Seafood consumption is crucial for global nutrition, but the decline of wild marine fisheries necessitates aquaculture to meet the rising demand. Nevertheless, the pervasive preference for wild seafood among Chinese consumers, especially in Qingdao, has not been comprehensively explored. This study investigates the preference for wild seafood in Qingdao, China, challenging the notion of wildness as a mere characteristic and revealing its active role in influencing consumer behavior. Employing the relational perspective of new materialism, the study unravels the dynamic interactions (...) between humans and non-human actors, providing a comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted nature of food. The research uncovers how wild seafood is entangled within the social fabric, labor relations, and consumer choices. It demonstrates that wildness is not a static social fact but rather is constantly emerging and transforming through interactions among seafood, people, places, nature, and technology. By examining the affective and subjective dimensions of seafood consumption, the findings indicate that the subjectivity of wild seafood impacts consumers’ physical and emotional states. The study also highlights the importance of social relations in food systems and calls for increased transparency and consumer education to promote sustainable consumption practices. (shrink)

With only two to five slots of visual working memory (VWM), humans are able to quickly solve complex visual problems to near optimal solutions. To explain the paradox between tightly constrained VWM and impressively complex human visual problem‐solving ability, we propose several principles for dynamic VWM allocation. In particular, we propose that complex visual information is represented in a temporal manner using only a few slots of VWM that include global and local visual chunks. We built a model of human (...) traveling salesman problem solving based on these principles of VWM allocation and tested the model with eye‐movement data. Exactly as the model predicted, human eye movements during traveling salesman problem solving have precise quantitative regularities with regard to both the general statistical pattern of attentional fixations and how they vary across individuals with different VWM capacities. Even though VWM capacity is very limited, eye movements dynamically allocate VWM resources to both local and global information, enabling attention to fine details without loss of the big picture. (shrink)

This study aims to explore the promoting effect of the combination of mental health education and ideological and political education for college students on improving their comprehensive psychological quality and ideological and political theoretical level. The research adopts a combination of system analysis methods, experimental methods and clustering algorithms, and conducts course experiments through experimental methods, providing basic data. In the process of the experiment, from the perspective of educational psychology theory, the systematic analysis method is used to distinguish subject (...) and object, and functional analysis is carried out. At the same time, clustering algorithms are used to classify the mental health problems of different students. The research results indicate that in terms of subjectivity, teachers’ psychological communication ability, psychological understanding ability and psychological guidance ability have a significant positive impact on students’ psychological state. The level of ideological and political theory and psychological strain ability also have a significant positive impact on students’ psychological state. Intervention on students’ values and personality psychological issues is also effective. These findings provide an important basis and guidance for further carrying out higher education reform. Contribution: With the development of society, students need to face more and more external concepts during their growth. Students whose mental growth is not mature are likely to have certain psychological problems in this process. This research can be utilised by scholars in the field of youth ministry and religious educational studies. (shrink)

In this paper, dynamic behavior analysis has been discussed for a class of switched complex-valued neural networks with interval parameter uncertainties and impulse disturbance. Sufficient conditions for guaranteeing the existence, uniqueness, and global robust exponential stability of the equilibrium point have been obtained by using the homomorphism mapping theorem, the scalar Lyapunov function method, the average dwell time method, and M-matrix theory. Since there is no result concerning the stability problem of switched neural networks defined in complex number domain, the (...) stability results we describe in this paper generalize the existing ones. The effectiveness of the proposed results is illustrated by a numerical example. (shrink)

In this paper, the stability of switched neural networks with interval parameter uncertainties and time delays is investigated. First, the conditions for the existence and uniqueness of the equilibrium point of the system are discussed. Second, the average dwell time approach and M-matrix property are employed to obtain conditions to ensure the globally exponential stability of the delayed SNNs under constrained switching. Third, by resorting to inequality technique and the idea of vector Lyapunov function, sufficient condition to ensure the robust (...) exponential stability of the delayed SNNs under arbitrary switching is derived. The form of the constructed Lyapunov functions is simple, which has certain commonality in studying delayed SNNs, and the proposed results not only are explicit but also reveal the relationship between the constrained switching and the arbitrary switching of the SNNs. Finally, two numerical examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness and less conservativeness of the main results compared with the existing literature. (shrink)

The event-triggered consensus control for leader-following multiagent systems subjected to external disturbances is investigated, by using the output feedback. In particular, a novel distributed event-triggered protocol is proposed by adopting dynamic observers to estimate the internal state information based on the measurable output signal. It is shown that under the developed observer-based event-triggered protocol, multiple agents will reach consensus with the desired disturbance attenuation ability and meanwhile exhibit no Zeno behaviors. Finally, a simulation is presented to verify the obtained results.

