Urbanization is causing profound changes in ecosystem functions at local and regional scales. The net primary productivity is an important indicator of global change, rapid urbanization and climate change will have a significant impact on NPP, and urban expansion and climate change in different regions have different impacts on NPP, especially in densely populated areas. However, to date, efforts to quantify urban expansion and climate change have been limited, and the impact of long-term continuous changes in NPP has not been (...) well understood. Based on land use data, night light data, NPP data, climate data, and a series of social and economic data, we performed a comprehensive analysis of land use change in terms of type and intensity and explored the pattern of urban expansion and its relationship with NPP and climate change for the period of 2000–2015, taking Zhengzhou, China, as an example. The results show that the major form of land use change was cropland to built-up land during the 2000–2015 period, with a total area of 367.51 km2 converted. The NPP exhibited a generally increasing trend in the study area except for built-up land and water area. The average correlation coefficients between temperature and NPP and precipitation and NPP were 0.267 and 0.020, respectively, indicating that an increase in temperature and precipitation can promote NPP despite significant spatial differences. During the examined period, most expansion areas exhibited an increasing NPP trend, indicating that the influence of urban expansion on NPP is mainly characterized by an evident influence of the expansion area. The study can provide a reference for Zhengzhou and even the world's practical research to improve land use efficiency, increase agricultural productivity and natural carbon sinks, and maintain low-carbon development. (shrink)
In this paper we consider two major issues: conceptual–experimental approaches to the self, and the neuroanatomical substrate of the self. We distinguish content- and processed-based concepts of the self that entail different experimental strategies, and anatomically, we investigate the concept of midline structures in further detail and present a novel view on the anatomy of an integrated subcortical–cortical midline system. Presenting meta-analytic evidence, we show that the anterior paralimbic, e.g. midline, regions do indeed seem to be specific for self-specific stimuli. (...) We conclude that future investigation of the self need to develop novel concepts that are more empirically plausible than those currently in use. Different concepts of self will require novel experimental designs that include, for example, the brain’s resting state activity as an independent variable. Modifications of both conceptual and anatomical dimensions will allow an empirically more plausible account of the relationship between brain and self. (shrink)
With outstanding geographical location and rich natural resources, coastal cities have become concentrated and active areas of human social and economic production. Furthermore, a large number of human activities have posed a great deal of ecological environmental pressure to coastal ecological areas. The emergy analysis method is selected to construct an index system with a total of nine indicators at five levels, including emergy source structure, social subsystem, economic subsystem, environmental subsystem, and comprehensive evaluation of sustainable development. The development level (...) of subsystems and the sustainable development ability of ecosystem in Shenzhen, Dalian, Ningbo, Qingdao, and Xiamen were evaluated. The emergy sustainable index of the five cities is 0.10, 0.23, 0.31, 0.49, and 0.93, respectively. According to the evaluation results, coastal cities should comprehensively optimize the population structure, reasonably develop natural resources, make efficient use of marine resources, attach importance to the source control of pollutants, and strive to build a modern economy, so as to realize the sustainable development of coastal urban ecosystem. (shrink)
In his political treatise, Mabadi ara ahl al-madina al-fadhila, Abu Nasr Alfarabi, the medieval Muslim philosopher, proposes a theory of virtuous city which, according to prominent scholars, is modeled on Plato’s utopia of the Republic. No doubt that Alfarabi was well-versed in the philosophy of Plato and the basic framework of his theory of city is platonic. However, his theory of city is not an exact reproduction of the Republic’s theory and, despite glaring similarities, the two theories do differ in (...) many aspects. In both, Alfarabi’s Mabadi ara ahl al-madina al-fadhila and Plato’s Republic, the theory of virtuous city is accompanied by a theory of the soul. Since the theory of soul plays a foundational role in both theories of the virtuous city, the present article intends to provide an explanation for the differences between the two theories of the city in terms of the differences between the two theories of the soul. (shrink)
ABSTRACTThis study exposes the cognitive flaws of ‘endogeneity bias’. It examines how conceptualisation of the bias has evolved to embrace all major econometric problems, despite extensive lack of hard evidence. It reveals the crux of the bias – a priori rejection of causal variables as conditionally valid ones, and of the bias correction by consistent estimators – modification of those variables by non-uniquely and non-causally generated regressors. It traces the flaws to misconceptions about error terms and estimation consistency. It highlights (...) the need to shake off the bias to let statistical learning play an active and formal role in econometrics. (shrink)
