The COVID-19 crisis has called into question the utilitarianism-oriented human-wildlife relations and the legitimacy of wildlife protection regime in China. The pandemic has triggered significant, swift, and encompassing changes in policies. Drawing on insights from historical institutionalism, we argue that COVID-19 constitutes a critical juncture in China’s wildlife protection policy.

The ubiquitin proteasome system is a potent regulatory mechanism used to control protein stability in numerous cellular processes, including neural development. Many neurodegenerative diseases are featured by the accumulation of UPS‐associated proteins, suggesting the UPS dysfunction may be crucial for pathogenesis. Recent experiments have highlighted the UPS as a key player during synaptic development. Here we summarize recent discoveries centered on the role of the UPS in synapse remodeling and draw attention to the potential link between the synaptic UPS dysfunction (...) and the pathology of neurodegenerative diseases. BioEssays 30:1075–1083, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Many healthcare goods, such as surgical instruments, textiles and gloves, are manufactured in unregulated factories and sweatshops where, amongst other labour rights violations, workers are subject to considerable occupational health risks. In this paper we undertake an ethical analysis of the supply of sweatshop-produced surgical goods to healthcare providers, with a specific focus on the National Health Service of the United Kingdom. We contend that while labour abuses and occupational health deficiencies are morally unacceptable in the production of any commodity, (...) an additional wrong is incurred when the health of certain populations is secured in ways that endanger the health and well-being of people working and living elsewhere. While some measures have been taken to better regulate the supply chain to healthcare providers in the UK, further action is needed to ensure that surgical goods are sourced from suppliers who protect the labour and occupational health rights of their workers. (shrink)

Academic dishonesty is an insidious problem that besets most tertiary institutions, where considerable resources are expended to prevent and manage students' dishonest actions within academia. Using a mixed retrospective and prospective design this research investigated Gottfredson and Hirschi's self-control theory as a possible explanation for academic dishonesty in 264 university students. The relationship between academic dishonesty and general criminality was also examined. A significant but small to moderate relationship between academic dishonesty and general criminality was present, including correlations with general (...) dishonesty, violent crime and drug offending subcategories. These findings suggested that a general criminological theory may be of use in explaining academic dishonesty, but the overall ability of self-control variables to explain academic dishonesty was not strong. Controlled logistic regressions indicated that a significant positive association with academic dishonesty was only present for one of 6 self-control subscales (self-centeredness), and even this association was only present in the prospective study component. A strong relationship between past and future academic dishonesty was present. Implications of the study for institutions are discussed. (shrink)

This paper reports part of a longitudinal research project, which sought to capture students’ conceptualization of caring practice as they progressed to different levels of study in a nursing diploma programme in Hong Kong. Model emulation was found to be an effective means of focusing students’ learning processes on the moral aspects of nursing practice. The theory of model emulation from a Chinese perspective and how it is applied to create a learning context to allow students to acquire a moral (...) sense of nursing are discussed. The participating students are invited to be sincere enquirers in the pursuit of the good embedded in practice through introspective self-examination and dialogue. They are asked to describe and share their experience of positive and negative examples of nursing in written accounts. Van Kaam’s phenomenological method was adopted to explicate the good and bad constituents of nursing from these examples, with the students assuming an active role in the explication process. The explication reveals that the students were able to articulate the good and bad practices in a variety of patient care situations. (shrink)

Reinterpreting Sartre’s main methodologies and removing Hegelian dialectics from his notion of violence, this book demolishes the supposed hostile intersubjective relations that characterizes all concrete relations. Furthering this stance, it reconstructs an interpretation of the "violent Sartre" and crafts an alternative response: one that rejects terrorist tactics, preemptive war and Western hegemony through democratization. Based on the latest debate on Sartre’s works on ethics and politics, this project examines the relevancy and new importance they hold for contemporary concerns -- the (...) reactionary nature of terrorism, the extremity of counter-violence, and limitations of democratization efforts -- all claiming to be justified in the name of "freedom" and "liberation." While it is the concern over the "terrorist’" nature of his writings that dominates the current debate, this project starts from the premise that it is as important to ask why violence is unjustified when it can put an end to a situation that disparages humanity. In arguing for the need for moral limitations to all violent struggles, and the need for seeing others as ends-for-themselves, it proceeds to outline a response based on existential humanist ethics that can reaffirm our moral compass. (shrink)

