This study examines the varying roles of power, status, and national culture in unethical decision-making. Most research on unethical behavior in organizations is grounded in Western societies; empirical comparative studies of the antecedents of unethical behavior across nations are rare. The authors conduct this comparative study using scenario studies with four conditions in both China and Canada. The results demonstrate that power is positively related to unethical decision-making in both countries. Status has a positive effect on unethical decision-making and facilitates (...) the unethical decisions of Canadian participants who have high power but not Chinese participants who have high power. To explicate participants’ unethical decision-making rationales, the authors ask participants to justify their unethical decisions; the results reveal that Chinese participants are more likely to cite position differences, whereas Canadian participants are more likely to cite work effort and personal abilities. These findings expand theoretical research on the relationship between social hierarchy and unethical decision-making and provide practical insights on unethical behavior in organizations. (shrink)

In previous research comparing the Context-driven Model with the Default Model of meaning processing, the former was preferred. It predicts that contexts play an exclusively decisive role in meaning processing, whereas the latter holds that the inference of literal meaning generally goes through, unless it is subsequently defaulted or cancelled by the context it is associated with. The Standardization Model, which we added to our experiments, highlights that implicatures are figured out from standardized forms typically based on the mutual background (...) belief and speaker’s intention. We tested whether Chinese people’s processing of the gradable adjective scale conformed more to the Context-driven Model, the Default Model, or the Standardization Model. The results demonstrated that the Standardization Model is the most acceptable among the three. The findings of this study, which is the first study using the experimental paradigm on Chinese gradable adjectives, highlighted a need for further studies to investigate the same questions with different languages and cultures. (shrink)

Food safety and food quality are two closely related aspects of the food management system. The difference between the two is that one keeps consumers safe while the other keeps consumers satisfied. This study examined the differences in how consumers value food safety and food quality with a focus on the influence of loss aversion on one’s psychological level and of income effect on one’s socio-demographic level. Our findings indicate that loss aversion and income effect significantly influence the way consumers (...) value food safety vs. quality labels when considering potential health risks and food price. High risk-averse and low-income consumers with strong loss aversion and a weak income effect show a higher demand for food safety labels as a way to ensure easy access to safety indications. Low risk-averse and high-income consumers with weak loss aversion and a strong income effect show a higher demand for food quality labels because they hope to gain more health benefits from high-quality food at good prices. This study provides insights that will assist public authorities and food industry in balancing food safety control and food quality improvement in order to meet the heterogeneous market demand changing alongside the transition of China’s food consumption and production. (shrink)

Although prior studies have extensively investigated the effect of working conditions upon professional satisfaction, the cross-national variance in the effect remains largely understudied due to technical or financial restrictions. The Teaching and Learning International Survey provides an opportunity to investigate the cross-country differences in the impact of working conditions upon principals’ professional satisfaction. The current study attempts to investigate the overall and specific effects of principals’ workplace environment satisfaction, rewards satisfaction, and workload stress on their professional satisfaction in 47 countries (...) included in the TALIS 2018. The results indicate that workplace environment, rather than the typically regarded effort-reward issues, is the most powerful contributor to individual principals’ professional satisfaction across 47 countries, while, in countries with low overall professional satisfaction, rewards satisfaction and workload stress are more powerful predictors for principals’ professional satisfaction on the country level. This study may inform policymakers in school principal stimulation and retention that effective practice to stimulate and/or retain school principals may vary across countries and research findings derived from data on the individual level may not be applicable to practice on the country level. (shrink)

