The current COVID-19 pandemic and the previous SARS/MERS outbreaks of 2003 and 2012 have resulted in a series of major global public health crises. We argue that in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs and to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechenisms it is necessary to integrate the large and exponentially growing body of heterogeneous coronavirus data. Ontologies play an important role in standard-based knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. Accordingly, we initiated the (...) development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology in early 2020. -/- As an Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) library ontology, CIDO is open source and interoperable with other existing OBO ontologies. CIDO is aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology and Viral Infectious Disease Ontology. CIDO has imported terms from over 30 OBO ontologies. For example, CIDO imports all SARS-CoV-2 protein terms from the Protein Ontology, COVID-19-related phenotype terms from the Human Phenotype Ontology, and over 100 COVID-19 terms for vaccines (both authorized and in clinical trial) from the Vaccine Ontology. CIDO systematically represents variants of SARS-CoV-2 viruses and over 300 amino acid substitutions therein, along with over 300 diagnostic kits and methods. CIDO also describes hundreds of host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and the drugs that target proteins in these PPIs. CIDO has been used to model COVID-19 related phenomena in areas such as epidemiology. The scope of CIDO was evaluated by visual analysis supported by a summarization network method. CIDO has been used in various applications such as term standardization, inference, natural language processing (NLP) and clinical data integration. We have applied the amino acid variant knowledge present in CIDO to analyze differences between SARS-CoV-2 Delta and Omicron variants. CIDO's integrative host-coronavirus PPIs and drug-target knowledge has also been used to support drug repurposing for COVID-19 treatment. -/- CIDO represents entities and relations in the domain of coronavirus diseases with a special focus on COVID-19. It supports shared knowledge representation, data and metadata standardization and integration, and has been used in a range of applications. (shrink)

Ontologies, as the term is used in informatics, are structured vocabularies comprised of human- and computer-interpretable terms and relations that represent entities and relationships. Within informatics fields, ontologies play an important role in knowledge and data standardization, representation, integra- tion, sharing and analysis. They have also become a foundation of artificial intelligence (AI) research. In what follows, we outline the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO), which covers multiple areas in the domain of coronavirus diseases, including etiology, transmission, epidemiology, pathogenesis, diagnosis, (...) prevention, and treatment. We emphasize CIDO development relevant to COVID-19. (shrink)

This study focuses on examining the thematic landscape of the history of scholarly publication in business ethics. We analyze the titles, abstracts, full texts, and citation information of all research papers published in the field’s leading journal, the Journal of Business Ethics, from its inaugural issue in February 1982 until December 2016—a dataset that comprises 6308 articles and 42 million words. Our key method is a computational algorithm known as probabilistic topic modeling, which we use to examine objectively the field’s (...) latent thematic landscape based on the vast volume of scholarly texts. This “big-data” approach allows us not only to provide time-specific snapshots of various research topics, but also to track the dynamic evolution of each topic over time. We further examine the pattern of individual papers’ topic diversity and the influence of individual papers’ topic diversity on their impact over time. We conclude this study with our recommendation for future studies in business ethics research. (shrink)

Objective: Work stress is one of the urgent public health problems, which has aroused wide attention. In addition, work stress also has a negative impact on the development of enterprises. This study has three purposes: to understand the current status of working stress among couriers, to examine the association between work stress, job satisfaction and sleep quality of Chinese couriers, and to verify the mediating role of psychological capital.Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 3000 couriers in Beijing of China (...) from January to December 2019 using cluster stratified random sampling. Descriptive statistical analysis was used to describe demographic characteristics of respondents. Pearson correlation analysis was used to analyze the correlation among work stress, job satisfaction, sleep quality, and psychological capital. The mediating analysis was calculated role of psychological capital.Results: A total of 2831 participants were included in this study. The average score of work stress was 2.49 ± 0.76. Work stress was negatively correlated with job satisfaction, sleep quality, and psychological capital, respectively. The direct effect of work stress on job satisfaction is –0.223, and the total effect of work stress on job satisfaction is –0.267. The a*b*c’ is positive, indicating the mediating role psychological capital has in explaining the relationship between couriers’ work stress and job satisfaction. Moreover, psychological capital plays a mediating role between work stress and sleep quality among couriers.Conclusion: Couriers face certain work stress and should be paid attention to and psychological capital can effectively alleviate the work stress of couriers, so measures can be taken to improve it, promoting healthy development of employees and organizations. (shrink)

