Most current online distributed machine learning algorithms have been studied in a data-parallel architecture among agents in networks. We study online distributed machine learning from a different perspective, where the features about the same samples are observed by multiple agents that wish to collaborate but do not exchange the raw data with each other. We propose a distributed feature online gradient descent algorithm and prove that local solution converges to the global minimizer with a sublinear rate O 2 T. Our (...) algorithm does not require exchange of the primal data or even the model parameters between agents. Firstly, we design an auxiliary variable, which implies the information of the global features, and estimate at each agent by dynamic consensus method. Then, local parameters are updated by online gradient descent method based on local data stream. Simulations illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithm. (shrink)

BackgroundFatigue is an important factor for the safety of ships. In order to alleviate fatigue of the seafarers, the STCW Convention has made many regulations on the working time of seafarers. At present, if a crew member takes only one day off at home before returning to work on the ship, the working time on the ship must be re-calculated again. If the time spent at home is not sufficient to allow the crew to recover, the regulations of only stipulating (...) the working time, not stipulating the home vacation time, cannot guarantee the crew’s fatigue been well controlled. The aim of present study is to explore the relationship between vacation schedule and fatigue of the seafarers.MethodsIn present study, a simplified stress scale developed by the Ministry of Labor of Japan has been used as a measurement tool. The method of stratified sampling was adopted. Data collection mainly came from domestic ocean-going seafarers. Analysis was conducted using the Cross analysis and hierarchical multiple regression analysis methods.ResultsWe found that there was no difference between crew members of different positions in terms of average vacation time and on-board service time. The length of last vacation time and this service time for seafarers of different positions showed obvious differences. The rank has a significant effect on the length of the last vacation and the length of this service time. Also, the results showed that there was a significant negative correlation between the duration of vacation and overall fatigue, while there was a significant positive correlation between the length of service time on board and overall fatigue.ConclusionThe results indicated that a reasonable vacation schedule was crucial for the relief of the seafarers’ fatigue, and also played a positive role in the state of working on the ship again. (shrink)

Inappropriate social interactions of entrepreneurs can generate negative effects in the peer-to-peer lending market. To address this problem and assist peer-to-peer entrepreneurs in customizing their online interaction strategies, we used the cutting-edge cognitive-experiential self-system conceptual model and studied the relationship between peer-to-peer entrepreneurs’ interactions and financing levels. Online interactive information was categorized as emotional or cognitive, adding the moderator of entrepreneur popularity, and the effect of these interactions on individual investors was analyzed. We found that the entrepreneurs’ online interactive information (...) affected psychological perception of entrepreneurs and their corresponding brand image. The interaction between popularity and interactive information types was significant. The findings imply that less popular entrepreneurs should engage in emotional interactions, while more popular entrepreneurs should choose cognitive interactions. Online interaction created comparative advantages in the financing activities of peer-to-peer companies. These results expand understanding of the psychological facets of the consumer–brand relationship in the digital world, and extend the current literature. This study also highlights key areas of learning and application for both practitioners and scholars of organizational psychology. (shrink)

Compiled by scholars at the court of Liu An, king of Huainan, in the second century B.C.E, _The Huainanzi_ is a tightly organized, sophisticated articulation of Western Han philosophy and statecraft. Outlining "all that a modern monarch needs to know," the text emphasizes rigorous self-cultivation and mental discipline, brilliantly synthesizing for readers past and present the full spectrum of early Chinese thought. _The Huainanzi_ locates the key to successful rule in a balance of broad knowledge, diligent application, and the penetrating (...) wisdom of a sage. It is a unique and creative synthesis of Daoist classics, such as the _Laozi_ and the _Zhuangzi_; works associated with the Confucian tradition, such as the _Changes_, the _Odes_, and the _Documents_; and a wide range of other foundational philosophical and literary texts from the _Mozi_ to the _Hanfeizi_. The product of twelve years of scholarship, this remarkable translation preserves _The Huainanzi_'s special rhetorical features, such as parallel prose and verse, and showcases a compositional technique that conveys the work's powerful philosophical appeal. This path-breaking volume will have a transformative impact on the field of early Chinese intellectual history and will be of great interest to scholars and students alike. (shrink)

