Excavated from the ruins of a Han dynasty postal and relay station located in the Gansu Corridor, the Xuanquan manuscripts provide a precious chance to look into the daily traffic along the ancient Silk Road. After a brief introduction to the Han postal system, this paper translates and examines some of the Xuanquan documents directly related to foreigners traveling to Han China, such as passports, records of lodging and boarding, and files concerning trade disputes. The author concludes that the management (...) of traffic and trade along the Silk Road was a business tightly controlled by the early Chinese empire. (shrink)

This paper explores iconicity in the metrical structure and the cultural value of Artistic Chinese calligraphy along the lines of Carles S.Peirce’s theory. It drawsattention to the fact that there is a simple categorical correspondence between the outer forms of Artistic Chinese Calligraphy and their subject-matter, presenting it a mixed form of representation, based on resemblances but also creating its own metaphysical meanings simultaneously.

Standard time series structure learning algorithms assume that the measurement timescale is approximately the same as the timescale of the underlying system. In many scientific contexts, however, this assumption is violated: the measurement timescale can be substantially slower than the system timescale. This assumption violation can lead to significant learning errors. In this paper, we provide a novel learning algorithm to extract systemtimescale structure from measurement data that undersample the underlying system. We employ multiple algorithmic optimizations that exploit the problem (...) structure in order to achieve computational tractability. The resulting algorithm is highly reliable at extracting system-timescale structure from undersampled data. (shrink)

As an unusual event, fasting can induce strong physiological and psychological reactions, but there is still no clear understanding of how previous fasting experiences affect people’s responses to current fasting. This study aimed to investigate the influence of previous fasting experiences on participants’ basic physiological and psychological responses in a fasting experiment conducted under intensive medical monitoring. For a 22-day experiment divided into four phases, a total of 13 persons participated; the participants were divided into a group with prior fasting (...) experience and a group without prior fasting experience. The results indicate no group differences in physiological responses ; however, differences in psychological states were observed, with the Newbie group showing more negative psychological states overall throughout the experiment. Hence, previous fasting experience may be a buffer against negative feelings during current fasting. For this reason, it is important to consider fasting experiences as a vital factor in future research. (shrink)

For unmanned aerial vehicle, object detection at different scales is an important component for the visual recognition. Recent advances in convolutional neural networks have demonstrated that attention mechanism remarkably enhances multiscale representation of CNNs. However, most existing multiscale feature representation methods simply employ several attention blocks in the attention mechanism to adaptively recalibrate the feature response, which overlooks the context information at a multiscale level. To solve this problem, a multiscale feature filtering network is proposed in this paper for image (...) recognition system in the UAV. A novel building block, namely, multiscale feature filtering module, is proposed for ResNet-like backbones and it allows feature-selective learning for multiscale context information across multiparallel branches. These branches employ multiple atrous convolutions at different scales, respectively, and further adaptively generate channel-wise feature responses by emphasizing channel-wise dependencies. Experimental results on CIFAR100 and Tiny ImageNet datasets reflect that the MFFNet achieves very competitive results in comparison with previous baseline models. Further ablation experiments verify that the MFFNet can achieve consistent performance gains in image classification and object detection tasks. (shrink)

In the realistic world, various individuals have distinct personalities, preferences, and attitudes toward new information and behavior acceptance, called population heterogeneity. It is seldom taken into account and theoretically analyzed in information propagation on a weighted network. Therefore, we divide individuals into fashionable and conservative individuals according to their passion degree and willingness for novel behaviors acceptance. Then, we build two behavior adoption threshold models corresponding to fashionable and conservative individuals on the weighted network to explore the effect of population (...) heterogeneity on information propagation. Next, a partition theory based on edge weight and population heterogeneity is proposed to qualitatively analyze the information propagation mechanism. The theoretical analyses and simulation results show that fashionable individuals promote information propagation and behavior adoption. More importantly, the crossover phenomena of phase transition appear. When the fraction of fashionable individuals is relatively large, the increasing pattern of the final adoption size shows a second-order continuous phase transition. In comparison, the increasing pattern alters to first-order discontinuous phase transition with the decrease of the fraction of fashionable individuals. Moreover, reducing weight distribution heterogeneity promotes information propagation and slightly accelerates the change of the phase transition pattern from the first-order discontinuous to the second-order continuous. Besides, increasing the degree distribution heterogeneity accelerates the change of the phase transition pattern. Finally, our theoretical analyses coincide well with the simulation results. (shrink)

