SummaryThis study estimates the effect of dysgenic trends in Taiwan by exploring the relationships among intelligence, education and fertility. Based on a representative adult sample, education and intelligence were negatively correlated with the number of children born. These correlations were stronger for females. The decline of genotypic intelligence was estimated as 0.82 to 1.33 IQ points per generation for the Taiwanese population.

Followership is an important but understudied domain. This study adopted a follower-centric perspective to examine the internal process by which followership affects creative performance via work autonomy and creative self-efficacy. The study employed a 3-wave survey of 341 employees of a Taiwanese university to achieve the research purpose. This study showed that effective followership is positively associated with employees’ work autonomy and creative self-efficacy. Work autonomy and creative self-efficacy mediate the relationship between effective followership and creative performance. This study’s empirical (...) findings provide an improved way of measuring followership and broaden our understanding of how followership triggers intrinsic motivation to facilitate creative performance. (shrink)

Research on self-determination theory emphasizes the importance of the internalization of motivation as a crucial factor for determining the quality of motivation. Hence, intrinsic motivation is deemed as an important predictor of learning. Research on epistemic beliefs, on the other hand, focuses on the nature of knowledge, and learning with more sophisticated epistemic beliefs associated with more adaptive outcomes. While learning and achievement are multiply determined, a more comprehensive theoretical model that takes into account both motivational quality and epistemic beliefs (...) is needed. Hence, this study aims to examine the role of intrinsic and instrumental motivation alongside epistemic beliefs in predicting students’ achievement in science. Data were drawn from the PISA 2015 survey. We focused on four of the top-performing societies. Two were Eastern societies – Singapore and Hong Kong, and the other two were Western societies: Canada and Finland. We found both common and specific patterns among the four societies. Regarding the common patterns, we found that intrinsic motivation and epistemic beliefs had direct positive effects on science achievement. As for the regionally-specific findings, instrumental motivation positively predicted achievement only in Western societies, but not in Eastern societies. The interaction effect between motivation and epistemic beliefs also demonstrated different patterns across the four societies. Implications for the role of motivation and epistemic beliefs in optimizing student learning and achievement are discussed. (shrink)

Rare copy number variants have a prominent role in the aetiology of schizophrenia and other neuropsychiatric disorders. Substantial risk for schizophrenia is conferred by large CNVs at several loci, including microdeletions at 1q21.1, 3q29, 15q13.3 and 22q11.2 and microduplication at 16p11.2. However, these CNVs collectively account for a small fraction of cases, and the relevant genes and neurobiological mechanisms are not well understood. Here we performed a large two-stage genome-wide scan of rare CNVs and report the significant association of copy (...) number gains at chromosome 7q36.3 with schizophrenia. Microduplications with variable breakpoints occurred within a 362-kilobase region and were detected in 29 of 8,290 patients versus 2 of 7,431 controls in the combined sample. All duplications overlapped or were located within 89 kilobases upstream of the vasoactive intestinal peptide receptor gene VIPR2. VIPR2 transcription and cyclic-AMP signalling were significantly increased in cultured lymphocytes from patients with microduplications of 7q36.3. These findings implicate altered vasoactive intestinal peptide signalling in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia and indicate the VPAC2 receptor as a potential target for the development of new antipsychotic drugs. © 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved. (shrink)

BackgroundThe rating of perceived exertion scales with respiratory and muscular illustrations are recognized as simple and practical methods to understand individual psychometric characteristics in breathing and muscle exertion during exercise. However, the implementation of respiratory and muscular RPE to quantify training load in futsal training camps has not been examined. This study investigates respiratory and muscular RPE relationships during domestic training camps and overseas training camps in an under 20 futsal national team.MethodsData collected from eleven field players were used for (...) comparison in this study. All players reported Borg CR10 RPE and 7-scales respiratory RPE and muscular RPE after training sessions and matches. Additionally, total distance covered and training impulse were used to quantify external and internal loads via the Polar Team Pro system. Paired-sample t-tests were used to compare the RPECR10, RPErespiration, RPEmuscle, TD, and TRIMP between DTC and OTC. Furthermore, linear regression was performed to determine the relationships among all RPE scales, TD, and TRIMP.ResultsThe RPECR10, TD, and TRIMP showed significant difference between DTC and OTC. Furthermore, linear regression analyses showed significant correlation between RPErespiration and RPEmuscle, RPECR10 and RPErespiration, and RPECR10 and RPEmuscle.ConclusionPictorial RPErespiration or RPEmuscle can be used as an alternative to quantify perceived measures of internal loads during DTC and OTC in futsal players. Interpretation of perceived measures of training load and cardiac-related responses in association with external training loads during short-term training camps would be useful in further understanding the demands of futsal players’ experience in these circumstances. (shrink)

