As an imitation of the biological nervous systems, neural networks, which have been characterized as powerful learning tools, are employed in a wide range of applications, such as control of complex nonlinear systems, optimization, system identification, and patterns recognition. This article aims to bring a brief review of the state-of-the-art NNs for the complex nonlinear systems by summarizing recent progress of NNs in both theory and practical applications. Specifically, this survey also reviews a number of NN based robot control algorithms, (...) including NN based manipulator control, NN based human-robot interaction, and NN based cognitive control. (shrink)

Dysregulation of lipid metabolism is a commonly observed feature associated with metabolic syndrome and leads to the development of negative health outcomes such as obesity, diabetes mellitus, non‐alcoholic fatty liver disease, or atherosclerosis. Time‐restricted feeding/eating (TRF/TRE), an emerging dietary intervention, has been shown to promote pleiotropic health benefits including the alteration of diurnal expression of genes associated with lipid metabolism, as well as levels of lipid species. Although TRF likely induces a response in multiple organs leading to the modulation of (...) lipid metabolism, a majority of the studies related to TRF effects on lipids have focused only on individual tissues, and furthermore there is a lack of insight into potential underlying mechanisms. In this review, we summarize the current insights regarding TRF effects on lipid metabolism and the potential mechanisms in adipose tissue, liver, skeletal muscle, and heart, and conclude by outlining possible avenues for future exploration. (shrink)

Based on the concept of “passengers self-help hubbing,” we build a flight schedule optimization model where maximizing the number of feasible flight connections, indicating transfer opportunities, as one objective and minimizing total slot displacements as the other objective. At the same time, the “Demand Smoothing Model” is introduced into the flight schedule optimization model to reduce the queuing delays for arrival and departure flights. We take into account all aircraft itineraries, the difficulty level of schedule coordination, and the maximum displacement (...) of any single flight acceptable to airlines when optimizing flight schedule. Given an original schedule, the model produces a feasible modified schedule that obeys the slot limits specified for an airport without canceling any flights, increases transfer opportunities, and improves on-time performance for hub airports while reducing interference with airline scheduling preferences. The model was verified with the operating data of the Urumqi international airport, and the results show that minor adjustments to flight schedules can increase the transfer opportunities of the airport and significantly reduce flight queuing delays. (shrink)

Understanding how teacher leaders are engaged in curriculum affairs is critical with the implementation of instructional decentralization. The current study adopts a qualitative approach to investigate Teaching Research Group leaders’ involvement in curriculum leadership in the Chinese context. It explores the conceptions of TRG leaders by interviewing 20 of them, observing four meetings held by TRG leaders, and collecting 10 extracts from appraisal summaries of TRG leaders in secondary schools in China. Drawing on the findings, this paper examines the characteristics (...) of TRG leader’s engagement in CL. More importantly, data highlighted significant problems the participants perceived and faced in their work as TRG leaders, which consisted of amplifying the necessity for empowering TRG leaders and identifying the phenomenon that said leaders are less empowered and less motivated to undertake the CL role. The results add to the international body of knowledge on the teachers’ engagement in CL. (shrink)

本书以专题的形式对哲学的一些基本理论、基本知识作了既有一定理论深度又有比较通俗易懂的阐述.

Extant studies of corporate hypocrisy have largely overlooked its implications for employees until recently. Drawing upon social information processing theory, we theorize the impact of corporate hypocrisy on employee silence—an employee behavior potentially detrimental to both organizations and society, as well as the underlying mediating and moderating mechanisms. We empirically tested our hypotheses with two studies. In Study 1, we found that corporate hypocrisy was positively related to employee silence through both employee cognitive trust and employee prosocial motivation. In Study (...) 2, we revealed that consumer pressure weakened the mediating roles of employee cognitive trust and prosocial motivation, while regulatory pressure strengthened these roles. Overall, this study sheds light on whether, how, and when employees remain silent when they perceive corporate hypocrisy. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. (shrink)

