This study explores teachers’ personal practical knowledge and curricular-instructional gatekeeping as they relate to the teaching of controversial issues in public elementary school settings, particularly the issue of immigration. The study took place in the urban setting of Houston and, using a case study design, documented how three elementary school teachers made curricular-instructional decisions by making use of their personal practical knowledge. Findings illuminate that personal practical knowledge plays a role in teacher's curricular-instructional gate keeping in socially divisive contexts. And, (...) the findings indicate that these three elementary school teachers make curricular-instructional decisions to effectively address controversial public issues in their classrooms through curriculum choosing, assignments creating, and conflict dialogue building. (shrink)

This study is aimed at exploring how teacher preparation programs in Taiwan—both traditional and alternative— prepare teachers for teaching controversial public issues specific to Taiwan (e. g., national identity, sovereignty, and ethnic issues). Using a case study design, this study documents six social studies teachers’ readiness and attitudes about whether to teach controversial public issues or not. Findings illuminate that 1) teachers’ attitudes and readiness have been influenced by their teacher preparation programs (both traditional and alternative); 2) teachers from different (...) teacher education programs contribute to their curricular-instructional decision making for teaching controversial public issues differently. (shrink)

How to enable the computer to accurately analyze the emotional information and story background of characters in Qin opera is a problem that needs to be studied. To promote the artistic inheritance and cultural emotion color dissemination of Qin opera, an emotion analysis model of Qin opera based on attention residual network is presented. The neural network is improved and optimized from the perspective of the model, learning rate, network layers, and the network itself, and then multi-head attention is added (...) to the ResNet to increase the recognition ability of the model. The convolutional neural network is optimized from the internal depth, and the fitting ability and stability of the model are enhanced through the ResNet model. Combined with the attention mechanism, the expression of each weight information is strengthened. The multi-head attention mechanism is introduced in the model and a multi-head attention ResNet, namely, MHAtt_ResNet, is proposed. The network structure can effectively identify the features of the spectrogram, improve the weight information of spectrogram features, and deepen the relationship between distant information in long-time series. Through experiments, the proposed model has high emotional classification accuracy for Qin opera, and with the increase of the number of data sets, the model will train a better classification effect. (shrink)

Pain has not only sensory, but also emotional and cognitive, components. Some studies have explored the effect of pain on time perception, but the results remain controversial. Whether individual pain-related emotional and cognitive factors play roles in this process should also be explored. In this study, we investigated the effect of electrical stimulation–induced pain on interval timing using a temporal bisection task. During each task session, subjects received one of five types of stimulation randomly: no stimulus and 100 and 300 (...) ms of non-painful and painful stimulation. Pain-related emotional and cognitive factors were measured using a series of questionnaires. The proportion of “long” judgments of a 1,200-ms visual stimulus duration was significantly smaller with 300 ms painful stimulation than with no stimulus and 100 ms and 300 ms non-painful stimulation. The point of subjective equality did not differ among sessions, but the average Weber fraction was higher for painful sessions than for no-stimulus session. The pain fear score correlated positively with the PSE under 100 ms non-painful and painful and 300 ms painful stimulation. Pain catastrophizing and pain anxiety scores correlated significantly with the WF under no stimulus and 100 ms non-painful stimulation, respectively. These results suggest that electrical stimulation–induced pain affects temporal sensitivity, and that pain-related emotional and cognitive factors are associated with the processing of time perception. (shrink)

Facial muscle activities are essential for the appearance and communication of human beings. Therefore, exploring the activation patterns of facial muscles can help understand facial neuromuscular disorders such as Bell’s palsy. Given the irregular shape of the facial muscles as well as their different locations, it should be difficult to detect the activities of whole facial muscles with a few electrodes. In this study, a high-density surface electromyogram system with 90 electrodes was used to record EMG signals of facial muscles (...) in both healthy and Bell’s palsy subjects when they did different facial movements. The electrodes were arranged in rectangular arrays covering the forehead and cheek regions of the face. The muscle activation patterns were shown on maps, which were constructed from the Root Mean Square values of all the 90-channel EMG recordings. The experimental results showed that the activation patterns of facial muscles were distinct during doing different facial movements and the activated muscle regions could be clearly observed. Moreover, two features of the activation patterns, 2D correlation coefficient and Centre of Gravity were extracted to quantify the spatial symmetry and the location of activated muscle regions respectively. Furthermore, the deviation of activated muscle regions on the paralyzed side of a face compared to the healthy side was quantified by calculating the distance between two sides of CGs. The results revealed that corr2 of the activated facial muscle region in Bell’s palsy subjects was significantly lower than that in healthy subjects, while CG distance of activated facial region in Bell’s palsy subjects was significantly higher than that in healthy subjects. The correlation between corr2 of these regions and Bell’s palsy [assessed by the Facial Nerve Grading Scale 2.0] was also significant in Bell’s palsy subjects. The spatial information on activated muscle regions may be useful in the diagnosis and treatment of Bell’s palsy in the future. (shrink)