Purpose The widespread use of information and communication technologies enables consumers to obtain and share information whenever they feel the urge. With the advent of review websites and forums, companies and business owners may find themselves victims of consumer cyber aggression, which can hurt a company badly. This study aims to explore why consumers would engage in cyber aggression against companies, and to that end, it examines consumers’ ethical orientation and other possible drivers of cyber aggression. Design/methodology/approach To examine how (...) ethical orientation affects consumers’ intention to engage in cyber aggression, a scenario-based 2 × 2 between-subject experimental design is used. Moreover, 26 possible drivers in related literature are identified and included in a questionnaire administered to 226 college students. Findings The results show that adult consumers’ deontological and teleological evaluations significantly affect their ethical judgment about engaging in cyber aggression, which further impacts their intention to perpetrate an act of cyber aggression. Moreover, the study identifies six factors contributing to cyber aggression engagement as follows: personal aggressiveness, ease of perpetration, internet negativity, personal gains, helping the company and recreation. Originality/value Cyber aggression is generally viewed as interpersonal violence among adolescents. This study views cyber aggression from a different perspective and it is one of the few studies to look at adult consumers’ motivations to engage in cyber aggression against companies. The findings of this study can help firms understand why their customers attack them online, and understanding that will enable businesses to formulate more effective responses to attacks. (shrink)

Calls for complementing, modifying and ‘decolonising’ the conceptualisation and implementation of Diversity Education (e.g. multicultural, intercultural, and/or social justice education) are currently being heard in the ‘West’. This paper explores some of the characteristics and benefits of Chinese Minzu Education as a potential addition to the field. Our starting point is that Chinese education is often misrepresented and that knowledge about diversity in China (which includes, amongst others, minority groups and Han people), and especially about how people are educated for (...) and through it, is scarce and negatively evaluated in the ‘West’. Taking a university specialising in Minzu studies as a case study (which should not be generalized to other Minzu institutions), we problematise formal and informal aspects of Minzu education that could be inspiring to, e.g. interculturalists and multiculturalists in ‘Western’ education. Fieldwork notes, student interviews about Minzu education and models of Minzu Diversity Learning co-constructed by Minzu students, illustrate the characteristics of Minzu education in higher education. The paper ends on a call for exploring other ‘unknown’ perspectives on diversity in education emerging from the so-called peripheries of the ‘West’. (shrink)

Drawing upon career construction theory, we examined the mediating effect of deliberate practice on career adaptability and the effects of learning goal orientation and supervisor incompetence accusations as well as career development training on DP. Using data collected from 204 Chinese PhD students in three waves over a period of 2 months, we found that individuals who were inclined to learn new skills and obtain new knowledge were more likely to deliberately practice professional activities in their fields. When a PhD (...) student’s professional competence was questioned by his or her supervisor, the student was more prone to negative emotions and would reduce his or her effort in the development of expertise. CDT – contrary to expectations – negatively predicted DP of professional activities. One possible reason is that the participants in this study have strong autonomy so that those who really struggling are participating in training and seeking help and those who with strong professional abilities are not accessing training programs. Moreover, results showed that DP of professional activities significantly promoted PhD students to adapt to their academic circumstances. Implications for career-related practice within the academic domain are provided. (shrink)

