Many people greet evidence of biologically based race and sex differences with extreme skepticism, even hostility. We argue that some of the vehemence with which many intellectuals in the West resist claims about group differences is rooted in the tacit assumption that accepting evidence for group differences in socially valued traits would undermine our reasons to treat people with respect. We call this theegalitarian fallacy. We first explain the fallacy and then give evidence that self-described liberals in the United States (...) are especially likely to commit it when they reason about topics like race and sex. We then argue that people should not be as worried as they often are about research that finds psychological differences between men and women, or between people of different racial or ethnic groups. We conclude that if moral equality is believed to rest on biological identity, ethnically diverse societies are in trouble. (shrink)

For years, experimental philosophers have attempted to discern whether laypeople find free will compatible with a scientifically deterministic understanding of the universe, yet no consensus has emerged. The present work provides one potential explanation for these discrepant findings: People are strongly motivated to preserve free will and moral responsibility, and thus do not have stable, logically rigorous notions of free will. Seven studies support this hypothesis by demonstrating that a variety of logically irrelevant (but motivationally relevant) features influence compatibilist judgments. (...) In Study 1, participants who were asked to consider the possibility that our universe is deterministic were more compatibilist than those not asked to consider this possibility, suggesting that determinism poses a threat to moral responsibility, which increases compatibilist responding (thus reducing the threat). In Study 2, participants who considered concrete instances of moral behavior found compatibilist free will more sufficient for moral responsibility than participants who were asked about moral responsibility more generally. In Study 3a, the order in which participants read free will and determinism descriptions influenced their compatibilist judgments—and only when the descriptions had moral significance: Participants were more likely to report that determinism was compatible with free will than that free will was compatible with determinism. In Study 3b, participants who read the free will description first (the more compatibilist group) were particularly likely to confess that their beliefs in free will and moral responsibility and their disbelief in determinism influenced their conclusion. In Study 4, participants reduced their compatibilist beliefs after reading a passage that argued that moral responsibility could be preserved even in the absence of free will. Participants also reported that immaterial souls were compatible with scientific determinism, most strongly among immaterial soul believers (Study 5), and evaluated information about the capacities of primates in a biased manner favoring the existence of human free will (Study 6). These results suggest that people do not have one intuition about whether free will is compatible with determinism. Instead, people report that free will is compatible with determinism when desiring to uphold moral responsibility. Recommendations for future work are discussed. (shrink)

For a graph G, its variable sum exdeg index is defined as SEI a G = ∑ x y ∈ E G a d x + a d y, where a is a real number other than 1 and d x is the degree of a vertex x. In this paper, we characterize all trees on n vertices with first three maximum and first three minimum values of the SEI a index. Also, we determine all the trees of order n (...) with given diameter d and having first three largest values of the SEI a index. (shrink)

We are living in a world which is severely crisis-ridden and faces some major challenges. The fact that we are currently facing a genuine global pandemic brings about even more uncertainty. The social and political institutions, which emerged and consolidated during the 20th century, and which created stability, have become fragile. The young generation born in the 1990s and onwards have experienced 9/11 and the ‘war against terrorism’, the financial crisis of 2008, changes to climate, environmental degradation, and most recently (...) the COVID-19 pandemic. The generation born between 1960 and 1990 have had the same experiences along with severe economic crises in the 1970s and 1980s and the Cold War. Some of these challenges are in different ways intertwined with capitalism and its crises, while others are linked to the rapid development of new technologies, in particular innovations within communication and information technologies. This introduction lists the most important grand challenges facing the world as they have emerged more recently. The five articles following this introduction address some of these challenges, with particular attention to the problems of capitalism and democracy and the relation between these two areas. Most authors agree that climate change and the destruction of the environment are the biggest and most pertinent problems to address, but it is their stance that we can only meet these challenges if democracy is functioning well. (shrink)

The explosion in sequencing technologies has provided us with an instrument to describe mammalian transcriptomes at unprecedented depths. This has revealed that alternative splicing is used extensively not only to generate protein diversity, but also as a means to regulate gene expression post‐transcriptionally. Intron retention (IR) is overwhelmingly perceived as an aberrant splicing event with little or no functional consequence. However, recent work has now shown that IR is used to regulate a specific differentiation event within the haematopoietic system by (...) coupling it to nonsense‐mediated mRNA decay (NMD). Here, we highlight how IR and, more broadly, alternative splicing coupled to NMD (AS‐NMD) can be used to regulate gene expression and how this is deregulated in disease. We suggest that the importance of AS‐NMD is not restricted to the haematopoietic system but that it plays a prominent role in other normal and aberrant biological settings. (shrink)

