ObjectiveThere is little literature on the validity of kurtosis-adjusted noise energy metrics in human studies. Therefore, this study aimed to validate the application of cumulative noise exposure adjusted by kurtosis in evaluating occupational hearing loss associated with non-Gaussian noise among manufacturing workers.MethodsA cross-sectional survey was conducted on 1,558 manufacturing workers exposed to noise from five industries to collect noise exposure and hearing loss data. Both CNE and kurtosis-adjusted CNE were collapsed into 2-dB∙year bins, and the mean noise-induced permanent threshold shifts (...) at 3, 4, and 6 kHz in each bin were calculated. The contributions of CNE and CNE′ to noise-induced hearing loss were compared using the multiple linear regression. The degree of overlap of two linear regression equations was used to evaluate the validity of the CNE′ using a stratified analysis based on age and sex.ResultsMultiple linear regression models showed that after kurtosis adjustment, the standardized regression coefficient of CNE increased from 0.230 to 0.255, and R2 increased from 0.147 to 0.153. The linear relationship between NIPTS346 and CNE′ or CNE showed that the regression line of non-Gaussian noise was closer to that of Gaussian noise when using CNE′ than using CNE. The mean difference in NIPTS346 between the equations of non-Gaussian noise and Gaussian noise was significantly reduced from 4.32 to 1.63 dB HL after kurtosis adjustment. Through a stratified analysis, these significant decreases were observed in male and female workers, and workers aged ≥30 years old.ConclusionAs a noise exposure metric combining noise energy and temporal characteristics, the kurtosis-adjusted-CNE metric was more effective than CNE alone in assessing occupational hearing loss among manufacturing workers in non-Gaussian noise environment. However, more studies are needed to verify the validity of the kurtosis-adjusted-CNE metric. (shrink)

Test anxiety is a widespread and primarily detrimental emotion in learning and achievement settings. This research aimed to explore the autonomic nervous system response patterns of test-anxious individuals in response to evaluative stress. By presenting a standard interview task, an evaluative scenario was effectively induced. Heart rate variability, a biomarker that can accurately reflect the ANS activity, was used to reflect the physiological responses of 48 high test-anxious subjects and 49 low test-anxious subjects. Results indicate that: both groups show a (...) significantly increased emotional arousal in the evaluative scenario; high test-anxious individuals show a significantly decreased emotional pleasantness in the evaluative scenario, whereas low test-anxious individuals show no significant changes; both groups show a significantly increased low-frequency HRV; high test-anxious individuals show a significantly decreased high-frequency HRV and root mean square of successive heartbeat interval differences, whereas low test-anxious individuals remain stable. These findings suggest that high test-anxious individuals display an increased sympathetic nervous system activity and a decreased parasympathetic nervous system activity in response to evaluative stress, while low-anxious individuals display an increased SNS activity and a stable PNS activity in response to evaluative stress. (shrink)

This article examines whether the likelihood and amount of firm charitable giving in response to catastrophic events are related to firm advertising intensity, and whether industry competition level moderates this relationship. Using data on Chinese firms’ philanthropic response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, we find that firm advertising intensity is positively associated with both the probability and the amount of corporate giving. The results also indicate that this positive advertising intensity-philanthropic giving relationship is stronger in competitive industries, and firms in (...) competitive industries are more likely to donate. This study thus provides evidence suggesting that even in the wake of catastrophic events, corporate philanthropic giving is strategic. (shrink)

In the Original publication of the article the revised date was erroneously published as: 20 August 2017 the correct date is: 20 August 2020.

Undergraduate education is very important for higher education. Among the factors affecting the quality of undergraduate education, teaching quality is the most important factor. At present, an important issue that affects teaching quality is insufficient teaching investment. An open-ended questionnaire survey was conducted on 62 faculty members and 65 university students in China. Results found that the undergraduate teaching investment of faculty members mainly consists of four parts: workload investment, ability investment, energy investment, and teaching emotional investment. A preliminary test (...) was conducted on 342 faculty members, and the results of an exploratory factor analysis supported the proposed four-dimensional teaching investment model. The test involved 293 faculty members and confirmatory factor analysis showed that the four-dimensional model had a good degree of fit. A further criterion-related test showed that the four-dimensional teaching investment of faculty members has a significant positive correlation with classroom management, clarity of teaching materials, teacher–student interaction, teaching strategies, and skills application, and work engagement. These results show that the proposed four dimensions of teaching investment effectively measure the teaching investment of faculty members, specifically the indicators of teaching investment and that they promote the development of faculty teaching investment research. (shrink)

How do essentialist beliefs about categories arise? We hypothesize that such beliefs are transmitted via language. We subject large language models (LLMs) to vignettes from the literature on essentialist categorization and find that they align well with people when the studies manipulated teleological information -- information about what something is for. We examine whether in a classic test of essentialist categorization -- the transformation task -- LLMs prioritize teleological properties over information about what something looks like, or is made of. (...) Experiments 1 and 2 find that telos and what something is made of matter more than appearance. Experiment 3 manipulates all three factors and finds that what something is for matters more than what it's made of. Overall, these studies suggest that language alone may be sufficient to give rise to essentialist beliefs, and that information about what something is for matters more. (shrink)

Mass media play a significant role in shaping public opinion. News coverage of abortion reflects narratives about reproductive health, ethics, and women, and may potentially reinforce negative soci...