Vehicular ad hoc network is a multihop mobile wireless communication network that can realize many vehicle-related applications through multitop communication. In the open wireless communication environment, security and privacy protection are important contents of VANET research. The most basic method of VANET privacy protection is anonymous authentication. Even through, there are many existing schemes to provide anonymous authentication for VANETs. Many existing schemes suffer from high computational cost by using bilinear pairing operation or need the assistance of the trust authorities (...) during the authentication process or rely on an ideal tamper-proof device, which requires very strong security assumption. In this study, an anonymous authentication and key negotiation scheme by using private key and group key is proposed, which is based on pseudonym using the nonsingular elliptic curve. In this scheme, there is no third party trust center to participate in the authentication, there is no need to query the database, and there is no need of the local database to save the identity information of many vehicles, which reduce the storage space and the authentication time compared with other schemes. The proposed scheme only needs realistic TPDs. In the proposed scheme, TPDs do not need to preinstall the system key as many other schemes do; hence, the failure of a single TPD does not affect the security of the entire system. The security of the scheme is proved under the random oracle model. Compared with the related schemes using bilinear pairings, the computational cost and communication cost of the proposed scheme are reduced by 82% and 50%, respectively. (shrink)

The construal of the self is related to individuals' cognition, emotion and behavior. The aim of this study was to investigate shame in the context of interdependent-self and independent-self culture. 163 Chinese and 196 American college undergraduates completed a questionnaire about their reaction to 3 different scenarios about shameful events involving 5 different persons including self, mother, boy/girl friend, best friend and classmate. The participants reported the intensity of shame they felt in each of the situation and how close they (...) were related to other people in the scenarios. The results demonstrated that there is a significant difference between Chinese and American participants on the levels of shame across all the scenarios, as well as for the persons involved in the scenario. It was also found that the intensity of shame was reduced as the relationship between the participants and the persons involved in the shameful events becomes remote in social distance. A significant correlation was found between closeness of relationship and intensity of shame felt. Implications for understanding cultural differences to emotions and future studies are discussed. (shrink)

Most studies evaluating companion effects on medical triadic interaction focus on the doctors' part, e.g., how the companion's presence diverts doctors' attention away from the patient. In contrast to this mainstream approach, the current research proposes an alternative framework by focusing on the patient parties—especially on how companion participation reshapes the discourse sequences where patient parties provide information, and how it affects patient full turns and priority in providing complete first-hand information to doctors. By examining fifteen geriatric triadic conversations collected (...) in a teaching hospital in southern Taiwan, this proposed framework concludes that in the companion's presence, the information providing sequences are restructured into eight patterns, among which sole information provider is preferred to joint providers. Furthermore, the more companions participate in providing information, the less patients by themselves volunteer information or respond to doctors' questions prior to companions' verbal involvement. A more striking companion effect shows that even in the triads with a low-participation companion, whenever the companion does participate, the patient rarely has a full turn or priority to complete an information unit. The patient's turns are either taken, are simultaneous with, or cut-off by the companion's participation. (shrink)

The disembodiment of cognitive science has resulted in curricula with disembodied concepts and practice. The emergence of the embodied cognitive science provoked public reflections on the nature of the curriculum. This has elevated the body from the ‘peripheral’ position to the ‘central’ position, acting as the subject in action and becoming the bridge to experience transformations. Meanwhile, the nurturing role of the environment for the mind is attracting increasingly more attention, and the environment, the body, and the mind jointly constitute (...) a dynamic system that prompts the transformation and restructuring of learners’ experience. The reshaping of the relationship between the body and education and the integration of physical experience and mind-building have led us to examine curriculum from a completely new perspective, and curriculum construction is thus transformed to the dynamic generation of interaction among the body, the mind, and the environment based on group experiences. To be precise, there are three basic dimensions in the construction of an embodied curriculum: returning to the life-world and promoting the integration of the curriculum narrative framework and the student’s learning trajectory; introducing the embodied experience and realizing the continuous interactions among the learner’s body, mind, and environment; and integrating the functions of technologies to provide a powerful mediating tool for the construction of embodied curriculum. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the problem of target tracking using k fittest robots in a group of n mobile robots with n>k. We present centralized and distributed coordination models with all-to-all and limited communications, respectively. For the case of all-to-all communication between robots, theoretical analysis is presented to prove the exponential stability of the whole system. In real applications of robotic networks, a robot may only be allowed to exchange information with a limited number of neighbors. In such a limited (...) communication case where centralized quantity is not available, a consensus filter is used to estimate the centralized quantities in a distributed way, and a distributed competitive target tracking is thus achieved. The stability of the distributed control is also proved in theory. Finally, illustrative examples are provided and analyzed to substantiate the efficacy of the proposed models for tracking moving target in a competition manner with all-to-all communications and limited communications. (shrink)

