Spoken word recognition involves a perceptual tradeoff between the reliance on the incoming acoustic signal and knowledge about likely sound categories and their co-occurrences as words. This study examined how adult second language (L2) learners navigate between acoustic-based and knowledge-based spoken word recognition when listening to highly variable, multi-talker truncated speech, and whether this perceptual tradeoff changes as L2 listeners gradually become more proficient in their L2 after multiple months of structured classroom learning. First language (L1) Mandarin Chinese listeners and (...) L1 English-L2 Mandarin adult listeners took part in a gating experiment. The L2 listeners were tested twice—once at the start of their intermediate/advanced L2 language class and again two months later. L1 listeners were only tested once. Participants were asked to identify syllable-tone words that varied in syllable token frequency (high/low according to a spoken word corpus) and syllable-conditioned tonal probability (most probable/least probable in speech given the syllable). The stimuli were recorded by 16 different talkers and presented at eight gates ranging from onset-only (gate 1) through onset+40 ms increments (gates 2 through 7) to the full word (gate 8). Mixed-effects regression modeling was used to compare performance to our previous study which used single-talker stimuli (Wiener, Lee, & Tao, 2019). The results indicated that multi-talker speech caused both L1 and L2 listeners to rely greater on knowledge-based processing of tone. L1 listeners were able to draw on distributional knowledge of syllable-tone probabilities in early gates and switch to predominantly acoustic-based processing when more of the signal was available. In contrast, L2 listeners, with their limited experience with talker range normalization, were less able to effectively transition from probability-based to acoustic-based processing. Moreover, for the L2 listeners, the reliance on such distributional information for spoken word recognition appeared to be conditioned by the nature of the acoustic signal. Single-talker speech did not result in the same pattern of probability-based tone processing, suggesting that knowledge-based processing of L2 speech may only occur under certain acoustic conditions, such as multi-talker speech. (shrink)

Blockchain technology applied to cryptocurrencies is the dominant factor in maintaining the security of cryptocurrencies. This article reviews the technological implementation of cryptocurrency and the security and stability of cryptocurrency and analyzes the security support from blockchain technology and its platforms based on empirical case studies. Our results show that the security support from blockchain technology platforms is significantly insufficient and immature. In addition, we further Zyskind and Nathan and Choi and find that the top ten platforms play critical roles (...) in security support and have significant advantages in terms of funds, duration, and human resources. Moreover, these platforms provide computational resources and benefits to the consensus algorithm selection for blockchain practitioners. Second, encryption ensures the security of cryptocurrencies. On the one hand, the digital signatures identify the identity of the signatory and the transaction. However, the principle of the hash algorithm confirms ownership. Meanwhile, SHA256 is infeasible to compute in the reverse direction and is difficult to attack. Furthermore, the records in the blockchain can be queried by every participant, making the system information transparent and open reliable. Third, compared to the study of Fu and Fang 2016, we find that the blockchain structure is composed of security components and basic components of six layers that are independent and cannot be extended completely and have a certain coupling among them. Fourth, the underlying ledger structures of Bitcoin and DAG are highly correlated to their security. Specifically, we follow Sompolinsky et al. and detect that the structure of SPECTRE ensures network security and robustness from its block production, conflict resolution, and generated trusted transaction sets. Meanwhile, the voting algorithm of SPECTRE makes resolving conflicting transactions by calculating votes and ensuring the transaction information that is virtually unable to be tampered with possible. In particular, the security calculation power of SPECTRE can reach 51% and resist “double-spend attacks” and “censorship attacks” effectively. In addition, the RDL framework of SPECTRE achieves security confirmation of transferring funds. Moreover, PHANTOM identifies evil blocks by employing block connectivity analysis and ensures its security. Eventually, we also expand the studies of and compare the basic characteristics of the protocols of Bitcoin, SPECTRE, and PHANTOM and find that protocols play imperative roles throughout the implementation process of cryptocurrency. In addition, the underlying ledger structure and consensus mechanism make up a blockchain while the confirmation time, throughput limit, and ordering are prerequisites for smart contracts. (shrink)

