With the advancement of human microbiome research, it is inevitable that a growing number of biobanks will include a collection of microbiota specimens to characterize the microbial communities that inhabit the human body and explore the relationships between the microbiota and their human hosts. Biobanks of human microbiota and their associated genetic information may become a valuable health resource. But, this area of research also presents ethical and social problems, some of which are distinct from those faced by biobanks that (...) store human tissue samples. This paper examines four core issues which are considered highly relevant to microbiome biobanking: the nature of human microbiome samples and how different understandings have an impact on benefit/risk evaluation, privacy, informed consent, and returning the result to participants. We argue that these issues should be addressed early on in microbiome research projects and also call for adjusting or developing new governance mechanism to better accommodate these changes. (shrink)

Hybrid energy storage system has been widely studied as an important technology for electric vehicles. Since the hybrid energy storage system is a nonlinear and complex system, the modeling of the system and the high-precision nonlinear control strategy are technical difficulties for research. The establishment of a high-precision mathematical model of the hybrid energy storage system is the basis for the study of high-quality nonlinear control algorithms. Fortunately, the theory of fractional calculus can help build accurate mathematical models of hybrid (...) energy storage systems. In order to obtain the high-quality nonlinear control strategy of this complex system, this paper, respectively, carried out fractional-order modeling and analysis on the three basic equivalent working states of the hybrid energy storage system of electric vehicles. Among them, the fractional-order average state space model is carried out for the equivalent Buck and Boost mode. Also, the steady-state analysis of the equivalent Dual-Boost mode is carried out by combining the fractional-order calculus theory with the equivalent small parameter variable method. Finally, the effectiveness and precision of the fractional-order model are proved by simulation and experiment. (shrink)

With comparative case studies from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, Jianlin Chen's new work offers a fresh, descriptive and normative perspective on law and religion. This presentation of the original law and religious market theory employs an interdisciplinary approach that sheds light on this subject for scholars in legal and sociological disciplines. It sets out the precise nature of religious competition envisaged by the current legal regimes in the three jurisdictions and analyses how certain restrictions on religious practices may (...) facilitate normatively desirable market dynamics. This updated and invaluable resource provides a new and insightful investigation into this fascinating area of law and religion in Greater China today. (shrink)

This study investigated the effect of non-task language in language switching experiment. Non-task language refers to participants’ language(s) (regardless of proficiency level) that are not used in any trials throughout the experiment. We recruited 60 Tibetan-Chinese-English trilinguals (grade-12 high school students with a median age of 17) to perform a lexical decision (word vs. non-word) task in only two of their languages. We repeated the experiment three times to present each language pair once. In each experiment, the participants were divided (...) into two groups which significantly contrasted with each other in their non-task language while remained comparable in the two task languages. Response time (RT) and error rate (ER) have been examined to evaluate task performance. The interaction between task performance and the participants’ proficiency in the non-task language was also examined. The results showed null effect of language switching. In addition, the effect of the non-task language was not found. These results were interpreted with reference to the main models of bilingual visual word recognition and the role of orthography specificity. (shrink)

As one of the important 21st-century skills, collaborative problem solving (CPS) has caught much attention in the assessment area. Two initiative approaches have been created: the human-to-human and human-to-agent modes. Between the two modes, the human-to-human interaction is much closer to the real-world situation and its process stream data can reveal more detailed information about the cognitive processes. In order to measure CPS ability effectively by this mode, how to extract indicators from the data and model it is crucial, while (...) the existing methods all have some disadvantages. In the present study, we proposed a new paradigm for extracting indicators and modeling the dyad data in the human-to-human mode. Specifically, both individual and group indicators were extracted from the data stream, which served as evidence for demonstrating CPS skills. In addition, a within-item multidimensional Rasch model was used to fit the dyad data. To test the validity of the paradigm, we developed five tasks following the asymmetric mechanism and integrated them into an online testing platform. Four hundred thirty-four students from China participated in the assessment and the online platform recorded their crucial actions with time stamps. The new paradigm was used to deal with the generated process stream data. Results showed that the model fitted well. The item parameter estimates and fitting indexes were acceptable, and students were well differentiated. In general, the new paradigm of extracting indicators and modeling the dyad data is feasible for improving the human-to-human assessment of CPS. Finally, the limitations of the current study and further research directions are discussed. (shrink)