Angle is an important concept in geometry. Young children have difficulty separating angle size from other dimensions such as the length of angle sides, perhaps due to whole-object bias in word learning. The present study used the pre-test–training–post-test design to investigate the effectiveness of two ways of separating angle from angle size in 3–6-year-old Chinese preschoolers. A total of 228 children were given a pre-test and 219 of them failed the crucial test. 168 of the 219 children were present at (...) school during the training phase and were randomly assigned to three groups: the “toma” group, which received training to call the whole angle figure as “toma” and angle size as angle size; the “angle/angle size” group, which received the training of separating “angle” from “angle size”; and the control group, which used “angle size” alone to represent both the overall angle figure and angle size. Results showed that the “toma” group improved significantly more than the other two groups, the latter of which did not differ from each other. These results suggest that it is insufficient to have two separate words/phrases for children to learn to differentiate angle from angle size, perhaps due to their shared usage of the word angle. Instead, the use of a novel term is necessary and sufficient to improve learning. Implications for preschool education are discussed. (shrink)

Chinese culture is the aggregate term for the diverse behavioral norms and ideas that Chinese people share. A college English education can assist students learn about Chinese culture and promote it across the world. This paper explores the deep integration of Chinese culture into college English education through the lens of cross-cultural communication. Effective cross-cultural knowledge has become especially important in English language instruction as globalization encourages relationships between various cultures. This study investigates how Chinese cultural components can enhance the (...) learning process and help students become more culturally conscious by examining the present curricula, teaching strategies, and evaluation procedures in Chinese higher education institutions. The study emphasizes the relevance of giving students the tools for navigating cultural distinctions in English communication by examining instructional approaches that integrate Chinese literature, philosophy, and values. Integration of Chinese cultural viewpoints into the English language curriculum in an effort to create a more comprehensive learning environment that fosters intercultural competency in addition to language ability. The results show that a culturally responsive approach to teaching English in college can help students better appreciate the complexity of global communication as well as their own cultural identity, which will eventually help them become well-rounded, culturally aware people. (shrink)

Bei Cun’s article is short and not written in an academic style but as a reflective essay. The essay is theological, discussing sin, authority, and resurrection, but it is also spiritually political, discussing how the Chinese people should choose its future path and what is true authority. It was originally published in the April 2011 issue of the lifestyle magazine Xinrui, not in a literary or philosophical journal.

El presente artículo constituye una metacrítica del tardigotchi, en cuanto producto híbrido biológico-tecnológico, derivado del tamagotchi, y en cuanto praxis del arte objetual, con una aproximación transversal de las diversas perspectivas humanísticas, i.e., la ontológica, la ética, la estética y la psicológica. La exégesis de las relaciones intrincadas entre el tardigotchi y su génesis humana, por consiguiente, nos permite dar cuenta de las coordenadas onto-psicológicas del tardigotchi y de las nuevas humanidades y, asimismo, la materialización de nuevas reflexiones sobre las (...) relaciones entre lo material y lo humano, entre las ciencias humanas, la tecnología y la ecología. (shrink)

In user cluster analysis, users with the same or similar behavior characteristics are divided into the same group by iterative update clustering, and the core and larger user groups are detected. In this paper, we present the formulation and data mining of the correlation rules based on the clustering algorithm through the definition and procedure of the algorithm. In addition, based on the idea of the K-mode clustering algorithm, this paper proposes a clustering method combining related rules with multivalued discrete (...) features. In this paper, we construct a method to calculate the similarity between users using Jaccard distance and combine correlation rules with Jaccard distances to improve the similarity between users. Next, we propose a clustering method suitable for MDF. Finally, the basic K-mode algorithm is improved by the similarity measure method combining the correlation rule with the Jaccard distance and the cluster center update method which is the ARMDKM algorithm proposed in this paper. This method solves the problem that the MDF cannot be effectively processed in the traditional model and demonstrates its theoretical correctness. This experiment verifies the correctness of the new method by clustering purity, entropy, contour, and other indicators. (shrink)

