L. Sun

Population aging has brought great challenges to many regions throughout the world. Enhancing the sense of participation, access, and well-being of older adults is the goal of China’s aging development. This study, taking urban–rural difference as the entry point, examined the difference in subjective well-being between urban and rural older learners. A total of 2,007 older adults learners aged over 50 years were recruited in Zhejiang, Anhui, and Shandong Provinces in China, including 773 rural older adults and 1,234 urban older adults. This study found that there was a significant positive correlation between senior learning and the subjective well-being of urban and rural older adult learners. Furthermore, there was a significant difference between the subjective well-being of urban and rural older adult learners’ and there was also an urban–rural difference between the effects of older adult learning on the subjective well-being. Based on the above findings, this study reveals the mechanism of the impact of older adult learning on subjective well-being of urban and rural older adults and gives relevant suggestions for improving the subjective well-being of urban and rural older learners.

Effective social data governance rests on a bedrock of social support. Without securing trust from the populace whose information is being collected, analyzed, and deployed, policies on which such data are based will be undermined by a lack of public confidence. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digitalization and datafication by governments for the purposes of contact tracing and epidemiological investigation. However, concerns about surveillance and data privacy have stunted the adoption of such contact-tracing initiatives. This commentary analyzes Singapore's contact-tracing initiative to uncover the reasons for public resistance and efforts by the state to address them. The government's contact-tracing program encompassing its proprietary TraceTogether app and physical token initially triggered vociferous public criticisms of Big Brother style surveillance. Using a dialogic communication framework, we analyze the TraceTogether initiative to interrogate the communicative strategies that were used to overcome public resistance. We argue that these strategies reflect a top-down approach that prioritizes transactional dissemination of information, in line with Singapore's technocratic stance toward governance. We further assert that such communicative tactics represent missed opportunities to foster public confidence in social data governance through greater trust building. We propose solutions for more dialogic communicative forms that build trust, so that officials can develop a sound understanding of the public concerns, increase the level of public engagement, and incorporate public feedback into policies that govern data use.

This paper investigates whether local religious beliefs have a significant impact on the practice of earnings management. We extend the existing literature on the role of firm characteristics in mitigating earnings management by showing that local religious beliefs significantly impact the practice of earnings management. Specifically, exploring firms located in the U.S. counties that vary from 2000 through 2010, we document the negative relationship between religiosity and earnings management using multivariate regression analysis. Our results show that firms in counties with strong religious social norms are less likely to engage in earnings management. Furthermore, we attempt to mitigate endogeneity concerns by employing a modified Difference-Differences model and Propensity score matching methods. We find that the negative effects of religion on earnings management still hold. Overall, these findings emphasize the empirical relevance of the association between the local social norms and earnings manipulations.

A growing number of children in the United States are exposed to multiple languages at home from birth. However, relatively little is known about the early process of word learning—how words are mapped to the referent in their child-centered learning experiences. The present study defined parental input operationally as the integrated and multimodal learning experiences as an infant engages with his/her parent in an interactive play session with objects. By using a head-mounted eye tracking device, we recorded visual scenes from the infant’s point of view, along with the parent’s social input with respect to gaze, labeling, and actions of object handling. Fifty-one infants and toddlers from an English monolingual or a diverse bilingual household were recruited to observe the early multimodal learning experiences in an object play session. Despite that monolingual parents spoke more and labeled more frequently relative to bilingual parents, infants from both language groups benefit from a comparable amount of socially coordinated experiences where parents name the object while the object is looked at by the infant. Also, a sequential path analysis reveals multiple social coordinated pathways that facilitate infant object looking. Specifically, young children’s attention to the referent objects is directly influenced by parent’s object handling. These findings point to the new approach to early language input and how multimodal learning experiences are coordinated socially for young children growing up with monolingual and bilingual learning contexts.

Purpose: Short track speed skating is a racing sport with racing tactics are equally crucial to speed and technical skating skills. Therefore, to investigate the relationship between starting and finishing positions for elite skaters and subsequently, explore pacing patterns for champions are necessary.Methods: To investigate a pattern of effective tactical positioning strategy, Kendall’s tau-b correlations between starting and finishing position were calculated, with 500 m races having the most positive correlation.Results: Furthermore, starting position distributions of winners in each round, as well as the fluctuations in champion starting positions across rounds were analyzed. Our findings showed that skaters on the first track were inclined to win the rounds in 500, 1,000, and 1,500 m, and the differences between starting and finishing positions for champions were minimized in semi-finals. Meanwhile, the pacing patterns were gaining more fluctuations by the increase of race distances for champions, as the average standard deviation of lap rankings equaled 0.90, 1.15, and 2.21 for 500, 1,000, and 1,500 m races, respectively.Conclusion: In conclusion, elite skaters should adopt flexible tactics at the lowest cost of energy consumption. The overall variability of lap ranking in long-distance races were distinctly higher than it in short distance.

