Malaysia had its first four patients with COVID-19 on 25 January 2020. In the same week, the World Health Organization declared it as a public health emergency of international concern. The pandemic has since challenged the ethics and practice of medicine. There is palpable tension from the conflict of interest between public health initiatives and individual’s rights. Ensuring equitable care and distribution of health resources for patients with and without COVID-19 is a recurring ethical challenge for clinicians. Palliative care aims (...) to mitigate suffering caused by a life-limiting illness, and this crisis has led to the awareness and urgency to ensure it reaches all who needs it. We share here the palliative care perspectives and ethical challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic in Malaysia. (shrink)

Background Residual dried blood spots (rDBS) from newborn screening programmes represent a valuable resource for medical research, from basic sciences, through clinical to public health. In Hong Kong, there is no legislation for biobanking. Parents’ view on the retention and use of residual newborn blood samples could be cultural-specific and is important to consider for biobanking of rDBS. Objective To study the views and concerns on long-term storage and secondary use of rDBS from newborn screening programmes among Hong Kong Chinese (...) parents. Methods A mixed-method approach was used to study the views and concerns on long-term storage and secondary use of rDBS from newborn screening programmes among Hong Kong Chinese parents of children 0–3 years or expecting parents through focus groups (8 groups; 33 participants) and a survey (n = 1012, 85% mothers) designed with insights obtained from the focus groups. We used framework analysis to summarise the themes as supportive factors, concerns and critical arguments for retention and secondary use of rDBS from focus group discussion. We used multiple logistic regression to assess factors associated with support for retention and secondary use of rDBS in the survey. Results Both in focus groups and survey, majority of parents were not aware of the potential secondary use of rDBS. Overall secondary use of rDBS in medical research was well accepted by a large proportion of Hong Kong parents, even if all potential future research could not be specified in a broad consent. However parents were concerned about potential risks of biobanking rDBS including leaking of data and mis-use of genetic information. Parents wanted to be asked for permission before rDBS are stored and mainly did not accept an “opt-out” approach. The survey showed that parents born in mainland China, compared to Hong Kong born parents, had lower awareness of newborn screening but higher support in biobanking rDBS. Higher education was associated with support in rDBS biobanking only among fathers. Conclusion Long-term storage and secondary use of rDBS from newborn screening for biomedical research and a broad consent for biobanking of rDBS are generally acceptable to Hong Kong parents given their autonomy is respected and their privacy is protected, highlighting the importance of an accountable governance and a transparent access policy for rDBS biobanks. (shrink)

Profound sensorineural hearing loss is an auditory disability associated with auditory and cognitive dysfunction. Due to distinct pathogenesis, some associated structural and functional changes within the brain have been investigated in previous studies, but whole-brain structural alterations are incompletely understood. We extended the exploration of neuroanatomic differences in whole-brain structure in children with profound SNHL who are primarily users of Chinese sign language. We employed surface-based morphometry and subcortical analyses. T1-weighted magnetic resonance images of 26 children with profound SNHL and (...) 27 age- and sex-matched children with normal hearing were analyzed. Compared with the normal control group, children with profound SNHL showed diverse structural changes in surface-based and subcortical analyses, including decreased cortical thickness in the left postcentral gyrus, superior parietal lobule, paracentral lobule, precuneus, the right transverse temporal gyri, and the middle temporal gyrus; a noticeable increase in the Local Gyrification Index in the left precuneus and superior parietal lobule; and diverse changes in gray-matter volume in different brain regions. Surface-based vertex analyses revealed regional contractions in the right thalamus, putamen, pallidum, and the brainstem of children with profound SNHL when compared with those in the NC group. Volumetric analyses showed decreased volumes of the right thalamus and pallidum in children with profound SNHL. Our data suggest that children with profound SNHL are associated with diffuse cerebral dysfunction to cortical and subcortical nuclei, and revealed neuroplastic reorganization in the precuneus, superior parietal lobule, and temporal gyrus. Our study provides robust evidence for changes in connectivity and structure in the brain associated with hearing loss. (shrink)

This essay examines Zhuangzi's idea, in his dialogue with Hui Shi in the De Chong Fu, of being without human qing. This idea is situated within the contrast that Zhuangzi constantly makes between heaven and human beings. Some contexts for this contrast are described. The essay concludes that qing should be read as basically referring to “facts" in the Zhuangzi, including certain factual beliefs about (false or mistaken) emotions.

Background Supporting physicians in Intensive Care Units s as they face dying patients at unprecedented levels due to the COVID-19 pandemic is critical. Amidst a dearth of such data and guided by evidence that nurses in ICUs experience personal, professional and existential issues in similar conditions, a systematic scoping review is proposed to evaluate prevailing accounts of physicians facing dying patients in ICUs through the lens of Personhood. Such data would enhance understanding and guide the provision of better support for (...) ICU physicians. Methods An SSR adopts the Systematic Evidenced Based Approach to map prevailing accounts of caring for dying patients in ICUs. To enhance the transparency and reproducibility of this process, concurrent and independent use of tabulated summaries, thematic analysis and directed content analysis is adopted. Results Eight thousand three hundred fifty-eight abstracts were reviewed from four databases, 474 full-text articles were evaluated, 58 articles were included, and the Split Approach revealed six categories/themes centered around the Innate, Individual, Relational and Societal Rings of Personhood, conflicts in providing end of life care and coping mechanisms employed. Conclusion This SSR suggests that caring for dying patients in ICU impacts how physicians view their personhood. To resolve conflicts within individual concepts of personhood, physicians use prioritization, reframing and rely on accessible, personalized support from colleagues to steer coping strategies. An adapted form of the Ring Theory of Personhood is proposed to direct timely personalized, appropriate and holistic support. (shrink)