This paper analyses the evolutionary characteristics of the interprovincial population mobility network structure in China and explores the roles of provinces from 2010 to 2015. By constructing the interprovincial population mobility network, we examine the provinces’ functions during periods of population mobility through population mobility diversity, population mobility, and population mobility intermediation. The results show that the coverage and tightness of the interprovincial population mobility network were influenced by national economic development, increasing steadily from 2010 to 2014 and then suddenly (...) falling in 2015. The regions that played essential roles in the province’s mobility diversity and intermediation showed a dispersion trend. In contrast, areas that played a vital role in the inflows or outflows were relatively concentrated and stable. Additionally, this work further explores how economic factors, e.g., GDP, residents’ consumption levels, total population, unemployment rate, and consumer price index, are used as independent variables to analyse the provinces’ roles in the interprovincial population mobility network. The analysis shows that the inflow or outflow volumes are easily affected by the five indices. These five indices are significantly related to network role indicators to different extents. (shrink)

Many perception and processing effects of the lexical status of tone have been found in behavioral, psycholinguistic, and neuroscientific research, often pitting varieties of tonal Chinese against non-tonal Germanic languages. While the linguistic and cognitive evidence for lexical tone is therefore beyond dispute, the word prosodic systems of many languages continue to escape the categorizations of typologists. One controversy concerns the existence of a typological class of “pitch accent languages,” another the underlying phonological nature of surface tone contrasts, which in (...) some cases have been claimed to be metrical rather than tonal. We address the question whether the Sequence Recall Task, which has been shown to discriminate between languages with and without word stress, can distinguish languages with and without lexical tone. Using participants from non-tonal Indonesian, semi-tonal Swedish, and two varieties of tonal Mandarin, we ran SRTs with monosyllabic tonal contrasts to test the hypothesis that high performance in a tonal SRT indicates the lexical status of tone. An additional question concerned the extent to which accuracy scores depended on phonological and phonetic properties of a language’s tone system, like its complexity, the existence of an experimental contrast in a language’s phonology, and the phonetic salience of a contrast. The results suggest that a tonal SRT is not likely to discriminate between tonal and non-tonal languages within a typologically varied group, because of the effects of specific properties of their tone systems. Future research should therefore address the first hypothesis with participants from otherwise similar tonal and non-tonal varieties of the same language, where results from a tonal SRT may make a useful contribution to the typological debate on word prosody. (shrink)

The dynamic models are proposed to investigate the influence node activity has on rumor spreading process in both homogeneous and heterogeneous networks. Different from previous studies, we believe that the activity of nodes in complex networks affects the process of rumor spreading. An active node can have contact with all the nodes it directly links to, while an inactive node could only interact with its active neighbors. We explore the joint effort of activity rate, spreading rate and network topology on (...) rumor spreading process by mean-field equations and numerical simulations, which reveals that there exists a critical curve consisting of critical activity rate and spreading rate; meanwhile, activity rate and spreading rate both have influence on the final rumor spreading scale. (shrink)

The concept of a public energy field is central to public administration discourse theory. Its main idea is the facilitation of dialog between government and the public, on the basis of equality, to construct a public policy consensus. In contemporary society, social media provides new and distinctive channels for such interactions. Social media can, therefore, be conceived as a novel type of public energy field. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, interactions between the Chinese government and the Chinese public (...) have been acutely reflected through WeChat official accounts. This article focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic and, through social media text mining and processing, analyzes the text topics and emotions covered. Basic principles of discourse validity, regarding this public energy field and two guarantee conditions, are applied to analyze the information exchange and dialog between the government and the public on COVID-19 through WeChat official accounts. It was found that the government’s WeChat official accounts have not yet formed a harmonious dialog space to balance the public energy field, and that the interaction between the government and the public has to be improved. The government’s social discourse had a significant influence on the public’s social discourse. Using text analysis, the study found that the government has published information on 11 topics related to the prevention and control of the pandemic. It can be argued that the public energy field presented by both the government and the public effectively portrayed and reflected the actual situation of the pandemic in China. (shrink)