The epidemic spreading is closely related to the spread of information, and it will coevolve with the information transmission. Considering that the network structure has a significant impact on network dynamics and the virtual contact networks have obvious community structures in reality, in this article, we built a multiplex network, which contains a community structure to explore the interplay of the coupled spread dynamics. We first use a microscopic Markov chain approach to characterize the coupled disease-awareness dynamics and then analyze (...) the effect of different factors on the coevolution of information dissemination and epidemic spreading based on the Monte Carlo simulation. The simulation results show that promoting the dissemination of information is indeed conducive to suppressing the spread of disease, but changing the process of disease transmission has no obvious effect on the information dissemination. The analysis also reveals that increasing the information transmission rate or decreasing the information recovery rate can promote the spread of information and inhibit the spread of diseases. In addition, taking preventive behaviors or decreasing the long-distance jump also helps slow the epidemic spreading. (shrink)

The innovation ecosystem is a dynamic network system of competition and cooperation between entities and enterprises as the core in order to achieve value cocreation. Technology provides growth power for the innovation ecosystem, organization provides management support for the innovation ecosystem, and value has a guiding effect on the innovation ecosystem. From the perspective of technology-organization-value to study the sustainable development of the innovation ecosystem, build a system dynamics model, take the automotive industry innovation ecosystem as a research case, and (...) find that technological elements have the most significant role in promoting innovation performance and organizational elements have a role in promoting economic benefits. Most notably, the coordinated adjustment of technological elements, organizational elements, and value elements is conducive to improving the innovation performance and economic benefits of the innovation ecosystem, and corresponding management measures are proposed from the dimensions of technology, organization, and value, which further promotes the sustainable development of the innovation ecosystem. (shrink)

In this rich and resonant work, Soren Kierkegaard reflects poetically and philosophically on the biblical story of God's command to Abraham, that he sacrifice his son Isaac as a test of faith. Was Abraham's proposed action morally and religiously justified or murder? Is there an absolute duty to God? Was Abraham justified in remaining silent? In pondering these questions, Kierkegaard presents faith as a paradox that cannot be understood by reason and conventional morality, and he challenges the universalist ethics and (...) immanental philosophy of modern German idealism, especially as represented by Kant and Hegel. This volume presents the first new English translation for twenty years, by Sylvia Walsh, together with an introduction by C. Stephen Evans which examines the ethical and religious issues raised by the text. (shrink)

Fruto de una convergencia de motivos e intereses procedentes de diversas disciplinas, los estudios sobre la argumentación han adquirido sus propias señas de identidad como conocimiento, análisis y evaluación del discurso argumentativo a través de sus dimensiones o proyecciones lógica, dialéctica, retórica y socio-institucional. La presente obra trata de reunir, precisar y articular las nociones básicas y los conceptos determinantes de los desarrollos que hoy tienen lugar en ese campo. Este Compendio de lógica, argumentación y retórica se ofrece como una (...) obra de referencia, una herramienta de trabajo y un estímulo para los estudiantes de —y los interesados o los preocupados por— la argumentación, tanto en el plano internacional como, primordialmente, en el medio cultural hispánico e hispanoamericano. No existía hasta ahora una publicación de estas características, a pesar de su necesidad tanto desde el punto de vista didáctico, y en atención a intereses prácticos, como desde el punto de vista teórico. Su elaboración ha ocupado a 59 autores, especialistas y estudiosos de diversos medios académicos y nacionalidades, en la confección de las 176 entradas de las que consta. (shrink)

While rules and exemplars are usually viewed as opposites, this paper argues that they form end points of the same distribution. By representing both rules and exemplars as (partial) trees, we can take into account the fluid middle ground between the two extremes. This insight is the starting point for a new theory of language learning that is based on the following idea: If a language learner does not know which phrase‐structure trees should be assigned to initial sentences, s/he allows (...) (implicitly) for all possible trees and lets linguistic experience decide which is the “best” tree for each sentence. The best tree is obtained by maximizing “structural analogy” between a sentence and previous sentences, which is formalized by the most probable shortest combination of subtrees from all trees of previous sentences. Corpus‐based experiments with this model on the Penn Treebank and the Childes database indicate that it can learn both exemplar‐based and rule‐based aspects of language, ranging from phrasal verbs to auxiliary fronting. By having learned the syntactic structures of sentences, we have also learned the grammar implicit in these structures, which can in turn be used to produce new sentences. We show that our model mimicks children’s language development from item‐based constructions to abstract constructions, and that the model can simulate some of the errors made by children in producing complex questions. (shrink)

Review of works on philosophy written by Mongolian authors, dealing with Western (European) scholars.

Philosophy. Review on Western Philosophy Thoughts how they are being used by Mongolian philosophers.

