The primary objective of the present research was to explore the statistical predictive power of thinking styles in coping strategies beyond demographic factors. One hundred and forty-eight mainland postgraduate students were administered to the Thinking Styles Inventory-Revised II and the Coping Orientation to Problems Experienced Revised. Results indicated that Type I thinking styles primarily predicted adaptive coping strategies, while Type II thinking styles positively contributed to maladaptive coping strategies. Results in the present research were largely in the expected directions beyond (...) the influence of demographic factors. Furthermore, thinking styles varied as a function of age, gender, gender-role orientation, and marital status. Implications for postgraduate students, academics, university administrators, and the limitations of the research, are discussed. (shrink)

Pronatalist policies, once regarded as a solution to declining fertility rates, face mounting scrutiny as they intersect with complex sociocultural dynamics across societies. Recent United Nations (UN) projections (2024) highlight an irreversible demographic trend: East Asian nations, exemplified by South Korea’s record-low fertility rate of 0.72, represent a global shift towards subreplacement fertility, as shown in figure 1.1 Lee’s analysis critiques pronatalist policies’ limitations, arguing that cash incentives and other state-sponsored measures merely mask systemic inequities while reinforcing paternalistic norms.2 This (...) commentary extends Lee’s critique by identifying a fundamental contradiction: welfare-driven pronatalist policies risk exacerbating inequities by diverting resources from broader well-being priorities. UN data show that even substantial pronatalist spending—as evidenced by South Korea’s $270 billion expenditure since 2008—fails to counter structural forces driving fertility decline,2 such as gendered labour disparities and rising single-person households. This paradox necessitates a paradigm shift from population sustainability—a relic of Malthusian anxieties—to population well-being, prioritising inclusive social services over demographic engineering. By anchoring this argument in the latest demographic evidence, we challenge policymakers to confront the ethical imperative of reallocating resources towards underserved groups, whose marginalisation is both a cause and consequence of pronatalism’s narrow calculus. Figure 1 Changes and projections of total fertility rate (live births per woman) in East Asia representative countries (1950–2050). *These data do not include …. (shrink)

Nowadays, depression is the world’s major health concern and economic burden worldwide. However, due to the limitations of current methods for depression diagnosis, a pervasive and objective approach is essential. In the present study, a psychophysiological database, containing 213 subjects, was constructed. The electroencephalogram signals of all participants under resting state and sound stimulation were collected using a pervasive prefrontal-lobe three-electrode EEG system at Fp1, Fp2, and Fpz electrode sites. After denoising using the Finite Impulse Response filter combining the Kalman (...) derivation formula, Discrete Wavelet Transformation, and an Adaptive Predictor Filter, a total of 270 linear and nonlinear features were extracted. Then, the minimal-redundancy-maximal-relevance feature selection technique reduced the dimensionality of the feature space. Four classification methods distinguished the depressed participants from normal controls. The classifiers’ performances were evaluated using 10-fold cross-validation. The results showed thatK-Nearest Neighbor had the highest accuracy of 79.27%. The result also suggested that the absolute power of the theta wave might be a valid characteristic for discriminating depression. This study proves the feasibility of a pervasive three-electrode EEG acquisition system for depression diagnosis. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This research aims to clarify the relationship between creativity and dishonesty. Study 1 examined whether creativity primed by the scrambled sentence test could influence dishonesty. The results showed that primed individuals were less likely to act dishonestly. Study 2 investigated the association between creative style and spontaneous and instructed dishonesty. Rule-followers more often implemented spontaneous dishonest behavior but showed low accuracy in instructed lying tasks. The findings expand our understanding of the correlation between creativity and unethical behavior, which may (...) improve moral creative talents. (shrink)

Green housing is a new type of building that advocates energy saving and environmental protection. How to stimulate buyers to buy green housing under the background of high cost is the key problem to guide green consumption. First of all, based on the existing literature, the comment of homebuyers was divided into comment quantity, comment quality, comment titer and evaluator credibility. The psychological distance mediation variable was introduced, and three dimensions of time distance, social distance, and space distance were selected (...) to construct the influence model of homebuyer comment on green housing purchase intention. Meanwhile, the concept model was built, and questionnaires were adopted for empirical analysis. On this basis, considering the long-term purchase behavior of buyers, the influence model of homebuyers' second comment on green housing purchase intention with the Hotelling model was established. The results show that comment quality, comment titer, and the credit rating of the evaluator have a positive effect on green housing purchase intention while comment quantity has no significant effect. Psychological distance plays a mediation role between comment quality, comment titer, the credit rating of the evaluator, and green housing purchase intention while having a mediation effect between comment quantity and green housing purchase intention. In the long-term purchase behavior of green housing, psychological distance plays a greater role than price. At last, some suggestions were proposed. (shrink)

