This study aimed to provide evidence of validity and reliability for the Perceived Mattering Questionnaire-Physical Education developed by Richards et al. for the Chinese physical education teachers. The PMQ-PE consisted of two factors with four items in each, measuring four dimensions. PMQ-PE in Chinese was validated among 1,278 elementary and secondary school PE teachers in China, of whom 59.0% were secondary PE teachers and 70.2% were males. Confirmatory factor analysis with the entire sample found a poor model fit. Then exploratory (...) factor analysis using half of the sample indicated there was only one factor in PMQ-PEC. CFA of the other half of the sample suggested a one-factor model with the elimination of three unfitted items showed a better fitness to the data. Cronbach's alpha value was also acceptable. The final version of PMQ-PEC included five items with one factor that demonstrated acceptable validity and reliability and was deemed acceptable among Chinese PE teachers after the above modifications were made. (shrink)

A dynamic domain consists of a set of legal states and a transition function that maps states to states. AI formalisms for specifying dynamic domains have so far focused on describing the effects of actions, that is, the transition functions. In this paper we propose a notion of characteristic set of position systems for the purpose of describing legal states. A position system for a type of objects is a set of properties that are mutually exclusive, and that in each (...) state, every object of the type must satisfy exactly one of these properties called its position under the position system. A set of position systems, one for each type of objects in the domain, is characteristic if there is a one-to-one mapping between legal states and sets of objects’ positions under these position systems. These position systems are useful for reasoning about these dynamic systems including planning. In particular, we show that once we have characteristic sets of position systems for a dynamic domain, planning can be done by writing rules about when to move objects from one position to another. (shrink)

The unprecedented economic growth in recent decades has cultivated the exploitation of natural resources and over-consumption, leading to ecological deterioration and sustainability. The ever-increasing consumption in developing countries is creating a significant environmental strain. Thus, the industry and consumers’ environmental issues and their harmful effects on human health have led to concerns among researchers, scientists, academic communities, and policymakers. The present work examines the impact of different consumption value factors on sustainable consumption behavior concerning consumer choice in Pakistan and China. (...) A cross-sectional study is conducted, and data are collected through a primary source questionnaire. A sample of 431 respondents is chosen from different cities in Pakistan, and a sample of 342 respondents is selected from China. Estimation techniques like descriptive statistics, frequency distribution, multicollinearity, R square, independent sample t-test, the coefficient of correlation, and regression analysis are used for the data analysis. The comparative results show that knowledge values and emotional values significantly influence the choice behavior of respondents toward environmentally friendly products both in Pakistan and China. In contrast, social values and conditional values show insignificant influence. Furthermore, functional values are significant in Pakistan while insignificant in the context of China, and environmental values are significant in China although insignificant in Pakistan with regard to sustainable consumption behavior. (shrink)

The term "political philosophy" refers to the abstract, fundamental, and guiding principles and basic theorems for observing, handling, and dealing with political problems and political struggles. Its meaning is analogous to, say, "military philosophy." Naturally, these theorems are connected to and integrated with specific political viewpoints, just as "military philosophy" is connected to and integrated with specific military strategies and military tactics. This kind of integration does not hinder in any way our study of political philosophies in history, just as (...) it does not hinder our study of any particular "military philosophy.". (shrink)

The rapid development of information science and technology today, its impact on culture and society, and how we should respond to this new phenomenon in our cultural undertakings is something that is probably of concern to many people. I would like to approach this question from the macro level, from the interrelationship between cultural exchange and the culture industry, linking it to the current state of international cultural exchange.

This paper investigates the semantic range of the term zhi (知, to know) in the Laozi, providing the understanding of its epistemological implications. It argues that, contrary to the conventional belief that the Laozi dismisses knowledge, the Laozi endorses certain sorts of knowledge as guidance for action. Through a systematic analysis of zhi 知 in its various grammatical and syntactic contexts, the paper identifies three epistemological types: know-that knowledge (propositional awareness), know-how knowledge (practical skills), and knowing by acquaintance (familiarity). These (...) distinctions illuminate the Laozi’s complex attitude toward knowledge, which simultaneously critiques knowledge that fosters desires and distinctions and endorses a reflective understanding of one’s cognitive limitations. (shrink)

In the past few decades, intensive and extensive social science studies have attempted to determine how textbooks provide society- and social reality-related information. This research type gained...

