The complexity of calcium profiles observed in plant cells has led to the realization that specific patterns of calcium propagation (now termed calcium signatures) encode specific information and relay it to downstream elements (effectors) for translation into corresponding cellular responses in higher plants. The concept of calcium signatures is now well established and the tight control of the temporal and spatial characteristics of cytosolic calcium alterations is considered to be responsible for the specificity of various cellular responses, in particular to (...) environment‐induced stresses. To date, three major classes of plant calcium sensors responsible for drought‐stress signal transduction during soil water deficit have been identified. Valuable pieces of the calcium signal‐specificity puzzle are being put together and are illustrated here for the calcium‐mediated signal‐transduction cascades that operate in the responses of higher plants to soil environmental deficits. BioEssays 30:634–641, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In 20th century, many philosophers were excited by new discoveries in natural science, and held some kind of thoughts of indeterminacy. The trend is opposite to the traditional pursuit of certainty with a dogmatic character. However, through analyzing Quine’s theory of indeterminacy of translation, as well as the ideas of indeterminacy what Rorty and Putnam have developed forward, the article will argue that: their conclusions of indeterminacy inferred from the observationsentences are questionable; indeterminacy perhaps is materialized so that they similarly (...) maintain, in another way, an ontological custom about which they have made a great effort to criticize; therefore, their some philosophical statements maybe have also implied a dogmatic inclination; indeterminacy has possibly become another ‘unempirical dogma of empiricists’. (shrink)

Confucianism designed a kind of social political theory quite different from those in the west. It was rooted in their realistic understandings on man, society, and the natural world. Generally, Confucians held that humankind has a specific meaning owing to mind though man came from the natural world and connected with all things. Human nature had to be defined in terms of mind whatever it was looked like. The potential ability of mind would be formed and perfected in a long (...) empirical history so as to shape one’s essence. The ability of mind to endow something with meanings was primary and then those of value judgment and rational cognition. It was the ability to plant meanings into things that was regarded as moral or positive in Confucians’ eyes because one’s world of meaning would be continuously widened and enriched. The process of resting meanings on things was exactly “efforts morally”. It led to a conclusion that education to help one require autonomy plays the key role in a society. It seems to be the only standard to judge whether a society is good or right. (shrink)

"Few thinkers have stood as squarely at both the center and the periphery of an intellectual movement as has Shao Yung (1011-1077). Ethical model and eccentric, socialite and eremite, Shao Yung is perhaps not only the greatest enigma of early Neo-Confucianism, but also one of its undisputed giants. In this impressive life-and-thought study, Don J. Wyatt painstakingly sifts through all available evidence relating to Shao Yung and his scholarship to provide a portrait that fully exposes the moral (...) center of the man and his work. Drawing on the abundant store of letters and accounts by Shao's contemporaries and his own much-neglected poetry, Wyatt has assembled a study that intimately relates Shao's life to his thought. He challenges the assumptions of previous Western scholarship by persuasively arguing against the acceptance of works traditionally ascribed to Shao - specifically, the Kuan-wu wai-p'ien (Outer Chapters on Observing Things), the Yu-ch'iao wen-ta (Fisherman and Woodcutter Dialogue), and the cryptic quasi-autobiographical essay Wu-ming kung chuan (Biography of the Nameless Lord)." "Shao is presented as an independent thinker whose philosophical lexicon functioned according to a profound interdependence that was unique among the systems of his peers. His metaphysical concepts, which appear impervious to and beyond the scope of human influence - namely, his ching-shih (world ordering), kuan-wu (observing things), and I-Ching - derived hsien-t'ien (before Heaven) methodologies - are essentially the products of a morally reflective life. Wyatt's discoveries, therefore, refute the common assertion of Shao Yung's moral indifference. Moreover, by meticulously integrating the progress of this Neo-Confucian's thought into the course of his life, the author has produced one of the most textured and accessible works on a philosopher of the Sung era."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