Starting with Jaakko Hintikka’s seminal work, epistemic logic has now grown up to a huge academic industry. When we look back to its history, however, there is a practical paradox. While Hintikka’s original purpose was to facilitate epistemological discussion, most subsequent work of epistemic logic has been done outside of philosophy, and has been ignored by most mainstream epistemologists. At the current point, one might naturally wonder, does epistemic logic still have something to do with epistemology? Along with Hintikka and (...) a growing number of formal epistemologists, we believe the answer is “yes”. Contemporary epistemology has largely focused on the goal of providing an analysis of knowledge and an answer to skepticism. To avoid skepticism, many epistemologists prefer to define knowledge in terms of evidence and relevant alternatives. A typical saying is that “in order to know that p, one only needs evidence to eliminate all relevant alternatives, rather than all alternatives”. We see such a project as perfectly congenial to the spirit of Hintikka’s epistemic logic. In this paper, we propose an epistemic logic to deal with evidence and relevant alternatives explicitly, and extend EREL to its dynamic version to investigate how different notions of knowledge behavior with the decrease and increase of relevant alternatives. To illustrate its philosophical application, we provide a new formalization of the so called factivity problem of epistemic contextualism. We conclude with some remarks on further developments of our framework. (shrink)

In the traditional system of Chinese families, individuals are embedded in the institution of the family with defined obligations to enhance family development. As a consequence of the male-biased sex ratio at birth in China since the 1980s, an increasing number of surplus rural males have been affected by a marriage squeeze becoming involuntary bachelors. Under China’s universal heterosexual marriage tradition, family development of rural involuntary bachelors has largely been ignored, but in China’s gender-imbalanced society, it is necessary to adopt (...) a family-based approach to identify and study the plight of rural involuntary bachelors. Studies on gender imbalance indicate that these men face multiple risks from the perspectives of their life course, the family life cycle, and the family ethic. To a certain extent, these risks are caused by a conflict between the individual’s family life and family ethics and are mainly reflected in problems concerning marriage, health, and old-age support. Not only do these vulnerabilities affect the individual and family development across the whole life cycle but also pose major risks to social development in the face of strong gender imbalance. In order to deal with risks faced by rural involuntary bachelors, core ethical principles, including autonomy, beneficence, and justice, need to be adopted. Through adjustments to informal support provided by the family and formal support provided by policy-makers, risk of uncertainty in family development faced by rural involuntary bachelors could be reduced. (shrink)

In recent years, due to factors such as rising sea levels, several island nations such as Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati, and the Marshall Islands are in danger of disappearing completely. When the land of an island country disappeared, the human rights protection of Environmentally Displaced Persons in the migration process and the possible loss of their unique culture, language, and lifestyle have aroused great concern. We call such Environmentally Displaced Persons as EDPs. This study selects the EDPs’ data of 241 countries (...) or regions from 2008 to 2018, establishes an ARIMA model, and predicts the future population of EDPs. By combining the influencing factors of cultural loss, the risk assessment model of cultural loss is established to evaluate the possibility of cultural loss during the migration process of EDPs. We have established a Bayesian Network and a Fault Tree Model to demonstrate the improvement brought about by the implementation of policy recommendations from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives and use the method of fault tree analysis to illustrate the importance of policies from the degree of probability reduction after policy changes. Finally, based on the above model establishment and data analysis, corresponding countermeasures are proposed to protect EDPs’ human rights from being violated and their culture will not be lost. (shrink)

Biological pacemakers can be achieved by various gene‐based and cell‐based approaches. Embryonic stem cells (ESCs)‐derived pacemaker cells might be the most promising way to form biological pacemakers, but there are challenges as to how to control the differentiation of ESCs and to overcome the neoplasia, proarrhythmia, or immunogenicity resulting from the use of ESCs. As a potential approach to solve these difficult problems, tissue‐engineering techniques may provide a precise control on the different cell components of multicellular aggregates and the forming (...) of a construct with‐defined architectures and functional properties. The combined interactions between ESC‐derived pacemaker cells, supporting cells, and matrices may completely reproduce pacemaker properties and result in a steady functional unit to induce rhythmic electrical and contractile activities. As ESCs have a high capability for self‐renewal, proliferation, and potential differentiation, we hypothesize that ESCs can be used as a source of pacemaker cells for tissue‐engineering applications and the ambitious goal of biological cardiac pacemakers may ultimately be achieved with ESCs via tissue‐engineering technology. (shrink)