The philosophy of economics has been largely guided by analytic philosophy. Even Marx has been appropriated without much scandal by economists who separate his scientific contributions from his politics. In this article, I place philosophical hermeneutics (i.e., Heidegger and Ricoeur) in dialogue with the conventional understanding of land as a factor of production. The history of political economy misunderstands land as an entity classifiable as property and capital. I argue instead that land's ontological role, deriving from Heidegger's concept of earth, (...) suggests that economics needs to account for it in a new way according to David Ricardo's notion of land rent. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, EarlyView.

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 209-223, January 2022.

Lo Stato, Il sovrano, Repubblica o monarchia, di A.C. de Meis.--Lettere di F. Fiorentino a Silvio Spaventa sullo Stato moderno.

In an era in which a conflicting relationship exists between humans and nature, ways of solv­ing environmental problems need to be introduced into people’s thinking about what to do, what lifestyle we should accept, and what kind of people we should become to support our environmental protection work using better justifications. Traditional Chinese Confucianism and Taoism can exert a profound ideological, philosophical, and spiritual influence on how people judge the meaning and value of their lives. Regarding how humans face the (...) natural environment and how they perceive the meaning and value of human lives, Chinese Con­fucianists and Taoists who possess profound wisdom and great benevolence have provided unique philosophical views. The philosophical views and thinking of Chinese Confucianism and Taoism provide links to the environmental crises that humans encounter today. (shrink)

Moral issues have been included in the studies of consumer misbehavior research, but little is known about the joint moderating effect of moral intensity and moral judgment on the consumer’s use intention of pirated software. This study aims to understand the consumer’s use intention of pirated software in Taiwan based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB) proposed by Ajzen (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50, 179, 1991). In addition, moral intensity and moral judgment are adopted as a joint (...) moderator to examine their combined influence on the proposed research framework. The results obtained from this Taiwan case reveal that the antecedent constructs proposed in the TPB model–an individual’s attitude and subjective norms toward using pirated software, and perceived behavioral control to use pirated software–indeed have positive impacts on the consumer’s use intention of pirated software. In addition, the joint moderating effect of moral intensity and moral judgment is manifested in the consumer’s use intention of pirated software. The results of this study not only could substantiate the results of consumer misbehavior research, but also could provide some managerial suggestions for Taiwanese government authorities concerned and the related software industries devoted to fighting pirated software. (shrink)

Moral issues have been included in the studies of consumer misbehavior research, but little is known about the joint moderating effect of moral intensity and moral judgment on the consumer's use intention of pirated software. This study aims to understand the consumer's use intention of pirated software in Taiwan based on the theory of planned behavior proposed by Ajzen. In addition, moral intensity and moral judgment are adopted as a joint moderator to examine their combined influence on the proposed research (...) framework. The results obtained from this Taiwan case reveal that the antecedent constructs proposed in the TPB model–an individual's attitude and subjective norms toward using pirated software, and perceived behavioral control to use pirated software–indeed have positive impacts on the consumer's use intention of pirated software. In addition, the joint moderating effect of moral intensity and moral judgment is manifested in the consumer's use intention of pirated software. The results of this study not only could substantiate the results of consumer misbehavior research, but also could provide some managerial suggestions for Taiwanese government authorities concerned and the related software industries devoted to fighting pirated software. (shrink)

