As the prevalence of self-harm among adolescents in Chinese escalates, finding out the potential risk factors associated with self-harm behaviors has aroused much attention. This study aims to explore the association between parent-child separation and series of self-harm subtypes among Chinese adolescents. We survey a total of 4,928 middle school students aged from 12 to 18 years at school. Parent-child separation was investigated from four dimensions—occurrence of parental separation, separation status, age at first separation and duration of separation. Self-harm series (...) are deemed as five subtypes—highly lethal self-harm, less lethal self-harm with visible tissue damage, self-harm without visible tissue damage, self-harmful behaviors with latent damage and psychological self-harm. Multivariate logistic regression is used to explore the associations between parent-child separation and different subtypes of self-harm among adolescents. Paternal separation is associated with each type of self-harm whilst maternal separation is not correlated with highly lethal self-harm. Except for highly lethal self-harm, the other four subtypes of self-harm demonstrate a relation with both length of paternal separation and maternal separation with aOR ranging from 1.02 to 1.06. Individuals who suffer parental separation prior to the age of three were at a higher risk for four types of less-lethal self-harm. The association of parent-child separation with self-harm deserves our attention, and future research is needed to identify the underlying mechanisms. (shrink)

With the development of geoscience, users are eager to obtain preferred service from geospatial information intelligently and automatically. However, the information grows rapidly while the service gets more complicated, which makes it difficult to find out the targeted information for an exact service in geospatial issues. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to promote the geospatial service from information to knowledge with spatiotemporal semantics. Both prompted and professional knowledge are further refined to be published as a service. In (...) terms of an exact task, numerous related services are recombined to a service chain under user requirement. Finally, the proposed method is applied to monitor the environment on the Air Quality Index and soil moisture in the Sensor Web service platform, the results of which indicate geospatial knowledge service is more efficient to support spatial decision-making. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The ongoing Sino-U.S. trade dispute between the world’s two largest economies has since 2018 attracted much attention from the international media. This study used the approach of corpus-assisted discourse studies to compare how leading English-language newspapers from each side—The New York Times and China Daily — discursively constructed this issue. The findings indicated that while NYT tended to profile the trade conflict as a ‘war’ in line with mainstream hard-line ideologies that emphasize China’s presumed threat to national security of (...) the U.S., CD sought to dial down the rhetoric and showed a preference for defining the matter as a ‘friction’, consistent with the tenet of ‘pragmatic nationalism’ endorsed by the Communist Party of China. Accordingly, the two newspapers framed the causes, moral evaluation/consequences, and treatment of the issue in congruence with their respective dominant metaphors by means of various linguistic patterns. These differences are interpreted with regard to each side’s underlying ideologies and national interests. (shrink)

Past research suggests that spiritual leadership plays a pivotal role in enhancing employee job performance, yet we have little understanding of how and when spiritual leadership enhances employee job performance. The present study explores how and when spiritual leadership promotes job performance by examining relational energy as a mediator and leader integrity and relational energy differentiation as boundary conditions. We tested the theoretical model with data gathered across three phases over 12 months from 497 employees and their supervisors in 108 (...) groups. Results showed that the positive relationship between spiritual leadership and job performance was mediated by relational energy. Moreover, we found that leader integrity amplified the mediated relationship between spiritual leadership and employee job performance via relational energy. In contrast, relational energy differentiation weakened this mediated relationship. (shrink)

Evidence suggests that perceived school culture is the most powerful predictor of teachers’ work performance. However, studies to date have paid little attention to the potential mechanisms behind this association. On the basis of the job demands–resources model, the present study explored the mediating role of affective empathy and the moderating role of job tenure in the association between perceived school culture and teachers’ work engagement. 647 primary and secondary school teachers completed questionnaires measuring perceived school culture, affective empathy, and (...) work engagement. After gender and educational level were included as covariates, the results showed that perceived school culture positively correlated with teachers’ work engagement, and more importantly, this association was partially mediated by affective empathy. In addition, job tenure significantly moderated the direct association between perceived school culture and work engagement. Specifically, there was a stronger association between perceived school culture and work engagement for teachers with shorter job tenure than those with longer job tenure. The findings suggested the direct effect of perceived school culture on work engagement, and the indirect effect of perceived school culture on work engagement through the mediating role of affective empathy. These findings enrich our understanding of how perceived school culture associates with work engagement, and highlight the moderating role of job tenure in the direct association between perceived school culture and work engagement. (shrink)

