The inversion of directions is an important operation with directions which plays an important role in qualitative spatial reasoning and spatial queries. In this work, we address on the inversion operation of the basic cardinal direction relations in the model of Goyal. The direction relation matrix model proposed by Goyal is a projection-based model for spatial direction relations between regions. This model is simple in calculation and easy to carry out formal reasoning, which is considered as currently one of the (...) most excellent models for representation and qualitative reasoning with cardinal direction relations in two-dimensional space. This work aims to realize the automatic inference and calculation of the inverse of the basic cardinal direction relations in the model of Goyal and further to improve the ability of spatial reasoning and spatial analysis of spatial database. In order to avoid the complicated manual reasoning, an algorithm for automatically performing the inverse operation on this model is devised by means of the operations of direction relation matrix. Theorems are provided to prove formally that our algorithm is correct and complete, which is also verified by comparing the result of our algorithm with that of manual reasoning for each basic cardinal direction relation. This study realized the automatic inference and calculation of the inverse of the basic cardinal direction relations in the model of Goyal and further improved the ability of spatial reasoning and spatial analysis of spatial database. (shrink)

Mass media play a significant role in shaping public opinion. News coverage of abortion reflects narratives about reproductive health, ethics, and women, and may potentially reinforce negative soci...

Because of the lack of interaction between seeking mode cats and tracking mode cats in cat swarm optimization, its convergence speed and convergence accuracy are affected. An information interaction strategy is designed between seeking mode cats and tracking mode cats to improve the convergence speed of the CSO. To increase the diversity of each cat, a top-N learning strategy is proposed during the tracking process of tracking mode cats to improve the convergence accuracy of the CSO. On ten standard test (...) functions, the average values, standard deviations, and optimal values of the proposed algorithm with different N values are compared with the original CSO algorithm and the adaptive cat swarm algorithm based on dynamic search. Experimental results show that the global search ability and the convergence speed of the proposed algorithm are significantly improved on all test functions. The proposed two strategies will improve the convergence accuracy and convergence speed of CSO greatly. (shrink)

Due to the arrival of positive psychology in the development of teaching, the construct of engagement has been thrived and got a notable function in the educational arena. Alternatively, numerous individual differences, containing ambiguity of tolerance, have been taken into consideration as a result of the key role they can play in the process of learning, and thus, on different facets of the learners’ engagement. Furthermore, resilience is recommended to be an alternate and effective way of engaging English as a (...) foreign language learners. Also, it is a significant feature of the human adaptation system in which students can efficaciously manage and tackle stressful involvements despite their troubles and disasters. Given the eminence of both ambiguity tolerance and resilience in educational settings and the fact that little attention has been given to these constructs in foreign language learning, the present review makes an effort to scrutinize the impact of ambiguity of tolerance and resilience on EFL learners’ engagement. Succinctly, the fundamental roles of ambiguity tolerance and resilience in learners’ engagement were confirmed, and consistent with the conclusions drawn from the present review, some suggestions are set forth concerning the implications of this paper. (shrink)

The target article (Nelson et al. 2023) offers a valuable contribution to the “paradox of experience,” which was illustrated by using examples about access to unproven medical products and disabili...

As a traditional clothing symbol that is unique to the Chinese nation, the dragon symbol combines the distinctive features of the Chinese nation, reflecting the depth of mental changes and the historical context of Chinese culture. The image of the dragon has formed a kind of dragon pattern as a certain set of ideas about the culture that encoded all its changes. Therefore, in national clothing the dragon image has been one of the most favorite patterns for thousands of years. (...) With the interweaving of world cultures and the deepening of the concept of clothing design, the dragon pattern will incorporate fresh elements of Western culture while maintaining the essence of traditional Chinese culture, and show a new design image through the utilization of various innovative ideas and design methods. The following methods were used for the study: literature review, field research, analysis of design cases, analysis of fashion trends. Using these methods, the specifics of using dragon designs in the fashion industry in different seasons and years are analyzed, and the trend of their evolution in the field of high fashion is studied. In the article we analyzed modern trends of clothing design and gave their characteristics. The results of the study showed that even in modern youth fashion this national symbol is actively used, which indicates that the patterns and images of the dragon have real applicability and wide prospects of application in modern fashion design. Modern clothing design provides a rich cultural heritage for modern clothing to retain the characteristics of civilization on the basis of continuous innovation. The use of dragon motifs in modern clothing not only meets the aesthetic concepts of modern people, but also adds vitality to clothing design. (shrink)

