In this article, we examine the effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on firms' financial performance (CSR-effect). Two competing hypotheses, social impact hypothesis and shift of focus hypothesis, are proposed to investigate this issue, where the former suggests that CSR has a positive relation with performance and the latter are opposite. In order to ensure the CSR-effect is not contaminated by other faeton or samples are randomly drawn, we employ four matching methods, Nearest, Caliper, Mahala and Mahala Caliper to match (...) the samples of CSR (CSR-firms) and without CSR (NonCSR-firms) with similar characteristics. Although four methods yield slightly different results, firms engaging in CSR activities tend to obtain significantly higher values on pretax income to net sales and profit margin, and adopting CSR at the very least not deteriorate the performance of firms, making our con clusion favors the social impact hypothesis and against shift of focus hypothesis in Taiwan. Thus, ambition and conscience are not conflicting with each other. (shrink)

To many, recent allegations of accounting fraud (or earnings management; EM) at Enron, coupled with similar ones at many other corporations, are a strong indication of a serious decay in business ethics. In academics, this raises the concern between EM and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Since it has neither been documented, nor globally tested whether CSR mitigates or increases the extent of EM, three kinds of EM are studied: earnings smoothing, earnings aggressiveness, and earnings losses and decreases avoidance. The extents (...) to which financial characteristics and institutional variables have an impact on the extent to which companies conduct EM are also tested. Our study investigates whether the CSR-related features of 1,653 corporations in 46 countries had a positive or negative effect on the quality of their publicly released financial information during the 1993-2002 period. There is no question that with a greater commitment to CSR, the extent of earnings smoothing is mitigated, that of earnings losses and decreases avoidance is reduced, but the extent of earnings aggressiveness is increased. (shrink)

In this paper, finite-time tracking problem of nonholonomic mobile robots for a moving target is considered. First of all, polar coordinates are used to characterize the distance and azimuth between the moving target and the robot. Then, based on the distance and azimuth transported from the sensor installed on the robot, a finite-time tracking control law is designed for the nonholonomic mobile robot by the switching control method. Rigorous proof shows that the tracking error converges to zero in a finite (...) time. Numerical simulation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed control method. (shrink)

In this paper, the stabilization problem of nonholonomic chained-form systems is addressed with uncertain constants. In this paper, the active disturbance rejection control is designed to solve this problem. The proposed control strategy combines extended state observer and adaptive sliding mode controller. The control of nonholonomic chained-form systems with dynamic nonlinear uncertain terms and uncertain constants is first discussed in this paper. In comparison with existing methods, the proposed method in this paper has better performance. It is proved that, with (...) the application of the proposed control strategy, semiglobal finite-time stabilization of the systems is achieved. An example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. (shrink)

Creative association is inherent and essential to creativity and insight. Here we utilised a Chinese compound Remote Associates Task (cRAT) to identify the potential impact of word order (i.e., solution position hereinafter) and word frequency on creative association across two behavioural experiments. Experiment 1 identified the effects of (a) word order and word frequency on cRAT-induced association without considering the specific strategies used during solving such problems and (b) their interaction not only on performance in solving the cRAT, including solution (...) time and accuracy, but also on difficulty rating. Following a coarse-to-fine approach, Experiment 2 examined the effect of both factors on creative association determined according to each participant’s trial-by-trial reports regarding insight solution strategies. Main effects of word order and word frequency, and a two-way interaction, were found on the accuracy and self-rated difficulty. These findings shed light on creative association, multiply-constrained problem solving and constructing compounds. (shrink)

E-commerce research usually focuses more on how to protect consumers’ rights and increase their purchase intention from the perspective of consumers. However, we still lack understanding of e-commerce sellers, especially cross-border e-commerce sellers. Based on the stimulus-body-response theory, this paper built a moderated mediation model to test the relationships among social support, perceived benefits, perceived usefulness and sellers’ willingness to retain. The results show that social support has a positive impact on perceived benefits and sellers’ willingness to retain; perceived benefits (...) play a partial intermediary role between social support and sellers’ willingness to retain; and perceived usefulness moderates these mediating effects. The research results further expand the perspective of e-commerce research and reveal the mechanism and boundary conditions of the influence of social support on the retention willingness of cross-border e-commerce sellers. (shrink)