Because of the impact of close partner's touch on psychological and physical well-being by alleviating stress, it is important to explore the influence factors that underlie the stress-alleviating effect of close partner's touch. Previous studies suggested that the stress-alleviating effect was different when individuals were touched by different persons. Specifically, the stress was reduced significantly when the individual was touched by the close partner compared with the acquaintance and the stranger. However, whether the stress-alleviating effect of touch was modulated by (...) the close relationship quality is unknown. To examine this question, the participants performed a 3 × 2 within-subjects experiment. The results revealed that the stress of the participants alleviated significantly while close partners present with touch compared with without touch during facing a threat. We also found that the relationship quality of couple-members modulated touch-induced stress alleviation. Participants perceiving the low quality of alternatives and the high partners' commitment level showed stronger touch-induced stress-alleviating effect than participants perceiving the high quality of alternatives and the low partners' commitment level. The explained variance was around 16.8% jointly for actor and partner effects. These findings provide evidence for explaining the reasons for touch-induced alleviating stress and have important implications for predicting the future effect of interactive behaviors. (shrink)

My aim in this article is to set out some counter-intuitive claims about the challenges posed by artificial intelligence (AI) applications to the protection and enjoyment of human rights and to be your guide through my unorthodox ideas. While there are familiar human rights issues raised by AI and its applications, these are perhaps the easiest of the challenges because they are already recognized by the human rights regime as problems. Instead, the more pernicious challenges are those that have yet (...) to be identified or articulated, because they arise from new affordances rather than directly through AI modeled as a technology. I suggest that we need to actively explore the potential problem space on this basis. I suggest that we need to adopt models and metaphors that systematically exclude the possibility of applying the human rights regime to AI applications. This orientation will present us with the difficult, intractable problems that most urgently require responses. There are convincing ways of understanding AI that lock out the very possibility for human rights responses and this should be grounds for serious concern. I suggest that responses need to exploit both sets of insights I present in this paper: first that proactive and systematic searches of the potential problem space need to be continuously conducted to find the problems that require responses; and second that the monopoly that the human rights regime holds with regards to addressing harm and suffering needs to be broken so that we can deploy a greater range of barriers against failures to recognize and remedy AI-induced wrongs. (shrink)

With the rapid development of mobile devices, users can now read on the screen. Electronic reading has become a common reading style with the growth in online learning or electronic learning. E-book applications are widely developed and applied for reading on a screen. However, it is difficult for readers to change their reading habits or preference from paper-printed books to digital devices. The study of readers' continuance intention to use e-book APPs is the first step to improving e-reading. This study (...) focuses on the influential factors on undergraduates' continuance intention of e-book APPs, which analyzed and summarized the literature related to the electronic book applications and undergraduates' continuous intention, combined with the characteristics of the e-book APPs, introduced relevant theories and variables, and established the factors that influence undergraduates' continuous intention of using e-book APPs. On this basis, the paper analyzed the relationship between various influencing factors and their influence on continuous intention. A model composed of five hypotheses was constructed to test the factors influencing undergraduates' continuous intention in e-book APPs. The results indicated that of all research variables, satisfaction is the most important factor that affects continuous intention; Perceived usefulness and perceived playfulness have an indirect effect on continuous intention through satisfaction; personalization has direct effects on perceived usefulness and perceived playfulness, so it also has an indirect effect on continuous intention. The findings of the study will be helpful for designers and developers of e-book APPs and provide e-book APP suggestions for readers as well. (shrink)

The purpose of this research is to examine the influence of servant leadership on teachers of moral education degree programs in Pakistan. By utilizing social learning, we propose that servant leadership and perceived coworker support can reduce the knowledge hiding by enhancing the sense of organization-based psychological ownership. The findings of time-lagged and multi-source data indicate that servant leadership has a negative relationship with knowledge hiding. Our results also indicate that psychological ownership mediates the effects of servant leadership on knowledge (...) hiding. Moreover, a higher level of perceived coworker support enhances the sense of psychological ownership which helps to reduce knowledge hiding. This research extends strong support for the proposition that servant leaders who adopt an employee-centered management approach, stressing personal integrity and care for employees significantly affect employee attitudes and behaviors. Moreover, this study suggests that managers should demonstrate care toward their subordinates which helps them to reduce negative behaviors. (shrink)

