Adopting an Ethics of Care theoretical framework, this paper aims to investigate the way in which the owner-mangers (OMs) of small and medium-sized enterprises in Malaysia engage in human resource management. Based on in-depth interviews with 48 OMs, the findings show that HRM practices occur within the remit of management but are described by the managers in terms of relational obligations and cannot be fully accounted for using a strategic, instrumental, or critical lens. The present study highlights the importance of (...) the caring attitudes of OMs who adopt a humanistic management approach, responding to the varied needs of their employees and the obligations which are inherent to relationships between humans. (shrink)

The Ethics of Care (EoC) theory has been widely applied in the field of management, and there is a growing consensus that it is important to recognise the value and practice of care in the workplace. In this paper, we consider the implications of the EoC at work, and in particular the risks unboundaried care demands may pose to employees who encounter unmanageable ‘calls to care’. We present findings from interviews with 27 nurses in Malaysia, which suggest that the demand (...) to care at work, in addition to demands made in the non-work sphere, may be unmanageable. We argue for a more boundaried approach to the EoC at work with a view to ensuring that in valuing care we do not over-burden the carer. (shrink)

The sport industry is an extremely diverse industry, including segments such as professional sport, intercollegiate athletics, health and fitness, recreational sport and facility management. The industry is currently experiencing rapid growth and development, and as it grows, sport managers in the different segments encounter ethical issues which are often unique to each segment. This article examines the professional sport, intercollegiate athletics, health and fitness, recreational sport and facility management segments of the sport industry and discusses the various ethical issues facing (...) managers in each of these segments. (shrink)

The cost of basic income is typically estimated for a particular year. However, to assess the financial feasibility of basic income, it is also important to consider how much basic income will cost in the future. This is especially important in countries experiencing an ageing population, where the proportion of workers is expected to shrink. This article considers basic income as a universal life annuity and develops two models based on actuarial concepts to estimate the flat tax rate required to (...) finance basic income. The first model considers the cost of basic income over the lifetime of the current population and the second model additionally considers changing population dynamics. The proposed models are conceptually simple, providing a straightforward way to assess the financial feasibility of basic income. Using Singapore data, the models show that the monthly cut-off income separating net contributors and net recipients is around $2710 and benefits around 39 % of adult residents. A tax rate of around 22 % is required to support a basic income of $600. (shrink)

It is generally believed that moral reductionism is immune from notorious problems in moral metaphysics and epistemology, such as the problem of moral explanation – it is at least on this dimension that moral reductionism scores better than moral anti- reductionism. However, in this article I reject this popular view. First, I argue that moral reductionism fails to help vindicate the explanatory efficacy of moral properties because the reductionist solution is either circular or otiose. Second, I attempt to show that (...) a successful vindication, if any, of moral explanation requires moral-descriptive irreducibility. My discussion thus raises an explanatory challenge to moral reductionism. (shrink)

Professor Davidson's anomalous monism has been subject to the criticism that, despite advertisements to the contrary, if it were true mental properties would be epiphenomenal. To this Davidson has replied that his critics have misunderstood his views concerning the extensional nature of causal relations and the intensional character of causal explanations. I call this his ‘extension reply’. This paper argues that there are two ways to read Davidson's ‘extension reply’; one weaker and one stronger. But the dilemma is that: the (...) weak extension reply on its own isn't sufficient to support the principle of the nomological character of causality, anything strong enough to support that principle under the weak extension reply would be strong enough to warrant the strong extension reply; but the strong extension reply threatens the very stability of anomalous monism by threatening the causal potency and reality of the mental. For these reasons, I claim that either version of the ‘extension reply’ is bad news for anomalous monism. I conclude by suggesting that a form of absolute idealism circumvents the very assumptions that generate these kinds of difficulty for committed monists. (shrink)

Professor Davidson's anomalous monism has been subject to the criticism that, despite advertisements to the contrary, if it were true mental properties would be epiphenomenal. To this Davidson has replied that his critics have misunderstood his views concerning the extensional nature of causal relations and the intensional character of causal explanations. I call this his ‘extension reply’. This paper argues that there are two ways to read Davidson's ‘extension reply’; one weaker and one stronger. But the dilemma is that: the (...) weak extension reply on its own isn't sufficient to support the principle of the nomological character of causality, anything strong enough to support that principle under the weak extension reply would be strong enough to warrant the strong extension reply; but the strong extension reply threatens the very stability of anomalous monism by threatening the causal potency and reality of the mental. For these reasons, I claim that either version of the ‘extension reply’ is bad news for anomalous monism. I conclude by suggesting that a form of absolute idealism circumvents the very assumptions that generate these kinds of difficulty for committed monists. (shrink)

