This paper presents a rectangular branch-and-reduction algorithm for globally solving indefinite quadratic programming problem, which has a wide application in engineering design and optimization. In this algorithm, first of all, we convert the IQPP into an equivalent bilinear optimization problem. Next, a novel linearizing technique is presented for deriving the linear relaxation programs problem of the EBOP, which can be used to obtain the lower bound of the global optimal value to the EBOP. To obtain a global optimal solution of (...) the EBOP, the main computational task of the proposed algorithm involves the solutions of a sequence of LRPP. Moreover, the global convergent property of the algorithm is proved, and numerical experiments demonstrate the higher computational performance of the algorithm. (shrink)

In order to explore, from the perspective of the social ecological model, the relationship and its mechanism linking public risk familiarity and mental health during the new coronary pneumonia epidemic, the new coronary pneumonia epidemic risk perception scale, psychological resilience scale, Chinese mental health scale, and SARS familiarity scale were used 741 members of the public were surveyed as research objects. The results show that: When gender, age, and educational background are controlled, risk familiarity has a significant positive predictive effect (...) on public mental health; Risk familiarity predicts mental health through the mediating effect of mental toughness; The mediating effect of mental toughness is moderated by the public’s familiarity with SARS. Specifically, for members of the public with low SARS familiarity, the indirect effect of risk familiarity on mental health through mental toughness is smaller than that for those with high SARS familiarity. The results of this study integrate psychological resilience into the theory of risk cognition, which has implications for the improvement of public mental health. (shrink)

Yidali si xiang jia Weike de "Xin ke xue" de zhong yao xing bu xia yu Daerwen de "Wu zhong qi yuan", shi mei xue jia Zhu Guangqian wan nian tou ru zui duo jing li wan cheng de yi bu zhong liang ji yi zuo. Zhu Guangqian zai fan yi de tong shi, hai dui "Xin ke xue" jin xing le shen ru yan jiu. zai ben shu zhong, Zhu Guangqian xian shi e yao jie shao le "Xin ke (...) xue" de jing sui, ren wei Weike yan jiu li shi shi qiang diao qiong ben qiu yuan, yi bu luo zi ran fa wei qi dian, lun zheng ren lei ji she hui zhi du de fa zhan; hou you tou shi Weike de shi xue he mei xue, fen xi le wei ke dui xi fang zhe xue de ge xin he Zhongguo mei xue de ju da ying xiang, bing dai chu le Zhu Guangqian zi ji dui zi you ji ren dao zhu yi de zhui qiu. (shrink)

Adopting fair value measurement may bring more earnings fluctuations and induce irrational psychology and radical financing behavior of managers. Based on behavioral corporate governance theory, using the sample of Chinese A-share nonfinancial listed companies during 2007–2017, this paper empirically examines the regulatory effect of fair value measurement, that is, whether fair value measurement affects the company's financing decisions when managers have irrational psychological characteristics, i.e., overconfidence. The study found that overconfident managers of the company that have fair value measurement assets (...) will be more aggressive for debt decisions, indicating that fair value measurement has a positively regulatory effect on overconfident managers. (shrink)

This study examines whether and how board gender diversity can affect corporate wage inequity by drawing on diversity theory and gender socialization and ethicality theories. Building on an exogenous relaxation of China’s one-child policy (OCP) in 2013, which led to a substantial decline in the female labor force participation rate. Our empirical analysis suggests that board gender diversity is negatively associated with corporate wage inequity. This result is robust to various endogeneity and sensitivity analyses. We find that the OCP relaxation (...) only increases average executive pay; it does not affect employee pay. One potential mechanism driving our results is that the decline in board gender diversity caused by the OCP relaxation reduces supervision, restriction, and fairness within the firm, which increases executives’ pursuit of personal interests and ultimately leads to the rise of wage inequity. Our findings are particularly significant for firms in capital-intensive industries, firms with a low level of employee bargaining power, and large firms. (shrink)