Counterfeiting is common in many industries. For the authenticity of online channel products and to combat counterfeiting, many companies have begun to use blockchain technology to trace product information. This paper investigates a dual-channel supply chain consisting of one manufacturer and one retailer, in which the manufacturer sells its standard products through the retailer and adopts blockchain technology to launch the online channel to sell the traceable products. A Stackelberg game is developed to depict the pricing decision and channel strategy (...) choice for the manufacturer. It shows that both the manufacturer and the retailer can benefit from blockchain adoption. And the longer it takes for product traceability, the lower the price of online traceable products. It is beneficial for the manufacturer when consumers in the market are less concerned about information transparency. For consumer sensitivity, as consumers’ acceptance of direct sales channels increases, the selling prices of online traceable products have risen. Furthermore, as the traceability time-sensitivity coefficient increases, the sales price of the traceable products decreases, and the retail price of offline standard products rises. The conclusion of this paper has a certain guiding role for the dominant manufacturers in choosing whether to apply blockchain technology to improve the demand for traceable products. (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)

The purposes of this study are to extract the essence from the in-depth study of entrepreneurial spirit and the exploration of China’s sports culture construction, find out the beneficial parts in line with China’s sports culture construction, and put forward operational suggestions and countermeasures for dealing with the relationship between entrepreneurial spirit and sports culture to help China’s sports culture construction move toward a new level. This exploration discusses the influence of entrepreneurial spirit on sports culture from the perspective of (...) cognitive regulation, and explores the importance of entrepreneurial spirit from the aspects of social psychology, system, economy, and ethics. The structure of sports culture is analyzed, and the role of entrepreneurial spirit in promoting the construction of sports culture is expounded. Moreover, a questionnaire survey is conducted to investigate the impact of entrepreneurial spirit on the construction of sports culture from the cognitive regulation perspective. The results show that most people agree with the development of the entrepreneurial spirit and positively impact the promotion of entrepreneurial spirit. Most people are not satisfied with the attention and level of sports culture construction. In China’s sports culture, the proportion of the entrepreneurial spirit is still tiny. Thereby, entrepreneurial spirit education must be vigorously promoted to enhance the integration of entrepreneurial spirit and sports culture. The entrepreneurial spirit needs to be introduced in the construction of sports culture. It is essential to do a good job in promoting entrepreneurial spirit, improving the supporting facilities related to sports culture and strengthening the correlation between sports culture and the entrepreneurial spirit. By discussing the influence of entrepreneurial spirit on sports culture, this exploration puts forward relevant opinions for developing sports culture. It is expected that they can have some reference values. This exploration provides new ideas for promoting the combination of sports culture construction and the dissemination of entrepreneurial spirit, which has crucial theoretical and practical significance. (shrink)

Linear regression and its variants have been widely used for classification problems. However, they usually predefine a strict binary label matrix which has no freedom to fit the samples. In addition, they cannot deal with complex real-world applications such as the case of face recognition where samples may not be linearly separable owing to varying poses, expressions, and illumination conditions. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the kernel negative ε dragging linear regression method for robust classification on noised and nonlinear (...) data. First, a technique called negative ε dragging is introduced for relaxing class labels and is integrated into the LR model for classification to properly treat the class margin of conventional linear regressions for obtaining robust result. Then, the data is implicitly mapped into a high dimensional kernel space by using the nonlinear mapping determined by a kernel function to make the data more linearly separable. Finally, our obtained KNDLR method is able to partially alleviate the problem of overfitting and can perform classification well for noised and deformable data. Experimental results show that the KNDLR classification algorithm obtains greater generalization performance and leads to better robust classification decision. (shrink)

This study aimed to investigate the common predictive factors between social media addiction and eating disorder symptoms, in a group of Chinese female college students. A total of 216 students completed the behavioral assessments of cognitive flexibility and sustained attention, as well as the questionnaires on anxiety, social media dependence, and eating disorders. The results indicate that SMA is significantly correlated with EDS. Structural equation modeling was used to test the model in which state anxiety, cognitive flexibility, and sustained attention (...) predicted social gain and EDS. Additionally, the results confirmed the mediating role of cognitive flexibility and sustained attention between state anxiety and SMA/EDS in the participants. The findings revealed that in the sample group, state anxiety was related to SMA and EDS through cognitive flexibility and sustained attention. These proposals reflect the significance of improving cognitive flexibility/sustained attention and reducing state anxiety to prevent EDS and SMA in female college students. (shrink)

