L. I. Liu

Recent studies have shown that the brain functional connectome constitutes a unique fingerprint that allows the identification of individuals from a group. However, what information encoded in the brain that makes us unique remains elusive. Here, we addressed this issue by examining how individual identifiability changed along the language hierarchy. Subjects underwent fMRI scanning during rest and when listening to short stories played backward, scrambled at the sentence level, and played forward. Identification for individuals was performed between two scan sessions for each task as well as between the rest and task sessions. We found that individual identifiability tends to increase along the language hierarchy: the more complex the task is, the better subjects can be distinguished from each other based on their whole-brain functional connectivity profiles. A similar principle is found at the functional network level: compared to the low-order network (the auditory network), the high-order network is more individualized (the frontoparietal network). Moreover, in both cases, the increase in individual identifiability is accompanied by the increase in inter-subject variability of functional connectivities. These findings advance the understanding of the source of brain individualization and have potential implications for developing robust connectivity-based biomarkers.

Wang Fuzhi develops from the doctrine of Mencius a moral philosophy based on the doctrine of vital energy (qi) and affective mindset (xin). Base on Mencius, Wang criticizes Gaozi, Buddhism and Laozi on the one hand, and the Cheng Brothers, Zhu Xi, Lu Jiuyuan and Wang Yangming on the other. Wang advocates that vital energy is always good while emotions can be evil, and emphasizes the significance of the affective mindset of dao to the accomplishment of human’s natural tendency. The position humans possess in the cosmos is founded on the affective mindset of dao. Humans are able to know their own nature (xing 性) – this fact is of primary significance for humans. The daily rebirth and daily regrowth of the natural human tendency (xing 性), and the capacity of humans “to be” is made possible by human beings’s capacity to sense reflexively, by virtue of the affective mindset of dao, the natural human tendency and the being of oneself. It is only in this state of self-awareness that the natural human tendency is one’s own natural tendency and the being is one’s own being.

The relationship between the public (gong 公) and the private (si 私) was a vital issue in the intellectual circle of the Warring States Period (475–221 BCE or 403–221 BCE). Although the thinkers of that time did not frequently use the terms gong and si in their works, to a certain extent, they realized that they had no alternative but to face the relevant problems directly and present ideal schemes to properly address them. In-depth discussions concerning the public and the private, in fact, had already taken place in the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 BCE or 770–403 BCE). For example, Kongzi (Confucius) once exchanged views with the Duke of She on the virtue of uprightness (zhi 直). The latter held that an environment of uprightness should be one in which one would bear witness against his father even if he commits only a minor crime; however, Kongzi had a completely opposite opinion: “The father conceals the misconduct of the son, and the son conceals the misconduct of the father. Uprightness is to be found in this” (Lunyu 2022: 13.18; Ruan 1980: 2507). This conversation has already touched the overlapping field between the public and the private. However, the changes of social order and social structure in the Spring and Autumn period were relatively minor, compared with those in the Warring States Period. During the latter period, thinkers became more and more interested in the issue of the public and the private; and they also frequently and directedly used the terms gong and si to express their previsions and hopes of a new social order. Xunzi (c. 310-c. after 238 BCE) and Hanfei (c. 280–233 BCE) were representative thinkers in the terminal stage of the Warring States Period putting forward systematic theses about the gong-si relationship. For example, Xunzi emphasized that the noble person should “overcome selfish desires (siyu 私欲) through public righteousness (gongyi 公義)” (Xunzi 2022: 2.12; Wang 1988: 36). Hanfei, once a disciple of Xunzi, also firmly believed that “carrying out selfish righteousness (siyi 私義) leads to disorder; carrying out public righteousness (gongyi 公義) leads to order” (Hanfeizi 2022: 19.5; Wang 1998: 128). From the above account, we can roughly conclude that the problem about the relationship between the public and the private, from Kongzi to Xunzi and Han Fei, was becoming increasingly acute and intense. And in the final stage of the Warring States period, thinkers including Xunzi and Han Fei generally called for a “sage-king” (shengwang 聖王) with the ability to advance a mode of absolutely political-religious unity, regardless how different their elaborations of the concept of “sage-king” may be.

