To support older users’ accessibility and learning of the prevalent information and communication technologies, libraries, as informal learning institutes, are committed to information literacy education activities with friendly interfaces. Chatbots using Voice User Interfaces with natural and intuitive interactions have received growing research and practical attention; however, older users report regular frustrations and problems in using them. To serve as a basis for the subsequent design and development of an automated dialog mechanism in senior-friendly chatbots, a between-subject user experiment was (...) conducted with 30 older adults divided into three groups. The preliminary findings on their interactions with the voice chatbots designed with different error handling strategies were reported. Participants’ behavioral patterns, performances, and the tactics they employed in interacting with the three types of chatbots were analyzed. The results of the study showed that the use of multiple error handling strategies is beneficial for older users to achieve effectiveness and satisfaction in human-robot interactions, and facilitate their attitude toward information technology. This study contributes empirical evidence in the genuine and pragmatic field of gerontechnology and expands upon voice chatbots research by exploring conversation errors in human-robot interactions that could be of further application in designing educational and living gerontechnology. (shrink)

Career sustainability is a well-researched issue in academics and other sectors. Technology advancements and COVID-19 have jeopardized career sustainability. Numerous studies have explored the influence of individual characteristics on career sustainability, but few have focused on leadership. In addition, cultural factors must be considered because leadership is rooted in culture. In particular, inclusive leadership reflects traditional Chinese culture. Therefore, based on self-determination social exchange theories, we analyzed the effects of inclusive leadership on career sustainability as well as the roles of (...) thriving at work and supervisor developmental feedback in career sustainability. In total, 363 samples were collected from China. The results revealed that inclusive leadership improves career sustainability through SDF and thriving at work. Theoretically, our study fills the research gap and establishes a mechanism and theoretical framework for inclusive leadership and career sustainability. Practically, we offer guidance for enterprises to cultivate inclusive leadership and improve career sustainability. (shrink)

Ruyu HungNational Chiayi UniversityThis collective writing is intended to portray the contour of philosophy of education in contemporary Taiwan, resounding many beautiful counterparts in EPAT (Bies...

The high turnover of nurses has become a global problem. Several studies have proposed that nurses’ perceptions of the ethical climate of their organization are related to higher job satisfaction and organizational commitment and thus lead to higher organizational citizenship behaviors. This study uses hierarchical regression to understand which types of ethical climate, facets of job satisfaction, and the three components of organizational commitment influence different dimensions of organizational citizenship behaviors. Questionnaires were distributed to 450 nurses, and 352 usable questionnaires (...) were returned. The findings of the article suggest that hospitals can increase organizational citizenship behaviors by influencing an organization’s ethical climate, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. Hospital administrators can foster within organizations, the climate types of caring, law and code and rules climate, satisfaction with coworkers, and affective commitment and normative commitment that increase organizational citizenship behavior, while preventing organizations from developing the type of instrumental climate and continuance commitment that decreases it. (shrink)

Employee innovation is the cornerstone of the organization, and the motivation for employee innovative behavior largely depends on the leadership style of the leader. With the economic development of society, the traditional authoritative style of leadership can no longer adapt to the psychological characteristics of employees, who use new-era work concepts, techniques, and social rules (hereafter, new generation workers). Inclusive leadership is based on the concept of “fully inclusive and equitable” in traditional Chinese culture, and it can adapt to the (...) independent needs of new generation employees. At present, the research on the relationship between the traditional leadership style and employee innovative behavior is relatively extensive, but there is little research on the relationship between inclusive leadership style and employee innovative behavior, and this needs further exploration. This paper takes new generation employees as the sample and uses psychological capital as an intermediary variable to explore the influence of inclusive leadership style on the innovative behaviors of new generation employees. We found that inclusive leadership is significantly and positively related to new generation employees’ innovative behaviors. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

This study attempts to investigate the relationships among the ethical beliefs of Chinese consumers and orientations based on attitudinal attributes: materialism and moral philosophies (idealism and relativism). In addition, this study examines Chinese consumers' ethical beliefs in relation to five selected demographic characteristics (gender, age, religion, family income and education). Based on this exploratory study of 284 Chinese consumers, the following statistically significant findings were discovered. First, Chinese consumers regard that a passively benefiting activity is more ethical, but actively benefiting (...) from an illegal or a questionable activity is unacceptable. Second, the two dimensions of passively benefiting and no harm/no foul can be used to distinguish the consumers who endorse higher levels of idealism or relativism. Third, Chinese consumers with a high level of materialism are more likely to actively benefit from illegal and questionable activities, and the passively benefiting actions. Finally, the more ethical Chinese consumers seem to be younger, be religious, and have a lower family income. (shrink)

