This research adopted the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology to emphasize the use of the PX Pay mobile payment app for PX Mart, the most popular supermarket in Taiwan, and examine the degree of involvement as a moderator. The influence of factors related to PX Mart’s target customer groups on their shopping intentions and usage behaviors were discussed, with subsequent benefits and optimization directions. This study indicated the following results. First, performance expectations, ease-of-use expectations, and social impact (...) enhance consumers’ behavioral intention and behavioral intention significantly influence usage behavior. Second, gender has no significant moderating effect on the proposed model. Third, age has a moderating effect from performance expectations and ease-of-use expectations, social influence on behavioral intention. Fourth, use is more significantly affected by perceived stakeholders for customers over age 50 than for those age 30–39. Fifth, the degree of involvement significantly affects the relationship between behavioral intention and usage behavior in terms of social influence and facilitating conditions effects. Finally, we provided academic and practical implications and make contributions to both the online payment industry and academia. (shrink)

This paper investigates the representation of authors with different linguistic backgrounds in academic publishing. We first review some common rebuttals of concerns about linguistic injustice. We then analyze 1039 authors of philosophy journals, primarily selected from the 2015 Leiter Report. While our data show that Anglophones dominate the output of philosophy papers, this unequal distribution cannot be solely attributed to language capacities. We also discover that ethics journals have more Anglophone authors than logic journals and that most authors are affiliated (...) with English-speaking universities, suggesting other factors may also play significant roles. Moreover, some interesting results are revealed when we combine the factor of sex with place of affiliation and linguistic background. It indicates that while certain linguistic injustice is inevitable in academic publishing, it may be more complex than thought. We next introduce Broadbent’s :457–476, 2012, Philosophy of epidemiology, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2013, Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci 48:250–257, 2014) contrastive account of causation to give a causal explanation of our findings. Broadbent’s account not only well characterizes the multifaceted causality in academic publishing but also provides a methodological guideline for further investigation. (shrink)

Should you be targeted by police for a crime that AI predicts you will commit? In this paper, we analyse when, and to what extent, the person-based predictive policing (PP) — using AI technology to identify and handle individuals who are likely to breach the law — could be justifiably employed. We first examine PP’s epistemological limits, and then argue that these defects by no means refrain from its usage; they are worse in humans. Next, based on major AI ethics (...) guidelines (IEEE, EU, and RIKEN, etc.), we refine three basic moral principles specific to person-based PP. We also derive further requirements from case studies, including debates in Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, Tokyo, and cities in China. Instead of rejecting PP programs, we analyse what necessary conditions should be met for using the tool to achieve social good. While acknowledging its risks, we conclude that the person-based PP could be beneficial in community policing, especially when merging into a larger governance framework of the social safety net. (shrink)

This paper examines racial discrimination and algorithmic bias in predictive policing algorithms (PPAs), an emerging technology designed to predict threats and suggest solutions in law enforcement. We first describe what discrimination is in a case study of Chicago’s PPA. We then explain their causes with Broadbent’s contrastive model of causation and causal diagrams. Based on the cognitive science literature, we also explain why fairness is not an objective truth discoverable in laboratories but has context-sensitive social meanings that need to be (...) negotiated through democratic processes. With the above analysis, we next predict why some recommendations given in the bias reduction literature are not as effective as expected. Unlike the cliché highlighting equal participation for all stakeholders in predictive policing, we emphasize power structures to avoid hermeneutical lacunae. Finally, we aim to control PPA discrimination by proposing a governance solution—a framework of a social safety net. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper is an exploration of the ethical significance of Sengzhao’s concept of the sage as exhibited through a Buddhist practitioner’s expanded understanding and cognition of reality. From a philosophical point of view, I aim to show that the ethical significance of his concept of the sage comprises a shift first from ontology to epistemology, and then from epistemology to ethics. I firstly define Sengzhao’s concept of the sage and present a preliminary account of this concept before elaborating on its (...) philosophical aspects. Next, I attempt to illustrate how ethical implications can be derived from Sengzhao’s ethical shift, and lastly, I shed light on the value and significance of this philosophical standpoint within Buddhist philosophy. (shrink)