This thesis is a translation, with notes and introduction, of the Commentary to the Hua-yan Dharma-Realm Meditation. This text is a commentary to the Dharma-Realm Meditation, which is incorporated into the former. The core text is by the first patriarch of the Hua-yan school of Buddhism in China, Du-shun (557-640); the commentary is by the fifth patriarch of the Hua-yan school, Zong-mi (780-841). The text is both philosophical and meditational in nature, and is a concise statement of the key doctrines (...) of the school. -/- The introduction to this text prepares the reader for the translation by providing the information and concepts necessary for an understanding of the text. This includes material on the translation of technical terms, a brief sketch of some Buddhist texts referred to by the authors, biographical information on the authors, historical and philosophical background to the Hua-yan school, a commentary on the literary and meditational aspects of the text, and a general summary of the text by chapters. (shrink)

Orientalism and Religion offers us a timely discussion of the implications of contemporary post-colonial theory for the study of religion. Drawing on a variety of post-structuralist and post-colonial thinkers, including Foucault, Gadamer, Said, and Spivak, Richard King examines the way in which notions such as mysticism, religion, Hinduism and Buddhism are taken for granted, and shows us how religion needs to be redescribed along the lines of cultural studies.

Followers of Wittgenstein allegedly once held that a meaningful claim to know that p could only be made if there was some doubt about the truth of p. The correct response to this thesis involved appealing to the distinction between the semantic content of a sentence and features attaching to its use. It is inappropriate to assert a knowledge-claim unless someone in the audience has doubt about what the speaker claims to know. But this fact has nothing to do with (...) the semantic content of knowledgeascriptions; it is entirely explicable by appeal to pragmatic facts about felicitous assertion. (shrink)

Belief in propositions has had a long and distinguished history in analytic philosophy. Three of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and G. E. Moore, believed in propositions. Many philosophers since then have shared this belief; and the belief is widely, though certainly not universally, accepted among philosophers today. Among contemporary philosophers who believe in propositions, many, and perhaps even most, take them to be structured entities with individuals, properties, and relations as constituents. For example, the (...) proposition that Glenn loves Tracy has Glenn, the loving relation, and Tracy as constituents. What is it, then, that binds these constituents together and imposes structure on them? And if the proposition that Glenn loves Tracy is distinct from the proposition that Tracy loves Glenn yet both have the same constituents, what is about the way these constituents are structured or bound together that makes them two different propositions? In The Nature and Structure of Content, Jeffrey C. King formulates a detailed account of the metaphysical nature of propositions, and provides fresh answers to the above questions. In addition to explaining what it is that binds together the constituents of structured propositions and imposes structure on them, King deals with some of the standard objections to accounts of propositions: he shows that there is no mystery about what propositions are; that given certain minimal assumptions, it follows that they exist; and that on his approach, we can see how and why propositions manage to have truth conditions and represent the world as being a certain way. The Nature and Structure of Content also contains a detailed account of the nature of tense and modality, and provides a solution to the paradox of analysis. Scholars and students working in the philosophy of mind and language will find this book rewarding reading. (shrink)

This paper investigates a first-order extension of GL called \. We outline briefly the history that led to \, its key properties and some of its toolbox: the \emph{conservation theorem}, its cut-free Gentzenisation, the ``formulators'' tool. Its semantic completeness is fully stated in the current paper and the proof is retold here. Applying the Solovay technique to those models the present paper establishes its main result, namely, that \ is arithmetically complete. As expanded below, \ is a first-order modal logic (...) that along with its built-in ability to simulate general classical first-order provability―"\" simulating the the informal classical "\"―is also arithmetically complete in the Solovay sense. (shrink)

Just as humans can draw conclusions responsibly or irresponsibly, so too can computers. Machine learning systems that have been trained on data sets that include irresponsible judgments are likely to yield irresponsible predictions as outputs. In this paper I focus on a particular kind of inference a computer system might make: identification of the intentions with which a person acted on the basis of photographic evidence. Such inferences are liable to be morally objectionable, because of a way in which they (...) are presumptuous. After elaborating this moral concern, I explore the possibility that carefully procuring the training data for image recognition systems could ensure that the systems avoid the problem. The lesson of this paper extends beyond just the particular case of image recognition systems and the challenge of responsibly identifying a person’s intentions. Reflection on this particular case demonstrates the importance (as well as the difficulty) of evaluating machine learning systems and their training data from the standpoint of moral considerations that are not encompassed by ordinary assessments of predictive accuracy. (shrink)