Type 2 diabetes mellitus is associated with cognitive impairment in many domains. There are several pieces of evidence that changes in neuronal neuropathies and metabolism have been observed in T2DM. Structural and functional MRI shows that abnormal connections and synchronization occur in T2DM brain circuits and related networks. Neuroplasticity and energy metabolism appear to be principal effector systems, which may be related to amyloid beta deposition, although there is no unified explanation that includes the complex etiology of T2DM with cognitive (...) impairment. Herein, we assume that cognitive impairment in diabetes may lead to abnormalities in neuroplasticity and energy metabolism in the brain, and those reflected to MRI structural connectivity and functional connectivity, respectively. (shrink)

René Descartes is often thought to have exerted a pernicious influence on our views concerning the relationship of humans to the environment. The view that because animals are machines, “thoughtless brutes,” they have no moral standing, and we thus have a right to use them to further our own interests, is attributed to him. A celebrated passage from the Discourse on Method adds fuel to the view that he subscribes to the “dominion” theory. I argue that this picture is misleading (...) and unfair. Descartes does not hold the dominion theory, and there is evidence that he accords animals (and plants) moral standing. Most importantly, Descartes holds that it is a human good to subordinate one’s interests to those of the larger universe. He can, in fact, be seen as a forerunner of modern ecocentrism. (shrink)

This study evidences turn actions done by ellipsis marks-only turns and blank turns as employed in quasisynchronous chats that are not discussed in prior literature. A brief introduction to the research background of ellipsis marks in online chats is followed by a description of the data collected before delving into the actions done by ellipsis marks-only turns and blank turns. Data were culled from multi-party chats among tertiary students during a critical reasoning class. A Conversation Analysis-informed approach is applied in (...) this article to analyze the preference organization of elliptical turns that illustrate several turn actions which include responses signaling disagreement, confusion and disapproval besides initial actions of eliciting responses and holding the floor. More than punctuation marks or paralinguistic restitution of silences, their interpersonal meaningfulness in sequential context and differentness/similarity vis-a-vis temporal silences are demonstratively shown in microscopic and interpretive description of chat excerpts. (shrink)

Synthetic physicalism—understood as the view that while mental concepts are distinct from physical concepts, mental properties are nonetheless identical to physical properties—is the dominant type of reductive physicalism in the philosophy of mind. With a focus on phenomenal concepts, this article examines two competing versions of synthetic physicalism: the demonstrative approach and the constitutive approach, both of which attempt to cash out the common idea that phenomenal concepts directly refer to phenomenal properties. I aim to argue that the synthetic physicalist (...) is impaled on a dilemma in addressing what I call the problem of double aspect: the mental-physical conceptual distinction seems to imply property dualism at a new level. Either she adopts the demonstrative approach or she goes for the constitutive approach, but neither option is acceptable. (shrink)

In this paper we prove that any c. e. degree is splittable with an c. e. infimum over any lesser c. e. degree in the class of d-c. e. degrees.

Pierre Manent is professor emeritus of political philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and is outspoken public intellectual in France. His book La loi naturelle et les dro...

Importance: Given the importance of apathy for stroke, we felt it was time to scrutinize the psychometric properties of the commonly used Starkstein Apathy Scale for this purpose.Objectives: The objectives were to: estimate the extent to which the SAS items fit a hierarchical continuum of the Rasch Model; and estimate the strength of the relationships between the Rasch analyzed SAS and converging constructs related to stroke outcomes.Methods: Data was from a clinical trial of a community-based intervention targeting participation. A total (...) of 857 SAS questionnaires were completed by 238 people with stroke from up to 5 time points. SAS has 14 items, rated on a 4-point scale with higher values indicating more apathy. Psychometric properties were tested using Rasch partial-credit model, correlation, and regression. Items were rescored so higher scores are interpreted as lower apathy levels.Results: Rasch analysis indicated that the response options were disordered for 8/14 items, pointing to unreliability in the interpretation of the response options; they were consequently reduced from 4 to 3. Only 9/14 items fit the Rasch model and therefore suitable for creating a total score. The new rSAS was deemed unidimensional. Apathy was correlated weakly with anxiety/depression and uncorrelated with physical capacity. Regression showed that the effect of apathy on participation and health perception was similar for rSAS/SAS versions: R2 participation measures ranged from 0.11 to 0.29; R2 for health perception was ∼0.25. When placed on the same scale, rSAS value was 6.5 units lower than SAS value with minimal floor/ceiling effects. Estimated change over time was identical which was not substantial but greater than expected assuming no change.Conclusion: The retained items of the rSAS targeted domains of behaviors more than beliefs and results support the rSAS as a robust measure of apathy in people with chronic stroke. (shrink)

