime in which, and by which, labour in totality takes place. And then consider the division of labour in natural spacetime as just the appearance of the alienation of labour in social spacetime by our Marxist renewal of the notion of labour - thus (...) manifesting its benefaction to an essential up-to-date explanation of human being, on which a labourer could struggle to survive as still a human being within social spacetime, to fight against the almighty empire of capitalism in the era of globalisation. RESUMO A compreensão da maioria dos estudiosos acerca do trabalho é ambígua em razão da variedade de contradições filosóficas embutidas no fato de suas teorias plausíveis não serem explicitamente declaradas, mas presumidas de modo irracional. Nós, assim, inquisitivamente, dirigimos nossa total atenção ao espaço-tempo social no qual, e através do qual, o trabalho ocorre, em sua totalidade. Em seguida, consideramos a divisão de trabalho em espaço-tempo natural como apenas uma aparência da alienação do trabalho em espaço-tempo social, segundo nossa renovação marxista da noção de trabalho - assim manifestando seu benefício em uma explicação atualizada do ser humano, segundo a qual um trabalhador deve lutar para sobreviver como um ser humano parado dentro do espaço-tempo social, lutar contra o todo-poderoso império do capitalismo na era da globalização. (shrink)

1. Mŏrimal -- 2. Inyŏm taerip kwa chŏngch'i hyŏnsil -- 3. Kŏdae han ch'akkak -- 4. Chayu sasang ŭi pyŏnch'ŏn kwa posu chŏngsin -- 5. T'arinyŏmjŏk inyŏm ŭi ppuri -- 6. Posujuŭi chŏngsin ŭi chaebalgyŏn -- 7. Sasil, chinsil kwa sahoe t'onghap -- 8. Maejŭmmal : yŏmwŏn kwa hyŏnsil.

To conceptualise moral education as ‘living and learning to bear suffering’ offers a humanistic vision for choices people make in the face of drastic threats to their existence. This essay proposes that bearing and transcending suffering—part of the human narrative—helps human beings to realise their ethical potential. Grounded in Eastern and Western metaphysics and ethics, I assess the human condition brought about by the 2008 earthquake disaster in China—in an attempt to come to terms with fundamental philosophical questions of existence (...) and human values. While raising questions about how human beings are intrinsically interrelated to Nature and the world, this account is linked by a thread of humanism encompassing three important values (caring, responsibility and free spirit). I conclude by suggesting that educating young people for the wisdom of suffering is to cultivate a humanistic morality. Ethical implications for ecology and moral education are considered. (shrink)

GraphicalPatients with early- to middle-stage PD were enrolled for C-Gait assessment and traditional walking ability assessments. The correlation of C-Gait assessment and traditional walking tests were studied. Two models were established based on C-Gait assessment and traditional walking tests to explore the value of C-Gait assessment in predicting freezing of gait.ObjectiveEfficient methods for assessing walking adaptability in individuals with Parkinson’s disease are urgently needed. Therefore, this study aimed to assess C-Gait for detecting freezing of gait in patients with early- to (...) middle-stage PD.MethodPeople with PD diagnosis were recruited from April 2019 to November 2019 in Beijing Rehabilitation Hospital. The participants performed six items of walking adaptability on an instrumented treadmill augmented with visual targets and obstacles. The patient’s walking adaptability was evaluated by C-Gait assessment and traditional walking tests, and FOG-related indexes were collected as outcome measures. Two discriminant models were established by stepwise discriminant analysis; area under the receiver operating characteristic curve was used to validate the models.ResultIn total, 53 patients were included in this study. Most C-Gait assessment items had no or low correlations with traditional walking tests. The obstacle avoidance and speed of adaptation items could lead to FOG with high sensitivity. In addition, the C-Gait assessment model had slightly better discrimination of freezers from non-freezers compared with traditional walking test models ; specifically, obstacle avoidance and speed of adaptation have uniquely discriminant potential.ConclusionC-gait assessment could provide additional value to the traditional walking tests for PD. Gait adaptability assessment, as measured by C-Gait, may be able to help identify freezers in a PD population. (shrink)

This study investigated the effect of non-task language in language switching experiment. Non-task language refers to participants’ language(s) (regardless of proficiency level) that are not used in any trials throughout the experiment. We recruited 60 Tibetan-Chinese-English trilinguals (grade-12 high school students with a median age of 17) to perform a lexical decision (word vs. non-word) task in only two of their languages. We repeated the experiment three times to present each language pair once. In each experiment, the participants were divided (...) into two groups which significantly contrasted with each other in their non-task language while remained comparable in the two task languages. Response time (RT) and error rate (ER) have been examined to evaluate task performance. The interaction between task performance and the participants’ proficiency in the non-task language was also examined. The results showed null effect of language switching. In addition, the effect of the non-task language was not found. These results were interpreted with reference to the main models of bilingual visual word recognition and the role of orthography specificity. (shrink)

