This book analyzes Marxian theories of justice within the context of contemporary political philosophy and intellectual history. Transcending perspectives from classical Marxism, the author analyses how western Marxism has engaged with critically and responded to the theories of justice, especially since the 1970s. The nine chapters cover major intellectual movements and multi-dimensional frameworks of thought that critique and understand anew the idea of justice, including anglophone debates on Marxism and justice, global distributive justice, and viewpoints from analytical Marxism, radical egalitarianism, (...) the Frankfurt School, Marxian feminism and ecological Marxism. The second part of the book returns to the classical texts of Marxism, with a focus on historical materialism and a critique of capitalism to reinterpret basic tenets of justice in Marxism and to reconstruct Marxian theory of justice. This title will be of value to scholars and students interested in theories of justice, Marxian philosophy and political philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, a finance system with delay is considered. By analyzing the corresponding characteristic equations, the local stability of equilibrium is established. The existence of Hopf bifurcations at the equilibrium is also discussed. Furthermore, formulas for determining the direction of Hopf bifurcation and the stability of the bifurcating periodic solutions are derived by applying the normal form method and center manifold theorem. Finally, numerical simulation results are presented to validate the theoretical analysis. Numerical simulation results show that delay can (...) lead a stable system into a chaotic state. (shrink)

Since humankind crossed the threshold to civilization, and up to the moment of the victory of the revolution of the proletariat, being oppressed and being enslaved was the common fate of women down through the ages. Albeit that in different periods and eras, in different societies, countries, or nations, and owing to the impact of different economic, political, cultural, and moral factors, the oppression and enslavement of women was expressed in different forms and to different degrees, such oppression and enslavement (...) existed in every age and place as a common feature of history. For the longest time, the value that women ought to have and deserve, as members of society, as members of the family, and as the object of the affection and intimacy of men, was consistently and maliciously damaged, undermined, and demeaned. (shrink)

Smith’s imagination of sociability and interpersonal relationships in commercial society carries a strong Epicurean tone. However, in terms of moral philosophy, Smith severely criticised Epicureanism and firmly defended the ‘natural beauty of virtue’ within the framework of sentimentalism (i.e. the existence of moral worth independent of pleasure and utility). He claimed that Epicureanism’s denial of the ‘natural beauty of virtue’ not only misunderstands the basis of moral judgement but also ignores people’s corresponding moral motives and the possibility of their self-formation (...) in character. He similarly criticised Hume. In Smith’s view, Hume also neglected the ‘natural beauty of virtue’. This negligence underestimated the dignity of human nature in terms of moral motives, moral perception and the self-cultivation of character, thus failing to explain the possibility of justice, self-command, generosity, and other virtues. In general, drawing on established intellectual resources, Smith offered a more active, energetic perspective on the moral agent than Epicurus and Hume. The active and noble moral agent, rather than rationally maximising individuals, was an enlightened participant in Smith’s commercial society. (shrink)

In this work, a virtual submerged floating operational system based on parallel and serial robotic platforms is proposed. The primary aim behind its development lies in carrying out simulated underwater manipulation experiments in an easier and safer way. This VSFOS is consisted of a six-degree-of-freedom parallel platform, an ABB serial manipulator, an inertial sensor, and a real-time industrial computer. The 6-DOF platform is used to simulate the movement of an underwater vehicle, whose attitude is measured by the inertial sensor. The (...) ABB manipulator, controlled by the real-time industrial computer, works as an operational tool to perform underwater manipulation tasks. In the control system architecture, software is developed to receive the data collected by the inertial sensor, to communicate and send instructions. Furthermore, the real-time status of the manipulator is displayed in this software. To validate the proposed system, two experiments have been conducted to test its performance. In the first experiment, the test is carried out to check the communication function of VSFOS, while in the second one, the manipulator is intended to follow the movement of the parallel platform and perform simulated operational task in the space. The obtained results from these two experiments show clearly the effectiveness and the performance of the proposed VSFOS. (shrink)

ABSTRACTUsing faces as the priming stimuli, the present study explored the influence of facial expressions on the activation of gender stereotypes using a lexical decision paradigm. Experiment 1 explored the activation of gender stereotypes when the facial primes contained only gender information. The results showed that gender stereotypes were activated. In Experiment 2, the facial primes contained both gender category and expression information. The results indicated that gender stereotypes were not activated. Experiment 3 required the participants to make emotion, gender, (...) or impression decisions concerning the facial primes before the lexical decision task. The results showed that gender stereotypes were not activated in emotion and impression decisions conditions, whereas stereotypes were activated in gender decisions condition. These finding suggest that facial expressions can inhibit automatic activation of gender stereotypes, unless the perceivers perform gender categorization processing to prime f... (shrink)