Chinese consumers comprise a unique subculture that exerts a considerable influence on the market and are treated as a collective group by researchers. However, few studies have examined the effects of collectivism and consumer attitudinal attributes on consumer ethics. Although the practice of religion was prohibited in China before economic reforms in the late 1970s, religion remains a major factor that affects the ethical judgment of consumers. The present study, based on the Hunt–Vitell model, examines the influence of culture and (...) personal characteristics on consumer ethics. A total of 284 Chinese consumers were surveyed. Structural equation modeling was used to test hypothesized relationships in the research model. The results indicate that collectivism had a significant explanatory power for four dimensions of consumer ethical beliefs: actively benefiting from illegal activities; passively benefiting from questionable activities; actively benefiting from deceptive legal activities; and engaging in no harm and no foul activities. However, consumer attitude toward business significantly explained only the passive dimension of consumer ethics, and religious beliefs significantly explained only the active dimension of consumer ethical beliefs. (shrink)

The high turnover of nurses has become a global problem. Several studies have proposed that nurses' perceptions of the ethical climate of their organization are related to higher job satisfaction and organizational commitment, and thus lead to lower turnover. However, there is limited empirical evidence supporting a relationship between different types of ethical climate within organizations and facets of job satisfaction. Furthermore, no published studies have investigated the impact of different types of ethical climate on the three components of organizational (...) commitment. This study attempts to explore the different types of ethical climate that exist in hospitals, and the degree of job satisfaction and organizational commitment of nurses in Taiwan. It uses path analysis to understand which types of ethical climate influence different facets of job satisfaction. The study also examines the impact of different types of ethical climate and facets of job satisfaction on the three components of organizational commitment. Questionnaires were distributed to 352 nurses. The relationships among variables were assessed by factor analysis, reliability, descriptive statistics, correlations, and regression. The important conclusion is that hospitals can increase job satisfaction and organizational commitment by influencing an organization's ethical climate. Hospital administrators can foster within organizations the climate types of caring, independent, and rules climate that increase satisfaction, while preventing organizations from developing the type of instrumental climate that decreases it. (shrink)

The connotation of the “Luddite Imagination” refers to the concepts of the “Luddite Movement” and the “Luddites”, those events and individuals who are seen as conservatives behind the times. The negative connotation of the “Luddite Imagination” changed from the political connotation to cultural connotation. Neo-Luddism identifys the rational advocacy in defense of the old Luddite Movement; There are deep-seated issues involved behind the rehabilitation of thenegative connotation of the “Luddite Imagination”; It has comparative implications on China’s modernization process.

Protein redox reactions are one of the most basic and important biochemical actions. As amino acids are weak redox mediators, most protein redox functions are undertaken by protein cofactors, which include organic ligands and transition metal ions. Since both kinds of redox cofactors were available in the pre‐protein RNA world, it is challenging to explore which one was more involved in redox processes of primitive proteins? In this paper, using an examination of the redox cofactor usage of putative ancient proteins, (...) we infer that organic ligands participated more frequently than transition metals in redox reactions of primitive proteins, at least as protein cofactors. This is further supported by the relative abundance of amino acids in the primordial world. Supplementary material for this article can be found on the BioEssays website. BioEssays 30:766–771, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

To explore whether the generation of new protein folds could be linked to metallic cofactor recruitment, we identified the oldest examples of folds for manganese, iron, zinc, and copper proteins by analyzing their fold‐domain mapping patterns. We discovered that the generation of these folds was tightly coupled to corresponding metals. We found that the emerging order for these folds, i.e., manganese and iron protein folds appeared earlier than zinc and copper counterparts, coincides with the putative bioavailability of the corresponding metals (...) in the ancient anoxic ocean. Therefore, we conclude that metallic cofactors, like organic cofactors, play an evolutionary role in the formation of new protein folds. This link could be explained by the emergence of protein structures with novel folds that could fulfill the new protein functions introduced by the metallic cofactors. These findings not only have important implications for understanding the evolutionary mechanisms of protein architectures, but also provide a further interpretation for the evolutionary story of superoxide dismutases. (shrink)