This study aimed to investigate the factor structure and measurement invariance of the Brief Symptom Inventory-18 among Chinese adults. A sample comprising 1,839 adults from four cities in Shaanxi province completed the BSI-18 and background information. The best-fitting factor structure model of the BSI-18 was verified by confirmatory factor analyses, and multigroup confirmatory factor analyses were performed to test the measurement invariance. The results indicated that the three-factor bi-factor model fitted the current data best. The configural, metric, scalar, and strict (...) invariance models all had acceptable model fit indexes across genders, and the configural, metric, scalar invariance models with different living areas and educational levels were all acceptable. Overall, the three-factor bi-factor model of the BSI-18 shows a good fit for use with Chinese adults, making it a viable tool for effectively measuring the mental health of Chinese adults. (shrink)

Intermediaries are social agents who can be found in all types of different environments, cultures, and organizations. More often than enough, intermediaries are middlepersons between two power centers, yet their agency is precarious due to their position as brokers who gain from bridging otherwise unconnected parties, or marginalized vulnerable individuals who suffer from the invasion of the neighboring power holders. How can these two different perspectives of the intermediaries be reconciled? Under what conditions do they shift from one type of (...) agency to another? Previous scholarship attributes the agency of intermediaries to static positionality. This paper treats the position of the intermediary as an opportunity structure, which is shaped by multi-level relational dynamics. We show the changing agency of three intermediary tribal groups (i.e. the Tibetans in northwestern China, Uriyangqad Mongols, and Jurchens) who were situated between the sedentary Chinese and nomadic Mongols during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) through a systematic study with horse trade data. The group-based and officially-regulated horse trade constituted the most important linkage between the intermediaries and these two power centers. We study the changes in the dynamics of their contact during trade, and explain why these intermediaries became client, client to two patrons, and broker in their trade with the Chinese and Mongols in different eras. We argue that the position of the intermediaries did not provide definite advantages for their exploitation, nor did it paralyze them with any concrete disadvantages. Rather, their position offered them unpredictable opportunities that arose from their relational dynamics with the power centers. Moreover, the self-serving and local interests of the intermediaries, and the strategies and tactics that they used, determined their capacity to respond to emerging and unpredictable opportunities and capitalize on them. (shrink)

The lack of a standardized reliable and valid instrument makes it difficult to measure attitudes toward lesbian women and gay men consistently and thus poses a challenge to compare and contrast intervention measures. This study aimed to validate Herek’s ATLG scale among undergraduates in mainland China and identify factors associated with negative attitudes toward LG. A total of 6,036 eligible undergraduates conveniently drawn from 30 provinces across mainland China were randomly split in half. Item analysis was first used to select (...) unrelated or redundant items for deletion. Exploratory factor analysis were then conducted on the first half of the sample, followed by confirmatory factor analysis and reliability analysis in the second half. Logistic regression analyses were finally carried out to identify their determinants. Six items were removed from the item analysis. EFA supported the existence of two factors. CFA results indicated that the two-factor model fit the data better than the one-factor model. Logistic regression analyses indicated that being female, majoring in non-health-related disciplines, attributing homosexuality to uncontrollable causes, non-adherence to traditional gender norms and exposure to homosexual content were significantly associated with less negative attitudes toward both L and G. Urban students were marginally less likely to express negative attitudes toward L but not G, while non-heterosexuals and those who had prior personal contact with homosexuals exhibited less negative attitudes toward G but not L. However, grade showed no significant associations with either ATL or ATG. The retained 14-item version of Herek’s ATLG scale has been proven to be a reliable and valid tool. Furthermore, ATL and ATG were determined by different factors and thus would be treated separately. In order to reduce negative attitudes toward LG among undergraduates in mainland China, a comprehensive intervention plan such as conducting comprehensive sex education and pushing the process of legalizing same-sex marriage should be designed, implemented and evaluated. (shrink)

