The Chinese traditionally have valued sons over daughters, depending on their sons to support them in old age. Recent changes, however, suggest a shift toward greater gender equality, with daughters also keeping elderly parents. The present study, undertaken in 1979 in the People's Republic of China, assessed attitudes of 48 university staff members toward financial support for aged parents and living arrangements in old age, with an emphasis on gender differences. We found that most sons and daughters gave financial support (...) to their parents regularly and most men and women still believed adult children should share housing with their aged parents. In this sample, the sons assumed this responsibility far more than the daughters, and few of the respondents believed their parents should live with a daughter. However, when asked to project their own preferences in old age, sons thought they would prefer to live with a son, but daughters feel they would like to live with a daughter. These results are discussed in terms of two important cultural changes, the new marriage laws and the one-child policy, that were implemented at the time of the study. (shrink)

Previous studies have shown that individuals in collectivist cultures may be more corrupt than those in individualist cultures when they are interacting with outgroup members. The countries that are least corrupt, according to the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index, tend to have horizontal individualist cultures, with Singapore being a prominent counterexample. Can findings at the cultural level of analysis be replicated at the individual level of analysis? To answer this question the authors examined the relationship between deception and cultural orientation (...) in a Singaporean sample. The results indicate that, despite the fact that Singapore is very low in corruption on the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index, vertical collectivism was still able to account for the variance in deception. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

Both Carnap and Quine made significant contributions to the philosophy of mathematics despite their diversedviews. Carnap endorsed the dichotomy between analytic and synthetic knowledge and classified certainmathematical questions as internal questions appealing to logic and convention. On the contrary, Quine wasopposed to the analytic-synthetic distinction and promoted a holistic view of scientific inquiry. The purpose of thispaper is to argue that in light of the recent advancement of experimental mathematics such as Monte Carlosimulations, limiting mathematical inquiry to the domain of (...) logic is unjustified. Robustness studies implemented inMonte Carlo Studies demonstrate that mathematics is on par with other experimental-based sciences. (shrink)

Smart grids are rolling out internationally, with the United States nearing completion of a significant USD4-plus-billion federal program funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The emergence of smart grids is widespread across developed countries. Multiple approaches to analyzing the benefits of smart grids have emerged. The goals of this white paper are to review these approaches and analyze examples of each to highlight their differences, advantages, and disadvantages. This work was conducted under the auspices of a joint U.S.-China (...) research effort, the Climate Change Working Group Implementation Plan, Smart Grid. We present comparative benefits assessments of smart grid demonstrations in the U.S. and China along with a BA of a pilot project in Europe. In the U.S., we assess projects at two sites: the University of California, Irvine campus, which consists of two distinct demonstrations: Southern California Edison’s Irvine Smart Grid Demonstration Project and the UCI campus itself; and the Navy Yard area in Philadelphia, which has been repurposed as a mixed commercial-industrial, and possibly residential, development. In China, we cover several smart-grid aspects of the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city and the Shenzhen Bay Technology and Ecology City. In Europe, we look at a BA of a pilot smart grid project in the Malagrotta area west of Rome, Italy, contributed by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. The Irvine sub-project BAs use the U.S. Department of Energy Smart Grid Computational Tool, which is built on methods developed by the Electric Power Research Institute. The TEC sub-project BAs apply Smart Grid Multi-Criteria Analysis developed by the State Grid Corporation of China based on the analytic hierarchy process with fuzzy logic. The B-TEC and TNY sub-project BAs are evaluated using new approaches developed by those project teams. JRC has adopted an approach similar to EPRI’s but tailored to the Malagrotta distribution grid. (shrink)

Singles are an understudied yet growing segment of the adult population. The current study aims to expand the lens of relationship science by examining the well-being of unpartnered, single adults using latent profile analysis. We recruited singles closely matched to the United States census for an exploratory cross-sectional survey using five variables that strongly predict well-being. All five variables significantly predicted life satisfaction for the full sample. Latent profile analyses detected 10 groups of singles. Half of the profiles were happy (...) and half of the profiles were unhappy. Each profile had its own unique patterns relating to personal relationships, self-esteem, and personality traits. The happiest profile had the best relationships, self-esteem, and personality, while the unhappiest profile had the worst relationships, self-esteem, and personality. The profiles in between these two extremes had more nuanced patterns. For example, one relatively happy profile in the middle had high friendship satisfaction but low family satisfaction, while an adjacent profile showed the opposite pattern. Overall, singles who had positive relationships—both with themselves and others—were happiest. (shrink)

Cell‐based therapies for degenerative diseases of the musculature remain on the verge of feasibility. Myogenic cells are relatively abundant, accessible, and typically harbor significant proliferative potential ex vivo. However, their use for therapeutic intervention is limited due to several critical aspects of their complex biology. Recent insights based on mouse models have advanced our understanding of the molecular mechanisms controlling the function of myogenic progenitors significantly. Moreover, the discovery of atypical myogenic cell types with the ability to cross the blood‐muscle (...) barrier has opened exciting new therapeutic avenues. In this paper, we outline the major problems that are currently associated with the manipulation of myogenic cells and discuss promising strategies to overcome these obstacles. (shrink)