Politics has become a common element in the performance appraisal process, and as decision recipients in this process, those appraised tend to be more sensitive to performance appraisal politics. This paper examines the mechanisms by which performance appraisal politics perception affects counterproductive work behavior from the perspective of those appraised. The mediating effect of perceived organizational justice and the moderating effect of political skill are incorporated into a parsimonious moderated-mediation model. A quantitative research approach is employed with survey data from (...) 460 employees of large and medium-sized enterprises in Hubei Province, and structural equation modeling and bootstrap analysis are used to test the proposed hypothesized relationships. The findings demonstrate that PAPP has a positive impact on CWB, and POJ partly mediates the relationship between PAPP and CWB. The results also reveal that individual PS moderates the positive correlation between PAPP and CWB. The academic and practical implications of these findings, as well as limitations and suggestions for future research, are also discussed. (shrink)

Following the idea of L -fuzzy generalized neighborhood systems as introduced by Zhao et al., we will give the join-complete lattice structures of lower and upper approximation operators based on L -fuzzy generalized neighborhood systems. In particular, as special approximation operators based on L -fuzzy generalized neighborhood systems, we will give the complete lattice structures of lower and upper approximation operators based on L -fuzzy relations. Furthermore, if L satisfies the double negative law, then there exists an order isomorphic mapping (...) between upper and lower approximation operators based on L -fuzzy generalized neighborhood systems; when L -fuzzy generalized neighborhood system is serial, reflexive, and transitive, there still exists an order isomorphic mapping between upper and lower approximation operators, respectively, and both lower and upper approximation operators based on L -fuzzy relations are complete lattice isomorphism. (shrink)

The financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic have caused many enterprises to suffer great losses. Thus, companies have to take measures such as pays cut, furloughs, or layoffs, which caused dissatisfaction among employees and triggered labor disputes. Therefore, this study explores the service-oriented organizational citizenship behavior based on the decomposed theory of planned behavior in order to understand the behavioral intentions of employees through their mental states, job attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. This study conducted questionnaire (...) surveys for employees in different industries, collected 281 valid questionnaires, and applied Structural Equation Model for the analysis. The results show: employees believe organizational justice in the organization is important, and when they feel treated fairly, their job attitudes and beliefs are enhanced. Employees’ job attitudes and beliefs support service-oriented organizational citizenship behavior, in other words, they have positive job attitudes and beliefs and will actively provide better service to customers. When employees are treated reasonably and fairly by the organization and have positive job attitudes and perceived behavior control, their spontaneous service-oriented organizational citizenship behavior is stimulated, thus increasing organizational development. (shrink)

Body ownership concerns what it is like to feel a body part or a full body as mine, and has become a prominent area of study. We propose that there is a closely related type of bodily self-consciousness largely neglected by researchers—experiential ownership. It refers to the sense that I am the one who is having a conscious experience. Are body ownership and experiential ownership actually the same phenomenon or are they genuinely different? In our experiments, the participant watched a (...) rubber hand or someone else’s body from the first-person perspective and was touched either synchronously or asynchronously. The main findings: (1) The sense of body ownership was hindered in the asynchronous conditions of both the body-part and the full-body experiments. However, a strong sense of experiential ownership was observed in those conditions. (2) We found the opposite when the participants’ responses were measured after tactile stimulations had ceased for 5 s. In the synchronous conditions of another set of body-part and full-body experiments, only experiential ownership was blocked but not body ownership. These results demonstrate for the first time the double dissociation between body ownership and experiential ownership. Experiential ownership is indeed a distinct type of bodily self-consciousness. (shrink)

The preschool education profession often faces many challenges and preschool teachers, as important members of the preschool education profession must respond to a variety of emergencies with young children, which also leads to high levels of job stress and can have a negative impact on their ongoing well-being. Past research has pointed out that a healthy lifestyle is one of the key factors in enhancing sustainable well-being in high-stress work situations and many studies have found that good leisure activity engagement (...) as a healthy lifestyle is associated with higher levels of well-being. However, the relationship between preschool teachers’ leisure engagement and sustainable well-being has been less explored. Therefore, this study proposed seven research hypotheses based on the engagement theory proposed by Fredricks et al. and developed a research model to explore the relationship between three types of leisure engagement, including behavioral, affective and cognitive, and preschool teachers’ job stress and sustainable well-being, using age as a control variable. This study used a cross-sectional web-based questionnaire with a convenience sample of 500 preschool teachers in China. The collected data were analyzed for reliability and validity, model fit testing and structural equation modeling for model validation after removing invalid data and incomplete responses. The results of the study showed that behavioral engagement was not related with either the job stress or sustainable well-being of preschool teachers; Emotional and cognitive engagement were negatively related to job stress but positively related to the sustainable well-being of preschool teachers; and Job stress was negatively related to the sustainable well-being of preschool teachers; Age is an effective control variable. From the above results, it is clear that not all three types of leisure engagement are effective in terms of reducing the work stress of preschool teachers. As well as being related to the sustainable well-being of preschool teachers emotional and cognitive engagement contributed more to sustainable well-being acquisition. (shrink)

