This article analyzes the method of orienting a gnomon developed by the eleventh century Chinese scientist Shen Kuo and described in his Ying Biao Yi. I argue that Shen Kuo’s criticism of the traditional orientation method was built on his belief that the earth is flat. The method Shen Kuo presented aims first to find the center of the earth, and only then to orient the gnomon to the cardinal directions. In addition, Shen Kuo developed two new techniques for improving (...) observation with a gnomon: the first method sets the gnomon in a closed chamber with only a small slit for the entrance of the noon sunlight, thereby reducing ambient light and making it easier to see the gnomon’s shadow. Shen’s other innovation is to use a second gnomon together with the first. This can greatly weaken the shadow’s penumbra. (shrink)

This paper investigates the methods of eclipse prediction in China before the fourth century AD, with a detailed example of the eclipse theory in the Jing chu li (Luminous Inception System ). As the official calendar of the Jin dynasty and the Kingdom Wei during the three kingdoms period, the Jing chu li was used for more than 200 years after it was adopted in 237 AD. From the San tong li (Triple Concordance System ) of the Western Han to (...) the Jing chu li, methods for predicting eclipses developed in three important ways: (i) from predicting only lunar eclipses to the prediction of both solar and lunar eclipses; (ii) from relying only on the mean periods of the sun and the moon to taking into consideration the variation in lunar velocity; and (iii) from estimating only a rough date to predicting the exact time of eclipses. This paper addresses two questions: first, how did ancient Chinese astronomers use cycles to predict eclipses in the Han dynasty? Second, how did astronomers such as Liu Hong and Yang Wei revise early eclipse prediction methods? The original text of the Jing chu li is analyzed to show how Yang Wei combined lunar velocity theory with the traditional method of predicting eclipses using cycles. (shrink)

Emotion is closely associated with language, but we know very little about how children express emotion in their own writing. We used a large‐scale, cross‐sectional, and data‐driven approach to investigate emotional expression via writing in children of different ages, and whether it varies for boys and girls. We first used a lexicon‐based bag‐of‐words approach to identify emotional content in a large corpus of stories (N>100,000) written by 7‐ to 13‐year‐old children. Generalized Additive Models were then used to model changes in (...) sentiment across age and gender. Two other machine learning approaches (BERT and TextBlob) validated and extended these analyses, converging on the finding that positive sentiments in children's writing decrease with age. These findings echo reports from previous studies showing a decrease in mood and an increased use of negative emotion words with age. We also found that stories by girls contained more positive sentiments than stories by boys. Our study shows the utility of large‐scale data‐driven approaches to reveal the content and nature of children's writing. Future experimental work should build on these observations to understand the likely complex relationships between written language and emotion, and how these change over development. (shrink)

Third-party punishment (TPP) has been shown to be an effective mechanism for maintaining human cooperation. However, it is puzzling how third-party punishment can be maintained, as punishers take on personal costs to punish defectors. Although there is evidence that punishers are preferred as partners because third-party punishment is regarded by bystanders as a costly signal of trustworthiness, other studies show that this signaling value of punishment can be severely attenuated because third-party helping is viewed as a stronger signal of trustworthiness (...) than third-party punishment. Third-party helpers donate their payoffs to victims of defection in games instead of punishing defectors as third-party punishers do. Then, under what circumstances can third-party punishment be maintained by costly signaling when helping is also present? We show that punishers are preferred over helpers by fourth-party individuals as their delegates to deter potential exploitation. This suggests that costly signaling can facilitate the maintenance of third-party punishment in partner choice with delegation interactions. (shrink)

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD).

This book explains China's intellectual property perspective in the context of European theories, through a critical examination of intellectual property theory and practice focused on China's compliance with the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). The author's critical review of contemporary intellectual property philosophy suggests that justifying intellectual property protection through Locke or Hegel's property theories internalizes a theoretical paradox. "Professor Wenwei Guan's treatment of intellectual property law and practice in the PRC offers new perspectives that (...) enrich an already active field of study. This book will be a useful contribution to academic and policy discourses examining conceptual and operational dimensions of China's intellectual property protection system and the broader process of China's international engagement." - Dr. Pitman B. Potter, Professor of Law, University of British Columbia, Canada "Dr. Guan reminds us of the daunting challenge of the public-private divide in forming and reforming TRIPS regime; how this regime has failed to address development needs and public concerns in developing countries like China; and how TRIPS's 'birth defect' can be overcome and its evolution can be put back on the right track." - Dr. Yahong Li, Associate Professor at Faculty of Law, Hong Kong University. (shrink)