Authoritarian leadership is of great significance to eastern countries, including China. Meanwhile, unethical employee behavior also exists in all types of social organizations. The relationship between authoritarian leadership and unethical employee behavior is worth studying. Senior leaders often do not have a direct influence on employees except for through their immediate supervisors. The leadership style of senior leaders also influences the leadership style of their subordinates. This paper studies how authoritarian manager leadership trickles down to unethical employee behavior through authoritarian (...) supervisor leadership and discusses the moderating effect of leader member exchange and an ethical climate. Through a questionnaire survey of 406 pairs of leaders, supervisors, and employees, the research results of the multilevel model show that authoritarian supervisor leadership is positively related to unethical employee behavior, authoritarian supervisor leadership mediates the relationship between authoritarian manager leadership and unethical employee behavior, LMX positively moderates the relationship between authoritarian manager leadership and authoritarian supervisor leadership and moderates the mediating effect of authoritarian supervisor leadership, and, that an ethical climate negatively moderates the relationship between authoritarian supervisor leadership and unethical employee behavior and moderates the mediating effect of authoritarian supervisor leadership. (shrink)

A nonlinear coupled wing model subject to unknown external disturbances is proposed in this paper. Since the model is modeled by partial differential equations, the traditional control design scheme based on the ordinary differential equation model is not applicable, and the control law design becomes very complex. In this paper, a new antidisturbance boundary control scheme based on a finite time convergent disturbance observer is proposed. The control laws are designed based on the new disturbance observers to make the external (...) disturbance errors converge to zero in a finite time and ensure the uniformly bounded stability of the controlled system. Finally, the effectiveness of the controllers and the finite-time convergence of disturbance errors are verified by the simulation and comparison. (shrink)

People’s comfort with and acceptability of artificial intelligence (AI) instantiations is a topic that has received little systematic study. This is surprising given the topic’s relevance to the design, deployment and even regulation of AI systems. To help fill in our knowledge base, we conducted mixed-methods analysis based on a survey of a representative sample of the US population (_N_ = 2254). Results show that there are two distinct social dimensions to comfort with AI: as a peer and as a (...) superior. For both dimensions, general and technological efficacy traits—locus of control, communication apprehension, robot phobia, and perceived technology competence—are strongly associated with acceptance of AI in various roles. Female and older respondents also were less comfortable with the idea of AI agents in various roles. A qualitative analysis of comments collected from respondents complemented our statistical approach. We conclude by exploring the implications of our research for AI acceptability in society. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that in any country, the realization of sexual equality requires a certain level of economic development. I support this general theme by examining a particular case—a dilemma faced by Chinese feminists today. I intend to show that in a developing country such as China, where heavy physical labor is still in great demand in daily life and productive activity, full sexual equality cannot be a reality.

By examining an exemplar sample of mental health nursing educational policies and related legislation, in this article, we trace the discursive production of madness as an “othered” identity category. We engage in a critical discourse analysis of mental health nursing education in Canada, drawing on provincial and federal policies and legislation as the main sources of data. Theoretically framed by critical posthumanism and mad studies, this article outlines how the mad subjectivity becomes decontextualized out of its identity‐based understanding and recontextualized (...) as an inferior category of “the human,” circulating within discourses of pedagogy, economics, law, and psychiatry. The article maps the intertextual nexus of the discourse of mental health nursing education, making visible the complex, the arbitrary, and the sometimes‐contradictory nature of the discipline's grappling with identity‐based mental health concepts. We close with several implications for nursing policy, education, and practice. (shrink)

If an agent prefers one kind of agents to the other agents, then the agent has first-order preferences. If the agent prefers agents with one kind of preferences to the other agents, then the agent has second-order preferences. The article proposes a sound, complete, and decidable logical system capable of expressing higher-order preferences.

This chapter contains section titled: Pluralistic Epistemology Panstructuralism Cultural Epistemology.

: In this essay I argue that in any country, the realization of sexual equality requires a certain level of economic development. I support this general theme by examining a particular case--a dilemma faced by Chinese feminists today. I intend to show that in a developing country such as China, where heavy physical labor is still in great demand in daily life and productive activity, full sexual equality cannot be a reality.