Faith music has existed with the emergence of belief since the archaic period and has been a tool in showing devotion to the sacred in almost all beliefs. Music is sometimes used individually, sometimes together with collective rituals, sometimes only with human voices, sometimes only with instruments and sometimes with musical accompaniment, in order to spread the belief, convey religious information and reinforce the teachings, purify, communicate with the spirits and present their devotion to them. In the study, the hymn (...) "Ya Hannân Ya Mennan", which was performed in the tarawih prayers during Ramadan for centuries and constituted the ancient tradition of a city, was evaluated ethnomusicologically within the ethnology of faith music. The hymn "Ya Hannân", which is a type of Ramadan hymns, has settled in the memory of the people and created a culture as the public hymn used in mosque music during Ramadan in the city. It is so embedded in the cultural codes of the divine city that it is seen as a part of the tarawih prayer for some people, especially children, who have not left the province. When people who grew up with this culture go to the tarawih prayer outside of Sivas, they expect to listen to the hymn "Ya Hannân" in their sense of belonging when the hymns begin. It also concerns the discipline of sociology of religion because of the hymn that costs the whole city. (shrink)

How is scientific knowledge used, adapted, and extended in deriving phenomena and real-world systems? This paper aims at developing a general account of 'applying science' within the exemplar-based framework of Data-Oriented Processing (DOP), which is also known as Exemplar-Based Explanation (EBE). According to the exemplar-based paradigm, phenomena are explained not by deriving them all the way down from theoretical laws and boundary conditions but by modelling them on previously derived phenomena that function as exemplars. To accomplish this, DOP proposes to (...) maintain a corpus of derivation trees of previous phenomena together with a matching algorithm that combines subtrees from the corpus to derive new phenomena. By using a notion of derivational similarity, a new phenomenon can be modelled as closely as possible on previously explained phenomena. I will propose an instantiation of DOP which integrates theoretical and phenomenological modelling and which generalises over various disciplines, from fluid mechanics to language technology. I argue that DOP provides a solution for what I call Kuhn's problem and that it redresses Kitcher's account of explanation. (shrink)

This article focuses on the global phenomenon of the marketization of higher education and how it has shaped the discourses of China’s top universities. By analyzing the university presidents’ messages published in the websites of 36 top-ranked universities in China, the aim is to ascertain the extent to which this institutionalized genre imbricates a marketizing role with other ideological imperatives. Informed by the theoretical principles of Critical Discourse Analysis and adopting a genre analysis methodological approach, we first examined the macro-level (...) rhetorical structure followed by a micro-level analysis of the discursive strategies used in the presidents’ messages. The findings reveal a dynamic interweaving of three distinct discursive strands – bureaucratic, conversational and advertising – constructed in and around the move structure of the presidents’ messages. This interdiscursive analysis reveals competing imperatives and contestations that reflect the dual role of the presidents’ messages to project a globalized, international outlook while maintaining an allegiance to political ideologies and national interests that top-ranked universities in China have to simultaneously negotiate. (shrink)

Though fields such as art history, the history of philosophy, and intellectual history have been around for a long time, the author's interest is in the history of what scholars in all of these fields are doing in common. This book looks beyond the humanities to the practice of disciplined inquiry more generally, bringing together the history of the humanities and the sciences under the guise of a unified search for patterns.

There is an increasing interest in scanning and assessing the science and technology landscape for emerging technologies - such as those based on genomics knowledge - because innovations are beneficial to businesses and nations, and because of the Collingridge dilemma. The latter concerns the uncertainty and manageability of technology in its early development phases versus the more solidified later stages. In this context, the assessment of upcoming scientific and technological (sub)fields or "hot spots" is of interest. In this paper we (...) focus on methods to identify hot spots in pharmacogenomics and nutrigenomics and how this method can contribute to policy strategies. Moreover, the bibliometric results contribute to our understanding of hot spots within these genomics subfields. We answer the following leading research question: What are the main research fields of emerging pharmacogenomics and nutrigenomics technologies and how do these impact policy strategies? First, this paper introduces a novel method for identifying hot spots in emerging technologies. Following this method, pharmacogenomics and nutrigenomics show an above-average growth in patent applications. Patent search also suggests that for pharmacogenomics, countries such as Italy and France, and subfields such as cancer genomics are highly visible. For nutrigenomics, the Netherlands and Austria are important countries, while the dairy subfield proves to be a hot spot. Second, we discuss implications for policy strategies. We argue that it is difficult for policymakers to follow hot spots when they design their policy, because of the inherent tendency to "nurture" winners instead of "picking" fundamental new winners. Policymakers should be aware of this bias and research should address this issue by, for example, complementing the hot spot analysis with more interactive methods. (shrink)

In this paper a complete proper subclass of Hilbert-style S4 proofs, named non-circular, will be determined. This study originates from an investigation into the formal connection between S4, as Logic of Provability and Logic of Knowledge, and Artemov's innovative Logic of Proofs, LP, which later developed into Logic of Justification. The main result concerning the formal connection is the realization theorem , which states that S4 theorems are precisely the formulas which can be converted to LP theorems with proper justificational (...) objects substituting for modal knowledge operators. We extend this result by showing that on the proof level, non-circular proofs are exactly the class of S4 proofs which can be realized to LP proofs. In turn, this study provides an alternative algorithm to achieve the realization theorem, and a novel logical system, called S4ΔS4Δ, is introduced, which, under an adequate interpretation, is worth studying for its own sake. (shrink)

