The domestic situation of the past few years shows the practices of employees’ unpaid leave and layoffs and the constant drain on capital, talent, and technologies in hospitality. Owners expect to reduce the losses to as low as possible by saving on human costs. Nevertheless, in face of such a changing environment, hospitality has to accumulate high-quality human capital through systematic investment, sensitive development, and continuous learning and growth to discover competitive advantages through the cultivation of human capital. The pre-service (...) education of new employees could accelerate their familiarity with the operations of the company and their understanding of their job role and duties. More importantly, with good planning, it could make employees feel emphasized with and respected with the result of largely changing their thoughts and working habits. Aiming at supervisors and employees in hospitality in Zhejiang as the research objects, a total of 420 copies of our questionnaire are distributed, and 357 valid copies were retrieved, with a retrieval rate of 85%. According to the results to propose discussions, it is expected to generate systematic and proper education methods for the pre-service education in hospitality, promote the education effectiveness, and promote employees’ capability and organizational performance. (shrink)

What is the interplay of high-tech industrial agglomeration and urban innovation? How does high-tech industrial agglomeration affect urban innovation? What are the heterogeneous effects of high-tech industry agglomeration on urban innovation in different conditions? To answer these questions, this paper analyzes the interrelationship between high-tech industry agglomeration and urban innovation based on panel data of China’s Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration from 2010 to 2019. We discuss the influence mechanism of high-tech industrial agglomeration on urban innovation by exploring the mediating (...) effect of industrial structure optimization and the threshold effect of industrial attributes. The heterogeneous impact of high-tech industry agglomeration on urban innovation is also been further studied. We find that the interaction relationship between high-tech industry agglomeration and urban innovation output is positive. The advancement of industrial structure plays a positive intermediary role between high-tech industrial agglomeration and urban innovation output, while the rationalization of industrial structure shows a suppressing effect. There are different threshold effects between capital intensity and technology intensity. The influence of high-tech agglomeration on urban innovation is positive only when the capital intensity exceeds 1.125. However, the influence is always positive in different levels of technology intensity, significantly. When the technology intensity is higher than 9.012E − 06, the degree and significance of this positive impact would decrease. There are heterogeneous impacts of high-tech industry agglomeration on urban innovation output in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration in different time stages, urban innovation development stages, and urban circles. (shrink)

Philosophical practice, an art of living rooted in ancient traditions, is enriched by modern techniques such as individual counseling, Socratic group dialogues, and organizational consulting. Philosophical counseling, a key aspect of this practice, employs traditional philosophical frameworks and rational reasoning to address clients' concerns, distinguishing itself from psychotherapy while respecting individual autonomy. The growing Western interest in Asian philosophies also underscores a shared pursuit of wisdom, spirituality, and meaning. This paper examines the development, key features, and leading proponents of philosophical (...) practice, its relationship with academic philosophy, and the tensions between their differing aims and methods. The outlook for philosophical counseling is promising, offering an alternative to medical approaches for existential issues and expanding its scope to personal guidance, conflict resolution, and life‐skill development. Its future trajectory hinges on societal trends toward secularization, the de‐medicalization of mental health, and the increasing recognition of philosophy's intrinsic practical value. (shrink)

This study explores the research paradigms of contemporary business ethics research in 2001–2008. With citation data from the top two business ethics journals included in the Social Sciences Citation Index, this study conducts citation and co-citation analysis to identify the most important publications, scholars, and research themes in the business ethics area and then maps the intellectual structure of business ethics studies between 2001 and 2008. The results show that current business ethics studies cluster around four major research themes, including (...) morality and social contract theory, ethical decision making, corporate social responsibility, and stakeholder theory. This study helps profile the invisible network of knowledge production in business ethics and provides important insights on current research paradigms of business ethics studies. (shrink)