Cause- related marketing is an effective marketing tool for promoting corporate span class =' span

Business Ethics in Applied Ethics

Direct download (4 more)  

 

Export citation  

 

Bookmark   7 citations  

Digital transformation of traditional enterprises can better develop new customer relationships and help mitigate the business risk of their over-reliance on single-customer relationships. However, little research has been conducted on the internal mechanisms of how enterprise digitalization reshapes corporate customer relationships. In this manuscript, from the perspective of dynamic capability theory, we construct conceptual models of enterprise digital transformation, innovation capability, operational cost, and customer satisfaction, and explore the internal mechanisms of enterprise digital transformation to reduce the dependence of enterprises (...) on large customers. The model is empirically studied by obtaining data on the degree of digital transformation of enterprises through “search statistics” of keywords in the annual reports of Chinese listed companies during 2011–2019. This manuscript finds that digital transformation significantly reduces the concentration of large customers and has become a powerful driver of business model innovation in the digital economy, and this finding remains robust to the use of PSM and instrumental variable methods to address endogeneity. Digital transformation reduces firms’ dependence on large customers through three mechanisms: improving firms’ innovation capabilities, reducing firms’ operating costs, and increasing customer satisfaction. The impact of digital transformation on reducing the dependence of non-state enterprises on large customers is greater than that of state-owned enterprises; the implementation of digital transformation strategies is more helpful for enterprises that have active interactions with customers to reduce their customer concentration; and the reduction of customer concentration is greater for enterprises in regions with higher levels of digital development compared to those in regions with lower levels of digital development. The economic consequence test finds that digital transformation diversifies customer structure and reduces business risks. The analysis of the innovation effect and customer satisfaction effect on reducing the concentration of large customers of enterprisesby implementing digital transformation enriches and expands the dynamic capability theory and provides important insights for enterprises to diversify their customer structure. (shrink)

Causalists and Evidentialists can agree about the right course of action in an (apparent) Newcomb problem, if the causal facts are not as initially they seem. If declining $1,000 causes the Predictor to have placed $1m in the opaque box, CDT agrees with EDT that one-boxing is rational. This creates a difficulty for Causalists. We explain the problem with reference to Dummett's work on backward causation and Lewis's on chance and crystal balls. We show that the possibility that the causal (...) facts might be properly judged to be non-standard in Newcomb problems leads to a dilemma for Causalism. One horn embraces a subjectivist understanding of causation, in a sense analogous to Lewis's own subjectivist conception of objective chance. In this case the analogy with chance reveals a terminological choice point, such that either (i) CDT is completely reconciled with EDT, or (ii) EDT takes precedence in the cases in which the two theories give different recommendations. The other horn of the dilemma rejects subjectivism, but now the analogy with chance suggests that it is simply mysterious why causation so construed should constrain rational action. (shrink)

Liu Ping discusses patriotism and nationalism in regard to culture and values and also the role of the prophetic voice in Chinese society. His provocative allegorical rewriting of a prophecy from the Biblical book of Amos, setting it in contemporary China, is pointedly political. Liu writes in the Chinese intellectual tradition of pointing out when a society or a country is on the brink of destruction.

Working memory (WM) is a fundamental cognitive ability to support complex thought, but it is limited in capacity. WM training has shown the potential to make benefit for those in need. Many studies have shown the potential of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to transiently enhance WM performance by delivering low current to the brain cortex of interest via electrodes on the scalp. TDCS has also been revealed as a promising intervention to augment WM training in a few studies. However, (...) those few tDCS-paired WM training studies focused more on the effect of tDCS on WM enhancement and its transferability after training but paid less attention to the variation of cognitive performance during the training procedure. The current study attempted to explore the effect of tDCS on the variation of performance during WM training in healthy young adults. All the participant received WM training with the load-adaptive verbal N-back task for five days. During the training procedure, active/sham anodal high-definition tDCS (HD-tDCS) was used to stimulate the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). To examine the training effect, pre- and post-test were performed respectively one-day before and after the training sessions respectively. At the beginning of each training session, stable-load WM tasks were performed to examine the performance variation during training. Compared to the sham stimulation, higher learning rates of performance metrics during the training procedure were found when WM training was combined with active anodal HD-tDCS. The performance improvements (post-pre) of the active group were also found to be higher than those of sham group and were transferred to a similar untrained WM task. Further analysis revealed that the negative relation between the training improvements and baseline performance. These findings show the potential that tDCS may be leveraged as an intervention to facilitate WM training for those in need of higher WM ability. (shrink)