Current COVID-19 pandemic and previous SARS/MERS outbreaks have caused a series of major crises to global public health. We must integrate the large and exponentially growing amount of heterogeneous coronavirus data to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechanisms, in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs. Ontologies have emerged to play an important role in standard knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. We have initiated the development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO). (...) As an Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) library ontology, CIDO is an open source and interoperable with other existing OBO ontologies. In this article, the general architecture and the design patterns of the CIDO are introduced, CIDO representation of coronaviruses, phenotypes, anti-coronavirus drugs and medical devices (e.g. ventilators) are illustrated, and an application of CIDO implemented to identify repurposable drug candidates for effective and safe COVID-19 treatment is presented. (shrink)

COVID-19 often manifests with different outcomes in different patients, highlighting the complexity of the host-pathogen interactions involved in manifestations of the disease at the molecular and cellular levels. In this paper, we propose a set of postulates and a framework for systematically understanding complex molecular host-pathogen interaction networks. Specifically, we first propose four host-pathogen interaction (HPI) postulates as the basis for understanding molecular and cellular host-pathogen interactions and their relations to disease outcomes. These four postulates cover the evolutionary dispositions involved (...) in HPIs, the dynamic nature of HPI outcomes, roles that HPI components may occupy leading to such outcomes, and HPI checkpoints that are critical for specific disease outcomes. Based on these postulates, an HPI Postulate and Ontology (HPIPO) framework is proposed to apply interoperable ontologies to systematically model and represent various granular details and knowledge within the scope of the HPI postulates, in a way that will support AI-ready data standardization, sharing, integration, and analysis. As a demonstration, the HPI postulates and the HPIPO framework were applied to study COVID-19 with the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO), leading to a novel approach to rational design of drug/vaccine cocktails aimed at interrupting processes occurring at critical host-coronavirus interaction checkpoints. Furthermore, the host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) relevant to COVID-19 were predicted and evaluated based on prior knowledge of curated PPIs and domain-domain interactions, and how such studies can be further explored with the HPI postulates and the HPIPO framework is discussed. (shrink)

Under the basic framework of self-determination theory, the present study examined a moderated mediation model in which exhibitionism mediated the relationship between online basic psychological need satisfaction and self-disclosure and the mobile Internet, and this mediation effect was moderated by narcissism. A total of 296 Chinese middle school students participated in this research. The results revealed that exhibitionism fully mediated the association between online competence need satisfaction and self-disclosure on the mobile net, and partly mediated the association between online relatedness (...) need satisfaction and self-disclosure on the mobile net. The mediating path from online basic psychological need satisfaction (competence and relatedness) to exhibitionism was moderated by narcissism. Compared to the low level of narcissism, online competence need satisfaction had a stronger predictive power on exhibitionism under the high level of narcissism condition. In contrast, online relatedness need satisfaction had a weaker predictive power on exhibitionism. (shrink)

Adapting the basic tenets of Marxism to outstanding traditional Chinese culture is a major issue in the current and future development of Marxism in China. This paper attempts to sort out the historical relationship of ‘contradiction’ and ‘adaptation’ between Marxism and traditional Chinese culture in the process of development. It summarizes the basic ideas that have been developed in the academic community concerning the ‘two aspects’ involved with adapting Marxism to the Chinese context and the typical achievements represented by Mao (...) Zedong Thought. The paper also proposes that the challenge of adapting the basic tenets of Marxism and outstanding traditional Chinese culture should continue to focus on comprehensive innovation as the basic principle, prioritize cultural identity as the crucial direction for further progress, and take daily life as the central field of exploration. (shrink)

