We present an argument-based formalism of contract dispute resolution following a modern view that the court would resolve a contract dispute by enforcing an interpretation of contract that reasonably represents the mutual intention of contract parties. Legal doctrines provide principles, rules and guidelines for the court to objectively arrive at such an interpretation. In this paper, we establish the appropriateness of the formalism by applying it to resolve disputes about performance relief with the legal doctrines of impossibility and frustration of (...) purpose in common laws of contract. The formalism is based on modular argumentation, a recently proposed extension of assumption-based argumentation for modelling contract dispute resolution. (shrink)

In this paper examines the roles and influence of China in the world and, mainly, in European Union. For a decade, Chinese investors have been looking for opportunities to buy european assets. Especially since the beginning of the 2008 crisis we observed an increase of investment activities of Chinese companies. During the crisis, cash troubled european companies due to loss of liquidity were forced to sell their shares at significant discount. Over time, with stabilizing the economic situation in Europe, European (...) companies asset prices seemingly ceased to be cheap, nevertheless a volume of Chinese FDI to Europe continued to grow. Our goal will be detailed insight into these investments and try to identify the benefits and risks of these investments. Moreover, this paper not only provide insight into economic development of Chinese FDI but also take into account political issues and background of these investment. As far as a methodology is concerned, the basis of our work will be comparing an impact of Chinese investments in European countries and their impact on economic development in selected countries. In particular, we are interested in the behavior of Chinese investors and their motivation to buy in Europe. At the same time it will also be interested in the motives of European companies that have decided to sell shares to new owners. Finally, we will also examine ways in which Chinese investors proceed with acquisitions in the EU. Data comes from Eurostat, the national statistical offices and stock market prices. We will also be examining the political influence on these countries individually and globally, therefore as part of the EU. Based on the gained information we will try to assess the current situation of China’s influence in the euro area and at the same time try to estimate its future impact. Finally, based on the detected information to analyze the results of our research. (shrink)

Data Transfer Service (DTS) is an open-source project that is developing a document-centric message model for describing a bulk data transfer activity, with an accompanying set of loosely coupled and platform-independent components for brokering the transfer of data between a wide range of (potentially incompatible) storage resources as scheduled, fault-tolerant batch jobs. The architecture scales from small embedded deployments on a single computer to large distributed deployments through an expandable ‘worker-node pool’ controlled through message-orientated middleware. Data access and transfer efficiency (...) are maximized through the strategic placement of worker nodes at or between particular data sources/sinks. The design is inherently asynchronous, and, when third-party transfer is not available, it side-steps the bandwidth, concurrency and scalability limitations associated with buffering bytes directly through intermediary client applications. It aims to address geographical–topological deployment concerns by allowing service hosting to be either centralized (as part of a shared service) or confined to a single institution or domain. Established design patterns and open-source components are coupled with a proposal for a document-centric and open-standards-based messaging protocol. As part of the development of the message protocol, a bulk data copy activity document is proposed for the first time. (shrink)

As conventionally understood, corruption relies on a set of universally agreed rules that determine what constitutes the appropriate allocation of organizational resources. This article explores whether rule-based approaches to corruption are applicable where business organizations, such as public private partnerships, and the public fundamentally disagree about what constitutes an appropriate allocation of resources. Drawing on empirical research about PPPs in Vietnam, this article compares how government, business organizations, and the public conceptualize the transfer of public assets into private ownership. It (...) argues that a public interest approach to corruption is needed where PPPs privatize public assets within the law, but against the express wishes of the public. (shrink)

Human contact is a key issue in social interactions for autonomous systems since robots are increasingly appearing everywhere, which has led to a higher risk of conflict. Particularly in the real world, collisions between humans and machines may result in catastrophic accidents or damaged goods. In this paper, a novel stop strategy related to autonomous systems is proposed. This control method can eliminate the vibrations produced by a system’s movement by analysing the poles and zeros in the model of autonomous (...) vehicles and goods. Using the pole placement technique, the motion of a system is guaranteed to be more stable, more flexible and smoother. Moreover, several control profiles are employed in the switching mechanism to choose the proper vibration-free effect. The main contributions of this paper are the recommendation of an active stopping planner using different smooth generators from a modelling study, the validation of their physical characteristics and the launching of a switching algorithm based on the socially aware navigation framework of a robot. This theoretical work is based on the virtual environment of MATLAB, and the experiment is implemented in the practical platform of an automated guided vehicle. From these results, it can be seen that the proposed approach is robust, effective and feasible for applications in storehouse management, public transportation or factory manufacturing. (shrink)