Confucianism advocates the lofty moral ideal of “humane love” (ren ai 仁愛) and condemns immoral actions. Strangely enough, however, Mencius, a “paradigmatic Confucian intellectual” who believed that “a true man cannot be corrupted by wealth, subdued by power, or affected by poverty” (Tu 1989a: 15), highly commended such typically corrupt actions as bending the law for the benefit of relatives or appointing people by mere nepotism when he talked about Shun 舜 in the text of the Mencius. In the first (...) four sections of this article, I will address the issue of how Confucianism encourages a special kind of corruption through its fundamentally consanguineous affection. Then, in the remaining sections, I will try to respond to some criticisms of my views by a few Chinese scholars. (shrink)

Cross-shareholding is a new type of strategic means for capital operation and is an important component of corporate governance. With the increasing complexity of business motivation, the structure of a cross-shareholding network is becoming more intricate, and it exposes various important local patterns with different economic functions. The goal of this paper is to uncover investment mechanisms and economic functions implied in cross-shareholding networks by analyzing the local characteristic patterns of company interactions. In this paper, we construct the CSNs of (...) listed companies and extract the directed triadic motifs to reveal the evolutionary characteristics of local investment patterns at the company and industry levels. On the company level, we find that companies tend to form V-shaped structures with other companies, but bidirectional shareholding patterns and circular relationships in the triads are scarce. On the industry level, we identify the characteristic linking patterns of some industries with a role analysis of the industries. Furthermore, we detect the evolutionary characteristics of industry interrelationships in three implied patterns. Such a motif evolution analysis may provide valuable information for investors and supervisory departments that make decisions about investment portfolios and policy. Meanwhile, this study is also helpful for exploring the implied information in other empirical networks. (shrink)

The biology major has developed rapidly in recent years. Biology is a science that penetrates every aspect of human life and is one of the core majors in most agricultural colleges and universities. However, many teachers lack practical experience in the subject. To overcome this problem, in recent years, we have been trying to introduce new reforms into our teaching. This article provides some insight into the way that biology majors have been reformed, which will help educators in agricultural colleges (...) and universities. At present, teachers implement the “Industrial Innovation and Entrepreneurship Talent Cultivation” model, but it is not clear whether this helps biology majors to master the course and improve their practical skills. In this study, the IIETC model is outlined, and the academic achievement and satisfaction of students taught under the IIETC model are assessed. A T-test is used to examine potential differences between IIETC and traditional teaching models. In-depth interviews and questionnaires were given to two groups of students who followed different teaching models as part of an exploratory study. The aim was to explore how effective IIETC is at helping biology majors master the course and improve students’ wellbeing. Our results show that compared with traditional teaching methods, the IIETC model has a significant positive impact on the academic performance and happiness of biology students. Students trained under the IIETC model were more active and scored more highly in their final exams. They were more likely to feel that they had achieved success and happiness through the course. The outcomes of this research reveal a novel teaching reform that improved students’ enthusiasm for innovation and entrepreneurship during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The effects are very encouraging and deserve further exploration and expansion in future 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)