Engineering programs in the United States have been experimenting with diverse pedagogical approaches to educate future professional engineers. However, a crucial dimension of ethics education that focuses on the values, personal commitments, and meaning of engineers has been missing in many of these pedagogical approaches. We argue that a value-based approach to professional ethics education is critically needed in engineering education, because such an approach is indispensable for cultivating self-reflective and socially engaged engineers. This paper starts by briefly comparing two (...) prevalent approaches to ethics education in science and engineering: professional and philosophical. While we acknowledge that both approaches help meet certain ethics education objectives, we also argue that neither of these is sufficient to personally engage students in authentic moral learning. We make the case that it is important to connect ethics education to the heart, which is extensively driven by values, and present a value-based approach to professional ethics education. We provide some classroom practices that cultivate a safe, diverse, and engaging learning environment. Finally, we discuss the implications of a value-based approach to professional ethics education for curriculum design and pedagogical practice, including opportunities and challenges for engineering faculty eager to incorporate value-based inquiry into their classrooms. (shrink)

The computer distance teaching system teaches through the network, and there is no entrance threshold. Any student who is willing to study can log in to the network computer distance teaching system for study at any free time. Neural network has a strong self-learning ability and is an important part of artificial intelligence research. Based on this study, a neural network-embedded architecture based on shared memory and bus structure is proposed. By looking for an alternative method of exp function to (...) improve the speed of radial basis function algorithm, and then by analyzing the judgment conditions in the main loop during the algorithm process, these judgment conditions are modified conditionally to reduce the calculation scale, which can double the speed of the algorithm. Finally, this article verifies the function, performance, and interface of the computer distance education system. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Although unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB) in the workplace has been widely researched, studies have focused on its antecedents rather than its outcomes. To fill this gap in the literature, we integrated moral licensing theory and the literature on leader gratitude expression to explore the ethical consequences of UPB. Using a sample of multi-source time-lagged surveys of 206 leader–employee dyads, we found that the pro-organizational nature of UPB fostered employees’ psychological entitlement and thereby increased their likelihood of engaging in subsequent (...) unethical behavior. Leaders’ expressions of gratitude for employee UPB strengthened the relationship between UPB and psychological entitlement, ultimately reinforcing employees’ unethical behavior. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed. (shrink)

In response to the COVID-19 outbreak in many parts of the world, online education has become a more viable option. Some studies have assessed undergraduate students’ readiness for online learning, while others examined students’ anxiety about online learning at home. The relationship between readiness and anxiety about online learning is, however, not well explored. This paper has two purposes: to develop a new and valid instrument—the Home-based Online Learning Readiness Questionnaire —to measure students’ readiness to study online at home based (...) on a theoretical framework of self-regulated learning. As a replacement for the previous readiness scale, this new instrument adds a section on learning strategies and updates and develops new items. to investigate the relationship between readiness and anxiety in online learning. In order to explore those issues, 527 undergraduate students in China were surveyed in this study. The results indicated that HOLRQ was validated in the following six domains: motivation, self-efficacy, information technology skills, resource management, learning strategies and help-seeking. Chinese undergraduate students were more prepared in resource management, motivation, and help seeking, but less prepared in learning strategies, information technology skills, and self-efficacy. However, the regression analysis showed that readiness did not predict online learning anxiety. It means even highly prepared self-regulated learners may experience anxiety when learning online from home. The findings provide insights for instructors and administrators to determine how students really feel about learning from home with online education. (shrink)

Except the two types of state, complete failure and perfect functioning, some intermediate states also existed between those two states. This characteristic enables multistate system whose components are often of more than two states. Moreover, because of dependence between components, common cause failure enhances the failure risk of components during the operating period of MSS. A protection mechanism needs to be adopted because of the importance of certain components. For a MSS with CCF and protection mechanism, its reliability can be (...) evaluated by a proposed approach. Certain components not only can cause failure at one state, but also can cause failure to other components because of the CCF. Under the impact of one type of CCF, those components can constitute a specific group that can overlap with certain components. Universal generating function is adopted to incorporate the CCF and protection mechanism of a component. Consequently, reliability indices of a MSS can be evaluated by the proposed approach based on UGF. Examples and comparisons illustrate and validate this method. This method can also help engineers prioritize elements that require protection mechanism under various resource limitations. (shrink)