A completeness theory for parameterized computational complexity has been studied in a series of recent papers, and has been shown to have many applications in diverse problem domains including familiar graph-theoretic problems, VLSI layout, games, computational biology, cryptography, and computational learning [ADF,BDHW,BFH, DEF,DF1-7,FHW,FK]. We here study the parameterized complexity of two kinds of problems: (1) problems concerning parameterized computations of Turing machines, such as determining whether a nondeterministic machine can reach an accept state in \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} (...) \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} $k$\end{document} steps (the Short TM Computation Problem), and (2) problems concerning derivations and factorizations, such as determining whether a word \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} $x$\end{document} can be derived in a grammar \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} $G$\end{document} in \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} $k$\end{document} steps, or whether a permutation has a factorization of length \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} $k$\end{document} over a given set of generators. We show hardness and completeness for these problems for various levels of the \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} $W$\end{document} hierarchy. In particular, we show that Short TM Computation is complete for \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} $W[1]$\end{document}. This gives a new and useful characterization of the most important of the apparently intractable parameterized complexity classes. (shrink)

We provide insight into how firms’ trade credit decisions respond to the coevolution of business ethics practices, technological innovation, and institutional reform for firms located in pilot cities of China’s social credit reform. The reform implements an external monitoring mechanism that potentially shifts the business ethics frontier by punishing or rewarding certain (un)ethical credit behaviors. Following the reform, pilot city firms enjoy greater access to trade credit financing. Three plausible channels include reduced default risk, improved information quality, and enhanced legal (...) protection. Suppliers provide more credit to young, small, private, politically unconnected firms, and those with geographically distant suppliers. Finally, we illustrate how increased access to trade credit translates into tangible strategic and performance benefits. Overall, this study underscores the importance of aligning business ethics practices with evolving societal values and technological advancements to facilitate companies’ willingness to provide trade credit within emerging markets. (shrink)

In the famous ‘Fragment on Machines’ of the ‘Grundrisse’, Marx points out how social or collective knowledge (the ‘general intellect’) has become a ‘direct force of production’ through its embodiment into technical devices. The rhetorical wording ‘artificial intelligence’, with its own misleading anthropomorphic connotations, looks, from a Marxist perspective, the apex of this process in which knowledge becomes the core of the fixed capital that ideally must be re-appropriated by the workers. In this context, AI Art appears as one of (...) the many expressions of the commodification of the collective knowledge in which, for using the expression of Guy Debord, ‘all that was once lived has moved into representation for being commodified’. However, the progressive availability of AI tools for generating art also opens the doors to a ‘detournement’ strategy by allowing a decolonization of the artistic scenario in which each of us becomes the ‘author’ without being the author. Maybe in future, rather than asking ‘who is the author?’ we will find ourselves asking ‘what is the author?’. A move of this kind achieves automatically the ‘death of the author’, with the corresponding subversion of the notions of artistic intention, authorship, and genius, while disrupting the present commodification process behind the artistic ecosystem, in a fashion beyond the best intentions of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Art in the age of mechanical reproduction’. This move is ultimately disruptive from a metaphysical point of view as well to the extent that the human centrality is dispossessed by the recognition of forms of creativity different from our own creativity. (shrink)

