The Lodz Film School has existed since 1948.... In the year of the school's jubilee, we decided to publish five selected MA theses written by Direction Department graduates. Three of th theses, written by Krzysztof Kieślowski, Marcel Łoziński and Wojciech Wiszniewski, concern documentary film, whereas the two remainingones written by Grzegorz Królikiewicz and Edward Żebrowski refer to fiction films.... Their authors, excellent Polish film-makers, presented their auteurs' concept they had at the beginning of their artistic careers which were carried out (...) and verified by them through their work on... subsequent film projects. We decided to combine those theses with five complementary essays in which film historians and theoreticians analyse these directors' films which followed in the course of their career in the context of the concepts described by the directors in their MA theses."--English section, page 6. (shrink)

Author's interpretation on Kinh Dịch in Vietnam.

A stochastic prey-predator system in a polluted environment with Beddington-DeAngelis functional response is proposed and analyzed. Firstly, for the system with white noise perturbation, by analyzing the limit system, the existence of boundary periodic solutions and positive periodic solutions is proved and the sufficient conditions for the existence of boundary periodic solutions and positive periodic solutions are derived. And then for the stochastic system, by introducing Markov regime switching, the sufficient conditions for extinction or persistence of such system are obtained. (...) Furthermore, we proved that the system is ergodic and has a stationary distribution when the concentration of toxicant is a positive constant. Finally, two examples with numerical simulations are carried out in order to illustrate the theoretical results. (shrink)

Modern Western medical individualism has had a significant impact on health care in China. This essay demonstrates the ways in which such Western-style individualism has been explicitly endorsed in China’s 2010 directive: The Basic Norms of the Documentation of the Medical Record. The Norms require that the patient himself, rather than a member of his family, sign each informed consent form. This change in clinical practice indicates a shift toward medical individualism in Chinese healthcare legislation. Such individualism, however, is incompatible (...) with the character of Chinese familism that is deeply rooted in the Chinese ethical tradition. It also contradicts family-based patterns of health care in China. Moreover, the requirement for individual informed consent is incompatible with numerous medical regulations promulgated in the past two decades. This essay argues that while Chinese medical legislation should learn from relevant Western ideas, it should not simply copy such practices by importing medical individualism into Chinese health care. Chinese healthcare policy is properly based on Chinese medical familist resources. (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)

Children tend to produce words earlier when they are connected to a variety of other words along the phonological and semantic dimensions. Though these semantic and phonological connectivity effects have been extensively documented, little is known about their underlying developmental mechanism. One possibility is that learning is driven by lexical network growth where highly connected words in the child's early lexicon enable learning of similar words. Another possibility is that learning is driven by highly connected words in the external learning (...) environment, instead of highly connected words in the early internal lexicon. The present study tests both scenarios systematically in both the phonological and semantic domains across 10 languages. We show that phonological and semantic connectivity in the learning environment drives growth in both production‐ and comprehension‐based vocabularies, even controlling for word frequency and length. This pattern of findings suggests a word learning process where children harness their statistical learning abilities to detect and learn highly connected words in the learning environment. (shrink)

This essay draws on classical Confucian intellectual resources to argue that the person who emerges from a head transplant would be neither the person who provided the head, nor the person who provided the body, but a new, different person. We construct two types of argument to support this conclusion: one is based on the classical Confucian metaphysics of human life as qi activity; the other is grounded in the Confucian view of personal identity as being inseparable from one’s familial (...) relations. These Confucian ideas provide a reasonable alternative to the currently dominant view that one’s personal identity “follows” one’s head. Together, these arguments imply that head transplantation is ethically inappropriate. (shrink)