Total factor productivity is not only the core of high-quality economic development but also a core indicator for measuring the quality of economic development. Improving total factor productivity is one of the most critical points in building a modern economic system. Firstly, this paper uses the DEA-Malmquist index method to measure and decompose the total factor productivity of China’s 30 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions from 2001 to 2017 and analyzes the characteristics of its temporal and spatial changes. From a (...) spatial perspective, the regional gap is relatively large. Secondly, we construct the index system of five dimensions and use this index system to comprehensively evaluate the improvement degree of China’s modernized economic system. The results show that the overall level of the improvement degree of China’s modernized economic system is relatively low, and the differences between provinces are great. Thirdly, this paper uses static and dynamic spatial econometric models to empirically analyze the effect of total factor productivity on the improvement degree of the modern economic system. The results show that the improvement degree of the modern economic system in China has obvious characteristics of time spillover and space spillover. Finally, we put forward countermeasures and suggestions on how to perfect the modern economic system. (shrink)

Social networks have become an important way for users to find friends and expand their social circle. Social networks can improve users’ experience by recommending more suitable friends to them. The key lies in improving the accuracy of link prediction, which is also the main research issue of this study. In the study of personality traits, some scholars have proved that personality can be used to predict users’ behavior in social networks. Based on these studies, this study aims to improve (...) the accuracy of link prediction in directed social networks. Considering the integration of personality link preference and asymmetric interaction into the link prediction model of social networks, a four-dimensional link prediction model is proposed. Through comparative experiments, it is proved that the four-dimensional social relationship prediction model proposed in this study is more accurate than the model only based on similarity. At the same time, it is also verified that the matching degree of personality link preference and asymmetric interaction intensity in the model can help improve the accuracy of link prediction. (shrink)

This paper provides a systematic analysis of how hometown ties, the most common and distinct bases for interpersonal ties to build upon in China, could influence corporate governance in Chinese corporations by focusing on its impact on CEO dismissals and corporate social responsibility. We find that hometown ties between CEOs and board chairs reduce the likelihood of CEO dismissals and that the negative relationship between firm performance and CEO dismissals is weaker for hometown-connected CEOs in locally administered state-owned enterprises, for (...) inside CEOs, for firms located outside board chairs’ hometowns, and for firms operating in regions with low social trust. Moreover, we find consistent evidence that hometown ties affect Chinese firms’ engagement in corporate social responsibility. Our study highlights the important role of hometown ties in Chinese relationship-based corporate governance. It also advances a normative ethical assessment of hometown-based favoritism by highlighting its distinct dynamics and impacts on focal actors and the third parties in specific contexts of actions. (shrink)

Late in 1990, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) received a grant of more than $200,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum.! Enough has now been accomplished to draw some tentative conclusions. I am the grant's principal investigator. In this paper, I shall describe what we at lIT did, what we learned, and what others, especially philosophers, can learn (...) from us. We set out to develop an approach that others could profitably adopt. I believe that we succeeded. (shrink)

Drawing upon conservation of resources theory, we develop and test a theoretical model that specifies how and when employee humor toward leaders affects leader abusive supervision. We propose that employee humor is negatively associated with leader abusive supervision via leader relational energy. Furthermore, the negative indirect relationship between employee humor and leader abusive supervision via leader relational energy is stronger for female leaders than for male leaders. An experiment and a multi-wave, multi-source field study provide substantial support for our hypotheses. (...) Our findings contribute to the abusive supervision literature by identifying employee humor as a safe and effective bottom-up approach to prevent leader abusive supervision. (shrink)

This paper begins by reviewing dominant themes in current teaching of professional ethics in engineering education. In contrast to more traditional approaches that simulate ethical practice by using ethical theories to reason through micro-level ethical dilemmas, this paper proposes a pragmatic approach to ethics that places more emphasis on the practical plausibility of ethical decision-making. In addition to the quality of ethical justification, the value of a moral action also depends on its effectiveness in solving an ethical dilemma, cultivating healthy (...) working relationships, negotiating existing organizational cultures, and achieving contextual plausibility in everyday professional practice. This paper uses a cross-cultural ethics scenario to further elaborate how a pragmatic approach can help us rethink ethical reasoning, as well as ethics instruction and assessment. This paper is expected to be of interest to educators eager to improve the ability of engineers and other professional students to effectively and appropriately deal with the kinds of everyday ethical issues they will likely face in their careers. (shrink)

