X. Wang

This paper explores the philosophical interplay among different conceptualizations of the heaven-human relationship (tian-ren guanxi 天人關係) in Zhuangzi. While existing scholarship often explains the apparent tensions among these conceptualizations in terms of different authors and historical dating, this paper sets aside questions of textual formation and brings to light conceptual patterns that emerge from Zhuangzi’s rich philosophical resources. Through a comprehensive analysis of the heaven-human relationship and its contextual usages across the corpus, this paper reveals that these seemingly incongruent conceptualizations constitute progressive transformations in philosophical perspective, with each conceptual layer building upon and refining the previous one. From one-sided views to the recognition of both sides, from rigid dichotomies to acknowledging ambiguities in epistemological categories and ultimately transcending these categories, this layered interpretative framework reveals an internally coherent and self-reflective vision underlying the Zhuangzi corpus as a whole.

The inversion of directions is an important operation with directions which plays an important role in qualitative spatial reasoning and spatial queries. In this work, we address on the inversion operation of the basic cardinal direction relations in the model of Goyal. The direction relation matrix model proposed by Goyal is a projection-based model for spatial direction relations between regions. This model is simple in calculation and easy to carry out formal reasoning, which is considered as currently one of the most excellent models for representation and qualitative reasoning with cardinal direction relations in two-dimensional space. This work aims to realize the automatic inference and calculation of the inverse of the basic cardinal direction relations in the model of Goyal and further to improve the ability of spatial reasoning and spatial analysis of spatial database. In order to avoid the complicated manual reasoning, an algorithm for automatically performing the inverse operation on this model is devised by means of the operations of direction relation matrix. Theorems are provided to prove formally that our algorithm is correct and complete, which is also verified by comparing the result of our algorithm with that of manual reasoning for each basic cardinal direction relation. This study realized the automatic inference and calculation of the inverse of the basic cardinal direction relations in the model of Goyal and further improved the ability of spatial reasoning and spatial analysis of spatial database.

Mismatch negativity of event-related potentials is a biomarker reflecting the preattentional change detection under non-attentional conditions. This study was performed to explore whether high self-related information could elicit MMN in the visual channel, indicating the automatic processing of self-related information at the preattentional stage. Thirty-five participants were recruited and asked to list 25 city names including the birthplace. According to the difference of relevance reported from the participants, we divided names of the different cities into high, medium, and low self-related information. Visual MMN was elicited by high self-related information but not by medium self-related information, with an occipital–temporal scalp distribution, indicating that, under non-attentional condition, high self-related information can be effectively processed automatically in the preattentional stage compared with low self-related information. These data provided new electrophysiological evidence for self-related information processing.

Language control is a cognitive ability that bilinguals use to suppress interference from the language they are not currently using to accurately select and use the intended language. Adaptive language control underpins language switching and enables bilinguals to flexibly switch between languages according to context. Reinforcement learning, which models how individuals update their strategies based on reward prediction errors, provides a computational framework for studying adaptive behavior in changing environments. To investigate how bilingual language control is shaped by reward signals in social interactions, we used dual‐electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the performance of bilinguals who alternated between active and observational learner roles in voluntary language switching tasks. Computational modeling results indicated that the dual‐sensitivity model best captured behavior which showed that bilinguals adaptively updated values by assigning distinct weights to feedback from themselves and others. EEG analyses revealed that bilinguals relied on expected values during active learning and on prediction errors during observational learning to modulate delta band activity. Taken together, these findings reveal how rewards dynamically modulate language control through expected values and prediction errors, providing new evidence for the adaptability of bilingual control during social interaction.

Science and technology drive research progress but also introduce growing risks, value conflicts and ethical challenges. Science and technology ethics review committees (STERCs) serve as key institutional mechanisms to ensure that scientific activities comply with ethical principles and professional norms. However, the establishment of STERCs worldwide remains at an early developmental stage, and structured, systematic criteria for evaluating their quality are largely absent. This study aims to develop a structured evaluation indicator system for STERCs and to explore its preliminary applicability. This study conducted a literature review and qualitative interviews to develop a preliminary evaluation indicator system, which was organized using Donabedian’s three-dimensional framework of structure, process, and outcome. The final indicator system was established after two rounds of expert consultation. The preliminary self-assessment data were collected from 80 medical institutions and 19 companies across 14 cities in Hunan Province. Both rounds of the Delphi consultation achieved a 100% response rate. The mean authoritative coefficient (Cr) was 0.900, while familiarity (Cs) and judgment basis (Ca) scores were 0.867 and 0.933, respectively. Kendall’s coefficient of concordance (Kendall’s W) was 0.300 (p < 0.001) in round one and 0.213 (p < 0.001) in round two. The final evaluation indicator system consisted of three first-level indicators, nine second-level indicators and 52 third-level indicators. This study proposes a unified framework for science and technology ethics review, integrating activities involving humans, animals, and other potential technological risks into a single evaluation system. The indicator system supports institutional self-assessment, promotes standardization, and guides continuous improvement. Preliminary findings indicate its feasibility and internal consistency, but these results should be interpreted cautiously due to the limited sample scope and reliance on self-reported data.