Background:There is controversy concerning the use of physical restraint. Despite this controversy, some nurses still consider the application of physical restraint unavoidable for some of their clients.Aim:Identify the perceptions and practice of physical restraint in China.Research design:This was a descriptive study that combined qualitative interviews with a quantitative cross-sectional survey.Participants:A total of 18 nurses were interviewed and 330 nurses were surveyed.Ethical considerations:Approval of the study was obtained from the hospital ethics committee. Permission to conduct the study was obtained from the (...) director of nursing. Participants were assured that their participation is voluntary.Results:Physical restraint was commonly used to protect patients’ safety. Naturally, intensive care unit nurses used physical restraint much more frequently than general medical/surgical ward nurses ( p < 0.01). In addition, night shift nurses tended to use physical restraint more frequently.Conclusion:Nursing managers should be aware of the role nurses play in the use of physical restraint. In-service training regarding the proper use of physical restraint should be strengthened and nurse staffing levels should be improved in order to minimize the use of physical restraint in China. (shrink)

Greed is one of the most common features of human nature, and it has recently attracted increasing research interest. The aims of this paper are to provide one of the first empirical investigations of the effects of greed on job performance and to explore the mediating role of the need for social status and perceived distributive justice. Using a working sample (N = 315) from China, the current study found that greed promoted both task and contextual performance through the intermediary (...) effect of the need for social status. At the same time, greed inhibited both types of performance through perceived distributive justice. These results confirmed our hypothesis that greed is a double-edged sword with opposite effects on one’s performance. The findings suggest that organizations should both address greedy employees’ social status concerns and ensure that they are treated fairly so that organizations can fully utilize the talents of greedy people and channel their energy in a beneficial direction. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This study investigated what information about brain death was available from Google searches for five major religions. A substantial body of supporting research examining online behaviors shows that information seekers use Google as their preferred search engine and usually limit their search to entries on the first page. For each of the five religions in this study, Google listings reveal ethical controversy about organ donation in the context of brain death. These results suggest that family members who go online (...) to find information about organ donation in the context of brain death would find information about ethical controversy in the first page of Google listings. Organ procurement agencies claim that all major world religions approve of organ donation and do not address the ethical controversy about organ donation in the context of brain death that is readily available online. (shrink)

This article hopes to accomplish two goals: first, it proposes a more effective framework for philosophers who engage in philosophical interpretations and constructions of Chan Buddhist texts, like the Linji Lu, to deal with challenges from historians when the integrity of those Chan texts as well as their authorship is called into question, so that a more robust intellectual space for the philosophical discourse on Chan classics can be carved out from the dominant historicist discourse. Accordingly, I argue that philosophical (...) and historical approaches to Chan classics have divergent scholarly objectives and follow different disciplinary norms. To clarify such divergence, I propose a hermeneutical model to distinguish two sets of scholarly objects operative in history and philosophy respectively, namely original versus inherited text, historical versus textual author, and authorial versus textual intent. These scholarly objects are related, at times even overlapped but often irreducibly distinct, with the former in the pairs belonging to historians and the latter to philosophers. Second, the article puts forward an alternative interpretation of Linji’s signature teaching of sudden enlightenment by connecting Linji’s demand for immediacy in his training of disciples with the nurturing of a particular set of character traits conducive to Chan enlightenment. It argues that only those practitioners with a strong character can weather the grueling demand of the arduous spiritual journey prescribed in Chan teachings. Therefore, I describe Linji’s teaching as advocating that “character is the Way,” wherein the Way refers to the Chan path of enlightenment. (shrink)

One of the most efficient nondestructive methods for pipeline in-line inspection is magnetic flux leakage inspection. Estimating the size of the defect from MFL signal is one of the key problems of MFL inspection. As the inspection signal is usually contaminated by noise, sizing the defect is an ill-posed inverse problem, especially when sizing the depth as a complex shape. An actor-critic structure-based algorithm is proposed in this paper for sizing complex depth profiles. By learning with more information from the (...) depth profile without knowing the corresponding MFL signal, the algorithm proposed saves computational costs and is robust. A pinning strategy is embedded in the reconstruction process, which highly reduces the dimension of action space. The pinning actor-critic structure helps to make the reward for critic network more efficient when reconstructing the depth profiles with high degrees of freedom. A nonlinear FEM model is used to test the effectiveness of algorithm proposed under 20 dB noise. The results show that the algorithm reconstructs the depth profile of defects with good accuracy and is robust against noise. (shrink)