A critical issue in executive control is how the nervous system exerts flexibility to inhibit a prepotent response and adapt to sudden changes in the environment. In this study, force measurement was used to capture “partial” unsuccessful trials that are highly relevant in extending the current understanding of motor inhibition processing. Moreover, a modified version of the stop-signal task was used to control and eliminate potential attentional capture effects from the motor inhibition index. The results illustrate that the non-canceled force (...) and force rate increased as a function of stop-signal delay, offering new objective indices for gauging the dynamic inhibitory process. Motor response was a function of delay in the presentation of novel/infrequent stimuli. A larger lateralized readiness potential amplitude in go and novel stimuli indicated an influence of the novel stimuli on central motor processing. Moreover, an early N1 component reflects an index of motor inhibition in addition to the N2 component reported in previous studies. Source analysis revealed that the activation of N2 originated from inhibitory control associated areas: the right inferior frontal gyrus, pre-motor cortex, and primary motor cortex. Regarding partial responses, LRP and error-related negativity were associated with error correction processes, whereas the N2 component may indicate the functional overlap between inhibition and error correction. In sum, the present study has developed reliable and objective indices of motor inhibition by introducing force, force-rate and electrophysiological measures, further elucidating our understandings of dynamic motor inhibition and error correction. (shrink)

This paper is an empirical analysis of how culture, specifically tradition, affects well-being, i.e., happiness, life satisfaction, and financial satisfaction, along with socioeconomic factors in East Asia. Ordered probit regression model results show that women have higher happiness and satisfaction levels than men even in Confucian cultures in which men generally receive more favourable conditions than women. Additionally, marital status or the impact of religion had strong and positive effects on happiness and sometimes on life satisfaction but not on financial (...) satisfaction. Interestingly, tradition has a statistically significant and important effect on both life and financial satisfaction. Finally, the results show that individuals who value tradition greater also have higher levels of financial satisfaction. (shrink)

Every year, the Vietnamese people reportedly burned about 50,000 tons of joss papers, which took the form of not only bank notes, but iPhones, cars, clothes, even housekeepers, in hope of pleasing the dead. The practice was mistakenly attributed to traditional Buddhist teachings but originated in fact from China, which most Vietnamese were not aware of. In other aspects of life, there were many similar examples of Vietnamese so ready and comfortable with adding new norms, values, and beliefs, even contradictory (...) ones, to their culture. This phenomenon, dubbed “cultural additivity”, prompted us to study the co-existence, interaction, and influences among core values and norms of the Three Teachings –Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism–as shown through Vietnamese folktales. By applying Bayesian logistic regression, we evaluated the possibility of whether the key message of a story was dominated by a religion (dependent variables), as affected by the appearance of values and anti-values pertaining to the Three Teachings in the story (independent variables). Our main findings included the existence of the cultural additivity of Confucian and Taoist values. More specifically, empirical results showed that the interaction or addition of the values of Taoism and Confucianism in folktales together helped predict whether the key message of a story was about Confucianism, β{VT ⋅ VC} = 0.86. Meanwhile, there was no such statistical tendency for Buddhism. The results lead to a number of important implications. First, this showed the dominance of Confucianism because the fact that Confucian and Taoist values appeared together in a story led to the story’s key message dominated by Confucianism. Thus, it presented the evidence of Confucian dominance and against liberal interpretations of the concept of the Common Roots of Three Religions (“tam giáo đồng nguyên”) as religious unification or unicity. Second, the concept of “cultural additivity” could help explain many interesting socio-cultural phenomena, namely the absence of religious intolerance and extremism in the Vietnamese society, outrageous cases of sophistry in education, the low productivity in creative endeavors like science and technology, the misleading branding strategy in business. We are aware that our results are only preliminary and more studies, both theoretical and empirical, must be carried out to give a full account of the explanatory reach of “cultural additivity”. (shrink)