This essay examines the depiction of French ragout in eighteenth-century English literature, arguing that the dish reflects social apprehension regarding ideological, cultural, and military conflicts between England and France. This essay first traces a brief history of ragout, along with an overview of the dish’s cultural connotation and complexity, in eighteenth-century English society. It next delves into the concept of eighteenth-century English Francophobia, demonstrating that this sentiment was a mixture of national pride and anxiety amid England’s identity crisis under the (...) potential French cultural threat. Finally, the essay examines ragout in eighteenth-century English literature and identifies the dish as the target of French pretension and cultural invasion. This research highlights the fact that eighteenth-century English authors’ satirical portrait of ragout underscored xenophobic gastronomy and cautioned against a simple interpretation of the dish. The caricature and representation of ragout as a feminized, artificial, and laughable dish reinforces eighteenth-century English writers’ concern for the invasion of foreign culture by emphasizing the contrast between authentic ‛Anglo’ meat consumption and ‛Franco’ sophistication. (shrink)

Background Participants' understanding of clinical trials is important in informed consent. However, little is known about what information participants really want to know. Aims To demonstrate the existence of a discrepancy between participants' understanding and their desire to know. Methods The participants in clinical trials at Seoul National University Hospital were surveyed. The survey consisted of 11 statements based on the essential elements of informed consent. The participants gave two responses to each statement on a five-point Likert scale to rate (...) their subjective understanding and desire to know, respectively. Information discrepancy was defined as the difference between these two ratings: if understanding exceeded desire to know for a particular item, it was defined as ‘over-informed’; if desire to know exceeded understanding for a particular item, it was defined as ‘under-informed’. Results Participants reported good understanding of ‘voluntariness’, ‘duration’, ‘study involves research’ and poor understanding of ‘confidentiality’, ‘compensation’, ‘benefits’, ‘procedures’ and ‘risks or discomforts’. For ‘risks or discomforts’, ‘who to contact’, ‘voluntariness’, ‘duration’ and ‘procedures’, participants reported high desire to know compared with ‘confidentiality’, ‘purpose’, ‘study involves research’ and ‘benefits’. The elements ‘study involves research’, ‘voluntariness’, ‘duration’, ‘purpose’ and ‘who to contact’ were over-informed, while ‘compensation’, ‘risks or discomforts’, ‘procedures’, ‘confidentiality’ and ‘benefits’ were under-informed. Participants over 50 years of age, those without a college education and those whose participation was less voluntary were relatively less informed about the clinical trials. Conclusions An information discrepancy was observed between the participants' understanding and their desire to know. By putting more emphasis on under-informed elements, the quality of informed consent could be improved. (shrink)

This study adds to the growing research exploring the consequences of knowledge hiding in organizations. Drawing from the social exchange theory and the norm of reciprocity, this paper examines the direct and indirect—via distrust in supervisor—relationships between supervisor knowledge hiding and supervisee organizational citizenship behavior directed at the supervisor in the context of the Middle East. Using a supervisor–supervisee dyadic design, two-source data were obtained from 317 employees of 41 Saudi firms. The findings suggest that supervisees’ distrust in their supervisors (...) mediates the significant and negative relationship between SKH and supervisees’ OCB-S. Furthermore, the significant and positive relationship between SKH and distrust in supervisor is more pronounced for foreign workers than for local workers. This study provides empirical support and a better understanding of the existence and consequences of SKH for local and foreign workers and also discusses the theoretical and practical implications of the findings. (shrink)

The impact of “love of money” on different aspects of consumers’ ethical beliefs has been investigated by previous research. In this study we investigate the potential impact of “love of money” on a manager’s ethical decision-making in marketing. Another objective of the current study is to investigate the potential impacts of extrinsic and intrinsic religiosity on ethical marketing decision-making. We also include ethical judgments as an element of ethical decision-making. We found “love of money”, both dimensions of religiosity, and ethical (...) judgment to have significant impacts on ethical intentions in a marketing situation. In addition to providing an important contribution to the business ethics literature, the findings also have important managerial implications. (shrink)

The article focuses on the role of social technology in the Russian electoral process. On this basis, the author provides answers to more general issues concerning such questions as whether it is possible in the Russian context to combine social stability and informative political communication; whether a conflict-free processing of objective information can be achieved; whether political communication can extricate itself from self-referential isolation around the issue of social unity and address the real challenges facing society; and whether the authorities (...) will be able to transition from motivative-integrative social technologies to object-information technologies. (shrink)