Whereas using artificial intelligence (AI) to predict natural hazards is promising, applying a predictive policing algorithm (PPA) to predict human threats to others continues to be debated. Whereas PPAs were reported to be initially successful in Germany and Japan, the killing of Black Americans by police in the US has sparked a call to dismantle AI in law enforcement. However, although PPAs may statistically associate suspects with economically disadvantaged classes and ethnic minorities, the targeted groups they aim to protect are (...) often vulnerable populations as well (e.g., victims of human trafficking, kidnapping, domestic violence, or drug abuse). Thus, determining how to enhance the benefits of PPA while reducing bias through better management is important. In this paper, we propose a policy schema to address this issue. First, after clarifying relevant concepts, we examine major criticisms of PPAs and argue that some of them should be addressed. If banning AI or making it taboo is an unrealistic solution, we must learn from our errors to improve AI. We next identify additional challenges of PPAs and offer recommendations from a policy viewpoint. We conclude that the employment of PPAs should be merged into broader governance of the social safety net and audited publicly by parliament and civic society so that the unjust social structure that breeds bias can be revised. (shrink)

Ruyu HungNational Chiayi UniversityThis collective writing is intended to portray the contour of philosophy of education in contemporary Taiwan, resounding many beautiful counterparts in EPAT (Bies...

The meshed control theory assumes that cognitive control and automatic processes work together in the natural attention of experts for superior performance. However, the methods adopted by previous studies limit their capacity to provide in-depth information on the neuromotor processes. This experiment tested the theory with an alternative approach. Twelve skilled golfers were recruited to perform a putting task under three conditions: (1) normal condition, with no focus instruction (NC), (2) external focus of attention condition (EC), and (3) internal focus (...) of attention condition (IC). Four blocks of 10 putts each were performed under each condition. The putting success rate and accuracy were measured and electroencephalographies (EEGs) were recorded. The behavioral results showed that the NC produced a higher putting success rate and accuracy than the EC and IC. The EEG data showed that the skilled golfers’ attentional processes in the NC initially resembled those in the EC and then moved toward those in the IC just before putting. This indicates a switch from more automatic processes to cognitive control processes while preparing to putt. The findings offer support for the meshed control theory and indicate the dynamic nature of neuromotor processes for the superior performance of athletes in challenging situations. (shrink)

Do people with different views of what is fair attribute different intentions to actions? In a novel experimental design, participants were significantly more likely to attribute a no-redistribution vote to selfishness if they considered redistribution as being fair. I define this—attributing actions that do not adhere to one’s own fairness view to selfishness—as suspicious attribution. I develop a theory of intention attribution to show how suspicious attribution arises from two other findings from the experiment: the participants underestimate the number of (...) people with fairness views differing from their own and overestimate the selfishness of participants with other fairness views. I discuss how the findings can help explain political polarization. (shrink)

Tu Weiming Tu Weiming is one of the most famous Chinese Confucian thinkers of the 20th and 21st centuries. As a prominent member of the third generation of “New Confucians,” Tu stressed the significance of religiosity within Confucianism. Inspired by his teacher Mou Zongsan as well as his decades of study … Continue reading Tu Weiming →.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1898 Edition.

The article presents a methodological update on the lexical profile of informal spoken English with the emphasis on movies, television programs, and soap operas. The study analyzed Mark Davies’s mega-corpora with data containing approximately 625 million words and employed Paul Nation’s comprehensive and up-to-date British National Corpus/Corpus of Contemporary American English wordlists. Data from the analyses showed that viewers would need a vocabulary knowledge at 3,000 and 5,000 words frequency levels to understand 95 and 98% of the words in scripted (...) dialogs, respectively. Soap operas were found to be less lexically demanding compared to TV programs and movies. Findings are expected to fill in the methodological gaps between vocabulary assessment and vocabulary profiling research. (shrink)