The automated valuation of benchmark land price plays an essential role in regulating land demand in Chinese real-estate market as the big data are currently accumulated rapidly. However, this problem becomes highly challenging due to the multidimension, large volume, and nonlinearity of the land price-influencing factors. In this paper, an effective data-driven automated valuation framework is proposed for valuing real estate assets by combining a GIS and neural network technologies. This framework can automatically obtain the values of spatial factors affecting (...) land price from GIS and generate training set data for training the neural network to identify the complex relationship between all kinds of factors and benchmark land prices. The effectiveness and universality of the framework is verified via the data of benchmark land prices in Wuhan. The framework can be applied for automated benchmark land price valuation in other cities. (shrink)

Point-of-interest recommendations are a popular form of personalized service in which users share their POI location and related content with their contacts in location-based social networks. The similarity and relatedness between users of the same POI type are frequently used for trajectory retrieval, but most of the existing works rely on the explicit characteristics from all users’ check-in records without considering individual activities. We propose a POI recommendation method that attempts to optimally recommend POI types to serve multiple users. The (...) proposed method aims to predict destination POIs of a user and search for similar users of the same regions of interest, thus optimizing the user acceptance rate for each recommendation. The proposed method also employs the variable-order Markov model to determine the distribution of a user’s POIs based on his or her travel histories in LBSNs. To further enhance the user’s experience, we also apply linear discriminant analysis to cluster the topics related to “Travel” and connect to users with social links or similar interests. The probability of POIs based on users’ historical trip data and interests in the same topics can be calculated. The system then provides a list of the recommended destination POIs ranked by their probabilities. We demonstrate that our work outperforms collaborative-filtering-based and other methods using two real-world datasets from New York City. Experimental results show that the proposed method is better than other models in terms of both accuracy and recall. The proposed POI recommendation algorithms can be deployed in certain online transportation systems and can serve over 100,000 users. (shrink)

Financial wellbeing is an emerging variable in business psychology that is expected to measure overall financial status and future financial trajectories. Financial intelligence and wellbeing have been key determining factors for the financial performance of entrepreneurs. The present study aimed to examine the crucial financial determinants and social capital factors for the entrepreneurial intentions and their financial performances among the 326 entrepreneurs in China. The study's findings showed that the key financial indicators and social capital are significantly related to entrepreneurial (...) intentions, which considerably predict the entrepreneurial financial performance. The mediating relationships also reported that entrepreneurial intentions and financial intelligence significantly mediate the relationship among social capital, financial wellbeing, and entrepreneurial financial performance. The present study has highlighted the implications for potential entrepreneurs for improving their financial performance through sustainable social capital, financial wellbeing, and financial intelligence. This study will also help the strategists in screening the individuals registering as entrepreneurs based on their financial intelligence quotient. The present study enriches the literature by offering an integrated model on financial wellbeing and entrepreneurial financial performance. (shrink)

In Singapore’s multicultural society, a sizable proportion of the population subscribes to complementary and alternative medicine. In this article, we discuss the impact this has on medical practice in the context of the four principles of medical ethics. To uphold the principle of autonomy, we propose a non-judgmental approach towards patients who use CAM. Nevertheless, in order to promote health and prevent harm, the safety profiles of CAM must be studied through systematic research. In addition, the principle of justice is (...) one concerned with the fair distribution of scarce healthcare resources, while granting equal access to healthcare regardless of beliefs. Understanding CAM from an ethical perspective allows for the provision of safe, holistic, and culturally relevant care. (shrink)