Empirical studies have suggested that language-capable robots have the persuasive power to shape the shared moral norms based on how they respond to human norm violations. This persuasive power presents cause for concern, but also the opportunity to persuade humans to cultivate their own moral development. We argue that a truly socially integrated and morally competent robot must be willing to communicate its objection to humans’ proposed violations of shared norms by using strategies such as blame-laden rebukes, even if doing (...) so may violate other standing norms, such as politeness. By drawing on Confucian ethics, we argue that a robot’s ability to employ blame-laden moral rebukes to respond to unethical human requests is crucial for cultivating a flourishing “moral ecology” of human–robot interaction. Such positive moral ecology allows human teammates to develop their own moral reflection skills and grow their own virtues. Furthermore, this ability can and should be considered as one criterion for assessing artificial moral agency. Finally, this paper discusses potential implications of the Confucian theories for designing socially integrated and morally competent robots. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that engineering ethics education does have moral implications. More specifically, practices in engineering ethics education can lead to negative moral consequences if not conducted appropriately. Engineering ethics educators are often passionate about teaching students ways to examine the ethical implications of engineering and technology. However, ethics educators may overlook the moral significance of their instructional classroom practices. In this paper, we discuss two issues: First, we discuss the moral impacts of ethics curriculum and pedagogies on (...) students’ learning experiences. Then we discuss the professional responsibilities of educators who are involved in designing ethics learning experiences for engineering students. The reflections presented in this paper will serve as catalysts for more comprehensive discussions regarding the impact of engineering ethics education on the ethical development of engineering students. (shrink)

Research in engineering ethics has assessed the ethical reasoning of students in mostly the US. However, it is not clear that ethical judgments are primarily the result of ethical reasoning, or that conclusions based on US samples would be true of global populations. China now graduates and employs more STEM (science technology engineering and mathematics) majors than any other country in the world, but the moral cognition and ethics education of Chinese engineers remains understudied. To address this gap, a study (...) was conducted examining the relations between ethical reasoning, moral intuitions, and ethics education among engineering students in China. Engineering students at a university in Shanghai, China completed measures of ethical reasoning and moral intuitions before and after a course on global engineering ethics. Among engineering students in China, (1) ethical reasoning is positively related to an emphasis on care and fairness and (2) global ethics education results in significantly higher levels of ethical reasoning, as well as a greater concern with fairness and loyalty. Whereas the relation between ethical reasoning and moral intuitions among engineering students in China is similar to that of students in the US, ethics education affects engineering students in China differently from their US counterparts. (shrink)

Ethics is crucial to engineering, although disagreement exists concerning the form engineering ethics education should take. In part, this results from disagreements about the goal of this education, which inhibit the development of and progress in cohesive research agendas and practices. In this regard, engineering ethics faces challenges like other professional ethics. To address these issues, this paper argues that the ultimate goal of engineering ethics education should be more long-term ethical behaviors, but that engineering ethics must more fully engage (...) with the fields of empirical moral and cultural psychology to do so. It begins by considering reasons for adopting ethical behaviors as the ultimate goal of ethics education, and moves on to discuss why ethical behaviors have not been adopted as the goal of ethics education. The paper ends by considering responses to these problems, why ethical behaviors should still be adopted as the ultimate goal of ethics education. (shrink)

Ethical leadership skills are crucial for professionally competent engineers working in a global context. This article explores the possibility of integrating a non-Western ethical tradition of Confucian ethics into the teaching of ethical leadership in engineering ethics. First comes a brief discussion of the historical origins of Confucianism and its persistence in contemporary Chinese culture. Second is a conceptualization of the major aspects of Confucian ethical leadership including moral power, role modeling, and meritocratic ethical leadership, introducing a prevalent approach to (...) developing ethical leadership in the Confucian tradition: self-cultivation. The practice of self-cultivation often includes three interrelated processes: observation, reflection, and practice. The Confucian development of ethical leadership goes through four different moral psychological stages: beginner, developing learner, junzi, and sage. Finally, I discuss potential implications of the Confucian understanding of ethical leadership for teaching engineering ethics. (shrink)

Engineering is a social enterprise. A successful engineering career depends on how engineers manage their relationships with diverse stakeholders including managers, clients, contractors, and the p...