We study the strategic interactions within testing in a model of political agency. A principal decides between convicting and acquitting an agent of unknown innocence based on a noisy signal that is manipulable by the agent’s unobserved actions. We identify conditions under which the principal sets a threshold conviction strategy in the form of “beyond a reasonable doubt.” We show that, in spite of strategic concerns, the amount of information that a principal can glean from the test is entirely determined by the threshold; in equilibrium, the threshold is set where the signal realization conveys just enough information to validate a conviction. As such, the game of testing is analytically equivalent to the principal’s statistical inference problem. We next examine how exogenous shocks on preference parameters affect the principal’s equilibrium threshold and welfare. In general, the principal benefits from being better at distinguishing types; whether she should increase or decrease the threshold depends crucially on whether the agent’s distribution of signals varies with types in the absence of manipulation.

Evidences are important proofs to support judicial trials. Automatically extracting evidences from judgement documents can be used to assess the trial quality and support “Intelligent Court”. Current evidence extraction is primarily depended on sequence labelling models. Despite their success, they can only assign a label to a token, which is difficult to recognize nested evidence entities in judgment documents, where a token may belong to several evidences at the same time. In this paper, we present a novel evidence extraction architecture called ATT-MRC, in which extracting evidence entities is formalized as a question answer problem, where all evidence spans are screened out as possible correct answers. Furthermore, to address the data imbalance problem in the judgement documents, we revised the loss function and combined it with a data enhancement technique. Experimental results demonstrate that our model has better performance than related works in evidence extraction.

Competition for land is increasing as demand for multiple land uses and ecosystem services rises. Land regulation of the principles of landscape ecology is necessary to develop more sustainable approaches to land use planning. The research evaluated the present land patterns and determined best practices for its regulation of Dongwang Township in Quyang County, located in the Taihang Mountain area of Hebei Province, China. The research used the landscape ecology theory to construct an index system for landscape pattern analysis based on the GIS and Fragstats 3.3 software. In this study, we examined the specific reasons that landscape ecology is superior to traditional methods in land consolidation planning and design, which is conducive to the comprehensive development of land ecological benefits. Landscape ecological planning can effectively reduce landscape fragmentation and improve intensive management. The result found that the descending order of the Shannon index was current landscape, landscape ecological planning, and traditional planning. Landscape ecological planning could protect the natural diversity than traditional planning. Landscape ecological planning enables the creation of long corridors, with higher densities and connectivity and lower average corridor widths than traditional planning. Besides, it can improve ecological service function values in the study area to varying degrees, thus discouraging residents from limiting themselves to grain production. This research has great potential to improve the visibility of ecosystem services in local land use planning and, thus, to improve the ecological functioning of future landscapes.

Deeply rooted in the Vedic tradition, animal sacrifice is a controversial issue associated with a larger discourse of violence and non-violence in South Asia. Most existent studies on Vedic killing focus on the polemics of ritual violence in six schools of Indian philosophy. However, insufficient attention has been paid to killing in Dharmaśāstric literature, the killing that is an indispensable element of a Vedic householder’s life. To fill in the gap, this paper analyzes the animal sacrifice in the Manubhāṣya of Medhātithi, perhaps the most influential exegesis of the Mānavadharmaśāstra. As an important but understudied Dharmaśāstric exegesis, the Manubhāṣya provides insights on how dharmaśāstrins as protagonists of Vedic tradition understand ritual killing while dialoguing with other traditions in the complex religious landscape of the ninth century Kashmir. By investigating Medhātithi’s commentary on Mānavadharmaśāstra 5.22–56, this paper interrogates how Medhatithi interprets sacrificial killing, and how his interpretation assists to buttress the authority of the Vedic tradition represented by the root text. I argue that Medhātithi’s exegesis of killing serves as apologetics that re-establishes the Vedic sacrificial tradition, which is challenged by popular non-Vedic practices. This study intends to contribute to a better understanding of animal sacrifice situated at the intersection of Vedic, Purānic and Tantric strands, and the way in which Dharmaśāstric exegesis as apologetics engages in the negotiation of violence.

