This study treats firm productivity as an accumulation of productive intangibles and posits that stakeholder engagement associated with better corporate social performance helps develop such intangibles. We hypothesize that because shareholders factor improved productive efficiency into stock price, productivity mediates the relationship between corporate social and financial performance. Furthermore, we argue that key stakeholders’ social considerations are more valuable for firms with higher levels of discretionary cash and income stream uncertainty. Therefore, we hypothesize that those two contingencies moderate the mediated (...) process of corporate social performance with financial performance. Our analysis, based on a comprehensive longitudinal dataset of the U.S. manufacturing firms from 1992 to 2009, lends strong support for these hypotheses. In short, this paper uncovers a productivity-based, context-dependent mechanism underlying the relationship between corporate social performance and financial performance. (shrink)

We investigate the dynamics of a nonautonomous stochastic SIS epidemic model with nonlinear incidence rate and double epidemic hypothesis. By constructing suitable stochastic Lyapunov functions and using Has’minskii theory, we prove that there exists at least one nontrivial positive periodic solution of the system. Moreover, the sufficient conditions for extinction of the disease are obtained by using the theory of nonautonomous stochastic differential equations. Finally, numerical simulations are utilized to illustrate our theoretical analysis.

This article brings to light how AI research has benefited from post-Wittgensteinian philosophy. My research shows that Wittgenstein’s work began to engage the attention of AI researchers not only in the 1970s down to the present but right from the early beginnings of computational research in the 1950s. More specifically, his later philosophy inspired a group of researchers called the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU) to start one of the first programs in machine translation, information retrieval, mechanical abstracting, and knowledge (...) representation technologies in the early 1950s, all of which have later been claimed for AI and cognitive science. I focus on the philosophical work of CLRU founder Margaret Masterman and her extraordinary but forgotten contributions to ordinary language philosophy. (shrink)

IntroductionDuring the COVID-19 outbreak, many citizens were asked to stay at home in self-quarantine, which can pose a significant challenge with respect to remaining physically active and maintaining mental health. This study aimed to evaluate the prevalence of inadequate physical activity, anxiety, and depression and to explore the relationship of physical activity with anxiety and depression symptoms among Chinese college students during quarantine.MethodUsing a web-based cross-sectional survey, we collected data from 1,396 Chinese college students. Anxiety and depression were assessed with (...) the Self-Rating Anxiety Scale and the Self-Rating Depression Scale, respectively. The data on physical activity were collected by types of physical activity and the International Physical Activity Questionnaire.ResultsDuring the COVID-19 outbreak, about 52.3% of Chinese college students had inadequate physical activity. The rates of anxiety and depression symptoms were 31.0 and 41.8%, respectively. A high level of physical activity was significantly closely associated with low anxiety, while a moderate, or high level of physical activity was significantly closely associated with reduced depression after adjusting confounding demographic factors. Moreover, specific types of physical activity, such as stretching and resistance training, were negatively correlated with both anxiety and depression; doing household chores was negatively correlated with depression.ConclusionOur findings highlight specific levels and types of home-based physical activities that need to be taken into consideration to protect the mental health of college students during the COVID-19 epidemic. (shrink)

Evidences are important proofs to support judicial trials. Automatically extracting evidences from judgement documents can be used to assess the trial quality and support “Intelligent Court”. Current evidence extraction is primarily depended on sequence labelling models. Despite their success, they can only assign a label to a token, which is difficult to recognize nested evidence entities in judgment documents, where a token may belong to several evidences at the same time. In this paper, we present a novel evidence extraction architecture (...) called ATT-MRC, in which extracting evidence entities is formalized as a question answer problem, where all evidence spans are screened out as possible correct answers. Furthermore, to address the data imbalance problem in the judgement documents, we revised the loss function and combined it with a data enhancement technique. Experimental results demonstrate that our model has better performance than related works in evidence extraction. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel fractional-order PID controller tuning strategy based on Bode’s optimal loop shaping which is commonly used for LTI feedback systems. Firstly, the controller parameters are achieved based on flat phase property and Bode’s optimal reference model, so that the controlled system is robust to gain variations and can achieve desirable transient performance according to various control requirements. Then, robustness analysis of the controlled system is carried out to support the results. Furthermore, the parameter setting is analyzed (...) to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed controller. At last, some simulation examples are shown to verify the accuracy and usefulness of the proposed control strategy. The proposed fractional-order PID controller does not have any restriction on the controlled plant, so it can be widely applied on both integer-order and fractional-order systems. (shrink)