This article sheds light on the diversity of meanings and connotations that tend to be lost or hidden in translations between different conceptualizations of nature in East and South-East Asia. It reviews the idea of “nature” in Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Tagalog, Cebuano, Lumad, Indonesian, Burmese, Nepali, Khmer, and Mongolian. It shows that the conceptual subtleties in the conceptualization of nature often hide wider and deeper cosmological mismatches. It concludes by suggesting that these diverse voices need to be represented in (...) global reports on sustainability, which can be fostered by the direct involvement of experts from diverse traditions of thought who have access and interpretative knowledge of sources in languages other than English. To take into consideration the diversity of conceptualizations of nature can lead to better decisions about sustainability and improve the acceptability and efficiency of environmental policies in each local context, as well as internationally. Solutions and policies on the ground must be designed based on the local conceptual and cultural frames. (shrink)

This study presents a description of an open database on scientific output of Vietnamese researchers in social sciences and humanities, one that corrects for the shortcomings in current research publication databases such as data duplication, slow update, and a substantial cost of doing science. Here, using scientists’ self-reports, open online sources and cross-checking with Scopus database, we introduce a manual system and its semi-automated version of the database on the profiles of 657 Vietnamese researchers in social sciences and humanities who (...) have published in Scopus-indexed journals from 2008 to 2018. The final system also records 973 foreign co-authors, 1,289 papers, and 789 affiliations. The data collection method, highly applicable for other sources, could be replicated in other developing countries while its content be used in cross-section, multivariate, and network data analyses. The open database is expected to help Vietnam revamp its research capacity and meet the public demand for greater transparency in science management. (shrink)

Cette étude propose une analyse des différences et similitudes linguistiques dans la presse écrite traditionnelle et les médias participatifs en ligne afin d’évaluer dans quelle mesure la production et la diffusion en ligne peuvent modifier nos usages linguistiques. Les analyses effectuées se basent sur un large corpus (8 millions de mots) qui représente des modes d’expression et des degrés de subjectivité a priori différents.

Cette étude propose une analyse des différences et similitudes linguistiques dans la presse écrite traditionnelle et les médias participatifs en ligne afin d’évaluer dans quelle mesure la production et la diffusion en ligne peuvent modifier nos usages linguistiques. Les analyses effectuées se basent sur un large corpus (8 millions de mots) qui représente des modes d’expression et des degrés de subjectivité a priori différents.

The article presents a methodological update on the lexical profile of informal spoken English with the emphasis on movies, television programs, and soap operas. The study analyzed Mark Davies’s mega-corpora with data containing approximately 625 million words and employed Paul Nation’s comprehensive and up-to-date British National Corpus/Corpus of Contemporary American English wordlists. Data from the analyses showed that viewers would need a vocabulary knowledge at 3,000 and 5,000 words frequency levels to understand 95 and 98% of the words in scripted (...) dialogs, respectively. Soap operas were found to be less lexically demanding compared to TV programs and movies. Findings are expected to fill in the methodological gaps between vocabulary assessment and vocabulary profiling research. (shrink)

Tu Weiming Tu Weiming is one of the most famous Chinese Confucian thinkers of the 20th and 21st centuries. As a prominent member of the third generation of “New Confucians,” Tu stressed the significance of religiosity within Confucianism. Inspired by his teacher Mou Zongsan as well as his decades of study … Continue reading Tu Weiming →.

Local item dependence is one of the most critical assumption in the Rasch model when it comes to the validity of a test. As the field of vocabulary assessment is calling for more clarity and validity for vocabulary tests, such assumption becomes more important than ever. The article offers a Rasch-based investigation into the issue of LID with the focus on the two popular formats of Vocabulary Levels Tests : multiple-choice and matching. A Listening Vocabulary Levels Test and an Updated (...) Vocabulary Levels Test were given to a single cohort of 311 university students in an English as a Foreign Language context. The analyses of raw score and standardized residuals correlations were conducted. The findings found no relationship between the 4-option, multiple-choice format of the LVLT and item local dependence. However, results from score and standardized residuals correlations analyses showed a strong link between the 3-item-per-cluster, matching format and item local dependence. The study calls for greater attention to the format of future vocabulary tests and support the use of meaning-recall formats in vocabulary testing. (shrink)