More and more studies showed that strabismus is not simply an ocular disease, but a neuro-ophthalmology disease. To analyze potential changes in brain activity and their relationship to behavioral performance in comitant strabismus patients and healthy controls. Our study recruited 28 patients with comitant strabismus and 28 people with matched weight, age range, and sex ratio as healthy controls. Using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging, we evaluated fALFF to compare spontaneous brain activity between comitant strabismus and healthy controls. We did (...) hospital anxiety and depression scale questionnaires for these patients. We found significantly lower fALFF value in comitant strabismus patients compared with controls in the left frontal superior medial gyrus and the right middle cingulum. In the latter region, fALFF was significantly negatively correlated with the hospital anxiety and depression scale, as well as the duration of disease. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis indicated that the fALFF method has clear potential for the diagnosis of comitant strabismus patients. These results revealed abnormal spontaneous activity in two brain regions of comitant strabismus patients, which may indicate underlying pathologic mechanisms and may help to advance clinical treatment. (shrink)

In recent years, foreign language learning has been proposed as a possible cognitive intervention for older adults. However, the brain network and cognitive functions underlying FLL has remained largely unconfirmed in older adults. In particular, older and younger adults have markedly different cognitive profile—while older adults tend to exhibit decline in most cognitive domains, their semantic memory usually remains intact. As such, older adults may engage the semantic functions to a larger extent than the other cognitive functions traditionally considered the (...) most important. Using anatomical measurements and a cognitive test battery, the present study examined this hypothesis in twenty cognitively normal older adults, who participated in a two-month Italian learning programme. Results showed that the immediate learning success and long-term retention of Italian vocabularies were most consistently predicted by the anatomical measures of the left pars orbitalis and left caudal middle frontal cortex, which are implicated in semantic and episodic memory functions. Convergent evidence was also found based on the pattern of cognitive associations. Our results are consistent with a prominent role of semantic and episodic memory functions in vocabulary learning in older learners. (shrink)

This article explicates Xunzi's three types of cognitive delusions in Xunzi's Zhengming Pian. The followings are my conclusions: first, general names such as “a white horse,” “a horse,” “a thief,” and “a man” are thought of as proper nouns because the classic Chinese theory of language concerned pragmatics rather than semantics. Second, classic Chinese epistemology does not address conceptual knowledge or knowledge based on argumentation distinguished from the art of description. Third, Gongsun Long believes in an extreme form of one‐name‐one‐thingism. (...) Fourth, Neo‐Moists' theory of inference is based on intensional contexts. Fifth, Hui Shi's position presupposes the art of knowing objects before any verbal expression and suggests the arbitrariness in the expressions of known objects. Sixth, Xunzi's logic and semantics are extensional. (shrink)

本书以近代文明冲突为视角,通过对梁漱溟与陈序经这样两个思想极端对立的代表性人物的比较研究,对中国伦理社会的历史由来、内在特质、近代考验、未来可能等作了一番梳理,并对中国传统文化的出路等问题作了进一步的 认识和思考 --.