In the context of coronavirus pandemic, the face-recognition-based access control system has been intensively adopted to protect students’ and teachers’ health and safety in school. However, the impact of FACS, as a new technology, on students’ attitude toward accepting FACS has remained unknown from the psychological halo effect. Drawn on “halo effect” theory where psychological effects affect the sense of social identity and belonging, the present study explored college students’ sense of school identity and belonging in using FACS during COVID-19 (...) based on the technology acceptance model. Data collected from 391 college students was analyzed using SEM to verify the relationship among perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, intention to use, school identity, and school belonging. The results show that PU and PEU can positively predict IU, and consequentially can positively predict school identity and school belonging. Our study expands the application of halo effect theory to study FACS acceptance based on TAM, and provides strong evidence to support the effect of school FACS during the pandemic. The findings of this study also suggest that FACS acceptance can enhance students’ sense of school identity and belonging. (shrink)

Fraud can cause severe financial losses and affect the physical and mental health of victims. This study aimed to explore the manipulative characteristics of fraudsters and their relationship with other psychological variables. Thirty-four fraudsters were selected from a medium-security prison in China, and thirty-one healthy participants were recruited online. Both groups completed an emotional face-recognition task and self-report measures assaying emotional manipulation, psychopathy, emotion recognition, and empathy. Results showed that imprisoned fraudsters had higher accuracy in identifying fear and surprise faces (...) but lower accuracy in identifying happiness than controls. Significantly lower scores on non-prosocial factors on the Managing the Emotions of Others scale were found for imprisoned fraudsters, relative to controls. Imprisoned fraudsters had low scores in the assessment of psychopathy than the control group, especially Factor 1. For empathy, imprisoned fraudsters had significantly higher scores in perspective-taking than controls. Correlation analyses revealed that psychopathic traits were positively correlated with non-prosocial factors in both groups. However, the relationships between emotional manipulation and emotional recognition and empathy were not consistent across the groups. The results suggest that fraudsters may pretend to be as prosocial as healthy controls, who had lower antisocial tendencies, normal empathy ability, and would like to manipulate others’ emotions positively during social interaction. (shrink)

Employee innovation is the cornerstone of the organization, and the motivation for employee innovative behavior largely depends on the leadership style of the leader. With the economic development of society, the traditional authoritative style of leadership can no longer adapt to the psychological characteristics of employees, who use new-era work concepts, techniques, and social rules (hereafter, new generation workers). Inclusive leadership is based on the concept of “fully inclusive and equitable” in traditional Chinese culture, and it can adapt to the (...) independent needs of new generation employees. At present, the research on the relationship between the traditional leadership style and employee innovative behavior is relatively extensive, but there is little research on the relationship between inclusive leadership style and employee innovative behavior, and this needs further exploration. This paper takes new generation employees as the sample and uses psychological capital as an intermediary variable to explore the influence of inclusive leadership style on the innovative behaviors of new generation employees. We found that inclusive leadership is significantly and positively related to new generation employees’ innovative behaviors. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

The choice of coping style of recruits under psychological stress in the process of military task execution has been an important topic in the promotion of military operations and cohesion of military forces. Taking a positive coping style under psychological stress can help recruits overcome the negative effects of stress and improve military morale and group combat effectiveness. Although soldiers' psychological stress in the process of military mission execution having an impact on coping style has been studied by a large (...) body of literature, very little literature has focused on the mechanism of self-efficacy and social support between recruits' psychological stress and coping style from the person-environment fit perspective. Therefore, this study was conducted to analyze the impact of recruits' psychological stress on coping style through a chain mediation model and to discuss the role of self-efficacy and social support in this relationship. Two waves of survey data were utilized to test the research hypotheses on a sample of 1028 Chinese recruits performing military tasks. The results indicated that recruits' psychological stress negatively impacted positive coping styles and positively correlated with negative ones. In addition, self-efficacy and social support mediated the relationship between psychological stress and positive coping style, and self-efficacy mediated the relationship between psychological stress and negative coping style. More importantly, self-efficacy and social support play the chain mediating effect between psychological stress and positive coping style. (shrink)