This study points out that families' support of perseverance in creative efforts will increase children's originality of creative drawing through children's persistence in information searching. Data analysis based on 134 Chinese young children's creative drawings and survey supports the above hypothesis. Moreover, children's exposure to COVID-19 pandemic positively moderates the relationship between supporting perseverance and children's search persistence, such that high exposure to COVID-19 pandemic will increase the positive relationship between support of perseverance and search persistence. And children's prosocial motivation (...) inhibits the influence of search persistence on originality. Contributions to the theory of children's creativity are discussed. (shrink)

In 2011, Jiangsu Province set up the guidance fund for sports industry. In 2016, Jiangsu Provincial Finance Department jointly issued the document with Jiangsu Provincial Sports Bureau, which was changed to “Jiangsu Special Fund for Sports Industry Development.” By 2019, Jiangsu Province has funded 1,009 sports industry development projects with a total investment of 796.6 million yuan. The effect of the investment has attracted extensive attention from the government, society, and enterprises. Entrusted by Jiangsu Sports Industry Guidance Center, this research (...) team spent one year on the performance research of 1,009 projects supported by special funds for the development of sports industry, from the construction of evaluation index system to the design, issuance, collection, and processing of questionnaires. Using the methods of literature, questionnaire, expert interview, and mathematical statistics, this paper takes the performance management of the special funds for the development of sports industry in Jiangsu Province as the research object, based on the investigation and analysis of the current situation of the special funds for the development of sports industry in Jiangsu Province. It analyzes the special funds from four aspects: the rate of funds in place, the ratio of funds pulled, the completion rate of project implementation, and the rate of fund prerecovery. Then, this paper expounds the current situation, effectiveness, and problems of the performance management of the special funds for the development of sports industry and puts forward some countermeasures and suggestions for improvement. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to improve the entrepreneurial performance and sports morality of college teacher-and-student entrepreneurs. Consequently, psychological capital is creatively combined with social and political education to explore college entrepreneurs’ EP and sports morality. First, following a theoretical model implementation, this article proposes several hypotheses. Then, a questionnaire survey was designed, and the data were analyzed. The results show that gender has little impact on EP and sports morality; PsyCap significantly affects the EP of college entrepreneurs at (...) the age of 33–38 years; in terms of educational background, average scores of PsyCap + SPE of bachelors are the highest, followed by masters or above, and finally, the college undergraduate; the average score of PsyCap + SPE of married respondents is 4.0, while that of the unmarried is 3.7; there is a significant difference between college entrepreneurs’ EP under the dimension of the basic enterprise situation; and the average score of the length of entrepreneurship is 9.87, which has the most significant impact on the EP and sports morality, and the significance of sports morality is 0.04. Among them, the most significant impact on EP and sports morality is weekly sports participation, with a score of 9.67. Therefore, PsyCap + SPE plays a positive role in the EP of college entrepreneurs. In contrast, sports morality has little impact on EP. This study provides a reference for the research on the influence of entrepreneurship and sports morality of college entrepreneurs. (shrink)

We construct a nonlow2 r.e. degree d such that every positive extension of embeddings property that holds below every low2 degree holds below d. Indeed, we can also guarantee the converse so that there is a low r.e. degree c such that that the extension of embeddings properties true below c are exactly the ones true belowd.Moreover, we can also guarantee that no b ≤ d is the base of a nonsplitting pair.