The concept of apublic energy fieldis central to public administration discourse theory. Its main idea is the facilitation of dialog between government and the public, on the basis of equality, to construct a public policy consensus. In contemporary society, social media provides new and distinctive channels for such interactions. Social media can, therefore, be conceived as a novel type ofpublic energy field. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, interactions between the Chinese government and the Chinese public (whether located in (...) China or abroad) have been acutely reflected through WeChat official accounts. This article focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic and, through social media text mining and processing, analyzes the text topics and emotions covered. Basic principles of discourse validity, regarding this public energy field and two guarantee conditions, are applied to analyze the information exchange and dialog between the government and the public on COVID-19 through WeChat official accounts. It was found that the government’s WeChat official accounts have not yet formed a harmonious dialog space to balance the public energy field, and that the interaction between the government and the public has to be improved. The government’s social discourse had a significant influence on the public’s social discourse. Using text analysis, the study found that the government has published information on 11 topics related to the prevention and control of the pandemic. It can be argued that the public energyfieldpresented by both the government and the public effectively portrayed and reflected the actual situation of the pandemic in China. (shrink)

ObjectiveInvestigating the mental health status of Chinese resident physicians during the 2019 new coronavirus outbreak.MethodsA cluster sampling method was adopted to collect all China-wide resident physicians during the epidemic period as the research subjects. The Symptom Checklist-90 self-rating scale was used to assess mental health using WeChat electronic questionnaires.ResultsIn total, 511 electronic questionnaires were recovered, all of which were valid. The negative psychological detection rate was 93.9%. Among the symptoms on the self-rating scale, more than half of the Chinese resident (...) physicians had mild to moderate symptoms of mental unhealthiness, and a few had asymptomatic or severe unhealthy mental states. In particular, the detection rate of abnormality was 88.3%, obsessive-compulsive symptoms was 90.4%, the sensitive interpersonal relationship was 90.6%, depression abnormality was 90.8% /511), anxiety abnormality was 88.3%, hostility abnormality was 85.3%, terror abnormality was 84.9%, paranoia abnormality was 86.9%, psychotic abnormalities was 89.0%, and abnormal sleeping and eating status was 90.8%. The scores of various psychological symptoms of pediatric resident physicians were significantly lower than those of non-pediatrics.ConclusionThe new coronavirus epidemic has a greater impact on the mental health of Chinese resident physicians. (shrink)

Huang's book analyzes the major Neo-Confucian philosophers from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries. Focusing on metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical philosophical issues, this study presents the historical development of the Neo-Confucian school, an outgrowth of ancient Confucianism, and characterizes its thought, background, and influence. Key concepts—for example ^Utai-ji (supreme ultimate), ^Uxin (mind), and ^Uren (humanity)—as interpreted by each thinker are discussed in detail. Also examined are the two major schools that developed during this period, Cheng-Zhu, School of Principle, and Lu-Wang, (...) School of Mind. These schools, despite different philosophical orientations, were convinced that their common goal, to bring about a harmonious relationships between man and the universe and between man and man, could be achieved through different ways of philosophizing. To understand the Chinese mind, it is necessary to understand Neo-Confucianism as a reformation of early Confucianism. This analytical presentation of major Neo-Confucian philosophers, from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries, examines Zhou Dun-yi (1017-1073), Shao Yong (1011-1077), Zhang Zai (1020-1077), Cheng Hao (1032-1085), Cheng Yi (1033-1107), Zhu Xi (1130-1200), Lu Xiang-shan (1139-1193), and Wang Yang-ming (1427-1529). With its focus on metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical philosophical issues, Huang's study presents the historical development of the Neo-Confucian school, an outgrowth of ancient Confucianism, and characterizes its thought, background, and influence. Key concepts—for example, ^Utai-ji (supreme ultimate), ^Uxin (mind), and ^Uren (humanity)—as interpreted by each thinker are discussed in detail. The two major schools that developed during these six centuries are examined as well. Lu-Wang, School of Mind, developed in criticism of Cheng-Zhu, School of Principle. The two schools, despite different approaches toward their philosophical pursuits, were convinced that their common goals, to bring about harmonious relationships between man and the universe and between man and man, could be achieved through different ways of philosophizing. To understand the Chinese mind, it is necessary to understand Neo-Confucianism as a reformation of early Confucianism. Scholars of Eastern religions and philosophy will appreciate the objective interpretations of each thinker's philosophy, for which pertinent passages spoken by each man have been selected and translated by the author from the original Chinese, and the comparisons of the Neo-Confucian philosophies with those of the West. An introduction provides the historical background in which to study the rise of Neo-Confucianism. The study is organized ehronologically and includes a glossary of terms and a bibliography which serves as a helpful guide for further research. (shrink)