As science has grown in size and scope, it has also presented a number of ethical and moral challenges. Approaching these challenges from an ethical framework can provide guidance when engaging with them. In this article, I place science within a virtue ethics framework, as discussed by Aristotle. By framing science within virtue ethics, I discuss what virtue ethics entails for the practicing scientist. Virtue ethics holds that each person should work towards her conception of flourishing where the virtues enable (...) her to realize that conception. The virtues must become part of the scientist’s character, undergirding her intentions and motivations, as well as the resulting decisions and actions. The virtue of phronêsis, or practical wisdom, is critical for cultivating virtue, enabling the moral agent to discern the appropriate actions for a particular situation. In exercising phronêsis, the scientist considers the situation from multiple perspectives for an in-depth and nuanced understanding of the situation, discerns the relevant factors, and settles upon an appropriate decision. I examine goods internal to a practice, which are constitutive of science practiced well and discuss the role of phronêsis when grappling with science’s ethical and moral features and how the scientist might exercise it. Although phronêsis is important for producing scientific knowledge, it is equally critical for working through the moral and ethical questions science poses. (shrink)

This work investigates the finite-time control problem for a nonlinear four-tank cross-coupled liquid level system by the port-controlled Hamiltonian model. A fixed-free methodology is exhibited which can be used to simplify the controller design procedure. To get an adjustable convergent gain of the finite-time control, a feasible technique named damping normalization is proposed. A novel parameter autotuning algorithm is given to clarify the principle of choosing parameters of the PCH method. Furthermore, a finite-time controller is designed by a state-error desired (...) Hamiltonian function, and the relationship between the settling time and a parameter is given, which can be applied in practical engineering easily to adjust the settling time according to the industrial need. Finally, simulation and experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence is regarded in the context of the tasks that are delegated to it during the development of technical projects and the features of the implementation of tasks that must be performed in real time without the possibility of interruption. The relevance of the study is determined by the fact that artificial intelligence sees as its main task the formalisation of decision-making with little or no human involvement. The basis of the methodological search are biological and prognostic methods. The (...) current stage of development of socio-humanitarian technologies, and in particular, systems with artificial intelligence, prompts people to conduct such socio-technical projects, for the implementation of which the properties of the human biological brain are no longer enough. The result of research on artificial intelligence is the desire to understand the work of the human brain, to reveal the secrets of human consciousness and the problem of creating machines with a certain level of human intelligence. The novelty of the study is determined by the fact that the understanding of artificial intelligence is primarily aimed at creating an environment that can distinguish artificial intelligence from the entire array of technological devices not only as a platform of knowledge and program code. The practical significance of the study is determined by the necessity for standardisation and the formation of attitudes and the acceptability of the use of artificial intelligence in tasks that will subsequently affect social development. (shrink)

This article is dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the publication of Niklas Luhmann’s book The Science of Society. The system-communicative approach to the analysis of science is reconstructed with a focus on the relation of science to its highly complex external world. The problem of complexity is posed as a key one and is considered in the context of the communicative “reduction of the complexity” of the external world, which science actualizes through its unique binary opposition (truth/falsehood distinction). The (...) complexity of the world that science is facing disintegrates into two large areas. On the one hand, science processes its own external world, i.e., nature, society, the human psyche, as its object and thus fulfills a unique function, the pursuance of research. Scientific communication in this case can be integrated in the form of transdisciplinary studies. On the other hand, science has to respond to the complexity of the internal (i.e., social) external world of the communicative system of science, namely, to interfaced communicative systems of the embracing system of world society (politics, economy, religion, education, law, etc.). In the latter case, science does not fulfill a function but delivers achievements on request to the above-mentioned communicative systems in exchange for resources for interdisciplinary studies, which are occasional and cannot serve for integrating scientific communication on a systematic basis. We will propose some corrections to this theory and apply it to the situation in Russian science. (shrink)