In the evaluation of teaching quality, aiming at the shortcomings of slow convergence of BP neural network and easy to fall into local optimum, an online teaching quality evaluation model based on analytic hierarchy process and particle swarm optimization BP neural network is proposed. Firstly, an online teaching quality evaluation system was established by using the analytic hierarchy process to determine the weight of each subsystem and each index in the online teaching quality evaluation system and then combined with actual (...) experience, the risk value of each index was constructed according to safety regulations. The regression model is established through BP neural network, and the weight and threshold of the model are optimized by the particle swarm algorithm. Based on the online teaching quality evaluation model of BP neural network, the parameters of the model are constantly adjusted, the appropriate function is selected, and the particle swarm algorithm which is used in the training and learning process of the neural network is optimized. The scientificity of the questionnaire was verified by reliability and validity test. According to the scoring results and combined with the weight coefficient of each indicator in the online course quality evaluation index system, the key factors affecting the quality of online courses were obtained. Based on the survey data, descriptive statistics, analysis of variance, and Pearson’s correlation coefficient method are used to verify the research hypothesis and obtain valuable empirical results. By comparing the model with the standard BP model, the results show that the accuracy of the PSO-BP model is higher than that of the standard BP model and PSO-BP effectively overcomes the shortcomings of the BP neural network. (shrink)

Given the high numbers of refugees from Syria entering Germany in the recent years, the social integration of refugee youth has become an increasingly important issue in Germany. Thus, the current study examines adolescents’ decisions and reasoning around the inclusion of Syrian peers in Germany. Using a hypothetical scenario, we assessed adolescents’ peer inclusion decisions and reasoning with attention to comparing inclusion of a Syrian refugee peer and a German peer. Given the importance of group norms for adolescents, we assessed (...) not only adolescents’ own inclusion decisions, but also what they would expect their peer group to decide and what they think their peer group should do. Moreover, adolescents’ underlying reasoning was assessed. The analyses revealed that adolescents thought they would be more inclusive of a Syrian peer than a German peer and that their peer group should be more inclusive of a Syrian peer than a German peer. These tendencies toward including refugees were justified with references to morality as well as social-conventions. In contrast to their own decisions and to what they think their peer group should, participants expected their group would be more inclusive toward a German peer than a Syrian peer. This was mainly justified by referencing aspects of group functioning and psychological information about the peers, whereas moral and prosocial reasoning was very rarely used for the expected group decision. In sum, these findings document that adolescents in Germany wish to be inclusive regarding refugee peers and that they balance attention to morality and other domains of social reasoning when thinking about inclusion decisions while they expect that their peers will not consider morally relevant information when making these decisions. These findings have important practical implications as they indicate the importance of interventions that focus on promoting inclusive peer group norms. (shrink)

Water quality prediction is the basis of water environmental planning, evaluation, and management. In this work, a novel intelligent prediction model based on the fuzzy wavelet neural network including the neural network, the fuzzy logic, the wavelet transform, and the genetic algorithm was proposed to simulate the nonlinearity of water quality parameters and water quality predictions. A self-adapted fuzzy c-means clustering was used to determine the number of fuzzy rules. A hybrid learning algorithm based on a genetic algorithm and gradient (...) descent algorithm was employed to optimize the network parameters. Comparisons were made between the proposed FWNN model and the fuzzy neural network, the wavelet neural network, and the neural network. The results indicate that the FWNN made effective use of the self-adaptability of NN, the uncertainty capacity of FL, and the partial analysis ability of WT, so it could handle the fluctuation and the nonseasonal time series data of water quality, while exhibiting higher estimation accuracy and better robustness and achieving better performances for predicting water quality with high determination coefficients R2 over 0.90. The FWNN is feasible and reliable for simulating and predicting water quality in river. (shrink)