Clinical ethics consultations (CECs) play an important role in resolving ethical issues in clinical practice worldwide. The government has encouraged the development of CECs in China to address the ethical challenges arising in prenatal diagnosis. So far, the current state and challenges facing CEC remain understudied. This study aimed to explore the perspectives of employees on ethics committees for prenatal diagnosis in 13 medical institutions in Hunan Province, China. Twenty-eight employees participated in interviews. Our qualitative approach employed content analysis to identify major themes in interviewees’ responses, which covered the composition and vision of their prenatal diagnosis ethics committee, as well as the challenges they faced. The results show that CEC in China is in an exploratory stage, with models for CEC composition, and workflow varying significantly. Therefore, we propose the future direction of efforts to improve CECs, including improving CEC working mechanisms and operating procedures, strengthening ethical training for healthcare workers and ethics committee employees, and developing more specific ethical guidance based on the accumulated experiences of ethics committee employees in the early development of CEC for prenatal diagnosis.

The international community has proposed a comprehensive strategy to prevent congenital abnormalities. And China, with a high incidence of congenital diseases, has implemented measures including prenatal screening and diagnosis to reduce the morbidity of congenital abnormalities. However, ethical challenges arise in the practice of prenatal screening and diagnosis among healthcare professionals. Five focus group discussions were conducted with twenty-four health professionals working in maternal and child health services in Hunan Province, China, to explore the ethical challenges they encountered in prenatal testing decision-making and information disclosure practices, as well as their views on these challenges. Participants were selected through purposive sampling, ensuring maximum demographic diversity. Three main themes were identified: 1) balancing between information disclosure and privacy protection; 2) patient-oriented decision-making and tensions within family-oriented decision-making; 3) the disparity between the limited help clinical ethics committees (CECs) can provide and professionals’ need for CECs. Ethical norms for information disclosure and autonomous decision-making within prenatal screening and diagnostic institutions must be established. Utilizing CECs is crucial to guide professionals in delivering prenatal testing services while simultaneously focusing on targeted improvement of communication skills among these professionals.

本文从理查德道金斯的理论出发，即我们是染色体片段的装甲。随即将存在的属性附着于这一装甲之上，认为存在是染色体的片段的先天属性。这是起点。基于这一起点，我们这些基因的装甲基于我们的先天属性展现出来的现象是寻求自身的生存，获取生存资料，从而使得自身持存。为了更好地履行这一属性，我们演变出了储存信息，也就是记忆的能力。认为意识是持存这一属性对于信息的处理经过漫长演化的结果。而储存信息并作出反应这一过程，也就是关于康德黑格尔他们的论证我认为已经十分成熟，于是暂且将我认为合适的原文搬进来。在论证这一过程中，顺带对艺术作出阐释。我认为艺术是基于上述的存在原理，将自然或者说那个存在环境的信息符号化，从而获取在那个自然环境中的感知。紧接着设其他他者从而引申出群体是如何发生。因为存在一个最后的结论。如果不讲述群体如何发生，这一结论将无法展开。这一结论是我视生物圈或者往小了说，我视人类族群为一只灯塔水母。繁衍是肉体的更新，而若储存的信息不进行清空，则主体的意识终将会丧失。根据上述推论，新生需要清空信息，但是在漫长的演化过程中，我们拥有了将信息记录于媒介的能力。理论传递知识，艺术传递感觉，意识的精华由此传递。在这一语境下，整个族群的意识与精神都在更新，是永生的。

The present study examines the bilingual aging lexicon by comparing word association networks across four age groups of Chinese–English bilingual adults. Adopting network analysis with breadth‐first search‐based sampling, results showed that in L1 (Chinese) networks, global connectivity increases from early to mid‐adulthood, accompanied by reduced local clustering and enhanced global efficiency; the network remains relatively stable through midlife, followed by declining efficiency and progressively pronounced modular structure in late adulthood. The L2 (English) networks mirror L1 developmental trends in early and mid‐adulthood but with substantially larger shifts; throughout adulthood, L2 exhibits lower global and local connectivity and weaker modularity compared to L1. These findings reveal distinct developmental trajectories for L1 and L2 semantic networks in bilinguals, underscoring greater structural stability in the dominant language (L1) across adulthood relative to the nondominant language (L2). This L1–L2 asymmetry points to differential impacts of aging on bilingual lexical organization. Results are discussed in relation to compensatory mechanisms and enrichment accounts of cognitive aging.