In the causal inference framework of Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines, inferences about causal relationships are made from samples from probability distributions and a number of assumptions relating causal relations to probability distributions. The most controversial of these assumptions is the Causal Faithfulness Assumption, which roughly states that if a conditional independence statement is true of a probability distribution generated by a causal structure, it is entailed by the causal structure and not just for particular parameter values. In this paper we (...) show that the addition of the Causal Faithfulness Assumption plays three quite different roles in the SGS framework: it reduces the degree of underdetermination of causal structure by probability distribution; computationally, it justifies reliable causal inference algorithms that would otherwise have to be slower in order to be reliable; and statistically, it implies that those algorithms reliably obtain the correct answer at smaller sample sizes than would otherwise be the case. We also consider a number of variations on the Causal Faithfulness Assumption, and show how they affect each of these three roles. (shrink)

Multimodal neuroimaging provides a rich source of data for identifying brain regions associated with disease progression and aging. However, present studies still typically analyze modalities separately or aggregate voxel-wise measurements and analyses to the structural level, thus reducing statistical power. As a central example, previous works have used two quantitative MRI parameters—R2* and quantitative susceptibility —to study changes in iron associated with aging in healthy and multiple sclerosis subjects, but failed to simultaneously account for both. In this article, we propose (...) a unified framework that combines information from multiple imaging modalities and regularizes estimates for increased interpretability, generalizability, and stability. Our work focuses on joint region detection problems where overlap between effect supports across modalities is encouraged but not strictly enforced. To achieve this, we combine L1, total variation, and L2 group lasso penalties. While the TV penalty encourages geometric regularization by controlling estimate variability and support boundary geometry, the group lasso penalty accounts for similarities in the support between imaging modalities. We address the computational difficulty in this regularization scheme with an alternating direction method of multipliers optimizer. In a neuroimaging application, we compare our method against independent sparse and joint sparse models using a dataset of R2* and QS maps derived from MRI scans of 113 healthy controls: our method produces clinically-interpretable regions where specific iron changes are associated with healthy aging. Together with results across multiple simulation studies, we conclude that our approach identifies regions that are more strongly associated with the variable of interest, more accurate, and more stable with respect to training data variability. This work makes progress toward a stable and interpretable multimodal imaging analysis framework for studying disease-related changes in brain structure and can be extended for classification and disease prediction tasks. (shrink)

Weber's 'science as a vocation' has often been viewed as a therapeutic concept with no functional significance in the fully bureaucratized and professionalized modern science. However, development in the philosophy of science in the last century, especially the Kuhn thesis of the discontinuity of scientific progress and the Duhem-Quine thesis of underdetermination, shows that Weber's distinction between science as a vocation and science as a profession (career) can potentially answer one of the oldest questions in science studies: What makes scientific (...) breakthroughs possible? (shrink)

With the increasing use of technology in nursing, how nurses perform practice care has changed, inevitably leading to ethical concerns that differ from original ethical norms in nursing. Studies have focused on ethical issues in health informatics from clinicians’ or patients’ perspectives, while nurses’ perspective is needed. This paper conducts a theoretical study on ethical predicaments that arise in nursing informatics from nurses’ perspectives. Why and how these predicaments emerge are elaborated. Also, this paper offers countermeasures in realistic contexts from (...) technique, education, and leadership aspects. Collaborations between governments, administrators, educators, technicians, and nurses are needed to step out of these predicaments. (shrink)

This paper is a complete student-led, student-edited collective writing project (CWP) conducted virtually in Spring 2022 throughout the course Knowledge Socialism taught by professor Michael Peters for the Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal university. The CWP involves 4 international, 5 domestic Ph.D. students, and 2 senior Western scholars as reviewers, revealing their thoughts, arguments, understanding, and criticisms towards the creative economy status in East Asian countries (Japan and China mostly) higher education as reflected in the knowledge socialism narratives. Xiyuan as (...) the lead author, co-editing with Woraport and Stefan, assigned each section to other authors and successfully devoted themself to organizing, proofreading, and revising the paper. Through a month of collective work, the final version of the paper elaborates on the contribution of East Asian creative universities and the economy as a whole to the knowledge socialism through co(labor)ation, with implications to the creative labors cultivation and shifted roles of students. (shrink)