Dynamic multiobjective optimization problems bring more challenges for multiobjective evolutionary algorithm due to its time-varying characteristic. To handle this kind of DMOPs, this paper presents a dynamic MOEA with multiple response strategies based on linear environment detection, called DMOEA-LEM. In this approach, different types of environmental changes are estimated and then the corresponding response strategies are activated to generate an efficient initial population for the new environment. DMOEA-LEM not only detects whether the environmental changes but also estimates the types of (...) linear changes so that different prediction models can be selected to initialize the population when the environmental changes. To study the performance of DMOEA-LEM, a large number of test DMOPs are adopted and the experiments validate the advantages of our algorithm when compared to three state-of-the-art dynamic MOEAs. (shrink)

Through the overall situation of athletes’ competition pressure, the pressure level of participating athletes can be understood and revealed. Analyzing the sources of stress and influencing factors of athletes can find measures to relieve and reduce stress and provide theoretical reference for the regulation of athletes’ competition pressure. Based on genetic algorithm and neural network theory, this paper proposes a method of tracing the sports competition pressure based on genetic algorithm backpropagation neural network to solve the problem that traditional neural (...) network learning algorithm is slow and easy to fall into local minimum. There is no significant difference between male and female athletes in the level of competition pressure. Athletes have the same training methods and the same goals, and the competition pressure tends to be the same, with no obvious difference; athletes with different educational backgrounds have no significant differences in training, academics, sports injuries, interpersonal relationships, social expectations, and evaluations. Due to the particularity of the stage, the competition pressure of fourth-year undergraduate and third-year masters is significantly higher than that of other grades. The number of athletes participating in college table tennis tournaments has very significant differences in competition dimensions. There is significant difference in training and self-expectation dimension difference. The competition pressure of athletes who participated in the college table tennis championship for the first time was significantly higher than that of athletes who participated repeatedly. There were significant differences between athletes before and after adapting to the venue. Before adapting to the venue, the competition pressure of athletes is generally greater. After adapting to the venue, the competition pressure of athletes has been relieved. (shrink)

Community search is a query-oriented variant of community detection problem, and the goal is to retrieve a single community from a given set of nodes. Most of the existing community search methods adopt handcrafted features, so there are some limitations in applications. Our idea is motivated by the recent advances of node embedding. Node embedding uses deep learning method to obtain feature representation of nodes directly from graph structure automatically and offers a new method to measure the distance between two (...) nodes. In this paper, we propose a two-stage community search algorithm with a minimum spanning tree strategy based on node embedding. At the first stage, we propose a node embedding model NEBRW and map nodes to the points in a low-dimensional vector space. At the second stage, we propose a new definition of community from the distance viewpoint, transform the problem of community search to a variant of minimum spanning tree problem, and uncover the target community with an improved Prim algorithm. We test our algorithm on both synthetic and real-world network datasets. The experimental results show that our algorithm is more effective for community search than baselines. (shrink)

In the field of natural language processing, the task of sensitive information detection refers to the procedure of identifying sensitive words for given documents. The majority of existing detection methods are based on the sensitive-word tree, which is usually constructed via the common prefixes of different sensitive words from the given corpus. Yet, these traditional methods suffer from a couple of drawbacks, such as poor generalization and low efficiency. For improvement purposes, this paper proposes a novel self-attention-based detection algorithm using (...) the implementation of graph convolutional network. The main contribution is twofold. Firstly, we consider a weighted GCN to better encode word pairs from the given documents and corpus. Secondly, a simple, yet effective, attention mechanism is introduced to further integrate the interaction among candidate words and corpus. Experimental results from the benchmarking dataset of THUC news demonstrate a promising detection performance, compared to existing work. (shrink)