Drawing on social exchange theory, the present study seeks to understand how ethical leaders channel followers’ responses to positive treatment from the organization into a dutiful mindset, resulting in in-role and extra-role performance. Specifically, it examines the influence of perceived organizational support on both followers’ job performance and organizational citizenship behaviors, and the mediating effects of duty orientation on such relationships. In addition, it examines whether the mediated effects are contingent on the ethical leadership exhibited by the team leader. Based (...) on multi-source, multi-level data obtained from 233 employees in 60 teams from the Chinese public sector, we found that ethical leadership moderated the mediated relationship between perceived organizational support and follower work behaviors through duty orientation, such that this relationship was stronger in the presence of higher ethical leadership. (shrink)

This paper concentrates on the event-triggered H ∞ filter design for the discrete-time Markovian jump neural networks under random missing measurements and cyber attacks. Considering that the controlled system and the filtering can exchange information over a shared communication network which is vulnerable to the cyber attacks and has limited bandwidth, the event-triggered mechanism is proposed to relieve the communication burden of data transmission. A variable conforming to Bernoulli distribution is exploited to describe the stochastic phenomenon since the missing measurements (...) occur with random probability. Furthermore, seeing that the communication networks are vulnerable to external malicious attacks, the transferred information via the shared communication network may be changed by the injected false information from the attackers. Based on the above consideration, sufficient conditions for the filtering error system to maintain asymptotically stable are provided with predefined H ∞ performance. In the end, three numerical examples are given to verify the proposed theoretical results. (shrink)

In this article, we focus on an extended model M ¯ of bounded rationality. Based on a rationality function with lower semicontinuity, we analyze the relationship between structural stability and robustness of Ω ¯. To further demonstrate the applicability of our theory, we introduce a model Ω ¯ 0 containing an abstract rationality function and generalize abstract fuzzy economies. We demonstrate the structural stability of the extended model Ω ¯ 0 at ξ ¯, ɛ. That is to say, Ω ¯ (...) 0 is robust to the ξ ¯, ɛ -equilibria. (shrink)

Anticipation is a crucial perceptual-cognitive skill in fast-ball sports, and the effect of high anxiety on performance has attracted more attention from sports psychologists. Related studies mainly focus on the effect of anxiety on influencing processing efficiency and attentional control during information processing in sport. Attentional Control Theory has been supported by several studies. However, these studies have been criticized by the low ecological validity of task design, such as neglecting the dynamic process of anticipation, and inadequate performance analysis, such (...) as analyzing response accuracy and time separately. Using temporal occlusion paradigm, we tested ACT in a dynamic anticipation process. Eighteen skilled and eighteen less-skilled table tennis players were required to anticipate the serves of opponents under dynamic task constraints and anxiety conditions. High cognitive state anxiety decreased processing efficiency for both groups whereas performance effectiveness did not differ. In addition, it negatively affected processing efficiency in early anticipation compared with late anticipation tasks, suggesting that high cognitive state anxiety may have a greater impact on top-down attentional control. Our findings provide support for ACT and show that anxiety impairs anticipation efficiency and performance, possibly due to an ineffectively attentional shift from external kinematic cues to internal long-term working memory. Findings also have implications for the adaptation of attentional strategies and anxiolytic training. (shrink)