In response to the COVID-19 outbreak in many parts of the world, online education has become a more viable option. Some studies have assessed undergraduate students’ readiness for online learning, while others examined students’ anxiety about online learning at home. The relationship between readiness and anxiety about online learning is, however, not well explored. This paper has two purposes: to develop a new and valid instrument—the Home-based Online Learning Readiness Questionnaire —to measure students’ readiness to study online at home based (...) on a theoretical framework of self-regulated learning. As a replacement for the previous readiness scale, this new instrument adds a section on learning strategies and updates and develops new items. to investigate the relationship between readiness and anxiety in online learning. In order to explore those issues, 527 undergraduate students in China were surveyed in this study. The results indicated that HOLRQ was validated in the following six domains: motivation, self-efficacy, information technology skills, resource management, learning strategies and help-seeking. Chinese undergraduate students were more prepared in resource management, motivation, and help seeking, but less prepared in learning strategies, information technology skills, and self-efficacy. However, the regression analysis showed that readiness did not predict online learning anxiety. It means even highly prepared self-regulated learners may experience anxiety when learning online from home. The findings provide insights for instructors and administrators to determine how students really feel about learning from home with online education. (shrink)
To investigate the effects of left-behind children’s empathy and coping styles on school adjustment, 605 left-behind children in the third grade from three rural elementary schools in Suzhou, Anhui Province were selected to complete the Chinese version of the Interpersonal Reaction Index Scale, the Coping Style Scale, and the School Adjustment Behavior Scale for Primary and Secondary School Students. The results showed that emotional empathy positively predicted children’s social competence, and negatively predicted children’s antisocial behavior; cognitive empathy positively predicted children’s (...) social competence; the role of positive coping styles mediated the relationship between cognitive empathy and social competence, and that between cognitive empathy and antisocial behavior; negative coping styles mediated the relationship between cognitive empathy and antisocial behavior; both positive and negative coping styles mediated the relationship between emotional empathy and social competence, and that between emotional empathy and antisocial behavior. The findings of the study are valuable for understanding the relationship between empathy and school adjustment, which also helps to enhance the school adjustment of left-behind children. (shrink)
Engineering programs in the United States have been experimenting with diverse pedagogical approaches to educate future professional engineers. However, a crucial dimension of ethics education that focuses on the values, personal commitments, and meaning of engineers has been missing in many of these pedagogical approaches. We argue that a value-based approach to professional ethics education is critically needed in engineering education, because such an approach is indispensable for cultivating self-reflective and socially engaged engineers. This paper starts by briefly comparing two (...) prevalent approaches to ethics education in science and engineering: professional and philosophical. While we acknowledge that both approaches help meet certain ethics education objectives, we also argue that neither of these is sufficient to personally engage students in authentic moral learning. We make the case that it is important to connect ethics education to the heart, which is extensively driven by values, and present a value-based approach to professional ethics education. We provide some classroom practices that cultivate a safe, diverse, and engaging learning environment. Finally, we discuss the implications of a value-based approach to professional ethics education for curriculum design and pedagogical practice, including opportunities and challenges for engineering faculty eager to incorporate value-based inquiry into their classrooms. (shrink)
q-Rung orthopair fuzzy number is a flexible and superior fuzzy information description tool which can provide stronger expressiveness than intuitionistic fuzzy number and Pythagorean fuzzy number. Muirhead mean operator and its dual form geometric MM operator are two all-in-one aggregation operators for capturing the interrelationships of the aggregated arguments because they are applicable in the cases in which all arguments are independent of each other, there are interrelationships between any two arguments, and there are interrelationships among any three or more (...) arguments. Archimedean T-norm and T-conorm are superior operations that can generate general and versatile operational rules to aggregate arguments. To take advantage of qROFN, MM operator, GMM operator, and ATT in multicriteria group decision making, an Archimedean MM operator, a weighted Archimedean MM operator, an Archimedean GMM operator, and a weighted Archimedean GMM operator for aggregating qROFNs are presented to solve the MCGDM problems based on qROFNs in this paper. The properties of these operators are explored and their specific cases are discussed. On the basis of the presented operators, a method for solving the MCGDM problems based on qROFNs is proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated via a numerical example, a set of experiments, and qualitative and quantitative comparisons. The demonstration results suggest that the proposed method has satisfying generality and flexibility at aggregating q-rung orthopair fuzzy information and capturing the interrelationships of criteria and the attitudes of decision makers and is feasible and effective for solving the MCGDM problems based on qROFNs. (shrink)