Within some online communities, discussion often centers on issues on which writers take sides, and within some subset of those debate-prone communities, we find over time that particular sets of writers almost always end up on the same side of an issue. These sets we call factions. In this paper, we describe a tool to perform what we call faction discovery on online communities. Generalizing methods developed in the bibliometrics and information retrieval literature, we define a network determined by similarities (...) of content in a community of users and add in direct evidence of online ties between users. We then perform community detection on the network to find factions. Using a set of data collected from science and fantasy blogs, we show that the discovered factions accurately reflect an active conflict in the community leading to significant, politically related social fracture. (shrink)

To explain perceptual justification, McDowell proposes so-called “conceptualism,” the view that the content of experience is all conceptual. Tony Cheng, in his book, John McDowell on Worldly Subjectivity (2021), suggests that McDowell can do without conceptualism. To support his suggestion, Cheng makes several contentions against McDowell’s thesis of the co-extensiveness of conceptuality and rationality. In this commentary, I focus on two most crucial contentions Cheng makes: (i) conceptualism is an extra commitment for explaining perceptual justification and (ii) it can be (...) replaced by a suitable structural constraint on non-conceptual content. First, I clarify McDowell’s co-extensiveness thesis and his conception of the conceptual. Then, based on my clarifications, I defend conceptualism against the two contentions. (shrink)

Based on the daily data from January 2, 2019, to September 30, 2020, this paper uses the extended CoVaR model to measure the spillover effect of systemic risk among top 10 securities companies by market value in China, All Share Brokerage Index, All Share Financials Index, All Share Insurance Index, and CSI Banks Index. The conclusions are as follows: there are risk spillover effects among 10 securities companies, which are asymmetric and bidirectional and highly volatile in a short period of (...) time; the spillover effect of systematic risk of securities companies is not necessarily related to the market value of securities companies but has a strong relationship with the stock market; there are risk spillover effects between the sample securities companies and the four major indexes, but there are significant differences in the size of the spillover effects; the securities industry has a great risk spillover effect on the financial industry, but the risk spillover effect of other financial sectors on the securities industry is very small. Finally, we put forward countermeasures and suggestions. (shrink)

When you have a conscious experience—such as feeling pain, watching the sunset, or thinking about your loved ones—are you aware of the experience as your own, even when you do not reflect on, think about, or attend to it? Let us say that an experience has “mineness” just in case its subject is aware of it as her own while she undergoes it. And let us call the view that all ordinary experiences have mineness “typicalism.” Recently, Guillot has offered a (...) novel argument for typicalism by leveraging the relation between self-knowledge and self-awareness. She starts by arguing that all ordinary experiences give their subjects immediate justification to believe that their experiences are their own. She then argues that this can be explained by typicalism. In this paper, I argue that her argument fails. I start by clarifying the notion of mineness and giving more details about her argument. I then explain why her argument fails by raising doubts about whether typicalism explains the target explanandum. I close by considering some implications of our discussion for self-knowledge. (shrink)

The online healthcare community has attained rapid development in recent years in which users are facilitated to exchange disease information and seek medical treatment. However, users’ motivation of participation in OHCs is still under investigation. Taking the perspective of user perceived value, this paper examined the impacts of different incentive levels including identity incentive, privilege incentive, and material incentive on user perceived value, user engagement, and user loyalty. To test the proposed hypotheses, the study adopted the methods of the between-subjects (...) experiment and questionnaire. Based on the data analysis by ANOVA and structural equation model, the results show there are significant differences in the impacts of different incentive levels on users’ perceived value. Most of the incentive measures exert significant effects on simple user hedonic value and community identity value. Accordingly, the research findings suggest that affective support value and self-health management value demonstrate more importance for user engagement and user loyalty. Therefore, OHCs should try to improve users’ affective support value and self-health management value which are the ultimate aims of the OHCs. Our study sheds some light on profoundly understanding the design of incentive mechanism of OHC and contributes to the research of OHC services. (shrink)

