X. Wang

The idea of conducting “upstream public engagement,” using nanotechnology as a test case, has been subject to criticism for its lack of any link to the political system. Drawing on the theoretical tools provided by Habermas, this article seeks to explore such a “link”, focusing specifically on the capacity of civil society organizations to distil, raise and transmit societal concerns in an amplified form to the public spheres at the European Union level. Based on content analysis and semi-structured interviews with relevant actors, this article examines the evolution of CSO approaches towards nanotechnology over the past decade and investigates whether and how upstream public engagement could contribute to more vibrant public spheres and facilitate the formation of communicative power. The answer to these questions is twofold: on the one hand, moving public engagement “upstream” enables CSOs to be better informed and to become part of the debates more quickly. A “green alliance” is taking shape, which calls for more stringent regulation on nanomaterials. On the other hand, upstream public engagement has turned out to be unsuccessful in generating substantial and sustained interest. A number of CSOs have quit this field in frustration at the tokenistic engagement and out of fatigue after the intense lobbying battle for Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals.

Education of Chinese cultural traditions has been endorsed by the central government in Mainland China in recent years. The article presents a study which examined how nationalism advocated in the policy text has been interpreted at the localized level by primary school teachers in Beijing. The study draws on discourse theories as the primary point of reference. The qualitative coding methods and textual analysis were employed to interpret the meanings of 52 interview transcripts of public primary school teachers. The findings reveal a discrepancy between the discourse on nationalism presented by the policy and the discourse used by the respondents. The former exhibited a strong nationalist aspiration. The latter made a discourse of cultural nationalism more explicit, which cherishes the intellectual and esthetic aspects of Chinese cultural heritage, and considers them important in cultivating students’ cultural taste and moral characters. Teachers’ lack of knowledge of the original policy text mi...

A survey study was conducted to look into the effect of Confucian ethics and the psychological foundations of morality on business managers' perspectives on corporate social responsibility (CSR). Using responses from 393 Chinese managers, we first conducted confirmatory factor analysis to assess the reliability and validity of the measurement model and then employed hierarchical regression to explore the relationships among Confucian ethics, moral foundations, and managers' shareholder value perspectives. The results indicate that both Confucian ethics and managers' moral foundations had significant influence on shareholder value perspectives. In fact, moral foundations and Confucian ethics interacted and jointly affected managers' positions on the shareholder value model of corporate responsibility. This study demonstrates the importance of psychological foundations of morality to managers' CSR orientations and substantiates the persistent impact of Confucian ethics/cultural traditions on today' business practices.

Classic of Changes is a Chinese cultural classic born more than 3000 years ago. Its profound philosophical thoughts and the use of divination have brought Classic of Changes to a strong oriental mysticism. The view of the heaven and man of yin and yang and the five elements states of Classic of Changes are completely different from the Western elemental theory of ancient Greece. The latter gave birth to classical and modern scientific theories, and the yin and yang and the eight trigrams symbol has become synonymous with oriental mysticism. In fact, the cosmology of the Holism of Classic of Changes is a precious scientific heritage of mankind. The axiomatization of the symbolic formal system of Classic of Changes aims to unveil the veil of oriental mysticism and provide oriental wisdom for the development of modern science. Transforming the symbolic system of Classic of Changes into a formal axiom system is the crystallization of the fusion of wisdom between the East and the West. The axiomatization of the symbolic formal system of Classic of Changes shows that the oriental and the western scientific tradition harmony but not sameness and there is no conflict. Classic of Changes can also be interpreted by the axiomatic system like Euclid’s Elements. The main contribution of this paper is that the author skillfully uses mathematical language to formulate the system of Classic of Changes, reconstructs the ideological system of Classic of Changes with the axiomatic method and realizes the scientificalization of Chinese classical natural philosophy. The formal axiom system of Classic of Changes may give us such a revelation: the gap between the oriental and western scientific traditions is mainly in the axiomatization, but the lack of oriental scientific tradition may be the bottleneck of the development of modern science.

I have enjoyed reading fiction since I was young, and until I was twenty-eight I believed that I could write it myself. Then I read a novel by [Michel] Tournier and changed my mind. Imperceptibly, great changes have taken place in fiction. The difference between modern fiction and classical fiction is as great as the difference between the car and the horse-drawn cart. The finest of the modern novels cannot be read ten lines at a glance. Let me cite an example, so that my readers can come to share my point of view. The first sentence of Marguerite Duras's novel The Lover is "I was already old." Innumerable vicissitudes are contained in that phrase. If you read on carefully, you will discover that more or less every sentence is written like that, and my views on modem novels were formulated by reference to The Lover. The great modern novels always contain a lot of information and are extremely elegantly written, delighting those who read them and scaring those who would like to write fiction. Of the classic writers, only the Russian Chekhov occasionally writes in this way, but by no means all his works command reverence. I have to confess that modern novelists used to shock me greatly. The novel by Tournier that I read, called Death and the Maiden, was only the first of a series of shocks

Online social network services have brought a kind of new lifestyle to the world that is parallel to people’s daily offline activities. Social network analysis provides a useful perspective on a range of social computing applications. Social interaction on the Web includes both positive and negative relationships, which is certainly important to social networks. The authors of this article found that the accuracy of the signs of links in the underlying social networks can be predicted. The trust that other users impart on a node is an important attribute of networks. In this article, the authors present a model to compute the prestige of nodes in a trust-based network. The model is based on the idea that trustworthy nodes weigh more. To fulfill this task, the authors first attempt to infer the attitude of one user toward another by predicting signed edges in networks. Then, the authors propose an algorithm to compute the prestige and trustworthiness where the edge weight denotes the trust score. To prove the algorithm’s effectiveness, the authors conducted experiments on the public dataset. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that this method is efficient and effective.

Chaucer tells this story: A knight commits a serious crime and the king hands him over to the queen for disposal, whereupon the queen orders him to answer one question: What is a woman's greatest wish? The knight is unable to answer the question then and there, so the queen gives him a time limit. If he cannot answer the question in that time, his head will be chopped off. So the knight journeys far and wide to find the answer. Eventually he finds it and saves his own head. There would be no story if he did not find it. It is said the noblewomen discussed the answer and all found it to be correct. It was: "A woman's greatest wish is to be loved." If that were today, women's rights activists would probably disagree, but in the Middle Ages, this answer would get full approval marks

This study conceptualized digital competence in line with self-determined theory and investigated how it alongside help-seeking and learning agency collectively preserved university students’ psychological well-being by assisting them to manage cognitive load and academic burnout, as well as increasing their engagement in online learning during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. Moreover, students’ socioeconomic status and demographic variables were examined. Partial least square modeling and cluster analysis were performed on the survey data collected from 695 students. The findings show that mental load and mental effort were positively related to academic burnout, which was significantly negatively associated with student engagement in online learning. Digital competence did not directly affect academic burnout, but indirectly via its counteracting effect on cognitive load. However, help-seeking and agency were not found to be significantly negatively related to cognitive load. Among the three SDT constructs, digital competence demonstrated the greatest positive influence on student engagement. In addition, female students from humanities and social sciences disciplines and lower-income families seemed to demonstrate the weakest digital competence, lowest learning agency, and least help-seeking behaviors. Consequently, they were more vulnerable to high cognitive load and academic burnout, leading to the lowest learning engagement. This study contributes to the ongoing arguments related to the psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and informs the development of efficient interventions that preserve university students’ psychological well-being in online learning.

BackgroundIndividuals with mind-wandering experience their attention decoupling from their main task at hand while others with flow experience fully engage in their task with the optimum experience. There seems to be a negative relationship between mind-wandering and flow. However, it remains unclear to what extent mind-wandering exerts an impact on flow. And it is also elusive whether physical activity and mindfulness, which are as important factors that affected individuals’ attentional control and psychological health, are beneficial in explaining the association between mind-wandering and flow. The current study investigated the relationship between mind-wandering and flow, and the potential mediation effects of physical activity and mindfulness in this association.MethodsA cross-sectional exploratory study design, including multiple scales such as the Mind-Wandering Questionnaire, the International Physical Activity Questionnaire Short Form, Mindfulness Attention and Awareness Scale, and the Short Dispositional Flow Scale was applied. Descriptive statistics and bivariate correlation coefficients were applied in the analysis of these data. A multiple mediation model was used to examine the relationships between mind-wandering, flow, physical activity, and mindfulness.ResultsMind-wandering was inversely associated with physical activity, mindfulness and flow, respectively; and flow was positively related to physical activity and mindfulness, respectively. Moreover, multiple mediation results demonstrated that physical activity and mindfulness, respectively, mediated the relationship between mind-wandering and flow.ConclusionThese findings are helpful to understand how our minds attend to the present moment, and the crucial roles of physical activity and mindfulness in the association between mind-wandering and flow. An implication of these is the possibility that the effective strategies aimed at enhancing both the levels of physical activity and mindfulness are needed to reduce the negative impact of mind-wandering on flow.