Service providers working for a service organization are asked to express such positive emotions as joy, pleasure, and politeness required at the organizational level rather than their natural emotions they are experiencing at the moment. They cannot express their emotion they are actually going through and accordingly, their level of emotional labor and emotional dissonance influence on their job commitment and trust toward their organization. This study thus set out to investigate the effects of leading variables of emotional labor on (...) the level of emotional labor and the impact of emotional labor on organizational trust and organizational commitment with a subject group of college administrative staffs. Three underlying factors such as job stress, intimacy, and professionalism were identified as the determinants of emotional labor. Conceptual background about job stress, intimacy, emotional labor, and organizational effectiveness as the core variables of the study was investigated. Based on the conceptual background and our research questions, 5 research hypotheses and the proposed research model regarding the effects of emotional labor on organizational commitment and trust were developed. We also tried to include the moderating effects of work environment and gender of service providers on the research model. Unlike many different studies on emotional labor from the traditional perspective of service, this study also offers a practical implication by expanding and applying it to the field of college administrative service, which is an area where service providers are in the different working environment from the traditional company work environment. Finally, the managerial implications and the limitations of the study were also discussed. (shrink)

Dogs are here to live with, not just to think with. In this autoethnographic essay, I share my experience of loneliness and more-than-human kinship while being in lockdown with my dog, Frank, in our small flat in Edinburgh due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I open with our histories and how we have come to be kin in order to make our positionalities explicit. I then tell three stories that illustrate how our lives – and our bodies – are being shaped (...) by the current pandemic, addressing the ways in which its contribution to my loneliness in COVID-induced lockdown manifested in our everyday life. Engaging with existing scholarship on emotional/personal, social and cultural loneliness, I theorise that life in lockdown suffers from a new type of loneliness: proximal loneliness. Then, I build on the concept of response-ability to argue that multispecies kinship helps to alleviate feelings of proximal loneliness through emergent practices that make us response-able – care and respond – to one another. I contend that even in these unprecedented and viral times that have come to elicit profound feelings of loneliness and despair for many, the repertoire of our multispecies emergent practices that may help us through the difficulties of proximal loneliness continues to exist and grow with shared response-abilities of our kinship across the species boundaries. (shrink)

Several functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have demonstrated abnormalities in static intra- and interhemispheric functional connectivity among diverse brain regions in patients with major depressive disorder. However, the dynamic changes in intra- and interhemispheric functional connectivity patterns in patients with MDD remain unclear. Fifty-eight first-episode, drug-naive patients with MDD and 48 age-, sex-, and education level-matched healthy controls underwent resting-state fMRI. Whole-brain functional connectivity, analyzed using the functional connectivity density approach, was decomposed into ipsilateral and contralateral functional connectivity. We computed (...) the intra- and interhemispheric dynamic FCD using a sliding window analysis to capture the dynamic patterns of functional connectivity. The temporal variability in functional connectivity was quantified as the variance of the dFCD over time. In addition, intra- and interhemispheric static FCD patterns were calculated. Associations between the dFCD variance and sFCD in abnormal brain regions and the severity of depressive symptoms were analyzed. Compared to HCs, patients with MDD showed lower interhemispheric dFCD variability in the inferior/middle frontal gyrus and decreased sFCD in the medial prefrontal cortex/anterior cingulate cortex and posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus in both intra- and interhemispheric comparisons. No significant correlations were found between any abnormal dFCD variance or sFCD at the intra- and interhemispheric levels and the severity of depressive symptoms. Our results suggest intra- and interhemispheric functional connectivity alterations in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and default mode network regions involved in cognition, execution and emotion. Furthermore, our study emphasizes the essential role of altered interhemispheric communication dynamics in the DLPFC in patients with MDD. These findings contribute to our understanding of the pathophysiology of MDD. (shrink)

Research in the field of Chinese as a foreign language education has been increasing in the past decades. However, the number of studies on CFL teacher identity is limited. To bridge the gap, this study employed a qualitative method to explore Chinese CFL teachers’ identity formation and reformation in Australian contexts. A Chinese-Australian language program was studied to examine the challenges, struggles and developments of Chinese CFL teachers who came to Australia to pursue professional growth. Five Master’s theses and three (...) interview participants were included to paint a picture of how Chinese CFL teachers interact internally and externally with a new environment. Guided by Mead’s theory of self and other, we found that Chinese CFL teachers’ identity formation and reformation in Australian classrooms are deeply influenced by their self-identification and their integration with others in the community. Cultural connectedness is a key for organizational attitudes in the relationship of self and other. Chinese CFL teachers were found lacking the wholeness of self in Australian contexts, which led to obstacles in teacher identity construction. Insufficient communication between self and other resulted in their positioning crisis. (shrink)

