The twenty-first century is arguably the century of computing. In such a world saturated by computing, Computational Thinking is now recognized as a foundational competency for being an informed citizen and being successful in STEM work. Nevertheless, how to effectively import different types of teaching methods in university courses is subjected to further evaluation. Currently, the arguments in favor of tangible robots including high interaction, great practicality, and specific operation results make themselves to be often used as a (...) teaching medium and tool for teaching activities between teachers and students. Hence, in addition to cultivating students with computational thinking ability, this paper discussed how to integrate tangible robots into project-based learning courses of thinking skills training to improve the learning performance of the computational thinking ability. This study conducted in one semester on the 105 students from three classes. Experimental results show that the project-based learning method integrated with the teaching material of robotic visual programs approach had significantly better effectiveness in improving students' learning achievements than the traditional teaching method integrated with paper practice teaching materials approach. Analysis of the questionnaire results showed that the proposed learning approach did not increase the students' cognitive burden. In sum, the proposed approach helps students' learning achievement and cognitive load. (shrink)

This article aims to discover the principle that underlies correlations between choices of evidential qualification and the communicative purposes of Chinese newspaper reportage along the dimension of subjectivity/objectivity. Distributional comparisons of data from the China Times news website reveal a pragmatic distinction between evidential subclasses. Reportatives predominate in politics and business news, where objectivity carries higher weight, while in less objectivity-oriented reports as local news, sensories are of greater frequency. The latter is also prevalent as journalists reflect on a reported (...) event. The level of evidential subjectivity thus varies significantly with the nature of evidence. An evaluation drawn from shared belief tends to be experienced as less subjective than one built upon what is accessible to the journalist alone. This suggests the use of evidentiality as reflective of the stance of the newspaper media. (shrink)

Happiness, defined as a state of well-being and contentment, is a central human goal. Despite advances in customer behavior research related to value co-creation, the link between customer happiness and these behaviors remains unclear. This study therefore examines customers’ in-role participation behavior and extra-role citizenship behavior to determine their influence on customers’ happiness. Customer participation and citizenship behaviors relate positively to customers’ perceptions of both service performance and their contributions to others’ welfare. In addition, collectivism moderates the relationship between perceived (...) contributions to others’ welfare and happiness; individualism instead moderates the relationship between perceived service performance and happiness. These findings provide both managerial implications and directions for business marketing ethics. (shrink)

Utopian socialism represented by Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen in the nineteenth century played a definitely progressive role in history. This progressive role found expression in two aspects. First, it contained criticism and denunciation of the foundation of capitalist society. As a result, it "provided valuable materials for awakening workers' consciousness." Second, it set forth some positive ideals on future society "such as the elimination of antagonism between urban and rural areas, the family, the private profit system, and the employed (...) labor system, the advocacy of social harmony, and the call for turning the state into a single production-controlling organ." These burgeoning, critical socialist thoughts constituted one of the sources of the theory of scientific socialism. But their conception of history was the idealist conception of history and also the supraclass theory of human nature. This essay is devoted to a detailed discussion of Saint-Simon's and Fourier's social doctrines and historical views. (shrink)

This article provides current Schwartz Values Survey (SVS) data from samples of business managers and professionals across 50 societies that are culturally and socioeconomically diverse. We report the society scores for SVS values dimensions for both individual- and societal-level analyses. At the individual-level, we report on the ten circumplex values sub-dimensions and two sets of values dimensions (collectivism and individualism; openness to change, conservation, self-enhancement, and self-transcendence). At the societal-level, we report on the values dimensions of embeddedness, hierarchy, mastery, affective (...) autonomy, intellectual autonomy, egalitarianism, and harmony. For each society, we report the Cronbach’s α statistics for each values dimension scale to assess their internal consistency (reliability) as well as report interrater agreement (IRA) analyses to assess the acceptability of using aggregated individual level values scores to represent country values. We also examined whether societal development level is related to systematic variation in the measurement and importance of values. Thus, the contributions of our evaluation of the SVS values dimensions are two-fold. First, we identify the SVS dimensions that have cross-culturally internally reliable structures and within-society agreement for business professionals. Second, we report the society cultural values scores developed from the twenty-first century data that can be used as macro-level predictors in multilevel and single-level international business research. (shrink)