continent. 1.2 (2011): 136-140. In early 2011, Cow Heavy Books published The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature , a compendium of catalog 'blurbs' for non-existent desired or ideal texts. Along with Erinrose Mager, I edited the project, in a process that was more like curation as it mainly entailed asking a range of contemporary writers, theorists, and text-makers to send us an entry. What resulted was a creative/critical hybrid anthology, a small book in which each page opens (...) to a new iteration of textual desire. These texts explore the material possibilities of the book. Somewhat parallel to the call of N. Katherine Hayles who, in her book Writing Machines , urges literary theorists to take up the practice of Medium Specific Analysis (to account for the way the medium in which it is presented conditions or at least bears on a literary text). I see in the imagined works of The Official Catalog a call for the innovative writers of today to become Medium-Responsive. This would mean thinking through the specific (materially constrained) possibilities offered by the media in which texts are presented, and in thinking of the literary text as a kind of art in the greater context of other arts and the book as a medium situated within the context of many other media. In doing so, the contemporary writer refutes the chorus of critics who lament the death of the book by consistently reinvigorating literary innovation. The following are selections from The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature that show possible paths for (thinking about) new writing that engages with its medium. —Ben Segal, Editor THE CUBE Even the most radical non-linear texts have tended to exploit or subvert only the sequential possibilities of print—from the continuous loop of Joyce's Finnegans Wake to the shuffled cards of Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1 —but The Cube takes such multiplicities to an entirely new level. Set in a grid, the book's words can be read conventionally, across the page, as well as down each column—with either route making complete grammatical sense. But they can also be read as stacked strata and mined like lexical core samples through the layered pages of the book. Each path tells the same story from a different perspective (the narrative, naturally, hinges on the potential outcomes of a throw of cubed dice). By opening up the z-axis to reading in this way, The Cube recognizes the book as a three-dimensional sculptural space. Taking its lead from Armand Schwerner's (If Personal) and Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes , The Cube reads like a experiment by Christian Bök precision printed by Emily McVarish. Craig Dworkin is the editor, most recently, of The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics (Roof Books, 2008), The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound , with Marjorie Perloff (U. Chicago Press, 2009), and Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing , with Kenneth Goldsmith (Northwestern UP, 2010). He teaches at the University of Utah. HE GOES In He Goes , we read notes, letters and e-mails from a scholar father to his novelist daughter. We read of the father's musings on Beckett, on Pinter, on Anne Frank; his description of a woman hanging laundry from a line. We read about his journey toward dying, followed by a brief, third person account of his death, and his obituary. Then a long series of blank pages that demand to be read in real time, non-sentence by non-sentence, blank page by blank page. Finally—and it is here that this peculiar little book begins to soar—the dead father writes to his as-of-yet-still-living daughter. He does not write from death. He does not write from life. The words unprint, unstamp, unkindle. Still, they require no translation. The father "writes" (for lack of a better word) about the serendipitous, the commonplace; he recommends another book. He jokes. He asks his daughter how her stomach is. He says forget about presence in absence, darling; screw words as memorial and the guys in garbage cans and loss as redemption and I can't go on I must go on. He goes, "Love, Fodder." He goes, "incidentally." He goes, "I thought you might like to know." Elizabeth Graver is the author of a story collection, Have You Seen Me? , and three novels: Unravelling ; The Honey Thief ; and Awake . Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories , Best American Essays , and Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards . She teaches at Boston College. THE PAPER ARCHIVIST A stunning package and a triumph of imagination, The Paper Archivist at times looks to be less a book than an abstract expressionist painting. Softly bound, its contents unfold to a single sheet of uneven thickness and texture—a canvas splattered with colored lines, stickers, broken sentences, and nonsense pictographs. But by following the directions to fold, dip, smell, rub, scratch, and tear the sheet according to the contingencies of the weather and using only the objects at hand, the reader slowly brings the forces hidden in the noise into a glorious sculptural convergence, processing a different story and shape each time. This is the rare book that continues to stir, whirl, and pop on every new reading. Sean Higgins blogs at BOMBlog where he is responsible for the column Volumes and Territories, as well as Ghost Island , a fledgling collaborative intellectual collective. THE SLOW BOOK The Slow Book , written by an anonymous author at the dawn of literacy, on a minor planet (otherwise notable only as the source of that exceptionally hardy, not very tasty grain called “shef” sowed on hostile planets as an early step to colonization), and encoded into a series of punctures on a strip of copper coiled inside a clever device, something between a player piano and an old-fashioned film projector, is being released into print, as was the author’s intention, at a rate of one word per century (local time). Each word is, across the Forty Galaxies, agreed to be uncannily apt for the century in which it appears—even “of,” in a century during which the highest value was attached to fidelity, whether to ideals, worlds, or romantic love; even “the,” which governed two centuries, one extraordinarily materialistic, during which advances in propulsion and navigation accelerated the exchange of exceptional objects between the remotest planets of the Forty, and one in which the central concern, both of philosophers and the common man, was whether, in an age of rapidly proliferating hypothetical worlds, anyone or anything concretely existed at all. Even those words published long before interstellar contact can be seen in retrospect to have transgalactic pertinence. As a result, attempts to abstract the machine from its publishers, Hobson & Hui, in order to “predict the future” for insight or gain by “fast- forwarding” the copper strip have been many and ingenious. While, in centuries of skepticism (“maybe”), or of unrest (“go”) the book has been nearly forgotten, in others it seems to haunt every thought, every deed, despite the fact that the subject of The Slow Book is still unclear. So far only a few