Biological pacemakers can be achieved by various gene‐based and cell‐based approaches. Embryonic stem cells (ESCs)‐derived pacemaker cells might be the most promising way to form biological pacemakers, but there are challenges as to how to control the differentiation of ESCs and to overcome the neoplasia, proarrhythmia, or immunogenicity resulting from the use of ESCs. As a potential approach to solve these difficult problems, tissue‐engineering techniques may provide a precise control on the different cell components of multicellular aggregates and the forming (...) of a construct with‐defined architectures and functional properties. The combined interactions between ESC‐derived pacemaker cells, supporting cells, and matrices may completely reproduce pacemaker properties and result in a steady functional unit to induce rhythmic electrical and contractile activities. As ESCs have a high capability for self‐renewal, proliferation, and potential differentiation, we hypothesize that ESCs can be used as a source of pacemaker cells for tissue‐engineering applications and the ambitious goal of biological cardiac pacemakers may ultimately be achieved with ESCs via tissue‐engineering technology. -/- . (shrink)

Donating money to a charity based on consumer purchase is referred to as cause-related marketing . In this research, we profile consumer psychographics for skepticism toward advertising in a CRM context. To be specific, this study investigates whether and how psychological antecedents and gender differences influence consumer skepticism toward advertising. An empirical study was conducted with 291 participants. Structural equation modeling was employed for hypothesis testing. The results suggest that a utilitarian orientation and an individualistic mindset are positively related to (...) skepticism toward advertising, while a hedonic orientation and a collectivistic mindset are negatively related to skepticism toward advertising. Gender differences are also found in the aforementioned relationships. The segmentational approach of gender and psychographics can assist marketers to explain consumer attitudes toward CRM and then to communicate with those CRM advocates better. (shrink)

Several previous studies have reported atypicality in resting-state functional connectivity in autism spectrum disorder, yet the relatively small effect sizes prevent us from using these characteristics for diagnostic purposes. Here, canonical correlation analysis and hierarchical clustering were used to partition the high-functioning ASD group into subgroups. A support vector machine model was trained through the 10-fold strategy to predict Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule scores within the ASD discovery group, which was further validated in an independent sample. The neuroimage-based partition derived (...) two subgroups representing severe versus mild autistic patients. We identified FCs that show graded changes in strength from ASD-severe, through ASD-mild, to controls, while the same pattern cannot be observed in partitions based on ADOS score. We also identified FCs that are specific for ASD-mild, similar to a partition based on ADOS score. The current study provided multiple pieces of evidence with replication to show that resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging FCs could serve as neural biomarkers in partitioning high-functioning autistic individuals based on their symptom severity and showing advantages over traditional partition based on ADOS score. Our results also indicate a compensatory role for a frontocortical network in patients with mild ASD, indicating potential targets for future clinical treatments. (shrink)

Delineation of the subthalamic nuclei on MRI is critical for deep brain stimulation surgery in patients with Parkinson’s disease. We propose this retrospective cohort study for quantitative analysis of MR signal-to-noise ratio, contrast, and signal difference-to-noise ratio of the STN on pre-operative three-dimensional stereotactic MRI in patients with medication-refractory PD. Forty-five consecutive patients with medication-refractory PD who underwent STN-DBS surgery in our hospital from January 2018 to June 2021 were included in this study. All patients had whole-brain 3D MRI, including (...) T2-weighted imaging, T2-weighted fluid-attenuated inversion recovery, and susceptibility-weighted imaging, at 3.0 T scanner for stereotactic navigation. The signal intensities of the STN, corona radiata, and background noise were obtained after placing regions of interest on corresponding structures. Quantitative comparisons of SNR, contrast, and SDNR of the STN between MR pulse sequences, including the T2WI, FLAIR, and SWI. Subgroup analysis regarding patients’ sex, age, and duration of treatment. We used one-way repeated measures analysis of variance for quantitative comparisons of SNR, contrast, and SDNR of the STN between different MR pulse sequences, and we also used the dependent t-test for the post hoc tests. In addition, we used Mann–Whitney U test for subgroup analyses. Both the contrast and SDNR were highest on FLAIR. The SNR was highest on SWI, and both the SNR and SDNR were lowest on T2WI. Subgroup analyses demonstrated significantly lower SDNR on SWI for patients receiving medication treatment for ≥13 years. In conclusion, on 3D stereotactic MRI of medication-refractory PD patients, the contrast and SDNR for the STN are highest on FLAIR, suggesting the optimal delineation of STN on FLAIR. (shrink)