Although the management and planning of water resources are extremely significant to human development, the complexity of implementation is unimaginable. To achieve this, the high-precision water consumption prediction is actually the key component of urban water optimization management system. Water consumption is usually affected by many factors, such as weather, economy, and water prices. If these impact factors are directly combined to predict water consumption, the weight of each perspective on the water consumption will be ignored, which will be greatly (...) detrimental to the prediction accuracy. Therefore, this paper proposes a deep neural network-based complex system for urban water management. The essence of it is to formulate a water consumption prediction model with the aid of principal component analysis and the integrated deep neural network, which is abbreviated as UWM-Id. The PCA classifies the factors affecting water consumption in the original data into three categories according to their correlation and inputs them into the neural network model. The results in the previous step are assigned weights and integrated into the form of fully connected layer. Finally, analyzing the sensitivity of the proposed UWM-Id and comparing its performance with a series of commonly used baseline methods for data mining, a large number of experiments have proved that UWM-Id has good performance and can be used for urban water management system. (shrink)

Phosphatidylinositol 3 kinase (PI 3-kinase) is an important enzyme that is involved in the regulation of a variety of biological processes such as apoptosis, cell division, and ion channel activity and can play a role in the pathological development of a number of diseases, including AIDS and cancer. The authors’ data indicate that external qi of Yan Xin Life Science Technology (YXLST) can modulate enzyme activity in two directions. Within a time window of 3 days of the initial emission of (...) external qi of YXLST, PI 3-kinase activity was restored in an outdated enzyme sample that had lost activity, and PI 3-kinase activity was suppressed in a freshly purified sample relative to an untreated control sample so that its activity was nearly undetectable. The data presented are consistent with the hypothesis that external qi of YXLST can alter molecular events. The uniqueness of this and other observations mandates further study. (shrink)

Electroacupuncture (EA) and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) are often used in the management of schizophrenia. This study sought to determine whether additional EA and ECT could augment antipsychotic response and reduce related side effects. In this retrospective controlled study, 287 hospitalized schizophrenic patients who received antipsychotics (controls, n = 50) alone or combined with EA (n = 101), ECT (n = 55) or both (EA+ECT, n = 81) were identified. EA and ECT were conducted for 5 and 3 sessions per week, (...) respectively, with a maximum of 12 sessions for ECT during hospitalization. The Scale for the Assessment of Positive Symptoms (SAPS) and Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS) were used to assess the severity of psychotic symptoms. Clinical response on SAPS and SANS, weight gain, and adverse events were compared. Survival analysis revealed that the ECT and EA+ECT groups had markedly greater clinical response rate than controls on SAPS [72.7% and 90.1% vs. 64.0%; relative risk (RR), 1.974 and 2.628, respectively, P ≤ 0.004] and on SANS (67.3% and 70.4% vs. 42.0%; RR, 1.951 and 2.009, respectively, P ≤ 0.015). A significantly greater response rate on SANS than controls was also observed in the EA group (64.4% versus 42.0%; RR = 1.938, P = 0.008). EA-containing regimens remarkably reduced weight gain and incidences of headache, insomnia, dry mouth, and electrocardiographic abnormalities. These results suggest that EA and ECT can serve as additional treatment for enhancing antipsychotic response and reduce the side effects in hospitalized patients with schizophrenia. (shrink)