Objectives: This study aimed to provide a comprehensive understanding of all intervention for learning burnout by meta-analyzing their effects.Methods: Relevant studies that had been published up to September 18, 2020, were identified through a systematic search of the PubMed, Web of Science, the China National Knowledge Infrastructure, and Wan Fang databases. Eligible studies included randomized control trials of any learning burnout intervention conducted among students. The Jadad scale was used to evaluate the quality of the study. Random-effect meta-analyses, subgroup analyses, (...) meta-regression analysis, and sensitivity analysis were conducted. Funnel plots and Egger's tests were used to evaluate publication bias. Duval and Tweedie's non-parametric trim-and-fill method was used to adjust the effect of publication bias.Results: Of the 5,245 articles found, 39 met the inclusion criteria for the systematic review. There were 3,400 students, including 1,847 students in the intervention group and 1,553 in the control group. A meta-analysis of 44 studies showed that the interventions were effective. Subgroup analyses were conducted according to education, scales, intervention measures, and intervention time. The results showed that, compared with the control group, the learning burnout scores of undergraduates, secondary vocational students, and middle school students were significantly lower. Based on different scales, all interventions were also effective. The funnel plot was asymmetric and consistent with the results of Egger's test. The trim-and-fill method was used, and seven missing studies were merged to obtain a symmetric funnel plot.Conclusions: This meta-analysis indicated that learning burnout interventions are effective. The subgroup analyses showed that group counseling is the most widely used, exercise intervention is probably the most effective, and 8 weeks or more is the appropriate intervention time. An integrated intervention study based on the factors of learning burnout adds value. More studies are needed to supplement the results in the future. (shrink)

To improve the personalized service of cultural tourism, anticipatory calculation has become an essential technology in the content design of intelligence navigation system. Culture tourism, as a form of leisure activity, is being favored by an increasing number of people, which calls for further improvements in the cultural consumption experience. An important component of cultural tourism is for tourists to experience intangible cultural heritage projects with local characteristics. However, from the perspective of user needs and the content adaptive system, there (...) are few suitable intelligent navigation and user demand anticipatory systems for intangible cultural heritage content. Purple clay culture is one of the first batches of national intangible cultural heritage protection projects in China. Therefore, taking purple clay culture exhibition as an example, this paper attempts to analyze the personalized information demand of tourism consumption experience in intangible cultural heritage communication activities with affective computing and meaning-driven innovative design method, by taking the content design in the navigation system as the research object. This paper uses the theory of planned behavior to calculate the relationship between tourists’ attitude, experience behavior, and display information demand. The findings indicate two issues. First, tourists’ demand for the entertainment and leisure attributes of intangible cultural heritage is greater than the demand for educational function attributes. Second, the meaning elements of information can change tourists’ beliefs in intangible cultural heritage and affect their attitude and behavior toward such heritage. According to the research results, strengthening the meaning elements of specific group information can improve people’s cultural identity and tourism satisfaction. The research results provide the basis for the content design direction of future museum intelligent navigation systems. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to develop an integrative model linking the effect of authoritarian leadership and differential leadership on employee turnover intention, and further explore the moderating role of the in-group/out-group on the above-mentioned relationships. We collected a sample of 624 supervisor–subordinate dyads from 87 teams in Mainland China and Taiwan. We find that, at the individual level, authoritarian leadership is positively related with employee turnover intention, and the relationship will be enhanced especially when the subordinate is an (...) in-group member. Through hierarchical linear modeling analysis, we find a negative relationship between differential leadership and employee turnover intention, significantly moderated by the within-team mean degree and the within-team variance degree of in-group/out-group. Contributions, limitations, and future research directions are discussed. (shrink)

Social enterprises combine activities, processes, structures, and meanings associated with multiple institutional logics that may pose conflicting goals, norms, values, and practices. This in-depth multi-source case study of an ecological social enterprise in Malaysia reveals how the enactment of the family logic interacts with the market and ecological logics not only in conflicting but also in synergetic ways. By drawing attention to the institutional logic of the family in social entrepreneurship, this study highlights the heterogeneity of social enterprises. The findings (...) have implications for research with social enterprises and family-owned firms in relation to the ethical obligations of these organizations and the interactions of multiple logics. (shrink)