Recently, infrared human action recognition has attracted increasing attention for it has many advantages over visible light, that is, being robust to illumination change and shadows. However, the infrared action data is limited until now, which degrades the performance of infrared action recognition. Motivated by the idea of transfer learning, an infrared human action recognition framework using auxiliary data from visible light is proposed to solve the problem of limited infrared action data. In the proposed framework, we first construct a (...) novel Cross-Dataset Feature Alignment and Generalization framework to map the infrared data and visible light data into a common feature space, where Kernel Manifold Alignment and a dual aligned-to-generalized encoders model are employed to represent the feature. Then, a support vector machine is trained, using both the infrared data and visible light data, and can classify the features derived from infrared data. The proposed method is evaluated on InfAR, which is a publicly available infrared human action dataset. To build up auxiliary data, we set up a novel visible light action dataset XD145. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art performance compared with several transfer learning and domain adaptation methods. (shrink)

Tradition wireless sensor networks transmit data by single or multiple hops. However, some sensor nodes close to a static base station forward data more frequently than others, which results in the problem of energy holes and makes networks fragile. One promising solution is to use a mobile node as a mobile sink, which is especially useful in energy-constrained networks. In these applications, the tour planning of MS is a key to guarantee the network performance. In this paper, a novel strategy (...) is proposed to reduce the latency of mobile data gathering in a WSN while the routing strategies and tour planning of MS are jointly optimized. First, the issue of network coverage is discussed before the appropriate number of clusters being calculated. A dynamic clustering scheme is then developed where a virtual cluster center is defined as the MS sojourn for data collection. Afterwards, a tour planning of MS based on prediction is proposed subject to minimizing the traveling distance to collect data. The proposed method is simulated in a MATLAB platform to show the overall performance of the developed system. Furthermore, the physical tests on a test rig are also carried out where a small WSN based on an unmanned aerial vehicle is developed in our laboratory. The test results validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the method proposed. (shrink)

To understand the gaps between current bioethics education and the requirements of practicing nurses, a semistructured questionnaire was used to invite the directors of nursing departments at all 82 teaching hospitals in Taiwan to participate in this survey. The response rate was 64.6%. Through content analysis we obtained information about previous bioethical training, required themes and content, recommended teaching strategies, and difficulties with education and its application. The results suggest that Taiwanese nursing personnel need to be instilled with both self-cultivation (...) of morality and mental cultivation to acquire nursing virtues and the right attitudes toward bioethical issues. Good communication skills to prevent damage to the harmonious relationships between patients, their families and medical team members, policies that support the provision of systematic formal knowledge of ethics, small group training, and clarification of values were also shown to be important in bioethics education. (shrink)

A growing body of research has started to examine how individuals from different countries may differ in their use of ethically questionable tactics during business negotiations. Whereas prior research focused on the main effect of the national culture or nationality of the negotiator, we add a new factor, which is the nationality of the counterpart. Looking at both these variables allows us to examine whether and how people may change their likelihood of using ethically questionable tactics in inter-cultural negotiations as (...) opposed to intra-cultural ones. Results of an experiment show that overall, American participants were less likely than Chinese participants to use ethically questionable tactics in negotiations. However, American participants were more likely to use ethically questionable tactics, particularly those related to false promises and inappropriate information gathering, in inter-cultural negotiations with Chinese counterparts, than in intra-cultural negotiations with American counterparts. By contrast, Chinese participants were less likely to use ethically questionable tactics, particularly those related to false promises and attacking opponent’s network, in inter-cultural negotiations with American counterparts, than in intra-cultural negotiations with Chinese counterparts. Implications and future directions are discussed. (shrink)