Previous studies have focused on individuals learning from observing a model to be able to produce the modeled behavior. However, there is a lack of studies emphasizing the perspective of being observed to understand the role of perceived value and stress when teachers act as a teaching model. To address this gap, the present study explored the correlates between teachers’ teaching beliefs, perceived value, psychosocial stress, and continuous intention to be the observed teaching model in classroom observations. Data of 349 (...) respondents were usefully collected, and confirmatory factor analysis with structural equation modeling was performed. Results showed that teachers’ constructivist belief in teaching was positively related to perceived value of being observed and getting feedback, but was negatively related to psychosocial stress. Perceived value was positively related to continuous intention to be observed in future classroom observations, but perceived psychosocial stress was not significantly related to continuous intention. The results of this study can be applied to encourage those who are resistant to presenting their teaching experience in classroom observations. (shrink)

Emergence is a notorious philosophical term of art. A variety of theorists have appropriated it for their purposes ever since George Henry Lewes gave it a philosophical sense in his 1875 Problems of Life and Mind. We might roughly characterize the shared meaning thus: emergent entities (properties or substances) ‘arise’ out of more fundamental entities and yet are ‘novel’ or ‘irreducible’ with respect to them. (For example, it is sometimes said that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain.) Each (...) of the quoted terms is slippery in its own right, and their specifications yield the varied notions of emergence that we discuss below. There has been renewed interest in emergence within discussions of the behavior of complex systems and debates over the reconcilability of mental causation, intentionality, or consciousness with physicalism. (shrink)

本书侧重从中国古代政治史、思想史、文化史和文学史的结合方面,研究和探讨了中国古代德治思想与文士文学的关系。.

Hong Kong is undergoing a public debate on the need to reform and future directions of reforming its health care system. This paper highlights the debates and considerations brought up by the Hospital Authority, the largest provider of public health care in Hong Kong, on the ethical principles and societal values underlying the upcoming reform. It is recognized that the exact meanings behind each ethical principle and value must be debated and clarified during the reform process. In a (...) modern day society like Hong Kong, societal values are likely to be diversified. A health care system also has to fulfil different and often conflicting objectives of equity, efficiency, quality and choice. It would be difficult for a health care system to satisfy these different values and objectives based on a single value parameter. The Hong Kong experience shows that a society may prefer a combination of strategies in addressing different societal values. The re-structuring of the health care system in Hong Kong should therefore be based on a balanced and optimum combination of various financing and delivery strategies. (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)

This is a critical discussion of Paul Humphreys's fusion view of emergence, focusing on the basal loss feature of his ontology. The discussion yields some general morals for special science ontology.

This study investigated the immediate and delayed effects of moderate-intensity continuous exercise and high-intensity interval exercise on working memory. Fifty healthy young adults engaged in a MICE session, 20 min of continuous running on a treadmill at an intensity of 40–59% of heart rate reserve ; a HIIE session, 10 sets of 1 min running at an intensity of 90% HRR, interspersed by 1 min self-paced walking at 50% HRR; and a control session, resting in a chair and reading books (...) for 24 min. A spatial 2-back task was performed to assess working memory before, immediately after and 30 min after each intervention. Reaction time in the 2-back task was significantly reduced immediately after both MICE and HIIE interventions. The enhanced working memory associated with HIIE sustained for 30 min after the exercise, whereas the beneficial effects associated with MICE returned to the pre-exercise level at 30 min after the exercise. These results suggest that although both MICE and HIIE enhance working memory in young adults, the positive effect sustains longer in HIIE than that in MICE. The current study extends the existing knowledge base by suggesting that improvements in working memory with HIIE last longer than with MICE. (shrink)

本书阐释了“命”论在王充的哲学体系中所起的作用,王充“气”论新议,王充“天地”论新议等内容。.

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)

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)

The results of the National Higher Education Entrance Examination have a life-long effect on most Chinese by labeling them clever or not. Some of the following rules of the Gaokao enhance the damage, for example, the rule of Who, What and Where. In general, Who you are and What you have done are of secondary importance, but Where you graduated from, especially the college of first-record is the most important, but discriminatory criterion in the recruitment courses of most of scientific (...) communities and social organizations in China. (shrink)