The present study explored heterogeneity in the association between engaged living and problematic Internet use. This study included 641 adolescents from four junior-senior high schools of Guangzhou, China. Besides the standard linear regression analysis, mixture regression analysis was conducted to detect certain subgroups of adolescents, based on their divergent association between engaged living and PIU. Sex, age, and psychological need were further compared among the latent subgroups. The results showed that a mixture regression model could account for more variance of (...) PIU than a traditional linear regression model, and identified three subgroups based on their class-specific regression of PIU to engaged living. For the High-PIU class, lower social integration and higher absorption were associated with increased PIU; for the Medium-PIU class, only high social integration was linked with the increase of PIU. For the Low-PIU class, no relation between engaged living and PIU were found. Additionally, being male or having a lower level of satisfied psychological needs increased the link between engaged living and PIU. The results indicated a heterogeneous relationship between engaged living and PIU among adolescents, and prevention or intervention programs should be tailored specifically to subgroups with moderate or high levels of PIU and to those with lower levels of psychological needs’ satisfaction, as identified by the mixture regression model. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the consideration of the good nature existential foundations. Good, as a transcendental phenomenon, reveals itself in a person as a powerful mechanism of its internal development – spiritual needs. Need, unlike desire, is not just a requirement of the human body. Need is a way of relationship, that is, communication with objective reality. This life aspiration is responsible for the personality realization as an active, creative, responsible part of co-existence. Therefore, all aspects of human life (...) and communication, and productivity, and harmony, depend on the state of the needs system satisfaction. It is these existential conditions that correspond to the principles of ethical absolutism. Thus, the intersection point of ethics and human, the condition for the interaction and implementation of the principles of ethics is concentrated in the development of our soul needs. The soul seeks to go beyond the egoistic desires of the flesh. Therefore, to hear the “voice” of the soul, to respond to its call, a person can only when the desire to know the world around him conquers the desire to possess this world. In this regard, we are talking about the fact that the basis for the spiritual needs of humans is the need for love. The need to love resonates with the basic ethical principle “love of one’s neighbor”. Therefore, working on our own egoism, we realize the whole complex of spiritual needs: in knowledge, communication, freedom, creativity. So, the need to love is the highest metaphysical force in which the nature of good is concentrated, both on the ontological and existential levels. (shrink)

The most ancient monuments of ancient Christian art were found in catacombs located outside the cities. The Christian catacombs were a complex plexus of underground narrow galleries with numerous niches where the coffins of martyrs and bishops were placed. These niches formed a kind of rectangular chambers, the walls and surfaces of which were decorated with images. Thus, early Christian art begins with catacomb paintings.

As one of the low-carbon products, remanufactured products are being paid more attention in more and more countries. But the low willingness of Chinese consumers to pay for them makes it difficult for remanufactured products companies to move forward in the Chinese market. This study explores the factors that affect consumers’ willingness to pay for remanufactured goods, through the hierarchical linear regression method, based on questionnaires. The results show that demographic variables (age, education, occupation, and income), individual subjective variables (environmental (...) awareness, secondhand preferences, and Chinese quality trust) and product perception variables (MP4 quality perceived risk, face risk, and product impact on the environment) have a significant impact on the willingness to pay for remanufactured goods. (shrink)

The article raises the problem of the ambiguity and polysemantic nature of the complex and heterogeneous semantics of the concept of science. This concept includes theories and methods, models and classifications of reality, scientific laws and laws of nature, scientific thinking, scientific publications, experiments and laboratory activities, scientific institutes and research teams, scientific research, expertise and scientific disciplines, scientific knowledge and scientific truth, etc. Nevertheless, with all the abovementioned complexity, science exhibits the properties of a single, dynamically developing complex phenomenon (...) and, accordingly, requires an appropriate interdisciplinary, complex definition that is sensitive to its fundamental contexts: thematic, social and temporal. (shrink)

Research has shown that corporate social responsibility (CSR) can have a positive impact on the firm’s reputation and financial performance. Moreover, CSR activities can have a positive impact on employees’ workplace experience. Consistent with past research, we argue that perceived organizational CSR value can have a positive impact on job satisfaction. We also argue that employees’ moral identity can play an important moderating role on the perceived CSR effect. Specifically, the current study was designed to test the predictive effects of (...) perceived organizational CSR value on job satisfaction. In addition, the study was designed to test the moderating roles of two moral identity dimensions, internalized and symbolic moral identity, on the effect of perceived organizational CSR value on job satisfaction. The study results were generally supportive of the hypotheses. Managerial implications of the study findings were also discussed. (shrink)