Many scholars have investigated education management. Scholars in the education field have made significant achievements in contributing to multiple educational reform policies, while other scholars discuss teacher-related issues from the perspective of organizational behavior. The teaching innovation of high school teachers plays a critical role in students’ learning attitude and motivation, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Teachers need to utilize more diversified teaching methods to enable students to carry out effective learning. In order to examine teachers’ teaching (...) innovation, this study explores teaching innovation intentions and performance from the perspective of individual and social factors in combination with goal-oriented behavior and social identity theory. This study conducts questionnaires with a sample of Chinese coastal high school teachers, and obtains a total of 475 responses. The research results show that innovation attitude, positive anticipated emotion, group norms and social identity positively affect teachers’ teaching innovation intention; furthermore, teachers’ teaching innovation intention also positively affects their teaching innovation performance. Based on the comprehensive research findings, this research proposes corresponding theoretical and practical implications. (shrink)

Due to the non-invasiveness and high precision of electroencephalography, the combination of EEG and artificial intelligence is often used for emotion recognition. However, the internal differences in EEG data have become an obstacle to classification accuracy. To solve this problem, considering labeled data from similar nature but different domains, domain adaptation usually provides an attractive option. Most of the existing researches aggregate the EEG data from different subjects and sessions as a source domain, which ignores the assumption that the source (...) has a certain marginal distribution. Moreover, existing methods often only align the representation distributions extracted from a single structure, and may only contain partial information. Therefore, we propose the multi-source and multi-representation adaptation for cross-domain EEG emotion recognition, which divides the EEG data from different subjects and sessions into multiple domains and aligns the distribution of multiple representations extracted from a hybrid structure. Two datasets, i.e., SEED and SEED IV, are used to validate the proposed method in cross-session and cross-subject transfer scenarios, experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our model to state-of-the-art models in most settings. (shrink)

This study investigates the sampled-data admissibility problem for a singular system. The objective of this paper is to design a sampled-data controller to ensure the admissibility of a singular system and to construct an appropriate Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional to get less conservative results for the sampled-data singular system. To accomplish these objectives, the system is converted into a time-delay system by the input delay approach firstly, and both lower and upper bounds of the delay are considered. Secondly, by introducing a suitable (...) LKF, the admissibility criteria are obtained. Then, when estimating the derivative of the LKF, a relaxation variable is introduced by the method of reciprocally convex inequality, and it is proved that the conservatism is reduced. Finally, two numerical examples are given to prove that the designed sampled-data controller can ensure the states of the systems under the influence of external interference. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to explore the causal relationship among athlete gratitude, athlete engagement, athlete burnout by cross-lag analysis of longitudinal associations. Two questionnaire surveys were conducted on 352 Chinese athletes with an interval of 1 year using gratitude questionnaire, athlete engagement questionnaire and athlete burnout questionnaire. The analysis yielded four main findings. The overall level of athlete gratitude and athlete engagement was high in China. Chinese athletes at master level had higher levels of gratitude and athlete engagement (...) than athletes at I and II grades. Athlete gratitude is a significant negative predictor of athlete burnout, and also a significant positive predictor of athlete engagement. Athlete engagement and athlete burnout are mutually causal and can be mutually predicted. Athlete gratitude indirectly affects athlete burnout through athlete engagement, and also indirectly affects athlete engagement through athlete burnout. The results of the current study demonstrated the important value of gratitude in the growth process of athletes, and clarified the mechanism of gratitude affecting athlete engagement and athlete burnout. These findings have important implications for athlete development by raising athlete gratitude, motivating athlete engagement levels and relieve athlete burnout. (shrink)