The Exclusion Argument has afflicted non-reductionists for decades. In this article, I attempt to show that emergentism—the view that mental entities can downwardly cause physical entities in a non-overdetermining way—is the most plausible approach to solving the exclusion problem. The emergentist approach is largely absent in contemporary philosophy of mind, because emergentism rejects the Causal Closure of Physics, a doctrine embraced by almost all physicalists. This article, however, challenges the consensus on causal closure and defends a physicalist version of emergentism. (...) On closer examination, I find that neither physical evidence nor physicalist considerations can satisfactorily support causal closure. Moreover, I argue that two competing approaches that accept causal closure, compatibilism and autonomism, involve ad hoc postulations of mental causation. Therefore, all things considered, emergentism is the best option available to non-reductive physicalists. (shrink)

In addition to a code of conduct for researchers, it is desirable to implement a code of conduct for funders of research. This is because researchers often behave unethically as a result of direct and/or indirect pressure from funders. The paper provides an expansion of the first proposal for such a code of conduct and includes several elements such as “policy relevant research should not be contracted and supervised by a client with an interest in the outcomes”, and “policy relevant (...) research should always be examined by an independent institute”. (shrink)

The study of dialectical logic has a history of nearly one hundred years in China. It is significant for understanding both the growth of Chinese logic and the Sinicization of Marxism to review dialectical logic in the context of introducing the study of Marxism in China. Debates about dialectical logic in Chinese academic circles involve not only the problems of logic itself, but more importantly the understanding of Marxist philosophy. In the 1920s and 1930s, some Marxist researchers in China were (...) influenced by the philosophers and logicians of the former Soviet Union, and they came very close to equating dialectical logic with Marxist dialectics. They also identified the formal logic originating from ancient Greece as metaphysics, praising the former and criticizing the latter. In the upsurge of Marxist philosophy in the 1950s and 1960s, Chinese logicians carried out normal and formal academic research on dialectical logic. During the period from the end of 1970s to the end of 1990s, the research and teaching of dialectical logic in China reached its heyday, and logicians performed comprehensive and detailed research on some critical issues, including the basic laws of dialectical logic, which they tried to formalize. Since the beginning of the 21st century, dialectical logic has ceased to prosper and has faded from the core field of the discipline of logic, although some honorable scholars still persist in studying it. (shrink)

A growing number of philosophers are bringing interventionism into the field of supervenient causation. Many argue that interventionist supervenient causation is exempted from the fixability condition. However, this approach looks ad hoc, inconsistent with the general interventionist requirement on fixation. Moreover, it leads to false judgments about the causal efficacy of supervenient/subvenient properties. This article aims to develop a novel interventionist account of supervenient causation that respects the fixability requirement. The treatment of intervention and fixation that I propose can accommodate (...) some theoretical constraints on causation and deliver correct causal verdicts in classic examples. It is also worth noting that this interventionist account offers a promising defense of mental causation without postulating mental-physical overdetermination. (shrink)

The Exclusion Argument, which aims to deny the causal efficacy of irreducible mental properties, is probably the most serious challenge to non-reductive physicalism. Many proposed solutions to the exclusion problem can only reject simplified exclusion arguments, but fail to block a sophisticated version I introduce. In this paper, I attempt to show that we can refute the sophisticated exclusion argument by appeal to a sophisticated understanding of causation, what I call the 'Dual-condition Conception of Causation'. Specifically, I argue that the (...) dual-condition account of causation gives strong support to the so-called 'Autonomy Solution', which contends that even if mental properties are unable to cause (fundamental) physical properties, they can still cause higher-level properties (such as mental, behavioral, and social properties)—if so, human agency would be preserved in the physical world. (shrink)

Moral education is a core component of ideological and political courses in primary and secondary schools and universities in China, and also an important part of contemporary Chinese Marxist educational theory and practice. In Chinese senior high schools, the main curriculum and platform for moral education is ideological and political courses. The Ideological and Political Curriculum Standards for General Senior High Schools (2017 Edition, 2020 Revised) issued by the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China explicitly includes a (...) course on logical thinking in the ideological and political curriculum in general senior high schools, strengthening the importance of logic in moral education there. In this paper, the authors explain the necessity of intensifying logic training for contemporary Chinese teenagers, introduce and interpret the relevant contents in the Ideological and Political Curriculum Standards for General Senior High Schools (2017 Edition, 2020 Revised), and put forward some theoretical suggestions on how to conduct teaching on the subject of logic. (shrink)