Language tests for overseas registered nurses (ORN) working outside their home country are essential for patient safety, as communication competency needs to be established in any workforce. We argue that the current employment of existing language tests is structurally and institutionally racist and disadvantages ORNs from non‐European Union (EU) and non‐White countries seeking to work in the United Kingdom. Using Critical Race Theory (CRT), we argue that existing English language tests for ORNs seeking registration in the United Kingdom are discriminatory (...) due to the UK's racist migration policies and a regulatory body for nursing and midwifery that fails to acknowledge and understand its own institutionally racist practices. (shrink)

Adopting an instrumental approach for stakeholder management, we focus on two primary stakeholder groups to investigate the relationship between employee treatment and loan contracts with banks. We find strong evidence that fair employee treatment reduces loan price and limits the use of financial covenants. In addition, we document that relationship bank lenders price both the levels and changes in the quality of employee treatment, whereas first-time bank lenders only care about the levels of fair employee treatment. Taking a contingency perspective, (...) we find that industry competition and firm asset intangibility moderate the relationship between good human resource management and bank loan costs. The cost reduction effect of fair employee treatment is stronger for firms operating in a more competitive industry and having higher levels of intangible assets. (shrink)

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) simulates uncertain gains and losses in real life situations and thus is a good measure of uncertain decision making. The role of working memory (WM) in IGT performance still remains unclear. The present study aimed to examine the effect of WM on IGT performance. Three groups of participants matched on gender ratio were randomly assigned to no WM load, low WM load, and high WM load conditions. Initially the three groups did not show significant difference (...) in WM capacity. They finished a modified version of IGT and then their implicit learning effect and explicit cognition on IGT were assessed. Results indicated a linear increasing trend of IGT performance among high WM load, low WM load and no WM load groups; participants in the no WM load and low WM load groups revealed implicit learning effect, while participants in the high WM load group did not; all participants showed explicit cognition on IGT to the same level. These results suggested that participants in the high WM load group showed good explicit cognition to IGT but showed poor performance. This pattern is similar to frontal patients. Further studies should be conducted to explore this issue. (shrink)

A central tenet of cognitive linguistics is that adults’ knowledge of language consists of a structured inventory of constructions, including various two-argument constructions such as the active, the passive and “fronting” constructions. But how do speakers choose which construction to use for a particular utterance, given constraints such as discourse/information structure and the semantic fit between verb and construction? The goal of the present study was to build a computational model of this phenomenon for two-argument constructions in Mandarin. First, we (...) conducted a grammaticality judgment study with 60 native speakers which demonstrated that, across 57 verbs, semantic affectedness – as determined by further 16 native speakers – predicted each verb’s relative acceptability in the bei-passive and ba-active constructions, but not the Notional Passive and SVO Active constructions. Second, in order to simulate acquisition of these competing constraints, we built a computational model that learns to map from corpus-derived input to an output representation corresponding to these four constructions. The model was able to predict judgments of the relative acceptability of the test verbs in the ba-active and bei-passive constructions obtained in Study 1, with model-human correlations in the region of r = 0.5 and r = 0.3, respectively. Surprisingly, these correlations increased when lexical verb identity was removed; perhaps because this information leads to over-fitting of the training set. These findings suggest the intriguing possibility that acquiring constructions involves forgetting as a mechanism for abstracting across certain fine-grained lexical details and idiosyncrasies. (shrink)

Given the current shortage of kindergarten teachers, this study examines the relationship between empowering leadership and job satisfaction among kindergarten teachers in China from the perspective of their job characteristics and the Chinese cultural context. The participants were 557 Chinese kindergarten female teachers whose average number of years of experience was 2.82. They completed a self-report survey regarding empowering leadership, vigor, affective commitment, and job satisfaction. The study results show that vigor and affective commitment could mediate the relationship between empowering (...) leadership and job satisfaction. Finally, we discuss the findings of this study in depth. At the same time, we suggest that administrators should focus on the empowering leadership of Chinese kindergarten teachers, strive to increase their level of dynamism, and finally, strengthen the emotional connection between the organization and the Chinese kindergarten teachers. Thus, we suggest that educational administrators should empower kindergarten teachers more, rather than allowing them to be mere enforcers. In addition, how to enhance the individual dynamics of early childhood teachers and their emotional connection to the organization may also be something for educational administrators to consider. (shrink)