The ideology about the relation between goodness and beauty for Confucius and the early Confucians is the continuation of the aesthetic tradition long before Confucius’s time, which sees more value in Yuejiao, namely, music/beauty education, than in Lijiao, Moral education. No doubt Confucius’s aesthetic idea is featured as the juxtaposition of Li and Yue, goodness and beauty. But we must not forget that Confucius, taking himself as a preserver of the sages’ tradition, personally values Yue (music/beauty) over Li (ritual/moral). It (...) is in this context that we argue that taking the unity of beauty and goodness as a Confucian aesthetic feature is a misinterpretation of his teaching and is poles apart from the ancient Chinese aesthetic tradition and from Confucius’ aesthetics. (shrink)

There is no notion of postmortem Heaven and Hell in both ancient Israeli and Confucian traditions, and the two traditions also share quite a number of similarities about the idea of immortal life after death. Therefore, a comparison of the commonness in this field, e.g. the Jewish Levirate Marriage custom and the Confucian custom of adopting one’s son as heir; the idea of name surviving death in Biblical Judaism and that of glorifying one’s parents by making one’s name famous in (...) future ages in Confucianism, can help us reveal the common pursuit in the two traditions: the postmortem fulfillment of an individual is realized in the form of the continuation of one’s family/ tribe/ nation of which they were, and forever remain, a generational link. In addition, this can help clarify a long faulted Confucian dogma of “Having no male heir being the gravest of the three cardinal offences against filial piety”. (shrink)

This paper develops an adaptive fixed-time trajectory tracking controller of an underactuated hovercraft with a prescribed performance in the presence of model uncertainties and unknown time-varying environment disturbances. It is the first time that the proposed method is applied to the motion control of the hovercraft. To begin with, based on the hovercraft's four degrees of freedom model, the virtual control laws are designed using an error transforming function and the fixed-time stability theory to guarantee that the position tracking errors (...) are constrained within the prescribed convergence rates and minimum overshoot. In addition, by combining the Lyapunov direct method and the adaptive radial basis function neural network, the actual control laws are designed to ensure that the velocity tracking errors converge to a small region containing zero while handling model uncertainties and external disturbances effectively. Finally, all tracking errors of the closed-loop system are uniformly ultimately bounded and fixed-time convergent. Results from a comparative simulation study verify the effectiveness and advantage of the proposed method. (shrink)

As the most frequently used tool for measuring empathy, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) is often scored by researchers arbitrarily and casually. Many commonly used IRI scoring approaches and their corresponding measurement models are unverified, which may make the conclusions of subsequent variable relation studies controversial and even misleading. We make the first effort to summarize these measurement models and to evaluate rationality of the common scoring methods of the IRI by confirmatory factor analysis, focusing on model fitting, factor loading, (...) and model-based reliability simultaneously. The results show that most of these models do not fit well, indicating that the scoring approaches of the IRI corresponding to these models may be problematic. Relatively speaking, better scoring approaches of the IRI include summing empathic concern and perspective taking as the total score of the IRI and reporting the score of perspective taking as cognitive empathy. (shrink)

This paper presents a theoretical framework of the circular shift network coding system through the study of nonmultiple clustered interval music performance style conversion and the analysis of music conversion by using circular shift topology, and a series of basic research results of circular shift network coding is obtained under this framework. It reveals the essential connection between scalar network coding based on finite domain and cyclic shift network coding, designs a solution construction algorithm for cyclic shift network coding under (...) multicast network, and portrays the multicast capacity of cyclic shift network coding. It overcomes the problem that the piano roll-curtain representation cannot distinguish between a single long note and multiple consecutive notes of the same pitch, describes musical information more comprehensively, extracts musical implicit style from the note matrix based on autoencoder, and better eliminates the potential influence of musical content on musical performance style. A two-way recurrent neural network based on the gated recurrent unit is used to extract a sequence of note feature vectors of different styles, and a one-dimensional convolutional neural network is used to predict the intensity of the extracted note feature vector sequence for a specific style, which better learns the intensity variation of different styles of MIDI music. (shrink)