The fiscal imbalance between the central and local governments under fiscal centralization may motivate local governments to pass tax burdens on firms. The causal identification of the tax system reform and the sustainable export innovation behavior of firms are of great significance. This study uses the income tax sharing policy of China to examine the impact of fiscal centralization on the sustainable export innovation behavior of firms. We find that this tax reform has significantly inhibited the increase of the export (...) value-added rate of firms, and has an increasing trend with the share ratio between the Central Government and the local government. Moreover, this effect mainly comes from the crowding-out effect of imported intermediate goods on domestic intermediate goods. The tests show that the above conclusions are consistent with the general logic of local governments. When they face greater downward fiscal pressure, they will further pass the tax burden on local firms and force the firms to promote their export performance to expand the tax base. This short-sighted behavior of replacing “quality improvement” with “quantity increase” is an important factor that affects the sustainable export innovation behavior of firms and the climb in the global value chain. (shrink)

BackgroundDepression is common psychiatric morbidity in breast cancer survivors, seriously affecting patients’ quality of life and mental health. A growing body of research has investigated depression in breast cancer. However, no visual bibliometric analysis was conducted in this field. This study aimed to visualize the literature to identify hotspots and frontiers in research on breast cancer and depression.MethodsThe publications related to depression in breast cancer were retrieved in the Web of Science Core Collection between 1 January 2002 and 17 March (...) 2022. VOSviewer was used to identify co-occurrences and collaborations among countries, institutions, and keywords. CiteSpace was used to detect keyword bursts.ResultsA total of 7,350 articles and reviews related to depression in breast cancer were identified. From 2002 to 2022, the United States and the People’s Republic of China were the most productive countries in this field. The University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Toronto were the most productive institutions in this field. The Journal of Psycho-oncology, followed by Supportive Care in Cancer and the Journal of Clinical Oncology, had the most publications on depression in breast cancer. Of the top 10 journals, seven were from the United States, two were from England, and one was from Germany. Five research hotspots of depression in breast cancer were identified by co-word analysis. Research on post-traumatic growth, spiritual interventions, cognitive-behavioral therapy, physical activity, and symptom cluster management of depression in breast cancer was relatively mature in the core hotspots. Burst detection of keywords on depression in breast cancer showed the latest hotspots, such as mental health, cancer survivor mortality, and activity.ConclusionThe research on depression in breast cancer is growing. Attention should be paid to the latest hotspots, such as mental health, cancer survivor, mortality, exercise, and physical activity. (shrink)

Pedagogy of Life takes its readers through the echoing stories of the half-century, historical Cultural Revolution of China to the literate lifeworld today. Rosa Hong Chen offers a gripping array of personal and kindred stories woven into the power of words and empathy of art through the volutes of writing and dancing for life, expressing genera of warm melancholy, weighty sensations, compulsive sobs, and refrained elation. It is for the existential history of individual lives and communal sharing that (...) life creates a pedagogical condition of possible experiences. Life itself forms a historical and social path of human growth and maturation. In a philosophical and educational autoethnographical inquiry, the author examines the nature of literacy for those marginalized and oppressed; Chen explores how one's name and the ways in which that name is used affect a person's self-knowing and knowing of the world. This book exemplifies the idea that individuals' autobiographical stories are importantly connected to wider cultural, political, and social meaning and understanding. Pedagogy of Life echoes readers' musings, affects, relations, imagination, choice, learning, teaching, and much more, because we, each and all, have our own names, ways of uttering, writing, and dancing, and, ultimately, our own ways of living, knowing, and becoming. (shrink)