We study the problem of existence of maximal chains in the Turing degrees. We show that: 1. ZF+DC+"There exists no maximal chain in the Turing degrees" is equiconsistent with ZFC+"There exists an inaccessible cardinal"; 2. For all a ∈ 2ω.(ω₁)L[a] = ω₁ if and only if there exists a $\Pi _{1}^{1}[a]$ maximal chain in the Turing degrees. As a corollary, ZFC + "There exists an inaccessible cardinal" is equiconsistent with ZFC + "There is no (bold face) $\utilde{\Pi}{}_{1}^{1}$ maximal chain of (...) Turing degrees". (shrink)

Speech categories are defined by multiple acoustic dimensions and their boundaries are generally fuzzy and ambiguous in part because listeners often give differential weighting to these cue dimensions during phonetic categorization. This study explored how a listener's perception of a speaker's socio-indexical and personality characteristics influences the listener's perceptual cue weighting. In a matched-guise study, three groups of listeners classified a series of gender-neutral /b/-/p/ continua that vary in VOT and F0 at the onset of the following vowel. Listeners were (...) assigned to one of three prompt conditions and rated the talker in terms of vocal gender prototypicality, attractiveness, friendliness, confidence, trustworthiness, and gayness. Male listeners and listeners who saw a male face showed less reliance on VOT compared to listeners in the other conditions. Listeners' visual evaluation of the talker also affected their weighting of VOT and onset F0 cues, although the effects of facial impressions differ depending on the gender of the listener. The results demonstrate that individual differences in perceptual cue weighting are modulated by the listener's gender and his/her subjective evaluation of the talker. These findings lend support for exemplar-based models of speech perception and production where socio-indexical features are encoded as a part of the episodic traces in the listeners' mental lexicon. This study also shed light on the relationship between individual variation in cue weighting and community-level sound change by demonstrating that VOT and onset F0 co-variation in North American English has acquired a certain degree of socio-indexical significance. (shrink)

Recent discussions of cognitive enhancement often note that drugs and technologies that improve cognitive performance may do so at the risk of “cheapening” our resulting cognitive achievements Arguing about bioethics, Routledge, London, 2012; Harris in Bioethics 25:102–111, 2011). While there are several possible responses to this worry, we will highlight what we take to be one of the most promising—one which draws on a recent strand of thinking in social and virtue epistemology to construct an integrationist defence of cognitive enhancement.. (...) According to such a line, there is—despite initial appearances to the contrary—no genuine tension between using enhancements to attain our goals and achieving these goals in a valuable way provided the relevant enhancement is appropriately integrated into the agent’s cognitive architecture. In this paper, however, we show that the kind of integration recommended by such views will likely come at a high cost. More specifically, we highlight a dilemma for users of pharmacological cognitive enhancement: they can meet the conditions for cognitive integration at the significant risk of dangerous dependency, or remain free of such dependency while foregoing integration and the valuable achievements that such integration enables. After motivating and clarifying the import of this dilemma, we offer recommendations for how future cognitive enhancement research may offer potential routes for navigating past it. (shrink)

The newest innovation in assisted reproduction is oocyte cryopreservation, more commonly known as egg freezing, which has been developed as a method of fertility preservation. Studies emerging from around the world show that highly educated professional women are turning to egg freezing in their late thirties to early forties, because they are still searching for a male partner with whom to have children. For these women, egg freezing may be a new “hope technology” for future romance; but it may also (...) be a “technology of despair,” as women navigate the ends of a failing relationship. Based on the largest ethnographic study to date, undertaken with 150 women who froze their eggs for nonmedical reasons in the United States and Israel, we examine egg freezing at the end of romance. Relationship dissolution—involving divorce, separation, broken engagements, and relationship breakups from men who are unfaithful, controlling, rejecting, uncommitted, or unready for fatherhood—is one of the major pathways to egg freezing. When such relationship dissolution ruptures a woman’s reproductive life course, egg freezing may become a “technology of repair,” allowing women to find new strengths and opportunities as well as new visions for the future. (shrink)

Education is so strongly emphasized in the Chinese culture that academic success is widely regarded as the only indicator of success, while too much physical activity is often discouraged because it drains energy and affects academic concentration. This study investigated the relations among academic achievement, self?esteem, school conduct and physical activity level. The participants were 333 Chinese pre?adolescents (aged 8?12) in Hong Kong. Examination results and conduct grades were obtained from the school records. Global self?esteem was measured with the Physical (...) self?description questionnaire (PSDQ), while physical activity patterns of the children were assessed with the Physical activity questionnaire for children (PAQ?C). Results showed that high academic achievers consistently attained better school conduct marks. However, physical activity level was quite an independent entity that was related neither to academic achievement nor school conduct. Furthermore, regression analyses showed that only academically high?achieving boys and physically active boys had higher self?esteem. (shrink)