With the rapid development of mobile devices, users can now read on the screen. Electronic reading has become a common reading style with the growth in online learning or electronic learning. E-book applications are widely developed and applied for reading on a screen. However, it is difficult for readers to change their reading habits or preference from paper-printed books to digital devices. The study of readers' continuance intention to use e-book APPs is the first step to improving e-reading. This study (...) focuses on the influential factors on undergraduates' continuance intention of e-book APPs, which analyzed and summarized the literature related to the electronic book applications and undergraduates' continuous intention, combined with the characteristics of the e-book APPs, introduced relevant theories and variables, and established the factors that influence undergraduates' continuous intention of using e-book APPs. On this basis, the paper analyzed the relationship between various influencing factors and their influence on continuous intention. A model composed of five hypotheses was constructed to test the factors influencing undergraduates' continuous intention in e-book APPs. The results indicated that of all research variables, satisfaction is the most important factor that affects continuous intention; Perceived usefulness and perceived playfulness have an indirect effect on continuous intention through satisfaction; personalization has direct effects on perceived usefulness and perceived playfulness, so it also has an indirect effect on continuous intention. The findings of the study will be helpful for designers and developers of e-book APPs and provide e-book APP suggestions for readers as well. (shrink)

In many-valued logic the decision of functional completeness is a basic and important problem, and the thorough solution to this problem depends on determining all maximal closed sets in the set of many-valued logic functions. It includes three famous problems, i.e., to determine all maximal closed sets in the set of the total, of the partial and of the unary many-valued logic functions, respectively. The first two problems have been completely solved , and the solution to the third problem boils (...) down to determining all maximal subgroups in the k-degree symmetric group Sk, which is an open problem in the finite group theory. In this paper, all maximal closed sets in the set of unary p-valued logic functions are determined, where p is a prime. (shrink)

Despite the productivity of basic cancer research, cancer continues to be a health burden to society because this research has not yielded corresponding clinical applications. Many proposed solutions to this dilemma have revolved around implementing organizational and policy changes related to cancer research. Here I argue for a different solution: a new conceptualization of causation in cancer. Neither the standard molecular biomarker approaches nor evolutionary biology approaches to cancer fully capture its complex causal dynamics, even when considered jointly. These approaches (...) map on to Ernst Mayr’s proximate–ultimate distinction, which is an inadequate conceptualization of causation in biological systems and makes it difficult to connect developmental and evolutionary viewpoints. I propose looking to evolutionary developmental biology to overcome the distinction and integrate the proximate and ultimate causal frameworks. I use the concepts of modularity and evolvability to show how an EvoDevo perspective can be manifested in cancer translational research. This perspective on causation in cancer is better suited for integrating the complexity of current empirical results and can facilitate novel developments in the investigation and clinical treatment of cancer. (shrink)

Comme dans les autres pays, Einstein a été l’un des scientifiques les plus célèbres en Chine. Dans les années soixante-dix du 20e siècle, trois volumes des OEuvres complètes d’Einstein ont été traduits et publiés en Chine. Pour de nombreux Chinois ces volumes représentaient une source d’informations sur Einstein et une influence idéologique importante. Le contexte politique en est le suivant: après l’an 1949 des mouvements politiques très influents sont nés en Chine, ayant pour objectif la critique des sciences. Ces mouvements (...) ont beaucoup influencé les décisions, la sélection, le progrès ainsi que la manière de traduire et de publier les oeuvres d’Einstein. Parmi les éditeurs et les traducteurs excellait Xu Liangying. Révolutionnaire clandestin avant la mise en place de la République, il est devenu par la suite historien de la science. Il a investi presque dix ans pour terminer la traduction des oeuvres d’Einstein parce qu’ à l’époque il travaillait comme agriculteur pour ses idées de droite pendant la Révolution culturelle. Dans ce contexte sociologique, culturel et politique, la traduction et la publication des OEuvres complètes d’Einstein offre beaucoup de points qui méritent d’être examinés et analysés dans une perspective historique. Surtout, par exemple, les implications idéologiques, symboliques reliés à Einstein et qui ont été les caractéristiques dominantes de cette époque historique. (shrink)