Participation in service-learning courses has always been considered a part of the informal education in tertiary education worldwide. Originating from the assumption that service-learning courses increase students’ civic engagement and bridge the gap between knowledge and practice, service-learning courses have gradually acquired the status of compulsory courses at universities. This being as it may be, it would seem that the nature of such courses would benefit from further analysis and discussion regarding their function in knowledge reproduction, and their role in (...) teaching and education. The aim of this article is to examine and analyze a university service-learning course—the National Taiwan University Star-Rain course with a commitment to serving children with autism—from a Foucaultian perspective, and reflect on how the process of putting knowledge during a service-learning course into practice comes to constitute the subjectivity of students who work with children who are autistic. We argue that the course under investigation has, in effect, become wholly entangled in the medical system’s treatment of autism in Taiwan. The service-learning process involves knowledge acquisition as well as long-term, detailed, concrete hands-on experience, and shapes, in a very complete way, students’ construction of their subject knowledge of autism. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine the pioneering research on electronic noise—the current fluctuations in electronic circuit devices due to their intrinsic physical characteristics rather than their defects—in Germany and the U.S. during the 1910s–1920s. Such research was not just another demonstration of the general randomness of the physical world Einstein’s work on Brownian motion had revealed. In contrast, we stress the importance of a particular engineering context to electronic noise studies: the motivation to design and improve high-gain thermionic-tube amplifiers for (...) radio and wired communications. Engineering scientists’ endeavors to understand electronic noise started in 1918, when Walter Schottky at Siemens formulated a theory of “shot noise,” current fluctuations owing to the random emissions of discrete electrons in a tube. Schottky’s theory was revised and experimentally tested at Siemens, General Electric, and AT&T during the 1920s, leading to the discoveries of several other types of noise and an increasing interest in the thermal fluctuations in electronic circuits. In 1925–1928, J.B. Johnson and Harry Nyquist at Bell Labs developed a theory of thermal noise for any electrical resistor at a non-zero temperature. Although these studies were initiated to chart the fundamental performance limit of electronic technology, they ended up assisting the empirical determination of individual electronic components’ characteristics. (shrink)

Xi Chen explores the question of why there has been a dramatic rise in and routinization of social protests in China since the early 1990s. Drawing on case studies, in-depth interviews and a unique data set of about 1,000 government records of collective petitions, this book examines how the political structure in Reform China has encouraged Chinese farmers, workers, pensioners, disabled people and demobilized soldiers to pursue their interests and claim their rights by staging collective protests. Chen suggests (...) that routinized contentious bargaining between the government and ordinary people has remedied the weaknesses of the Chinese political system and contributed to the regime's resilience. Social Protest and Contentious Authoritarianism in China challenges the conventional wisdom that authoritarian regimes always repress popular collective protest and that popular collective action tends to destabilize authoritarian regimes. (shrink)

This article analyses and compares the classical science fiction film Blade Runner and its recent sequel Blade Runner 2049 from the perspective of Zizek's subjectivity theory. Through Zizek's tracing and weaving the concept of subjectivity from Descartes' radical doubt to metaphysical subject and then death drive in Lacanian psychoanalysis, it will argue that the principle concern of this film is the issue of subjectivity, and while carefully scrutinizing replicants in the films with the multi-faceted conception of Zizekian subject, a detailed (...) comparison between these two films could be accomplished. Subsequently, by analyzing from the genre, namely noir and cyberpunk, it will point out the world delineated in both film is a claustrophobic and paranoid one, as well as a postmodern multicultural world. The denizens of this world lead a machine-like and unreflecting life due to the decline of the Big Other. Finally, by associating subjectivity with death drive, the ultimate significance of subjectivity is revealed as a weapon to antagonize the repressing symbolic order and redeem our world from an apocalyptic future presaged in the films. (shrink)

本书内容包括:“法律政治人——人的光明,法的黑暗”;“再论律师——朦胧选项里的清楚选择”;“检察官——正义守卫或贪腐共犯”;“再论检察官——人与制度的双面期待”等。.

本書以習近平關於意識形態安全問題的一系列重要論述為指導，按照從一般到特殊、從理論到現實的邏輯脈絡，以理論闡述為基礎，以現實問題為參照，準確界定意識形態安全概念，重點把握國家意識形態安全風險演變特點，全 面分析互聯網時代影響中國意識形態安全的複雜因素，提出牢牢掌握互聯網時代維護中國意識形態安全戰略主動權的對策措施，試圖建構研究互聯網時代中國意識形態安全問題的完整理論框架，具有一定理論價值和現實意義。.

本书分四编,分别论述了教育价值的实质,回答教育价值是什么的问题以及教育价值的理论基础;教育价值观念;教育价值创造,着重论述教育价值的形成以及教育评价等内容。.

本书在阐明科技异化内涵的基础上,追溯了科技异化的历史,从社会制度、利益矛盾、现代性等角度分析科技异化产生的根源,并探讨了消除科技异化的具体途径。.