Risky driving behavior is a major cause of traffic conflicts, which can develop into road traffic accidents, making the timely and accurate identification of such behavior essential to road safety. A platform was therefore established for analyzing the driving behavior of 20 professional drivers in field tests, in which overclose car following and lane departure were used as typical risky driving behaviors. Characterization parameters for identification were screened and used to determine threshold values and an appropriate time window for identification. (...) A neural network-Bayesian filter identification model was established and data samples were selected to identify risky driving behavior and evaluate the identification efficiency of the model. The results obtained indicated a successful identification rate of 83.6% when the neural network model was solely used to identify risky driving behavior, but this could be increased to 92.46% once corrected by the Bayesian filter. This has important theoretical and practical significance in relation to evaluating the efficiency of existing driver assist systems, as well as the development of future intelligent driving systems. (shrink)

This study investigated what information about brain death was available from Google searches for five major religions. A substantial body of supporting research examining online behaviors shows that information seekers use Google as their preferred search engine and usually limit their search to entries on the first page. For each of the five religions in this study, Google listings reveal ethical controversy about organ donation in the context of brain death. These results suggest that family members who go online to (...) find information about organ donation in the context of brain death would find information about ethical controversy in the first page of Google listings. Organ procurement agencies claim that all major world religions approve of organ donation and do not address the ethical controversy about organ donation in the context of brain death that is readily available online. (shrink)

This essay is an attempt to sketch out two contrasting notions of freedom in the Zhuangzi and the Xunzi . I argue that to understand the classical Chinese formulations of freedom we should look at the concept of hua 化 (transformation or to transform). It is a kind of freedom that highlights the moral and/or spiritual transformation of the self and its entailments on the connection between the self and various domains of relationality. The Zhuangzian hua is the transformation of (...) the self in such a way that the self becomes supremely attuned to the complexity of the world and can thus navigate various domains of relationality with extraordinary grace, ease, and efficacy. The Xunzian hua is the transformation of the self so that the self can extend its relationality to include the entire world and transform it from a raw and uncouth world to a civilized one through ritual practices. (shrink)

Source domain verification has not received as much attention as criteria for metaphor identification in the study of conceptual metaphor. In this paper, we provide a replicable approach to source...

Discussing the issues of “Asia,” Takeuchi Yoshimi’s discourse of “Overcoming Modernity” has received broad attention among the international community of scholars. Commentators try to identify the ideological elements of this discourse that, as they hope, could help to solve post-modern problems. After analysing Takeuchi’s understanding of the war and its context, this paper shows that his discourse of “overcoming modernity” has an anti-historical tendency, which stems from the ideological ambiguity of his attitude towards the question of who was responsible for (...) the war. (shrink)

Ten years ago, conceptual history was still relatively unknown in Chinese academic circles. But within just a single decade, it has already emerged as a very popular field among scholars. When broaching conceptual history, the first thing to make clear is that, whether we’re speaking of a research field or a methodology, this is a scholarly tradition rooted in Germany. Hence, if we are to apply conceptual historical methods to China and carry out transcultural conceptual historical research here, we must (...) understand the basic connotations of conceptual history. Reinhart Koselleck’s introduction to 8 volumes of Basic Concepts of History: An Historical Lexicon of Political and Social Terms in Germany is an essential text in conceptual history. In this work, Koselleck proposes three These for conceptual history: concepts are historical, criteria for the “four changes” of basic historical concepts, and the “saddle period.”. (shrink)

If we do not shrink from making rough generalizations and adopt a broad, conventional approach, then what we call modernity refers to the process whereby a state of heterogeneity progresses toward homogeneity in time, space, human collectives, social order, and other areas. In his book The Cheese and the Worms, Carlo Ginzburg discusses a late-16th century incident of heterodoxy that cannot be classified into previously existing standard categories. As new knowledge was disseminated thanks to the invention of the Gutenberg printing (...) press, old and new knowledge came into conflict in the mind of a heterodox figure by the name of Menocchio. He attacked the church, saying that it was more important to love one’s neighbor than to love God. Through these small, humble manifestations of change, Ginzburg was able to reveal the juncture when European modern knowledge first emerged from a muddled, undifferentiated state into one of clarity, whereby over the course of about a century of fermentation, its contours eventually became clearly evident around the year 1800. This process has been termed by the pioneer of conceptual history Otto Brunner as the “threshold era”, and by Reinhart Koselleck as the beginning of the “saddle era”. (shrink)