Shun argues that the distinction between first and third person is ill-suited to explain the complexities of anger. In this commentary, I first argue that, while the distinction is not uniquely important in characterizing anger and its variations, it can be distinctively important in illuminating the nature and normative significance of different forms of anger. Indeed, Shun’s own characterizations of anger in the paper seem to presuppose this importance. Secondly, I show that there are two related but distinct ways in (...) which one’s anger is ‘personally involved’: the first concerns how the offence is registered (e.g., whether it is perceived as targeting oneself), and the second concerns one’s emotional uptake of the offence. Lastly, I propose an alternative interpretation of Zhu Xi’s distinction between anger that ‘resides in things’ and anger that ‘resides in the self’, where the emphasis is not on whether anger is an appropriate response to a situation but on whether anger is properly encapsulated. (shrink)

It is interesting to explore the effects of second language acquisition on anatomical change in brain at different stages for the neural structural adaptations are dynamic. Short-term Chinese training effects on brain anatomical structures in alphabetic language speakers have been already studied. However, little is known about the adaptations of the gray matter induced by acquiring Chinese language for a relatively long learning period in adult alphabetic language speakers. To explore this issue, we recruited 38 Indian overseas students in China (...) as our subjects. The learned group included 17 participants who had learned Mandarin Chinese for an average of 3.24 years and achieved intermediate Chinese language proficiency. The control group included 21 subjects who had no knowledge about Chinese. None of the participants had any experience in learning logographic and tonal language before Chinese learning. We found that the learned group had significantly greater gray matter volume in the left lingual gyrus compared with the control group; the Chinese characters’ reading accuracy was significantly and positively correlated to the GMV in the left LG and fusiform gyrus across the two groups; and in the learned group, the duration of Chinese learning was significantly and positively correlated with the GMV in the left inferior frontal gyrus after correction for multiple comparisons with small volume corrections. Our structural imaging findings are in line with the functional imaging studies reporting increased brain activation induced by Chinese acquisition in alphabetic language speakers. The regional gray matter changes reflected the additional requirements imposed by the more difficult processing of Chinese characters and tones. The present study also show that the biological bases of the adaptations induced by a relatively long period of Chinese learning were limited in the common areas for first and foreign language processing. (shrink)

This paper discusses Heller’s aesthetic ethics in her feeling theory. ‘Feeling’ is an aesthetic problem as well as an ethical problem. Heller discusses the important role of emotions in modern life. ‘Housekeeping of feelings’ is the key category of Heller’s ethical aesthetics, which is related to one’s self-realization. It is beneficial to the formation of individual value and helps to reconstruct an increasingly atomized community. The housekeeping of feelings is some kind of care, which is important both ethically and aesthetically. (...) Heller’s feelings theory is based on human value itself, which is of great methodological significance for the reconstruction of the broken emotional community in the post-epidemic era. (shrink)

