The "gang of four" — Wang Hung-wen, Chang Ch'un-ch'iao, Chiang Ch'ing and Yao Wen-yuan — have created great chaos by confusing the relations between ourselves and the enemy, obliterating the differences between the two kinds of contradiction, wrecking Chairman Mao's policy of uniting with, educating and reforming intellectuals, calling intellectuals the "stinking number nine," smothering the revolutionary initiative of the broad masses of intellectuals, and destroying the ranks of revolutionary intellectuals.

In connection with the discussion on the problem of logic, both within our country and abroad , it has already turned from the general, comparatively abstract, and difficult-to-resolve problem of the "relationship between formal logic and dialectics" to the more concrete problem of the functional scope of formal logic. Some people have even utilized special articles to inquire about a certain law in formal logic: the functional scope of the law of identity or the law of contradiction. The purpose of (...) these philosophers or logicians is to try to define the functional scope of a certain law in formal logic as a starting point, and then to proceed to study the functional scope of formal logic in the entire thinking process of mankind. If the functional scope of formal logic in mankind's entire thinking process is clearly and precisely defined, the solution of this complicated problem of the "relationship between formal logic and dialectics" would certainly not be very difficult. The basic purpose of Comrade Chu-ko Yin-t'ung's article on the problem of "whether or not formal logic's law of contradiction can be contravened in the dialectical thinking process" of men, which appeared in issue No. 82 of the "Philosophy" supplement of Kuang-ming Daily on April 24, is like this. It should be considered as a rather practical method. But I do not quite agree with his basic points of argument and with his analysis of certain examples of dialectics. I intend to present my superficial views here and to study them with Comrade Chu-ko. (shrink)

Objective: The objectives of this study are to understand the current functions, structure and operation of hospital ethics committees (HECs) in Shanghai and to facilitate their improvement. Methods: (1) A questionnaire survey, (2) interviews with secretaries and (3) on-site document reviews of HECs in Shanghai were used in the study, which surveyed 33 hospitals. Results: In Shanghai, 57.56% of the surveyed hospitals established HECs from 1998 to 2005. Most HECs used bioethical review of research involving human subjects as well as (...) bioethical review or consultation regarding medical care services and administrative decision- making. Of the surveyed HECs, 14.3% did not provide any formal bioethical training to the HECs’ members and many HECs had no standard operating procedures. Some HECs had no clear definition of what was “conflict of interest” that should be considered by the HECs, while 44.4% of the HECs did not perform continuing review. Discussion: After the issues of related national regulations, more and more hospitals established HECs in Shanghai, but the functions of HECs need to be further developed and formal training on bioethics should be provided to HEC members. To assure the independence and good performance of HECs, the conflict of interest procedure, the standard operating procedures and bioethical review should be improved. Conclusion: HECs in Shanghai had developed in the preceding 10 years and they played great roles in protecting the rights and welfare of human subjects and patients; some areas need improvement. (shrink)

Objectives The objectives of the study are to understand the current practice of informed consent in medical research in public hospitals in Shanghai, and to share our views with other countries, especially developing countries. Methods In the study, 145 consent forms (CFs) of the selected research projects in eight public hospitals with ethics committees in Shanghai were audited, and the principle investigators (PIs) of these research projects and 40 student subjects who had participated in clinical drug tests were surveyed by (...) questionnaires. Results The CFs of medical researches in public hospitals with ethics committees in Shanghai were generally acceptable. However, there were some defects in the CFs. Although most of the surveyed PIs had correct recognition of informed consent, some processes of informed consent were not in accordance with generally accepted requirements. A large number of the PIs considered the greatest difficulty with informal consent was lack of correct recognition of subjects or legally authorised representatives on medical research. Discussion Informed consent in medical research should consider the research ethics, the background of potential subjects, the local resources and culture of medical research. In addition, special protection is needed for student subjects in informed consent as well as efforts for building and restoring the public's trust in biomedical research. Conclusion The informed consent in Shanghai's public hospitals with ethics committees was generally acceptable and the achievement of adequate informed consent is influenced by many factors. (shrink)