Local item dependence is one of the most critical assumption in the Rasch model when it comes to the validity of a test. As the field of vocabulary assessment is calling for more clarity and validity for vocabulary tests, such assumption becomes more important than ever. The article offers a Rasch-based investigation into the issue of LID with the focus on the two popular formats of Vocabulary Levels Tests : multiple-choice and matching. A Listening Vocabulary Levels Test and an Updated (...) Vocabulary Levels Test were given to a single cohort of 311 university students in an English as a Foreign Language context. The analyses of raw score and standardized residuals correlations were conducted. The findings found no relationship between the 4-option, multiple-choice format of the LVLT and item local dependence. However, results from score and standardized residuals correlations analyses showed a strong link between the 3-item-per-cluster, matching format and item local dependence. The study calls for greater attention to the format of future vocabulary tests and support the use of meaning-recall formats in vocabulary testing. (shrink)

The growing prevalence of health care ethics consultation (HCEC) services in the U.S. has been accompanied by an increase in calls for accountability and quality assurance, and for the debates surrounding why and how HCEC is evaluated. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of HCEC as indicated by several novel outcome measurements in East Asian medical encounters.

It is not uncommon for business institutions to position themselves as stakeholder-caring companies or organizations. However, there is little research on conceptualizing stakeholder-caring as a component of brand image. Through a theoretical lens of brand-consumer interactions, this paper introduces a new construct—stakeholder-caring image—and proposes a model that examines stakeholder-caring’s antecedents (integrity and courtesy) and its consequence (customer satisfaction). The two antecedents—integrity and courtesy—capture intrinsic and extrinsic aspects of brand-consumer interaction practice, respectively, while the consequence (customer satisfaction) is one important behavioral (...) outcome in marketing. The proposed model was tested with Hong Kong customers (n = 296) via a systematic survey. The data were analyzed using LISREL. Several measurement and structural models were constructed to test the proposed hypotheses. The findings reveal that the effect of integrity on customer satisfaction is mediated by a stakeholder-caring image. However, contrary to the conventional wisdom, we surprisingly find that courtesy is not effective to build a stakeholder-caring image. Managerially, this research offers guidance on how to develop stakeholder-caring image and subsequently increase customer satisfaction. In addition, we discuss the nuanced distinction between a stakeholder-caring image and related brand constructs, such as “sincerity” in Aaker’s (1997) brand personality framework. (shrink)

What am I? There are a number of possible answers: I am a person, a mind, a human animal, a soul, part of a human being (e.g., a brain), I do not exist, and even more. Philosophers have been asking this for thousands of years and were not satisfied. In the contemporary analytic tradition, philosophers are attracted to a naturalistic, scientific ontology hence a materialistic personal ontology that matches the huge success in scientific discoveries. They think that we are material (...) objects. However, their views do not match our intuition about some cases regarding our survival. Also, the possibility of an afterlife is eliminated. In my thesis, I explain the shortcomings of current philosophical theories, and develop a better account. I propose the Conscious Subject View, according to which (1) I am a subject of experience, a mental entity whose essential property is to be conscious, and (2) Subjects have haecceities, a property that makes an object a different object from other objects even if they are qualitatively identical with it. I provide two arguments for the claim that we are essentially subjects. The first is the Essentiality Argument. I first define an egoistic concern as one such that necessarily, my concern about X can be egoistic if and only if I exist and persist as X. Furthermore, I argue that necessarily, I can be egoistically concerned with an entity E if and only if E is numerically identical with my subject of experience. I then conclude that we are essentially subjects of experience. My second argument, which I call the Argument of Persistence, is that we have the intuition that we persist only when there is the gradual replacement of the brain. I argue that the best candidate to explain this intuition is that we persist as subjects of experience. I further offer a conceivability argument for the claim that haecceity of the subject determines its persistence. I defend a mentally-oriented proposal regarding our nature by examining the essential properties of our existence. It solves most of the problems with the materialistic personal ontology and shows the theoretical advantages of a long-neglected approach. (shrink)

This paper aims at revealing the various meanings of schools as more than built physical environments from a geographical‐phenomenological (or ‘geo‐phenomenological’) perspective. This paper consists of five sections: the first explicates the meaning of ‘geo‐phenomenology’; the second reveals the meaning of ‘environment’ and a dialectics of strangeness and intimacy through geo‐phenomenological analysis; the third examines the meanings of environment as ‘space’ and ‘place’ and the act of naming as the process of constructing meaning between humans and environment; the fourth section (...) attempts to explore the meaning of conceiving school as a particular environment; and the final is the conclusion. (shrink)