Fear is a common and potentially distressful psychological response to the current COVID-19 pandemic. The factors associated with such fear remains relatively unstudied among older adults. We investigated if fear of COVID-19 could be associated with a combination of psychological factors such as anxiety and depressive symptoms, and risk perception of COVID-19, and demographic factors in a community sample of older adults. Older adults completed measures of fear of COVID-19, anxiety and depressive symptoms, and risk perception of COVID-19, during a (...) COVID-19 lockdown. These variables, together with demographics, were fitted to a structural equation model. Anxiety and depressive symptoms were highly correlated with each other and were combined into the higher order latent variable of affective symptoms for analyses. The final model revealed that fear of COVID-19 was positively associated with psychological factors of affective symptoms and risk perception. Older age was associated with greater fear of COVID-19. Our findings showed that fear of COVID-19 can be a projection of pre-existing affective symptoms and inflated risk perceptions and highlighted the need to address the incorrect risk perceptions of COVID-19 and socio-affective issues among older adults in the community. (shrink)

In this paper, a seven-parameter BRDF model with double-peak characteristic, which could fit double-peak data, was adopted to fit the BRDF of Mars simulation soil. At the same time, the three-dimensional figure of the original data of the sample and the three-dimensional curve of the fitted curve were given. The results proved that the model worked well for this type of data. In addition, the experimental data of four kinds of earth sand samples with different roughness were also fitted and (...) analyzed. It was found that the model still had a good fitting effect on such data. At last, the Mars simulation soil and the four kinds of earth sand samples with different roughness were compared horizontally and vertically. Moreover, the double-peak characteristics and other properties of the Mars simulation soil and the earth sand were analyzed under the same and different roughness. (shrink)

BackgroundPrehospital delay is associated with non-modifiable factors such as age, residential region, and disease severity. However, the impact of psychosocial factors especially for job burnout on prehospital decision delay is still little understood.MethodThis internet-based survey was conducted between 14 February 2021 and 5 March 2021 in China through the Wechat platform and web page. Self-designed questionnaires about the expected and actual length of prehospital decision time and the Chinese version of Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey, Type D Personality Scale-14, and Social (...) Support Rating Scale were applied. A total of 1,039 general participants with a history of perceptible but tolerable body discomfort were included.ResultsThe top six reasons for prehospital decision delay were: endure until self-healing, too busy to ask for leave, process for seeing a doctor too complicated, too tired after work, worry about the expenditure, and fear of being identified as with serious problem. The univariate analyses revealed that older age, type D personality, job burnout, and worrying about expenditure were associated with prolonged prehospital decision time, while engaged in medical-related job and with more social support would shorten the delay. The multivariate analysis using logistic regression model with forward selecting method showed that age [per 10 years, odds ratio 1.19, p 7 days). Mediating effects were analyzed by using bias-corrected percentile bootstrap methods. Social support was found partially mediated the relationship between the determinants and prehospital decision time. The partial mediating effect of social support accounted for 24.0% of the total effect for job burnout and 11.6% for worrying about expenditure.ConclusionPsychosocial factors have a non-negligible impact on prehospital decision delay. The crucial part of prehospital decision delay may be the lack of motivation inside. Job burnout and lack of social support, as two commonly seen features in the modern world, should be given enough consideration in disease prevention and treatment. (shrink)

Offering organic food is a new trend in the hospitality industry seeking sustainable competitiveness. Premiums and information barriers impede continued growth in organic consumption. This study aims to explore the role of comparative advertising in organic food communication. Three empirical studies were used to verify the effect of CA vs. non-comparative advertising on consumers’ willingness to pay a premium for organic food, examining how benefit appeals and consumers’ organic skepticism affects CA. The results indicate that matching CA and health appeals (...) increase consumers’ WTPP, while environmental appeals have no significant differences between the CA and NCA groups. Information persuasiveness mediates the interaction between CA and benefit appeal on WTPP. CA increases WTPP among consumers with high organic skepticism, while the interaction between CA and health appeal is only effective for low skepticism consumers. The findings unravel and explain the mechanics of how CA works in organic products, which can help restaurants, retailers and tourist destinations advertise organic food to increase consumers’ WTPP. (shrink)