BackgroundIndividuals with mind-wandering experience their attention decoupling from their main task at hand while others with flow experience fully engage in their task with the optimum experience. There seems to be a negative relationship between mind-wandering and flow. However, it remains unclear to what extent mind-wandering exerts an impact on flow. And it is also elusive whether physical activity and mindfulness, which are as important factors that affected individuals’ attentional control and psychological health, are beneficial in explaining the association between (...) mind-wandering and flow. The current study investigated the relationship between mind-wandering and flow, and the potential mediation effects of physical activity and mindfulness in this association.MethodsA cross-sectional exploratory study design, including multiple scales such as the Mind-Wandering Questionnaire, the International Physical Activity Questionnaire Short Form, Mindfulness Attention and Awareness Scale, and the Short Dispositional Flow Scale was applied. Descriptive statistics and bivariate correlation coefficients were applied in the analysis of these data. A multiple mediation model was used to examine the relationships between mind-wandering, flow, physical activity, and mindfulness.ResultsMind-wandering was inversely associated with physical activity, mindfulness and flow, respectively; and flow was positively related to physical activity and mindfulness, respectively. Moreover, multiple mediation results demonstrated that physical activity and mindfulness, respectively, mediated the relationship between mind-wandering and flow.ConclusionThese findings are helpful to understand how our minds attend to the present moment, and the crucial roles of physical activity and mindfulness in the association between mind-wandering and flow. An implication of these is the possibility that the effective strategies aimed at enhancing both the levels of physical activity and mindfulness are needed to reduce the negative impact of mind-wandering on flow. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo confirm the effects of a transtheoretical model based on multidimensional life management on healthy behavior in patients with polycystic ovary syndrome.MethodsIn total, eighty eligible patients were recruited from March 2021 to June 2021 and randomly assigned to either the intervention or control groups. Outcome measures include health-promoting behavior, self-efficacy, anthropometrics, and the number of unplanned outpatient admissions. Data were collected at baseline, 3, and 6 months after the intervention. The chi-square test, rank-sum test, t-test, and repeated measurement analysis of (...) variance were used to analyze the data.ResultsIn total, sixty-six participants completed the study: 35 participants in the intervention group and 31 participants in the control group. After 6 months of intervention, the healthy behavior level of patients with PCOS increased from moderate [health-promoting lifestyle profile -II score of 105.37 ± 12.57] to good in the intervention group; and there was no change observed in the control group. In addition, the total self-efficacy score, PCOS-related unplanned outpatient admissions, waist circumference, and body mass index were found to have a significant difference in the intervention group at 6 months. Meanwhile, repeated measures analysis of variance showed a significantly greater improvement in health-promoting behavior and self-efficacy over time in the intervention group than in the control group.ConclusionThe transtheoretical model based on multidimensional life management positively affected healthy behavior, self-efficacy, the number of unplanned outpatient admissions, and anthropometrics in patients with PCOS.Clinical Trial Registrationwww.chictr.org.cn, ChiCTR2000034572. (shrink)

Abnormal behaviour detection algorithm needs to conduct behaviour analysis on the basis of continuous video inclination tracking, and the robustness of the algorithm is reduced for the occlusion of moving targets, the occlusion of the environment, and the movement of targets with the same colour. For this reason, the optical flow information between RGB images and video frames is used as the input of the network in view of group behaviour. Then, the direction, velocity, acceleration, and energy of the crowd (...) were weighted and fused into a global optical flow descriptor. At the same time, the crowd trajectory map is extracted from the original image of a single frame. Following, in order to realize the detection of large displacement moving target and solve the problem that the traditional optical flow algorithm is only suitable for the detection of displacement moving target, a video abnormal behaviour detection algorithm based on the double-flow convolutional neural network is proposed. The network uses two network branches to learn spatial dimension information and temporal dimension information, respectively, and uses short- and long-time neural network to model the dependency relationship between long-time video frames, so as to obtain the final behaviour classification results. Simulation test results show that the proposed method can achieve good recognition effect on multiple datasets, and the performance of abnormal behaviour detection can be significantly improved by using interframe motion information. (shrink)