sentences exist in print; everyone knows them, can quote them, offer the standard exegeses and assorted heresies; yet certainties are the stuff of adolescence; mature readers are forced to acknowledge that these sentences are probably only a preamble to the main argument. They contain no proper nouns, nor can we identify any definite theme. There is even disagreement about their tone, whether coolly ironic, as some insist, or ardent. The appearance of an unusual grammatical case, sometimes called the future pluperfect continuous, used to describe events that at some future point will have always been true (but are not yet)—hitherto known to appear only in the synthetic dogmas of the Thanatographical Society, and in certain highly circumscribed religious contexts—has suggested to some scholars that the Slow Book was originally intended for ritual use, but the proximity of the usage to a term designating a small hand plow that, as Pott and Mielcke have convincingly shown, would have borne a distinctly obscene double meaning in its culture of origin in the author’s time, argues otherwise. It is likewise unclear whether the situation that seems to be—with teasing incompleteness—sketched out in these few lines is intended as an illustration of general principles, a case study, a dramatic scene, or an extended metaphor. In short, we have no idea what The Slow Book is about. In our own time, we believe that it is almost certainly a work of fiction, but that may be because we live in the century of “if”. In each age, perhaps, we see the book we most need to read. Some have dared to suggest that the metal strip is blank until, with millennial fanfare, it advances into its new position, that no ur-text exists, that the book itself is brought into being—written—by our need. But that is exactly the sort of thing we would believe, in 7645. Shelley Jackson is the author of the story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy , the novel Half Life , and hypertexts including Patchwork Girl . The recipient of a Howard Foundation grant, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2006 James Tiptree Jr Award, she has also written and illustrated several children's books, including The Old Woman and the Wave ; Sophia, the Alchemist's Dog ; and Mimi's Dada Catifesto . Her stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions , McSweeney's , The Paris Review , and Cabinet Magazine . In 2004 she launched her project SKIN , a story published in tattoos on 2095 volunteers. THE BOOK OF SOUNDS The Book of Sounds is just that: a book of sounds made when letters are construed in new ways to bring forth out of the alphabet new forms of speech. A book meant to be read out loud, The Book of Sounds is not unlike Laurie Anderson's O Superman or Brian Eno's Music for Airports in its attempt to make music out of the most primary and simplest of methods. It breaks language down to its barest bones and makes out of the page a drum that has never before been beaten upon. Peter Markus is the author of a novel, Bob, or Man on Boat (Dzanc Books) as well as two books of short fiction, Good, Brother and The Singing Fish , both of which were published by Calamari Press. A new collection of stories, We Make Mud , is now available from Dzanc Books. PARADISE OF THE BLIND by Celan Solen Although the reclusive Celan Solen published his first and only book in 1963—paying out-of-pocket for a limited edition of the slim collection No One May Have the Same Knowledge Again —he remained in American obscurity for almost three decades. In 1992 a micro-press in Istanbul brought out No One in Turkish. A German translation followed in 1995. Soon it became clear in literary circles Solen was a world-class (if highly unclassifiable) artist—lyrical, dense, enigmatic—who could undo the conventional short story in 397 words by inventing impossible worlds housed in impossible whirls (in “Small Sadnesses,” a single chartreuse tree frog in Borneo unknowingly holds time together by its very presence in the universe, while each letter of its tale refers, not to itself, but to the one preceding it in the alphabet). By his disappearance last year, Solen was considered master by a generation of writers and critics (except, alas, for those gentlemen in the Swedish Academy). Imagine, then, that generation’s delight at the discovery, locked away in the author’s safe-deposit box, of his second and final composition. Had Lynch’s Lost Highway been book instead of film, and had it been penned by Beckett at his least certain, revised by Barthelme at his most formally deranged, and typeset by Derrida at his most semiotically catastrophic, the result might have been something like Paradise of the Blind : interlacing narratives of a man composed of borrowed organs (whose most cheerless and difficult to locate, god, could only have been invented by an empty heart), a nonexistent medieval painting blamed for the ruin of future hope, and the spread of a philosophy that holds earth a mistake constantly recurring in the dream of a fish lying on the floor of the Atlantic (if the fish wakes, our world winks off)—all contained in a text packed with typed-over passages, torn postcards, poems that can be deciphered only when held up to a mirror, pages ornamented with trompe-l'œil paperclips and coffee stains and buzzing houseflies, some busy with illegible runes that dissolve when exposed to light, three that smell like roses or lemons (depending on whether a man or woman is reading), two that stain with the bloody fingerprints of the those who handle them, one that ignites when brushed with breath, thirteen sewn from baby skin, one that moans when touched, and one that screams—yet all without mass, unimaginable, and invisible. Lance Olsen is author of more than 20 books of and about innovative fiction, including, most recently, the novels Calendar of Regrets (2010) and Head in Flames (2009). He teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. SUPERSTRUCTURE! by Barbara D'Albi As soon as I opened the third drawer of Barbara D'Albi's wooden novel, everything became hopeless. Now in Ithaca, there was no going back. And it wasn't just the intricate series of shelves, hinged doors and locked drawers which D'Albi layered into the book, no, lo, I was constructed anew by the story. Who else but D'Albi to imagine a God who becomes a carpenter and gets killed?! And makes it good! You want stories? D'Albi is a skyscraper, built with planes and levers. Momentarily I wondered where I could shelve this book, and then I thought: no matter; I couldn't put it down. Adam Robinson lives in Baltimore, where he runs Publishing Genius. He is the author of Adam Robison and Other Poems and Say, Poem. 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Ben shu yi dao de chuan cheng wei shi jiao,cong yan hui zhi le yu xian, zi gong zhi zhi yu yan, zi lu zhi zhi yu zheng, zi xia zhi xue yu ren si ge fang mian, lun shu zhu xi dui kong zi men ren yan xing de quan shi,cong er jie shi zhu xi dui "Lun yu" zhe yi jing dian suo fan ying de sheng huo shi jie de li jie ji qi he si kao fang (...) shi......shi dui chuan tong zhu xi yan jiu nai zhi song ming li xue yan jiu de yi ge zhong yao bu chong. (shrink)