Various studies have recognized the importance of humility as a foundational aspect of virtuous leadership and have revealed the beneficial effects of leader humility on employee moral attitudes and behaviors. However, these findings may overestimate the benefits of leader humility and overlook its potential costs. Integrating person–supervisor fit theory and balance theory with the humility literature, we employ a dyadic approach to consider supervisor and employee humility simultaneously. We investigate whether and how the congruence of supervisor and employee humility influences (...) employee citizenship and deviance behaviors. We conducted a multilevel, multiphase, and multisource field study to test our hypotheses. The results of cross-level polynomial regression analyses revealed that when supervisors and employees were incongruent in humility, employees experienced higher levels of negative affect toward supervisors. Also, compared to those in low–low congruent dyads, employee negative affect toward supervisors was lower in high–high congruent dyads. The results further revealed asymmetric incongruence effects: employees experienced the highest levels of negative affect toward supervisors when their own humility was lower than their supervisors’. In addition, we found that employee negative affect toward supervisors mediated the impacts of supervisor–employee congruence in humility on employee organizational citizenship behavior and counterproductive work behavior. (shrink)
Developmental and neuroscience works have demonstrated that the moral judgment is influenced by theory of mind, which refers to the ability to represent the mental states of different agents. However, the neural and cognitive time course of interactions between moral judgment and ToM remains unclear. The present event-related potential study investigated the underlying neural substrate of the interaction between moral judgment and ToM by contrasting the ERPs elicited by moral judgments for self and for others in moral dilemmas. In classic (...) moral dilemmas, the agents must choose between the utilitarian choice and the non-utilitarian choice. The ERPs were recorded from participants who made moral judgments for self and for others when the agent made utilitarian or non-utilitarian choices during the dilemma. The results revealed that the moral judgment for others elicited a larger frontal late positive component than that for self when the agents made utilitarian choices, while no difference was observed on early components of N1, P2, and N2. Moreover, individual differences in mentalizing ability were negatively correlated with the LPC amplitudes. These findings suggested that ToM modulated the late controlled process but not the early automatic process during moral judgments. (shrink)
There is a tendency among scholars to identify Alfarabi’s political philosophy in general and his theory of the state in particular with that of Plato’s The Republic. Undoubtedly Alfarabi was well versed in the philosophy of Plato and was greatly influenced by it. He borrows the Platonic concept of the philosopher king and uses it in his theory of the state. However, we argue that the identification of Alfarabi’s virtuous city with that of Plato’s The Republic is an inaccurate assessment (...) as it involves overlooking Alfarabi’s unique religiopolitical context. Alfarabi was a Muslim political philosopher, and the present article intends to understand Alfarabi’s theory of the state in light of his historical context. The article shows that, viewed through the prism of Islamic religion and political history, Alfarabi’s virtuous city seems distinct from that of Plato’s The Republic. (shrink)
Because of difficulty processing the electronic medical record data of patients with cerebrovascular disease, there is little mature recognition technology capable of identifying the named entity of cerebrovascular disease. Excellent research results have been achieved in the field of named entity recognition, but there are several problems in the pre processing of Chinese named entities that have multiple meanings, of which neglecting the combination of contextual information is one. Therefore, to extract five categories of key entity information for diseases, symptoms, (...) body parts, medical examinations, and treatment in electronic medical records, this paper proposes the use of a BERT-BiGRU-CRF named entity recognition method, which is applied to the field of cerebrovascular diseases. The BERT layer first converts the electronic medical record text into a low-dimensional vector, then uses this vector as the input to the BiGRU layer to capture contextual features, and finally uses conditional random fields to capture the dependency between adjacent tags. The experimental results show that the F1 score of the model reaches 90.38%. (shrink)
The computer distance teaching system teaches through the network, and there is no entrance threshold. Any student who is willing to study can log in to the network computer distance teaching system for study at any free time. Neural network has a strong self-learning ability and is an important part of artificial intelligence research. Based on this study, a neural network-embedded architecture based on shared memory and bus structure is proposed. By looking for an alternative method of exp function to (...) improve the speed of radial basis function algorithm, and then by analyzing the judgment conditions in the main loop during the algorithm process, these judgment conditions are modified conditionally to reduce the calculation scale, which can double the speed of the algorithm. Finally, this article verifies the function, performance, and interface of the computer distance education system. (shrink)
Hui Shi (370-310B.C.E.?) is a unique one among the pre-Qin scholars. The object and orientation of his scholarship emphasized on “chasing after the materials” or the research for objective knowledge of natural things. He shows a tendency of tolerating and advocating diversity and variety, and intentionally pursuing new and unusual ideas. In certain degree he judges the value of knowledge by its truthfulness rather than its usefulness. As pointed out by Wing-tsit Chan, Hui shi represents a “tendency in ancient China (...) toward intellectualism for its own sake”. (shrink)
The author establishes an elementary system AS which contains functions +, ≐ and a constant 0 and then proves the semi-completeness and the decidability of AS, using the theory of systems of inequalities.