Educational assessments tests are often constructed using testlets because of the flexibility to test various aspects of the cognitive activities and broad content sampling. However, the violation of the local item independence assumption is inevitable when tests are built using testlet items. In this study, simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of item response theory models and testlet response theory models for both the dichotomous and polytomous items in the context of equating tests composed of testlets. We also examine (...) the impact of testlet effect, length of testlet items, and sample size on estimating item and person parameters. The results show that more accurate performance of testlet response theory models over item response theory models was consistently observed across the studies, which supports the benefits of using the testlet response theory models in equating for tests composed of testlets. Further, results of the study indicate that when sample size is large, item response theory models performed similarly to testlet response theory models across all studies. (shrink)

Dissertation is the most important research genre for graduate students as they step into the academic community. The abstract found at the beginning of the dissertation is an essential part of the dissertation, serving to “sell” the study and impress the readers. Learning to compose a well-organized abstract to promote one's research is therefore an important skill for novice writers when they step into the academic community in their discipline. By comparing 112 dissertation abstracts in material science by Chinese and (...) American doctoral students, this study attempts to analyze not only the rhetorical moves of dissertation abstracts but also the lexical-grammatical features of stance in different abstract moves. The findings show that most of the abstracts include five moves, namely, Situating the research, Presenting the research, Describing the methodology, Summarizing the findings, and Discussing the research. However, fewer abstracts by Chinese students include all five moves. In addition, the choices of stance expressions by the two groups vary across the five abstract moves for different communication purposes. The results of this study have pedagogical implications for facilitating the development of academic writing skills for L2 writers. (shrink)

In the field of natural language processing, the task of sensitive information detection refers to the procedure of identifying sensitive words for given documents. The majority of existing detection methods are based on the sensitive-word tree, which is usually constructed via the common prefixes of different sensitive words from the given corpus. Yet, these traditional methods suffer from a couple of drawbacks, such as poor generalization and low efficiency. For improvement purposes, this paper proposes a novel self-attention-based detection algorithm using (...) the implementation of graph convolutional network. The main contribution is twofold. Firstly, we consider a weighted GCN to better encode word pairs from the given documents and corpus. Secondly, a simple, yet effective, attention mechanism is introduced to further integrate the interaction among candidate words and corpus. Experimental results from the benchmarking dataset of THUC news demonstrate a promising detection performance, compared to existing work. (shrink)

Intern physicians are generally more burdened by stress than the general population. This cross-sectional study aimed to evaluate the current situation regarding burnout and explore its association with the self-evaluation of competence among Chinese dental interns. A self-administered anonymous survey was conducted on 91 dental interns in the Peking University School of Stomatology, from August 2019 to June 2020. It consisted of a psychological stress questionnaire, including burnout and self-evaluation of clinical competence. The Wilcoxon signed rank test was used to (...) determine the differences between self-evaluation scores of clinical competence. Results showed average scores for emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal accomplishment of 22.22 ± 9.04, 8.16 ± 5.21, and 36.08 ± 7.76, respectively. Dental clinical technology was considered more useful than other clinical competencies, and there was a correlation between its importance and the stress caused by its deficiency. Significant associations were found between stress due to a lack of dental clinical technology and high emotional exhaustion. Burnout was common among the dental interns, which may be a valuable finding. Among the six different aspects of clinical competence, “dental clinical technology” represented the most stressful item. Strengthening pre-clinical training and promptly conducting targeted training in the early clinical process may be considered as decompression measures. (shrink)