Among all the post-Zhuang Zi schools of Zhuang Zi philosophy, the Shu Zhuang school was the school of most direct descent. Its works included the twelve "chapters": "Qiushui", "Zhi le", "Da sheng", "Shan mu", "Tian Zifang," "Zhi beiyou," "Geng Sang Chu," "Xu wugui," "Ze yang," "Wai wu", "Yuyan", and "Lie Yukou." From the intellectual content and linguistic style of these essays, the works of the Shu Zhuang school appear to belong to a chronologically earlier category of the outer and miscellaneous (...) chapters. The chief characteristic of this category of writings is that they inherited and basically developed the meaning of the ideas of the "inner chapters." They provided a more careful and detailed explanation of Zhuang Zi's theories of original source, true knowledge, and the equality of things, and they also developed other key ideas of Zhuang Zi, including his idea of human life. The Shu Zhuang school did, to a certain extent, reform and develop Zhuang Zi's ideas, but there is no major breakthrough from his ideas, and, basically, the work of this school was to elaborate but not to innovate. The works of the Shu Zhuang school served as the major corpus of reference material for the study of Zhuang Zi's ideas. In Part 2 of this book, where we developed an interpretaion of Zhuang Zi's ideas, we have already touched on some of these essays written by the people of the Shu Zhuang school. Let us now analyze and critique the ideas of this school in a more concentrated fashion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Awful Patriotism: Richard Rorty and the Politics of KnowingDavid Palumbo-Liu* (bio)Richard Rorty. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.This essay addresses the current debates surrounding what some have labeled the Two Lefts: a “cultural left” and an activist left. 1 Debate over this “divide” has made many strange bedfellows, but perhaps none quite so unheimlich as “liberal leftist” Richard Rorty and cultural conservative Harold (...) Bloom. To be sure, Rorty has often alluded to Bloom’s work, especially Bloom’s notion of “strong poets,” but in his most recent book, Rorty has appropriated Bloom in a particularly telling manner. In 1994, Harold Bloom published his polemic The Western Canon. At once eloquent and pathetic, it pressed all the right buttons. Bloom succinctly (or shall we say, reductively?) deployed his version of the “aesthetic” against any other approach. Cultural conservatives were gratified that someone of Bloom’s stature had done them the service of voicing their interests in a highly visible and contestatory manner; more moderate sorts squirmed uncomfortably at Bloom’s unabashed elitism and the shrillness of his tone; theorists and cultural studies folks were outraged at Bloom’s absolute ignorance of their work and his resort to parody instead of anything vaguely resembling an engaged critique; and ethnic, minority, queer, and feminist critics had more than enough to be insulted by in his racist and sexist arrogance. So far out is Bloom’s jeremiad that it probably came close to realizing his worst nightmare—it may have driven students screaming into all those horrid cultural studies classes to find out what was so seductive, so powerful as to corner The Canon. So I didn’t worry too much about The Western Canon. That is, until I read Richard Rorty’s essay “The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature” and its companion pieces in Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. What was Rorty, a self-proclaimed leftist, doing, calling to his aid the social and cultural archconservative Harold Bloom?In the first part of my essay I ponder this strange alliance, particularly as it joins forces against ethnic studies (to be sure, its common target is more generally “theory” of any stripe or color, but I want specifically to address the issue of ethnic literary study). Rorty adapts Bloom’s School of Resentment to characterize what he calls a certain, bad “knowingness,” against which he poses “hope” and “inspiration.” I want to examine more closely the nature and content of that destructive “knowledge,” for it becomes clear that [End Page 37] this knowledge is for Rorty the recognition of Otherness as a politically (as opposed to “merely” ontologically) functional identity. This knowledge is disturbing to Rorty and deeply informs his notions of “patriotism” and Americanism. For him, such knowledge impedes the formation of a leftist politics. It is precisely the disjunction between the “knowing” discourse of the cultural left obsessed with identity politics and an activist political left (modeled after the old reformist left) that troubles Rorty.My essay will be largely devoted to showing how Rorty’s recent work develops his earlier work on “ethnocentrism” into an “Americanism” that erodes precisely the liberal foundations of that earlier work and discloses the weakness of its claims. I understand this development as compelled by a certain impatience with identity politics that is shared by a number of liberal and leftist critics of American political society, an impatience fueled perhaps not so much by a conservative threat as by a perceived threat from “within” progressive politics. Basically, I ask, how and why are knowledge and recognition of “difference” taken to immobilize progressive politics? To frame that same question in a slightly different manner—what is the presumed content of that “progressive” politics, and what assumptions do we have to make in order to arrive at that point of view?Against the rather odd Bloom/Rorty pairing, set against “knowledge,” one would naturally seek out an enemies list for possible allies. Rorty in fact begins his essay by providing us with one in the figure of Fredric Jameson, an archpractitioner of theory whose “antiromantic” skepticism Rorty finds both debilitating and... (shrink)