A two-part survey was conducted, where respondents reported ethically challenging incidents encountered in the previous two years and actions taken to address them. 132 certified counseling psychologists participated and reported 136 ethical dilemmas. The top categories of dilemmas pertained to breaking confidentiality between respondents and clients, including mandatory reporting, collaborating with education associates, and interjecting by the authority. 82% of the respondents took actions to address the dilemmas. These actions ranged from steering a middle course, upholding professional ethical standards, seeking (...) consultation to taking no actions. Potential environmental contributors to the dilemmas and actions taken to address them were explored. (shrink)

The effective controlling and monitoring of an industrial process through the integration of statistical process control and engineering process control has been widely addressed in recent years. However, because the mixture types of disturbances are often embedded in underlying processes, mixture control chart patterns are very difficult for an SPC-EPC process to identify. This can result in problems when attempting to determine the underlying root causes of process faults. Additionally, a large number of categories of disturbances may be present in (...) a process, but typical single-stage classifiers have difficulty in identifying large numbers of categories of disturbances in an SPC-EPC process. Therefore, we propose a two-stage neural network based scheme to enhance the accurate identification rate for MCCPs by performing dimension reduction on disturbance categories. The two-stage scheme includes a combination of a NN, support vector machine, and multivariate adaptive regression splines. Experimental results reveal that the proposed scheme achieves a satisfactory AIR for identifying MCCPs in an SPC-EPC system. (shrink)

Cryonics offers certain individuals the opportunity to preserve their bodies or brains with the potential for future revival. Proponents of this technology often invoke Pascal’s wager to argue that we all have a prudential reason to embrace cryonics: if future technology enables the revival of those who have been frozen, they stand to gain immense benefits; if not, undergoing cryonics is no worse than facing death directly. However, the cryonics wager carries hidden risks, not only in terms of whether future (...) generations will be able to revive us, but also in terms of how they will choose to treat us. Given that the potential returns of the cryonics wager are not necessarily positive, it is not a guaranteed investment but rather an uncertain venture. I demonstrate that the risks of cryonics vary from person to person, making it a safer option for those who are talented, kind, and hold a weak view of personal identity. This leads to a paradoxical conclusion: those most suited for cryonics might be those least keen on this technology. (shrink)

Since the transparency approach to introspection need not posit a dedicated mechanism specialized for detecting one’s own mental states, its economy is often viewed as a major advantage by both proponents and opponents. But sometimes economy comes at the cost of relying on controversial views of the natures of mental states. Perceptual experience is a case in point. For example, Alex Byrne’s account relies on the view that experience constitutively involves belief, and Matthew Boyle’s account relies on the view that (...) experience constitutively involves a form of implicit consciousness of experience. In this paper, I develop a transparency account of our access to our experiences that retains the benefit of economy while avoiding the cost of relying on controversial views of the nature of experience. I start by discussing Byrne’s and Boyle’s accounts. I focus on the problems that lead them to hold the controversial views they do, and raise some challenges to their solutions. I then develop my own account. I argue that when you attend to an object, your experience gives you justification to believe that you see the object (under some descriptions). I close by highlighting some advantages of my account. I argue that it (1) can solve the problems facing Byrne and Boyle without relying on controversial views of the nature of experience; (2) respects the idea that there is something special about our access to our minds; and (3) can be generalized to other cases of introspection. (shrink)

Background As noise brings great error in the analysis of metallographic images, an adaptive weighted mean filtering method proposed to overcome the shortcomings of the standard mean filtering method. Methods The method used to detect the pulse noise points in the image, and then the modified mean method used to filter out the detected noise points. Patents on metallographic image processing have discussed for the development of the proposed methodology. Results It is shown that filter window can be filtered in (...) comparison with the conventional 3×3, 5×5 and 7×7 filt window to reduce noise detection and reduce the complexity of the weight calculation. Conclusion It can be concluded that this method can better protect the details of the image, has better filtering effect than the standard mean filtering, and its processing speed is faster than the median filtering of the large window, which has profound significance for the edge detection and processing of the metallographic image. (shrink)