As an unusual event, fasting can induce strong physiological and psychological reactions, but there is still no clear understanding of how previous fasting experiences affect people’s responses to current fasting. This study aimed to investigate the influence of previous fasting experiences on participants’ basic physiological and psychological responses in a fasting experiment conducted under intensive medical monitoring. For a 22-day experiment divided into four phases, a total of 13 persons participated; the participants were divided into a group with prior fasting (...) experience and a group without prior fasting experience. The results indicate no group differences in physiological responses ; however, differences in psychological states were observed, with the Newbie group showing more negative psychological states overall throughout the experiment. Hence, previous fasting experience may be a buffer against negative feelings during current fasting. For this reason, it is important to consider fasting experiences as a vital factor in future research. (shrink)

Resource saving has become an integral aspect of manufacturing in industry 4.0. This paper proposes a multisystem optimization algorithm, inspired by implicit parallelism of heuristic methods, to solve an integrated production scheduling with resource saving problem in textile printing and dyeing. First, a real-world integrated production scheduling with resource saving is formulated as a multisystem optimization problem. Then, the MSO algorithm is proposed to solve multisystem optimization problems that consist of several coupled subsystems, and each of the subsystems may contain (...) multiple objectives and multiple constraints. The proposed MSO algorithm is composed of within-subsystem evolution and cross-subsystem migration operators, and the former is to optimize each subsystem by excellent evolution operators and the later is to complete information sharing between multiple subsystems, to accelerate the global optimization of the whole system. Performance is tested on a set of multisystem benchmark functions and compared with improved NSGA-II and multiobjective multifactorial evolutionary algorithm. Simulation results show that the MSO algorithm is better than compared algorithms for the benchmark functions studied in this paper. Finally, the MSO algorithm is successfully applied to the proposed integrated production scheduling with resource saving problem, and the results show that MSO is a promising algorithm for the studied problem. (shrink)

This study investigated the effect of obstructive sleep apnea on the neural mechanism of visual perception. A preliminary case-control study was conducted. Seventeen patients with moderate to severe OSA in the sleep center of Civil Aviation General Hospital and 20 healthy controls matched for age, sex, and education were recruited. The participants accepted the perceptual contour integration task, compared the differences in behavioral indicators between the two groups, and compared the differences in electroencephalography data between the two groups through event-related (...) potential technology. The groups did not differ significantly in age and gender, but they differed significantly in body mass index. The groups were not statistically different in terms of sleep structure and total sleep time. AHI, sleep efficiency, and minimal SaO2 value in the OSA group were significantly different from those of the control group. The results showed that the average reaction time of the OSA group was significantly longer than that of the healthy control group in the contour integration task. There was no significant difference in the accuracy rate. The results of EEG showed that the amplitudes of N100 of the OSA group were significantly higher than those of the control group at O1, Oz, and O2 electrodes. There was no significant difference in latency between the two groups. At the FCz electrode, the amplitudes of N200 of the OSA group were significantly higher than those of the control group. Therefore, we concluded that in the early stage of the perceptual integration task, although the neural response activity of patients with moderate and severe OSA was not accelerated, they need to call on more psychological resources, activate more neurons in the contour global recognition processing stage, and the compensatory effect of frontal lobe appeared in the stage of visual perception. (shrink)

The ability to recover from official match-play across a single and multiple matches is often considered a key factor in subsequent performance for modern professional basketball. The aims of this study were to: explore the differences in match performances between different match congestion cycles ; and identify the key performance indicators discriminating between winning and losing during different match congestion cycles. The current study indicated that scoring close to or very far away was significantly greater for winning matches separated by (...) 1- and 2-days of rest compared to consecutive matches. Additionally, shooting efficiency, and attaining Defensive Rebounds and Steals, were significant offensive and defensive KPIs that differentiated winning and losing teams. Similarly, opponent quality and match pace were important situational variables that affected match outcome during different match congestion cycles. While match location had an impact on winning following 1- and 2-days of rest, it had no impact for back-to-back matches. The current results will support coaches' offensive, defensive and recovery strategies during various match congestion cycles for a greater probability of winning NBA matches. (shrink)