The use of AI in weapons systems raises numerous ethical issues. To date, work on weaponized AI has tended to be theoretical and normative in nature, consisting in critical policy analyses and ethical considerations, carried out by philosophers, legal scholars, and political scientists. However, adequately addressing the cultural and social dimensions of technology requires insights and methods from empirical moral and cultural psychology. To do so, this position piece describes the motivations for and sketches the nature of a normative, cultural (...) psychology of weaponized AI. The motivations for this project include the increasingly global, cross-cultural and international, nature of technologies, and counter-intuitive nature of normative thoughts and behaviors. The nature of this project consists in developing standardized measures of AI ethical reasoning and intuitions, coupled with questions exploring the development of norms, administered and validated across different cultural groups and disciplinary contexts. The goal of this piece is not to provide a comprehensive framework for understanding the cultural facets and psychological dimensions of weaponized AI but, rather, to outline in broad terms the contours of an emerging research agenda. (shrink)

Technology has a pervasive and profound effect on the contemporary world, and engineers play a central role in all aspects of technological development. In order to hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public, engineers must be morally committed and equipped to grapple with ethical dilemmas they confront.

Some engineering educators recognize the necessity and challenges of teaching students moral sensitivity. As recently pointed out by some scholars, along with moral sensitivity, promoting “self-knowledge” is significantly lacking in engineering curricula. We suggest that the “ethics autobiography” employed in some health and psychological science programs can serve as a useful tool for helping engineering students develop moral sensitivity and self-reflective competencies. First, this paper briefly discusses some unique potential strengths of introducing ethics autobiography as a tool for moral pedagogy (...) to engineering education. Second, this paper provides five specific examples on how to implement ethics autobiography in the classroom. Among the five examples, two are directly related to engineering education and the other three can easily be adapted to meet the needs of engineering education. Finally, this paper concludes with some discussion of the implications of ethics autobiography for engineering ethics education reform and the limitations and ethical considerations of using autobiography in moral pedagogy. (shrink)

Engineers and other technical professionals are increasingly challenged by the impacts of globalization. Further, engineering educators, technical managers, and human resources staff have demonstrated great interest in selecting and training engineers who are capable of working competently, professionally, and ethically in global context. However, working across countries and cultures brings considerable challenges to global engineers, including as related to understanding and navigating local and regional differences in what counts as professional ethics and integrity. In this study, we focus on written (...) responses to 27 assessment scenarios that involve micro- and/or macro-ethical considerations in six national/cultural contexts. More specifically, we analyze responses to open-ended versions of the scenarios. Our participants consisted of both experts and novices. Comparing and contrasting how experts and novices responded to these ethical problems sheds light on differences in their ethical strategies and approaches. This analysis also allows us to discern what specific cultural knowledge and sensitivity were employed by experts in solving cross-cultural ethical problems, but were largely lacking among novices. Finally, we analyze and discuss challenges faced by experts and novices in responding to cross-cultural ethical situations. (shrink)

The article argues that mainstream value-sensitive approaches to design have been based on narrow understandings of personhood and social dynamics, which are biased toward Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic cultures and contradicted by empirical evidence. To respond to this weakness, the article suggests that design may benefit from focusing on user behaviours from the joint perspective of values and norms, especially across cultural contexts. As such, it proposes Norm Sensitive Design as a complement to value-sensitive approaches when designing and (...) implementing new technologies. Versus values, norms serve as more accurate predictors or descriptors of behaviours and can thus support value-sensitive approaches to realize the aspiration of informing user behaviour via design. The article makes two key contributions. On the theoretical side, it promotes the consideration of norms in design. On the practical side, it offers designers and instructors prompts for reflecting on design ethics from the perspective of norms. (shrink)