Working memory performance affects children’s learning. This study examined objective, subjective, and physiological cognitive load while children completed a spatial working memory complex span task. Frist, 80 Taiwanese 11-year-olds who participated in Experiment 1 confirmed the suitability of the materials. Then, 72 Taiwanese 11-year-olds were assigned to high and low complexity groups to participate in Experiment 2 to test the study hypothesis. Children had to recall at the end of a dual-task list and answer two questions regarding the difficulty and (...) mental effort involved in processing and storage. Their pupil diameters were recorded using an eye-tracker. Two-way mixed ANOVA found that the processing requirements and memory load reduced storage and aggravated the subjective CL of storage; the subjective CL of processing was higher under highly complex conditions. Stepwise regression analysis indicated that subjective CL of processing predicted memory performance in low CL conditions, and physiological CL of processing predicted it in high CL conditions. (shrink)

Ch'en Ch'un: An Introduction . CHEN CH'UN THE MAN Ch'en Ch'un (-), honored as Master of Pei-hsi (the river in the northern part of the prefecture) was one ...

Background: Individuals’ information processing includes automatic and effortful processes and the latter require sustained concentration or attention and larger amounts of cognitive “capacity.” Event-related potentials reflect all neural activities that are related to a certain stimulus. Investigating ERP characteristics of effortful cognitive processing in people with schizophrenia would be helpful in further understanding the neural mechanism of schizophrenia.Methods: Both schizophrenia patients and health controls completed ERP measurements during the performance of the basic facial emotion identification test and the face-vignette task. (...) Data of ERP components, BFEIT and FVT performances were analyzed.Results: Schizophrenia patients’ accuracies of face emotion detection in the BFEIT and vignette emotion detection in the FVT were both significantly worse than the performance of the HC group. Repeated-measures ANOVAs performed on mean amplitudes and latencies revealed that the interaction effect for group × experiment × site was significant for N250 amplitude. In FVT experiment, N250 amplitudes at prefrontal and frontal sites in schizophrenia group were larger than those of HC group; the maximum N250 amplitude was present at the prefrontal site in both the groups. For N250 latency, the interaction effect for group × experiment was significant; N250 latencies in the schizophrenia group were longer than those of the HC group.Conclusion: Schizophrenia patients present effortful cognitive processing dysfunctions which reflect in abnormal ERP components, especially N250 at prefrontal cortex and frontal cortex sites. These findings have important implications for further clarifying the neural mechanism of effortful cognitive processing deficits in schizophrenia. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, Victor and Cullen's (Adm Sci Q 33:101-125, 1988) typology of ethical climates has been employed by many academics in research on issues of ethical climates. However, little is known about how managerial practices such as communication and empowerment influence ethical climates, especially from a functional perspective. The current study used a survey of employees from Taiwan's top 100 patent-owning companies to examine how communication and empowerment affect organizational ethical climates. The results confirm the relationship between (...) these two managerial practices and organizational ethical climates. We discuss our results and their implications for both future academic research and practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:258 Feminist Studies 47, no. 2. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Mei-Hua Chen and Hong-zen Wang Flexible Intimacies in the Global Intimate Economy: Evidence from Taiwan’s Cross-Border Marriages When Lin Ping was interviewed by the first author of this article at a detention center in the southern city of Tainan, Taiwan, in September 2006, she was forty-three. At that time, she had been married to a (...) Taiwanese man for five years and had successfully obtained a permit for employment at a factory, earning NT$27,000 a month for working ten hours a day. However, before having obtained the work permit, Lin managed to find jobs in informal sectors as a cleaner, a care worker, and a stall vendor’s helper, earning NT$15,000 a month. By the time of our interview, Lin had gone to work at a brothel because she could not put up with her husband anymore. Lin’s husband is twenty years older than she is and, as she described their relationship, the huge age gap makes communication between the couple difficult. They fought often and fiercely. During those fights, Lin’s husband would threaten to divorce her and to not renew her application for residency, which would result in her immediate deportation to China. This did happen once when Lin’s husband refused to renew her work permit. As a result, Lin overstayed her visa and lost her job at the factory. Being thus unemployed, Lin had to dip into her savings and risked going into debt. Her dire financial situation caused her anxiety. Losing the regular income provided by her factory job meant not only having nothing to live on but also being unable to send money back home to China. Given that her marriage failed to provide her the work permit she needed, Lin wanted to leave her husband Mei-Hua Chen and Hong-zen Wang 259 and “go out” for her own good. When asked what she thinks of the stigma attached to commercial sex, Lin replied, “I need to be able to feed myself first. But if you don’t have a work permit and a job, it [sex work] is the only way out. So, I thought I would do it.” She continued: “Once I had the money, I would be able to run a small business such as a noodle stall or selling steam dumplings.” Lin Ping’s stories serve to sketch out the interconnectedness between cross-border sex work and cross-border marriage. As her experiences show, cross-border sex work and marriage tend to overlap in certain spheres; however, they are more often than not conceptualized as two separate institutions. Both are grouped under already dichotomized migratory categories such as marriage migrants and economic migrants, real marriage and fake marriage, legal workers and workers without permits, and legal and illegal migrants, etc. Such dichotomization downplays the fact that many marriage migrants, like economic migrants, invest great economic interests in cross-border marriages; it also downplays the fact that migrant sex workers might also be involved in having intimate relationships with someone. Apart from the entanglement of monetary exchange and intimacy, cross-border marriage and cross-border sex work are also parts of a global intimate economy in which the Global North appropriates southern women’s reproductive and intimate labor. Seen in this light, it becomes urgent to theorize how women from the South manage to survive in the global intimate economy by shifting between cross-border marriage and cross-border sex work in the North. Admittedly, such a Global North-and-South framework fits awkwardly when it comes to understanding Taiwan’s situation because economic development is the sole barometer used to define the North and the South, and economically, Taiwan should be in the North camp. Politically, however, due to the majority of nations not recognizing its sovereignty, Taiwan is much more peripheral than most southern countries, let alone China. Therefore, compared to countries in Southeast Asia, Taiwan is economically North but politically South. This semi-peripheral position in the North-South framework, in our view, makes Taiwan a unique case to theorize the global intimate economy. As a tactic... (shrink)