In traditional Chinese political philosophy, there has been a lack of explicit discussion on the power-responsibility relationship or the contract state . Western learning does not lack such content. As Western countries have already resolved the question of power-responsibility correspondence by means of constitutional democracy, it has become a linguistic usage of theirs that is not all too logical but quite harmless in practice to discuss “big and small” questions without taking power and responsibility into account. Yet, were our countrymen, (...) our compatriots, who are first of all muddleheaded about the relationship between power and responsibility, to take over and accept such language as theirs and discuss “their problems,” there would be great harm. If it is a mere academic error to say “State power does not go down to the county level,” which in history is actually “The state is not responsible for anybody and anything below the county level,” then the following will bring real harm. (shrink)
Disorders of consciousness (DoC)—that is, unresponsive wakefulness syndrome/vegetative state and minimally conscious state—are debilitating conditions for which no reliable markers of consciousness recovery have yet been identified. Evidence points to the GABAergic system being altered in DoC, making it a potential target as such a marker.
The performance level of a multistate system can vary among different values rather than only two states. To improve the reliability of MSSs, a maintenance strategy has been adopted to satisfy customer demand, and reliability modeling of MSS with preventive maintenance and customer demand is proposed. According to the regular degradation and random failure at each state, based on the Markov random process, the proposed MSS with preventive maintenance can be modeled to satisfy the customer demand in a specific state. (...) This model can also be adapted to compute other reliability indices. Based on this model, the effect of different preventive maintenance actions on the reliability indices can be analyzed and further compared. Two numerical examples have been illustrated to show the validity of the proposed model. The reliability model presented in this study can be used to assess the type of MSS and help reliability engineers to compare different maintenance actions quantitatively and make optimal decisions. (shrink)
Seismic processing and interpretation techniques provide important tools for oil and gas exploration in the Songliao Basin in eastern China, which is dominated by terrestrial facies. In the Songliao Basin, a large number of thin-sand reservoirs are widely distributed and they are the primary targets of potential oil and gas exploration and exploitation. An important part of exploration in the Songliao Basin is to accurately describe the distribution of these thin-sand belts and the sand-body shapes. However, the thickness of these (...) thin-sand reservoirs is generally below the resolution of conventional seismic processing. Most reservoirs are thin interbeds of sand and mudstones with strong vertical and lateral variations. This makes it difficult to accurately predict the vertical and horizontal distribution of the thin-sand bodies using conventional seismic processing and interpretation methods. In addition, these lithologic traps are difficult to identify due to the complex controlling factors and distribution characteristics and the strong concealment. These challenges motivate us to improve the seismic data quality to help delineate thin-sand reservoirs. We have used the broadband, wide-azimuth, and high-density integrated seismic exploration technique to help delineate thin reservoirs. We first use field single-point excitation and single-point receiver acquisition to obtain seismic data with wide frequency bands, wide azimuth angles, and high folds, which contain rich geologic information. Next, we perform near-surface Q compensation, viscoelastic prestack time migration, seismic attributes, and seismic waveform indication inversion on the newly acquired seismic data. The 3D case study indicates the benefits of improving the imaging of thin-sand body and the accuracy of inversion and reservoir characterization using our method. (shrink)
Empirical studies have suggested that language-capable robots have the persuasive power to shape the shared moral norms based on how they respond to human norm violations. This persuasive power presents cause for concern, but also the opportunity to persuade humans to cultivate their own moral development. We argue that a truly socially integrated and morally competent robot must be willing to communicate its objection to humans’ proposed violations of shared norms by using strategies such as blame-laden rebukes, even if doing (...) so may violate other standing norms, such as politeness. By drawing on Confucian ethics, we argue that a robot’s ability to employ blame-laden moral rebukes to respond to unethical human requests is crucial for cultivating a flourishing “moral ecology” of human–robot interaction. Such positive moral ecology allows human teammates to develop their own moral reflection skills and grow their own virtues. Furthermore, this ability can and should be considered as one criterion for assessing artificial moral agency. Finally, this paper discusses potential implications of the Confucian theories for designing socially integrated and morally competent robots. (shrink)
This paper begins by reviewing dominant themes in current teaching of professional ethics in engineering education. In contrast to more traditional approaches that simulate ethical practice by using ethical theories to reason through micro-level ethical dilemmas, this paper proposes a pragmatic approach to ethics that places more emphasis on the practical plausibility of ethical decision-making. In addition to the quality of ethical justification, the value of a moral action also depends on its effectiveness in solving an ethical dilemma, cultivating healthy (...) working relationships, negotiating existing organizational cultures, and achieving contextual plausibility in everyday professional practice. This paper uses a cross-cultural ethics scenario to further elaborate how a pragmatic approach can help us rethink ethical reasoning, as well as ethics instruction and assessment. This paper is expected to be of interest to educators eager to improve the ability of engineers and other professional students to effectively and appropriately deal with the kinds of everyday ethical issues they will likely face in their careers. (shrink)