This dissertation concerns justifications for how economic activity is organized. The dissertation considers the role of economic theory in the process of justification and assesses justifications for specific capitalist institutions. The three essays that comprise this dissertation pursue this inquiry by addressing questions respectively in the history of thought, distributive justice, and the ethics of work. ;To advance our general understanding about the development of nineteenth-century Irish political economy in the wake of the Great Irish Famine , the first (...) essay analyzes the Famine's impact on a previously unstudied, yet uniquely authoritative, element of the discipline: the questions given to candidates for the Whately Professorship of Political Economy at Trinity College, Dublin. The essay concludes, contrary to previous arguments, that the Famine did not fundamentally influence the discipline's development. Examining justifications for government responses to the Famine in light of this conclusion, the essay considers the role of economic theory in justifying how economic activity is organized. ;Challenging the position that people morally deserve their market earnings often relies on showing that there is little that people can be said to deserve or that market imperfections undermine desert claims. The second essay argues that even if people can generally be deserving and absent market imperfections, people cannot claim to deserve their earnings with respect to four common desert bases: social contribution, effort, compensation and promise of payment. A principle of fairness that requires fulfilling legitimate expectations might ground a moral claim to market earnings, but it is much weaker than moral desert in limiting income redistribution or in justifying use of the market. ;Given the nineteenth-century American labor movement's objection to the employment relationship on grounds that it was a form of servitude, the third essay assesses the extent to which a similar objection applies in contemporary society. The essay argues that despite changes in employment practices, from the standpoint of legitimate authority the employment relationship represents a form of servitude. Given ethical objections to voluntary servitude more generally, this analysis suggests the need for alternatives to the employment relationship, such as worker-owned cooperatives, in a just economy. (shrink)

Vampire stories and folklores have originated from a range of sources; however, it is rather certain that the repulsive but attractive vampiric monster images in present popular culture are primarily derived from Anne Rice’s novel Interview with the Vampire. That being said, it was around the end of the eighteenth century that vampires first invaded the popular literary world, with literary vampires growing noticeably more powerful and perpetual than any of their monstrous predecessors in the years since the publication (...) of John Polidori’s successful short story The Vampyre in 1819. Due to associated aesthetic transformations, vampirism itself has become increasingly popular, to the extent that it now commands some followers who even worship vampiric rituals and lifestyles in spite of there being no solid, physical evidence of actual vampires, but rather only literary and imaginary examples of the creatures. In order to grasp how this fascination with vampires has turned into a quasi-religious phenomenon and ideology, a proper investigation of vampiric mechanisms and aesthetics should be empirical in nature. Utilizing Interview with the Vampire as an example due to its clearly substantial influence on current vampire imagery, this article examines how the paradoxical interchange between aversion and attraction plays its role in the visceral religion of the vampire-immersed world. (shrink)

The co-edited volume under consideration presents the peer-reviewed proceedings of a homonymous conference held at the Free University of Brussels and the Royal Academy of Belgium in 2015. It opens with a general introduction by the editors to the topic of the conference and to its 17 constitutive papers. The contributions deal with ceremonial contexts and rituals of diverse kinds, which antedate, transcend, or develop beneath or independently of the polis and its institutions. The papers are...

Ash’arism, which emerged in the first quarter of the fourth century of Hijra, is a theological sect that has been accepted by the majority of hadith scholars throughout Islamic history. This fact, which has important consequences for the history of hadith, raises the question of the extent to which the hadith scholars belonging to the Ash’arite sect were interested in theology. This is because theology, which is considered an heretical innovation according to the traditional understanding of Ahl al-hadīth, was (...) severely criticised by hadith scholars representing Salafī thought and positioned as the opposite pole of hadith. Accordingly, Ash’arism could not escape from being the target of the anti-theological Ahl al-hadīth. However, this did not prevent the adoption of the Ash’arite sect by hadith scholars and the emergence of a group of Ash’arite hadith scholars who engaged in theology. Thus, from the fourth century of Hijra, Ash’arite theology, like other Islamic sciences, became a natural part of education and teaching activities. Andalusia and the Maghrib, one of the regions where the Ash’arite sect was widespread, provide a favourable ground for determining the place of theology in the scholarly life of the hadith scholars. The famous hadith scholars who lived in this region in the fifth and sixth centuries of Hijra are analysed in this study in terms of their affiliation with Ash’arism and their interest in the science of kalām. By analysing the education and training lives of the hadith scholars subject to the research, the details that highlight their Ash’arite identities were determined. Issues such as how the Ash’arite tradition was inherited by hadith scholars in the Western Islamic region, what roles hadith scholars played in the spread of the Ash’arite sect in this region, which books were most widely used by hadith scholars in the study of kalām, and which methods were used to read and transmit theological texts are clarified within the framework of available data. As a result, it was revealed that in the Western Islamic world of the fifth and sixth centuries of Hijra, the science of kalām was in great demand among the Ash’arite hadith scholars and that important texts of Ash’arite theology remained in circulation among hadith scholars through reading and transmission. (shrink)