Traditional Chinese Medicine is often considered an “experiential medicine.” As such, it is seen as in need of conceptual elevation by scientific experiments and theorization, which actualize and undermine scientized forms of TCM. This essay argues that the predicaments of TCM are thoroughly modern and must be understood within the “Modern Constitution” in which the production and proliferation of asymmetries are both constitutive of and obscured by modern knowledge production. This essay dislodges these asymmetries through transdisciplinary engagements with TCM. This (...) transdisciplinary approach, as I will show, allows us to animate the experiential in order to unsettle the relations between the empirical and the conceptual, the concrete and the abstract, and the contingent and the universal. Most importantly, it enables reconsiderations of the experiential and the empirical as conditions for thinking, doing, and being that insist on immanence, move analogously, and travel sideways. Thus, rather than wanting conceptual uplifting, TCM as an experiential medicine could not only work as a critique of the Modern Constitution but also force a conceptual disruption from within by insisting on the empirical as conceptual. (shrink)

While the movement to ensure patient’s rights to information and informed consent spreads throughout the world, patient rights of this kind have yet to be introduced in mainland China. Nonetheless, China is no different from other parts of the world in that nurses are expected to shoulder the responsibility of safeguarding patients’ best interests and at the same time to uphold their right to information. This paper expounds on the principle of protectiveness grounded in traditional Chinese medical ethics concerning the (...) practice of informed consent. Nurses in China have a moral obligation to treat patients with sincerity. This notion carries a strong sense of parental protectiveness. As far as information-giving is concerned, nurses in China are ambivalent about the notion of truthfulness. The findings of an empirical study undertaken in seven Chinese cities reveal that nurses in China experience similar difficulties related to the disclosure of information as their counterparts in other parts of the world. A nurse’s narrative, the Chan case, is used to illustrate the typical difficult situation that nurses in China often encounter in looking after vulnerable patients who would like to learn more about their therapeutic regimens. The moral tension embedded in nursing practice is analysed. It is found that most nurses would prefer to tell the truth to patients, but their primary ethical justification is not that of respect for patients’ autonomy or safeguarding patients’ right to self-determination. Rather, it is basically beneficent in nature; that is, they base their decision to reveal the truth on whether or not patients will receive more relevant treatment and better nursing care. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:258 Feminist Studies 47, no. 2. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Mei-Hua Chen and Hong-zen Wang Flexible Intimacies in the Global Intimate Economy: Evidence from Taiwan’s Cross-Border Marriages When Lin Ping was interviewed by the first author of this article at a detention center in the southern city of Tainan, Taiwan, in September 2006, she was forty-three. At that time, she had been married to a Taiwanese man (...) for five years and had successfully obtained a permit for employment at a factory, earning NT$27,000 a month for working ten hours a day. However, before having obtained the work permit, Lin managed to find jobs in informal sectors as a cleaner, a care worker, and a stall vendor’s helper, earning NT$15,000 a month. By the time of our interview, Lin had gone to work at a brothel because she could not put up with her husband anymore. Lin’s husband is twenty years older than she is and, as she described their relationship, the huge age gap makes communication between the couple difficult. They fought often and fiercely. During those fights, Lin’s husband would threaten to divorce her and to not renew her application for residency, which would result in her immediate deportation to China. This did happen once when Lin’s husband refused to renew her work permit. As a result, Lin overstayed her visa and lost her job at the factory. Being thus unemployed, Lin had to dip into her savings and risked going into debt. Her dire financial situation caused her anxiety. Losing the regular income provided by her factory job meant not only having nothing to live on but also being unable to send money back home to China. Given that her marriage failed to provide her the work permit she needed, Lin wanted to leave her husband Mei-Hua Chen and Hong-zen Wang 259 and “go out” for her own good. When asked what she thinks of the stigma attached to commercial sex, Lin replied, “I need to be able to feed myself first. But if you don’t have a work permit and a job, it [sex work] is the only way out. So, I thought I would do it.” She continued: “Once I had the money, I would be able to run a small business such as a noodle stall or selling steam dumplings.” Lin Ping’s stories serve to sketch out the interconnectedness between cross-border sex work and cross-border marriage. As her experiences show, cross-border sex work and marriage tend to overlap in certain spheres; however, they are more often than not conceptualized as two separate institutions. Both are grouped under already dichotomized migratory categories such as marriage migrants and economic migrants, real marriage and fake marriage, legal workers and workers without permits, and legal and illegal migrants, etc. Such dichotomization downplays the fact that many marriage migrants, like economic migrants, invest great economic interests in cross-border marriages; it also downplays the fact that migrant sex workers might also be involved in having intimate relationships with someone. Apart from the entanglement of monetary exchange and intimacy, cross-border marriage and cross-border sex work are also parts of a global intimate economy in which the Global North appropriates southern women’s reproductive and intimate labor. Seen in this light, it becomes urgent to theorize how women from the South manage to survive in the global intimate economy by shifting between cross-border marriage and cross-border sex work in the North. Admittedly, such a Global North-and-South framework fits awkwardly when it comes to understanding Taiwan’s situation because economic development is the sole barometer used to define the North and the South, and economically, Taiwan should be in the North camp. Politically, however, due to the majority of nations not recognizing its sovereignty, Taiwan is much more peripheral than most southern countries, let alone China. Therefore, compared to countries in Southeast Asia, Taiwan is economically North but politically South. This semi-peripheral position in the North-South framework, in our view, makes Taiwan a unique case to theorize the global intimate economy. As a tactic... (shrink)