Algorithms can now identify patterns and correlations in the (big) datasets, and predict outcomes based on those identified patterns and correlations with the use of machine learning techniques and big data, decisions can then be made by algorithms themselves in accordance with the predicted outcomes. Yet, algorithms can inherit questionable values from the datasets and acquire biases in the course of (machine) learning, and automated algorithmic decision-making makes it more difficult for people to see algorithms as biased. While researchers have (...) taken the problem of algorithmic bias seriously, but the current discussion on algorithmic fairness tends to conceptualize ‘fairness’ in algorithmic fairness primarily as a technical issue and attempts to implement pre-existing ideas of ‘fairness’ into algorithms. In this paper, I show that such a view of algorithmic fairness as technical issue is unsatisfactory for the type of problem algorithmic fairness presents. Since decisions on fairness measure and the related techniques for algorithms essentially involve choices between competing values, ‘fairness’ in algorithmic fairness should be conceptualized first and foremost as a political issue, and it should be (re)solved by democratic communication. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to explicitly reconceptualize algorithmic fairness as a political question and suggest the current discussion of algorithmic fairness can be strengthened by adopting the accountability for reasonableness framework. (shrink)

Ben shu zhi zai yong zhe xue yan jiu de fang shi zheng ti lun shu fo xue ti xi. wei le shi pu tong da zhong neng chu kui wan zheng de fo jiao xi tong, zuo zhe fen bie cong fo jiao de ge di yu pai bie,zhe xue si xiang guan dian,si miao jian zhu yi ji fo jing shu ji lun zhu deng fang mian jin xing liao xiang jin de xu shu ji tao lun. shu (...) zhong chu le dui fo jiao wen hua zhi shi de zheng li yu chuan hang, hai hui jie he you zuo zhe zai de zhe xue ji Zhongguo wen hua ling yu zhong di yan jiu cheng guo. ben shu zun zhong zong jiao ben shen, zai xie zuo shou fa shang shi fen yan jin, fo jing ji xue zhe guan dian jie zhi yi yin yong xing shi lie chu, bing bu zuo ping lun ; dui zhuan men de shu yu hui dai you jiao zhu,jian suo shen zhi shi fan wen yuan wen de shuo ming, ke du xing qiang bing yi yu cha yue. (shrink)

Ben shu wei "Song Ming shi qi Chang Jiang zhong you de ru xue yan jiu" cong shu zhi yi: ben cong shu shi ren wen she hui ke xue chong dian yan jiu ji di-Wuhan da xue Zhongguo chuan tong wen hua yan jiu zhong xin tou biao, jing jiao yu bu zu zhi zhuan jia ping shen tong guo, zheng shi pi zhun de jiao yu bu ren wen she hui ke xue 2001 nian du zhong da yan (...) jiu xiang mu, xiang mu pi zhun hao shi 01JAZJD720008, ding yu 2004 nian qian hou wan cheng. ke ti zu zhu chi ren wei Guo Qiyong jiao shou, "Jiangxi zhi xue"shi Zhu Xi ti chu de yi ge gai nian, zhu yao zhi chu zi yu Jiangxi Jinxi Lu shi jia zu yi men de xue shuo, qi nei he shi Lu Jiuyuan de xin xue; di 2 quan ze shi you "Song Yuan xue an" suo zai zhi Xiangshan xiong Zhangfu, Suoshan de xue shuo; di 3 quan wei Xiangshan xiong di de di zi men de si xiang. Ben shu quan mian kao cha Jiangxi zhi xue zai Song dai Chang Jiang zhong you xing qi de xue mo yuan yuan, zhu yao xue shuo, yu Luo xue Min xue Zhejiang zhu xue zhe (Lü Zuqian, Yong Shangsi xian sheng deng) zhi jian de guan xi, yi ji qi dui Wang (Yangming) xue xing qi de nei zai guan lian xing, bing yan ji dui xian dai xin ru xue de tan tao. ben shu de xie zuo jiang zhu zhong si xiang kao gu de fang fa, zai quan mian yan jiu you guan dian ji de ji chu shang, dui you guan ren wu de chu sheng di, huo dong de di qu (ru jia zu suo zai cun luo, xue zhe shu xin wang lai, jiang xue, hui jiang, shu yuan deng) jin xing shi di de kao cha, guang fan di yun yong fang zhi, nian pu, shu yuan zhi, jia pu deng cai liao, ba si xiang jia huan yuan yu ju ti huan jing zhi zhong, zai ju ti she hui de li shi de jia zu de bei jing xia kao cha qi si xiang de nei han, jie shi qi jing shen suo zai, bing jin er yin shen chu qi yi yi yu jia zhi. (shrink)

Ben shu tong guo dui Kang Youwei zhi "qun" yu"du" guan nian de kao cha, lai ba wo Kang Youwei dui ge ren, guo jia nai zhi tian xia zhi xu de shen ke si kao. Zhu yao nei rong you: yi, Jin dai"qun-du" guan nian de chu xian ji qi zou xiang, er, Kang Youwei "qun-du" guan nian chan sheng de si xiang bei jing, san, "Du ren" yu Kang Youwei dui xian dai xing ge ti sheng cun zhi (...) ling hui, si, "Qun" yu guo jia wei xin, wu, "qun-du" guan lian yu chong tu: min quan yu guo jia guan nian zhi jian de zhang li, liu, Shi jie fan wei zhi "du" yu "qun" : guo jia yu "da tong"deng. (shrink)

A major international consultancy firm identified ‘AI ethicist’ as an essential position for companies to successfully implement artificial intelligence (AI) at the start of 2019. It declares that AI ethicists are needed to help companies navigate the ethical and social issues raised by the use of AI. Top 5 AI hires companies need to succeed in 2019. The view that AI is beneficial but nonetheless potentially harmful to individuals and society is widely shared by the industry, academia, governments, and civil (...) society organizations. Accordingly and in order to realize its benefits while avoiding ethical pitfalls and harmful consequences, numerous initiatives have been established to a) examine the ethical, social, legal and political dimensions of AI and b) develop ethical guidelines and recommendations for design and implementation of AI. (shrink)