In order to explore the relationship of social support, self-efficacy, and subjective well-being of special education teachers in China, 496 teachers from 67 special education schools were surveyed by questionnaire. We found that (1) the subjective well-being of special education teachers in China was in the medial level. (2) There were significant differences in subjective well-being level among teachers of different genders, teacher position, education background, and teaching age. Male teachers were of higher subjective well-being; subjective well-being of head teachers (...) was lower than those were not head teachers; teachers with the educational background of postgraduate were of higher relaxation and tension than those with junior college educational background; the control scores of emotion and behavior of teachers with teaching age of 3 years and below were significantly lower than those of teachers with teaching age of more than 10 years. (3) Self-efficacy played a partially mediating role in the relationship between social support and subjective well-being of special education teachers. Suggestions to improve the subjective well-being of special education teachers were discussed in the article. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:An Exegetic Study of the So-Called Proposition of Confucian AestheticsWang Yi (bio) and Xiaowei FuSince Wang Guowei and Cai Yuanpei introduced the concepts of aesthetics and aesthetic education, respectively, to China in the early twentieth century, there has been a strong tendency in many of the aesthetic discussions to examine ancient texts and materials using modern concepts of aesthetics. In particular, sentences with the character-word mei1 are often (...) sought in classical works and interpreted as speeches on or about beauty, which has led to frequent misunderstandings of the classical texts and of the ancient Confucian aesthetic theory.The most typical among these misunderstandings, we think, is the misinterpretation of one of Mencius's remarks on the goodness of human nature-"To possess these qualities of goodness fully is beautiful" (Chongshi zhiwei mei)2-as a representative statement of the Confucian aesthetic theory of "the union of the beautiful and good." Although it is not clear who was the first to put this interpretation forward, it is now widely accepted and almost unquestioned that the statement "Chongshi zhiwei mei" is the classical proposition of the Confucian aesthetic theory after countless repetitions by aestheticians and educationalists. And extended from this is the claim that "the union of the beautiful and good," or the union of the moral and beauty, is the traditional theory of Confucian aesthetic education.3 Finding it coincidentally in accordance with the idea of "the union of the beautiful and good" in both the Soviet and Greek philosophies, aesthetic educators are apt to admit that aesthetic education is included in moral education or aesthetic education is but one of the means of moral education; thus, aesthetic education cannot be an independent subject. [End Page 80]It is rather surprising that in spite of the wide interest in quoting this sentence, very little in the textual research and criticism has offered convincing proof that it is really Mencius's opinion about beauty or aesthetic theory and therefore-since he is the most influential Confucian educator and philosopher after Confucius-representative of the aesthetic theory of Confucianism.Actually, the proper analysis of the meaning of the word mei in this statement by Mencius has long been a controversial issue in Chinese history. There have been two main approaches: mei as an equivalent of shan (good/ goodness) and mei as a synonym with its modern Chinese counterpart. The former is taken by Zhao Qi,4 according to whom mei in this statement is a term used to explain a level of shan. This analysis is further developed by Sun Shi,5 who argues that mei is the third level of the six shan. Likewise, Yang Bojun,6 among other modern scholars, also considers mei an equivalent of shan. The latter approach, on the other hand, is pursued by Zhang Zai, Zhu Xi, Jiao Xun,7 and many modern aestheticians, who all interpret mei as "beauty" or "beautiful" in the aesthetic sense.The main interest of the present analysis is an attempt to decode the genuine meaning of the statement. With references to ancient dictionaries like Origin of Chinese Characters8 and exegetic works (from 206 bc to the modern times) of Mencius, this article attempts to contextualize mei in the original text and historical context in order to interpret the meaning of the sentence and the real intention of Mencius. In this way we hope to determine whether it can be regarded as the proposition of Mencius or the Confucian aesthetic theory of "the union of the beautiful and good."IIn the first part of this article we shall offer a contextual study of the sentence with reference to two of the ancient interpretations of the theme of the passage and the meaning of the character mei. By investigating the context of the sentence "Chongshi zhiwei mei" we argue that the theme of the passage is a discussion of the six levels of shan (goodness).The context of the sentence comes from a passage in Mencius (Jinxin part 2), which begins with Mencius talking with Haosheng Buhai about one of his disciples, Yue Zhengzi, who was reported to embark in a political career in the State... (shrink)

