The computational complexity of finding a shortest path in a two-dimensional domain is studied in the Turing machine-based computational model and in the discrete complexity theory. This problem is studied with respect to two formulations of polynomial-time computable two-dimensional domains: domains with polynomialtime computable boundaries, and polynomial-time recognizable domains with polynomial-time computable distance functions. It is proved that the shortest path problem has the polynomial-space upper bound for domains of both type and type ; and it has a polynomial-space lower (...) bound for the domains of type , and has a #P lower bound for the domains of type. (shrink)

The computational complexity of finding a shortest path in a two-dimensional domain is studied in the Turing machine-based computational model and in the discrete complexity theory. This problem is studied with respect to two formulations of polynomial-time computable two-dimensional domains: domains with polynomialtime computable boundaries, and polynomial-time recognizable domains with polynomial-time computable distance functions. It is proved that the shortest path problem has the polynomial-space upper bound for domains of both type and type ; and it has a polynomial-space lower (...) bound for the domains of type, and has a #P lower bound for the domains of type. (shrink)

We have shown that FEF lesion-induced extinction could be compensated for by changing the relative temporal onsets of two targets presented on either side of the midline. Monkeys were trained to make saccades to either of two identical visual stimuli presented with various stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA). In intact animals the targets were chosen with equal probability when they appeared simultaneously. After unilateral FEF lesions an SOA of 67–116 msec had to be introduced, with the contralesional target appearing first, to (...) obtain equal probability choice. With a smaller target separation, averaging saccades occurred with highest frequency at similar SOAs. Our findings suggest that neglect may be attributable to more time being required in the damaged hemisphere for converting sensory information into motor responses. (shrink)

The authors aim to explore a better fitting leadership style that is designed for the sustainable era in believing and committing to work for cherishing resources and developing the organization toward a new sustainable direction. This study developed the questionnaire items of the Resource-Dilemma-Handling-Leadership scale, representing a new sustainable era's new leadership style, and then to compare it with the transformational leadership style in order to highlight the importance of RHDL for sustainable development. This study took companies, which have more (...) than 100 employees in Taiwan as research samples. Those companies were selected because they were socially tagged as being operating continuously for more than 20 years and identifying themselves with the operational orientation of social responsibility as their business philosophy and core values for management. A total of 532 valid questionnaires were collected, with a 90.6% valid return rate, and tested with the SEM method. Consistent with the authors' inferences from the literature, the test results suggest that CSR plays the role of full mediator between RDHL and OC. CSR itself is like a sense of responsibility, giving employees a sense of mission, to complete meaningful sustainability-relevant tasks in the organization. RDHL, compared with TL, has a better prediction power on CSR and OC. Theoretically, this study implies that the impact of leadership of the organization on OC in the aspects of sustainable development should be going through the influence of the ELB system in the form of CSR to promote the organization's internal and external organizational CSR performance, with added internal strengthening power from OC. Practically, the new RDHL concepts brought up by this study include the training and enhancement of leadership skills based on the content of the scale items being explored. The new RDHL scale contains a comprehensive description of the spirit of the new sustainable era's leadership style. Also, the future applications of RDHL ideas in the form of human resource development should help the realization of the ideally sustainability behavioral patterns of leaders and employees in the organizations. (shrink)

In ‘Measuring the Consequences of Rules’, Holly Smith presents two problems involving the indeterminacy of compliance, which she takes to be fatal for all forms of rule-utilitarianism. In this reply, I attempt to dispel both problems.

Patrick Manson, the so-called father of tropical medicine, played a pivotal role in making that discipline into a specialty. During his early career in China he discovered that the mosquito was the intermediate host of the filarial parasite and he somewhat peculiarly called the mosquito the " nurse " of the filarial worm. The discovery contributed greatly to the intellectual foundation of modern parasitology. In this paper I situate Manson's nomenclature in the context of nineteenth-century biological research on reproductive mechanisms (...) and argue that Manson's concept of the " nurse " was derived from nineteenth-century theories of sexual division of labor in nature's economy. The way he framed the relation between the mosquito and the parasite, moreover, can be understood in the terms of the domestic arrangement of the colonial European household. Manson's research demonstrates the significant exchange between medical concerns over European women's procreative role in the tropics and biological studies of parasitic reproduction. (shrink)