' Home ' and 'nature' are usually taken as two opposite concepts in relation to human geographical experience. However, drawing on the perspective of geo-phenomenology, this paper argues that the meanings of nature and home overlap to the extent that it is possible to experience nature as home. Moreover, it can be shown from the paradoxically interwoven senses of nature and of home that there is a dynamic process of a to and fro journey between nature and home. Fertile educational (...) implications can be drawn out from the invisible journey: first, the dynamic experience between nature and home elicits a learning about differences; and secondly, the experience of nature as home, which can inspire feelings for nature, implies an ethical dimension of learning to treat nature as carefully as home. (shrink)

Insanity is identified with irrationality, while rationality is considered to be the mark of sanity. Yet we want to say that rationality could be the cause of insanity. We can see a subtle kind of insanity inherent in an institution believed to be highly rational. Rationality in an ideological belief also turns into rational insanity when the ideology itself works for the interest of the advantaged as a tool of deception. We believe in the rationality of open communication. We believe (...) that information technology has given us the most rational means for open communication. The Internet revolution or Internet democracy is expected to become the most rational means for the institutional goal of democracy. However the rationality of Internet communication has demonstrated a serious tendency to cause Internet insanity. We have been proud of being 'rational animals'. But now we are concerned because 'rational animal' could mean 'rational but animal-like' or 'rational but impulsive', which in turn could mean 'rational but violent' or 'rational but mad and insane'. Perhaps it is time for us to think seriously about the possibility of mass insanity through rational insanity, and seek the way beyond such rational insanity. (shrink)

Hawking, in his book, A Brief History of Time, concludes with a conditional remark: If we find a complete theory to explain the physical world, then we will come to understand God’s mind. With Goedel in mind, we can raise questions about the completeness of our scientific understanding and the nature of our understanding with regard to God’s mind. We need to ask about the higher order of our understanding when we move to knowing God’s mind. We go onto develop (...) these problems with Nietzsche’s thoughts on the death of God, and the emergence of super human intelligences. Then, we come to Buddha, a logical genius, to see how the Buddhistic enlightenment exemplifies the super human intelligence, as well as the higher order understanding in our knowledge of God’s mind. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 8, Page 58-59, August 2011.

"Science and religion are often viewed as dichotomies. But although our contemporary society is often perceived as a rationalization process, we still need broad, metaphysical beliefs outside of what can be proven empirically. Rituals and symbols remain at the core of modern life. Do our concepts of science and religion require revitalization? Can science itself be considered a religion, a belief, or an ideology? Science's authority and prestige allows for little in the way of alternate approaches not founded in empirical (...) science. It is not unusual to believe that technology and science will solve the world's fundamental problems. Has truth been colonized by science? Have scientific disciplines become so specialized and "operationally closed" that they have constructed barriers to other disciplines as well as the general public? The writers of this book set out to investigate whether the symbols of academia may in some cases take on a quality of sacrality, whether the rule of experts can be said to have the character of a "priesthood of knowledge", whether religion has a place in scientific contexts, and a selection of other questions concerning science and its relations to religious belief."--P. [4] of cover. (shrink)

The present study analyzed the vocabulary profile of the News on the Web corpus, which contained 12 billion words from online newspapers and magazines in 20 countries to determine the vocabulary knowledge needed to reasonably understand online newspaper and magazine articles. The results showed that, in general, knowledge of the most frequent 4,000 word families in the British National Corpus/Corpus of Contemporary American English wordlist plus proper nouns, marginal words, transparent compounds and acronyms was necessary to gain 95% coverage for (...) the NOW corpus. However, when it came to the 98% coverage, online newspaper and magazine articles from different countries had relatively distinct lexical demands. In-depth analyses were carried out and the findings offered comprehensive insights into the issue. Implications for teaching and learning were also provided. (shrink)