Recent studies on the effects of mandatory online teaching, resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, have widely reported low levels of satisfaction, unwillingness to continue online teaching, and negative impacts on the psychological well-being of teachers. Emerging research has highlighted the potential role of psychological need thwarting, in terms of autonomy, competence, and relatedness thwarting, resulting from online teaching. The aim of this study was to evaluate the immediate and delayed effects of PNT of online teaching on teachers’ well-being, intention to (...) continue online teaching, and job satisfaction. Moreover, data collected from both cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys allowed for a systematic validation of an important instrument in the field of teacher psychology, the Psychological Need Thwarting Scale of Online Teaching, in terms of longitudinal reliability and validity. The data reveal the usefulness of the construct of PNT in terms predicting and explaining teachers’ willingness to continue using online teaching as well as the degree of burnout after a period of 2 months, such that PNT is positively associated with burnout and negatively associated with willingness to continue online teaching. As such, the PNTSOT is recommended for future research evaluating the long-term psychological, affective, and intentional outcomes stemming from teachers’ PNT. Moreover, based on our findings that the impact from PNT of online teaching is persistent and long-term, we suggest that school leaders provide flexible and sustained professional development, model respectful and adaptive leadership, and create opportunities for mastery for the development of community of practice that can mitigate the thwarting of teachers’ autonomy, competence, and relatedness during times of uncertainty. Additionally, in terms of the psychometric properties of the PNTSOT instrument, our empirical findings demonstrate internal reliability, test–retest reliability, measurement invariance, and criterion validity based on cross-sectional and longitudinal data. (shrink)

Yan Xin Life Science Technology-Optimized Caloric Restriction (YXLST-CR) is a unique food abstinence, which suppresses appetite and sensation of hunger while maintaining physiological homeostasis. The authors review the first clinical case study on YXLST-CR, or YXLST-bigu, a 15-day, 24-hour observation in 1987 on a 21-year-old female undergoing YXLST-bigu for several months. The participant took no food or water and conducted normal physical activities. The daily records of body weight, temperature, pulse rate, blood pressure, and daily urine test results showed no (...) abnormalities. Homeostasis was maintained during YXLST-CR. The authors also report serum leptin levels in a group of individuals undergoing YXLST-CR and a control group before and after a 24-hour water-only period. The leptin level prior to the observation for the YXLST-CR group was lower than that for the control group and remained unchanged during the observation, suggesting the possibilities of an established metabolic adaptation. (shrink)

Clinical studies as well as hundreds of case reports have indicated that Yan Xin Life Science Technology has enabled human participants to live a normal life with little or no food intake for prolonged periods—a state referred to as bigu. Bigu is described in historical records as “taking in qi to avoid food,” and is regarded as a special technique to achieve a long and healthy life. In this study, experiments were designed to study whether cells in vitro can survive (...) without commonly acknowledged essential nutrients after receiving external qi treatments from Dr. Yan Xin, a chief physician and a renowned life scientist. Results reported here indicate that mouse hybridoma cells can survive in Dulbeco’s modified Eagles medium without serum or in phosphate-buffered saline buffer without other nutrient ingredients after qi treatment. These results are the first evidence that a cellular equivalent of the human bigu phenomenon or cellular bigu phenomenon may occur. (shrink)

Anxious major depressive disorder is a common subtype of major depressive disorder; however, its unique neural mechanism is not well-understood currently. Using multimodal MRI data, this study examined common and specific alterations of amygdala subregions between patients with and without anxiety. No alterations were observed in the gray matter volume or intra-region functional integration in either patient group. Compared with the controls, both patient groups showed decreased functional connectivity between the left superficial amygdala and the left putamen, and between the (...) right superficial amygdala and the bilateral anterior cingulate cortex and medial orbitofrontal cortex, while only patients with anxiety exhibited decreased activity in the bilateral laterobasal and superficial amygdala. Moreover, the decreased activity correlated negatively with the Hamilton depression scale scores in the patients with anxiety. These findings provided insights into the pathophysiologic processes of anxious major depressive disorder and may help to develop new and effective treatment programs. (shrink)