Dans cet article, nous décrivons un schéma et des modèles de représentation développés pour structurer les corpus de communication médiée par ordinateur (CMC) en suivant les recommandations de la Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Nous considérons le discours CMC comme un échange dialogique entre humains, organisé de manière séquentielle. Nous insistons d’abord sur le fait que de nombreuses caractéristiques de la CMC ne sont pas traitées de manière adéquate par les schémas et les outils actuels d’encodage de corpus. Nous formulons donc (...) un ensemble de recommandations pour représenter la CMC avec des schémas d’encodage, en insistant sur le fait que la TEI nous semble être un cadre particulièrement approprié pour l’encodage des corpus CMC. Nous proposons une modélisation des unités de base de la CMC (énoncés, messages et actions non verbales) ainsi que des structures de niveaux macro- et micro des interactions dans les environnements de la CMC. À partir de ces modèles, nous introduisons le CMC-core, un noyau TEI pour l’encodage des corpus CMC, qui définit un ensemble de traits d’encodage spécifiques à la CMC sur quatre niveaux: (i) éléments, (ii) classes de modèles, (iii) classes d'attributs et (iv) modules de l'infrastructure TEI. La description du noyau proposé est illustrée au moyen d’exemples extraits des corpus des chercheurs du groupe SIG TEI CMC, représentant une grande variété de genres de la CMC (le chat, le wiki talk, le tweet, le blog, les interactions Second Life…). Le matériel décrit, i.e. les schémas, les exemples d’encodage et la documentation, est disponible sur le Wiki du SIG CMC TEI et accompagnera une demande d’enrichissement de la TEI (TEI feature request) au conseil de la TEI à la fin de l’année 2019. (shrink)

This book examines some possible ethical principles to resolve moral dilemmas involving water. Existing problems in current water management practices are discussed in light of these principles. Transformation of human water ethics has the potential to be far more effective, cheaper and acceptable than some existing means of “regulation”, but transformation of personal and societal ethics need time because the changes to ethical values are slow.

For millennia, the basic idea that there is a universal order that connects human beings and the universe has lived on in many cultures. This order has often been expressed in geometric or musical-harmonic terms. From Pythagoras to Kepler, universal scholars were firmly convinced that this order represented the primordial code of all things. This chapter explores a new interdisciplinary perspective that combines the fields of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), music theory, and Keplerian astronomical insights. By means of corresponding mathematical (...) analyses, it is shown that the energy meridians of the human body correspond to a specific musical-harmonic order, which in turn is inextricably linked to certain relational aspects of the celestial bodies of our solar system. The study represents completely new discoveries in relation to this universal connection. In doing so, it also opens up new levels of understanding and provides new aspects for the further development of the concept of cosmic life. (shrink)

Previous studies suggested that facial attractiveness perception can be increased with facial skin homogeneity improving; and human’s facial change detection increases along with facial skin homogeneity increases. However, it’s unknown whether a face can be perceived prettier than it did before while still being considered as physically the same. It is possible that these two kinds of cognitive-aesthetic processing may have separate mathematical functions in psychophysical studies. In other words, human’s facial attractiveness differentiation may be more sensitive than facial change (...) detection. In this current study, we explored the above questions. Using three types of psychophysical techniques to manipulate facial skin homogeneity, we measured how participants’ sensitivity to facial skin homogeneity and attractiveness change. Results showed a linear function curve for facial physical change detection and a logarithmic function curve was drawn in the forced-choice technique, which was the most sensitive one, indicating that participants can judge a face prettier than before without being aware of it has physically changed. Besides, two linear function curves were shown in the same/different technique and a rating technique. Taken together, this current study revealed that facial attractiveness can be enhanced and discriminated by improving facial skin homogeneity, without being realized by people with conscious awareness that the face has been changed. (shrink)