This paper aims at revealing the various meanings of schools as more than built physical environments from a geographical‐phenomenological (or ‘geo‐phenomenological’) perspective. This paper consists of five sections: the first explicates the meaning of ‘geo‐phenomenology’; the second reveals the meaning of ‘environment’ and a dialectics of strangeness and intimacy through geo‐phenomenological analysis; the third examines the meanings of environment as ‘space’ and ‘place’ and the act of naming as the process of constructing meaning between humans and environment; the fourth section (...) attempts to explore the meaning of conceiving school as a particular environment; and the final is the conclusion. (shrink)

Academia is a competitive environment. Early Career Researchers (ECRs) are limited in experience and resources and especially need achievements to secure and expand their careers. To help with these issues, this book offers a new approach for conducting research using the combination of mindsponge innovative thinking and Bayesian analytics. This is not just another analytics book. 1. A new perspective on psychological processes: Mindsponge is a novel approach for examining the human mind’s information processing mechanism. This conceptual framework is used (...) to construct models in studies. The framework is highly flexible and widely applicable for many different types of information processes. The mindsponge approach can help researchers discover interesting ideas or even formulate their very own theories when investigating psychosocial phenomena. This approach brings a fresh wind to the current landscape of social sciences and humanities (SSH). 2. Easy-to-follow analysis protocol: The Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF analytics) is useful in terms of computing and visualizing power but also easy to learn and apply. Contrary to being intimidating, the Bayesian analytics section of this book is presented in a reader-friendly manner with a detailed yet clear step-by-step procedure. Examples are from published BMF articles, allowing readers to immediately practice the method and quickly create their own applications. With educational purposes in mind, the book is very suitable for ECRs who are looking to innovate their research methods. 3. Advocating for low-cost, high-quality research: Doing science can be very costly. Mindsponge innovative thinking and BMF analytics help produce impactful studies using openly available data on online repositories. This is based on the authors’ previous works and experiences. The book presents examples of employing the open R package bayesvl on secondary data from different sources. With less financial constraints, researchers can have more freedom of thought to pursue their curiosity and creativity. ECRs in low- and middle-income countries may find this aspect crucial in their careers. 4. Support and collaboration: The authors share their insights from experiences in the academic publishing system to help readers get through the processes of manuscript writing and peer-reviewing more easily. The authors are also ready to support other researchers with further inquiries and collaboration opportunities at the following website, mindsponge(dot)info. This book is for: a) ECRs whose only abundant resources are their innovation capacity and strength of will; b) Researchers in SSH who want to explore a novel approach to thinking and study conducting; c) Low- and middle-income countries’ researchers looking for a cost-effective research protocol; and, d) Innovative thinkers who want to turn their interesting thoughts into good publications. (shrink)

Insanity is identified with irrationality, while rationality is considered to be the mark of sanity. Yet we want to say that rationality could be the cause of insanity. We can see a subtle kind of insanity inherent in an institution believed to be highly rational. Rationality in an ideological belief also turns into rational insanity when the ideology itself works for the interest of the advantaged as a tool of deception. We believe in the rationality of open communication. We believe (...) that information technology has given us the most rational means for open communication. The Internet revolution or Internet democracy is expected to become the most rational means for the institutional goal of democracy. However the rationality of Internet communication has demonstrated a serious tendency to cause Internet insanity. We have been proud of being 'rational animals'. But now we are concerned because 'rational animal' could mean 'rational but animal-like' or 'rational but impulsive', which in turn could mean 'rational but violent' or 'rational but mad and insane'. Perhaps it is time for us to think seriously about the possibility of mass insanity through rational insanity, and seek the way beyond such rational insanity. (shrink)

Hawking, in his book, A Brief History of Time, concludes with a conditional remark: If we find a complete theory to explain the physical world, then we will come to understand God’s mind. With Goedel in mind, we can raise questions about the completeness of our scientific understanding and the nature of our understanding with regard to God’s mind. We need to ask about the higher order of our understanding when we move to knowing God’s mind. We go onto develop (...) these problems with Nietzsche’s thoughts on the death of God, and the emergence of super human intelligences. Then, we come to Buddha, a logical genius, to see how the Buddhistic enlightenment exemplifies the super human intelligence, as well as the higher order understanding in our knowledge of God’s mind. (shrink)