BackgroundThe rating of perceived exertion scales with respiratory and muscular illustrations are recognized as simple and practical methods to understand individual psychometric characteristics in breathing and muscle exertion during exercise. However, the implementation of respiratory and muscular RPE to quantify training load in futsal training camps has not been examined. This study investigates respiratory and muscular RPE relationships during domestic training camps and overseas training camps in an under 20 futsal national team.MethodsData collected from eleven field players were used for (...) comparison in this study. All players reported Borg CR10 RPE and 7-scales respiratory RPE and muscular RPE after training sessions and matches. Additionally, total distance covered and training impulse were used to quantify external and internal loads via the Polar Team Pro system. Paired-sample t-tests were used to compare the RPECR10, RPErespiration, RPEmuscle, TD, and TRIMP between DTC and OTC. Furthermore, linear regression was performed to determine the relationships among all RPE scales, TD, and TRIMP.ResultsThe RPECR10, TD, and TRIMP showed significant difference between DTC and OTC. Furthermore, linear regression analyses showed significant correlation between RPErespiration and RPEmuscle, RPECR10 and RPErespiration, and RPECR10 and RPEmuscle.ConclusionPictorial RPErespiration or RPEmuscle can be used as an alternative to quantify perceived measures of internal loads during DTC and OTC in futsal players. Interpretation of perceived measures of training load and cardiac-related responses in association with external training loads during short-term training camps would be useful in further understanding the demands of futsal players’ experience in these circumstances. (shrink)

Ben shu jie shao le gong zi zhen, wei yuan, yan fu, kang you wei, tan si tong, liang qi chao, chen tian hua, zhang bing lin deng wan qing si xiang jia de zhe xue si xiang.

Ben shu chan shu de nei rong shi zhi shi zhong ya fang wen hua de shen tou yu jiao liu.

本书分为六章及"引言"与"后记".第一章"荣格的中国文化情怀",从荣格出生与成长中所接触的中国文化元素作为缘起,呈现荣格家中的中国气氛,以及荣格内心深处的中国意象,第二章,第三章,第四章,第五章分别从 中国主流文化的几大支系出发,分析荣格著作中体现的中国文化印记,探索荣格思想形成过程中"中学"的催化,启发和影响;第六章"爱诺思及荣格之后的发展",呈现荣格及其学生致力于东西方文化沟通与整合的持续努力, 分析心理学在中国的发展,以及荣格与中国文化在当代的影响.