Design ethics has been offered as a course in undergraduate design programs in Taiwan for over a decade, but research on teaching design ethics and the results of teaching these courses is scant. We conducted two tests to examine the effect of an ethics course, and the differences among the effects of design department, gender, and study year on student opinions regarding ethical design standards at the National Yunlin University of Science and Technology in Taiwan. The participants comprised 934 undergraduates (...) from the five design departments at YunTech’s College of Design from Years 1–4. The results confirmed the effect of an ethics course on student EDS opinions. In addition, we observed significant variations among students according to design departments, suggesting that the characteristics of the design departments also affected students’ EDS opinions. The results indicated that gender did not significantly affect design students’ EDS opinions; however, students in their early years of study produced higher scores than those in their advanced years of study did, based on the six EDS opinions. The implications of these results for teaching design ethics and future research are discussed in this paper. (shrink)

In the field of natural language processing, the task of sensitive information detection refers to the procedure of identifying sensitive words for given documents. The majority of existing detection methods are based on the sensitive-word tree, which is usually constructed via the common prefixes of different sensitive words from the given corpus. Yet, these traditional methods suffer from a couple of drawbacks, such as poor generalization and low efficiency. For improvement purposes, this paper proposes a novel self-attention-based detection algorithm using (...) the implementation of graph convolutional network. The main contribution is twofold. Firstly, we consider a weighted GCN to better encode word pairs from the given documents and corpus. Secondly, a simple, yet effective, attention mechanism is introduced to further integrate the interaction among candidate words and corpus. Experimental results from the benchmarking dataset of THUC news demonstrate a promising detection performance, compared to existing work. (shrink)

Nonmonotonic causal logic is a knowledge representation language designed for describing domains that involve actions and change. The process of literal completion, similar to program completion familiar from the theory of logic programming, can be used to translate some nonmonotonic causal theories into classical logic. Its applicability is restricted, however, to theories that deal with truth-valued fluents, represented by predicate symbols. In this note we introduce functional completion—a more general process that can be applied to causal theories in which fluents (...) are treated as functions. (shrink)

With the emergence of organ donation and donation technology, the previous indivisibility of the human body becomes divisible, and different human organs form a new life subject. With reference to specific case studies in China, a new life, consisting of donated organs from different bodies by donation, can be called “donated life.” Donated life is a win‐win action between altruism and egoism, that is, to save the lives of others and to regenerate the organs of donors or their relatives. Due (...) to the emergence of this kind of life, traditional social ethics theories based on the marriage‐related family find it difficult to difficult to explain the new realities. Thus, new thinking about social ethics is necessary. (shrink)

The California Verbal Learning Test-Second Edition, is a commonly used tool to assess episodic memory. This study analyzed learning and memory characteristics in a cognitively healthy Chinese population, as well as the effects of age, sex and education on CVLT-II factors. In total, 246 healthy people aged 20–80 years and 29 persons with multiple sclerosis were included in this study and completed the CVLT-II. Factors including total learning, learning strategy, serial position effects, short-delay free and cued recall, long-delay free and (...) cued recall, repetitions and intrusions during recall, hits and false positives of recognition, and total recognition discriminability were calculated. The effects of age, sex and education on these factors were analyzed using ANCOVA or independent two-sample t-tests and further confirmed by multiple regression analysis. The regression-based normative data were then computed by the equivalent scores method. Moreover, differences in learning and memory were compared between persons with MS and age-, sex- and education-matched healthy individuals. Most CVLT-II factors significantly differed between different age and education groups; in particular, better performance in total learning, recall, semantic clustering and recognition was observed in the younger and more educated groups than in the older and less educated groups. Male participants showed higher recency effect scores, more repetitions and fewer hits than female participants. Compared with healthy individuals, persons with MS showed extensive impairments in memory processes, such as learning, recall, learning strategy and recognition. These findings indicated that verbal learning and memory were highly dependent on age and educational level but not strongly affected by sex. The CVLT-II effectively assesses episodic memory impairment in the Chinese-speaking population. (shrink)