Engineering ethics calls the attention of engineers to professional codes of ethical responsibility and personal values, but the practice of ethics in corporate settings can be more complex than either of these. Corporations too have cultures that often include corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices and policies, but few discussions of engineering ethics make any explicit reference to CSR. This article proposes critical attention to CSR and role ethics as an opportunity to help prepare engineers to think through the ethics of (...) their professional practice. After a brief overview of the evolution of social responsibility within engineering ethics in the United States, this article shares empirical research with practicing engineers in the mining and energy industries to explore how their formal ethics training did and did not prepare them to grapple with the ethical dimensions of their professional practice. It then illustrates the ways in which these dilemmas and the strategies employed for navigating them are framed within CSR policies and practices and resonate more strongly with role ethics rather than ethical theory as currently taught in most US engineering programs. The article concludes that engineering ethics teaching and learning would benefit from explicitly incorporating critical discussions of role ethics and CSR. (shrink)

Any consideration of relationships between technology and ethics is likely at some point to encounter the concept of technocracy, as a proposal to incorporate scientific and engineering expertise into the political process.

The idea of technocracy has been widely criticized in Western literature in the philosophy and sociology of technology. A common critique of technocracy is that it represents an “antidemocratic” and “dehumanizing” ideology. This paper invites Western scholars to reconsider their oppositions to technocracy by drawing on resources from Confucian ethics. In doing so, this paper synthesizes the major ethical challenges of technocracy mainly concerned by Western scholars in philosophy, political theories, sociology, and policy studies. This paper argues that incorporating Confucian (...) resources such as the rule of virtue into technocracy may be helpful for reexamining these ethical challenges to technocracy that are deeply rooted in Western liberal democratic ideologies. The Confucian rule of virtue means that social policies should be made by the virtuous and capable and these policies need to have impacts on the moral progress of the society. Confucian values provide ethical guidance for technocrats in assessing the moral quality of the sociotechnical systems they build. From the Confucian perspective, sociotechnical systems are often assessed based on the criterion whether and how these sociotechnical systems contribute to a process of harmonization. This paper will introduce some practical cases that demonstrate how technical experts and expertise contribute to organizational and social management. In these cases, virtues and the rule of virtue do play a crucial role: virtues either determine the selection of technocrats and the legitimization of their political power or are embedded in engineering design and affect human behavior in the use context. (shrink)

This volume, the result of an ongoing bridge building effort among engineers and humanists, addresses a variety of philosophical, ethical, and policy issues emanating from engineering and technology. Interwoven through its chapters are two themes, often held in tension with one another: “Exploring Boundaries” and “Expanding Connections.” “Expanding Connections” highlights contributions that look to philosophy for insight into some of the challenges engineers face in working with policy makers, lay designers, and other members of the public. It also speaks to (...) reflections included in this volume on the connections between fact and value, reason and emotion, engineering practice and the social good, and, of course, between engineering and philosophy. “Exploring Boundaries” highlights contributions that focus on some type of demarcation. Public policy sets a boundary between what is regulated from what is not, academic disciplines delimit themselves by their subjects and methods of inquiry, and professions approach problems with unique goals and by using concepts and language in particular ways that create potential obstacles to collaboration with other fields. These and other forms of boundary setting are also addressed in this volume. Contributors explore these two themes in a variety of specific contexts, including engineering epistemology, engineers’ social responsibilities, engineering and public policy-making, engineering innovation, and the affective dimensions of engineering work. The book also includes analyses of social and ethical issues with emerging technologies such as 3-D printing and its use in medical applications, as well as social robots. Initial versions of the invited papers included in this book were first presented at the 2014 meeting of the Forum on Philosophy, Engineering, and Technology, held at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA. The volume furthers fPET’s intent of extending and developing the philosophy of engineering as an academic field, and encouraging conversation, promoting a sense of shared enterprise, and building community among philosophers and engineers across a diversity of cultural backgrounds and approaches to inquiry. (shrink)