The concept of digital twinning has become a hot topic in the manufacturing industry in recent years. The emerging digital twin technology is an intelligent technology that makes full use of multimodels, big data, and interdisciplinary knowledge, which provides some new approaches for the field of the intelligent manufacturing industry. The job shop scheduling problem has been an important research field in the discrete manufacturing industry. Digital twin technology is adopted to solve the problem of job shop scheduling, which provides (...) the possibility for the intelligent development of workshops. Based on digital twin technology and combined with the actual problem of production line scheduling, we propose a new intelligent scheduling platform to solve the shop scheduling problems above. Meanwhile, based on the prediction and diagnosis of multisource dynamic interference in the workshop production process by big data analysis technology, the corresponding interference strategy is formulated in advance by the scheduling cloud platform. The model simulation experiment of intelligent dispatching cloud platform was carried out, and some enterprises in intelligent manufacturing workshop were taken as examples to verify the superiority of the dispatching cloud platform. Finally, we look forward to the future research direction of intelligent manufacturing based on digital twin technology. (shrink)

The ethical governance of the global Internet is an accelerating global phenomenon. A key paradox of the global Internet is that it allows individual and collective decision making to co-exist with each other. Open source software (OSS) communities are a globally accelerating phenomenon. OSS refers to groups of programs that allow the free use of the software and further the code sharing to the general and corporate users of the software. The combination of private provision and public knowledge and software, (...) and the seeming paradox of economic versus social motivations have stimulated a wide debate between researchers and policymakers. In this article, we analyze OSS communities from the viewpoint of "intrinsic motivation," knowledge creation, and collective Internet governance. We believe that the growth of global OSS has fundamental implications for business ethics and the governance of the global Internet in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

To better reflect the precise clustering results of the data samples with different shapes and densities for affinity propagation clustering algorithm, an improved integrated clustering learning strategy based on three-stage affinity propagation algorithm with density peak optimization theory was proposed in this paper. DPKT-AP combined the ideology of integrated clustering with the AP algorithm, by introducing the density peak theory and k-means algorithm to carry on the three-stage clustering process. In the first stage, the clustering center point was selected by (...) density peak clustering. Because the clustering center was surrounded by the nearest neighbor point with lower local density and had a relatively large distance from other points with higher density, it could help the k-means algorithm in the second stage avoiding the local optimal situation. In the second stage, the k-means algorithm was used to cluster the data samples to form several relatively small spherical subgroups, and each of subgroups had a local density maximum point, which is called the center point of the subgroup. In the third stage, DPKT-AP used the AP algorithm to merge and cluster the spherical subgroups. Experiments on UCI data sets and synthetic data sets showed that DPKT-AP improved the clustering performance and accuracy for the algorithm. (shrink)

This descriptive study was undertaken to identify the degree of ethical sensitivity of staff nurses and to analyze the differences in ethical sensitivity in terms of both general and ethics-related characteristics. Participants were 236 staff nurses working in general hospitals in Korea. Ethical sensitivity was measured by means of an instrument developed by the researchers. The results showed that the mean score for the degree of ethical sensitivity was 0.71 out of a possible maximum score of 1 (range 0.30 to (...) 0.97). For general characteristics, there was a significant difference in ethical sensitivity according to age (F (df 2233)-3.99, P-0.02). For characteristics related to ethics, there was a significant difference in ethical sensitivity according to attitude towards the nursing profession (F (df 4231)-2.94, P-0.03). It is therefore recommended that a training program reflecting these variables be developed to enhance staff nurses’ ethical sensitivity. (shrink)

Background: We described the prevalence of anxiety and depression related to COVID-19 pandemic among different types of population and examined their potential risk factors.Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted to collect demographic characteristics, exposure histories, and many other concerns about COVID-19. The Zung's self-rating anxiety scale and self-rating depression scale, followed by a four-step multiple logistic regression analysis was performed to identify factors associated with mental health outcomes.Results: Out of 3,303 participants, the quarantined people, community workstation staffs-policemen-volunteers and general public (...) reported higher percentages of depression than the general medical staff. Moreover, the quarantined people also showed higher prevalence of anxiety than the general public and the general medical staff. The quarantined people had the highest risk of anxiety and depression, whereas the self-rated health was negatively associated with the risks of anxiety and depression. Younger age group showed higher risks of anxiety and depression. People who had exposure history or contact from Hubei province after December 1, 2019, had family or friends engaged in front-line health care work, had confirmed case nearby were all more likely to suffer from anxiety. Moreover, the negligence or overindulgence toward the epidemic information was associated with a higher risk of depression and anxiety.Conclusions: Our findings show that the CPV and quarantined people were most at-risk population. We have identified that the young people, people with exposure histories and negligence or overindulgence toward epidemic information are in grave need of attention. (shrink)