Social networks are widely used as a fast and ubiquitous information-sharing medium. The mass spread of food rumours has seriously invaded public’s healthy life and impacted food production. It can be argued that the government, companies, and the media have the responsibility to send true anti-rumour messages to reduce panic, and the risks involved in different forms of communication to the public have not been properly assessed. The manuscript develops an empirical analysis model from 683 food anti-rumour cases and 7,967 (...) data of the users with top comments to test the influence of the strength of rumour/anti-rumour on rumour control. Furthermore, dividing the users into three categories, Leaders, Chatters, and General Public, and study the influence of human characteristics on the relationship between the strength of rumour/anti-rumour and rumour control by considering the different human characteristics as moderator variables. The results showed that anti-rumours have a significant positive impact on the control of rumours; the ambiguity of rumours has a significant negative impact on the Positive Comment Index in rumour control. Further, the Leaders increased the overall level of PCI, but negatively adjusted the relationship between evidence and PCI; the Chatters and the General Public reduced the overall level of PCI, and Chatters weakened the relationship between the specific type of anti-rumour form and PCI while the General Public enhanced the relationship between the specific type of anti-rumour form and PCI. In the long run, the role of Leaders needs to be further improved, and the importance of the General Public is growing in the food rumour control process. (shrink)

In past studies, the few quantitative approaches to discourse structure were mostly confined to the presentation of the frequency of discourse relations. However, quantitative approaches should take into account both hierarchical and relational layers in the discourse structure. This study considers these factors and addresses the issue of how discourse relations and discourse units are related. It draws upon the available corpora of discourse structure ) from a new perspective. Since an RST tree can be converted into a syntactic dependency (...) tree, the data extracted from the RST-DT can be useful for calculating the discourse distance in much the same way as syntactic dependency distance is calculated. Discourse distance is also applicable to measuring the depth of the human processing of discourse. Furthermore, the data derived from the RST-DT are also easily converted into network data. This study finds that discourse structure has its discourse distance minimum and each type of RST relations has its range of discourse distance. The frequency distribution of discourse data basically follows the power law on several levels, while a network approach reveals how discourse units are arranged spatially in regular patterns. The two methods are mutually complementary in revealing the interaction between discourse relations and discourse units in a comprehensive manner, as well as in revealing how people process and comprehend discourse dynamically. Accordingly, we propose merging the two methods so as to yield a computational model for assessing discourse complexity and comprehension. (shrink)

How does internet censorship work in China, and how does it reflect the Chinese state’s logic of governing society? An online political publication, Global China, was created by the authors, and the pattern and record of articles being censored was analyzed. Using results from A/b tests on the articles and interviews with relevant officials, the article shows that the state employs delegated censorship, outsourcing significant responsibility to private internet companies and applying levels of scrutiny based on timing, targets, and stage (...) of publication. The dynamic, layered, multistage censorship regime creates significant variation and flexibility across the Chinese internet, most often in decisions about what to censor. This approach aims to maintain regime stability and legitimacy while minimizing costs. Rather than blocking all information and players, the state recognizes its technical and bureaucratic limits but also realizes the benefits of a degree of toleration. Delegated censorship utilizes both power control and power sharing and offers a new understanding of authoritarian state-society relations. (shrink)

With the increasing proportion of the logistics industry in the economy, the study of the vehicle routing problem has practical significance for economic development. Based on the vehicle routing problem, the customer presence probability data are introduced as an uncertain random parameter, and the VRP model of uncertain customers is established. By optimizing the robust uncertainty model, combined with a data-driven kernel density estimation method, the distribution feature set of historical data samples can then be fitted, and finally, a distributed (...) robust vehicle routing model for uncertain customers is established. The Q-learning algorithm in reinforcement learning is introduced into the high-level selection strategy using the hyper-heuristic algorithm, and a hyper-heuristic algorithm based on the Q-learning algorithm is designed to solve the problem. Compared with the certain method, the distributed robust model can effectively reduce the total cost and the robust conservatism while ensuring customer satisfaction. The improved algorithm also has good performance. (shrink)

A reciprocal relation has been identified between teacher emotion and teacher professional identity. However, the underlying mechanism explaining this complex interaction remains underexamined. Moreover, limited attention has been paid to the emotional dimension of student-teachers' development of professional identity during university coursework. To bridge this gap, the present study explores how student-teachers' emotions reciprocally interact with their professional identities, drawing data from questionnaires, reflections, and interviews with students taking courses related to language teaching in a teacher-training university. Both quantitative and (...) qualitative data delineated the intertwined trajectories of student-teachers' emotional experiences and the development of professional identity in the learning process of becoming teachers. Mainly triggered by course-related factors, student-teachers experienced a wide array of emotions, of which the polarity and intensity were determined and mediated by their goals and actions deriving from their professional identities. Those aroused emotions, in turn, signaled the developmental process of professional identity and promoted or hindered their emerging identities. This paper concludes with some implications for initial teacher education programs. (shrink)