Digitalization plays an integral role in the transformation of the Omni structure. This study aims to investigate the effect of digital marketing capabilities and blockchain technology on customer-linking capabilities, market-sensing capabilities, consumer-brand engagement, and firm performance in China. The study was quantitative, and a simple random sampling technique was adopted for data collection. Data were collected using a structured questionnaire, 311 questionnaires were distributed, and a 5-point Likert scale was used to collect the data from the respondents who were employed (...) in the Omni structure industries. The research hypothesis was tested using the structural equation modeling technique. The results have identified a significant correlation and direct effect between DMCs, CLCs, MSCs, and firm performance. Remarkably, the effect of DMCs on CBE is significant. The mediating effect of MSCs and CLCs is significant between the relationship of DMCs and firm performance. The organization performance in the Omni structure depends on how well the DMCs have been employed. The DMCs influence MSCs, CLCs, and CBE. Henceforth, this study contributes by analyzing the role of DMCs in blockchain technology. (shrink)

With the rapid development of the economy, the land use/cover change in the Greater Bay Area has undergone tremendous changes, which have had directly negative effects on ecosystem functions and services. The development of sustainable land use strategies to quantitatively evaluate ecosystem services is required. Based on multitemporal land use data, the equivalent coefficients table method was used to assess the ecosystem service values, and the impact of LUCC on ecosystem services was analyzed. A future land use simulation model and (...) multiscenario simulations were employed to predict land use change in 2030. Our results indicated that the loss of ESVs decreased by 14.29 billion yuan from 2005 to 2020. The spatial distribution of the high-value ecosystem services was concentrated around the peripheral area of the northern regions in the GBA, and those areas had less land use development and human activity. Compared with those in 2020, the total ESVs of the business-as-usual scenario, socioeconomic development scenario, and cultivated protection priority scenario in 2030 decreased, while they increased in the ecological protection priority scenario. In the CPP scenario, regulating, supporting, provisioning, and cultural services increased slightly, but they decreased in the other scenarios. The patterns of LUCC were the main reasons for the decrease in ESVs, such as the loss of land with high ecological value. Additionally, a four-quadrant analysis is introduced to determine which land use simulation will be expected to be adopted by the government. The findings of this study provide valuable information for decision-making and policy development in the coastal zones and for the sustainable management of ecosystems. (shrink)

According to conceptual metaphor theory, individuals are thought to understand or express abstract concepts by using referents in the physical world—right and left for moral and immoral, for example. In this research, we used a modified Stroop paradigm to explore how abstract moral concepts are metaphorically translated onto physical referents in Chinese culture using the Chinese language. We presented Chinese characters related to moral and immoral abstract concepts in either non-distorted or distorted positions or rotated to the right or to (...) the left. When we asked participants to identify the Chinese characters, they more quickly and accurately identified morally positive characters if they were oriented upright or turned to the right and more quickly and accurately identified immoral characters when the characters were distorted or rotated left. These results support the idea that physical cues are used in metaphorically encoding social abstractions and moral norms and provided cross-cultural validation for conceptual metaphor theory, which would predict our results. (shrink)

In the 1990s, have long been into the "limbo" of literary criticism and ethics scholars quietly occupied the United States. In the post-modern context, the literary criticism of the ethical shift is not a simple return to tradition, but was given a new meaning and carry a new mission. Engaged in literary criticism of the construction of ethical theorists because of their different starting points and strategies basically two camps: the new humanism and deconstruction were sent, who together constitute a (...) post-modern context of the ethical criticism of American literature the landscape. Ethic criticism dominated American literary criticism once again in 1990's, though for a long time it was marginized. However, the ethics turn of literary criticism in the post modern context is not simply a returning to tradition, instead, it was endowed with new connotation therefore equipped with new missions. Varied in starting points and strategies, critics devoted to ethic criticism could roughly be divided into two parts: that of ness humanism and of deconstruction. The work together and form a postmodern brilliant ethic landscape in American criticism. (shrink)