Conventional methods for fault diagnosis typically require a substantial amount of training data. However, for equipment with high reliability, it is arduous to form a large-scale well-annotated dataset due to the expense of data acquisition and costly annotation. Besides, the generated data have a large number of redundant features which degraded the performance of models. To overcome this, we proposed a feature transfer scenario that transfers knowledge from similar fields to enhance the accuracy of fault diagnosis with small sample. To (...) reduces the redundant information, data were filtered according to manifold consistency. Then, features were extracted based on CNN and feature transfer was conducted. For adequate fitness, the joint adaptation of conditional distribution and marginal distribution was used between the two domains. Minimum structural risk and MMD of adaptation were two indicators weighted for training the model. To test the efficiency of the model, we built an airborne fuel pump testbed, and contributed a new dataset that contained 15 categories of fault data, which serves as the small sample dataset in this research. Then the proposed model was applied in our experimental data. As a result, the fault diagnosis rate increases by 28.6% through our proposed model, which is more precise than other classical methods. The results of feature visualization further demonstrate that the features are more distinguished through the proposed method. All code and data are accessible on my GitHub. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo explore the relationship between adolescents’ social mobility belief and their learning engagement, as well as the mediating effect of achievement goal orientation and the moderating effect of psychological capital.MethodA sample of 895 adolescents from Hunan, Jiangxi, Hainan, Henan, and Guangdong provinces were assessed using the social mobility belief questionnaire, the achievement goal orientation questionnaire, the adolescents’ psychological capital questionnaire, and the adolescents’ learning engagement questionnaire.ResultsFirst, adolescents’ social mobility belief was positively related to their learning engagement ; Second, the two (...) achievement goal orientations-mastery goal orientations and performance goal orientations-had mediating effects between social mobility belief and learning engagement ; Third, the relationship between achievement goal orientation and learning engagement was regulated by psychological capital. Adolescents with high psychological capital had higher learning engagement.ConclusionAdolescents’ social mobility belief can directly affect their learning engagement, and it can also indirectly affect their learning engagement through achievement goal orientation moderated by their level of psychological capital. Our findings highlighted the importance of providing adolescents with guidance in setting up positive social values and definitions of success while stimulating their psychological capital as a part of the teaching process. (shrink)

The original design of a software system is rarely prepared for every new requirement. Software systems should be updated frequently, which is usually accompanied by the decline in software modularity and quality. Although many approaches have been proposed to improve the quality of software, a majority of them are guided by metrics defined on the local properties of software. In this article, we propose to use a global metric borrowed from the network science to detect the moving method refactoring. First, (...) our approach uses a bipartite network to represent classes, features, and their dependencies. Second, a new metric is introduced to quantify the modularity of a software system as a whole. Finally, a crossover-only evolutionary algorithm that uses the metric as its fitness function is introduced to optimize the class structure of a software system and detect the methods that should be moved. Empirical results on the benchmark Java projects show that our approach can find meaningful methods that should be moved with a high stability. The advantages of our approach are illustrated in comparison with some other approaches, specifically one refactoring approach, namely search-based refactoring approach, and two community detection algorithms, namely a graph theoretic clustering algorithm and a fast algorithm for community detection. Our approach provides a new way to do refactoring from the perspective of software structure. (shrink)

Environmental education usually appeals to the students’ knowledge and rational understanding. Even though this is needed, there is a neglected aspect of learning ecologically fruitful action; that of the lived-body. This paper introduces the lived-body as an important site for learning ecological action. An argument is made for the need of a biophilia revolution, in which refined experience of the body and enhanced capabilities for sensing are seen as important ways of complementing the more common, knowledge-based environmental education. Alienation from (...) the physical environment is seen as one key element in producing environmental devastation. Consequently, human alienation from nature is seen as closely related to alienation from one's body. It is claimed that through overcoming the dualist alienation of human consciousness from its lived body, we can decrease the alienation of human beings from their environment. Methods of contemplative pedagogy are introduced for addressing alienation. By getting in touch with the tangible lived-body in yoga or mindfulness meditation we reconnect to the material world of nature. Contemplative pedagogy cultivates the body and its senses for learning intrinsic valuation and caring for the environment. Lived-body experience is challenging to conceptualise; we use Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of the flesh in our attempt to do so. Finally, this paper suggests some contemplative practices of the lived-body for environmental education. Experiencing the flesh of oneself and the world as one and the same is an environmentally conducive experience that gives value and meaning to the flourishing of all life, human and non-human. (shrink)