With the development of industrialization and urbanization, cities have become the main carriers of economic activities. However, the long-term development of cities has also caused damage to resources and the environment. Hence, objective and scientific evaluation of urban low-carbon sustainable development capacity is very important. An index system of urban low-carbon sustainable development capability is constructed in this paper, and a TOPSIS-BP neural network model is established to evaluate the low-carbon sustainable development capability of Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou in (...) China. At the same time, the difference degree of low-carbon sustainable development level in these four cities is analyzed by standard deviation and coefficient of variation, and the influencing factors of urban low-carbon sustainable development ability are extracted by grey correlation analysis. The results show that the capability of low-carbon sustainable development in four cities is rising and the difference of low-carbon sustainable development capability is decreasing; the general view that the higher the general investment in low-carbon sustainable development, the higher the level of low-carbon sustainable development in cities has not been verified; with the change of time series, the factors affecting the capability of low-carbon sustainable development in the same city are different and the influence of the same factor on the capability of low-carbon sustainable development in different cities is different. (shrink)

Drawing on social information processing theory and a career development perspective, we examined the effect of transformational leadership on the perceived overqualification via career growth opportunities, and how the supervisor–subordinate guanxi moderates the relationship between transformational leadership and perceived overqualification. We tested this proposal using three waves of lagged data collected from 351 company employees in the Yangtze River Delta region in China. The results revealed that transformational leadership had an indirect effect on perceived overqualification through career growth opportunities, and (...) supervisor–subordinate guanxi moderated the positive association between transformational leadership and career growth opportunities. In addition, the mediating effect of transformational leadership on perceived overqualification through career growth opportunities was stronger when the level of supervisor–subordinate guanxi was high and weaker when it was low. The findings have theoretical and practical implications for reducing employees’ perceptions of overqualification in the organizational context. (shrink)

Commented article: XU, Y. Chinese cultural landscapes: from the ideal of a balanced bond between humans and nature to ecological forms of life. Trans/Form/Ação, v. 47, n. 4 “Eastern thought”, e0240067, 2024. Available at: https://revistas.marilia.unesp.br/index.php/transformacao/article/view/14623.

Editors’ AbstractThis articles expresses a strong discontent with Sinologism and argues that its rise is the result of an uncritical application of Said’s Orientalism and postcolonial theory to Sinology, and that its proponents have committed a grave error in treating Sinology as a discourse of ideology full of subjective imaginations, to the neglect of the fact that Sinology is a branch of objective scholarship. After reviewing the evolution of the concept of Sinology in history, it critically analyzes some major ideas (...) of Sinologism in relation to Orientalism and draws the conclusion that the proponents of Sinologism are unaware of the inherent problems in Said’s theory and postmodern theory, have inadequate knowledge of Sinological history, and oversimplified the complex issues in Sinological studies. (shrink)

Surrogate endpoints are a common application of biomarkers to estimate clinical benefit in clinical trials, despite questions about reliability. This article discusses ongoing opportunities for their validation, in the context of a regulatory environment in which they are increasingly championed.

To investigate mechanisms of rational representation, I consider construction of an ordered continuum of psychophysical scale of magnitude of sensation; counting mechanism leading to an approximate numerosity scale for integers; and conjoint measurement structure pitting the denominator against the numerator in tradeoff positions. Number sense of resulting rationals is neither intuitive nor expedient in their manipulation.

本书是 "海外汉学研究丛书" 之一, 全书共分三个部分, 主要从各个角度呈现了莱布尼茨对中国的关注及他思想中与中国相关的元素, 具体内容包括"反各种乌托邦思想的人类可完满性--莱布尼茨政治哲学的几个观点","莱布尼茨认识与文化的多元透视洞悉论与其形而上学基础","耶稣会士白晋与莱布尼茨","中国莱布尼茨研究的历史,现状和展望" 等.

Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, working from home promotes the importance of indoor environment qualities. With the settings and functions of home offices, an experiment was carried out to determine the interaction effects between indoor plants and traffic noise levels on the performance and environmental evaluations of English reading comprehension tasks and the performance of short-term breaks. A sample of 22 Chinese university students took part in the experiment. Two visual conditions and five TNLs were included. Participants’ accuracy rates, eye (...) movements, mental workload, and feelings about the environment were collected. The mental fatigue recovery, visual fatigue recovery, anxiety recovery, and unfriendly recovery were measured for the analysis of a 5-min short-term break. The results demonstrate plants have significant effects on ERCTs and short-term breaks, especially at 45 and 50 dBA TNL; the effects of TNLs on ERCTs’ eye movements and work environment satisfaction differ by the presence of plants, e.g., the average pupil diameter, lighting and layout satisfaction; The effects of indoor plants on ERCT differ by the range of TNLs. In conclusion, indoor plants are beneficial to home workers engaged in ERCT when TNL does not exceed 50 dBA. The current data highlight the importance of audio-visual interaction in home offices and provide insights into the interaction mechanism between indoor plants and traffic noise. (shrink)

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, most employees face increasing career-related stress, particularly those who work in multinational corporations, because the international travel constraints prevent them from going back to their families. Hence, it is imperative to investigate the critical impact of employees’ occupational burnout on career-related outcomes. In response, this research explores the moderating effect of OB on the relationships between career competencies and career sustainability. To achieve a more comprehensive understanding of relevant issues, we adopted a mixed-method research design (...) that includes both qualitative and quantitative analyses. Findings indicate that all the three dimensions of CCs were positively related to CS; moreover, OB negatively moderated the individual relationships of CC and BC with CS. The main contribution of this study is to enrich the existing career literature by addressing the critical moderating role of OB in the links of CC and BC individually with CS. Practical implications are also discussed in this study. (shrink)

Experimental results in Ultimatum, Trust and Social Dilemma games have been interpreted as showing that individuals are, by and large, not driven by selfish motives. But we do not need experiments to know that. In our view, what the experiments show is that the typical economic auxiliary hypothesis of non-tuism should not be generalized to other contexts. Indeed, we know that when the experimental situation is framed as a market interaction, participants will be more inclined to keep more money, share (...) less, and disregard other participants’ welfare [Hoffman et al., 1994]. When the same game is framed as a fair division one, participants overall show a much greater concern for the other parties’ interests. The data thus indicate that the context of an interaction is of paramount importance in eliciting different motives. The challenge then is to model utility functions that are general enough to subsume a variety of motives and specific enough to allow for meaningful, interesting predictions to be made. For the sake of simplicity (and brevity), in what follows we will concentrate upon the results of experiments that show what appears to be individuals’ disposition to behave in a fair manner in a variety of circumstances [Camerer, 2003]., though what we are saying can be easily applied to other research areas. Such experimental results have been variously interpreted, each interpretation being accompanied by a specific utility function. We shall consider three such functions and the underlying interpretations that support them, and assess each one on the basis of what they claim to be able to explain and predict. (shrink)

White LEDs, which have been widely used in the urban street lighting, are increasingly applied to replace traditional HPS lamps with a lower CCT. Generally, studies on the CCT of street lighting focus on providing safe functional lighting for vehicle drivers. However, it is still unknown how the street light color can affect pedestrians’ perception and preferences with respect to lighting levels and ambient temperature.In this study, a wide range of CCTs was measured for urban street lighting in Beijing, China, (...) for example. And the transition from traditional HPS lamps to LEDs lacks a reference street lighting standard for CCT. The study aims to conduct a cross-sensory test to evaluate urban street lighting with multiple combinations of CCT values and illuminance levels according to pedestrians’ visual perception and psychological preferences.A total of 18 night street lighting scenes with six CCT values and three illuminance levels were first selected in Beijing city, and then HDR videos of these scenes were taken from the view of pedestrians to conduct psychological experiments in an indoor environment with three ambient temperatures. A total of 77 university students were invited to assess videos of the 18 lighting scenes in terms of seven factors, such as lighting brightness, color temperature sensation, light color preference, sense of safety, recognition, comfort, and overall preference. Several key findings were achieved as follows. The CCT of urban street lighting can have significant effects on the visual psychological perceptions of participants. There was a significant interaction between CCT, illuminance, and ambient temperature on the visual psychological performances of participants. The higher ambient temperature will deliver the higher level of overall preference for the street lighting with medium and high CCT, and the perception of warmer light color. There was a strong correlation found between participants’ light color preference, comfort, and overall preferences. (shrink)