Included with this letter, please find a list of corrections to the chapter "Lao Zi's Political Philosophy." The Jilin People's Publishing House did not show us the page proofs of the book Lao Zi Tong prior to publication, and as a consequence it contains a large number of typos. In the chapter "Lao Zi's Political Philosophy" alone there are 63 errors and deletions, some of which are serious and may make an accurate English translation difficult. For instance, "si hu" has (...) been typeset as "xiong [vicious beast] hu" throughout. "Si" means rhinoceros, and "si hu" thus means rhinoceros and tiger. Compare the passage "the rhinoceros finds no place to cast its horn; the tiger finds no place to put its claws." We hope that the translation can be checked against the list of corrections. (shrink)

Cellular reprogramming can manipulate the identity of cells to generate the desired cell types1– 3. The use of cell intrinsic components, including oocyte cytoplasm and transcription factors, can enforce somatic cell reprogramming to pluripotent stem cells4– 7. By contrast, chemical stimulation by exposure to small molecules offers an alternative approach that can manipulate cell fate in a simple and highly controllable manner8– 10. However, human somatic cells are refractory to chemical stimulation owing to their stable epigenome2,11,12 and reduced plasticity13,14; it (...) is therefore challenging to induce human pluripotent stem cells by chemical reprogramming. Here we demonstrate, by creating an intermediate plastic state, the chemical reprogramming of human somatic cells to human chemically induced pluripotent stem cells that exhibit key features of embryonic stem cells. The whole chemical reprogramming trajectory analysis delineated the induction of the intermediate plastic state at the early stage, during which chemical-induced dedifferentiation occurred, and this process was similar to the dedifferentiation process that occurs in axolotl limb regeneration. Moreover, we identified the JNK pathway as a major barrier to chemical reprogramming, the inhibition of which was indispensable for inducing cell plasticity and a regeneration-like program by suppressing pro-inflammatory pathways. Our chemical approach provides a platform for the generation and application of human pluripotent stem cells in biomedicine. This study lays foundations for developing regenerative therapeutic strategies that use well-defined chemicals to change cell fates in humans. (shrink)

Social desirability bias (SDB) is one of the main concerns in self-reported studies that measures explicit attitudes such as ethics research. Although SDB was introduced since the early 1950s, little effort has been made to understand the necessity of including an SDB scale in studies of sensitive topics such as ethics. The purpose of this paper was to (1) identify whether current ethics-related studies considered SDB when conducting their research and (2) ascertain whether SDB was a significant variable in such (...) studies. This investigation takes the form of a systematic review of articles published within the last 20 years in well-known business ethics journals (2000–2019). We found that (a) only 13.67% of ethics research measured SDB; (b) although the majority of the reviewed articles were from the West, researchers in Asia have also made significant progress in recent years in measuring SDB in their studies; (c) SDB was used mainly as a control variable and as such researchers preferred scales with fewer items; and (d) SDB was unavoidable even when using online surveys. Based on our findings, we attempt to provide an overview of SDB in ethics research and encourage ethics researchers who adopt self-reported surveys to include an SDB measurement in their studies to control SDB. (shrink)

Background The concept of career identity is integral to nursing practices and forms the basis of the nursing professions. Positive career identity is essential for providing high-quality care, optimizing patient outcomes, and enhancing the retention of health professionals. Therefore, there is a need to explore potential influencing variables, thereby developing effective interventions to improve career identity. Objectives To investigate the relationship between moral distress, moral courage, and career identity, and explore the mediating role of moral courage between moral distress and (...) career identity among nurses. Design A quantitative, cross-sectional study. Methods A convenient sample of 800 nurses was recruited from two tertiary care hospitals between February and March 2022. Participants were assessed using the Moral Distress Scale-revised, Nurses’ Moral Courage Scale, and Nursing Career Identity Scale. This study was described in accordance with the STROBE statement. Ethical consideration Research ethics approval was obtained from the researcher’s university and hospital where this study was conducted prior to data collection. Findings Moral distress is negatively associated while moral courage is positively associated with career identity among nurses. Moral courage partially mediates the relationship between moral distress and career identity ( β = −0.230 to −0.163, p < 0.01). Discussion The findings reveal a relationship between moral distress, moral courage, and career identity among nurses. Conclusion By paying attention to nurses’ moral distress and courage, healthcare providers can contribute to the development of effective interventions to improve career identity, and subsequently performance, among nurses. (shrink)