Based on the branching time theory proposed by Prior and Thomason, this thesis is devoted to characterizing the causal aspect of agency by considering a sentence "$\alpha$ sees to it that A" as asserting a causal relation between a choice made by the agent $\alpha$ and a fact described in the sentence A. The phrase "see to it that" is abbreviated as stit. This thesis provides conceptual analyses of stit and develops some modal logics of stit in accordance with these (...) analyses. Theories of stit discussed in this thesis include B. Chellas' theory, Von Kutschera and Horty's theory, and Belnap and Perloff's theory. ;Chapters I-II focus on a conceptual examination of stit theories. We start with branching time theory, and develop a notion of possibility based on reality. After a discussion of Chellas' theory of stit and the controversial issue about stit closure under consequence, we introduce a notion of factual consequences of actions to serve as a basic interpretation of stit sentences. In order to back up this notion, we present a theory of events, a theory of causation and a theory of alternatives for agents in branching time. Using these theories, we interpret the relation between actions and their factual consequences as a causal relation, i.e., factual consequences of actions are sentences describing facts that are caused by those actions. Finally we reach the same semantics for stit as those proposed by Von Kutschera and Horty, and Belnap and Perloff. In Chapters III-VI, we focus on the technical aspect of the stit theory proposed by Belnap and Perloff. We present an axiomatization of the basic logic ${\bf L}\sb0$ of stit with a single agent and prove its completeness, and present an axiomatization of the logic ${\bf L}\sb1$ of stit with a single agent and refref equivalence and prove its completeness and decidability. Finally we present a study of stit modalities which serves as a study of modes of actions/inactions as well as a preparation for further studies of logics between ${\bf L}\sb0$ and ${\bf L}\sb1.$. (shrink)

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

This is an ethnographic exploration into the meanings of contaminated blood. Intense commercial harvesting of human plasma, a blood component, in rural central China during the 1990s resulted in extensive HIV infection among donors. The lack of viral diversity among these infected donors, as revealed by research in molecular epidemiology, confirms that this epidemic took hold and spread rapidly with deadly efficiency through unsanitary plasmapheresis. The distinction in viral strains between this epidemic and the spread of HIV via other routes (...) of transmission in other parts of China serves also to promote claims to victimhood by infected rural commercial donors in the ambiguous geography of moral ambivalence towards carriers of the virus. Through a series of vignettes from field research among rural plasma donors in China, this article examines the tensions between solidarity and distinction, victimhood and responsibility, alliance and strife as they play out in meanings derived from contaminated blood, within their everyday experience and also within their participation in the broader HIV/aids activism, in which their distinction is inevitably challenged. (shrink)

The conceptual metaphor “THOUGHT IS FOOD” is exemplified in many verbal expressions. Nevertheless, how food metaphors are realized through the actual dining experience remains unexplored. Based on a food design event called EATAIPEI that took place in the London Design Festival in 2015, one aimed at promoting Taipei as World Design Capital 2016, this article analyzes how the multimodal metaphors of food were creatively represented and elaborated within it. This study proposes an analytical framework that combines insights from cognitive linguistics (...) with an intercultural performative view of food presentation and food metaphor. More specifically, it treats complex metaphors as resulting from the interactions of primary metaphors, proposition schemas and intercultural performance. The multimodal metaphors of food are complex metaphors composed of combined sets of primary metaphors, enriched by schema propositions and embedded within food performance. The experience of eating in the event reactivates the sensorimotor experiences that underpin the complex metaphors. (shrink)

This work explored the mediating effects of affective commitment on transformational leadership and job performance and job insecurity on transformational leadership and affective commitment. Meanwhile, the inter-relationships between the four verified the mediating effect of affective commitment, including job insecurity. The results were as follows: transformational leadership and job performance were positively related. Transformational leadership was proportional to an emotional commitment. The affective commitment had a positive impact on job performance. Transformational leadership indirectly positively affected job performance through the intermediary (...) effect of affective commitment. Transformational leadership regulated affective commitment through job insecurity. The more job security employees have, the higher the impact of transformational leadership on affective commitment; the lower the contrary. (shrink)

The target article describes a Dutch case that happened in 2008, where Albert Heringa helped his 98-year-old mother, whose general practitioner rejected her request for an assisted d...

