Statistical network models have been used to study the competition among different products and how product attributes influence customer decisions. However, in existing research using network-based approaches, product competition has been viewed as binary, while in reality, the competition strength may vary among products. In this paper, we model the strength of the product competition by employing a statistical network model, with an emphasis on how product attributes affect which products are considered together and which products are ultimately purchased by (...) customers. We first demonstrate how customers’ considerations and choices can be aggregated as weighted networks. Then, we propose a weighted network modeling approach by extending the valued exponential random graph model to investigate the effects of product features and network structures on product competition relations. The approach that consists of model construction, interpretation, and validation is presented in a step-by-step procedure. Our findings suggest that the weighted network model outperforms commonly used binary network baselines in predicting product competition as well as market share. Also, traditionally when using binary network models to study product competitions and depending on the cutoff values chosen to binarize a network, the resulting estimated customer preferences can be inconsistent. Such inconsistency in interpreting customer preferences is a downside of binary network models but can be well addressed by the proposed weighted network model. Lastly, this paper is the first attempt to study customers’ purchase preferences and car competition together using weighted directed networks. (shrink)

Translated from Telugu by Adivi Radha Krishna and Seeta Rama Hanuma Kumari.

The widespread use of online information resources by translation students has motivated an increasing number of researchers to investigate the relationship between online information seeking and translation performance. However, these studies mainly address the direct effect of online information seeking on translation performance, thus failing to explore and identify the internal psychological mechanisms. This study, therefore, explores the mediating role of translation self-efficacy in the relationship between online information seeking and translation performance. A total of 314 translation students in China (...) completed questionnaires on online information seeking and translation self-efficacy, and translation performance was measured by assessing the quality of a translation task given to them. Results showed that translation self-efficacy partially mediated the association between online information seeking and students’ translation performance. These findings can contribute to our understanding of the role that translation self-efficacy plays in information seeking behaviors and the emotional states of translation students in translator training. (shrink)

Articles; chiefly on Islamic ethics and conveying non Muslims for Islam.

Michel Serres said that history is the propagation of effects, saying in his conversations with Bruno Latour, “we experience time as much in our inner senses as externally in nature, as much as le temps of history as le temps of weather,” characterized more by turbulence than by Euclidean geometry. Setting out from Serres’ nautical meditation on noise, guided by Giuseppe Longo’s and interlocutors’ characterization of the random as a function of theory and measure, one can distinguish the random from (...) the non-schematizable noisy. How do we think given the noisy dynamics of the world? Bernard Stiegler’s epiphylogenetic technologies and Gilbert Simondon’s transindividuating technics prepares considering thought as collective as well as individual activity. After sallies into algorithmic technology to establish its limits, we consider how epiphylogenetic thought develops in the presence of indeterminacy. We return to noise not as a simple veil between the discernible and indiscernible, but as a constitutive aspect of the complexification and enrichment of developmental ontologies, an enrichment co-articulated by epiphylogenetic imagination and technics. (shrink)

The issue of employability has already become a well-delineated topic of study among interpreting educators. However, the current literature still lacks descriptive research on interpreting students' employability development and ignores the developmental effects of interpreter competences in this process. Moreover, the advantage of using career adaptability for measurement is also under-researched. This exploratory case study aims at taking an initial step forward, surveying interpreting students' career adaptability development and the developmental effects of different interpreter competences on major adaptability resources, and (...) ultimately diagnosing curriculum problems and making modifications accordingly. Thirty grade 2019 interpreting students from three Chinese universities contributed to data collection, through six questionnaires in a two-wave survey. The results highlight that, throughout the Chinese MTI program, interpreting students could become more concerned and well prepared for their future, more curious to explore themselves and their surroundings, and more capable of solving problems. The results also indicate that students' knowledge and language competence serve as the major facilitators in this process, and that other interpreter competences, such as psychological competence, transfer competence, professionalism, and cross-cultural competence, are also instrumental. In order to further boost their adaptability constructs, the results suggest that students' language and knowledge competence, professionalism, and cross-cultural and mental agility still need to be improved. Five suggestions for curriculum revision have been raised accordingly. As an initial effort, the current study will hopefully inspire further studies on interpreting students' career adaptability and add more knowledge to the curriculum design from this viewpoint. (shrink)

One can use mathematics not as an instrument or measure, or a replacement for God, but as a poetic articulation, or perhaps as a stammered experimental approach to cultural dynamics. I choose to start with the simplest symbolic substances that respect the lifeworld’s continuous dynamism, temporality, boundless morphogenesis, superposability, continuity, density and value, and yet are independent of measure, metric, counting, finitude, formal logic, syntax, grammar, digitality and computability – in short, free of the formal structures that would put a (...) cage over all of the lifeworld. I call these substances topological media. This article introduces elementary topological concepts with which we can articulate material and cultural change using notions of proximity, limit, and change, without recourse to number or metric. The motivation is that topology furnishes us with concepts well-adapted for poietically articulating the world as stuff, rather than objects with an a priori schema. With care, it may provide a fruitful approach to morphogenesis and cultural dynamics that is neither reductive nor anthropocentric. I will not pretend any systematic application of the scaffolding concepts introduced in this article. Instead, I would see what fellow students of cultural dynamics and cosmopolitics make of these concepts in their own work. (shrink)