Objective: Stand-to-sit task is an important daily function, but there is a lack of research evidence on whether knee osteoarthritis affects the postural balance during the task. This study aimed to compare individuals with knee OA and asymptomatic controls in postural balance and identify kinematic and lower extremity muscle activity characteristics in individuals with knee OA during the stand-to-sit task.Methods: In total, 30 individuals with knee OA and 30 age-matched asymptomatic controls performed the 30-s Chair Stand Test at self-selected speeds. (...) Motion analysis data and surface electromyography were collected while participants performed the 30sCST. To quantify postural balance, the displacement of the center of mass and the peak instantaneous velocity of the CoM were calculated. The kinematic data included forward lean angles of the trunk and pelvic, range of motion of the hip, knee, and ankle joints in the sagittal plane. The averaged activation levels of gluteus maximus, vastus lateralis, vastus medialis, rectus femoris, biceps femoris, tibialis anterior, and medial head of gastrocnemius muscles were indicated by the normalized root mean square amplitudes.Results: Compared with the asymptomatic control group, the knee OA group prolonged the duration of the stand-to-sit task, demonstrated significantly larger CoM displacement and peak instantaneous CoM velocity in the anterior-posterior direction, reduced ankle dorsiflexion RoM, greater anterior pelvic tilt RoM, and lower quadriceps femoris and muscles activation level coupled with higher BF muscle activation level during the stand-to-sit task.Conclusion: This study indicates that individuals with knee OA adopt greater pelvic forward lean RoM and higher BF muscle activation level during the stand-to-sit task. However, these individuals exist greater CoM excursion in the anterior-posterior direction and take more time to complete the task. This daily functional activity should be added to the rehabilitation goals for individuals with knee OA. The knee OA group performs reduced ankle dorsiflexion RoM, quadriceps femoris, and TA activation deficit. In the future, the rehabilitation programs targeting these impairments could be beneficial for restoring the functional transfer in individuals with knee OA. (shrink)

This study aims to explore the influence mechanism of COVID-19 risk perception on anxiety in emerging adulthood in the context of public health events of the second round of COVID-19 outbreaks and provide support for exploring the path of mental health after the normalization of the epidemic situation. An online questionnaire, combined with community social work, was used in this study, and data of 522 emerging adults were collected in February 2021. The Perceived Risk of COVID-19 pandemic scale, the generalized (...) anxiety disorder 7-item scale, the scale of affect balance, and the connor-davidson resilience scale were used to investigate. The results showed that: first, the risk perception of COVID-19 in early adulthood was positively predictive of anxiety symptoms [B = 0.110, p < 0.05, 95%CI = ]. Second, the affective quality of life plays a mediating role between the risk perception of COVID-19 and anxiety [B = 0.108, 95%CI = ]. Thirdly, resilience plays a moderating role between the risk perception of COVID-19 and anxiety, the higher the resilience of emerging adulthood, the weaker effects of the risk perception of COVID-19 negative prediction of anxiety [B = −0.110, p < 0.001, 95%CI = ]. Therefore, to control the anxiety of emerging adulthood in public health events, we should pay attention to the propaganda and management of epidemic information, improve the quality of life, and attention should be paid to the emerging adulthood with low resilience. (shrink)

In this study, we sorted out the research hotspots in sports science by bibliometric method and also used social network analysis to explore the relationship between knowledge networks and their scientific performance. We found 38 high-frequency keywords with obvious curricular nature or classical direction of sports science research and 4 high-frequency research groups. The topics of hotspots covered the secondary disciplines of sports science: physical education and training, national traditional sports, sports human science, and sports humanities and sociology. However, sports (...) human science research is less; therefore, accelerating the research of sports human science is the focus of future research. Meanwhile, we use social network structure analysis to study the relationship between knowledge elements in knowledge networks and their scientific performance. In addition to betweenness centrality, the closeness centrality, clustering coefficient, and structural holes of knowledge elements are significantly and positively related to their influence. In the relationship between knowledge elements and productivity, betweenness centrality and closeness centrality show significant positive correlations, and clustering coefficient and structural hole show significant negative correlations. Therefore, knowledge networks can be used to predict the scientific performance of knowledge elements. (shrink)