Cross-sectional studies indicate that normal aging is accompanied by decreases in brain structure. Longitudinal studies, however, are relatively rare and inconsistent regarding their outcomes. Particularly the heterogeneity of methods, sample characteristics and the high inter-individual variability in older adults prevent the deduction of general trends. Therefore, the current study aimed to compare longitudinal age-related changes in brain structure in two large independent samples of healthy older adults ; the Longitudinal Healthy Aging Brain database project at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, (...) and 1000BRAINS at the Research Center Juelich, Germany. Annual percentage changes in the two samples revealed stable to slight decreases in cortical thickness over time. After correction for major covariates, i.e., baseline age, sex, education, and image quality, sample differences were only marginally present. Results suggest that general trends across time might be generalizable over independent samples, assuming the same methodology is used, and similar sample characteristics are present. (shrink)

Substantial evidence indicates that cognitive training can be efficacious for older adults, but findings regarding training-related brain plasticity have been mixed and vary depending on the imaging modality. Recent years have seen a growth in recognition of the importance of large-scale brain networks on cognition. In particular, task-induced deactivation within the default mode network is thought to facilitate externally directed cognition, while aging-related decrements in this neural process are related to reduced cognitive performance. It is not yet clear whether task-induced (...) deactivation within the DMN can be enhanced by cognitive training in the elderly. We previously reported durable cognitive improvements in a sample of healthy older adults who completed 6 weeks of process-based object-location memory training compared to an active control training group. The primary aim of the current study is to evaluate whether these cognitive gains are accompanied by training-related changes in task-related DMN deactivation. Given the evidence for heterogeneity of the DMN, we examine task-related activation/deactivation within two separate DMN branches, a ventral branch related to episodic memory and a dorsal branch more closely resembling the canonical DMN. Participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while performing an untrained object-location memory task at four time points before, during, and after the training period. Task-induced activation values were extracted for the ventral and dorsal DMN branches at each time point. Relative to visual fixation baseline: the dorsal DMN was deactivated during the scanner task, while the ventral DMN was activated; the object-location memory training group exhibited an increase in dorsal DMN deactivation relative to the active control group over the course of training and follow-up; changes in dorsal DMN deactivation did not correlate with task improvement. These results indicate a training-related enhancement of task-induced deactivation of the dorsal DMN, although the specificity of this improvement to the cognitive task performed in the scanner is not clear. (shrink)

Bus bunching is ostensibly regarded as a detrimental phenomenon in bus systems. We study a bus loop with two bus stops, one regular bus stop and one spike bus stop, where bunched buses can outperform staggered buses. The spike bus stop models a bus stop connected to a train or metro service, where passengers arrive in groups at periodic intervals. We introduce the configuration of synchronised bunched buses, where bunched buses wait for the spike in demand. For a wide range (...) of parameters, synchronised bunched buses outperform perfectly staggered buses in terms of minimising the waiting time of commuters. We present an analytical formulation of the average waiting time in the case of bunched buses, synchronised bunched buses, and perfectly staggered buses with the consideration of different passenger demands, number of buses, and bus capacity. We demonstrate the validity of our analytical results through an agent-based simulation of the bus loop system. (shrink)

Moral hypocrisy (MH) occurs when people fail to practice what they preach. Despite the prevalence of the effect of social identity on an individual’s MH, few empirical studies have explored contextual factors that may help reduce MH. By conducting two experiments based on the research paradigm of real stranger presence, we examined how in-group and out-group strangers’ presence and moral behavior may contribute to reducing MH. The results of experiment 1 demonstrated that compared with the presence of out-group strangers, the (...) presence of in-group stranger could effectively inhibit MH (no significant difference between participants reported and actual donation proportions was obtained). The results of experiment 2 replicated and extended the results of experiment 1, first by showing that the presence of in-group strangers could effectively inhibit MH and then by revealing the influence of present strangers’ behavior (moral or hypocritical) on MH. The results indicated that strangers’ moral behavior could effectively eliminate participants’ MH, especially in the presence of in-group strangers. However, when present strangers exhibited hypocritical behavior, they exhibited no effect on participants’ MH, irrespective of the condition of in-group and out-group strangers. The current study provides empirical support for theories related to MH and moral decision making and contributes to the literature on in-group and out-group effects on MH and decision making. (shrink)