Deficits in gestures act as early signs of impairment in social interaction and communication in children with autism spectrum disorder. However, the pieces of literature on atypical gesture patterns in ASD children are contradictory. This investigation aimed to explore the atypical gesture pattern of ASD children from the dimensions of quantity, communicative function, and integration ability; and its relationship with social ability and adaptive behavior. We used a semi-structured interactive play to evaluate gestures of 33 ASD children and 24 typically (...) developing children. And we evaluated the social ability, adaptive behavior, and productive language of ASD and TD children by using the Adaptive Behavior Assessment System version II and Chinese Communication Development Inventory. No matter the total score of CCDI was corrected or not, the relative frequency of total gestures, behavior regulation gestures, SI gestures, and joint attention gestures of ASD children were lower than that of TD children, as well as the proportion of JA gestures. However, there was no significant group difference in the proportion of BR and SI gestures. Before adjusting for the total score of CCDI, the relative frequency of gestures without vocalization/verbalization integration and vocalization/verbalization-integrated gestures in ASD children was lower than that in TD children. However, after matching the total score of CCDI, only the relative frequency of gestures without vocalization/verbalization integration was lower. Regardless of the fact that the total score of CCDI was corrected or not, the relative frequency and the proportion of eye-gaze-integrated gestures in ASD children were lower than that in TD children. And the proportion of gestures without eye-gaze integration in ASD children was higher than that in TD children. For ASD children, the social skills score in ABAS-II was positively correlated with the relative frequency of SI gesture and eye-gaze-integrated gestures; the total score of ABAS-II was positively correlated with the relative frequency of total gestures and eye-gaze-integrated gestures. In conclusion, ASD children produce fewer gestures and have deficits in JA gestures. The deficiency of integrating eye gaze and gesture is the core deficit of ASD children’s gesture communication. Relatively, ASD children might be capable of integrating vocalization/verbalization into gestures. SI gestures and the ability to integrate gesture and eye gaze are related to social ability. The quantity of gestures and the ability to integrate gesture with eye gaze are related to adaptive behavior.Clinical Trial Registration:www.ClinicalTrials.gov, identifier ChiCTR1800019679. (shrink)

What happens to philosophy when philosophical activities migrate to the AI lab? My article explores the philosophical work that has gone into the machine simulations of language and understanding after Alan Turing. The early experiments by AI practitioners such as Karen Spärck Jones, Richard Richens, Yorick Wilks, and others at the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU) led to the creation of the machine interlingua, semantic networks, and other technological innovations central to the development of AI in the 1950s–1970s. I attempt (...) to show how, in the midst of their computational work, the CLRU pioneers engaged with Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ferdinand de Saussure, Rudolf Carnap, and other philosophers and developed startling new ways of formulating fundamental questions about language and human understanding. More significantly, their philosophical activities on the machine present an inclusive and culturally diverse picture of the world that profoundly negates the ethnocentric metaphysics of human-machine conundrums that John Searle and his critics represent in the Chinese Room debate. The familiar legacy of that debate has long distorted the narrative of AI origins through its simultaneous reiteration and repudiation of the Turing test. My study seeks to clarify those origins, but my primary goal is to demonstrate what it is like to practice philosophy on the machine and how the critique of metaphysics is made possible in the AI lab. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the target tracking problem of an autonomous surface vehicle in the presence of a maneuvering target. The velocity information of target is totally unknown to the follower vehicle, and only the relative distance and angle between the target and follower are obtained. First, a reduced-order extended state observer is used to estimate the unknown relative dynamics due to the unavailable velocity of the target. Based on the reduced-order extended state observer, an antidisturbance guidance law for (...) target tracking is designed. The input-to-state stability of the closed-loop target tracking guidance system is analyzed via cascade theory. Furthermore, the above result is extended to the case that collisions between the target and leader are avoided during tracking, and a collision-free target tracking guidance law is developed. The main feature of the proposed guidance law is twofold. First, the target tracking can be achieved without using the velocity information of the target. Second, collision avoidance can be achieved during target tracking. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed antidisturbance guidance law for tracking a maneuvering target with the arbitrary bounded velocity. (shrink)

道德修养是否必须以物质富裕为前提? 抑或物质贫困反而是历练并检验道德修养的必要条件? 先秦儒家对此表达了两种看似矛盾的观点,我们可以将此解读为早期儒家的“富德两难”问题.对此问题可以提出四种可能的解决方案,即分别主张:(一)上述两种观点一对一错;(二)物质富裕与物质贫困 分别对应不同德性;(三)物质价值与道德价值相互独立;(四)上述矛盾命题分别针对着不同而说教对象.然而,这四种处理方案,各有其文本解释与学理上的局限性.区分个人和社会两种视角,一方面强调个人在道德选择上 肩负着无法推卸的责任,另一方面从统计科学的角度看待社会整体道德水平与物质贫富之间的正相关关系,或为解释物质富裕与道德修养关系问题的有效思路.