abstract: This article compares and contrasts the Ignatian concept of consolation without previous cause with the Zen Buddhist concept of satori. The aim is to underscore a unique but not commonly recognized characteristic of Ignatian contemplation and promote interreligious understanding. I argue that Ignatian prayer methods, though primarily kataphatic in their approach, share common features with apophatic spirituality and Zen meditation, even though Zen does not make any reference to God. This article consists of three main parts: In the first (...) part, I delve into Ignatius's own religious experience, particularly the experiences he had during eleven months in Manresa, and interpret these experiences from the lens of the Ignatian consolation without previous cause. In the second part, I explore the overall goal of Zen, focusing on the discussion of Zen sunyata and satori. In the final part, I draw out points of contact and differences between the Ignatian concept of consolation without previous cause and Zen satori with an aim toward better appropriating the Ignatian consolation without previous cause from Zen satori. In doing so, I hope to make Ignatian spirituality more appealing and available to spiritual seekers across religious traditions. (shrink)

The current debate over aesthetic testimony typically focuses on cases of doxastic repetition — where, when an agent, on receiving aesthetic testimony that p, acquires the belief that p without qualification. I suggest that we broaden the set of cases under consideration. I consider a number of cases of action from testimony, including reconsidering a disliked album based on testimony, and choosing an artistic educational institution from testimony. But this cannot simply be explained by supposing that testimony is usable for (...) action, but unusable for doxastic repetition. I consider a new asymmetry in the usability aesthetic testimony. Consider the following cases: we seem unwilling to accept somebody hanging a painting in their bedroom based merely on testimony, but entirely willing to accept hanging a painting in a museum based merely on testimony. The switch in intuitive acceptability seems to track, in some complicated way, the line between public life and private life. These new cases weigh against a number of standing theories of aesthetic testimony. I suggest that we look further afield, and that something like a sensibility theory, in the style of John McDowell and David Wiggins, will prove to be the best fit for our intuitions for the usability of aesthetic testimony. I propose the following explanation for the new asymmetry: we are willing to accept testimony about whether a work merits being found beautiful; but we are unwilling to accept testimony about whether something actually is beautiful. (shrink)

In this paper, we defined (I,T) − standard neutrosophic rough sets based on an implicator I and a t-norm T on I; lower and upper approximations of standard neutrosophic sets in a standard neutrosophic approximation are defined. Some properties of (I,T) − standard neutrosophic rough sets are investigated. We consider the case when the neutrosophic components (truth, indeterminacy, and falsehood) are totally dependent, single-valued, and hence their sum is ≤ 1.

The present study analyzed the vocabulary profile of the News on the Web corpus, which contained 12 billion words from online newspapers and magazines in 20 countries to determine the vocabulary knowledge needed to reasonably understand online newspaper and magazine articles. The results showed that, in general, knowledge of the most frequent 4,000 word families in the British National Corpus/Corpus of Contemporary American English wordlist plus proper nouns, marginal words, transparent compounds and acronyms was necessary to gain 95% coverage for (...) the NOW corpus. However, when it came to the 98% coverage, online newspaper and magazine articles from different countries had relatively distinct lexical demands. In-depth analyses were carried out and the findings offered comprehensive insights into the issue. Implications for teaching and learning were also provided. (shrink)

What is the primary intellectual aim of philosophy? The standard view is that philosophy aims to provide true answers to philosophical questions. But if our aim is to settle controversy by answering such questions, our discipline is an embarrassing failure. Moreover, taking philosophy to aim at providing true answers to these questions leads to a variety of puzzles: How do we account for philosophical expertise? How is philosophical progress possible? Why do job search committees not care about the truth or (...) falsity of a candidate’s philosophical views? We argue that philosophy does not aim at discovering true answers to philosophical questions. Instead, its primary intellectual aim is understanding. We argue that many familiar aspects of philosophy become intelligible once we accept this hypothesis. (shrink)