Consumers play an important role as one of the main actors in food safety social co-governance. To create a pattern of food safety social co-governance, the active and effective participation of consumers is critical. To encourage consumers to participate in food safety social co-governance voluntarily and positively, we attempted to develop and preliminarily validate a multidimensional questionnaire on consumer psychological capital that could be used to measure the degree of consumer participation in food safety social co-governance. The aim of the (...) initial sample and test sample 2 was to investigate the factor structure of a preliminary measure of consumer psychological capital. A 4-factor model with 23 items explained 61.05% of the total variance in item scores. The aim of test sample 3 was to measure the retest reliability. Test sample 4 was randomly allocated to the modeling sample and validation sample to verify questionnaire reliability and validity. Convergent validity, discriminant validity, and the internal inconsistency coefficients of the questionnaire were assessed in the modeling sample. While processing CFA, we deleted 9 items with small standardized factor loadings. The remaining 14 items in the final revised 4-factor model included self-efficacy, resilience, hope, and optimism. The fit indices of the revised four-factor model and second-order factor model in the modeling sample revealed an acceptable model fit. The convergent validity and discriminant validity of the revised model were good and acceptable, respectively. A cross-validation procedure confirmed the appropriateness of the revised four-factor model and second-order factor model in the validation sample. The cross-validation results confirmed that the fit indices of the revised four-factor model fitted the data well and the second-order factor model in the validation sample reached acceptable values. We concluded that the questionnaire developed in this study had good reliability and stable and acceptable construct validity. It could provide a theoretical basis for measuring psychological capital in food safety co-governance. (shrink)

A scientific paper’s citation represents its influence, which is the most intuitive indicator to access the quality of papers. This paper mainly adopts the social network analysis method, using the authors and the keywords of sports industry papers in China to constitute the networks of collaboration and knowledge, to explore effects of the degree centrality of authors and keywords and the structural hole of authors and keywords on the citation of papers in the collaboration and knowledge networks and draw the (...) following conclusions: as for collaboration networks, the degree centrality at the paper level is positively correlated with citations; in the collaboration network, the positive correlation between the structural hole at the paper level and citations does not exist; within knowledge networks, an inverted- U shape was found between degree centrality and paper’s citation; and within knowledge networks, a positive correlation is in existence between the structural hole of papers and their citation. This study synthesizes the already widely used collaboration network with the knowledge network constructed through keywords, distinguishes from the previous network features focusing at the author level, and explores research projects of Chinese Sports Industry from the paper level, providing a new perspective for the research of sports industry in China, complementing the methods and ideas of sports industry research, as well as providing a reference for the research in other disciplinary fields. (shrink)

A fundamental entity is an entity that is ‘ontologically independent’; it does not depend on anything else for its existence or essence. It seems to follow that a fundamental entity is ‘modally free’ in some sense. This assumption, that fundamentality entails modal freedom (or ‘FEMF’ as I shall label the thesis), is used in the service of other arguments in metaphysics. But as I will argue, the road from fundamentality to modal freedom is not so straightforward. The defender of FEMF (...) should provide positive reasons for believing it, especially in light of recent views that are incompatible with it. I examine both direct and indirect routes to FEMF. (shrink)

My wife was a student from among the "workers, peasants, and soldiers" and studied history at university. One day, during her junior year, a female student from a country village announced loudly in class, "I don't know what a eunuch is!" She looked very pleased with herself when she had said this. Other students in the class chimed in: "I don't know either." "Neither do I." My wife is a very straightforward sort of person and she said shyly, "Oh, I (...) think I might know—a eunuch is a man who has been castrated." Someone asked, "What does ‘castrated’ mean?" and she blushed scarlet and was unable to speak. She was only a girl at the time, and it upset her very much to admit in front of everybody that she knew what eunuchs and castration were. For a long while she felt miserable, not daring to see anybody or to say anything. (shrink)

In his book The Road Ahead, Bill Gates writes that modern developments in information technology mean that engineers already have the capability to produce real sensations. They can put goggles on you that show colored pictures and give you stereo earphones so that what you see and hear is controlled by computer. Once the hardware and software are sophisticated enough, we will not be able to tell the difference between electronic sounds and images and real sounds and images. The hardware (...) and software available at present are probably not yet that sophisticated and are not at the stage where this would be feasible; but in the past twenty years technological progress has been amazing, and we must prepare ourselves psychologically for the day when it does become possible. (shrink)