To study whether Tai Chi practice can improve the brain connectivity of the prefrontal lobe of college students, the positive psychological capital questionnaires and resting EEG signals were acquired from 50 college students including 25 TC practitioners and 25 demographically matched TC healthy controls. The results showed that the score of the positive psychological capital questionnaire of the TC group was significantly higher than that of the control group, and the node degree of the frontal lobe and temporal lobe of (...) both groups was positively correlated with the score of the positive psychological capital questionnaire. In addition, the response time of the TC group under auditory stimulation was significantly shorter than that of the control group, and there was a significant positive correlation between response time and its characteristic path length, and a significant negative correlation with global efficiency. Meanwhile, during the selected range of sparsity, the difference in global network parameters between two groups is significant in the alpha band. Under all single sparsity, the clustering coefficient, global efficiency, and local efficiency of the TC group have a higher trend, while the characteristic path length tended to be shorter. In the analysis of the local characteristics of the resting brain functional network, it was found that the node degree of the frontal lobe and temporal lobe of the TC group was higher, and the difference was significant in some nodes. These results all point to the fact that TC practice has a certain impact on specific brain areas of the brain. (shrink)

Configural face processing precedes featural face processing under the face-attended condition, but their temporal sequence in the absence of attention is unclear. The present study investigated this issue by recording visual mismatch negativity, which indicates the automatic processing of visual information under unattended conditions. Participants performed a central cross size change detection task, in which random sequences of faces were presented peripherally, in an oddball paradigm. In Experiment 1, configural and featural faces were presented infrequently among original faces. In Experiment (...) 2, configural faces were presented infrequently among featural faces, or vice versa. The occipital-temporal vMMN emerged in the 200–360 ms latency range for configural, but not featural, face information. More specifically, configural face information elicited a substantial vMMN component in the 200–360 ms range in Experiment 1. This result was replicated in the 320–360 ms range in Experiment 2, especially in the right hemisphere. These results suggest that configural, but not featural, face information is associated with automatic processing and provides new electrophysiological evidence for the different mechanisms underlying configural and featural face processing under unattended conditions. (shrink)

Although many studies have provided evidence that abstract knowledge can be acquired in artificial grammar learning, it remains unclear how abstract knowledge can be attained in sequence learning. To address this issue, we proposed a dual simple recurrent network model that includes a surface SRN encoding and predicting the surface properties of stimuli and an abstract SRN encoding and predicting the abstract properties of stimuli. The results of Simulations 1 and 2 showed that the DSRN model can account for learning (...) effects in the serial reaction time task under different conditions, and the manipulation of the contribution weight of each SRN accounted for the contribution of conscious and unconscious processes in inclusion and exclusion tests in previous studies. The results of human performance in Simulation 3 provided further evidence that people can implicitly learn both chunking and abstract knowledge in sequence learning, and the results of Simulation 3 confirmed that the DSRN model can account for how people implicitly acquire the two types of knowledge in sequence learning. These findings extend the learning ability of the SRN model and help understand how different types of knowledge can be acquired implicitly in sequence learning. (shrink)

This research empirically investigates the static and dynamic impacts of firms' digital transformation on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance by employing data of listed Chinese companies from 2011 to 2020 via estimations of propensity score matching and difference in differences. First, we find that digital transformation does some good to improve firms' ESG, which is confirmed after conducting several robustness tests. Second, digital transformation benefits the three aspects of ESG (environmental performance, social responsibility, and governance), and its impact is (...) dynamic, promote ESG two years after the digital reform. Third, the impact of digital transformation on ESG is not constant among different firms. Specifically, digital transformation's impact on ESG is stronger among firms located in western or central regions of China and to those in polluting and competitive industries, as well as among non-stated-owned enterprises. (shrink)