The search for new ideas often frustratingly cycles back to old ones, a phenomenon known as fixation. Recent research has shown ways to kick‐start finding new uses for familiar objects, a prototypical creativity task: wandering in the mind or the world or working on a messy desk. Those techniques seem to succeed by helping break fixation, but do not guide the search for new ideas. The perspective‐taking or human‐centric or empathic mindset championed by many in HCI and in design firms (...) does provide a search strategy. We compared the mind‐wandering mindset to a perspective‐taking mindset, the latter priming thinking of ways that people in different roles (gardener, artist, etc.) might use the objects. In two studies, the Perspective‐Taking mindset yielded more ideas and more original ideas than Mind‐Wandering, which did not differ from a No‐Mindset control. Original ideas came late, rewarding persistence. The perspective‐taking mindset is productive for problem‐solving, forecasting, and social interactions as well as innovation. (shrink)

Background: Monitoring the daily change in resting heart rate variability can provide information regarding training adaptation and recovery status of the autonomic nervous system during training camps. However, it remains unclear whether postural stabilization is essential for valid and reliable ultra-short-term recordings in short-term overseas training camps.Design: Observational and longitudinal study.Purpose: This study aimed to investigate ultra-short-term heart rate variability recordings under stabilization or post-stabilization periods in four overseas training camps.Participant: Twenty-seven U-20 male national team futsal players voluntarily participated in (...) this study.Method: Resting HRV was evaluated for 10 min during the early morning of each training camp. The natural logarithm of the root mean square of successive normal-to-normal interval differences was used for comparisons. Time segments of HRV were divided into two periods with three measures within each: the first 30-s, the first 60-s, and the 5-min standard during stabilization; the first 30-s, the first 60-s, and the 5-min standard after stabilization.Result: The results demonstrated trivial to small ES, very large to nearly perfect ICC, and narrow range of SEM when all time segments of HRVUST were compared to the 1st_5 min and 2nd_5 min HRV. Furthermore, the magnitude of the correlation coefficients ranged from very high to nearly perfect for all the time segments. The HRVUST posted excellent agreement in all time segments with/without postural stabilization. Trivial to small levels of effect size in all time segments of LnRMSSDmean and LnRMSSDcv across overseas training camps was identified.Conclusion: The first 30 or 60-s LnRMSSD recordings can be used to evaluate daily cardiac-autonomic function during overseas training camps in futsal players. The process for stabilization seems to be unnecessary for measuring the morning resting LnRMSSD in overseas training camps among young adult futsal players. (shrink)

The significance of the discovery of half of Dewey’s most important China lecture series notes, “Social and Political Philosophy,” cannot be overestimated. These newly-discovered lecture notes provide us with a unique opportunity to conduct a translation case study in both directions: first, to check Hu Shi’s translation against Dewey’s lecture notes; and second, to check John Dewey: Lectures in China, 1919-1920, “back translations” in the terminology of translation studies, both against Hu’s translation and against Dewey’s original notes that the back (...) translators tried to reconstruct. More important, by treating translations as re-writes and as products of cultural and ideological manipulations, this case study enables us to analyze how Hu Shi appropriated Dewey’s ideas to advance his own cultural and political agenda while acting as the latter’s interpreter. (shrink)

The current study aims to separate conscious and unconscious behaviors by employing both online and offline measures while the participants were consciously performing a task. Using an eye-movement tracking paradigm, we observed participants’ response patterns for distinguishing within-word-boundary and across-word-boundary reverse errors while reading Chinese sentences . The results showed that when the participants consciously detected errors, their gaze time for target words associated with across-word-boundary reverse errors was significantly longer than that for targets words associated with within-word-boundary reverse errors. (...) Surprisingly, the same gaze time pattern was found even when the readers were not consciously aware of the reverse errors. The results were statistically robust, providing converging evidence for the feasibility of our experimental paradigm in decoupling offline behaviors and the online, automatic, and unconscious aspects of cognitive processing in reading. (shrink)