To analyze the argument structure, the linked vs convergent distinction is crucial. In applying this distinction, argumentation scholars test for variations of argument strength under premise revision. A relevance-based test assesses whether an argument’s premises are individually relevant to its conclusion, while a support-based test assesses whether premises support the conclusion independently. Both criteria presuppose that evaluating an argument’s strength is methodologically prior to identifying its structure. Yet, if ‘argument structure’ is a concept of analysis, then a structural analysis would (...) precede evaluating an argument’s strength. We problematize that state-of-the-art methods to identify structures fail, because they rely on evaluative judgments, and so “put the cart before the horse.”. (shrink)

In this paper, I deal with Heidegger’s evolving account of metaphysics, since Heidegger’s persistent concern, the question of being, is a basic metaphysical question. To date, most Heidegger scholars have focused only on a particular stage of Heidegger’s philosophy: either his early attempt to deconstruct metaphysics, or his efforts to overcome metaphysics in the 1930s, or his late embrace of ‘releasement’ from metaphysics. However, these limited approaches fail to address Heidegger’s different understandings of metaphysics, which lie at the root of (...) his changing approaches to the question of being. They also fail to explain whether there is any inner connection between the various approaches. Further, given Heidegger’s unremittingly negative attitude towards metaphysics, some scholars have even maintained that Heidegger thought it both possible and desirable to leave metaphysics behind altogether. I address these issues first by arguing that metaphysics for Heidegger has three interconnected meanings: initially it is the representation of the totality of things that are present-at-hand, a view subsequently developed into subjective representational thinking, and finally radicalized into an expression of the will to power. At each stage, Heidegger critiques the metaphysical tradition but never claims that it can be fully eliminated, since it is a mode of Dasein’s being and ultimately possiblized by being itself. For this reason, Heidegger’s own philosophy of being remains inseparable from metaphysics. (shrink)

At this stage of evolution of our discipline, philosophy of science, there seems no single great theme that has attracted the attention of most practitioners in the field. Rather, scholarly works in the field are quite diffused. Traditional topics, such as reductionism and the unity of science, remain to be carefully examined from various perspectives. The debate over realism versus instrumentalism, although dismissed by some as uninteresting and unproductive, is still taken by many active scholars as vital in our understanding (...) of the nature of scientific theories and in our appraisal of scientific enterprise. Of course, the new spirit of our times has also shown itself, sometimes in the discussion of some major theses in the post-empiricist philosophy of science, such as incommensurability, underdetermination and constructivism, on the basis of detailed examination of scientific materials, other times in the shift of the attention from static aspects of science, such as theory justification and the nature of explanation, to more dynamic aspects, such as negotiations within a scientific community and its function and role in the development of science. Even more to the point in this regard is the great attention paid to the place science has occupied in modernity, the defect of modernist understanding of science and its possible remedy. Not surprisingly, this current state of affairs in our field has also manifested in the essays collected in this volume of contributions to the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy. Thus, an inspection of these essays, although it will not provide us with a focus of the discipline, may give us some sense as to what is going on in the field. (shrink)

We study the problem of existence of maximal chains in the Turing degrees. We show that: 1. ZF+DC+"There exists no maximal chain in the Turing degrees" is equiconsistent with ZFC+"There exists an inaccessible cardinal"; 2. For all a ∈ 2ω.(ω₁)L[a] = ω₁ if and only if there exists a $\Pi _{1}^{1}[a]$ maximal chain in the Turing degrees. As a corollary, ZFC + "There exists an inaccessible cardinal" is equiconsistent with ZFC + "There is no (bold face) $\utilde{\Pi}{}_{1}^{1}$ maximal chain of (...) Turing degrees". (shrink)