The brain-computer interface based on functional near-infrared spectroscopy has received more and more attention due to its vast application potential in emotion recognition. However, the relatively insufficient investigation of the feature extraction algorithms limits its use in practice. In this article, to improve the performance of fNIRS-based BCI, we proposed a method named R-CSP-E, which introduces EEG signals when computing fNIRS signals’ features based on transfer learning and ensemble learning theory. In detail, we used the Independent Component Analysis algorithm for (...) the correspondence between the sources of the two signals. We then introduced the EEG signals when computing the spatial filter based on a modified Common Spatial Pattern algorithm. Experimental results on public datasets show that the proposed method in this paper outperforms traditional methods without transfer. In general, the mean classification accuracy can be increased by up to 5%. To our knowledge, it is an innovation that we tried to apply transfer learning between EEG and fNIRS. Our study’s findings not only prove the potential of the transfer learning algorithm in cross-model brain-computer interface, but also offer a new and innovative perspective to research the hybrid brain-computer interface. (shrink)

The political environment has a significant impact on the sustainable development of enterprises. This manuscript aims to investigate the effect of policy uncertainty and official social capital on enterprises’ effective tax rate due to the change of officials. Based on the panel data from the Chinese Industrial Enterprise Database from 1998 to 2009, it is shown that the policy uncertainty caused by the change of local government officials significantly increases the ETR of enterprises. Meanwhile, municipal officials who have social ties (...) with provincial officials in their province also tend to raise the ETR of industrial enterprises, and this tendency is more evident when the officials take office. Further research shows that the effects vary in many aspects for policy uncertainty and social capital on the ETR of enterprises. The findings of this manuscript provide support for a deeper understanding of the change in local government fiscal policies and give suggestions to strengthen political environmental governance for the sustainable development of enterprises. (shrink)

Environmental sustainability has become the need of the hour and has been emphasized immensely because of the increased environmental awareness and resulting problems caused due to negligence. This study has intended to determine the role of knowledge management practices in achieving a sustainable environment with the mediating role of environmental awareness and green technological use. The study further examined the moderating role of green innovative culture between the relationship of KM practices and a sustainable environment. The data were acquired from (...) 378 managerial level personnel of the construction industry in China through questionnaires. Smart-PLS 3.3.3 was used to determine the study's hypothesis through the structural equation modeling technique. The study found that KM practice has a significant relationship with a sustainable environment, environmental awareness, and green technological use. Also, environmental awareness has a significant effect on a sustainable environment. Moreover, it was found in the study that environmental awareness significantly mediated the relationship between KM practices and sustainable environment, but green technological use did not find any mediating effect on the relationship between KM practices and sustainable environment. Furthermore, green innovative culture considerably moderated the relationship between KM practices and a sustainable environment. Theoretically, this study contributes to the existing literature by incorporating and investigating the role of KM practices in a sustainable environment. Practically, this article presented some implications for the management concerning promoting KM practices and environmental awareness within the organization and developing a green innovative culture. (shrink)

The present study examined the effects of transcranial direct current stimulation using Halo Sport on the time to exhaustion in relation with muscle activities and corticomuscular coupling of agonist and antagonist muscles during a sustained isometric fatiguing contraction performed with the elbow flexors. Twenty healthy male college students were randomly assigned to tDCS group and control group. The two group participants performed two experimental sessions which consisted of pre-fatigue isometric maximal voluntary contraction, sustained submaximal voluntary contractions performed to exhaustion, and (...) post-fatigue MVC with the right elbow flexor muscles. Sham stimulation and tDCS were applied for control and tDCS group participants 20 min prior to the second session test, respectively. MVC strength in pre- and post-fatigue test, TTE, electroencephalogram, and electromyography of biceps brachii and triceps brachii were recorded during the tests. It was found that tDCS using the Halo Sport device significantly increased TTE and thus improved muscular endurance performance. The improvement may be partly related to the improvement of neuromuscular efficiency as reflected by decrease of antagonistic muscle coactivation activities, which may be related to cortical originated central processing mechanism of neuromuscular activities. (shrink)