L(ow) tone in Mandarin Chinese causes both downstep and post-low-bouncing. Downstep refers to the lowering of a H(igh) tone after a L tone, which is usually measured by comparing the H tones in a “H…HLH…H” sentence with a “H…HHH…H” sentence (cross-comparison), investigating whether downstep sets a new pitch register for the scaling of subsequent tones. Post-low-bouncing refers to the raising of a H tone after a focused L tone. The current study investigates how downstep and post-low-bouncing interact with focus and (...) phrasing in Mandarin Chinese. In the experiment, we systematically manipulated (a) the tonal environment by embedding two syllables with either LH or HH tone (syllable X and Y) sentence-medially in the same carrier sentences containing only H tones; (b) boundary strength between X and Y by introducing either a syllable boundary or a phonological phrase boundary; and (c) information structure by either placing a contrastive focus in the HL/HH word (XF), syllable Y (YF), or the sentence-final word (ZF). A wide-focus condition served as the baseline. With systematic control of focus and boundary strength around the L tone, the current study shows that the downstep effect in Mandarin is quite robust, lasting for 3–5 H tones after the L tone, but eventually levelling back again to the register reference line of a H tone. The way how focus and phrasing interact with the downstep effect is unexpected. Firstly, sentence-final focus has no anticipatory effect on shortening the downstep effect; instead, it makes the downstep effect lasts longer as compared to the wide focus condition. Secondly, the downstep effect still shows when the H tone after the L tone is on-focus (YF), in a weaker manner than the wide focus condition, and is overridden by the post-focus-compression. Thirdly, the downstep effect gets greater when the boundary after the L tone is stronger, because the L tone is longer and more likely to be creaky. We further analyzed downstep by measuring the F0 drop between the two H tones surrounding the L tone (sequential-comparison). Comparing it with F0 drop in all-H sentences (i.e., declination), it showed that the downstep effect was much greater and more robust than declination. However, creaky voice in the L tone was not the direct cause of downstep. At last, when the L tone was under focus (XF), it caused a post-low-bouncing effect, which is weakened by a phonological phrase boundary. Altogether, the results showed that although intonation is largely controlled by informative functions, the physical-articulatory controls are relatively persistent, varying within the pitch range of 2.5 semitones. Downstep and post-low-bouncing in Mandarin Chinese thus seem to be mainly due to physical-articulatory movement on varying pitch, with the gradual tonal F0 change meeting the requirement of smooth transition across syllables, and avoiding confusion in informative F0 control. (shrink)

Physarum polycephalum, a unicellular and multiheaded slime mould, can form highly efficient networks connecting separated food sources during the process of foraging. These adaptive networks exhibit a unique characteristic in that they are optimized without the control of a central consciousness. Inspired by this phenomenon, we present an efficient exploration and navigation strategy for a swarm of robots, which exploits cooperation and self-organisation to overcome the limited abilities of the individual robots. The task faced by the robots consists in the (...) exploration of an unknown environment in order to find a path between two distant target areas. For the proposed algorithm, we experimentally present robustness tests and obstacle tests conducted to analyse the performance of our algorithm and compare the proposed algorithm with other swarm robot foraging algorithms that also focus on the path formation task. This work has certain significance for the research of swarm robots and Physarum polycephalum. For the research of swarm robotics, our algorithm not only can lead multirobot as a whole to overcome the limitations of very simple individual agents but also can offer better performance in terms of search efficiency and success rate. For the research of Physarum polycephalum, this work is the first one combining swarm robots and Physarum polycephalum. It also reveals the potential of the Physarum polycephalum foraging principle in multirobot systems. (shrink)

This paper explores the integration of philosophical principles with Civic and Political Science education to foster innovative teaching reforms. It starts by delineating specific pedagogical methods—comparative analysis, case study, and outcome-oriented strategies—to enrich Civics and Politics through philosophical discourse. Central to this integration is developing a teaching model rooted in cultural self-confidence, structured around interactive lectures where students are active participants and teachers guide the exploration. Philosophical tenets are employed to cultivate comprehensive teaching resources that support a culturally confident pedagogical (...) framework. This approach is evaluated using fuzzy subset theory and characteristic functions to assess the impact of incorporating philosophical perspectives into political education, moving through incremental assessment stages towards sophisticated evaluative indices. Empirical findings from an experimental setup reveal significant enhancements in student achievements and understanding of their political environment. Students exposed to the experimental teaching model showed a notable increase in achievement, with a progress value of 21.68 compared to 1.52 in the control group. Furthermore, their comprehension of the political landscape reached 93.5%, which is 30.1% higher than their counterparts. This teaching model elevates student performance and political acumen and deepens their appreciation of Chinese cultural values, thereby bolstering their cultural self-confidence. Through this philosophical-educational synthesis, the paper contributes to ongoing dialogues within the philosophy of religion, suggesting how religious values can implicitly support civic and political education in a multicultural context. (shrink)

This paper focuses on modeling and control of a class of serial variable stiffness actuators based on level mechanisms for robotic applications. A multi-input multi-output complex nonlinear dynamic model is derived to fully describe SVSAs and the relative degree of the model is determined accordingly. Due to nonlinearity, high coupling, and parametric uncertainty of SVSAs, a neural network-based adaptive control strategy based on feedback linearization is proposed to handle system uncertainties. The feasibility of the proposed approach for position and stiffness (...) tracking of SVSAs is verified by simulation results. (shrink)