The moral commonly drawn from Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream is that there is no distinction between the subjectivity of the dreamer and the awake. It is, however, tenuous to incorporate this insight into an overall view of Zhuangzi, whether as a perspectival relativist, a mystic, or an anti-rationalist, just to name the more popular positions. The parable, despite its brevity and clarity, is difficult because the assertion about metaphysical distinction in the last two lines does not cohere with the preceding text (...) about knowledge. To cope with this problem, there are recent interpretations that advocate textual revision or adumbrate a non-skeptical Zhuangzi. In this article, I shall evaluate these strategies and explain the discrepancy in understanding the butterfly dream. Besides employing the concept of self-locating belief to account for the paradox of waking and not-knowing, I shall also argue for an epistemic grounding of the metaphysical distinction. (shrink)

It is widely held that there is an asymmetry between our access to our minds and our access to others’ minds. Philosophers in the literature tend to focus on the asymmetry between our access to our mental states and our access to those mental states of others that are not shared by us. What if a mental state can have multiple subjects? Is there still an asymmetry between our access to our mental states and our access to those mental states (...) of others that are also ours? In this paper, I discuss the implications of a case of shared consciousness—the case of the Hogan twins—for asymmetry. I start by clarifying the notion of asymmetry. Here I develop a characterization of asymmetry and argue that it is preferable to the standard approaches in the literature. I then present the twins’ case and argue that it does not threaten asymmetry. I close by drawing some lessons. (shrink)

Work-related satisfaction has critical benefits. To predict work-related satisfaction, we investigated how a counterpart’s expressions of emotional complexity (both positive and negative emotions), positive emotions, and negative emotions influenced a perceiver’s work-related satisfaction during discussions over different work-relevant ideas. We conducted a three-wave coworker survey (N = 529) and an experiment with a confederate as a task partner (N = 378). The results consistently showed significant positive impacts of a counterpart’s emotional complexity and positive emotion expressions on a perceiver’s work-related (...) satisfaction by enhancing the perceiver’s positive emotions and evaluation of the counterpart’s openness. Conversely, a counterpart’s negative emotion expression significantly decreased a perceiver’s work-related satisfaction by reducing perceived counterpart openness. We also did not find a perceiver’s negative emotion as a significant mediator of the associations between the three emotional expressions and work-related satisfaction. Therefore, our investigation highlights similar positive effects of emotional complexity and positive emotion expressions and suggests that an expression of both positive and negative emotions promotes satisfaction by enhancing positive emotions and openness perception. (shrink)

By introducing the intensional mappings and their properties, we establish a new semantical approach of characterizing intermediate logics. First prove that this new approach provides a general method of characterizing and comparing logics without changing the semantical interpretation of implication connective. Then show that it is adequate to characterize all Kripke_complete intermediate logics by showing that each of these logics is sound and complete with respect to its (unique) ‘weakest characterization property’ of intensional mappings. In particular, we show that classical (...) logic has the weakest characterization property , which is the strongest among all possible weakest characterization properties of intermediate logics. Finally, it follows from this result that a translation is an embedding of classical logic into intuitionistic logic, iff. its semantical counterpart has the property. (shrink)

In classical Chinese wu 吾 is commonly employed as the first-person pronoun, similar to wo 我 that retains its use in modern Chinese. Although these two words are usually understood as stylistic variants of “I,” “me,” and “myself,” Chinese scholars of the Zhuangzi 莊子 have long been aware of the possible differences in their semantics, especially in the philosophical context of discussing the relation between the self and the person, as evinced by their occurrences in the much-discussed line “Now I (...) have lost myself” in the chapter “Discussion on Making All Things Equal”. In this essay, I first provide an exegesis of the proffered explanations of the semantical differences between wu and wo as an introduction to two ways of understanding them in the Zhuangzi literature, viz. the single-reference view and the double-reference view. Then I shall argue against these two views in favor of the no-reference view, meaning that both pronouns in “Now I have lost myself” do not function referentially, given the peculiarity of the verb “lose.” I believe the no-reference view has not been explicitly articulated and defended in the literature, although some scholars who want to read the no-self view into the Zhuangzi might have implied it. My argument is supported by a close reading of the targeted passage in the Zhuangzi, premised on the assumption that the part on the “piping of Heaven” immediately following the discussion of losing oneself is an indirect explanation rather than a digression. My explanation is framed within a similar discussion of “I” by the British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. This comparative interpretation, I believe, not only provides the grounds for understanding Zhuangzi’s ideal of attaining the state where “the ten thousand things are one with me,” but also demonstrates how metaphysics and the philosophy of language are two interwoven threads in Zhuangzi’s reasoning. (shrink)

Despite growing concerns that children tend to avoid the news, the reasons why have received little research attention. Therefore, the current study aims to develop and test a model conceptualizing the relations between children’s news consumption, news avoidance, emotional responses, and parent and child mitigation strategies. The model was tested using data collected during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The current, preregistered, survey study was part of a longitudinal project and used data from the second wave. Data were (...) collected in November/December 2020 among 510 children. Findings showed that children who consumed more news during the pandemic avoided pandemic news less often. Children who experienced more anxiety-related behaviors regarding pandemic news avoided pandemic news more often. The relation between news consumption and emotional responses was stronger for children who experienced restrictive parental mediation more often, indicating that this was not an effective parental mediation strategy for tempering their emotional responses. Children with higher levels of emotional responses used reactive coping strategies more often. However, this did not seem to be an effective strategy against pandemic news avoidance because none of the strategies had a negative relation with pandemic news avoidance. Distancing was even positively related to pandemic news avoidance. Although the current study was not able to fully unravel how news avoidance-related constructs relate to one another, we were able to get some important insights guiding future research. Specifically, it is of crucial importance to unravel the mechanisms that increase the chance of children’s news avoidance and those that mitigate it, to build interventions to counteract news avoidance and to protect children from the negative emotional consequences by news consumption. (shrink)

Sydney Shoemaker argues that a certain class of self-ascriptions is immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronouns. In their “Self-Consciousness and Immunity,” Timothy Lane and Caleb Liang question Shoemaker’s view. Lang and Liang present a clinical case and an experiment and argue that they are counterexamples to Shoemaker’s view. This paper is a response to Lane and Liang’s challenge. I identify the desiderata that a counterexample to Shoemaker’s view must meet and show that somatoparaphrenia and the Body (...) Swap Illusion fail to meet those desiderata. Thus, despite being puzzling phenomena, somatoparaphrenia and the Body Swap Illusion are not counterexamples to Shoemaker’s view. (shrink)

With the change in the location of school education from the classroom to the home during the COVID-19 outbreak, there should be more educational caregiving from children’s parents when children learn online. Parental involvement in children’s online learning including study guide and psychological counseling is the specific content of educational caregiving, which is different from face-to-face learning. More attention should be paid to parental involvement and parents’ satisfaction with the online learning effect. This study therefore conducted a survey on middle (...) school students’ parents to establish a moderating model, exploring the influence of parental involvement on parent satisfaction, and the number of children and parental education level as the moderator variables influencing parental involvement. The results show that there is a significant positive correlation between parental involvement and satisfaction, while the parental education level and the number of children both have a moderating effect on the relationship between parental involvement and parent satisfaction. The moderating effect of the education level of parents shows negative, while the moderating effect of the number of children is positive. An interesting finding is that the number of children has a very low influence on parental involvement. (shrink)

The multilevel model of meme diffusion conceptualizes how mediated messages diffuse over time and space. As a pilot application of implementing the meme diffusion, we developed the social media analytics and research testbed to monitor Twitter messages and track the diffusion of information in and across different cities and geographic regions. Social media analytics and research testbed is an online geo-targeted search and analytics tool, including an automatic data processing procedure at the backend and an interactive frontend user interface. Social (...) media analytics and research testbed is initially designed to facilitate searching and geo-locating tweet topics and terms in different cities and geographic regions; filtering noise from raw data ; analyzing social media data from a spatiotemporal perspective; and visualizing social media data in diagnostic ways. Social media analytics and research testbed provides researchers and domain experts with a tool that can efficiently facilitate the refinement, formalization, and testing of research hypotheses or questions. Three case studies are introduced to illustrate how the predictions of meme diffusion can be examined and to demonstrate the potentials and key functions of social media analytics and research testbed. (shrink)