How vertebrates evolved different traits for acid excretion to maintain body fluid pH homeostasis is largely unknown. The evolution of Na+/H+ exchanger (NHE)‐mediated NH4+ excretion in fishes is reported, and the coevolution with increased ammoniagenesis and accompanying gluconeogenesis is speculated to benefit vertebrates in terms of both internal homeostasis and energy metabolism response to acidic stress. The findings provide new insights into our understanding of the possible adaptation of fishes to progressing global environmental acidification. In human kidney, titratable H+ and (...) NH4+ comprise the two main components of net acid excretion. V‐type H+‐ATPase‐mediated H+ excretion may have developed in stenohaline lampreys when they initially invaded freshwater from marine habitats, but this trait is lost in most fishes. Instead, increased reliance on NHE‐mediated NH4+ excretion is gradually developed and intensified during fish evolution. Further investigations on more species will be needed to support the hypothesis. Also see the video abstract here https://youtu.be/vZuObtfm-34. (shrink)

Examines four notable thinkers in the field of modern social and political theory, with a view to determining how far it is possible to create and maintain a non-coercive but sustainable political order under conditions of diversity in contemporary Western democracies.

In a much-revised version of his 1980 doctoral dissertation in the history of science for Princeton University, Kim (history and philosophy of science, Seoul National U.) examines the knowledge about the natural world that informed Chu Hsi's renowned neo-Confucian synthesis. He sets out his basic concepts, reviews his understanding of the world, and examines the relationship between the two. He includes an extensive glossary with the English meaning and the Chinese characters. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR.

本书简要介绍了从明中叶至辛亥革命这一历史时期中国文化史上的主流思潮。全书按历史顺序分别评介了晚明人文主义思潮、明清之际启蒙主义思潮、嘉道之际实学思潮和19世纪末—20世纪初的新民思潮。.

本书以现实人生为立足点,通过一系列美学范畴的辩证运动,论证审美关系的生成、审美意识的结构与功能及人性结构的主体化等。.

In this paper, finite-time tracking problem of nonholonomic mobile robots for a moving target is considered. First of all, polar coordinates are used to characterize the distance and azimuth between the moving target and the robot. Then, based on the distance and azimuth transported from the sensor installed on the robot, a finite-time tracking control law is designed for the nonholonomic mobile robot by the switching control method. Rigorous proof shows that the tracking error converges to zero in a finite (...) time. Numerical simulation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed control method. (shrink)

In this paper, the stabilization problem of nonholonomic chained-form systems is addressed with uncertain constants. In this paper, the active disturbance rejection control is designed to solve this problem. The proposed control strategy combines extended state observer and adaptive sliding mode controller. The control of nonholonomic chained-form systems with dynamic nonlinear uncertain terms and uncertain constants is first discussed in this paper. In comparison with existing methods, the proposed method in this paper has better performance. It is proved that, with (...) the application of the proposed control strategy, semiglobal finite-time stabilization of the systems is achieved. An example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. (shrink)

Ancient Chinese thought inquired primarily into how the achievement of things is possible rather than into what a thing as a thing is. It held that man should participate in the achieving or generation of things in order to realize his self-achievement. A thing is understood as an event. Because all things and man are united as one, it is possible for man to enter into things by tasting and feeling rather than by relying on the sense of sight. This (...) may provide a possible new means of rescuing things from the numericalization and phenomenalization that sweep over the world today. (shrink)

CHAPTER I THE FRAMEWORK OF SELF-PERFECTION 1. Buddhism and Ethics Anyone who has read even a very little in the early Buddhist Scriptures is aware that from ...

Hong Kong’s Covid-19 epidemic circumstances have given us a valuable opportunity to reflect on Hong Kong’s elderly care policies. This essay argues that Hong Kong should learn from the West and provide a subsidy to family caregivers for proper elderly care. We rebut the social and moralistic reasons for not introducing such a subsidy in Hong Kong. We indicate that providing cash subsidy to family caregivers does not monetize or tarnish Confucian filial obligation to take care of elderly people, but (...) enable adult children from low-income families to undertake this obligation effectively. In addition, we contend that providing such a subsidy would not significantly affect the job market in Hong Kong and that incurred financial and manpower costs for monitoring family care are controllable. (shrink)

Previous research has shown implicit semantic processing of faces or pictures, but whether symbolic carriers such as words can be processed this way remains controversial. Here we examine this issue by adopting the continuous flash suppression paradigm to ensure that the processing undergone is indeed unconscious without the involvement of partial awareness. Negative or neutral words projected into one eye were made invisible due to strong suppression induced by dynamic-noise patterns shown in the other eye through binocular rivalry. Inverted and (...) scrambled words were used as controls to provide baselines at orthographic and feature levels, respectively. Compared to neutral words, emotion-described and emotion-induced negative words required longer time to release from suppression, but only for upright words. These results suggest that words can be processed unconsciously up to semantic level since under interocular suppression completely invisible words can lead to different processing speed due to the emotion information they carry. (shrink)