司馬遷《史記》載老子晚年見周之衰，西去而後出關，說明老子道家開宗祖師爺老子向異域開放，強調道和聖人的慷慨，走向多元他者。 跨文化哲學──哲學出自文化、不同的文化有不同的哲學、不同的文化傳統應透過相互外推，豐富彼此。 從跨文化的向度，歷覽西方文藝復興以降，西方哲學與中國哲學的跨文化互動；瞭解基督徒哲學家和中國哲學家彼此之間的交流。 在哲學外推的歷史中，本書侃侃而談中、西方哲學家如何彼此對話，超越主體哲學與狹隘理性的困境： 明朝時，第一位被系統引進中國的西方思想家是亞里斯多德。 利瑪竇：中國其實就是一個世界，中國不僅是一個王國。 ．耶穌會士認為像亞里斯多德這樣一位大哲，也有像中國蘇秦「髮懸樑，錐刺股」的精神，他睡覺時手持一顆銅球，下面放一個銅鑼；當他睡覺時，手一鬆，銅球掉落到銅鑼上，敲出鑼響，於是他就醒來了，繼續用功。 ．利瑪竇嚮往先秦儒家對天的敬仰，他穿著儒服，從壓抑的德行觀來推解「克己復禮」之意。因為在文藝復興時期，由於才從中世紀的禁錮中獲得解放，因此「人欲橫流」。人要親近天主，就必須克制肉體慾望，陶成美德。 ．被時人稱為「西來孔子」的艾儒略說：在傳統中國哲學裡有各種名詞來說靈魂，他一方面習取了中國的人性論，並透過天主教及其對亞里斯多德《靈魂論》的詮釋，把人的靈魂與人的精神本性等同，而以此來和中國哲學溝通。 之所以翻譯亞理斯多德，是為了讓東海聖人（孔子）與西海聖人（亞里斯多德）的思想相逢。 文藝復興時，第一位被譯介到歐洲的中國哲人是孔子和其倫理智慧。到清朝，法國皇帝路易十四派名數學家白晉到中國來為康熙服務，教學並研究數學和《易經》。 ．耶穌會士介紹、翻譯的經典，主要都是環繞著《四書》、《五經》，認為其中對人整體理性的重視甚至超過西方；所介紹的聖者，主要是孔子。對於先秦儒家所訂下的人文典範最為推崇。 ．萊布尼茲：我認為這是個天定獨特的計畫，今天人類的文明與改良必須集中在我們這塊大陸的兩端，也就是歐洲和中國。中國是東方的明珠，就如同我們歐洲是另一端的明珠一般。 本書特色 ★十六世紀明末時，中國的思想與學術在一場驚天動地的典範轉變後，中西方哲人逐漸進行「跨文化哲學」的對話。 ★中、西方彼此的思想家不斷進行交談，面對西潮，「明季四公子」方以智結交湯若望、畢方濟，又讓自己兒子與波蘭人穆尼閣學習數學。這是一種尊重外邦人差異性的智慧。 ★傳教士羅明堅抱持著傳教的熱忱與文明的慷慨抵華，利瑪竇因而說「朋友宛自我的另外一半」（《交友論》），平等友善地「相互豐富」彼此的文化內涵。 ★從利瑪竇到海德格，這兩位西方哲人的心靈映照出不同的東方世界，藉由西方哲學家的眼光，重新認識印象中的中國思想。 利瑪竇：「中國的領導者是一個具有哲人王素質的皇帝，他公正、智慧、仁慈；中國的君主是在一些哲學家的輔佐下，維持他的統治的。孔子開創的儒家道德傳統哲學，是中國社會政治文化生活的準則，個人以其修身，統治者以 其治國。」 海德格將《老子》第十五章之「孰能濁而靜之徐清」、「孰能安而動之徐生」當作對聯掛在他的書房，藉以思考他心中「光與暗」論證、屬於古希臘哲學的傳統。 名人推薦 劉千美教授（多倫多大學東亞系教授） 專文導讀.

Study of Miao fa lian hua jing xuan yi, Chinese commentary on Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra by Zhiyi, 538-597, on Tiantai Buddhism.

The increasing importance of computational techniques in post-genomic life science research calls for new forms and combinations of expertise that cut across established disciplinary boundaries between computing and biology. These are most marked in large scale gene sequencing facilities. Here new ways of organising knowledge production, drawing on industrial models, have been perceived as pursuing efficiency and control to the potential detriment of academic autonomy and scientific quality. We explore how these issues are played out in the case of BGI (...) (Beijing Genomics Institute prior to 2008). BGI (in Pinyin, Hua Da Jiyin– Big China Genome) is today the world’s largest centre for gene sequencing research. Semi-detached from traditional academic institutions, BGI has developed distinctive models for organising research and for developing expertise, informed by practices in US Information Technology and Life Science Laboratories, that differ from existing models of interdisciplinary research in academic institutions. (shrink)

The academic confusion caused by the "gang of four" was prominently manifested in the history of Chinese philosophy. The history of Chinese logic was also affected by the confusion. Now the "gang of four" has been smashed after a merciless trial by history. Under the leadership of Chairman Hua and the Party Central Committee, scientific research has begun to make a long stride ahead. Therefore, it is possible to conduct scientific investigations and thorough discussions on a series of issues in (...) the history of Chinese philosophy and logic. Appraisal of the book entitled the Kung-sun Lung Tzu [The Works of Kung-sun Lung] is one of the issues. (shrink)