This essay addresses the moral nature of corporate social media platforms through the lenses of Axel Honneth’s concept of justice, according to which relations of mutual recognition must be institutionalized into spheres of social freedom to claim a just society. This perspective allows us to observe how platforms configure a symmetrically inverted form of ethical sphere, in which users are led to formulate non-autonomous desires that can only be realized socially. We characterize this as social unfreedom. A just platform ought (...) to be the one in which rights and self-legislation capabilities enable users to have a stake in governing how these digital spaces can be designed to foster the practical realization of users’ autonomous aims, the essay argues. (shrink)

Pluractionality (PLR) is the morphological category that generally signifies multiple actions. This paper, based on original fieldwork, provides the first investigation of PLR in Chechen, a Nakh language spoken in the eastern central part of the North Caucasus. The data reflects the standard dialect of Chechen spoken in and near the cities of Murus-Martan and Grozny. Chechen PLR, which is marked by stem vowel alternations, prototypically signifies the repetition of an event (e.g., saca/sieca `to stop once/many times'; laaca/liica `to catch (...) once/many times'). The plurality of the nominative argument can affect the interpretation of some verbs (e.g., ghitta `to wake up'; hitta `to assume a standing position'), rendering the reading distributive. More interestingly, a durative reading, signaling the prolongation of an event, is available for some verbs (e.g., xouzha/xiizha `to ache momentarily/for a while', zouza/ziiza `to itch momentarily/for a while') but not others. Following Ojeda (1998) and Lasersohn (1995), PLR is accounted for in terms of the pluralization of the event argument of a predicate. The various semantic effects are the results of interactions between the aspectual properties of individual verbs and event pluralization. (shrink)

A fresh modern translation of a major French Revolutionary text, whose arguments for popular sovereignty are couched in the form of an Oriental dream-tale. This is a forgotten bestseller in the history of political thought which was translated by Thomas Jefferson and hugely influenced radical poets from Shelley to Whitman.

The fourteen authors in this collection used phenomenology and hermeneutics to conduct deep inquiry into perplexing and wondrous events in their work and personal lives. These seasoned scholar-practitioners gained remarkable insight into areas such as health care and illness, organ donation, intercultural communications, high-performance teams, artistic production, jazz improvisation, and the integration of Tai Chi into education. All authors were transformed by phenomenology's expanded ways of seeing and being.

This review is primarily concerned with two key issues in research on dystrophin: (1) how the protein interacts with the plasma membrane of skeletal muscle fibres and (2) how an absence of dystrophin gives rise to Duchenne muscular dystrophy. In relation to the first point, we suggest that the post‐translational acylation of dystrophin may contribute to its interaction with the plasma membrane. Regarding the second point, it is generally considered that an absence of dystrophin makes the plasma membrane susceptible to (...) damage by contraction/relaxation cycles. In this connection, we propose that the progressive nature of Duchenne dystrophy, and the phenotypic characteristics of mdx mice, are more consistent with dystrophin functioning as a mechanical transducer that transmits growth stimuli from the enlarging skeleton to the muscle. On the basis of this hypothesis, dystrophin‐deficient muscles would be unable to grow at the same rate as the skeleton. (shrink)

Recent studies have documented substantial variability among typical listeners in how gradiently they categorize speech sounds, and this variability in categorization gradience may link to how listeners weight different cues in the incoming signal. The present study tested the relationship between categorization gradience and cue weighting across two sets of English contrasts, each varying orthogonally in two acoustic dimensions. Participants performed a four‐alternative forced‐choice identification task in a visual world paradigm while their eye movements were monitored. We found that (a) (...) greater categorization gradience derived from behavioral identification responses corresponds to larger secondary cue weights derived from eye movements; (b) the relationship between categorization gradience and secondary cue weighting is observed across cues and contrasts, suggesting that categorization gradience may be a consistent within‐individual property in speech perception; and (c) listeners who showed greater categorization gradience tend to adopt a buffered processing strategy, especially when cues arrive asynchronously in time. (shrink)

Despite spending more on health care than every other industrialized country, the U.S. ranks 37th in health outcomes. These differences cannot be explained away with differences in age and income, or even with quality of care. And, the rate of growth in health care spending in the U.S. continues to increase. The share of the Gross Domestic Product attributable to health care grew from 9% in 1980 to more than 17% in 2011. Health care costs are projected to account for (...) more than one-fifth of our economy by 2021. Despite spending more and more, the U.S. does not have better health outcomes than other countries. Worse, our increasing spending is largely attributable to preventable conditions. More than 85 cents of every dollar spent on health in the U.S. are spent on the treatment and management of chronic diseases, such as those caused by preventable conditions related to obesity and tobacco use. (shrink)