In 1959, the Chinese government conducted a democratic reform in Tibet, and thoroughly abolished feudal serf system. Feudal serf system in Tibet before that time was dark and ferocious, vandalizing “human character, personality, human rights and humanity”, seriously obstructing overall progress of the Tibetan society, and isolating Tibet from the modern civilized world. The fact in Tibet that “millions of serfs acquired freedom and liberation, and thence became human in its actual meaning” was in line with the goal of human (...) rights campaign without doubt. Therefore, the Chinese government and people made another great contribution to the human rights campaign and human civilized progress. (shrink)

Analects 2.3 is a key passage in the construal of Confucius' political and legal thought, but readings of it diverge. Many scholars view it as a broader evaluation of the rule of law relative to that of rites, while some read it more specifically as pertaining to the coercive enforcement of morality. Some read the quotation as an instrumental, conformist tenet, whereas some perceive its humanistic and ethical nature. Textual and contextual findings show that the latter categories in both cases (...) are the more plausible. This clarification illuminates differences between Confucius' notion of virtue-rites guidance and later variations that may lack respect for moral autonomy. (shrink)

Articles on materialistic element in Indian philosophy.

Research shows that entrepreneurial activities significantly promote economic development, which enhances the importance of the innovative entrepreneurial potential of college students. This study analyzes the effect of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intention from the perspective of planned behavior theory. By examining the significant role of entrepreneurship education at colleges and universities on economic and social development, we established a conceptual model. To understand the relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention, the hypotheses propose the intermediary role of entrepreneurial ability, and (...) the study provides evidence from China the relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention. Improving entrepreneurial intention and encouraging college students to establish businesses through entrepreneurship education in universities is crucial. This study proposes a hypothetical model of the relationship between entrepreneurial competence and entrepreneurial intention in entrepreneurship education at universities. Using a questionnaire survey of college students with practical experience in the Yangtze River Delta of China, the bootstrap method in the SPSS macro program process software verifies the hypotheses. The results show that entrepreneurial teaching, business plan competition, and entrepreneurial practice support positively affect entrepreneurial competence. In addition, entrepreneurial competence plays an intermediary role in the relationship between entrepreneurial teaching, business plan competition, entrepreneurship practice support, and entrepreneurial intention. Entrepreneurship education improves the ability to establish a business in the present and in entrepreneurial activities in the future. Entrepreneurial competence obtained through entrepreneurship education continuously affects entrepreneurial intention. (shrink)

This study investigates the role of socially responsible management as a significant determining factor for employees’ morale engagement, employee vitality, and employee-based brand equity. Human resource management policies and strategies are important for addressing the interests of the employees and boosting the overall effectiveness of the organization. To examine this, this study analyzes the role of socially responsible management and organizational morality on EME with the mediation of EV. Also, the study examines the role of EME in EBBE. To conduct (...) this study, the data were obtained from 310 female employees working in software houses from home in China. The sampling technique used in the study is purposive sampling. A partial least square structural equation modeling technique is used to analyze the data of the study. The study found that socially responsible management has a positive effect on both EME and EV. The study also reveals that organizational morality has a positive impact on EME and consequently impacts the EBBE in a positive way. The results of the mediation analysis show that EV mediates the relationship between socially responsible management and EME. The study provides practical implications, explaining the strategies and policies that can be adopted by the HR department of the organization to boost employee interests. The study also provides some limitations and future recommendations, such as sample size, the context of the study, and adding new variables to the existing framework. (shrink)

In this essay we explore extensive modes of enactive engagement among humans, physical and computational media richer than the modes represented by classical notions of interaction and relation. We make use of a radically material and a potential-theoretic account of event to re-conceive ad hoc, non-pre-schematized activity in responsive environments. We can regard such activity as sense-making via dehomogenization of material that co-articulates subjects and objects.

Study on the concept of substance, one of the basic elements in Jaina philosophy.

Sermons of ʻAbdullāh Shāh, b. 1872, Islamic scholar, on Islamic customs and practices and Muslim ethics.

Compare with other professions, teachers are reported to have a higher risk of poor mental health. This study examined the relationships between emotional intelligence, perceived organizational justice, and mental health among Chinese high school teachers. Three hundred and eighty-one high school teachers, with their age range between 21 and 50 years, were administered the Emotional Intelligence Scale, Perceived Organizational Justice Scale, and Mental Health Scale. The result found that emotional intelligence and perceived organizational justice directly influence the mental health of (...) high school teachers. In addition, perceived organizational justice mediated the association between emotional intelligence and mental health. Moreover, the present study analyzes the different role of subtypes of perceived organizational justice on the relationships between emotional intelligence and mental health, and the results showed that the mediating effects of perceived distributive justice and interactive justice on emotional intelligence and mental health are not significant, only the perceived procedural justice mediated the relationships between emotional intelligence and teachers’ mental health. The results are discussed in a conceptual context. (shrink)

_This mirror for princes sheds light on the relationship between spiritual and political authority in early modern Egypt_ This guide to political behavior and expediency offers advice to Sufi shaykhs, or spiritual guides, on how to interact and negotiate with powerful secular officials, judges, and treasurers, or emirs. Translated into English for the first time, it is a unique account of the relationship between spiritual and political authority in late medieval / early modern Islamic society.