Through comparisons between traditional Chinese and Western aesthetics, this article tries to explain the worldwide significance of Chinese aesthetic tradition in the twenty-first century. In contrast to cognitive-rational spirit and the tendency to distinguish the subjectives and objectives of traditional Western aesthetics, traditional Chinese aesthetics shows a distinctive practical-emotional spirit and a tendency to harmoniously unite human beings with nature, and believes that beauty is, first and foremost, a free state or way (Dao) of human life; the most important thing (...) for human beings is how to make their own lives and existence beautiful. Therefore, it puts forward some persuasive and valuable insights into beauty and art, thus playing an independent and constructive role in intercultural aesthetic dialogues of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted the lives of families in the United States and across the world, impacting parent mental health and stress, and in turn, the parent-child relationship. Music is a common parent-child activity and has been found to positively impact relationships, but little is known about music’s role in parent-child interactions during a pandemic. The current study utilized an online questionnaire to assess the use of music in the home of young children and their parents (...) in the United States and Canada during Covid-19 and its relationship with parents’ affective attachment with their child. Musical activity was high for both parents and children. Parents reported using music for both emotion regulation and to socially connect with their children. Parent-child musical engagement was associated with parent-child attachment, controlling for relevant parent variables including parent distress, efficacy, education, and parent-child engagement in non-musical activities. These results indicate that music may be an effective tool for building and maintaining parent-child relationships during a period of uncertainty and change. (shrink)

Extant research on design thinking is subjective and limited. This manuscript combines protocol analysis and electroencephalogram to read design thoughts in the core design activities of concept generation phase. The results suggest that alpha band power had event related synchronization in the scenario task and divergent thinking occupies a dominant position. However, it had event related desynchronization in analogy and inference activities, etc., and it is stronger for mental pressure and exercised cognitive processing. In addition, the parietooccipital area differs significantly (...) from other brain areas in most design activities. This study explores the relationship of different design thinking and EEG data, which is innovative and professional in the field of design, providing a more objective data basis and evaluation method for future applied research and diverse educational practices. (shrink)

In this essay I review four recent monographs on Chinese American history: Xiao-huang Yin's Chinese American Literature since the 1850s, Madeline Hsu's Dreaming of Gold, Dream of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, Young Chen's Chinese San Francisco 1850-1943: A Trans-Pacific Community, and Xiaojian Zhao's Remaking Chinese America: Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940-1965. Based on both English- and Chinese-language sources, the authors of these four books explore migration processes and the social origins of Chinese immigrants (...) from an international perspective and they reinterpret the cultural values of immigrants as fundamentally open, engaged, and cosmopolitan. Moreover, they characterize the Chinese American community as a dynamic, fluid, and flexible global network and place Chinese America in a larger historical context beyond that of a single nation. They have seriously challenged the American-centered and nation-based research paradigm and promoted a more transnational, transcultural, and multilingual approach to the history of Asian American experience. (shrink)

Endosteal stem cells are a subclass of bone marrow skeletal stem cell populations that are particularly important for rapid bone formation occurring in growth and regeneration. These stem cells are strategically located near the bone surface in a specialized microenvironment of the endosteal niche. These stem cells are abundant in young stages but eventually depleted and replaced by other stem cell types residing in a non‐endosteal perisinusoidal niche. Single‐cell molecular profiling and in vivo cell lineage analyses play key roles in (...) discovering endosteal stem cells. Importantly, endosteal stem cells can transform into bone tumor‐making cells when deleterious mutations occur in tumor suppressor genes. The emerging hypothesis is that osteoblast‐chondrocyte transitional identities confer a special subset of endosteal stromal cells with stem cell‐like properties, which may make them susceptible for tumorigenic transformation. Endosteal stem cells are likely to represent an important therapeutic target of bone diseases caused by aberrant bone formation. (shrink)

Liu Shipei received an outstanding classical education and obtained the juren degree in 1902. After failing the metropolitan exam in the following year, however, he went to Shanghai where he became involved in revolutionary activities and wrote a number of political, ethical, and historical treatises, including the Textbook on Ethics. In his Textbook, Liu sets out a more systematic presentation of an ethical theory than any we find in earlier centuries. His goal is a complete reworking of Confucian ethics, and (...) his methods and conclusions merit comparison to the similar objectives of Liang Qichao in the more popularized On the New People of three years earlier. Like Liang's "new ethics," Liu's ethical theory is shorn of much of the metaphysical apparatus that accompanied earlier neo-Confucian ethical teachings, and, like Liang, Liu is to some extent familiar with Western philosophical trends and concepts. Finally, like Liang, Liu finds "rights" to be centrally important to his new ethics, as the following chapters from the Textbook make clear. (shrink)