The agentic web marks a structural transition from a human-centered information network to a digital environment populated by artificial intelligence (AI) agents that perceive, decide, and act autonomously. As delegated action unfolds at machine speed, exceeds discrete moments of human judgment, and distributes decision-making across non-human actors, existing legal frameworks face growing strain, creating an urgent need for new mechanisms capable of sustaining legality in this emerging order. A trustworthy agentic web therefore depends on the infrastructuring of legality through interoperable protocols that organize identity, delegation, and accountability across systems, enabling coherent governance beyond isolated platforms. Towards this end, this article advances a distributed legal infrastructure (DLI), a governance paradigm composed of five interlocking layers: (1) self-sovereign, soulbound agent identities; (2) cognitive AI logic and constraint systems; (3) decentralized adjudication mechanisms for dispute resolution; (4) bottom-up agentic market regulation to mitigate information asymmetries and network effects, including insurance-based models; and (5) portable institutional frameworks that enable legal interoperability while preserving plural sources of authority. This reference framework contributes to emerging research on embedding legality within agentic web infrastructure, aligning distributed technical systems with accountability, contestability, and rule-of-law principles.

Background Performance evaluation is vital for IRB operations. As the number of IRBs and their responsibilities in reviewing and supervising clinical research grow in China, there is a significant need to evaluate their performances. To date, little research has examined IRB performance within China. The aim of this study was to ascertain the perspectives and experiences of IRB employees and researchers to understand the current status of IRBs; compare collected results with those of other countries; and identify shortcomings to improve IRB performance. Methods This study was conducted in China from October 2020 to September 2021, using an online survey with the IRB-researcher assessment tool-Chinese version. Results 757 respondents were included in the analysis and classified into IRB employees, researchers, or those who are both IRB employees and researchers. Overall, the score for an ideal IRB was significantly higher than that of an actual IRB. Compared to the US National Validation study, Chinese participants and American participants both agree and differ in their perspectives on the most and least important ideal items. Conclusion This investigation provides a benchmark of the perceived performance of actual IRBs in China. IRBs in China can be precisely adjusted by targeting identified areas of weakness to improve their performances.

BackgroundUsing an effective method for evaluating Institutional Review Board (IRB) performance is essential for ensuring an IRB’s effectiveness, efficiency, and compliance with applicable human research standards and organizational policies. Currently, no empirical research has yet been published in China evaluating IRB performance measures by the use of a standardized tool. This study was therefore conducted to develop a Chinese version of the IRB Researcher Assessment Tool (IRB-RAT), assess the psychometric properties of the Chinese version (IRB-RAT-CV), and validate the tool for use in China.MethodsIn this cultural adaptation, cross-sectional validation study, the IRB-RAT-CV was developed through a back-translation process and then distributed to 587 IRB staff members and researchers in medical institutions and schools in Hunan Province that review biomedical and social-behavioral research. Data from the 470 valid questionnaires collected from participants was used to evaluate the reliability, content validity, and construct validity of the IRB-RAT-CV.ResultsParticipants’ ratings of their ideal and actual IRB as measured by the IRB-RAT-CV achieved Cronbach's alpha 0.989 and 0.992, Spearman-Brown coefficient 0.964 and 0.968, and item-total correlation values ranging from 0.631 to 0.886 and 0.743 to 0.910, respectively.ConclusionThe IRB-RAT-CV is a linguistically and culturally applicable tool for assessing the quality of IRBs in China.

Background: In China, research ethics is a subject of increasingly formal regulation. However, little is known about how nursing researchers understand the concept of research ethics and the ways in which they can maintain ethical standards in their work. Aim: The aim of this study is to examine nursing researchers’ perspectives on research ethics in China. Research design: We conducted a descriptive qualitative study. Qualitative research methods enabled us to gain an in-depth understanding of nursing researchers’ views on research ethics. Participants and research context: We carefully selected and extensively interviewed 28 nursing researchers, nursing faculty, and clinical nurses who had been involved in research or who may undertake research in the future. We collected data between October 2014 and March 2015. Ethical considerations: This study was approved by the institutional review boards of Yale University and Central South University. Findings: We grouped the data into five categories based on the interviewees’ responses: (1) perceptions of ethics, bioethics, and research ethics; (2) perception of the ethics review process; (3) perception of the function of institutional review boards; (4) the need for comprehensive ethical guidelines for future studies; and (5) ethical challenges faced by the interviewees. Discussion and conclusion: This study contributes new insights into nursing researchers’ views on research ethics in China and finds considerable shortcomings in researchers’ understanding and implementation of ethical principles. Intensive educational efforts are needed to provide nursing researchers, institutional review board members, and even study subjects with accurate and up-to-date information and guidance on research ethics. In addition, while Western research ethics theoretically have guided Chinese clinical research for several years, the ways in which nursing researchers have implemented these ethical standards highlight the differences between the Eastern and Western ethical paradigms. This finding suggests the need for ethical standards that are more tailored to the Chinese context.