Neospora caninum infection, one of the major causes of abortions in dairy cattle, has brought a huge loss to farmers worldwide. In this study, we develop a six-compartment susceptible-infected model of N. caninum transmission which is later reduced to a two-equation system. Potential controls including medication, test-and-cull, and vaccination are proposed and analyzed, and the corresponding reproduction numbers are derived. The conditions for the global stabilities of disease-free and endemic equilibria are investigated with analytical solutions and geometric approach. Furthermore, uncertainty (...) and sensitivity analysis shows that three control strategies are effective towards the varied environment, whereas the effectiveness of each measure highly depends on parameters related to control actions. Dynamics of reproduction numbers illustrate that disease elimination can be achieved by three types of controls: adopting medication with medicine efficacy higher than 0.4 to prevent vertical transmission, implementing test-and-cull with culling coverage larger than 0.3, and taking vaccine with coverage larger than 0.1. Numerical results suggest that preventive measures should at least include the prevention of access of other hosts, such as dogs, to cattle; otherwise, these control measures will lose effectiveness. Our presented study provides guidance for decision-making on N. caninum infected farm management. (shrink)

More and more research on left ventricle quantification skips segmentation due to its requirement of large amounts of pixel-by-pixel labels. In this study, a framework is developed to directly quantify left ventricle multiple indices without the process of segmentation. At first, DenseNet is utilized to extract spatial features for each cardiac frame. Then, in order to take advantage of the time sequence information, the temporal feature for consecutive frames is encoded using gated recurrent unit. After that, the attention mechanism is (...) integrated into the decoder to effectively establish the mappings between the input sequence and corresponding output sequence. Simultaneously, a regression layer with the same decoder output is used to predict multi-indices of the left ventricle. Different weights are set for different types of indices based on experience, and l2-norm is used to avoid model overfitting. Compared with the state-of-the-art, our method can not only produce more competitive results but also be more flexible. This is because the prediction results in our study can be obtained for each frame online while the SOTA only can output results after all frames are analyzed. (shrink)

Pellet is widely used in blast furnace ironmaking. Pellet quality affects the effect of ironmaking, the existing control system of grating-rotary kiln mainly adopts manual control mode, and the quality of pellet production largely depends on the experience, fatigue, and sense of responsibility of the site operators. The use of the Internet of things technology in the integration and improvement of enterprise information level, to achieve fine, intelligent production management, at the same time, is conducive to promoting steel enterprises to (...) reduce costs and increase efficiency, energy conservation and emission reduction, transformation and upgrading, and taking a new road to industrialization. According to the working principle and technological characteristics of the grate-rotary kiln at all stages, this paper designs the management system of firing pellets based on convolutional neural network and IoT technology, so as to realize automatic recognition of image data obtained by the perceptual layer and make an intelligent analysis of it. The system can classify the working conditions of the current equipment, so as to judge whether the production process parameters of the grate-rotary kiln are up to the standard, thus achieving the goal of controlling the quality of the finished pellet. (shrink)

From the perspective of the complex system, university ranking is a complex system that involves multiagent actors, which evolve over time. Yet, current major university rankings fail to reflect the system dynamics of the university innovation system. In this paper, we apply the complex system model in the field of the university innovation system in the context of university ranking in the countries along the Belt and Road, which is a long-term overlooked field. We introduce a new method of university (...) ranking based on the “winning and losing” relationship to measure the relative competitiveness between universities. This paper contributes to complex system research, the Belt and Road research, and the university ranking arena. (shrink)

Volume 16, Issue 4, September 2019, Page 493-496.

PurposeThe effect of sensorimotor stripping on neuroplasticity and motor imagery capacity is unknown, and the physiological mechanisms of post-amputation phantom limb pain (PLP) illness remain to be investigated.Materials and methodsIn this study, an electroencephalogram (EEG)-based event-related (de)synchronization (ERD/ERS) analysis was conducted using a bilateral lower limb motor imagery (MI) paradigm. The differences in the execution of motor imagery tasks between left lower limb amputations and healthy controls were explored, and a correlation analysis was calculated between level of phantom limb pain (...) and ERD/ERS.ResultsThe multiple frequency bands showed a significant ERD phenomenon when the healthy control group performed the motor imagery task, whereas amputees showed significant ERS phenomena in mu band. Phantom limb pain in amputees was negatively correlated with bilateral sensorimotor areas electrode powers.ConclusionSensorimotor abnormalities reduce neural activity in the sensorimotor cortex, while the motor imagination of the intact limb is diminished. In addition, phantom limb pain may lead to over-activation of sensorimotor areas, affecting bilateral sensorimotor area remodeling. (shrink)

L3 acquisition is gaining prominence in the academic community. The cardinal aim of this study is to conduct a bibliometric analysis of research on L3 acquisition. 425 documents from the Scopus database were analyzed with Bibliometrix. To gain a general and systematic overview of research on L3 acquisition, we grounded our study on three main levels of bibliometric analysis: performance analysis, collaboration analysis, and thematic map. By doing so, we identified the most influential sources, authors, affiliations, countries, and documents, the (...) scientific network among different constituents, as well as the evolution of research trends. The results suggest that L3 acquisition has experienced three periods: initial phase (1984–2008), development phase (2009–2014), and burst phase (2015–2022). The results also indicate that: (1) TheInternational Journal of Multilingualismis the most steady source contributing to this field. (2) Relevant contributors for each period are recognized, including established and emerging researchers. (3) European countries such as Spain, United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, and Poland are at the forefront of publication. (4) Collaboration increases over time but is becoming increasingly oriented in European and Anglophone countries. (5) The research hotspots have shifted throughout time, encompass a broad range of fields, and continue to grow. The study results provide insights into the evolving trends of L3 acquisition studies and data to assist researchers in identifying research gaps. (shrink)

Online creative idea generation is often considered an extension of traditional creative idea activities on the Internet platform, in which digital technology plays an important role. Consistent with the studies on traditional creative idea activities, the studies on online creative idea generation take the creativity of mass psychology as the core, and believe that digital technology can stimulate people’s creative output. This study challenges the past research paradigm from the perspective of media materiality, redefines the processes and activities of online (...) creative idea generation, and further suggests that it may affect people’s psychology by reducing their creativity without real awareness. The study is innovative in both theory and practice. We also discuss the limitations and future directions of the study. (shrink)

What it is to have a first person perspective? How do we come to understand our own perspective in the world? How do we take into account other people's perspectives in our social and linguistic interactions? This dissertation is an exploration of these issues. But instead of approaching them in the abstract, it aims to shed light on these difficult questions through a series of case studies. First, I examine the role of the first person perspective in our agency, and (...) explain the sense in which it is essential for action. Next, drawing on recent work in psychology, I propose an model of the development of temporal self-understanding in young children. Lastly, I develop a two-level pragmatic theory of epistemic modals. (shrink)

Mobile ad hoc network is a network composed of mobile terminals without infrastructure. Due to its fast-networking ability, it is widely used in smart cities, car networking, military, agriculture, medicine, and other fields. Routing technology is a key technology in the field of MANET. The energy consumption is optimized through the technical network simulator NS-3, and the nodes in the MANET routing protocol can accurately simulate the problem, thereby optimizing the MAC layer of important research tools. This article combines the (...) advantages of the lithium-ion battery model. Compared with the KiBaM battery model, the effective charge in the KiBaM model simulates the output voltage well, which can reflect the battery capacity effect rate and the recovery effect of the lithium-ion-KiBaM battery model. The model can respond to the characteristics of the output voltage as the society gets lower and lower. In order to solve the problem that the analytic solution of differential equations cannot be obtained in the model, a numerical solution of the optimization algorithm is proposed based on the implicit Runge–Kutta method. The MAC layer energy consumption and routing protocol optimization algorithm proposed in this paper can be applied well in various fields. (shrink)