The term "political philosophy" refers to the abstract, fundamental, and guiding principles and basic theorems for observing, handling, and dealing with political problems and political struggles. Its meaning is analogous to, say, "military philosophy." Naturally, these theorems are connected to and integrated with specific political viewpoints, just as "military philosophy" is connected to and integrated with specific military strategies and military tactics. This kind of integration does not hinder in any way our study of political philosophies in history, just as (...) it does not hinder our study of any particular "military philosophy.". (shrink)

The rapid development of information science and technology today, its impact on culture and society, and how we should respond to this new phenomenon in our cultural undertakings is something that is probably of concern to many people. I would like to approach this question from the macro level, from the interrelationship between cultural exchange and the culture industry, linking it to the current state of international cultural exchange.

The effects of psycholinguistic variables on reading development are critical to the evaluation of theories about the reading system. Although we know that the development of reading depends on both individual differences (endogenous) and item-level effects (exogenous), developmental research has focused mostly on average-level performance, ignoring individual differences. We investigated how the development of word recognition in Chinese children in both Chinese and English is affected by (a) item-level, exogenous effects (word frequency, radical consistency, and curricular grade level); (b) subject-level, (...) endogenous individual differences (orthographic awareness and phonological awareness); and (c) their interactive effect. We tested native Chinese (Putonghua)-speaking children (n = 763) in grades 1 to 6 with both Chinese character and English word identification (lexical) decision tasks. Our findings show that (a) there were effects of both word frequency and age of acquisition in both Chinese and English, but these item-level effects generally weakened with increasing age; (b) individual differences in phonological and orthographic awareness each contributed to successful performance; and (c) in Chinese, item-level effects were weaker for more proficient readers. We contend that our findings can be explained by theoretical models that incorporate cumulative learning as the basis for development of item-level effects in the reading system. (shrink)

John Swales’ 1986 article ‘Citation analysis and discourse analysis’ was the first to apply citation analysis to describe in-text citations in the field of discourse analysis. Howard White’s 2004 article ‘Citation analysis and discourse analysis revisited’ was written by an information scientist and primarily focused on citation analysis and discourse analysis. Here, we cast a wider net by conducting a bibliometric analysis of discourse analysis to sketch its scientific landscape between 1978 and 2018. Our findings show that discourse analysis has (...) emerged as a major, and increasingly distinctively sociological, contribution to the analysis of language in social life. It is evident that discourse analysts are increasingly interested in such topics as corpus linguistics, digital conversation analysis, discursive news values approach, membership categorization analysis, multimodal analysis and social media. It is a general trend that the United States is no longer the only dominating publication powerhouse in the field. Countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia and China are wielding a growing share of research output. (shrink)

然則蘋果樹不會議論蘋果，而只負載之， 待到秋熟，便讓它們墜下來。（GA-97: 222） 從形而上的角度看，思慮比哲學要簡單得多， 但正因為其簡單，故實行起來卻困難許多。（GA-16: 709） ——海德格 德國哲學家海德格對二十世紀思想界影響重大，在當代華語世界亦深受重視。但他也是位謎樣的哲人，用詞撲朔迷離，著述晦澀難解，學說跡近玄秘，而其納粹往跡，更曾引起過多番重大爭議。如何在他迷宮般的用語中，辨識出 持續不變的核心關懷？又如何公允地理解他的思想，闡明其中對於現代文明危機的洞察？ 《徘徊於天人之際》是關子尹研究海德格哲學三十多年的集大成之作，精湛而深刻地詮釋這位謎樣哲人的思想，並給予其批判性的定位，為海德格學說提供了清晰且獨到的見解。 書中除討論海德格的主要著作《存在與時間》之理論佈局、其「生命圖式」學說和「時間性」之關係，與歷史性概念對西方人文傳統定位的影響等問題外，亦涉及海德格後期的「同一性思維」，及與此相關的各種概念名相。此外 ，更論說海德格對西方近世主體性理論的批判、與西方哲學巨擘特別是康德和黑格爾學說的理論關係、和神學的轇轕、同道家哲學的比較，還有其所牽涉的反猶爭議等；最後還論及海德格對現代世界技術文化的批判等多種議題。 .

v. 1. Chapters I, 1-XI, 34, and XX, 64-XXI, 65-66 --.