In recent years, with the continuous improvement of urban public transportation capacity, citizens’ travel has become more and more convenient, but there are still some potential problems, such as morning and evening peak congestion, imbalance between the supply and demand of vehicles and passenger flow, emergencies, and social local passenger flow surged due to special circumstances such as activities and inclement weather. If you want to properly guide the local passenger flow and make a reasonable deployment of operating buses, it is necessary to grasp the changing law of public transportation short-term passenger flow. This paper builds a short-term passenger flow prediction model for urban public transportation based on the idea of integrated learning. The goal is to use the integrated model to accurately predict the short-term passenger flow of urban public transportation, using Multivariable Linear Regression, K-Nearest Neighbor, eXtreme Gradient Boosting, and Gated Recurrent Unit as the four seed models, and then use regression algorithm to integrate the model and predict the passenger flow, station boarding and landing, and cross-sectional passenger flow data of the typical representative line 428 in the “Huitian Area” of Beijing from January 1, 2020, to May 31, 2020. Finally, the prediction results of the submodels are compared with those of the integrated model to verify the superiority of the integrated model. The research results of this paper can enrich the short-term passenger flow forecasting system of urban public transportation and provide effective data support and scientific basis for the passenger flow, vehicle management, and dispatch of urban public transportation.

The extant research has attached increasing importance to the role of nonstandard managerial beliefs in affecting the decision-making process of firms. This study takes Zodiac year beliefs as an example of nonstandard managerial beliefs and investigates their influence on greenwashing, as well as the corresponding influence mechanism. The analysis is grounded in a dataset of A-share listed companies in China from 2009 to 2023. The results demonstrate that Zodiac year beliefs can inhibit firms from engaging in greenwashing. In addition, it is corroborated that Zodiac year beliefs can reduce the risk-taking level of firms, which in turn further mitigates the intention to engage in greenwashing. Finally, we also demonstrate that Confucianism can reinforce the negative influences of Zodiac year beliefs on greenwashing and risk-taking levels. The findings of this study provide some insights into how nonstandard managerial beliefs shape corporate unethical behaviour.

Pascal’s Wager has generated persistent decision-theoretic objections—many-gods symmetry, policy indeterminacy, prior arbitrariness, and infinite-utility pathologies—that resist resolution despite sophisticated refinements. This article diagnoses these objections as symptoms of a shared presupposition: the _neutral calculator_, a supposed context-transcendent standpoint from which all religious options can be compared on a single decision matrix. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s forms of life, Austin’s felicity conditions, and Ryle’s category-mistake analysis, I argue that positing such a standpoint constitutes a category mistake. Religious evaluation necessarily occurs within practices that give determinate meaning to concepts like salvation, belief, and infinite reward. From this diagnosis, I develop the principle of _Background-Conditioned Rationality_ (BCR), which holds that rational assessment must be conducted within the background that confers sense on its evaluative tokens. Applying BCR dissolves the standard objections by showing they demand an impossible standpoint. The article clarifies Pascal’s original project as situated pastoral counsel rather than neutral arbitration, and indicates how inter-religious dialogue can proceed without the mythical _neutral calculator_. This diagnosis explains why technical solutions generate endless counter-objections. They attempt to solve practice-constituted problems from a practice-transcendent standpoint.

This study aims to prove the Riemann Hypothesis and the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis by extending the Riemann zeta function and Dirichlet $L$ -functions to the elliptic complex domain, based on a newly constructed system of elliptic complex numbers $\mathbb{C}_\lambda(\lambda<0)$. The core challenge addressed is the inherent difficulty in resolving these conjectures within the traditional "circular complex domain" framework ($\lambda=-1$); the author posits that a complete proof is unattainable strictly within this conventional setting. The primary innovation of this work lies in the formulation of the theory of elliptic complex numbers, specifically identifying the limiting case as $\lambda\to 0^{-}$ as the key to the proof. Through rigorous deduction, a bijective correspondence between zeros across different complex planes is established. By employing proof by contradiction and leveraging the correspondence between $\mathbb{C}_\lambda$ (as $\lambda\to 0$) and the circle complex plane $\mathbb{C}$, the Riemann Hypothesis and the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis are ultimately proven. This paper is organized into three parts: \begin{enumerate} \item Construction and Geometric Properties: The first part details the construction of elliptic complex numbers and their fundamental geometric properties, laying the necessary foundation for subsequent analysis and the proof of the conjectures. \item Analytic Extension: The second part introduces elliptic complex numbers into mathematical analysis, deriving numerous results analogous to those in classical complex variable function theory. \item Proof of Conjectures: The final part presents the formal proofs of the Riemann Hypothesis and the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis.