The newest innovation in assisted reproduction is oocyte cryopreservation, more commonly known as egg freezing, which has been developed as a method of fertility preservation. Studies emerging from around the world show that highly educated professional women are turning to egg freezing in their late thirties to early forties, because they are still searching for a male partner with whom to have children. For these women, egg freezing may be a new “hope technology” for future romance; but it may also (...) be a “technology of despair,” as women navigate the ends of a failing relationship. Based on the largest ethnographic study to date, undertaken with 150 women who froze their eggs for nonmedical reasons in the United States and Israel, we examine egg freezing at the end of romance. Relationship dissolution—involving divorce, separation, broken engagements, and relationship breakups from men who are unfaithful, controlling, rejecting, uncommitted, or unready for fatherhood—is one of the major pathways to egg freezing. When such relationship dissolution ruptures a woman’s reproductive life course, egg freezing may become a “technology of repair,” allowing women to find new strengths and opportunities as well as new visions for the future. (shrink)

Globalization and informatization are reshaping human life and social behaviors. The purpose is to explore the worldwide strategies to cultivate international talents with a global vision. As a global language with the largest population, English, and especially its learning effect, have always been the major concerns of scholars and educators. This work innovatively studies the combination of immersion-based English teaching with virtual reality technology. Then, based on the experimental design mode, 106 students from a Chinese school were selected for a (...) quasi-experimental study for 16 weeks. The collected data were analyzed by computer statistical software, and hypotheses are verified. The results showed that there is a significantly positive correlation between VR and immersion-based language teaching. There is a significantly positive correlation between immersion-based language teaching and academic achievement, and VR is positively correlated with learning outcome. Compared with other state-of-art research methods, this work modifies the students’ oral test through the analysis and comparison with the system database, and the students’ learning effect is greatly improved. Finally, some suggestions are put forward according to the research results to provide an experimental reference for English teachers and future linguistics teaching. (shrink)

PurposeTo explore the changes of cerebral blood flow and fractional anisotropy in stroke patients with motor dysfunction after repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation treatment, and to better understand the role of rTMS on motor rehabilitation of subcortical stroke patients from the perfusion and structural level.Materials and MethodsIn total, 23 first-episode acute ischemic stroke patients and sixteen healthy controls were included. The patients were divided into the rTMS and sham group. The rehabilitation assessments and examination of perfusion and structural MRI were performed (...) before and after rTMS therapy for each patient. Voxel-based analysis was used to detect the difference in CBF and FA among all three groups. The Pearson correlation analysis was conducted to evaluate the relationship between the CBF/FA value and the motor scales.ResultsAfter rTMS, significantly increased CBF was found in the ipsilesional supplementary motor area, postcentral gyrus, precentral gyrus, pons, medulla oblongata, contralesional midbrain, superior cerebellar peduncle, and middle cerebellar peduncle compared to that during the prestimulation and in the sham group, these fasciculi comprise the cortex-pontine-cerebellum-cortex loop. Besides, altered CBF in the ipsilesional precentral gyrus, postcentral gyrus, and pons was positively associated with the improved Fugl-Meyer assessment scores. Significantly decreased FA was found in the contralesional precentral gyrus, increased FA was found in the ipsilesional postcentral gyrus, precentral gyrus, contralesional supplementary motor area, and bilateral cerebellum, these fasciculi comprise the corticospinal tract. The change of FMA score was positively correlated with altered FA value in the ipsilesional postcentral gyrus and negatively correlated with altered FA value in the contralesional precentral gyrus.ConclusionOur results suggested that rTMS could facilitate the motor recovery of stroke patients. High frequency could promote the improvement of functional activity of ipsilesional CPC loop and the recovery of the microstructure of CST. (shrink)

BackgroundThe rating of perceived exertion scales with respiratory and muscular illustrations are recognized as simple and practical methods to understand individual psychometric characteristics in breathing and muscle exertion during exercise. However, the implementation of respiratory and muscular RPE to quantify training load in futsal training camps has not been examined. This study investigates respiratory and muscular RPE relationships during domestic training camps and overseas training camps in an under 20 futsal national team.MethodsData collected from eleven field players were used for (...) comparison in this study. All players reported Borg CR10 RPE and 7-scales respiratory RPE and muscular RPE after training sessions and matches. Additionally, total distance covered and training impulse were used to quantify external and internal loads via the Polar Team Pro system. Paired-sample t-tests were used to compare the RPECR10, RPErespiration, RPEmuscle, TD, and TRIMP between DTC and OTC. Furthermore, linear regression was performed to determine the relationships among all RPE scales, TD, and TRIMP.ResultsThe RPECR10, TD, and TRIMP showed significant difference between DTC and OTC. Furthermore, linear regression analyses showed significant correlation between RPErespiration and RPEmuscle, RPECR10 and RPErespiration, and RPECR10 and RPEmuscle.ConclusionPictorial RPErespiration or RPEmuscle can be used as an alternative to quantify perceived measures of internal loads during DTC and OTC in futsal players. Interpretation of perceived measures of training load and cardiac-related responses in association with external training loads during short-term training camps would be useful in further understanding the demands of futsal players’ experience in these circumstances. (shrink)

Expletive pronouns have posed significant challenges to both linguistic studies and natural language processing in Chinese. Based on the data from the Chinese corpus at the Center for Chinese Linguistics of Peking University, this paper investigates the automatic dependency parsing errors of expletive ta and relative constructions and provides a detailed quantitative analysis of the characteristics of the constructions in question. The findings not only provide evidence to show that even in radical pro-drop languages such as Mandarin, pleonastics can occur (...) in both object and subject positions but also offer important insights for Chinese natural language processing. (shrink)

In service marketing, AI assistants and self-service technology have become popular. As a result, it is critical to enrich the understanding of whether consumers react differently in the artificial intelligence service context in comparison with the human service context. This study examines the effect of assistant type on consumers’ decision-making. Through three experiments, this research finds that variety seeking will be higher when consumers are making decision in AI service environment. Furthermore, we tested uncertainty as the underlying mechanism. Moreover, we (...) demonstrated that this pattern is moderated by situational involvement. Specifically, in consumption contexts of high involvement, the consumers are less likely to seek variety, and in consumption contexts of low involvement, they prefer more variety. This research offers service providers new insights by revealing how, why, and when the interaction of AI technology influences consumers’ decision-making in service marketing. (shrink)

Codes are mechanisms in which signs are actualized. They relate various sign sides to each other. These sign sides can be represented as heterogeneities (diversity, relations, differences), some are organized with the help of various differences – identities formulated in a specific way. The basis of the codes of visual perception and art are primarily the heterogeneities of the elements perceived directly (contours of objects, sizes, directions of movement, light and color irritants, etc.). A structure, conceived of as a manner (...) of connection, is a principle for constructing a kind of a whole and is the center of an organized heterogeneity. (shrink)

We present a decision procedure for the ∀∃ theory of the lattice of Σ1 sentences of Peano Arithmetic.

In my dissertation "Kant, Wordsworth, and the Aesthetic Experience," I explore the poetic and political implications of the Kantian aesthetic experience, and use them implicitly for a new reading of Wordsworth's poetry. The dissertation begins by considering Kant's view that beauty and sublimity are what may potentially occur inside each and every one of us in our interaction with any given object rather than what exists outside us in the external world. Emphasizing the reading activity of the spectator rather than (...) the creative endeavor of either divine or secular genius, Kant's depiction of art as a certain subjective and universal experience seems to make possible an analogical discussion of the democratic right and responsibility. Guided by this insight, I examine Wordsworth's similar preference of feeling developed in his poetry over the action and situation, and trace his innovation in both the Lyrical Ballads and The Prelude to instances where the literal text fails to make sense but where that very failure paradoxically produces the possibility of meaning through a certain self-critical inward turn of the narrator/poet/reader outside the narrative. Through the movement from sound , to silence , and to the concurrent possibility of new sound , Wordsworth seems to express his ambivalence toward the conception of poetry as a fixed linguistic construct. Transforming the failure of the literal text into the success of the reading activity, Wordsworth also seems to produce a new kind of reader-oriented poetry which both resembles the French Revolution in its egalitarian aspirations and differs from it in directing its energy not toward any external object but to the moral and cognitive capabilities of the poet himself and his readers. But the ambiguity of sound and silence also tempts Wordsworth at times into championing a certain mythical return to the silence of nature and human infancy, and this self-sacrificial impulse of his poetry and his awareness of it seem to be responsible for the complications and ironies of his creative aspiration and achievement. (shrink)

Article seeks to explain the resistance to China's agricultural collectivization movement in the relative lack of experience with the Soviet Union, by contrast, the collectivization of agriculture far encountered great social resistance. This analysis of five factors: the impact of land reform; innovative class system; social control system; the party's primary structure; legalization of words. Analysis of these factors in rural China, "climax" is an organization's success: the organizers are dense, united and effective, is scattered by the organizers, subordination and (...) standstill in space, by pointing to the success of the history of mass mobilization experience and symbolic words, both of which link up well. This paper tries to explain the relative lack of resistance during China's agricultural collectivization campaign, in contrast to the Soviet Union experience in which agricultural collectivization encountered much heavier social resistance. Five factors are analysed: the effects of the Land Reform; the innovative class system; the social control system; th basic-level Party apparatus; the legitimizing discourse. Analyses of these factors reveal that the High Tide in rural China was an organizational success: the organizers were dense, cohesive and efficient, the organized were divided, dependent and spatially paralysed, and the two were well connected through historical experiences and symbolic discourse, all of which point to the success of mass mobilization. (shrink)

We develop measure theory in the context of subsystems of second order arithmetic with restricted induction. We introduce a combinatorial principleWWKL (weak-weak König's lemma) and prove that it is strictly weaker thanWKL (weak König's lemma). We show thatWWKL is equivalent to a formal version of the statement that Lebesgue measure is countably additive on open sets. We also show thatWWKL is equivalent to a formal version of the statement that any Borel measure on a compact metric space is countably additive (...) on open sets. (shrink)

Starting from the many-world interpretation of quantum mechanics, this work gives a holistic view of consciousness. The entirety is complete and does not possess any particular physical properties or subjective experience. It is the superposition of all possibilities. Its partition, however, gives rise to physical properties and subjective experience simultaneously. They play complementary roles to each other. The latter cannot be conveyed to a third person, and cannot be reduced to the former. It in fact fills the informational gap which (...) is impossible for the former to fill. The casual effect and the privilege of subjective experience are related to the role it plays, which is to identify the subject's self location. (shrink)

Knowledge graphs entity typing aims to predict the potential types to an entity, that is,. Recently, several embedding models are proposed for KG entity types prediction according to the existing typing information of the tuples in KGs. However, most of them unreasonably assume that all existing entity typing instances in KGs are completely correct, which ignore the nonnegligible entity type noises and may lead to potential errors for the downstream tasks. To address this problem, we propose ConfE, a novel confidence-aware (...) embedding approach for modeling the tuples, which takes tuple confidence into consideration for learning better embeddings. Specifically, we learn the embeddings of entities and entity types in separate entity space and entity type space since they are different objects in KGs. We utilize an asymmetric matrix to specify the interaction of their embeddings and incorporate the tuple confidence as well. To make the tuple confidence more universal, we consider only the internal structural information in existing KGs. We evaluate our model on two tasks, including entity type noise detection and entity type prediction. The extensive experimental results in two public benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms all baselines on all tasks, which verify the effectiveness of ConfE in learning better embeddings on noisy KGs. The source code and data of this work can be obtained from https://github.com/swufenlp/ConfE. (shrink)

Speech categories are defined by multiple acoustic dimensions and their boundaries are generally fuzzy and ambiguous in part because listeners often give differential weighting to these cue dimensions during phonetic categorization. This study explored how a listener's perception of a speaker's socio-indexical and personality characteristics influences the listener's perceptual cue weighting. In a matched-guise study, three groups of listeners classified a series of gender-neutral /b/-/p/ continua that vary in VOT and F0 at the onset of the following vowel. Listeners were (...) assigned to one of three prompt conditions and rated the talker in terms of vocal gender prototypicality, attractiveness, friendliness, confidence, trustworthiness, and gayness. Male listeners and listeners who saw a male face showed less reliance on VOT compared to listeners in the other conditions. Listeners' visual evaluation of the talker also affected their weighting of VOT and onset F0 cues, although the effects of facial impressions differ depending on the gender of the listener. The results demonstrate that individual differences in perceptual cue weighting are modulated by the listener's gender and his/her subjective evaluation of the talker. These findings lend support for exemplar-based models of speech perception and production where socio-indexical features are encoded as a part of the episodic traces in the listeners' mental lexicon. This study also shed light on the relationship between individual variation in cue weighting and community-level sound change by demonstrating that VOT and onset F0 co-variation in North American English has acquired a certain degree of socio-indexical significance. (shrink)

Because of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, the traditional didactic teaching method that is practiced in Confucian culture, an Eastern cultural model, is being challenged by multiple alternative teaching modes. In Western cultures, the teaching behavior of teachers is dependent on their ability to influence the temperament of students; in contrast, teachers in Eastern cultures are influenced by changes in external environment. This phenomenon can mainly be explained by the tendency of students in Eastern cultures to adopt a passive learning (...) style because of Confucianism. On the basis of Confucian culture and literature review, we conducted a Chinese-language questionnaire survey of temperament scales and learning motivation, and 724 effective questionnaires were collected and used to explore the relationship between students’ temperament and learning motivation under three teaching modes, namely, online teaching, traditional offline classroom teaching, and online–offline mixed teaching. Conclusions drawn were as follows. In a Chinese Confucian cultural system, the passive learning style of students and its relationship with the surrounding collective culture creates the temperament characteristics of sanguinity and phlegmatism. Influenced by the traditional Confucian values of benevolence and honesty, students with a melancholic temperament do not focus on their learning motivations. Furthermore, changes in external information, to which such students are sensitive, cause them to give up opportunities easily. Similarly, students with a choleric temperament are sensitive and prone to fluctuating emotions, and they tend to be affected by changes in their external environment. Although students have a strong learning motivation under the traditional offline teaching mode, a paradox in individual cognition exists because of differences between Chinese and Western cultures. Therefore, students generally prefer the online–offline mixed teaching mode to the traditional single teaching mode. This study explored factors that influence students’ learning motivation, namely, individual temperament and educational environment, and provides a reference for the future development of post epidemic education. (shrink)

According to Donald Davidson, an akratic action is opposed to the agent’s better judgment if the agent act freely and intentionally. Davidson says akratic actions are possible and all akratic actions are irrational. However, although akratic actions are possible, akratic actions could be rational. The reasons are that some of these actions are rational; these rational akratic actions are caused by some emotions sometimes, while some emotions cannot make akratic actions rational, including excessive negative emotions, recalcitrant emotions, etc. Therefore, it (...) is reasonable to explain akratic actions caused by these emotions and these emotions not play a rational role in akratic actions. (shrink)

Peripatetics. ; Political science -- Philosophy. ; Islamic philosophy.

Smart homes represent an effective approach to improve one’s quality of life. Developing user interfaces that are both comfortable and understandable can assist users, particularly the elderly, embrace smart home technologies. It’s critical to concentrate on the characteristics of smart home interface design and their impact on people of various ages. Since sliders are one of the most common components utilized in the smart home user interface, this article aimed to investigate the effects of slider design characteristics on user performance (...) and preference. Thirty-four participants were recruited for the experiment. Our results revealed that both groups had shorter task completion time, less fixation time, and saccades on horizontal sliding orientation and larger buttons, which means better user performance. For the older group, the slider with color gradient track led to better user performance, while the track color only had less effect on the performance of the younger group. In terms of user preference, the results and performance of the older group were basically consistent, while the younger group had no significant difference in sliding orientation and track color. (shrink)

Due to the arrival of positive psychology in the development of teaching, the construct of engagement has been thrived and got a notable function in the educational arena. Alternatively, numerous individual differences, containing ambiguity of tolerance, have been taken into consideration as a result of the key role they can play in the process of learning, and thus, on different facets of the learners’ engagement. Furthermore, resilience is recommended to be an alternate and effective way of engaging English as a (...) foreign language learners. Also, it is a significant feature of the human adaptation system in which students can efficaciously manage and tackle stressful involvements despite their troubles and disasters. Given the eminence of both ambiguity tolerance and resilience in educational settings and the fact that little attention has been given to these constructs in foreign language learning, the present review makes an effort to scrutinize the impact of ambiguity of tolerance and resilience on EFL learners’ engagement. Succinctly, the fundamental roles of ambiguity tolerance and resilience in learners’ engagement were confirmed, and consistent with the conclusions drawn from the present review, some suggestions are set forth concerning the implications of this paper. (shrink)

原始共同体、古代日本、ヘレニズムとヘブライズム、近代社会―文化と社会の形態によって異なる時間の感覚と観念を比較検討し、近代的自我に特有の時間意識がどのように形成されたかを、自然と人間、共同体と都市、市 場と貨幣等々の関係のなかで解明する。近代世界の自己解放の運動の一環を担う比較社会学の深い洞察に満ちた労作。.

Metaphor generation is both a creative act and a means of learning. When learning a new concept, people often create a metaphor to connect the new concept to existing knowledge. Does the manner in which people generate a metaphor, via sudden insight (Aha! moment) or deliberate analysis, influence the quality of generation and subsequent learning outcomes? According to some research, deliberate processing enhances knowledge retention; hence, generation via analysis likely leads to better concept learning. However, other research has shown that (...) solutions generated via insight are better remembered. In the current study, participants were presented with science concepts and descriptions, then generated metaphors for the concepts. They also indicated how they generated each metaphor and rated their metaphor for novelty and aptness. We assessed participants’ learning outcomes with a memory test and evaluated the creative quality of the metaphors based on self- and crowd-sourced ratings. Consistent with the deliberate processing benefit, participants became more familiar with the target science concept if they previously generated a metaphor for the concept via analysis compared to via insight. We also found that metaphors generated via analysis did not differ from metaphors generated via insight in quality (aptness or novelty) nor in how well they were remembered. However, participants’ self-evaluations of metaphors generated via insight showed more agreement with independent raters, suggesting the role of insight in modulating the creative ideation process. These preliminary findings have implications for understanding the nature of insight during idea generation and its impact on learning. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Remarks at Harvard University Memorial Service for Benjamin I. SchwartzYu-sheng LinAmong the eminent intellectual historians in the world after World War II, Ben Schwartz was one of the most subtle and profound. He was deeply rooted in—but not confined by—the humanist tradition of Montaigne and Pascal, and this provided him with insights into the wretchedness as well as the grandeur of the human condition and with a conscious Socratic (...) moral and intellectual drive toward self-examination as a prerequisite for any inquiry into human affairs. Indeed, the distinctivecharacter of Ben's scholarship lay in his integration of morality and intellect. These humanistic resources in combination with his outstanding intellectual endowment enabled Ben to reach great heights of scholarly endeavor.To mention just a few of his many enduring achievements: Ben's thesis, advanced as early as 1951 and based on a study of the inner history of the rise of the Chinese Communist movement from a comparative perspective, developed the idea that the trajectory of Marxism eastward to Russia and China was, in fact, "a steady process of decomposition." This powerful argument has stood the test of time, whereas both the notion, on the Right, of a monolithic world communism and the idea, on the Left, of the Chinese Communist movement as the embodiment of the intellectual and moral legitimacy of Marxism fell by the wayside.His In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West, which offers a double mirror, with modern China illuminated by the modern West and vice versa, is a trailblazing work in intercultural intellectual history. Furthermore, The World of Thought in Ancient China, Ben's prizewinning magnum opus, which treats the whole range of ancient Chinese thought from a world-historical perspective, has achieved a methodological, no less than a historiographical, breakthrough. Ben's discussion of the need to "descend from the level of total cultural orientations to the level of shared problématiques" advances boldly beyond Max Weber's ideal-typical analysis in comparative world history. Historiographically, Ben's study of the general orientations in ancient China and their dialectical relations with the problématiques manifested in different schools of thought is the most incisive and comprehensive treatment of ancient Chinese thought to date.These great achievements derived from his ability to combine deep insights into historical realities with a humane simplicity in holding onto what is central in life. Such a simplicity was manifest in his spontaneous humility, a quality that furnished him with the moral and intellectual resources by which to develop empathetic understanding of the various strands of thought in China as well as in the West. Ben's analyses of human problems from a world-historical perspective, while characteristically erudite, subtle, complex, and at times extraordinarily brilliant, were singularly free from any trace of the influence of intellectual fashions and from any sort of [End Page 187] posturing or self-exhibition. He always struggled at the center of life and history, making the best effort to enter into the depth of human reality, drawing out its significanceas fully as he could. These great attainments were, I submit, a natural outgrowth of the strength of his moral and intellectual character, which led him to be truly open-minded and thus acutely perceptive. It was because he was so seriously interested in the study of humanity that he so seriously studied the Chinese. His universalist concerns fused with his humanist humility and thus empowered him to lift the field of Chinese studies out of its various forms of parochialism.The Confucian philosopher Xun Zi once said that the genuine scholar "explains with a humane compassion, listens with a studious attitude, and engages in disputation with an impartial mind." I know no one other than Ben Schwartz to have attained this ideal. His absolute joy in intellectual give-and-take and his delight, with his eyes gently sparkling, in reaching an understanding of a complex issue were infectious. It was indeed my good fortune and great privilege to be able to sit at the feet of Professor Schwartz. He embodied most eloquently the very essence of humanistic scholarship; his spirit is and shall always be a... (shrink)