The present research explored differences in gift evaluation between gift givers and receivers. Three studies were conducted to test how the pricing influenced the gift evaluations of givers and receivers, and whether the price-quality and price-monetary sacrifice inferences were the underlying mechanisms. The results showed that: givers evaluated high-priced gifts as better than low-priced gifts, whereas receivers evaluated low-priced gifts as better than high-priced gifts; price-quality inference mediated the effect of pricing on gift evaluations, but only for givers. Furthermore, the (...) effect of pricing on gift evaluation was moderated by the gift type: givers evaluated the high-priced gift as better only for the desirable gift ; receivers evaluated the low-priced gift as better only for the feasible gift. The results demonstrate the effect of pricing on gift evaluation and could contribute to understanding the differences between givers’ and receivers’ perception of what a “good gift” is, and the underlying psychological mechanisms. (shrink)

Smart grids are rolling out internationally, with the United States nearing completion of a significant USD4-plus-billion federal program funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The emergence of smart grids is widespread across developed countries. Multiple approaches to analyzing the benefits of smart grids have emerged. The goals of this white paper are to review these approaches and analyze examples of each to highlight their differences, advantages, and disadvantages. This work was conducted under the auspices of a joint U.S.-China (...) research effort, the Climate Change Working Group Implementation Plan, Smart Grid. We present comparative benefits assessments of smart grid demonstrations in the U.S. and China along with a BA of a pilot project in Europe. In the U.S., we assess projects at two sites: the University of California, Irvine campus, which consists of two distinct demonstrations: Southern California Edison’s Irvine Smart Grid Demonstration Project and the UCI campus itself; and the Navy Yard area in Philadelphia, which has been repurposed as a mixed commercial-industrial, and possibly residential, development. In China, we cover several smart-grid aspects of the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city and the Shenzhen Bay Technology and Ecology City. In Europe, we look at a BA of a pilot smart grid project in the Malagrotta area west of Rome, Italy, contributed by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. The Irvine sub-project BAs use the U.S. Department of Energy Smart Grid Computational Tool, which is built on methods developed by the Electric Power Research Institute. The TEC sub-project BAs apply Smart Grid Multi-Criteria Analysis developed by the State Grid Corporation of China based on the analytic hierarchy process with fuzzy logic. The B-TEC and TNY sub-project BAs are evaluated using new approaches developed by those project teams. JRC has adopted an approach similar to EPRI’s but tailored to the Malagrotta distribution grid. (shrink)

Experts play a crucial role in underpinning decision-making in most management situations. While recent studies have disclosed the impacts of individuals’ inherent cognition and the external environment on expert performance, these two-dimensional mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this study, we identified 14 factors that influence expert performance in a bid evaluation and applied cross-impact matrix multiplication to examine the interdependence of the factors. The results indicate that the two dimension-related factors affect each other within a person–environment system, and a poor (...) situation perception gives rise to the deviation of expert performance. Expert performance can be improved if external supervision and expertise are strengthened through deliberate practices. The study proposes a new expert performance research tool, elucidates its mechanism in bid evaluation from a cognitive psychology perspective, and provides guidelines for its improvement in workplace contexts. (shrink)