Breaking with discriminatory views and segregated education for children with disabilities, regions often referred to as Confucian Heritage Regions (CHRs) have been moving towards inclusive education. Although some of these regions have been at the centre of attention in global education recently, there is a lack of research and information about how they ‘do’ inclusive education. Considering that reinforcing legislative foundations is of foremost importance for its fulfillment, this study examines legislation on the education of children with disabilities in four (...) neighbouring CHRs: the Chinese Mainland, Japan, South Korea and China's Taiwan. The core principles that frame such legislation were analyzed and cross-compared. The findings show that despite the common Confucian heritage that is attributed to them systematically in studies of inclusive education – which is often said to influence the way disability is perceived and dealt with – the four Regions treat inclusion differently in terms of legislation. While some CHRs are clearly influenced by e.g. the USA, others are trying to design a specific perspective on inclusive education. The authors argue that the complex example of these CHRs can serve as an important template for studies on both inclusive and comparative education. The article also calls for the careful treatment of inclusive education beyond an essentialist and somewhat simplistic perspective that could reduce certain regions to a monolith. (shrink)

Meeting others abroad and/or online is considered important in the broad field of intercultural communication education (amongst others: international education, minority and migrant education, but also teacher education, language education) to test out one’s learning about interculturality. For several weeks, a group of university students from China and a group of local and international students studying at a Finnish university met regularly online to talk about global educational issues. Using a specific lens of interculturality, which focuses on the discursive co-construction (...) of identities, we explore their initial interactions, how they deal with the uncertainty and potential awkwardness of their very first encounters, before they start working on their educational tasks. Based on the students’ self-disclosure (practices, thoughts, identity construction), and adopting a dialogical discourse analysis, the authors examine their co-construction of interculturality. The results show that the students try to facilitate interculturality while promoting it together more or less successfully. Reasons are discussed. The authors argue that research on the underexplored case of online initial interactions, which represent crucial moments in establishing and negotiating interculturality, could provide important research and pedagogical input for intercultural telecollaboration. (shrink)