River segmentation of remote sensing images is of important research significance and application value for environmental monitoring, disaster warning, and agricultural planning in an area. In this study, we propose a river segmentation model in remote sensing images based on composite attention network to solve the problems of abundant river details in images and the interference of non-river information including bridges, shadows, and roads. To improve the segmentation efficiency, a composite attention mechanism is firstly introduced in the central region of (...) the network to obtain the global feature dependence of river information. Next, in this study, we dynamically combine binary cross-entropy loss that is designed for pixel-wise segmentation and the Dice coefficient loss that measures the similarity of two segmentation objects into a weighted one to optimize the training process of the proposed segmentation network. The experimental results show that compared with other semantic segmentation networks, the evaluation indexes of the proposed method are higher than those of others, and the river segmentation effect of CoANet model is significantly improved. This method can segment rivers in remote sensing images more accurately and coherently, which can meet the needs of subsequent research. (shrink)

Included with this letter, please find a list of corrections to the chapter "Lao Zi's Political Philosophy." The Jilin People's Publishing House did not show us the page proofs of the book Lao Zi Tong prior to publication, and as a consequence it contains a large number of typos. In the chapter "Lao Zi's Political Philosophy" alone there are 63 errors and deletions, some of which are serious and may make an accurate English translation difficult. For instance, "si hu" has (...) been typeset as "xiong [vicious beast] hu" throughout. "Si" means rhinoceros, and "si hu" thus means rhinoceros and tiger. Compare the passage "the rhinoceros finds no place to cast its horn; the tiger finds no place to put its claws." We hope that the translation can be checked against the list of corrections. (shrink)

This study aims to better promote the innovation and entrepreneurship of teachers and students in finance and economics colleges and universities in terms of food security. Based on the relevant theories such as food security, innovation and entrepreneurship, the questionnaire was used to investigate the issues related to food security of teachers and students in colleges and universities. Next, the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution analysis method was introduced to evaluate the safety metrics of the (...) response subsystem. Finally, Internet of Things monitoring technology was applied to grain growth and sales. The research results show that college teachers and students have a disjointed cognition of food security as important talents in innovation and entrepreneurship. After the TOPSIS analysis method is used to study, when college teachers and students choose to start a business in food security, they must pay attention to the changes in economic factors. The IoT monitoring technology is applied to grain growth and sales, and the monitoring technology of the IoT could reduce the mortality rate of corn seedlings to 3.59%. The mortality rate of seedlings is much higher than that of farmers relying on their own experience to grow corn. Therefore, this has great reference significance for the innovation and entrepreneurship development of college teachers and students in food security at this stage. (shrink)

Background The concept of career identity is integral to nursing practices and forms the basis of the nursing professions. Positive career identity is essential for providing high-quality care, optimizing patient outcomes, and enhancing the retention of health professionals. Therefore, there is a need to explore potential influencing variables, thereby developing effective interventions to improve career identity. Objectives To investigate the relationship between moral distress, moral courage, and career identity, and explore the mediating role of moral courage between moral distress and (...) career identity among nurses. Design A quantitative, cross-sectional study. Methods A convenient sample of 800 nurses was recruited from two tertiary care hospitals between February and March 2022. Participants were assessed using the Moral Distress Scale-revised, Nurses’ Moral Courage Scale, and Nursing Career Identity Scale. This study was described in accordance with the STROBE statement. Ethical consideration Research ethics approval was obtained from the researcher’s university and hospital where this study was conducted prior to data collection. Findings Moral distress is negatively associated while moral courage is positively associated with career identity among nurses. Moral courage partially mediates the relationship between moral distress and career identity ( β = −0.230 to −0.163, p < 0.01). Discussion The findings reveal a relationship between moral distress, moral courage, and career identity among nurses. Conclusion By paying attention to nurses’ moral distress and courage, healthcare providers can contribute to the development of effective interventions to improve career identity, and subsequently performance, among nurses. (shrink)