During the past four decades, China has gone through rapid urbanization and modernization. As people adapt to dramatic sociodemographic shifts from rural communities to urban centers and as economic level rises, individualistic cultural values in China have increased. Meanwhile, parent and child behavior in early childhood has also evolved accordingly to match a more individualistic society. This mixed-method study investigated how social change in China may have impacted parenting goals and child development in middle childhood, as seen through the eyes (...) of the current generation of mothers. Thirty mothers of fifth-grade elementary school students from Shenzhen, China were recruited and took part in semi-structured interviews. Participants answered questions and provided examples about their children’s life, their own childhood, and the perceived differences between the two generations. Participating mothers were also asked to rate which generation, themselves or their parents, cared more about the childrearing goals of academic competitiveness and socioemotional well-being. Using both qualitative and quantitative analysis, we expected and found an intergenerational increase in the perceived value mothers placed on individualistic traits: current mothers care more about their children’s academic competitiveness, personal happiness, and social adjustment, compared to their experience of their own mothers’ attitudes during their childhood a generation earlier. They also experience conflict between their children’s academic competitiveness and socioemotional well-being. As a function of both urbanization and increased economic means, children’s collectivistic family responsibilities for essential household chores have declined as the importance of schoolwork has increased. (shrink)

This book presents a variety of discussions from different countries about regulations and applications of ethics in business practice. It demonstrates how Ethics, both in the world of business and in academic life, is consistently a central and unavoidable issue that institutions must devise new regulations on a regular basis to address. Given that applying such regulations becomes complicated in a global business landscape and that International companies have lost large amounts of revenues due to fraudulent activities, the book provides (...) insights for professionals in business world to teach, learn, apply, measure and report on companies' daily business. Business and Professional Ethics: Theories, Standards, and Analysis is essential reading for researchers and students in business schools around the world. (shrink)

This volume explores the ethical principles that guide institutions such as corporations, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. The author argues that institutional ethics must go beyond the traditional focus on individual morality, and instead address broader questions of social responsibility and accountability. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly (...) other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Loneliness and solitude have similar attributes to individuals, but there is a critical variance between the two regarding the impact on the individual. Loneliness is an unpleasant feeling in a broad sense, while according to some philosophers, solitude is regarded as a joyful necessity when one establishes a deep relationship with the outside world. This article aims to develop a sensible account of the difference between solitude and loneliness by looking at some insightful philosophical viewpoints. Importantly, this article aims to (...) explain the dimensions in which solitude is a positive phenomenon. I will analyze the role of solitude in eliminating loneliness from two aspects: self-consciousness and self-knowledge construction. (shrink)

本书由金岳霖的人生艺术和欧阳中石的艺术人生上、下两篇组成，内容包括：天赋的逻辑感、与清华同步扬帆、在转折的湍流、天上掉下个林妹妹、养只蛐蛐打天下等。.

本书论述了列宁在《哲学笔记》中通过研究黑格尔哲学的途径,以马克思主义“《资本论》的逻辑”为典范,试图建立辩证法的“大逻辑”。.

本书论述了列宁在《哲学笔记》中通过研究黑格尔哲学的途径,以马克思主义“《资本论》的逻辑”为典范,试图建立辩证法的“大逻辑”。.

Urban elites and their relative income levels are windows on the emerging socioeconomic order in China. We add to the research literature a new view that economic sectors are the institutional contexts in which different elites seek their material gains. Conducting a trend analysis with 1988 and 1995 national surveys of urban China, we found that political, administrative, and managerial elites maintained consistently higher levels of income relative to professional elites, but this applied mainly to a monopoly sector of industries (...) that were restricted to state operation. Managers in the open industry sector that allowed for free entry and exile experienced income declines relative to professionals within the sector, even though the former had moderately higher income levels than the latter in 1988 and 1995. All elite groups in the monopoly sector retained higher incomes than their counterparts in the open sector in 1995, but not necessarily in 1988. (shrink)