United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals 4 Quality Education has highlighted major challenges for all nations to ensure inclusive and equitable quality access to education, facilities for children, and young adults. The SDG4 is even more important for developing nations as receiving proper education or vocational training, especially in science and technology, means a foundational step in improving other aspects of their citizens’ lives. However, the extant scientific literature about STEM education still lacks focus on developing countries, even more so in (...) the rural area. Using a dataset of 4967 observations of junior high school students from a rural area in a transition economy, the article employs the Bayesian approach to identify the interaction between gender, socioeconomic status, and students’ STEM academic achievements. The results report gender has little association with STEM academic achievements; however, female students (αa_Sex[2] = 2.83) appear to have achieved better results than their male counterparts (αa_Sex[1] = 2.68). Families with better economic status, parents with a high level of education (βb(EduMot) = 0.07), or non-manual jobs (αa_SexPJ[4] = 3.25) are found to be correlated with better study results. On the contrary, students with zero (βb(OnlyChi) = -0.14) or more than two siblings (βb(NumberofChi) = -0.01) are correlated with lower study results compared to those with only one sibling. These results imply the importance of providing women with opportunities for better education. Policymakers should also consider maintaining family size so the parents can provide their resources to each child equally. (shrink)

Background: As moral action could help nurses reduce moral distress, it is necessary to carry out qualitative research to present the experiences in which nurses apply moral action. Aim: To describe and analyze the phronesis applied by nurses in the face of moral distress. Research design: The research participants were invited to participate in in-depth interviews. The research materials were based on the stories described by the research participants and recorded by means of first-person narrative. Narrative analysis was applied to (...) interpret the nurses’ phronesis. Participants: Twenty-seven nurses from Taiwan. Ethical considerations: The Institutional Review Board of the Kaohsiung Medical University Hospital in Taiwan confirmed that this study passed the research ethical review. Findings: According to the narrative analysis results, the phenomenon of moral distress contains difficulty, action, and idea transformation. The difficulty is the source of moral distress, action is the practice of moral courage, and idea transformation is the nurse’s emotional movement. Action and idea transformation are collectively called phronesis in this study. Discussion: Moral distress refers to a state of suffering caused by situations in which nurses cannot carry out their ethical intentions. Phronesis is the process through which nurses take actions and relocate the subjects and is an ethical way to find relief from moral distress. Starting with empathy and respectful attitudes arising from self-reflection, nurses may be helped to get relief from the suffering of moral distress. Conclusion: Phronesis can help nurses positively face the emotional strain of moral distress. This article puts forward a narrative method to complete the four steps of phronesis: write about the care experience, identify the difficulties in the stories, seek the possibility of action, and form a new care attitude, which could help nurses learn to reduce their moral distress. (shrink)

Global engineering ethics is the engineering ethics’ response to globalization. It plays a major role in the received narrative about the need for a global engineering ethics, which is often illustrated by stories of some engineers A (of culture X) who interact with people or organizations of culture Y, and as a result encounter conflicts between their (i.e. culture X’s) ethical values and culture Y’s ethical values that generate ethical conundrums to the engineers. Global engineering ethics is thus needed to (...) help engineers to navigate through these ethical conundrums. However, the received narrative is insufficient in attending to the different nature and scope of ethical challenges for engineers and engineering practices in a globalized context, or so I shall argue. To understand these differences, I elaborate three basic presuppositions that create the need for global engineering ethics and explain their various interpretations. These presuppositions will then form the basis of my discussion of current approaches to global engineering ethics. I also argue that global engineering ethics is not merely reactive but also proactive, but the existing approaches have paid insufficient attention to the proactive dimension of global engineering ethics. So, I will end this chapter by arguing for the importance of the proactive dimension and exploring what it demands from engineers and engineering practices. (shrink)

An extensive body of literature in sociology and anthropology has shown that different societies have developed different structures for exchange of items such as goods, status and information. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how social exchange theory can help illuminate many of the underlying bases of different ethical perspectives in debates about social exchanges. Social exchange theory is applied to three common types of knowledge exchange – R&D joint ventures, commercial intellectual property exchange and academic exchange. Two (...) key factors that underlie different ethical perspectives are shown to be differences in structures for social exchange and differences in views of the alienability of knowledge from its originator. (shrink)

A highly transmittable and pathogenic viral infection, COVID-19, has dramatically changed the world with a tragically large number of human lives being lost. The epidemic has created psychological resilience and unbearable psychological pressure among patients and health professionals. The objective of this study is to analyze investor psychology and stock market behavior during COVID-19. The psychological behavior of investors, whether positive or negative, toward the stock market can change the picture of the economy. This research explores Shanghai, Nikkei 225, and (...) Dow Jones stock markets from January 20, 2020, to April 27, 2020, by employing principal component analysis. The results showed that investor psychology was negatively related to three selected stock markets under psychological resilience and pandemic pressure. The negative emotions and pessimism urge investors to cease financial investment in the stock market, and consequently, the stock market returns decreased. In a deadly pandemic, the masses were more concerned about their lives and livelihood and less about wealth and leisure. This research contributes to the literature gap of investors’ psychological behavior during a pandemic outbreak. The study suggests that policy-makers should design a plan to fight against COVID-19. The government should manage the health sector’s budget to overcome future crises. (shrink)