Community and stakeholder support for marine and coastal ecosystem conservation policies is crucial. However, extant multinational studies on climate change-related factors that constrain stakeholders’ willingness to protect the ocean are limited. Therefore, the dataset from 709 marine stakeholders across 42 countries, part of the MaCoBioS project funded by the European Commission, was analyzed using the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) method to fill the knowledge gap. The findings reveal that for individuals who think society is doing too much to address climate (...) change, new technologies can solve climate change. Responses to climate change can damage the country’s economy and might not be productive in supporting actions protecting the ocean. Based on the study results, we recommend policymakers raise awareness among individuals engaged in marine and coastal ecosystems about the crucial role of marine protection in combating climate change, taking into account the limitations of technology in solving climate change problems and the inadequacy of current efforts. The findings also provide insights for enhancing the effectiveness of awareness and knowledge-raising campaigns, conservation programs, and eco-surplus culture-building agenda. (shrink)

Climate change has become one of the most pressing problems that can threaten the existence and development of humans around the globe. Almost all climate scientists have agreed that climate change is happening and is caused mainly by greenhouse gas emissions induced by anthropogenic activities. However, some groups still deny this fact or do not believe that climate change results from human activities. This essay discusses the causes, significance, and skeptical arguments of climate change denialism, as well as the roles (...) of scientists and science communication in addressing the issues. Through this essay, we call for the active participation of scientists in science communication activities with the public, the opening of new science communication sectors specified for climate change, and more attention to social sciences and humanities in addressing climate change issues. (shrink)

It is not uncommon for business institutions to position themselves as stakeholder-caring companies or organizations. However, there is little research on conceptualizing stakeholder-caring as a component of brand image. Through a theoretical lens of brand-consumer interactions, this paper introduces a new construct—stakeholder-caring image—and proposes a model that examines stakeholder-caring’s antecedents (integrity and courtesy) and its consequence (customer satisfaction). The two antecedents—integrity and courtesy—capture intrinsic and extrinsic aspects of brand-consumer interaction practice, respectively, while the consequence (customer satisfaction) is one important behavioral (...) outcome in marketing. The proposed model was tested with Hong Kong customers (n = 296) via a systematic survey. The data were analyzed using LISREL. Several measurement and structural models were constructed to test the proposed hypotheses. The findings reveal that the effect of integrity on customer satisfaction is mediated by a stakeholder-caring image. However, contrary to the conventional wisdom, we surprisingly find that courtesy is not effective to build a stakeholder-caring image. Managerially, this research offers guidance on how to develop stakeholder-caring image and subsequently increase customer satisfaction. In addition, we discuss the nuanced distinction between a stakeholder-caring image and related brand constructs, such as “sincerity” in Aaker’s (1997) brand personality framework. (shrink)

Solidarity is a valuable tradition of Vietnam Communist Party and Vietnamese people and Ho Chi Minh is the personification of the great national Solidarity. Ho Chi Minh Solidarity is reflected by tolerant, which is not tight in national matter but also extends to the contemporary world. This is the foundation of national Solidarity as well as international Solidarity to the liberating, building and developing carier of a country. It is difficult to reach a common point between 54 minority ethnics in (...) all around Vietnam with different culture, custom, religious beliefs. However, Ho Chi Minh, by his thinking and action, he was successful in establishing a great united bloc of all the minority ethnics in Vietnam. It leads to a happy, comfortable and peaceful life. That is the reason why people said that: “In the past, there were few men could be a part of legend when he was still alive, but Ho Chi Minh extremely did it”. (shrink)

Pacific Conservation Biology has officially published the manuscript. The article can be accessed using the following DOI:10.1071/PC23044.

This study aims at putting characterology to the test of the epistemology presented in J.C. Pariente's work, Language and the Individual. This epistemology requires certain conditions for a knowledge of the individual to be valid, i.e., to be at the same time conceptual and adapted to its individual object. By following characterologists in their work, the study concludes that the characterological processes have met the conditions demanded by Pariente's epistemology. So, one cannot say that characterology, like history, "is not a (...) conceptual knowledge of its object". (shrink)

Extant literature suggests a positive correlation between social trust (also called generalized trust) and life satisfaction. However, the psychological pathways underlying this relationship can be complex. Using the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF), we examined the influence of social trust in a high-violence environment. Employing Bayesian analysis on a sample of 1237 adults in Cali, Colombia, we found that in a linear relationship, generalized trust is positively associated with life satisfaction. However, in a model including the interactions between trust and education (...) level as well as between trust and socioeconomic status, generalized trust is found to be negatively associated with life satisfaction. In this non-linear relationship, both education level and socioeconomic status have moderating effects against the negative association between generalized trust and life satisfaction. In other words, less educated people living in worse socioeconomic conditions are more likely to have lower life satisfaction when they have higher levels of social trust. In contrast, highly educated people living in better socioeconomic conditions are more likely to have higher life satisfaction when they have higher levels of social trust. Due to the facilitating function of trust in information processing, lowering the rigor of the filtering system in a high-violence social environment will likely put an individual at risk. Based on our findings, we suggest that policymakers should consider the impacts of social contexts when advocating for increasing social trust. We also recommend that researchers carefully examine the psychological mechanism underlying an observed association before making suggestions for policymaking. (shrink)