A debunking argument contends that some target moral judgments were produced by unreliable processes and concludes that such judgments are unjustified. Debunking arguments face a regress challenge: to show that a process is unreliable at tracking the moral truth, we need to rely on other moral judgments. But we must show that these relied-upon judgments are also reliable, which requires yet a further set of judgments, whose reliability needs to be confirmed too, and so on. Some argue that the debunker (...) faces an insurmountable regress, which disables the debunking conclusion. In this paper, I explore and defuse this regress challenge. (shrink)

This paper provides an account of the experience of empathizing with the fictional characters of literary works, through the lens of Husserl's theory of presentification. Via a critical analysis of Husserl and other phenomenologists, I argue that fictional characters, though lacking embodied presence, can be presentified to the reader in the mode of "as if." Moreover, I claim that imaginative empathy is a guided creative reproduction of sedimented past bodily experiences. This explains why, motivated by imaginative empathetic presentification, not only (...) aesthetic feelings, but also "as if" existential feelings come to the fore. Finally, it shows to what extent presentation and the different modes of presentification are interwoven and function together. (shrink)

In this paper, have two parts: the first is the critical part, in this section I will critically pointed out that the reductionism of the research project in the face of ideas and language to explain the dualism of the plight of the game, only to avoid paying with phenomenology price. Followed by the construction of the part, I will be back "perspective of dualism," the anthropological roots, and this "perspective dualism" itself does not exclude a unified view of natural (...) evolution. On the "spirit of the decision situation of the brain" and "the spirit of stylized brain," the complex interactions between the images is a philosophical reflection of the results, rather than the results of natural science knowledge itself. I represent a non-scientific or a "soft" the naturalistic point of view and attempt to obtain a between Kant and Darwin compatible views. This article mainly has two parts: First is the critique part, I will criticize in this part and it will be pointed out that when the reductional research plan will face the dualism's difficult situation of the explanation viewpoint and the language game, it tries only to avoid to pay the price of epiphenomenon. Next constructs the construction part, I will recall the anthropological root of "the perspective dualism", because this "the perspective dualism" itself has not certainly repelled the unified viewpoint of the natural theory of evolution. About the complex interactive image between "cerebrum" and "spirit" is one philosophical reflexive achievement, but is not the natural sciences knowledge itself achievement. I represent one kind of non-science or "soft" naturalism viewpoint and try obtaining the compatible opinion between Kant and Darwin. (shrink)

Suppose an agent is choosing between rescuing more people with a lower probability of success, and rescuing fewer with a higher probability of success. How should they choose? Our moral judgments about such cases are not well-studied, unlike the closely analogous non-moral preferences over monetary gambles. In this paper, I present an empirical study which aims to elicit the moral analogues of our risk preferences, and to assess whether one kind of evidence—concerning how they depend on outcome probabilities—can debunk them. (...) I find significant heterogeneity in our moral risk preferences—in particular, moral risk-seeking and risk-neutrality are surprisingly popular. I also find that subjects’ judgments aren't probability-dependent, thus providing an empirical defense against debunking arguments from probability dependence. (shrink)

Debunking arguments in ethics contend that our moral beliefs have dubious evolutionary, cultural, or psychological origins—hence concluding that we should doubt such beliefs. Debates about debunking are often couched in coarse-grained terms—about whether our moral beliefs are justified or not, for instance. In this paper, I propose a more detailed Bayesian analysis of debunking arguments, which proceeds in the fine-grained framework of rational confidence. Such analysis promises several payoffs: it highlights how debunking arguments don’t affect all agents, but rather only (...) those agents who updated on their intuitions using a specific range of evidentiary weights; it underscores how the debunkers shouldn’t conclude that we should reduce confidence beyond some threshold, but rather only that we should reduce confidence by some amount; and it proposes a method of integrating different kinds of evidence—about the kinds of epistemic flaws at play, about the different possible origins of our moral beliefs, about the background normative assumptions we’re entitled to make—in order to arrive at a rational moral credence in light of debunking. (shrink)

On the seventh page of the People's Daily for April 15, 1958, Ma T'e published an article entitled "Discussions of Problems of Logic." In his conclusion he critically evaluates many people and even classifies me as a revisionist who must be criticized. I have studied this article closely and feel that it is shot through with difficulties.