To this day I still do not know exactly what sort of people are to be regarded as intellectuals, and what sort of people are not. When I was being re-educated in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, a military representative once told me that I was a "petty bourgeois intellectual." I was only seventeen at the time, had received six years of primary school education, and was barely literate, so I felt I did not deserve to be called an (...) intellectual. By the way, I also felt I did not deserve the appellation "petty bourgeois." My family lived on wages from the government; even our furniture belonged to the government. We had not set up a stall to sell cigarettes in front of our house, so where did he get the term "petty bourgeois"? As for myself as an individual, it was only right and proper that I should belong to one social class or another, and I was not against doing so. However, to this day, I do not know in what class intellectual youths should be counted. In my opinion, if one insists on making comparisons or analogies, they should be counted as lumpen proletarians or the like. But this is taking the subject too far. (shrink)

Someone asks a climber why he wants to climb a mountain—everyone knows that climbing is dangerous and is of no practical advantage—and he replies, "Because it is there." I like this answer because it shows a sense of humor—it is quite clear that it is because he wants to climb it, but he tries to trick us by saying that it is because the mountain is there that he is itching to get at it. Apart from this, I also like (...) what the climber does, scaling sheer cliffs for no good reason. It may cause aching muscles, and there is a risk you might knock your brains out, so the average person does all he can to avoid climbing mountains. From the point of view of thermodynamics, this is the very rarely seen phenomenon of negative entropy. Because human beings always tend toward what is beneficial and avoid what is harmful, and in thermodynamics spontaneous phenomena are known as entropy-increasing phenomena, anything that tends toward the harmful and avoids the beneficial must be negative entropy. (shrink)

In the history of ethical thoughts of China and the West, ethical relations are always regarded as social relations among people, and the objects to which ethical norms apply are targeted for social business or man’s behavior. What traditional ethics concerns is ethical relationship among people or ethical feature of socialbusiness or man’s behavior. By comparison with it, environmental ethics has a good reputation for its research on ethical relationship between human being and natural environment. It has been discussing and (...) reconstructing ethical relationship between man and nature from the very beginning, and requires ethical solicitude or moral concern for natural environment. As a result, environmental ethics has to answer the question how it is possible. However, the mainstream views in environmental ethics, based on the position of moral expansion and non-anthropocentrism, can't and won't explain how environmental ethics is possible. What environmental ethics deals with is no other than the ethical relationship between man and man represented by the relationship between man and nature, what it confirms is no other than our obligations and duties to others and next generations when dealing with the relationship between man and nature, and finally, the criterion of evaluation it pursues in dealing with the man-nature relationship is no other than the integrated and long-run interest of all human beings. All these are the ground on which the contemporary environmental ethics stands possibly. (shrink)

This paper introduces the history and the present situation of Chinese scholarly research on "Chinese modernity." Due to the limited amount of source materials, this outline is concise and sketchy. Before explaining the tendencies and the characteristics of Chinese scholars' research on modernity, we must first give an overview of the historical sequence of the trends and theories on modernization that were introduced in China from the West and Japan.

Attentional biases have received considerable focus in research on cognitive biases and body dissatisfaction (BD). However, most work has focused on spatial allocation of attention. The current two experiments employed a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task to investigate the temporal allocation of attention to body-related words among young females with high and low BD. Experiment 1 assessed the stimulus-driven attention of body-related stimuli. Participants identified a neutral second target (T2) as accurately as possible while ignoring the preceding neutral, fat-, (...) or thin-related first target (T1). As expected, we observed spontaneous attentional blink effects elicited by fat- and thin-related T1s among participants with high BD, suggesting enhanced awareness of body-related stimuli even when this information does not have to be identified. Such effects did not emerge among participants without BD. Experimental 2 investigated the goal-directed attention of body-related stimuli, during which participants needed to identify both the T1 and neutral T2. Participants with BD showed reduced attentional blink effects after both fat- and thin-related T1, suggesting facilitated consolidation of body-related information in goal-directed attention among participants with BD. The findings may have important clinical implications for understanding how to decrease and even prevent body image dissatisfaction. (shrink)