The neural networks that constitute corticostriatothalamocortical circuits between prefrontal cortex and subcortical structure provide a heuristic framework for bridging gaps between neurocircuitry and executive dysfunction in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). “Cool” and “Hot” executive functional theory and dual pathway models are supposed to be applied within the neuropsychology of ADHD. The theoretical model elaborated response inhibition and delayed gratification in ADHD. We aimed to review and summarize the literature about the circuits on ADHD and ADHD-related comorbidities, as well as (...) the effects of neurocircuitry on the executive dysfunction in ADHD. (shrink)

In this paper, a normalized robust FOPID controller regulation algorithm is proposed. Only one parameter k is necessary to be tuned in the controller regulation process, so the proposed control algorithm is convenient to be applied on both fractional-order systems and integer-order systems. A robustness evaluation function is constructed based on the small gain theorem. Larger robustness evaluation function value will help the system achieve better robustness performance. Another parameter, β, is also available to serve as a tuning knob when (...) larger robust evaluation function value is needed. Therefore, the controlled systems can be stabilized and can achieve quite satisfactory robust control performance using the proposed algorithm. The corresponding robust analysis results are obtained according to different conditions in the discussion. For a special case of widely used fractional-order systems, the FOPI and FOID controllers are presented based on the same tuning scheme together with their robustness discussion. Some examples are shown to verify the robustness of systems controlled by the proposed algorithm. (shrink)

This article aims at clarifying some critical, yet under-explored, conceptual issues of social representations from a dialogical perspective. The article recasts the notion of social representations as a sensitising, rather than a definitive, concept, based on the distinction between dialogical and monological epistemologies. It is argued that the introduction of the concept of themata into the theory suggests the dialogical interdependence between common thinking and social morphology, between the genesis and structure of social representations, and between implicit underlying themata and (...) their pragmatic manifestations in structuring social representations. At the same time, the concept of themata implies that a social representation may be, at one and the same time, shared and communicated in hegemonic, emancipated and polemical ways in a complementary manner. These three ways of “sharing” are dialogically interrelated to each other. (shrink)

This paper investigates how entrepreneurs' social media usage affects corporate philanthropy. Departing from the extant literature, which focuses on the instrumental role of social media, we draw upon the normative perspective of stewardship theory and propose that entrepreneurs' social media usage promotes their ethical and prosocial motivation for corporate philanthropy. In particular, we theorize that entrepreneurs' social media usage enhances their self-perceived status and philanthropic identification, thus affecting corporate philanthropy. Our analysis of a sample of Chinese ventures provides empirical support (...) for the mediating effects of self-perceived status and philanthropic identification on the relationship between entrepreneurs' social media usage and the philanthropic propensity and intensity of their ventures. Our study has implications for the role of social media in promoting corporate philanthropy and contributes to the literature on entrepreneurship and corporate philanthropy. (shrink)

BackgroundThe neural activity of irritable bowel syndrome patients in the resting state without any intervention has not been systematically studied. The purpose of this study was to compare the resting-state brain functions of IBS patients with healthy controls.MethodsThe published neuroimage studies were obtained from electronic databases including PubMed, EMBASE, PsycINFO, Web of Science Core, CNKI Database, Wanfang Database, VIP Database, and CBMdisc. Search dates were from inception to March 14th, 2022. The studies were identified by the preidentified inclusion and exclusion (...) criteria. Two independent reviewers compiled the studies and evaluated them for quality and bias.ResultsAltogether 22 fMRI studies were included in this review. The risk of bias of the included studies was generally low. The findings indicated that in IBS patients, increased or decreased brain areas were mostly associated with visceral sensations, emotional processing, and pain processing. According to brain network research, IBS may exhibit anomalies in the DMN, CEN, and emotional arousal networks. The fluctuations in emotion and symptoms in IBS patients were associated with alterations in the relevant brain regions.ConclusionThis study draws a preliminary conclusion that there are insufficient data to accurately distinguish the different neurological features of IBS in the resting state. Additional high-quality research undertaken by diverse geographic regions and teams is required to reach reliable results regarding resting-state changed brain regions in IBS. (shrink)

Cyclin-dependent kinase 5 has been implicated in Alzheimer's disease pathogenesis. Here, we demonstrate that overexpression of p25, an activator of cdk5, led to increased levels of BACE1 mRNA and protein in vitro and in vivo. A p25/cdk5 responsive region containing multiple sites for signal transducer and activator of transcription was identified in the BACE1 promoter. STAT3 interacts with the BACE1 promoter, and p25-overexpressing mice had elevated levels of pSTAT3 and BACE1, whereas cdk5-deficient mice had reduced levels. Furthermore, mice with a (...) targeted mutation in the STAT3 cdk5 responsive site had lower levels of BACE1. Increased BACE levels in p25 overexpressing mice correlated with enhanced amyloidogenic processing that could be reversed by a cdk5 inhibitor. These data demonstrate a pathway by which p25/cdk5 increases the amyloidogenic processing of APP through STAT3-mediated transcriptional control of BACE1 that could have implications for AD pathogenesis. (shrink)