This paper expands upon the work by Wang (Proceedings of TARK, pp. 493–512, 2017) who proposes a new framework based on quantifier-free predicate language extended by a new bundled modality \(\exists x\Box \) and axiomatizes the logic over S5 frames. This paper first gives complete axiomatizations of the logics over K, D, T, 4, S4 frames with increasing domains and constant domains, respectively. The systems w.r.t. constant domains feature infinitely many additional rules defined inductively than systems w.r.t. increasing domains. In the second part of the paper, we show that these rules are admissible in the systems without them by providing a general strategy for proving completeness theorems for the logics without these rules over constant domain models (also increasing domain models).

A short-lived but important movement in seventeenth-century English natural philosophy—which scholars call “magnetical philosophy” or “magnetical cosmology”—sought to understand gravity (both terrestrial and celestial) by analogy with magnetism. The movement was clearly inspired by William Gilbert’s De magnete (1600) and culminated with Robert Hooke’s prefiguring of the universal principle of gravitation, which he personally communicated to Isaac Newton in 1679. But the magnetical cosmology, as professed by those in the movement, differed from Gilbert’s philosophy in highly significant ways. Proponents never accepted Gilbert’s animistic account of magnets and seem tacitly to have accepted a belief in action at a distance that Gilbert himself rejected. This essay argues that Francis Bacon (1561–1626) had already provided just the adaptations to Gilbert’s philosophy that the later thinkers adopted, including an important endorsement of action at a distance, and that he should be recognized as playing an important role in the movement.

About a month ago, I went to a university to give a lecture. During the questions-and-answers and discussion, a young fellow standing in the last row drew a good deal of attention: "Some people today show concern for spiritual values but are very helpless where material life is concerned." However, he said, "more people are pursuing only material benefits and have absolutely no spiritual requirements." You may perhaps doubt that people today truly, as he indicated, regard the spiritual and the material as "fish-and-bear's-paws"—if you want the one, you have to give up the other

Using U.S. listed firms during the period from 1971 to 2010, this paper investigates the effect of religion on corporate cost behavior. We find that religion mitigates cost stickiness induced by agency or behavioral biases of managers. This result holds for several robustness tests that address endogeneity concerns. The mitigating effect of religion on cost stickiness is through the channel of reducing top managers’ overconfidence and optimistic bias regarding future demand change and promoting managers’ adherence to fiduciary responsibilities and consideration of shareholder benefits. Further evidence shows that the reduction in cost stickiness caused by religion increases firm value. Overall, our findings suggest that religion reduces the wedge between a firm’s actual and optimal resource commitments, which helps to improve firm value and resource allocation efficiency.

I make my living by writing. Someone once said to me, "It's no good writing like this; you've no life! "At first I thought he meant I was dead, and I got very angry. Then I suddenly thought that the word' life" could be used in a different way. Writers often go and live for a while in remote places where conditions are hard, and such excursions are called "experiencing life." This expression may sound as if it refers to a corpse momentarily coming back to life, but that is not actually what it means. These writers do it in order to gain some understanding of a hard life and to write better books, and it is a very good way to set about it. This was what the person speaking to me meant by "life": He did not mean I needed to die. When I realized that, my anger turned to joy. Although I had lived and worked with a production team in a very poor area, I did not consider that I had seen enough of life. Far from it; in fact, I needed more experience of it. But I still felt that "experiencing the hard life" would be a better way of putting it. Leaving out the adjective implies that "life" means frequently having to suffer hardship—there is a presumption that life is to be understood especially in a negative sense. People of my age have all had the experience of contrasting present happiness with past misery: Listening to reports of past sufferings, eating "recalling suffering" meals, and so on. This is not the same as "experiencing life," but there are some similarities. As we all know, in the old society poor people led lives worse than the lives of cattle, eating chaff and greens—not vegetables, but wild plants—and the "recalling suffering" meals were modeled on the diet of the poor in the old society

Iconicity is a fundamental property of spoken and signed languages. However, quantitative analysis of sound-meaning association in Chinese has not been extensively developed, and little is known about the impact of sound symbolism in children’s literature. As sound symbolism is supposed to be a universal cognitive phenomenon, this research seeks to investigate whether iconic structures of Mandarin are embodied in native Chinese speakers’ language experience. The paper describes a case study of Chinese storybooks with the goal of testing whether phonosemantic association is prominent between name sounds and character features. A quantitative method was used to investigate the distribution of different phonological units in character denomination depending on their physical and emotional traits. The results show that phonemes and syllable combination patterns are closely related to perceivable character features. By comparing schematic mapping in Chinese with other languages, the study illuminates a cross-linguistic tendency in addition to a Chinese-specific iconic relation between sound and meaning.