The essay centers on Gödel's views on the place of our intuitive concept of time in philosophy and in physics. It presents my interpretation of his work on the theory of relativity, his observations on the relationship between Einstein's theory and Kantian philosophy, as well as some of the scattered remarks in his conversations with me in the seventies — namely, those on the philosophies of Leibniz, Hegel and Husserl — as a successor of Kant — in relation to their (...) conceptions of time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Ways of Interpreting DaoRuiqi MaDaodejing: The Book of the Way. By Laozi. Translation and Commentary by Moss Roberts. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. ix + 226.The Daodejing of Laozi. Translation and Commentary by Philip J. Ivanhoe. New York and London: Seven Bridges Press, 2002. Pp. xxxii + 125.According to an old Chinese saying, "Good things come in pairs." This is certainly true (...) for Laozi studies in America since two new translations of the Daodejing offer contrasting yet complementary readings of this ancient Daoist canon: Moss Roberts' Daodejing: The Book of the Way, and Philip J. Ivanoe's The Daodejing of Laozi. The Daodejing is the most translated of the Chinese classics, and there are more than "forty versions in English alone" (Roberts, p. 9). What makes these two new translations stand out is the linguistic sensitivity and philosophical sophistication of both.Ludwig Wittgenstein once compared the complexity and multiplicity of language to a confusing "ancient city" with "a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods."1 Likewise, translating an ancient text into a modern language resembles leading readers through a labyrinth of strange city streets. The Daodejing is such a challenging text. Its mystical subject matter, its brevity, and the lexical and grammatical changes in the Chinese language all make it especially demanding for translators. According to Jacques Lacan, there is "an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier."2 The linguistic sliding from classical Chinese to modern English is as enormous as a continental shift. The connotations of many words have changed so much that it is often very difficult to determine the most appropriate choice for some seemingly simple words. For example, in the opening stanza the word miao 妙 would appear easy to translate. In modern Chinese, miao means "wonder," "excellence," or "subtlety." However, according to the commentary of the third-century philosopher Wang Bi, miao refers to "the infinitesimal, for the ten thousand things initiate from the infinitesimal." 3 It becomes a crucial yet complicated task for a translator to determine which word one is willing to use in order to convey the meaning of the original text.4The grammatical structure of the Daodejing poses another serious challenge to translators. In classical Chinese, the subject of a sentence is often omitted and a noun can be used as a verb, depending on the context. It is very confusing for non Chinese readers if the text is translated word for word, as some translators have attempted to do. An effective translation must preserve intended meanings and at the same time present them comprehensibly to the reader. Considering the linguistic challenge in the translation of the text, it is amazing to see how both Roberts and [End Page 487] Ivanhoe have offered us two equally accurate yet stylistically contrasting readings of the same work. Because of his training in classical Chinese literature, Roberts is better able to preserve the stylistic characteristics of the original text. The translation by philosopher Ivanhoe focuses on precision and clarity of terminology. Reading both their versions of the Daodejing is like listening to two masters performing the same musical piece: it is not the melody but their expression and interpretations that increase our appreciation and understanding.5Roberts' Daodejing: The Book of the Way is an outstanding translation because he has so skillfully employed the English language to convey successfully the poetic quality of the Daodejing, a quality that, in my opinion, has often been overlooked by many previous translators. As Roberts states in his Introduction, his version attempts to "reproduce the condensed aphoristic force of Laozi's style, the appeal of his intriguing and often indeterminate syntax, and the prevalence of rhymed verse in his original" (p. 3). The Daodejing is a hybrid text combining both verse and prose.6 The versed sections often state philosophical principles or tenets, while the prose sections offer definitions or arguments.7 By faithfully following the structure of the original work, Roberts has contributed greatly to the study of the Daodejing by providing non-Chinese readers an opportunity to experience the beauty of form... (shrink)