Digital media has become an integral part of people’s lives, and its ubiquity and pervasiveness in our everyday lives raise new ethical, social, cultural, political, economic and legal issues. Many of these issues have primarily been dealt with in terms of what is ‘right’ or ‘just’ with digital media and digitally-mediated practices, and questions about the relations between digital media and the good life are often left in the background. In short, what is often missing is an explicit discussion of (...) the relations between digital media and the good life. Under the label of ‘Net recommendation’, the present study aims to offer a balanced and constructive normative analysis of digital media, focusing on the relations between digital media and the good life. The project of Net recommendation aims to (re)assert the importance of actual discourses in our normative analysis of the relations between digital media and the good life. I pursue this project with a Walzerian approach to digital media and the good life that takes seriously (and, ideally, also interacts with) actual discourses. This approach allows us to have a better understanding of our normative judgements on the impacts of digital media has (or will have) on the good life and, at the same time, allows us to answer the question of ‘how should we live with digital media?’ more adequately. Moreover, the Walzerian approach is useful in both an intra-cultural and an inter¬cultural context. Using China’s Internet as a case study, I show that the relations between digital media and the good life in each culture should be examined in its own right. Together, I hope, this study provides an adequate illustration and defence of the project of Net recommendation that does not start with the assumption of digital media being a source of moral problem and strives to recommending specific ways to reform and/or transform digital media and digitally-mediated practices that allow us to have better relations with digital media and enable us to live better lives with them. (shrink)

Volume 46, Issue 6, November 2020, Page 658-675.

Background: Social media has become an integrated part of nursing profession, requiring nursing students to develop confidentiality and professional fitness to practice. The aim of this study was to investigate nursing students’ usage, professionalism and attitudes toward social media. Methods: A cross-section study was conducted online among undergraduate nursing students (n = 654). Questionnaires of self-directed learning, self-efficacy and usage and views toward social media were administered. Ethical considerations: Ethical approval was obtained from the Hubei University of Chinese Medicine. Results: (...) All participants were social media users. QQ (93.2%) was the most frequently used. 74.5% respondents spent 2–6 h on social media daily. The majority held positive attitudes toward social media. Year group and gender had influence on perceptions and attitudes toward social media. Furthermore, 81.5% students believed that social media positively influenced self-directed learning. Self-directed learning and learning motivation acted as predictors of the attitudes toward social media. Meanwhile, 67.3% students had posted personal photos and videos online, and 82.4% of them did not have privacy setting on social media. In addition,13.8% students attacked others or posted improper photos online. 22.9% participants witnessed improper posts from schoolmates or teachers, such as complaints about schoolmates or teachers (22.2%), foul language (11.1%), violence (3.9%), sexually suggestive photos (2.6%) and patient confidentiality (0.7%). In all, 15.0% respondents accepted “friend request” from patients. A total of 58.2% students were not aware of professional standards of behavior online for health care providers. In addition, 52.3% participants insisted that it is essential to develop social media and professionalism course for nursing students. Conclusion: Nursing students use social media extensively. Some students are at risk of carrying out unprofessional behavior which have detrimental effects on students’ future opportunities. This suggests that best practices and training in nurse education should be implemented to help students to be informed of professionalism. (shrink)

We test the hypothesis that US corporations headquartered in states with greater public corruption are also prone to more unethical behavior when operating abroad. We exploit passage of Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that curtailed bribery of foreign officials and find firms in corrupt states, especially those exporting to more corrupt countries, suffer greater performance decline following FCPA, suggesting larger loss from anticipated bribery restrictions. Controlling for industry, firms in corrupt states are more likely to be targets of FCPA enforcement actions. (...) They are also more likely to have paid foreign bribes, as disclosed during pre-FCPA investigations. (shrink)

The flow of high-level talents in China is becoming more and more active and has a profound impact on the innovation and development of cities. Based on the research on the spatial distribution of the school and work stages of high-level talent in China, we study the structure and evolution of China’s high-level talent mobility network by using the data on the flow trajectory of talent among cities in China. The results show that: the spatial distribution of talents in the (...) two stages has greater consistency, but there is a change characteristic of “large dispersion, small agglomeration.” Compared with the school stage, the network in the work stage has much more connections; the centrality gap of cities has narrowed. “Core-periphery” structure of two networks is relatively significant and similar. The core layer in the two networks has not changed, but the subcore layer and the subedge layer have undergone changes. In addition, talents mainly flow to core and subcore cities. The space structure of network is more complex in the work stage, and it is expanding to the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area in southeastern China. (shrink)

Pictorial representations such as diagrams and figures are widely used in scientific literature for explanatory and descriptive purposes. The intuitive nature of pictorial representations coupled with texts foster a better understanding of the objects of study. Biological mechanisms and processes can be clearly illustrated and grasped in pictures. I argue that pictorial representations describe biological phenomena by telling stories. I elaborate on the role of narrative structures of pictures in the frontier research using a case study in immunology. I articulate (...) that pictures with an inherent narrative structure are crucial in biological sciences. (shrink)

In the long 20th century, modern China experienced perhaps the world’s most radical and systematic secularization process and the decimation of traditional religious and ritual cultures. This article seeks to account for this experience by engaging with postcolonial theory, a body of discourse seldom found relevant to China Studies. The article attempts a two-pronged critique of both state secularization and some aspects of existing Postcolonial Studies/theory. It shows the many ways in which nationalist elites in modern China unwittingly absorbed Western (...) Orientalist discourse even as their words and actions were ostensibly anti-colonial, and much of the article examines the consequences of this native Orientalism upon Chinese religiosities. Finally, the article suggests that one cannot discuss governmentality in modern China without understanding how it is intertwined with a sovereign power that is both archaic and, at the same time, has experienced renewal and expansion in modernity. (shrink)