This article addresses how Asian racialization grounds contemporary social media experimentation on—and comprehensive surveillance of—users. To make this point, we focus on the relationship between the sentimentality of white benevolence as an expression of US empire and the social scientific history of sentiment analysis, which derives from early twentieth-century analyses of women workers and Japanese internment camps. The drive to “read” the inscrutable other—framed as a benevolent alternative to direct coercion—underlies methods to better capture and control individuals by understanding their (...) reactions within experimental and disruptive environments. In tracing these histories, we contribute to larger efforts to unpack the centrality of racial formations to current forms of social media and to reveal how contemporary digital campaigns to protect Asian Americans sustain the mutually constitutive logic of white love and white hate. We conclude by reading for moments of Asian affective opacity as ways to move beyond the sentimental economy of love and hate that so easily feeds the digital economy of sentiment analysis. These examples of opacity make possible contradictory meanings to any particular affective response and makes possible practices of care that coexist with, but exceed, the extractive logics of sentiment analysis. (shrink)

Flipped learning could improve the learning effectiveness of students. However, some studies have pointed out the limitations related to flipped classrooms because the content of the flipped course does not vary according to the needs of the students. On the other hand, adaptive teaching, which customizes the learning mode according to the individual needs of students, can make up for some of the shortcomings of flipped teaching. This study combines adaptive teaching with flipped teaching and applies it to face-to-face classroom (...) activities. The purpose of this research is to explore whether the implementation of flipping and adaptive learning in a computer programming course can improve the learning effectiveness of students. The experimental subjects of this study are the sophomore students in the Department of Information Management. The flipped classroom with adaptive instruction has been realized in the limited course time. This study uses questionnaires to collect pre- and post-test data on the “learning motivation” of students. The learning effectiveness was evaluated based on the students' previous programming course and the semester scores of this course. Research results show that the post-test “learning motivation” has improved overall compared with the pre-test, and the learning effect is significant. The results of this research not only prove the effectiveness of modern teaching theories in programming courses but also lay the foundation for future teaching design. (shrink)