This study introduces visual cognition into Lithium-ion battery capacity estimation. The proposed method consists of four steps. First, the acquired charging current or discharge voltage data in each cycle are arranged to form a two-dimensional image. Second, the generated image is decomposed into multiple spatial-frequency channels with a set of orientation subbands by using non-subsampled contourlet transform. NSCT imitates the multichannel characteristic of the human visual system that provides multiresolution, localization, directionality, and shift invariance. Third, several time-domain indicators of the (...) NSCT coefficients are extracted to form an initial high-dimensional feature vector. Similarly, inspired by the HVS manifold sensing characteristic, the Laplacian eigenmap manifold learning method, which is considered to reveal the evolutionary law of battery performance degradation within a low-dimensional intrinsic manifold, is used to further obtain a low-dimensional feature vector. Finally, battery capacity degradation is estimated using the geodesic distance on the manifold between the initial and the most recent features. Verification experiments were conducted using data obtained under different operating and aging conditions. Results suggest that the proposed visual cognition approach provides a highly accurate means of estimating battery capacity and thus offers a promising method derived from the emerging field of cognitive computing. (shrink)

In the field of natural language processing, the task of sensitive information detection refers to the procedure of identifying sensitive words for given documents. The majority of existing detection methods are based on the sensitive-word tree, which is usually constructed via the common prefixes of different sensitive words from the given corpus. Yet, these traditional methods suffer from a couple of drawbacks, such as poor generalization and low efficiency. For improvement purposes, this paper proposes a novel self-attention-based detection algorithm using (...) the implementation of graph convolutional network. The main contribution is twofold. Firstly, we consider a weighted GCN to better encode word pairs from the given documents and corpus. Secondly, a simple, yet effective, attention mechanism is introduced to further integrate the interaction among candidate words and corpus. Experimental results from the benchmarking dataset of THUC news demonstrate a promising detection performance, compared to existing work. (shrink)

An experiment explored the acquisition of conscious and unconscious knowledge of semantic prosody in a second language under incidental and intentional learning conditions. Semantic prosody is the conotational coloring of the semantics of a word, largely uncaptured by dictionary definitions. Contrary to some claims in the literature, we revealed that both conscious and unconscious knowledge were involved in the acquisition of semantic prosody. Intentional learning resulted in similar unconscious but more conscious knowledge than incidental learning. The results are discussed in (...) terms of second language learning and the nature of unconscious knowledge. (shrink)

Data heterogeneity is the obstacle for the resource sharing on Semantic Web, and ontology is regarded as a solution to this problem. However, since different ontologies are constructed and maintained independently, there also exists the heterogeneity problem between ontologies. Ontology matching is able to identify the semantic correspondences of entities in different ontologies, which is an effective method to address the ontology heterogeneity problem. Due to huge memory consumption and long runtime, the performance of the existing ontology matching techniques requires (...) further improvement. In this work, an extended compact genetic algorithm-based ontology entity matching technique is proposed, which uses both the compact encoding mechanism and linkage learning approach to match the ontologies efficiently. Compact encoding mechanism does not need to store and maintain the whole population in the memory during the evolving process, and the utilization of linkage learning protects the chromosome’s building blocks, which is able to reduce the algorithm’s running time and ensure the alignment’s quality. In the experiment, ECGA-OEM is compared with the participants of ontology alignment evaluation initiative and the state-of-the-art ontology matching techniques, and the experimental results show that ECGA-OEM is both effective and efficient. (shrink)

