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...

Visual programming language is a crucial part of learning programming. On this basis, it is essential to use visual programming to lower the learning threshold for students to learn about artificial intelligence to meet current demands in higher education. Therefore, a 3-h AI course with an RGB-to-HSL learning task was implemented; the results of which were used to analyze university students from two different disciplines. Valid data were collected for 65 students in the Science -student group and 39 students in (...) the Humanities -student group. Independent sample t-tests were conducted to analyze the difference between cognitive styles and computational thinking. No significant differences in either cognitive style or computational thinking ability were found after the AI course, indicating that taking visual AI courses lowers the learning threshold for students and makes it possible for them to take more difficult AI courses, which in turn effectively helping them acquire AI knowledge, which is crucial for cultivating talent in the field of AI. (shrink)

Students often face difficulties and experience negative emotions toward second language learning. The affective tutoring system is a next-generation learning approach that can detect the affective status of learning to increase performance. Therefore, for the purposes of this study, an innovative affective mobile language tutoring system was designed to support Japanese language learning. The effects of AMLTS, along with asynchronous discussion, that were intended to improve performance, were examined using a triangulation method. To investigate the effect on emotion, the proposed (...) AMLTS provides a virtual emotion agent that can interact with users and record emotional events, learning assessments, and the results of the interaction into a database. Learning effectiveness evaluations were conducted via two experiments: prototype evaluation and final evaluation. Sixty-three students, all beginners, were invited to use the AMLTS to learn Japanese. The research results show that the proposed AMLTS affective interaction design significantly improves learner engagement and performance. In the emotion feedback analysis and learning process, AMLTS helped students deepen their understanding of the content, enabled them to clearly understand the content, and to engage in peer interaction and experience positive emotions. In the evaluation of system usability, AMLTS reveals good usability for foreign language acquisition. (shrink)

While univariate functional magnetic resonance imaging data analysis methods have been utilized successfully to map brain areas associated with cognitive and emotional functions during viewing of naturalistic stimuli such as movies, multivariate methods might provide the means to study how brain structures act in concert as networks during free viewing of movie clips. Here, to achieve this, we generalized the partial least squares analysis, based on correlations between voxels, experimental conditions, and behavioral measures, to identify large-scale neuronal networks activated during (...) the first time and repeated watching of three ∼5-min comedy clips. We identified networks that were similarly activated across subjects during free viewing of the movies, including the ones associated with self-rated experienced humorousness that were composed of the frontal, parietal, and temporal areas acting in concert. In conclusion, the PLS method seems to be well suited for the joint analysis of multi-subject neuroimaging and behavioral data to quantify a functionally relevant brain network activity without the need for explicit temporal models. (shrink)

In this article we present a parameterized model for generating multimodal behavior based on cultural heuristics. To this end, a multimodal corpus analysis of human interactions in two cultures serves as the empirical basis for the modeling endeavor. Integrating the results from this empirical study with a well-established theory of cultural dimensions, it becomes feasible to generate culture-specific multimodal behavior in embodied agents by giving evidence for the cultural background of the agent. Two sample applications are presented that make use (...) of the model and are designed to be applied in the area of coaching intercultural communication. (shrink)

Yan Yuan (1635-1704) has long been a controversial figure in the study of Chinese intellectual and cultural history. Although marginalized in his own time largely due to his radical attack on Zhu Xi (1130-1200), Yan became elevated as a great thinker during the early twentieth century because of the drastic changes of modern Chinese intellectual climate. In Body, Ritual and Identity : A New Interpretation of the Early Qing Confucian Yan Yuan (1635-1704), Yang Jui-sung has demonstrated that the complexity of (...) Yan's ideas and his hatred for Zhu Xi in particular need be interpreted in light of his traumatic life experiences, his frustration over the fall of the Ming dynasty, and anxiety caused by the civil service examination system. Moreover, he should be better understood as a cultural critic of the lifestyle of educated elites of late imperial China. By critically analyzing Yan's changing intellectual status and his criticism that the elite lifestyle was unhealthy and feminine, this new interpretation of Yan Yuan serves to shed new light on our understanding of the features as well as problems of educated elite culture in late imperial China"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

This book examines Mohism as a movement in early China. To analyze how the Mohists pursued power, the author analyzes nonviolence as a goal and strategy of the Mohist movement, the Mohists' creation of strategic knowledge, and their quest for a personhood that made their activism possible.

This volume explores Confucian views regarding the human body, health, virtue, suffering, suicide, euthanasia, `human drugs,' human experimentation, and justice in health care distribution. These views are rooted in Confucian metaphysical, cosmological, and moral convictions, which stand in contrast to modern Western liberal perspectives in a number of important ways. In the contemporary world, a wide variety of different moral traditions flourish; there is real moral diversity. Given this circumstance, difficult and even painful ethical conflicts often occur between the East (...) and the West with regard to the issues of life, birth, reproduction, and death. The essays in this volume analyze the ways in which Confucian bioethics can clarify important moral concepts, provide arguments, and offer ethical guidance. The volume should be of interest to both general readers coming afresh to the study of bioethics, ethics, and Confucianism, as well as for philosophers, ethicists, and other scholars already familiar with the subject. (shrink)

By analyzing what are necessary conditions in the proof [4] ofthe classical model existence theorem CME, we present the left resolution Gentzen systems R,which proof-theoretically characterize CME.

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)

Recently Communist China has launched an all-out campaign to criticize Confucius. It has taken a thoroughly negative and nihilistic attitude in a vigorous attempt to vilify Confucius and his thought.