' Home ' and 'nature' are usually taken as two opposite concepts in relation to human geographical experience. However, drawing on the perspective of geo-phenomenology, this paper argues that the meanings of nature and home overlap to the extent that it is possible to experience nature as home. Moreover, it can be shown from the paradoxically interwoven senses of nature and of home that there is a dynamic process of a to and fro journey between nature and home. Fertile educational (...) implications can be drawn out from the invisible journey: first, the dynamic experience between nature and home elicits a learning about differences; and secondly, the experience of nature as home, which can inspire feelings for nature, implies an ethical dimension of learning to treat nature as carefully as home. (shrink)

Relationships with international students can be beneficial to higher education in terms of financial and human resources. For this reason, establishing and maintaining such relationships are usually pre-eminent concerns. In this study, we extended the application of the disconfirmation expectation model by incorporating components from subjective task value to predict the loyalty of international students toward their host countries. On a sample of 410 Vietnamese students enrolled in establishments of higher education in over 15 countries across the globe, we employed (...) structural equation model to construct the conceptual model. Our empirical findings revealed that while the roles of satisfaction and disconfirmation are still important as direct and indirect antecedents of international student loyalty, its most powerful predictors are the three components of subjective task value: attainment, utility and intrinsic. These insights result in a number of implications for actors on the higher ducation scene, such as heads of institutions and policy makers. (shrink)

La contribution se propose de mettre en évidence les problèmes épistémologiques et méthodologiques posés par l’annotation discursive de productions écrites d’élèves et les choix techniques qu’implique sa mise en œuvre. Dans un premier temps, l’article montre l’intérêt scientifique de la constitution de « grands » corpus scolaires rassemblant plusieurs centaines de textes d’élèves d’école primaire et de collège de niveaux scolaires différents répondant à une même consigne. L’unicité de la consigne permet de comparer les productions en vue d’élaborer une cartographie (...) des moyens linguistiques choisis par les élèves et de mettre en évidence des indicateurs de progressivité. Dans un second temps, sont présentés les enseignements tirés de l’expérience d’annotation discursive qui a abouti à la création de la ressource ANNODIS, corpus de textes en français écrit standard annoté discursivement. Elle s’interroge sur les adaptations nécessaires pour traiter des textes d’élèves et définit des principes de travail généraux notamment sur le choix de la version de texte à annoter, la définition du modèle d’annotation et les guides d’annotation. Sont ensuite exposés deux chantiers d’annotation portant sur des textes d’élèves de fin d’école primaire en réponse à une consigne mettant en jeu la cohésion textuelle, qui demande d’insérer dans un texte narratif trois phrases comportant des pronoms et des syntagmes nominaux anaphoriques. Les notions sont illustrées par l’analyse de deux textes d’élèves de 5° Primaire. L’annotation des Relations de Discours procède successivement, dans une démarche proche de celle d’Annodis, par segmentation du texte en Unités de Discours Élémentaires, analyse de la cohérence temporelle et annotation des Relations de discours. L’annotation des chaînes de référence dans les textes d’élèves suppose des adaptations plus importantes du guide d’annotation antérieurement élaboré. Les premiers essais permettent ainsi de définir des principes de travail pour l’annotation des textes d’élèves. (shrink)

The issue of climate change poses an important problem that requires immediate collaboration from everyone, including individuals, governments, and businesses. While consumption culture constitutes a significant proportion of greenhouse gas emissions, most of these emissions are caused by the consumption of the wealthiest. In this article, we will explore the challenges that consumer culture has exacerbated regarding climate change and propose that transitioning to a simpler and more sustainable lifestyle could be an effective solution in the fight against climate change. (...) Such transitions can be leveraged through the inspiration of celebrities (e.g., Keanu Reeves, Chow Yun-fat, Kristen Bell, Leonardo DiCaprio) that pursue simple, non-glamorous lifestyles that do not promote excessive consumerism. (shrink)