The relationship between analysts' forecasts and corporate fraud is a vital theoretical and practical question that needs to be clarified. Based on a strict distinction between negative performance gaps relative to analyst forecasts (negative forecast gaps hereinafter) and analyst coverage, this study investigates the influence of analyst forecasts on corporate fraud from a panoramic perspective. Using panel data on listed companies in China from 2008 to 2019, we find that short-term performance pressure caused by negative forecast gaps is significantly positively (...) correlated with firms’ possibility for fraudulent behavior. However, this positive correlation is weaker in state-owned enterprises than in their non-state-owned counterparts. Further, as a key external governance mechanism, analyst coverage enhances the negative moderator effect of state ownership on the positive relationship between negative forecast gaps and the likelihood of corporate fraud. (shrink)

The problem of other minds has a distinguished philosophical history stretching back more than two hundred years. Taken at face value, it is an epistemological question: it concerns how we can have knowledge of, or at least justified belief in, the existence of minds other than our own. In recent decades, philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists and primatologists have debated a related question: how we actually go about attributing mental states to others (regardless of whether we ever achieve knowledge or rational (...) justification in this domain). Until the mid-nineties, the latter debate – which sometimes goes under the name of the “mindreading” debate – was characterized by a fairly clear-cut opposition between two theoretical outlooks: “theory-theory” (TT) and “simulation theory” (ST). Theory-theorists typically argued that we attribute mental states to others on the basis of a “theory of mind” that is either constructed in early infancy and subsequently revised and modified (Gopnik 1996), or else is the result of maturation of innate mindreading “modules” (Baron-Cohen 1995). (shrink)

This study applies agenda setting theory to understand how firms’ financial performance is affected by both the news media and the public agenda. Using content and time-series analysis for the data of five Dutch firms, we demonstrate that media attention and public attention for a firm affect stock market ratings. As hypothesized, the effect of media attention was found to be negative whereas the effect of public attention was positive.

In this article, we discuss the use of time series models in communication research. More specifically, we consider autoregressive and moving-average processes, which together constitute the autoregressive integrated moving average-framework. This approach provides a comprehensive framework to deal with the essential issue of stationarity and to model the dynamics of any time series by estimating the autocorrelation structure. Underlying the models are questions as to what extent news tends to reproduce itself and how news flows adjust after deviations from the (...) normal news stream. The data illustrating the models consist of visibility-scores of the immigration issue in Dutch national newspapers. The empirical analysis demonstrates that the impact of immigration figures on this visibility is not significant when the ARIMA-framework is applied, while an analysis using OLS suggests a positive influence. (shrink)

A common Chinese addressing practice is to address non-kin people with kinship terms, a phenomenon sometimes described as ‘kinship term generalization’. Previous studies have mainly focused on the characteristics and functions of kinship term generalization, confined to certain specific generalized kinship terms, and limited to GKTs in some Chinese dialects or certain Chinese literary works. The present study adopts the socio-pragmatic perspective to examine the phenomenon among Chinese graduate students, a social group not heeded in the literature. Based on the (...) analysis of the data collected, we argue that Chinese graduate students’ varying use of GKTs in academic settings is a pragmatic strategy, characterized by the family-centered cultural values of the Chinese society. It is hoped that the present study at the intersection between pragmatics and sociolinguistics may enrich the study of address forms in general, and in particular of Chinese GKTs. (shrink)

By considering another version of the Inverted Earth thought experiment in which the protagonist is informed that she is implanted with inverting lenses behind her eyes, I argue that the thought experiment doesn’t successfully pose a challenge to representationalism because after many years, the protagonist’s visual experience of the sky of Inverted Earth would simply represent it as blue.

Unlike basic sciences, scientific research in advanced technologies aims to explain, predict, and describe not phenomena in nature, but phenomena in technological artefacts, thereby producing knowledge that is utilized in technological design. This article first explains why the covering‐law view of applying science is inadequate for characterizing this research practice. Instead, the covering‐law approach and causal explanation are integrated in this practice. Ludwig Prandtl’s approach to concrete fluid flows is used as an example of scientific research in the engineering sciences. (...) A methodology of distinguishing between regions in space and/or phases in time that show distinct physical behaviours is specific to this research practice. Accordingly, two types of models specific to the engineering sciences are introduced. The diagrammatic model represents the causal explanation of physical behaviour in distinct spatial regions or time phases; the nomo‐mathematical model represents the phenomenon in terms of a set of mathematically formulated laws. (shrink)