. The defects in macro traffic model research are pointed out firstly. In order to remedy these defects, traffic movements at the grid intersection were analyzed, and with the basic framework of the traffic transmission model, the new macro traffic model used in the paper for control simulation and evaluation has been proposed. Secondly, the bi-level optimization control model is proposed, using minimal delay and maximal throughput as its upper objectives, and optimal traffic coordination on both sides as the lower (...) objective. A corresponding heuristic ant algorithm is subsequently designed to solve the control model. Finally, the proposed method is tested at a suppositional road network, under three different demand scenarios, compared with Transyt-7F. The results show that the proposed method has better performance, especially under high demand scenarios. (shrink)

The effects of psycholinguistic variables on reading development are critical to the evaluation of theories about the reading system. Although we know that the development of reading depends on both individual differences (endogenous) and item-level effects (exogenous), developmental research has focused mostly on average-level performance, ignoring individual differences. We investigated how the development of word recognition in Chinese children in both Chinese and English is affected by (a) item-level, exogenous effects (word frequency, radical consistency, and curricular grade level); (b) subject-level, (...) endogenous individual differences (orthographic awareness and phonological awareness); and (c) their interactive effect. We tested native Chinese (Putonghua)-speaking children (n = 763) in grades 1 to 6 with both Chinese character and English word identification (lexical) decision tasks. Our findings show that (a) there were effects of both word frequency and age of acquisition in both Chinese and English, but these item-level effects generally weakened with increasing age; (b) individual differences in phonological and orthographic awareness each contributed to successful performance; and (c) in Chinese, item-level effects were weaker for more proficient readers. We contend that our findings can be explained by theoretical models that incorporate cumulative learning as the basis for development of item-level effects in the reading system. (shrink)

John Swales’ 1986 article ‘Citation analysis and discourse analysis’ was the first to apply citation analysis to describe in-text citations in the field of discourse analysis. Howard White’s 2004 article ‘Citation analysis and discourse analysis revisited’ was written by an information scientist and primarily focused on citation analysis and discourse analysis. Here, we cast a wider net by conducting a bibliometric analysis of discourse analysis to sketch its scientific landscape between 1978 and 2018. Our findings show that discourse analysis has (...) emerged as a major, and increasingly distinctively sociological, contribution to the analysis of language in social life. It is evident that discourse analysts are increasingly interested in such topics as corpus linguistics, digital conversation analysis, discursive news values approach, membership categorization analysis, multimodal analysis and social media. It is a general trend that the United States is no longer the only dominating publication powerhouse in the field. Countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia and China are wielding a growing share of research output. (shrink)

This book explains China's intellectual property perspective in the context of European theories, through a critical examination of intellectual property theory and practice focused on China's compliance with the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). The author's critical review of contemporary intellectual property philosophy suggests that justifying intellectual property protection through Locke or Hegel's property theories internalizes a theoretical paradox. "Professor Wenwei Guan's treatment of intellectual property law and practice in the PRC offers new perspectives that (...) enrich an already active field of study. This book will be a useful contribution to academic and policy discourses examining conceptual and operational dimensions of China's intellectual property protection system and the broader process of China's international engagement." - Dr. Pitman B. Potter, Professor of Law, University of British Columbia, Canada "Dr. Guan reminds us of the daunting challenge of the public-private divide in forming and reforming TRIPS regime; how this regime has failed to address development needs and public concerns in developing countries like China; and how TRIPS's 'birth defect' can be overcome and its evolution can be put back on the right track." - Dr. Yahong Li, Associate Professor at Faculty of Law, Hong Kong University. (shrink)

Although big data analytics capability leads to competitive performance, the mechanism of the relationship is still unclear. To narrow the research gap, this paper investigates the mediating roles of two forms of resource integration in the relationship between two forms of BDAC [big data analytics management capability and BDA technology capability] and competitive performance. Supported by Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modeling and the cross-sectional survey data from 219 Chinese enterprises, the results show that the resource bricolage plays a significantly mediating (...) role in the relationships between BDA management capability and competitive performance as well as in the relationship between BDA technology capability and competitive performance. Furthermore, the mediating effect in the former relationship is stronger than that in the latter relationship. Additionally, BDA technology capability only has a direct effect on resource bricolage, while BDA management capability has a stronger effect on resource optimization than that on resource bricolage. Finally, resource bricolage has a stronger impact on competitive performance than resource optimization. These findings contribute to understanding how enterprises could apply different forms of BDAC to other kinds of resource integration to achieve outstanding competitive performance. (shrink)