Working memory performance affects children’s learning. This study examined objective, subjective, and physiological cognitive load while children completed a spatial working memory complex span task. Frist, 80 Taiwanese 11-year-olds who participated in Experiment 1 confirmed the suitability of the materials. Then, 72 Taiwanese 11-year-olds were assigned to high and low complexity groups to participate in Experiment 2 to test the study hypothesis. Children had to recall at the end of a dual-task list and answer two questions regarding the difficulty and (...) mental effort involved in processing and storage. Their pupil diameters were recorded using an eye-tracker. Two-way mixed ANOVA found that the processing requirements and memory load reduced storage and aggravated the subjective CL of storage; the subjective CL of processing was higher under highly complex conditions. Stepwise regression analysis indicated that subjective CL of processing predicted memory performance in low CL conditions, and physiological CL of processing predicted it in high CL conditions. (shrink)

We investigate the class of those algebras in which is a de Morgan algebra, is a quasi-Stone algebra, and the operations \ and \ are linked by the identity x**º = x*º*. We show that such an algebra is subdirectly irreducible if and only if its congruence lattice is either a 2-element chain or a 3-element chain. In particular, there are precisely eight non-isomorphic subdirectly irreducible Stone de Morgan algebras.

We identify the \-ideals of a distributive demi-pseudocomplemented algebra L as the kernels of the boolean congruences on L, and show that they form a complete Heyting algebra which is isomorphic to the interval \ of the congruence lattice of L where G is the Glivenko congruence. We also show that the notions of maximal \-ideal, prime \-ideal, and falsity ideal coincide.

A speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) in behavioural decisions is known to occur in a wide range of vertebrate and invertebrate taxa. Accurate decisions often take longer for a given condition, while fast decisions can be inaccurate in some tasks. Speed-accuracy tactics are known to vary consistently among individuals, and show a degree of flexibility during colour discrimination tasks in bees. Such individual flexibility in speed-accuracy tactics is likely to be advantageous for animals exposed to fluctuating environments, such as changes in predation (...) threat. We therefore test whether individual speed-accuracy tactics are fixed or flexible under different levels of predation threat in a model invertebrate, the bumblebee Bombus terrestris. The flexibility of speed-accuracy tactics in a foraging context was tested in the laboratory using a ‘meadow’ of artificial flowers harbouring ‘robotic’ crab spider predators. We found that while the ranking of bees along the speed and accuracy continuums was consistent across two levels of predation threat, there was some flexibility in the tactics used by individual bees – most bees became less accurate at colour discrimination when exposed to predation threat when flower types were rewarding. The relationship between decision speed and accuracy was influenced by predator detectability and the risk associated with making incorrect choices during the colour discrimination task. Predator crypsis resulted in a breakdown in the relationship between speed and accuracy, especially when making an incorrect floral choice incurred a distasteful quinine punishment. No single speed-accuracy tactic was found to be optimal in terms of foraging efficiency under either predation threat situation. However, bees that made faster decisions achieved higher nectar collection rates in predator free situations, while accurate bees achieved higher foraging rates under predation threat. Our findings show that while individual bees remain relatively consistent in terms of whether they place greater emphasis on speed or accuracy under predation threat, they can respond flexibly to the additional time costs of detecting predators. (shrink)

Using the corpus of JSTOR articles, we investigate the role of gender in collaboration patterns across the scholarly landscape by analyzing gender-based homophily--the tendency for researchers to co-author with individuals of the same gender. For a nuanced analysis of gender homophily, we develop methodology necessitated by the fact that the data comprises heterogeneous sub-disciplines and that not all authorships are exchangeable. In particular, we distinguish three components of gender homophily in collaborations: a structural component that is due to demographics and (...) non-gendered authorship norms of a scholarly community, a compositional component which is driven by varying gender representation across sub-disciplines, and a behavioral component which we define as the remainder of observed homophily after its structural and compositional components have been taken into account. Using minimal modeling assumptions, we measure and test for behavioral homophily. We find that significant behavioral homophily can be detected across the JSTOR corpus and show that this finding is robust to missing gender indicators in our data. In a secondary analysis, we show that the proportion of female representation in a field is positively associated with significant behavioral homophily. (shrink)