The military-industrial complex, military operations, and wars are major contributors to exacerbating both climate change and biodiversity crises. However, their environmental impacts are often shadowed due to national security reasons. The current paper aims to go through the devastating impacts of military operations and wars on climate change and biodiversity loss and challenges that hinder the inclusion of military-related activities into environmental crisis mitigation efforts. The information blind spot induced by concerns about national security reasons jeopardizes the efforts to involve (...) the military-industrial complex and military operations in the global climate and biodiversity agendas. Besides that, many military-related challenges, such as specificity of operational requirements and lifecycles, dependence on fossil fuels, complex supply change, inadequate civilian technologies and innovations, and requirements of structural changes, can hinder emission reduction. Meanwhile, wars and conflicts not only threaten to drain all human and material resources available to tackle environmental problems but also inflict long-lasting destructions, pains, and trauma that can lead to hatred and distrust among nations and parties. With the rising hatred and distrust, global agreement and commitment to address climate change and biodiversity will hardly be achieved. Thus, promoting peace is the humanistic and planetary conscience. (shrink)

This monograph offers a critical introduction to current theories of how scientific models represent their target systems. Representation is important because it allows scientists to study a model to discover features of reality. The authors provide a map of the conceptual landscape surrounding the issue of scientific representation, arguing that it consists of multiple intertwined problems. They provide an encyclopaedic overview of existing attempts to answer these questions, and they assess their strengths and weaknesses. The book also presents a comprehensive (...) statement of their alternative proposal, the DEKI account of representation, which they have developed over the last few years. They show how the account works in the case of material as well as non-material models; how it accommodates the use of mathematics in scientific modelling; and how it sheds light on the relation between representation in science and art. The issue of representation has generated a sizeable literature, which has been growing fast in particular over the last decade. This makes it hard for novices to get a handle on the topic because so far there is no book-length introduction that would guide them through the discussion. Likewise, researchers may require a comprehensive review that they can refer to for critical evaluations. This book meets the needs of both groups. (shrink)

This study proposed and examined a conceptual framework on the influence of real estate brokers’ personalities, psychological empowerment, social capital, and knowledge sharing on their innovation performance, and used moral hazard as a moderating variable. We used structural equation modeling for data analysis and estimation. The participants were real estate brokers in Kaohsiung City. A total of 1,000 questionnaires were administered to 100 branch offices of real estate companies, 571 of which were later recovered from 80 branch offices. After removing (...) 52 for being invalid, we were left with 519 valid questionnaires, indicating a 51.9% recovery rate. The empirical results suggest that the real estate brokers’ personalities and psychological empowerment positively and significantly influence social capital; personality and psychological empowerment also positively and significantly influence their innovation performance; and social capital significantly influences knowledge sharing, which in turn positively and significantly influences the brokers’ innovation performance. In environments with higher levels of moral hazard, the influence of social capital on the brokers’ knowledge sharing is significantly diminished. (shrink)

We investigated how employees’ perceptions of ethical leadership affects different facets of work behavior. We also explored the effects of psychological ownership on this relationship. Data were collected from 456 workers from various industries in Taiwan over three time periods. Ethical leadership positively related to both psychological ownership of the job and organization. Specifically, we found that psychological ownership of the job positively predicted contextual performance and was negatively associated with counterproductive work behavior. Additionally we found psychological ownership for the (...) organization to be negatively associated with counterproductive work behavior for the organization. (shrink)

Climate change, primarily driven by human activities, is becoming one of the most urgent global challenges of our time. Despite lingering doubts about climate change in some research documents, strong consensus within the scientific community still affirms that global surface temperatures have risen in recent decades. Over the past decade, significant efforts have been made by humans to address the climate change crisis, resulting in certain impacts in combating climate change and raising awareness about its consequences. However, the question remains: (...) Are we heading in the right direction to effectively address this crisis, or do we need to reconsider our approach? This essay will examine some of major achievements in the fight against climate change, the increasing awareness of its impacts, the escalating severity of the climate crisis, and whether our actions are on the right track or require reevaluation. (shrink)