This study adopted a dynamic perspective in investigating the effects of employees’ perception of equity (PoE) and perception of organizational politics (POP) on their trust in organizations and the subsequent effect of such on their commitment. Data were collected from 216 employees from various industries. The positive effect of PoE and negative effect of POP on employees’ trust were confirmed in this study. It is also found that employees’ trust in organizations has a positive effect on their organizational commitment. This (...) study also confirmed the mediation of employees’ trust on the relationships between POP, PoE, and organizational commitment. Besides, the moderation of employees’ trust on the relationships between POP, PoE, and organizational commitment was not confirmed. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has fueled anti-Asian, especially anti-Chinese sentiments worldwide, which may negatively impact diasporic Chinese youths’ adjustment and prosocial development. This study examined the association between compassion, discrimination and prosocial behaviors in diasporic Chinese youths during the COVID-19 pandemic. 360 participants participated and completed the multi-country, cross-sectional, web-based survey between April 22 and May 9, 2020, the escalating stage of the pandemic. This study found compassion as prosocial behaviors’ proximal predictor, while discrimination independently predicted participation in (...) volunteering, and could potentially enhance the association between compassion and charitable giving. These findings suggest that prosociality among young people is sensitive to social context, and that racial discrimination should be considered in future prosocial studies involving young members of ethnic and racial minorities. (shrink)

This project uses machine learning and computer vision techniques and a novel interactive visualization tool to provide street-level characterization of urban spaces such as safety and maintenance in urban neighborhoods. This is achieved by collecting and annotating street-view images, extracting objective metrics through computer vision techniques, and using crowdsourcing to statistically model the perception of subjective metrics such as safety and maintenance. For modeling human perception and scaling it up with a predictive algorithm, we evaluate perception predictions across two points (...) in time separated by economic changes in the urban core of Raleigh, North Carolina, in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession. We hypothesize specific socioeconomic processes can be substantially reflected in the built environment of cities and, thus, render themselves visible at the street level. This paper describes the process of incorporating subjective visual ratings across two datasets of temporally separated street-view images, an algorithm, and a visualization tool. This work serves as a case study for utilizing AI and visualization techniques in a richer characterization of urban spaces that includes both objective metrics such as income (that operates at a broader scale) and subjective metrics such as perception of individuals (that operates at a narrower scale at specific locations). We outline an interdisciplinary methodology to test this hypothesis in streetscape data from Raleigh, NC, from 2008 to 2020. We describe the results of training algorithms that utilized image features with crowdsourced human perception ratings. We provide a comparison of the results with income data. The analysis and interpretation of this comparison provide insight into the challenges and opportunities for using AI technology in characterizing changes in urban environments. One challenge is the ability of human domain experts to interpret the output of algorithms through manipulation and to integrate these results into their workflow. This is addressed with a novel interface designed for interactive analysis and visualization. We conclude with a discussion of some of the benefits and limitations of integrating AI models in the human expert’s decision-making process in the presence of both subjective and objective metrics. (shrink)

Background: High ethical sensitivity positively affects the quality of nursing care; nevertheless, Chinese nurses’ ethical sensitivity and the factors influencing it have not been described. Research objectives: The purpose of this study was to describe ethical sensitivity and to explore factors influencing it among Chinese-registered nurses, to help nursing administrators improve nurses’ ethical sensitivity, build harmony between nurses and patients, and promote the patients’ health. Research design: This was a descriptive, cross-sectional study. Participants and research context: We recruited 500 nurses (...) from several departments in three tertiary hospitals. The Chinese Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire–Revised version and the Jefferson Scale of Empathy-Health Professionals were used to assess the nurses’ ethical sensitivity and empathy ability, respectively. Fifteen sociodemographic variables were included in the questionnaires. Ethical considerations: Informed consent was obtained from the participants regarding participation and data storage and handling. This program has been examined and supported by the research center of medical ethics and professional ethics of Guilin Medical University. The Approval No. was 2016RWYB04. The whole research process is conducted strictly according to ethical requirements. Results: The valid response rate was 84.40% ( n = 422). The total score of Chinese Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire–Revised was 35.82 ± 8.17. The subscale scores of moral responsibility and strength and sense of moral burden were 21.50 ± 4.91 and 14.33 ± 3.98, respectively. Significant differences were found among age groups, gender, years of working, category of profession, and quality of family communication regarding nurses’ ethical sensitivity ( p < 0.05). Regression analysis showed that the main factors influencing nurses’ ethical sensitivity were gender, years of working, quality of family communication, career satisfaction, and empathic ability. Discussion: Our findings suggest that Chinese nurses’ ethical sensitivity in tertiary hospitals in Guilin is at a medium level. Conclusion: The director of nursing schools and hospitals in China should pay attention to nurses’ ethical sensitivity and should intensify education and training to improve nurses’ ethical sensitivity. Further studies should focus on interventions aimed at improving Chinese nurses’ ethical sensitivity. (shrink)