Live stream platforms have transformed the production and consumption of music, allowing KPop music to expand globally. Successful KPop idols are contrasted with large numbers of retired KPop performers, some of whom live in undesirable conditions. Drawing on the attachment theory, loyalty theory, and parasocial interaction theory, this study focuses on a unique group, comeback KPop performers, to examine how they acquire empathetic attachment and sustained loyalty from audiences through live stream shows, and the antecedents of these two variables. Answering (...) these questions seems important because comeback KPop performers have to interact with audiences without the financial and marketing support from entertainment agencies. The structural equation modeling of 288 responses from 176 Chinese and 112 Korean KPop audiences confirmed that empathetic attachment and sustained loyalty are positively associated with audience purchase intentions; sustained attractiveness and parasocial interactions function as antecedents of these two factors. The findings shed light on the comeback KPop performers who co-create value with audiences through live stream platforms, with theoretical contributions to the three theories mentioned above and managerial suggestions to KPop entertainment agencies, comeback KPop performers, and managers of live stream platforms. (shrink)

One important goal of cognitive science is to understand the mind in terms of its representational and computational capacities, where computational modeling plays an essential role in providing theoretical explanations and predictions of human behavior and mental phenomena. In my research, I have been using computational modeling, together with behavioral experiments and cognitive neuroscience methods, to investigate the information processing mechanisms underlying learning and visual cognition in terms of perceptual representation and attention strategy. In perceptual representation, I have used neural (...) network models to understand how the split architecture in the human visual system influences visual cognition, and to examine perceptual representation development as the results of expertise. In attention strategy, I have developed the Eye Movement analysis with Hidden Markov Models method for quantifying eye movement pattern and consistency using both spatial and temporal information, which has led to novel findings across disciplines not discoverable using traditional methods. By integrating it with deep neural networks (DNN), I have developed DNN+HMM to account for eye movement strategy learning in human visual cognition. The understanding of the human mind through computational modeling also facilitates research on artificial intelligence's (AI) comparability with human cognition, which can in turn help explainable AI systems infer humans’ belief on AI's operations and provide human-centered explanations to enhance human−AI interaction and mutual understanding. Together, these demonstrate the essential role of computational modeling methods in providing theoretical accounts of the human mind as well as its interaction with its environment and AI systems. (shrink)

A prevailing issue in clinical research is the duty clinicians have to treat or prevent the progression of disease during a study that they are conducting. While all clinical researchers have a duty of care for the patients who participate in clinical research, intervening at the onset or progression of disease may skew results and have a negative impact on the scientific validity of a study. Extreme examples of failures to intervene can be found in the Tuskegee syphilis study and (...) in an attempt to determine if cervical smears were an accurate predictor of cancer, which was uncovered by the Cartwright Inquiry. However, the issue arises in all research where delay in intervention can cause harm. A current study in Singapore is investigating the significance of an ‘ultra-high risk’ state that may constitute the prodromal phase of psychosis. This project called ‘The Longitudinal Youth at Risk Study’ is potentially contentious because it is recruiting young people who are identified as being ‘at risk’ of developing psychosis. In this paper, the decision to offer treatment to all participants as well as a fast track for those who are assessed to have developed serious mental illness into treatment is discussed. It is argued that this approach is ethically justified because of the duty of care that is owed to research participants, and suggests that the principle of equipoise may be used to guide intervention decisions in other clinical research protocols. (shrink)

In the 1830s and 1840s, animal transportation by rail and steamer gradually replaced traditional long-distance droving in Britain. Responding to the posthumanist calls for critical attention to the experience of nonhuman actors in history, this article first explores how each aspect of this new mode of transportation affected the bodily experience of the animals, including their embarkation, stowage, ventilation and other uses of equipment fitted on the vessel, the provision of care, and disembarkation. It then discusses how those people who (...) were affected by witnessing the animals’ experience responded to it in light of two contributory factors: first, the outbreak of cattle plague in 1865 and, second, the growing calls for greater humanity to animals. In conclusion, the article summarizes the legislative advances that were made in pursuit of this humanitarian aim by reviewing the first and last pieces of relevant legislation that were passed prior to the First World War—the 1870 Transit of Animals Order and the 1912 Animals (Transit and General) Order. The article further illustrates how the simple logic of paying attention and responding to the experience of other lifeworlds helped establish the first milestones in animal transit legislation in the age of steam transport. (shrink)

Along with urban development globally, the NIMBY crisis has been a complex social problem, which requires urgent remedial action. The inevitable management of Municipal Solid Waste has been one of the toughest risk management tasks in the worldwide modernization process. At present, certain fuzzy and unstructured results and methods have been formed for MSW-NIMBY crisis response, mainly focusing on the sociology and politics which scatter in complex and sensitive reports and news. Aiming at enhancing the effectiveness of data mining from (...) specific sparse text of MSW-NIMBY crisis, an improved knowledge extraction method is developed. Through rule-based text mining and complex network analysis, the Entity Relationship network of MSW-NIMBY crisis is reconstructed. Meanwhile, a novel transitivity for relationship between entities in semantic analysis is proposed to improve the feasibility and accuracy of information extraction. Characteristics and regularity of MSW-NIMBY crisis evolution and experience of crisis governance could be identified effectively. Results show that knowledge integration and ER transitivity can enhance knowledge recognition and major other factors, which could help formulate the governance strategies of NIMBY crisis from academic texts. (shrink)