The imminent demise of the nation-state in the face of global capitalism and supra-national agencies like the United Nations has often been predicted, yet in practice the death of the state seems unimaginable: indeed terrorist activity and corporate collapse have made states, if anything, more assertive in recent years, and the condition of 'statelessness' is regarded as pitiable and grave in the extreme. This volume, first published in 2003, offers a coherent survey of perceptions of the state, its history, its (...) theoretical underpinnings, and its prospects in the contemporary world. The coverage of the Western European experience is thorough and wide-ranging, with the greatest post-colonial democratic state, India, as a comparative example. The provocative and accessible contributions of a very distinguished and genuinely pan-European team of contributors ensure that States and Citizens provides a unique and valuable resource, of interest to students and teachers of the history of ideas, political theory and European studies. (shrink)

The consistent tanh expansion method is successfully applied to the coupled integrable dispersionless system. A nonauto-Bäcklund transformation theorem includes two fields f and v 1 is obtained by using the CTE method. One obtains the consistent condition in the nonauto-BT theorem by means of the relation between the fields f and v 1. The CID system possesses the CTE solvability property by some detailed analysis. Many interactions between one soliton and multiple resonant solitons, and between one soliton and cnoidal waves (...) are generated by using the nonauto-BT theorem. The types of bright and gray two front waves are shown by some figures. In the meanwhile, the nonlocal symmetry is obtained by the truncated Painlevé method and the Möbious invariant form. The initial value problem and an auto-BT are constructed by the localization procedure. (shrink)

In this study, we are concerned with how agents can best amalgamate their private information about a binary state of Nature. The agents are heterogeneous in their “ability”, the quality of their private information. The agents cannot directly communicate their private information but instead can only vote between the two states. We first describe possible methods of sequential majority voting, and then we analyze a particular one: the first n-1\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$n-1$$\end{document} jurors vote (...) simultaneously and, in the case of a tie, the remaining juror has the casting vote. We prove that when n=3\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$n=3$$\end{document}, the probability of a correct verdict is maximized when the agent of median ability has the casting vote. (shrink)

This book investigates Aristotelian psychology through his works and commentaries on them, including De Sensu, De Memoria and De Somno et Vigilia. Authors present original research papers inviting readers to consider the provenance of Aristotelian ideas and interpretations of them, on topics ranging from reality to dreams and spirituality. Aristotle’s doctrine of the ‘common sense’, his notion of transparency and the generation of colours are amongst the themes explored. Chapters are presented chronologically, enabling the reader to trace influences across the (...) boundaries of linguistic traditions. Commentaries from historical figures featured in this work include those of Michael of Ephesus, Albert the Great and Gersonides’. Discoveries in 9th-century Arabic adaptations, Byzantine commentaries and Renaissance paraphrases of Aristotle’s work are also presented. The editors’ introduction outlines the main historical developments of the themes discussed, preparing the reader for the cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspectives presented in this work. Scholars of philosophy and psychology and those with an interest in Aristotelianism will highly value the original research that is presented in this work. The introduction and Chapter 4 of this book are open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com. (shrink)

Evidence suggests divergent thinking is the cognitive basis of creative thoughts. Neuroimaging literature using resting-state functional connectivity has revealed network reorganizations during divergent thinking. Recent studies have revealed the changes of network organizations when performing creativity tasks, but such brain reconfigurations may be prolonged after task and be modulated by the trait of creativity. To investigate the dynamic reconfiguration, 40 young participants were recruited to perform consecutive Alternative Uses Tasks for divergent thinking and two resting-state scans were used for mapping (...) the brain reorganizations after AUT. We split participants into high- and low-creative groups based on creative achievement questionnaire and targeted on reconfigurations of the two brain networks: default-mode network and the network seeded at the left inferior frontal gyrus because the between-group difference of AUT-induced brain activation located at the left IFG. The changes of post-AUT RSFCs indicated the prolonged effect of divergent thinking. More specifically, the alterations of RSFCIFG−AG and RSFCIFG−IPL in the high-creative group had positive relationship with their AUT performances, but not found in the low-creative group. Furthermore, the RSFC changes of DMN did not present significant relationships with AUT performances. The findings not only confirmed the possibility of brain dynamic reconfiguration following divergent thinking, but also suggested the distinct IFGN reconfiguration between individuals with different creativity levels. (shrink)