Debunking arguments use empirical evidence about our moral beliefs - in particular, about their causal origins, or about how they depend on various causes - in order to reach an epistemic conclusion about the trustworthiness of such beliefs. In this thesis, I investigate the scope and limits of debunking arguments, and their implications for what we should believe about morality. I argue that debunking arguments can in principle work - they are based on plausible epistemic premises, and at least some (...) of them avoid putative problems concerning regress and redundancy. However, I also argue that some debunking arguments fall short because they are insufficiently supported by the empirical evidence. By considering different objections, analyses, and a case study, I explore the conditions for a successful debunking argument. (shrink)

This essay examines the persistent engagement with cosmopolitan inclusivity through the endorsement of indigenous sacredness in works of ethnographic fiction. I focus on Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, James Cameron’s Avatar, and Taiwanese writer Ming-yi Wu’s science fiction The Man with the Compound Eyes, three iconic environmental representations of indigenous knowledge. These texts illustrate how indigenous thinking has very often been transformed from place-bound, locally-embedded cultural traditions to an embodiment of Euro-American eco-spirituality that overturns both national boundaries and (...) the humannature divide at the turn of the twenty-first century. In settler environmental narratives, the insistence on the ethnographic mode strengthens the desire for authenticity and intimacy. (shrink)

Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are critical climate policy documents formulated by the Party countries, under the UNFCCC Paris Agreement, to communicate their goals and commitments to reduce national emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change. As an emerging discourse genre, it has attracted increasing attention from discourse analysts. However, few studies have specifically focused on the NDCs of African countries as a whole, leading into the situation in which their positions and voices are largely underrepresented in the current (...) climate negotiation. Using a combined method of positioning theory and critical discourse analysis, this paper aims to explore the African countries’ positioning in the climate change agenda by examining the discursive narratives around three prominent thematic categories in their NDCs, i.e. responsibility, vulnerability and conditionality. It is found that the African countries intend to position themselves as non-villains, victims, and demi-heroes by strategically highlighting their insignificant historical responsibility, exceptional vulnerability, and conditionality of implementation on the external support from the international community. Furthermore, it is argued that the commonality of their self-positioning is conducive to forming a collective identity to resist the hegemonic discourses of inequality and struggle for equity in the current climate negotiation. (shrink)

Philosophy, Modern -- 20th century ; Critical thinking.

Student performance prediction aims to evaluate the grade that a student will reach before enrolling in a course or taking an exam. This prediction problem is a kernel task toward personalized education and has attracted increasing attention in the field of artificial intelligence and educational data mining. This paper provides a systematic review of the SPP study from the perspective of machine learning and data mining. This review partitions SPP into five stages, i.e., data collection, problem formalization, model, prediction, and (...) application. To have an intuition on these involved methods, we conducted experiments on a data set from our institute and a public data set. Our educational dataset composed of 1,325 students, and 832 courses was collected from the information system, which represents a typical higher education in China. With the experimental results, discussions on current shortcomings and interesting future works are finally summarized from data collections to practices. This work provides developments and challenges in the study task of SPP and facilitates the progress of personalized education. (shrink)

Kerridge et al recently published a paper in the journal about organ transplantation and the diagnosis of death.1 Although I appreciate the authors’ efforts to present their arguments about such a controversial issue, I found some inconsistencies in this article that I would like to discussWhen Kerridge and his collaborators discussed the origins of the concept of brain death, they emphasised that after the report of the medical consultants on the diagnosis of death to the US President’s Commission was published (...) in 1981,2 clinicians equated the concept of BD with brainstem death. In fact, the brainstem criterion was first proposed by Mohandas and Chou in Minnesota, in 1971.3 The Minnesota criteria inspired the UK code, which was mainly adopted in UK commonwealth countries.4 This view was afterwards powerfully defended by Christopher Pallis.5 After the US President’s Commission report,2 a lot of countries, and most US states, accepted the whole brain, and not the brainstem, criterion.6Regarding the “dead donor rule”, with the advent of transplant surgery, interest in definitions and diagnosis of death based on brain formulations really acquired a new urgency. None the less, it is important to point out that the concept of BD as death of the individual, did not appear to benefit organ transplantation, but was a consequence of the development of intensive care. As Pallis emphasised, if organ transplant techniques had never been developed, intensive care procedures would have provided the possibility of supplying life support to those cases with destroyed brains and preserved heart function, and physicians would need to face the clinical syndrome called BD.5 When French neurophysiologists and neurologists described the death of the nervous system and coma dépassé, organ transplant techniques were only in the very early stages of development. …. (shrink)

SUMMARYThis paper purports to show that important traces of Chinese humanism existed in the Shang long before the founding of the Chou dynasty in 1111 B.C. despite the opinion in vogue which regards superstition as the Shang's style of life and humanism as the dominant theme of the Chou's culture. The discovery of humanism in the Shang enables us not only to endorse once more the continuity of cultures of Shang and Chou, but (...) also to suggest placing the beginning of Chinese humanism and thought at a much earlier date. (shrink)