Fundamental frequency (ƒ0), perceived as pitch, is the first and arguably most salient auditory component humans are exposed to since the beginning of life. It carries multiple linguistic (e.g., word meaning) and paralinguistic (e.g., speakers’ emotion) functions in speech and communication. The mappings between these functions andƒ0features vary within a language and differ cross-linguistically. For instance, a rising pitch can be perceived as a question in English but a lexical tone in Mandarin. Such variations mean that infants must learn the specific mappings based on their respective linguistic and social environments. To date, canonical theoretical frameworks and most empirical studies do not view or consider the multi-functionality ofƒ0, but typically focus on individual functions. More importantly, despite the eventual mastery ofƒ0in communication, it is unclear how infants learn to decompose and recognize these overlapping functions carried byƒ0. In this paper, we review the symbioses and synergies of the lexical, intonational, and emotional functions that can be carried byƒ0and are being acquired throughout infancy. On the basis of our review, we put forward the Learnability Hypothesis that infants decompose and acquire multipleƒ0functions through native/environmental experiences. Under this hypothesis, we propose representative cases such as the synergy scenario, where infants use visual cues to disambiguate and decompose the differentƒ0functions. Further, viable ways to test the scenarios derived from this hypothesis are suggested across auditory and visual modalities. Discovering how infants learn to master the diverse functions carried byƒ0can increase our understanding of linguistic systems, auditory processing and communication functions.

This paper further extends the existing GARCH-MIDAS model to deal with the effect of microstructure noise in mixed frequency data. This paper has two highlights. First, according to the estimation of the long-term volatility components of the GARCH-MIDAS model, rAVGRV is adopted to substitute for the RV estimator. rAVGRV uses the rich data sources in tick-by-tick data and significantly corrects the impact of the microstructure noise on volatility estimation. Second, besides introducing macroeconomic variables, deposits in financial institutions, industrial value-added, and M2), Chinese Economic Policy Uncertainty index and Infectious Disease Equity Market Volatility Tracker are introduced in the long-run volatility component of the GARCH-MIDAS model. As indicated by the results of this paper, the rAVGRV-based GARCH-MIDAS is slightly better than the RV model-based GARCH-MIDAS. In addition to the common macroeconomic variables significantly impacting stock market volatility, CEPU also substantially impacts stock market volatility. Nevertheless, the effect of EMV on the stock market is insignificant.

IntroductionThe 2019–2020 pandemic COVID-19 has become a global health crisis. While many recent studies on COVID-19 pandemic have focused on disease epidemiology and psychological status of patients, few have explored the multi-facet influential factors or combined perspectives from both the patients and healthcare workers. The purposes of this study were to: analyze the influencing factors of psychological distress of COVID-19 patients; and describe the experience of healthcare workers relieving psychological distress.Materials and MethodsThis study uses a mixed-method cross-sectional design, including a quantitative study and a qualitative study, targeting two populations: COVID-19 patient and health workers, respectively. In the quantitative part, we recruited a convenience sample of patients with COVID-19 from five hospitals in Wuhan, Hubei Province from 10 to 15 April, 2020. Besides, we collected data by using participants’ socio-demographic information sheet, the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale-10, the Herth Hope Index, the Distress Thermometer, the Revised Chinese Version of Mishel Uncertainty in Illness Scale, and the Chinese Version of Wake Forest Physician Trust Scale. In the qualitative part, the participants were healthcare workers involved in medical aid missions in Hubei Province, China. Meanwhile, we used sampling with convenient and purposive, data collection with a semi-structured online video interview, and text transcription with Colaizzi’s phenomenological method.ResultsThe results reveal that 25.7% of patients reported higher level of psychological distress. After controlling the sociodemographic variables, only severity of COVID-19 and uncertainty in illness shown significant effect on psychological distress in the regression model. The experience of healthcare workers emerged five themes: Particularly needed psychological care, Manifestation of negative emotion, Manifestation of proactive adaptation, Strategies relieving psychological distress, and gains of healthcare workers after delivering effective psychological care.ConclusionThe 25.7% of patients with COVID-19 still suffered from psychological distress, which should receive timely attention from healthcare workers. And the severity of the disease and disease uncertainty have a significant impact on distress. It is critical to train the healthcare workers on detecting the different manifestation of psychological distress, offering timely disease related information, and applying communication strategies.

Confronting the uncertain environment, this article adopts a case research approach to resonate with the studies of hybridity. It aims to explain how the perception of uncertainty in the institutional environment affects the adaptation of organizational structure in pursuing legitimacy for hybrid organizations. Based on the empirical data collected from a two-staged fieldwork and in-depth interviews, the case analysis concentrates on the correlation between the evolution of institutional logics and organizational structure change from a diachronic perspective. The findings indicate that in the face of competing and changing institutional logics, Chinese mass media organizations have gradually shifted from a dominated blending strategy in the exploration stage to a deeply compartmentalizing strategy in the stable stage. The hybrids can deal with the uncertainty of the institutional environment by enhancing the uncertainty of the organizational structure. Consequently, the case evolves an organizational integration through internal legitimacy. It manifests a possibility for hybrids of combining the two major response mechanisms in one process.

To improve the accuracy and timeliness of the trajectory tracking control of the driverless racing car during the race, this paper proposes a track tracking control method that integrates the rear wheel differential drive and the front wheel active steering based on optimal control theory and fuzzy logic method. The model of the lateral track tracking error of the racing car is established. The model is linearized and discretized, and the quadratic optimal steering control problem is constructed. Taking advantage of the differential drive of dual-motor-driven racing car, the dual motors differential drive fuzzy controller is designed and integrated driving with active steering control. Simulation analysis and actual car verification show that this integrated control method can ensure that the car tracks different race tracks well and improve the track tracking control accuracy by nearly 30%.

Efforts to improve student–teacher education have recently focused on developing adequate Pedagogical Content Knowledge as a critical element for effective preparation. Despite many initiatives implemented in teacher education programs, however, their effectiveness in developing student–teachers’ PCK and factors affecting the PCK development are under-researched and evidenced. Drawing upon theories about and research on PCK, this study examined whether a recently updated 2-year teacher education program could develop student–teachers’ PCK effectively and explored what factors influencing the PCK development of student–teachers with different developmental trajectories. Forty English-as-foreign-language student–teachers on the program were involved as participants. This study employed a longitudinal research design. Data were collected at four different stages along with the program through the content representation matrix, interviews with all the participants, and focus group interviews with four particularly sampled participants. Findings revealed that the current teacher education program successfully enhanced student–teachers’ PCK and the factors influencing different PCK developmental trajectories were varied and personalized. Implications for teacher education are also discussed.

Pink and blue colors have been found to associate with gender stereotypes in previous Western studies. The purpose of the present study was to explore the neuropsychological processing basis of this effect in contemporary Chinese society. We presented stereotypically masculine or feminine occupation words in either pink or blue colors to Chinese college students in a modified Stroop paradigm, in which participants were asked to classify each occupation word by gender as quickly and accurately as possible. Event-related potential signals were concurrently recorded in order to identify the temporal dynamics of gender stereotypical interference effect. The behavioral results showed that pink–masculine stimuli elicited a longer response time and lower accuracy than blue–masculine stimuli in the participants, while no such differences were observed between pink–feminine and blue–feminine conditions. The ERP results further revealed distinctive neural processing stages for pink–masculine stimuli in P200, N300, N400, and P600. Overall, our results suggested that pink but not blue was a “gendered” color in Chinese culture. Moreover, our ERP findings contributed to the understanding of the neural mechanism underlying the processing of gender–color stereotypes.