With the accelerating aging of the population and the worsening psychological conditions of older people, the traditional mode of family support for the elderly in China does not always meet the physical and psychological needs of the elderly, and more social support modes for the elderly are needed. Based on 3,513 valid questionnaires on the long-term care and protection needs of Chinese residents, this paper uses a logit regression model to analyze the factors influencing the willingness of the elderly to (...) choose nursing care. The results show that intergenerational family support for the elderly is a significant psychological driver on the willingness of the elderly to choose nursing care. Compared with the elderly living with family, empty nesters or older people living alone are more inclined to select nursing care when they have difficulties taking care of themselves. The physical health of the elderly affects their willingness to choose nursing care, and elderly individuals with more hospitalizations are less likely to select nursing care. In addition, elderly females who are relatively young, have a high level of education, have a high income, have a nursing home near the residence, and are already covered by medical insurance are more willing to choose nursing care. The results of this study are of great importance for improving the medical services and aging care services for the elderly and providing theoretical support for alleviating the psychological and social pressure brought by population aging. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Symposium Art and Aesthetic Education in Times of Terror: Negotiating an Ethics and Aesthetics of Answerability Deanne Bogdan University of Toronto Claudia Eppert Louisiana State University Candace Yang Louisiana State University Charlene Morton University of Prince Edward Island The terrorist attacks of 1 1 September 2001 have created a climate of loss and fear among many in the western world. Some educators have maintained that any discussion ofthese (...) events so soon after they have happened threatens to dishonor the memory ofthe victims and is too difficult because ofour emotional unsettlement. These concerns are warranted; any discussion would indeed need to be mindful ofthem. The predominant position ofthis symposium, however, is that these events have created such chaos and uncertainty that we are faced with the immediate challenge not of disavowing or deferring discussion but rather of determining the initial terms of an ethical answerability. Thesymposiumparticipants seek to initiate such a difficult conversation in the hope that aspects of it might offer a productive resource forclassroompracticeanddailylivingas we find our way through grief and moral confusion. Thediscussion centers ontheroleaesthetics and aesthetic education haveplayed and continue to play in responding to these events and their aftermath. In particular, it considers the terms on which the arts might variably serve as a vehicle for consolation and healing, for honoring the victims of this event, and for educating present and future generations about what happened and about the requirements ofpeace. Furthermore, the challengefacedbythearts andaestheticeducation in addressingNorthAmerica's psychic and social needs is increased in recognition that these challenges are occurring in a context heavily infused with senseless violence and nationalist rhetoric. This context makes evident the need for artists and educators to help map an ethical and spiritual terrain for re-evaluating the "American way of life," national identities, and democracy itself. It is amappingthat shouldnot takeplace outsidethe arena ofthe political, but should respond to and intervene in it. It is a mapping, therefore, directed toward helping find"a wayofdevelopingapraxis ofeducational consequence that opens the spaces necessary for the remaking ofa democratic community " (Maxine Greene, The Dialectic ofFreedom [New York: Teachers College Press, 1988], 126). The papers in this symposium were originally presented as a panel discussion at a special session of the Philosophy of Education Society (PES) annualmeeting,Vancouver,BritishColumbia, in April 2002.©Philosophy ofMusic Education Review 10, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 124-139.... (shrink)

For a long time, Lin Biao and the "gang of four" completely annihilated the place and function of the identity of contradiction in the development of things. Above all, the special significance of the unity of contradiction under socialist conditions was looked upon as a deviant heresy and a taboo to be carefully avoided. Concealing their true intentions, they clamored for the so-called "struggle philosophy," saying that revolutionary unity and stable consolidation represented compromise and capitulationism, reducing contradiction to struggle, confusing (...) chaos for struggle, and turning their philosophy of beating up counter-revolutionaries against the revolutionary dialectic. This severely damaged the tasks of socialist revolution and construction and created social stagnation and regression throughout China. Thus one of the urgent tasks of the present philosophical line is to reveal the place and function of the identity of contradiction inherent in the development of things, to restore identity to its proper place within the theory of contradiction, and to further clarify the special significance of the identity of contradiction under socialist conditions. (shrink)