Exploring the cultural politics of diasporic entrepreneurs and migrant labourers through an examination of Chinese restaurants in Johannesburg, this article presents what I call the “intra-migrant economy” amid everyday racialized insecurities in urban South Africa. I use the term “intra-migrant economy” to refer to the employment of one group of migrants by another group of migrants as an economic strategy outside the mainstream labour market. These two groups of migrants work in the same industry, live in the same city, and (...) have established a sort of unequal employment relation that can be hierarchical and interdependentat once. Chinese migrants are socially marginalized but not economically underprivileged, which stands in contrast to Zimbabwean migrants, who remain economically underprivileged even though they speak local languages. Their different socioeconomic positions in South Africa are profoundly influenced by their nationality and racialization. Thisanalysis of their interdependency focuses on the economic and political structures that shaped the underlying conditions that brought Chinese and Zimbabwean migrants to work together in South Africa. (shrink)

Reading-to-write is an essential skill in academic writing, and reading-writing tasks have been widely adopted in standardized English tests. Much more recent literature on integrated reading-writing tasks has focused on writers’ use of source texts or the validity of integrated writing assessment, while little is known about whether the nature of the types of reading texts has any bearing on integrated reading-writing tasks. This study examines whether the types of reading texts have any influence on second language students’ argumentative writing (...) in terms of the use of argument elements and its overall quality. Fifty-four Chinese second-year university students majoring in English language teaching were asked to write an argumentative essay after reading texts with either similar views or opposing views. Results show that students reading texts with opposing viewpoints presented more data and higher overall quality of argumentative essays than students reading texts with similar viewpoints, although the latter group presented more counterargument data. Pedagogical implications on teaching argumentative writing are discussed. (shrink)

This work is devoted to studying the stochastic stabilization of a class of neutral-type complex-valued neural networks with partly unknown Markov jump. Firstly, in order to reduce the conservation of our stability conditions, two integral inequalities are generalized to the complex-valued domain. Secondly, a state-feedback controller is designed to investigate the stability of the neutral-type CVNNs with H ∞ performance, making the stability problem a further extension, and then, the stabilization of the CVNNs with H ∞ performance is investigated through (...) a sampling-based event-triggered control for the first time that the transmission event is not triggered except when it violates the event-triggered condition. Finally, two examples are given to illustrate the validity and correctness of our obtained theorems. (shrink)

Online education has advantages during COVID-19, but it also has problems related to hardware support and user experience. Focusing on teaching quality by discipline is an effective way to improve teaching quality in universities. To investigate the online education experience from the perspective of different academic disciplines, we evaluated 251,929 student questionnaires and 13,695 teacher questionnaires from 334 universities in China. The main finding was a difference in teaching preparation, experience, feedback, and improvement processes by disciplines. Teachers and students had (...) obvious disciplinary differences in preparation, school support, and teaching constraints. However, disciplinary differences were minor for pedagogical issues such as participation, assignments, and grading, as well as for evaluation of platform technical support and views on the continuation of online learning. The research results analyzed the teaching psychology of teachers and students in different disciplines during the pandemic. Therefore, it explained the impact and role of discipline differences on students’ learning psychology during COVID-19. This research will benefit educators, researchers, and policy makers to help them with the improvement of online education. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a case study of how well subject metadata (comprising headings from an international classification scheme) has been deployed in a national data catalogue, and how often data seekers use subject metadata when searching for data. Through an analysis of user search behaviour as recorded in search logs, we find evidence that users utilise the subject metadata for data discovery. Since approximately half of the records ingested by the catalogue did not include subject metadata at the (...) time of harvest, we experimented with automatic subject classification approaches in order to enrich these records and to provide additional support for user search and data discovery. Our results show that automatic methods work well for well represented categories of subject metadata, and these categories tend to have features that can distinguish themselves from the other categories. Our findings raise implications for data catalogue providers; they should invest more effort to enhance the quality of data records by providing an adequate description of these records for under-represented subject categories. (shrink)