This letter explores the intricate historical and contemporary links between large language models (LLMs) and cognitive science through the lens of information theory, statistical language models, and socioanthropological linguistic theories. The emergence of LLMs highlights the enduring significance of information‐based and statistical learning theories in understanding human communication. These theories, initially proposed in the mid‐20th century, offered a visionary framework for integrating computational science, social sciences, and humanities, which nonetheless was not fully fulfilled at that time. The subsequent development of (...) sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, especially since the 1970s, provided critical perspectives and empirical methods that both challenged and enriched this framework. This letter proposes that two pivotal concepts derived from this development, metapragmatic function and indexicality, offer a fruitful theoretical perspective for integrating the semantic, textual, and pragmatic, contextual dimensions of communication, an amalgamation that contemporary LLMs have yet to fully achieve. The author believes that contemporary cognitive science is at a crucial crossroads, where fostering interdisciplinary dialogues among computational linguistics, social linguistics and linguistic anthropology, and cognitive and social psychology is in particular imperative. Such collaboration is vital to bridge the computational, cognitive, and sociocultural aspects of human communication and human−AI interaction, especially in the era of large language and multimodal models and human‐centric Artificial Intelligence (AI). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Introduction to Benjamin I. Schwartz' "China and Contemporary Millenarianism—Something New under the Sun"Lin Yu-shengIn the spring of 1998, my colleague Mike Clover, a historian of the ancient West and an admirer of Benjamin I. Schwartz' The World of Thought in Ancient China, invited Professor Schwartz to participate, with Heiko Oberman, J. C. Heesterman, and Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, among others, in a conference he had been organizing on "Eurasia and Africa (...) during the Last Thousand Years." The essay that follows—the last piece of scholarly writing by Ben Schwartz, finished thirty-seven days before his passing—was read by me on his behalf at the conference, held on October 11 and 12, 1999, in Madison.From my telephone conversations with Ben in the summer of 1999, I learned that while he intended to work on a paper for the conference to be titled "The Idea of Unilinear Evolution and the Destinies of China," his attention was very much drawn to the fact of the onset in America of unbridled consumerism and materialism, whose characteristic of feeding on themselves with ever increasing intensity and widespread impact seemed to indicate to him the rise of a profoundly disturbing new phenomenon in this world. When I visited with Ben and Bunny (Mrs. Schwartz) in Cambridge on October 2 and 3, Ben was in the midst of writing an essay on what he would call the "new technological-economic millenarianism" or "materialistic apocalypticism." He said that he preferred to have me read this essay, which he would finish before the conference, rather than the one he originally intended to write. Since the conference was meant to take note of the significance of the passage of time from a world-historical perspective, the reflections by a thinker as deeply serious and searching as Ben Schwartz at the juncture of the end of the second millennium and the beginning of the third on the implications of an entirely new worldwide phenomenon as he perceived it—though having little direct bearing on China's past—would of course be most welcome at the conference.Ben's health deteriorated almost immediately after he had completed the essay on Friday, October 8, and he died on November 14, 1999. We now know from hindsight that Ben had probably felt that he might soon leave us, but he summoned enough energy not to let this happen before his completion of the essay, partly due to his sense of responsibility to deliver what he had promised and partly, and more importantly, because of the imperative he felt to issue, in the spirit of the old prophets, as his parting words, a grave warning to his fellow human beings.The essay is discursive, with many important points implied through nuance rather than formally argued. We can hardly expect more, given the physical condition of its author at the time of its writing. Although this does not, in my opinion, diminish its importance, it does demand close reading from its readers. The following is my brief attempt at this task, for whatever it may be worth. [End Page 189]To begin with, that Ben chooses to use religious language (which is related to "ultimate concerns")—words like "millenarianism" or "apocalypticism," which are ordinarily reserved for depicting the rare and drastic deliverance of humankind from "the vast burden of human suffering and despair"—as a means to explore metaphorically the nature and implications of the new consumerism and materialism is indicative of how serious he has perceived the onset of the phenomenon under consideration to be.To the extent that consumerism and materialism promise to their true believers "a totally new way of neutralizing the age-old causes of human suffering" (italics mine) through their "total attention on every aspect of human life from the techno-economic side," it is legitimate to speak of them as "materialistic apocalypticism," in that they transcend all tensions and agonies in life and elevate the true believers to a state of salvation. However, in its exclusive concern with "unalloyed, unreflective contentment" and pleasure in the self without any regard for the ethical consequences of techno-economic progress, it is a new materialism very different from... (shrink)

The majority of higher plants (including almost all important crops) demonstrate strict uniparental maternal inheritance of plasmagenes in the process of conventional sexual crossing; it is therefore impossible to generate heterozygosity for these genes with standard crossing procedures. However, recent experiments have shown that hybrid plants can be produced by somatic cell fusion and that these contain the cytoplasmic genes of both parents. The phenotypic and genetic properties of these hybrid plants are described here.