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, multitasking textual translation has attracted more and more attention. Especially after the application of deep learning technology, the performance of multitask translation text detection and recognition has been greatly improved. However, because multitasking contains the interference problem faced by the translated text, there is a big gap between recognition performance and actual application requirements. Aiming at multitasking and translation text detection, this paper proposes a text localization method based on multichannel multiscale detection (...) of the largest stable extreme value region and cascade filtering. This paper selects the appropriate color channel and scale to extract the maximum stable extreme value area as the character candidate area and designs a cascaded filter from coarse to fine to remove false detections. The coarse filter is based on some simple morphological features and stroke width features, and the fine filter is trained by a two-recognition convolutional neural network. The remaining character candidate regions are merged into horizontal or multidirectional character strings through the graph model. The experimental results on the text data set prove the effectiveness of the improved deep learning network character model and the feasibility of the textual implication translation analysis method based on this model. Among them, the text contains translation character recognition results prove that the model has good description ability. The characteristics of the model determine that this method is not sensitive to the scale of the sliding window, so it performs better than the existing typical methods in retrieval tasks. (shrink)

The outbreak of COVID-19 at the end of 2019 has become the most devastating public health event of the 21st century. The different performances of governments and people in different countries and regions show that national values may play an important role in the prevention and control of COVID-19. Based on data from the seventh wave of World Values Survey and the Human Freedom Index report in 2020, three national value factors are extracted in this manuscript, including religious belief, government (...) satisfaction and individual freedom. Then ordinary least squares regression regression model is constructed to explore the influence of these three value factors on the prevention and control of COVID-19 and some heterogeneity analysis is implemented. The results show that religious belief and individual freedom significantly increased the COVID-19 infection rate, while government satisfaction significantly reduced the COVID-19 infection rate. The study findings have the ability to hold up after a range of robustness. For countries and regions with different COVID-19 testing policies, the influence of national values is different. Only in countries and regions with high testing rate policies and complete systems of the prevention and control of COVID-19, the influence of national values is significant. Based on these findings, a series of targeted policy recommendations for building national values in the post-epidemic era are proposed. (shrink)

This paper addresses the concept of play concerning human formation, especially as manifested in the philosophies of Gadamer and Schiller. Gadamer depicted understanding as an organic motion that unfolds through seeing differences and characterized play as a flexible back-and-forth movement or interplay between possibilities and transformations. Schiller structured play as the playful impulse similarly as an interactive moving force that connects the two seemingly oppositional impulses of reason and sensation and lets the two affect the other dialogically. Both Gadamer and (...) Schiller suggest that play, as in essence an inter-play, orients us into seeing more possibilities of making a refreshing sense of our intellectual and perceptual abilities and thereby transfiguring our living being into richer and fuller meaningfulness. (shrink)

Evidence accumulation has been the core component in recent development of perceptual and value-based decision-making theories. Most studies have focused on the evaluation of evidence between alternative options. What remains largely unknown is the process that prepares evidence: how may the decision-maker sample different sources of information sequentially, if they can only sample one source at a time? Here we propose a normative framework in prescribing how different sources of information should be sampled proactively to facilitate the decision process: beliefs (...) for different noisy sources are updated in a Bayesian manner and participants can proactively allocate resource for sampling (i.e. saccades) among different sources to maximize the information gain in such process. We show that our framework can account for human participants’ actual choice and saccade behaviors in a two-alternative value-based decision-making task. Moreover, our framework makes novel predictions about the empirical eye movement patterns. (shrink)

This research explores the historical and cultural impact of Oracle Bone Inscriptions (OBIs) on the development of Chinese Calligraphy, employing a systematic literature review approach. Focusing on the period from the Shang Dynasty (1600 to 1050 BCE) to contemporary Chinese Script, the study uncovers the contributions of OBIs to the evolution of the Chinese writing system, character configurations, and linguistic structures during the Shang dynasty. Through an extensive review of primary sourced documents, specifically oracle-bone inscriptions from the late Shang dynasty, (...) and secondary scholarly literature, the research elucidates traditional practices and the origin of the Chinese writing system. The evolution of OBIs into various script forms, including Bronze Inscriptions, Seal Script, Official Script, and Regular Script, reflects linguistic transformation and cultural refinement. This study sheds light on the intricate relationship between OBIs and Chinese Calligraphy, providing insights into how these ancient markings influenced the evolution of calligraphic art. The research illuminates intriguing parallels between Oracle Bone Inscription words, exemplified by "Dingxi" for divination, and their evolved counterparts in Chinese calligraphy. Notably, the character "羊" for sheep in oracle bones undergoes a fascinating evolution in calligraphy, showcasing the dynamic transformation of visual symbols over millennia. By detailing the selection criteria and the systematic approach employed in the literature review, the research enhances transparency and replicability, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of the enduring cultural and aesthetic influence of Oracle Bone Inscriptions on the calligraphy tradition. (shrink)