Samuel Phillips Huntington was an influential American political scientist. He was also a consultant to various America government agencies. He upholds the idea of conservative realism in politics. His research covers several areas of political science, such as civil-military relations, modernization and political development, comparative politics, and international relations. Regarding the role of military, he argues for autonomous military professionalism. In discussing about modernization of developing countries, he emphasizes the priority of political order over democracy. In the case of America, (...) as well as other democratizing countries, he worries that the excess of political participation would diminish the authority and effectiveness of state governance, enhancing political instability, and, at worst, leading to the reverse of democratization. After the end of the Cold War, Huntington characterizes the international order as multicivilizational, in which the clash of civilizations will direct the development of global politics. In such a multicultural situation, Huntington urges Americans to affirm their unique national identity by revitalizing Anglo-Protestant culture and its religiosity which has defined America since its founding. (shrink)

In today’s global higher education environment, international students represent not only an important source of external income for universities: the degree of cross-border student mobility also reflects the internationalization of higher education sector. Universities have engaged in efforts to sell themselves to prospective students and promotional videos are among the most widely used marketing tools for this purpose. This study reports the results of a study analyzing the content of 140 higher education promotional videos from 14 countries available on YouTube. (...) The results reveal that while the pattern of use of YouTube for two-waycommunication with viewers, information contents and appeal messages among sampled universities is fairly homogenous, some marked differences emerge when cultural background and global position ranking of the university are taken into account. The implications of these findings are that, although, transnational higher education has been profoundly globalized, culture still plays a significant role in marketing practice for the recruitment of mobile students. In addition, different universities have various student-targeted segments. These findings provide the basis of a series of recommendations for universities looking to optimize their use of YouTube and promotional video design to market to international students. (shrink)

Case law retrieval is the task of locating truly relevant legal cases given an input query case. Unlike information retrieval for general texts, this task is more complex with two phases (legal case retrieval and legal case entailment) and much harder due to a number of reasons. First, both the query and candidate cases are long documents consisting of several paragraphs. This makes it difficult to model with representation learning that usually has restriction on input length. Second, the concept of (...) relevancy in this domain is defined based on the legal relation that goes beyond the lexical or topical relevance. This is a real challenge because normal text matching will not work. Third, building a large and accurate legal case dataset requires a lot of effort and expertise. This is obviously an obstacle to creating enough data for training deep retrieval models. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called supporting model that can deal with both phases. The underlying idea is the case–case supporting relation and the paragraph–paragraph as well as the decision-paragraph matching strategy. In addition, we propose a method to automatically create a large weak-labeling dataset to overcome the lack of data. The experiments showed that our solution has achieved the state-of-the-art results for both case retrieval and case entailment phases. (shrink)

This study proposed and examined a conceptual framework on the influence of real estate brokers’ personalities, psychological empowerment, social capital, and knowledge sharing on their innovation performance, and used moral hazard as a moderating variable. We used structural equation modeling for data analysis and estimation. The participants were real estate brokers in Kaohsiung City. A total of 1,000 questionnaires were administered to 100 branch offices of real estate companies, 571 of which were later recovered from 80 branch offices. After removing (...) 52 for being invalid, we were left with 519 valid questionnaires, indicating a 51.9% recovery rate. The empirical results suggest that the real estate brokers’ personalities and psychological empowerment positively and significantly influence social capital; personality and psychological empowerment also positively and significantly influence their innovation performance; and social capital significantly influences knowledge sharing, which in turn positively and significantly influences the brokers’ innovation performance. In environments with higher levels of moral hazard, the influence of social capital on the brokers’ knowledge sharing is significantly diminished. (shrink)

This study attempts to identify customer retention strategies for legal software and discusses their effectiveness for three consumer groups (stayers, dissatisfied switchers, and satisfied switchers). Although previous studies propose several antipirating strategies, they do not discuss how to enhance customer intentions to use legal software, which is crucial for software companies. The authors provide four generic retention strategies developed from both antipiracy and customer loyalty literature. The results indicate lower-pricing, legal, communication, and product strategies all enhance customer purchase intentions toward (...) legal software. The lower-pricing strategy is more useful for stayers and dissatisfied switchers, and the communication strategy is most useful for dissatisfied switchers. Both the legal and product strategies have similar impacts on purchase intentions across the three segments. From a firm perspective, a product strategy is most worthwhile and useful across all segments. (shrink)

Extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation has been introduced to clinical practice for several decades. It is unclear how internet and newspapers portray the use of extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation. This study were: (1) to quantify the coverage of extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation use in newspapers and on the Internet; (2) to describe the characteristics of extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation users presented in newspaper articles and the Internet web pages in comparison with those shown in extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation studies in Taiwan; and (3) to examine the (...) survival rates of extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation users presented in newspaper articles and the Internet web pages in comparison with those in Taiwan and in the Extracorporeal Life Support Registry Report International Summary for January 2014. (shrink)

Background Individual physicians and physician-associated factors may influence patients’/surrogates’ autonomous decision-making, thus influencing the practice of do-not-resuscitate orders. The objective of this study was to examine the influence of individual attending physicians on signing a DNR order. Methods This study was conducted in closed model, surgical intensive care units in a university-affiliated teaching hospital located in Northern Taiwan. The medical records of patients, admitted to the surgical intensive care units for the first time between June 1, 2011 and December 31, (...) 2013 were reviewed and data collected. We used Kaplan–Meier survival curves with log-rank test and multivariate Cox proportional hazards models to compare the time from surgical intensive care unit admission to do-not-resuscitate orders written for patients for each individual physician. The outcome variable was the time from surgical ICU admission to signing a DNR order. Results We found that each individual attending physician’s likelihood of signing do-not-resuscitate orders for their patients was significantly different from each other. Some attending physicians were more likely to write do-not-resuscitate orders for their patients, and other attending physicians were less likely to do so. Conclusion Our study reported that individual attending physicians had influence on patients’/surrogates’ do-not-resuscitate decision-making. Future studies may be focused on examining the reasons associated with the difference of each individual physician in the likelihood of signing a do-not-resuscitate order. (shrink)

Several studies have demonstrated that individuals’ ability to perceive a speech sound contrast is related to the production of that contrast in their native language. The theoretical account for this relationship is that speech perception and production have a shared multimodal representation in relevant sensory spaces. This gives rise to a prediction that individuals with more narrowly defined targets will produce greater separation between contrasting sounds, as well as lower variability in the production of each sound. However, empirical studies that (...) tested this hypothesis, particularly with regard to variability, have reported mixed outcomes. The current study investigates the relationship between perceptual ability and production ability, focusing on the auditory domain. We examined whether individuals’ categorical labeling consistency for the American English /ε/–/æ/ contrast, measured using a perceptual identification task, is related to distance between the centroids of vowel categories in acoustic space and to two measures of production variability: the overall distribution of repeated tokens for the vowels and the proportional within-trial decrease in variability as defined as the magnitude of self-correction to the initial acoustic variation of each token. No significant associations were found between categorical labeling consistency and vowel contrast distance, between categorical labeling consistency and area of the ellipse, or between categorical labeling consistency and centering ratio. These null results suggest that the perception-production relation may not be as robust as suggested by a widely adopted theoretical framing in terms of the size of auditory target regions. However, the present results may also be attributable to choices in implementation that should be subject to further investigation. (shrink)

BioArt has become an umbrella term for art practices utilizing biotechnology and living matter. Pioneering BioArt creations erode the boundaries between science and art, provoking a series of social and cultural debates. BioArtists deprive the pragmatic function of biotechnology and alter life itself. However, BioArt is an art practice strongly tied to the development of biotechnologies and evolving bio-media. The increasing familiarity of biotechnologies enables the creative works to evolve as technologies evolve. This article aims to contextualize the issues presented (...) in the artworks by two artists based in Taiwan, Kuang-Yi Ku and Pei-Ying Lin, who adapted emerging biotechnologies for their artworks. This article attempts to use affect theory as a lens to observe post-biological artworks and suggests that the Autonomy of Affect, the postmodern power after ideology, should play a significant role in their works. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 5, Page 40-41, May 2012.