The extant pieces of literature on discretion has mainly focused on its effect on policy implementation and public service delivery, but few studies have looked at its influence on street-level bureaucrats' work behavior, such as taking charge behavior, which is of great importance for government reforms, especially in developing and transitional countries. Based on the self-determination theory, this study examines whether and how discretion promotes street-level bureaucrats' TCB. Two studies were conducted among street-level bureaucrats in China. First, a survey experiment (...) suggests that discretion positively predicts street-level bureaucrats' TCB. Then, a survey questionnaire study shows that discretion is positively related to TCB through the mediator of public service motivation. We concluded with implications for theory and practice. (shrink)

The correct use of connectives has great influence on language learners’ writing proficiency, while errors of connectives are common in foreign learners’ interlanguages. This study examines the types of errors that occur in native English-speaking learners’ Chinese writing, the possible causes for the errors, and the learners’ consequent learning strategies. The present research adopted corpora investigation, questionnaire survey, and focus-group interviews to examine the error types, causes of identified errors, and related learning strategies. Data analysis indicated that: the main error (...) types made by native English-speaking learners from high to low are misuse, overuse, mismatch, misplacement, and underuse of connectives; causes related to intralingual transfer greatly contributes to the presence of errors; and memory, social, and cognitive strategies were the most preferred, followed by metacognitive and compensation strategies, and then by effective strategies which were the least preferred. These findings showed that different strategies can be employed to cope with different errors in writing. The study further suggests that teachers and educators need to help native English-speaking learners find strategies that work best for them in terms of learning Chinese connectives. (shrink)

The wanton dissemination of network pseudohealth information has brought great harm to people’s health, life, and property. It is important to detect and identify network pseudohealth information. Based on this, this paper defines the concepts of pseudohealth information, data block, and data block integration, designs an architecture that combines the latent Dirichlet allocation algorithm and data block update integration, and proposes the combination algorithm model. In addition, crawler technology is used to crawl the pseudohealth information transmitted on the Sina Weibo (...) platform during the “epidemic situation” from February to March 2020 for the simulation test on the experimental case dataset. The research results show that the LDA model can deeply mine the semantic information of network pseudohealth information, obtain the features of document-topic distribution, and classify and train topic features as input variables; the dataset partitioning method can effectively block data according to the text attributes and class labels of network pseudohealth information and can accurately classify and integrate the block data through the data block reintegration method; and considering that the combination model has certain limitations on the detection of network pseudohealth information, the support vector machine model can extract the granularity content of data blocks in pseudohealth information in real time, thus greatly improving the recognition performance of the combination model. (shrink)

***Translated a Korean-language book to English with Dr. Chang-Seong Hong*** Venerable Hyun-Eung's Enlightenment and History is the first book of Buddhist philosophy of history published in South Korea; possibly the first of its kind in the world. In this book of telling points and clear visions, Hyun-Eung discusses East Asian Buddhist traditions in light of Western-philosophical perspectives and presents his views on the theory and praxis in contemporary Buddhism in a way that Western readers can easily understand. East Asian Buddhist (...) philosophy has had little introduction to English-speaking societies compared with the philosophies of other traditions in Buddhism. This book provides penetrating insight into such major issues of East Asian Mahayana Buddhism as enlightenment, compassion, emptiness, and sudden enlightenment in the Zen traditions. Hyun-Eung s approach is creative, clear, logical, and methodologically modernized. Hyun-Eung s Buddhist philosophy of history is not a mere product of armchair philosophy. He wrote most essays in this book during the 1980 s while South Korea was undergoing serious political turmoil as it tried to overthrow a government backed by military generals. This book presents a philosophy that evolved from his contemplations on the real issues of South Korean society. Defining the ideal form of life as the life of bodhisattva in Mahayana Buddhism, Hyun-Eung summarizes the theme of this book as follows: My book Enlightenment and History is a collection of essays that interpret Buddhist doctrines under a new light. In particular, this book interprets bodhisattva as the combination of bodhi (enlightenment) and sattva (life, history), and defines the life of bodhisattva as enlightenment s becoming history and history s becoming enlightenment. This is the representative of all the new interpretations in this book. Also, I classify the issue of fact judgments on how to understand facts and phenomena as the area of bodhi (enlightenment) and the issue of value judgments on how to live life as the area of sattva (history), and thereby I make their logical differences clear. However, at the same time, I claim that harmonizing these two areas into one area of life is the model of a nice and practical life, which is the bodhisattva that Mahayana Buddhism praises. From Introduction. (shrink)

Like Machiavelli's The Prince and the Japanese Book of Five Rings, Sun Tzu's The Art of War is as timely for business people today as it was for military strategists in ancient China. Written in China more than 2,000 years ago, Sun Tzu's classic The Art of War is the first known study of the planning and conduct of military operations. These terse, aphoristic essays are unsurpassed in comprehensiveness and depth of understanding, examining not only battlefield maneuvers, but also relevant (...) economic, political, and psychological factors. Indeed, the precepts outlined by Sun Tzu regularly applied outside the realm of military theory. It is read avidly by Japanese businessmen and was touted in the movie Wall Street as the corporate raider's bible. Providing a much-needed translation of this classic, Samuel Griffith has made this powerful and unique work even more relevant to the modern world. Including an explanatory introduction and selected commentaries on the work, this edition makes Sun Tzu's strategical and tactical principles accessible not only students of Chinese history competition. (shrink)