Abstract:To respond to the current advocacy of a transcultural inquiry into music education philosophy rooted deeply in Western civilization, the primary purpose of this essay is to provide a broader alternative to examine the phenomena of music teaching and learning to bridge the philosophical gap between the West and the East. This essay also attempts to expand the discussion of Eastern philosophies by including Balinese taksu, an aesthetic and ecstatic experience rarely discussed in music education literature. I juxtapose the intellectual (...) and spiritual methods of attaining enlightenment through Zhuangzi's wuwei (無為), non-action or effortlessly losing self, and Balinese taksu and associate them with Turner's liminality theory, Csíkszentmihályi's flow state, and other Western scholars' discussions on spirituality and music to illustrate the ultimate spiritual enlightenment that an exemplary person or a virtuoso can achieve. The intersecting parallels between wuwei and taksu enable me to suggest a multi-stage development of musicianship as a way of learning that allows students to identify their inner selves, to evaluate the difficulty levels of obstacles challenging their mastery and overcome them, to roam in between practice routines, and eventually to enjoy the ecstatic experience of flow, losing self in performance. (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)

Microsaccades, small saccadic eye movements occurring during fixation, have been suggested to be modulated by various sensory, cognitive, and affective processes relating to arousal. Although the modulation of fatigue-related arousal on microsaccade behavior has previously been characterized, the influence of other aspects of arousal, such as emotional arousal, is less understood. Moreover, microsaccades are modulated by cognitive processes that could also be linked to arousal. To investigate the influence of emotional arousal, saccade preparation, and global luminance levels on microsaccade behavior, (...) emotional auditory stimuli were presented prior to the onset of a fixation cue whose color indicated to look either at the peripheral stimulus or in the opposite direction of the stimulus. Microsaccade behavior was found to be significantly modulated by saccade preparation and global luminance level, but not emotional arousal. In the pro- and anti-saccade task, microsaccade rate was lower during anti-saccade preparation as compared to pro-saccade preparation, though microsaccade dynamics were comparable during both trial types. Our results reveal a differential role of arousal linked to emotion, fatigue, saccade preparation, and global luminance level on microsaccade behavior. (shrink)

On March 11, 2011, one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded occurred off the northeast coast of Japan. It destroyed buildings, damaged infrastructure, and killed people in the Tohoku region. The associated tsunami was even more destructive, engulfing coastal areas and obliterating whole towns. The earthquake and the tsunami together occasioned a third disaster: the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.Like most people, Dr. Makoto Sato was horrified by the destruction and suffering that he saw. He wanted to (...) help and felt that he should, but doing something appropriate and effective was not easy. He is a general internist and bioethicist at a university medical center in Hokkaido, the large island north of Tohoku.What should Dr. Sato have done then? What should he do now? (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)

Several features of the yeast mitochondrial genome, including high mutation rate, dynamic genomic structure, small effective population size, and dispensability for cellular viability, make it a promising candidate for generating hybrid incompatibility and driving speciation. Cytonuclear incompatibility, a specific type of Dobzhansky‐Muller genetic incompatibility caused by improper interactions between mitochondrial and nuclear genomes, has previously been observed in a variety of organisms, yet its role in speciation remains obscure. Recent studies in Saccharomyces yeast species provide a new insight, with experimental (...) evidence that cytonuclear incompatibility and DNA sequence divergence are both causes of the reproductive isolation of different yeast species. Interestingly, these two mechanisms seem to be perfectly complementary to each other in terms of their effects and evolutionary trajectories. Direct molecular analyses of the incompatible genes in yeasts have started to shed light on the evolutionary forces driving speciation. Editor's suggested further reading in BioEssaysThe cytoplasmic structure hypothesis for ribosome assembly, vertical inheritance, and phylogeny AbstractMitochondrial bioenergetics as a major motive force of speciation Abstract. (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 →.

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)

In the field of biosemiotics in our time, Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of semiology has been dismissed for its glottocentric, anthropocentric, and dyadic characteristics and as such unsuitable for the said field. Such accusation is symptomatic of an extremely narrow view of Saussure, which ignores the efforts he made in tackling problems concerning the unification of biology and semiotics . A broader view of Saussure, emerging from the newly-discovered orangery manuscripts along with his thought-provoking course lectures, reveals that his epistemology (...) is actually grounded in evolutionary differences and the concept of uniformitarianism. In order to demonstrate the value of his ideas, this paper proceeds through five sections. To begin with, the understandings and misunderstandings of key terms are summarized while seeking to reconcile arbitrary and relatively arbitrary modes of consciousness within the network of differences that Saussure proposes in his manuscripts. My study points out how such a network blurs disciplinary or systematic boundaries between language and non-verbal systems and how it might serve as a framework for appreciating true analogies between natural sciences and the science of language. The paradox of analogy, torn between the synchronic and diachronic schemes of time, is discussed. This unravels several strings that have made the functioning of analogy into such a delicate point in Saussure's theory of evolution. The concept of état de langue is made comprehensive in relation to appropriations of Darwinian model and Neo-Darwinian ideas. Saussure's model of evolution explicates the phenomenon of symbiogenesis, which is non-linear, non-adaptive, non-restrictive as regards localities, yet claims certain truths about nature and culture. Finally, my study draws attention to the implications of conceptualizing non-linear evolution within and across systems. There are indeed disparities between Saussure's epistemology and that of biosemiotics: nineteenth-century confused epistemology reoccurred within biosemiotics in its early phase. (shrink)