This study tested whether compassionate goals to support others and self-image goals to maintain and defend desired self-images: 1) are equivalent constructs across three cultures ; 2) overlap with interdependent self-construal; and 3) predict relationships and growth measures similarly in each country. We re-analyzed data from American and Japanese students, reported in Niiya et al., along with new data from Poland. Single and multiple group confirmatory analyses showed that the two-factor structure holds across the three cultures. Interdependence correlated with compassionate (...) and self-image goals only in Japan. In all three samples, compassionate goals correlated with non-zero-sum belief, feeling close, growth-seeking, self-compassion, and learning from failures, whereas self-image goals correlated with defensive responses to conflicts and validation-seeking. Our results suggest that compassionate and self-image goals may serve similar functions in relationships and growth across cultures. (shrink)

From the earliest times, the very existence of Soviet power to combat religion and tirades, along with methods of economic and ideological pressure, actively using legal factors, is a rather strict system. Following the massive unveiling of solidarity and white army officials who were unable to leave the peninsula in November 1920, they began to form in the Crimea various branches of government, including their judicial system, which was published in a new regime of elements of legitimacy. However, the legal (...) system created on the peninsula was annexed to a radical political system, so when there were various problems, they were members of principles of political expediency, not morality and rights. (shrink)

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

Objective: This study aimed to test the psychometric properties of the suicide stroop task in a Chinese college population. Methods: College students who were in the 1st–4th grade, fluent in Chinese, and without color blindness were recruited from a university in Guangzhou, China from September to December 2019. Participants were administered the suicide stroop task at baseline and 1-month follow-up. Results: The suicide stroop task showed excellent internal reliability. However, the suicide stroop task did not reveal suicide-related attentional biases among (...) current suicide ideators and was not significantly associated with the severity of suicidal ideation, depression, hopelessness, nor anhedonia, indicating a lack of concurrent validity for the task. Additionally, the two-time data of interference scores could not generate intraclass correlation coefficients due to a negative average covariance among data, which indicated poor test–retest consistency for the task. Conclusion: The results of this study did not support the use of the suicide stroop task on the identification of suicidal risk among Chinese college students. It is crucial to assess the psychometric properties of behavioral measures rigorously as self-report measures before large applications in clinical and community settings. (shrink)

This study draws on Relevance Theory, Conversation Analysis, and Politeness Theory in investigating a full range of discourse functions for hao and dui with reference to recurrent patterns, distributions, and forms of organization in a large corpus of talk. Special emphasis is placed on a comparison of hao and dui in combination with a small subset of discourse particles: in particular hao/hao le/ hao la/hao a/hao ba and dui/dui a/dui le in spoken discourse. We find that both of the markers (...) signal special sequential relatedness in talk and carry information which is relevant in determining the boundaries of conversational exchange. However, in interaction hao is used for expressing acceptance of the other speaker’s move or act, whereas dui conveys acknowledgment of the propositional content of the utterance produced by the other speaker. (shrink)

Computational visual perception, also known as computer vision, is a field of artificial intelligence that enables computers to process digital images and videos in a similar way as biological vision does. It involves methods to be developed to replicate the capabilities of biological vision. The computer vision’s goal is to surpass the capabilities of biological vision in extracting useful information from visual data. The massive data generated today is one of the driving factors for the tremendous growth of computer vision. (...) This survey incorporates an overview of existing applications of deep learning in computational visual perception. The survey explores various deep learning techniques adapted to solve computer vision problems using deep convolutional neural networks and deep generative adversarial networks. The pitfalls of deep learning and their solutions are briefly discussed. The solutions discussed were dropout and augmentation. The results show that there is a significant improvement in the accuracy using dropout and data augmentation. Deep convolutional neural networks’ applications, namely, image classification, localization and detection, document analysis, and speech recognition, are discussed in detail. In-depth analysis of deep generative adversarial network applications, namely, image-to-image translation, image denoising, face aging, and facial attribute editing, is done. The deep generative adversarial network is unsupervised learning, but adding a certain number of labels in practical applications can improve its generating ability. However, it is challenging to acquire many data labels, but a small number of data labels can be acquired. Therefore, combining semisupervised learning and generative adversarial networks is one of the future directions. This article surveys the recent developments in this direction and provides a critical review of the related significant aspects, investigates the current opportunities and future challenges in all the emerging domains, and discusses the current opportunities in many emerging fields such as handwriting recognition, semantic mapping, webcam-based eye trackers, lumen center detection, query-by-string word, intermittently closed and open lakes and lagoons, and landslides. (shrink)