This paper develops an adaptive fixed-time trajectory tracking controller of an underactuated hovercraft with a prescribed performance in the presence of model uncertainties and unknown time-varying environment disturbances. It is the first time that the proposed method is applied to the motion control of the hovercraft. To begin with, based on the hovercraft's four degrees of freedom model, the virtual control laws are designed using an error transforming function and the fixed-time stability theory to guarantee that the position tracking errors (...) are constrained within the prescribed convergence rates and minimum overshoot. In addition, by combining the Lyapunov direct method and the adaptive radial basis function neural network, the actual control laws are designed to ensure that the velocity tracking errors converge to a small region containing zero while handling model uncertainties and external disturbances effectively. Finally, all tracking errors of the closed-loop system are uniformly ultimately bounded and fixed-time convergent. Results from a comparative simulation study verify the effectiveness and advantage of the proposed method. (shrink)

This paper identifies brand age as an important factor in consumers’ brand evaluations following unethical firm behavior. In two experiments, we assess the effect of brand age on three types of brand evaluations: perceived quality, brand credibility, and behavioral intentions following a brand crisis. The findings suggest that disclosing an older brand’s age can not only improve consumers’ brand evaluations in general, but can also provide a buffering effect when the firm is involved in unethical behavior. Moreover, the relationship between (...) brand age and consumers’ post-crisis intentions is mediated by perceived brand credibility. By exploring consumers’ attitudes following the most common firm response strategies, this research also identifies a boundary condition of the mitigating effect of brand age. Several significant implications for practitioners are discussed. (shrink)

This article presents a theodicy based on a revision of the popular concept of God’s benevolence. If we follow the Protestant tradition by assuming that God is the exclusive source of virtue, the benevolence of God has to be radically different from the benevolence of a human being. A benevolent and almighty God who wishes to reward virtue and punish evil would design the world order similar to that in the allegory of the long spoons. Divine punishment is unforgiving, merciless, (...) individually non-retributive, holistically retributive, and quantitatively unpredictable. All sufferings are divine punishment. Several popular arguments from evil, including animal suffering, victims of evil deeds, natural disasters, and children’s diseases, can be resolved within this framework. (shrink)

本书包括: 晚明士人的个体生命情怀及其哲学意蕴、晚明士人自我实现的文化透视、晚明士人尚情思潮的美学解读三篇内容.

In order to provide a consistent explanation for Aristotelian modal syllogistic, this paper reveals the reductions between the Aristotelian modal syllogism ◇I□A◇I-3 and the other valid modal syllogisms. Specifically, on the basis of formalizing Aristotelian modal syllogisms, this paper proves the validity of ◇I□A◇I-3 by means of the truth value definition of (modal) categorical propositions. Then in line with classical propositional logic and modal logic, generalized quantifier theory and set theory, this paper deduces the other 47 valid Aristotelian modal syllogisms (...) from the modal syllogism ◇I□A◇I-3. This study shows that the reasons why these syllogisms are reducible are: 1) any of Aristotelian quantifier can be defined by the other three Aristotelian quantifiers; 2) the Aristotelian quantifiers some and no have symmetry; 3) the possible modality ◇ and necessary modality □ can be mutually defined. This formal study of Aristotelian modal syllogistic not only conforms to the needs of formalization transformation of various information in the era of artificial intelligence, but also provides a unified mathematical research paradigm for other kinds of syllogistic. (shrink)

本书运用逻辑学原理重新审视《易经》的本质,通过对《易经》作者的思维形式和思维逻辑的分析把握,揭示《易经》所反映的思想内容。.

本书主要介绍了先秦、汉代、宋代、近代四个时期传统义利思想的历史发展及中国传统义利思想对日本义利观的影响。.

Member selection to form an effective collaboration new product development team is crucial for a successful NPD. Existing researches on member selection mostly focus on the individual attributes of candidates. However, under the background of collaboration, knowledge complementarity and collaboration performance among candidates are important but overlooked. In this paper, we propose a multi-objective optimization model for member selection of a Co-NPD team, considering comprehensively the individual knowledge competence, knowledge complementarity, and collaboration performance. Then, to solve the model, an improved (...) adaptive genetic algorithm is developed. Finally, a real case is provided to illustrate the application of the model, and the IAGA is implemented to select the desired team members for optimal team composition. Additionally, the standard generic algorithm and particle swarm optimization are used to compare with the IAGA to further verify the effectiveness of the IAGA. (shrink)