Cellular reprogramming can manipulate the identity of cells to generate the desired cell types1– 3. The use of cell intrinsic components, including oocyte cytoplasm and transcription factors, can enforce somatic cell reprogramming to pluripotent stem cells4– 7. By contrast, chemical stimulation by exposure to small molecules offers an alternative approach that can manipulate cell fate in a simple and highly controllable manner8– 10. However, human somatic cells are refractory to chemical stimulation owing to their stable epigenome2,11,12 and reduced plasticity13,14; it (...) is therefore challenging to induce human pluripotent stem cells by chemical reprogramming. Here we demonstrate, by creating an intermediate plastic state, the chemical reprogramming of human somatic cells to human chemically induced pluripotent stem cells that exhibit key features of embryonic stem cells. The whole chemical reprogramming trajectory analysis delineated the induction of the intermediate plastic state at the early stage, during which chemical-induced dedifferentiation occurred, and this process was similar to the dedifferentiation process that occurs in axolotl limb regeneration. Moreover, we identified the JNK pathway as a major barrier to chemical reprogramming, the inhibition of which was indispensable for inducing cell plasticity and a regeneration-like program by suppressing pro-inflammatory pathways. Our chemical approach provides a platform for the generation and application of human pluripotent stem cells in biomedicine. This study lays foundations for developing regenerative therapeutic strategies that use well-defined chemicals to change cell fates in humans. (shrink)

Yuejiao was the primary form of education ever since the time of Emperors Yao and Shun. This tradition of valuing Yue over Li lasted till the Three Dynasties period. After the Spring and Autumn Period, Lijiao became the dominant form, but it still consisted of a lot of yue. Seeing the declining of this tradition, Confucius claimed to “follow upon Zhou”. That is, he wanted to recover and inherit this ideology that engages primarily in music cultivation supplemented by ritual normalization. (...) His statement: “Let a man be first incited by the Songs, then given a firm footing by the study of ritual, and finally perfected by music,” also shows his emphasis on Yue. More proofs can be found in Confucian classics such as Analects and the Record of Rites, in which discourses on/ about beauty and goodness are characterized by the juxtaposition of Li and Yue to serve a higher purpose for the pre-Qin Confucians. However, this ideology was not inherited by later Confucians. And the consequence is with the increasing status and impact of Confucianism in China in the past 2500 years, such a tradition of valuing Yue over Li gradually turned into a tradition of valuing Li over Yue. This, however, is inconsistent with both Confucius’ ideology of Li and Yue and the real characteristic of Chinese cultural tradition. (shrink)

Common spatial pattern is an effective algorithm for extracting electroencephalogram features of motor imagery ; however, CSP mainly aims at multichannel EEG signals, and its effect in extracting EEG features with fewer channels is poor—even worse than before using CSP. To solve the above problem, a new combined feature extraction method has been proposed in this study. For EEG signals from fewer channels, wavelet packet transform, fast ensemble empirical mode decomposition, and local mean decomposition were used to decompose the band-pass (...) filtered EEG into multiple time–frequency components, and the corresponding components were selected according to the frequency characteristics of MI or the correlation coefficient between its time–frequency components and the original EEG signal. Furthermore, phase space reconstruction was performed on the selected components after the three time-frequency decompositions, the maximum Lyapunov index was calculated, and the features were reconstructed; then, CSP projection mapping was used for the reconstructed features. The support vector machine probability output model was trained by the obtained three mappings. Probability outputs by three different support vector machines were then obtained. Finally, the classification of test samples was determined by the fusion of the Dempster–Shafer evidence theory at the decision level. The results showed that the accuracy of the proposed method was 95.71% on data set III of BCI competition II, which was 2.88% higher than the existing methods. On data set IIb of BCI competition IV, the average accuracy was 86.60%, which was 2.3% higher than the existing methods. This study verified the effectiveness of the proposed method and provided an approach for the research and development of the MI-BCI system based on fewer channels. (shrink)

Carroll denies that the spectator of fiction film commonly has empathy with the characters. He argues that the spectator typically emotes to the events in the film from his position as observer, and that this context gives asymmetrical reactions in spectator and character. According to Carroll, empathy is unlikely to occur. Theproblem with this argument is that if the differences between spectator and character that Carroll points to exclude empathy, it would also exclude empathy in real life. Furthermore, Carroll merely (...) shows that the spectator cannot only feel as the character feels. This does however not entail that empathy cannot be one part of the spectator’s response as observer. This paper thus argues that Carroll fails to show that empathy is an unlikely spectator response. (shrink)