This paper studies the fixed-time trajectory tracking control problem of robot manipulators in the presence of uncertain dynamics and external disturbances. First, a novel nonsingular fixed-time sliding mode surface is presented, which can ensure that the convergence time of the suggested surface is bounded regardless of the initial states. Subsequently, a novel fast nonsingular fixed-time sliding mode control is developed so that the closed-loop system is fixed-time convergent to the equilibrium. By applying the proposed NFNFSMC method and the adaptive technique, (...) a novel adaptive nonsingular fixed-time control scheme is proposed, which can guarantee fast fixed-time convergence of the tracking errors to small regions around the origin. With the proposed control method, the lumped disturbance is compensated by the adaptive technique, whose prior information about the upper bound is not needed. The fixed-time stability of the trajectory tracking control under the proposed controller is proved by the Lyapunov stability theory. Finally, corresponding simulations are given to illustrate the validity and superiority of the proposed control approach. (shrink)

We design and implement an intelligent IoT-based motion monitoring system to realize the monitoring of three important parameters, namely, the type of movement, the number of movements, and the period of movement in physical activities, and optimize the system to support the simultaneous use by multiple users. Considering the motion monitoring scenario for smart fit, the framework of an IoT-based motion monitoring system is proposed. The framework contains components such as active acquisition nodes, wireless access points, data processing servers, and (...) terminals. In terms of algorithm optimization, research related to active pattern recognition and periodic calculation methods is conducted. For active pattern recognition, two types of classification algorithms with different complexity are proposed based on Support Vector Machine and deep neural networks, respectively, to adapt to scenarios with different computational capabilities. For period calculation, a method based on over-zero detection and wavelet transform is proposed to count the number of actions and calculate the period of each action. In 100 times action cycle calculation experiments, the count statistic calculation method achieves 100% calculation accuracy and the active cycle calculation results are close to the real value, which proves the effectiveness of the cycle calculation method. The system provides a multiuser-oriented communication method and realizes accurate and reliable human movement monitoring, which has a wide application prospect in the fields of physical education and rehabilitation training. (shrink)

The puzzle has played a significant role in Chinese culture since its formation. The Lo-shu and the Ba-gua, the most prominent number puzzle in ancient China, with its instinctual quest for universal order, has constructed a philosophical system that has incorporated human being as an integral part of nature. The system has exerted great influence on Chinese culture to this day. Because of its mysterious origin and magical evolution, the Ba-gua has been used to predict the fortune of both the (...) nation and the individual. The Chinese character-deconstructing puzzle has also functioned as a foreshadow of one’s fate. By analyzing the components of a character, written by the subject in a specific context, divination was made. In contrast to the solemn mission of the number puzzle, and the character-deconstructing puzzle, the wedding puzzle and the riddle are lighthearted, and intended to provoke humor, and to function pedagogically. A latecomer, once the mysteriousness of number and character has faded, the riddle is used to promote the intellectual development of children. The wedding puzzle has been popular among those who are illiterate and make analogy by using common occurrence to allude to taboo in the oral dialect. Since their illiteracy has excluded them from reading and writing, they are free to make puzzles in their own dialect without being limited by a reverence for the written character. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed the patterns of lifestyle and posed psychological stress on pregnant women. However, the association of sleep duration and screen time with anxiety among pregnant women under the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic scenario has been poorly addressed. We conducted one large-scale, multicenter cross-sectional study which recruited 1794 pregnant women across middle and west China. Self-reported demographic characteristics, lifestyle, and mental health status were collected from 6th February to 8th May 2020. We investigated the association (...) of sleep duration and screen time with the risk of anxiety by multivariable logistic regression analysis and linear regression analysis after adjusting potential confounders. The dose-response relationship of sleep duration and screen time with anxiety was visualized using a cubic spline plot. Our data revealed that almost 35% of pregnant women suffered from anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sleep duration was dose-dependently associated with a lower risk of anxiety among pregnant women, while screen time exhibited a conversed effect. Notably, sleep duration synergistically combined with screen time to diminish the risk of anxiety. Taken together, sleep duration and screen time were independently and jointly associated with anxiety. Therefore, promoting a more active lifestyle and maintaining higher sleep quality could improve the mental health of pregnant women, especially under public health emergency. (shrink)

As the father of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure influences all aspects of linguistic development with no exception of Cognitive Grammar. A scrutiny of how Saussure is understood in Cognitive Grammar indicates that Saussurean linguistics is misinterpreted in terms of five core ideas: (1) langue, rather than parole, is given highest priority; (2) the internal relation of “signifier-signified” counts as the pairing of “form-meaning”; (3) “arbitrariness” is contradictory to “symbolicity”; (4) “arbitrariness” means “unmotivatedness”; (5) arbitrariness is not the inherent nature (...) of morphological and syntactic structures. This paper is intended to reassess these five ideas and argue that they depart further from Saussure’s thought. (shrink)