Ingratiation is a common strategy for subordinates to deal with their supervisors in eastern and western societies. Based on the theory of impression management, this study focuses on the impact of upward ingratiation outside the workplace on supervisor’s human resource decisions in the Chinese context and the mechanism behind this impact. The data were collected from 252 supervisor-subordinate dyads in four manufacturing firms. The results demonstrate the following: first, supervisors hold a more favorable view of upward ingratiation outside the workplace; second, upward ingratiation outside the workplace has a positive effect on the supervisor’s chance of promotion and bonus allocation decisions, and leader-member exchange plays a mediation role in this influence; third, Zhongyong thinking moderates the relationship between LMX and supervisor’s chance of promotion and bonus allocation decisions; and finally, ZYT moderates the indirect effect of ingratiation behavior outside the workplace on supervisor’s chance of promotion and bonus allocation decisions through LMX, and the mediated relationship is weakened when a supervisor has a higher level of ZYT. This is one of the first empirical studies, which examines the validity of subordinate’s upward ingratiation outside the workplace from the perspective of supervisor’s ZYT. This study plays an important role in highlighting the effect of ZYT on the ingratiation behavior.

At present, urban traffic congestion is a common problem of urban development in China. Therefore, China’s government issued the policy of opening the gated communities in 2016, hoping to alleviate traffic pressure to some extent. But, at present, the quantitative empirical research on the effect of the policy implementation is less and more idealistic. In order to complete the leap from research on local isolated traffic capacity of static gated communities to research on global coupling traffic capacity of dynamic multilayer network and, to a certain extent, reflect the innovation of the research model and method, we make a quantitative analysis of the effect of the policy more consistent with the actual situation, which provides a quantitative management basis for the implementation of the policy. Based on literature review, this paper carried out two stages of research. Stage one consists of constructing traffic capacity assessment model—Road Capacity Assessment model based on BPR impedance function from a simple local static perspective. Considering the factors such as delay of signalized intersection and travel time, through modeling analysis and empirical test, it is found that about 12% of local traffic capacity can be improved after open community. Stage two consists of constructing a global capacity model based on multilayer complex network coupling from the perspective of complex global dynamics. Considering the various network nodes of pedestrians, nonmotor vehicles, and other factors, we construct a multilayer complex network and dynamic superposition coupling. The empirical data show that the overall traffic capacity of the open community is improved by at least 11.3%. Finally, it can be concluded that a significant increase in the global traffic capacity of complex urban road networks means that the losses caused by traffic congestion will be reduced. In some first-tier cities, the direct monthly income of the open-gated community is as high as 230 million yuan, not to mention its overall economic, social, and environmental benefits.

The rapid advancement of new digital technologies, such as smart technology, artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, robotics, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT), is fundamentally changing the nature of work and increasing concerns about the future of jobs and organizations. To keep pace with rapid disruption, companies need to update and transform business models to remain competitive. Meanwhile, the growth of advanced technologies is changing the types of skills and competencies needed in the workplace and demanded a shift in mindset among individuals, teams and organizations. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digitalization trends, while heightening the importance of employee resilience and well-being in adapting to widespread job and technological disruption. Although digital transformation is a new and urgent imperative, there is a long trajectory of rigorous research that can readily be applied to grasp these emerging trends. Recent studies and reviews of digital transformation have primarily focused on the business and strategic levels, with only modest integration of employee-related factors. Our review article seeks to fill these critical gaps by identifying and consolidating key factors important for an organization’s overarching digital transformation. We reviewed studies across multiple disciplines and integrated the findings into a multi-level framework. At the individual level, we propose five overarching factors related to effective digital transformation among employees: technology adoption; perceptions and attitudes toward technological change; skills and training; workplace resilience and adaptability, and work-related wellbeing. At the group-level, we identified three factors necessary for digital transformation: team communication and collaboration; workplace relationships and team identification, and team adaptability and resilience. Finally, at the organizational-level, we proposed three factors for digital transformation: leadership; human resources, and organizational culture/climate. Our review of the literature confirms that multi-level factors are important when planning for and embarking on digital transformation, thereby providing a framework for future research and practice.

Consumers play an important role as one of the main actors in food safety social co-governance. To create a pattern of food safety social co-governance, the active and effective participation of consumers is critical. To encourage consumers to participate in food safety social co-governance voluntarily and positively, we attempted to develop and preliminarily validate a multidimensional questionnaire on consumer psychological capital that could be used to measure the degree of consumer participation in food safety social co-governance. The aim of the initial sample and test sample 2 was to investigate the factor structure of a preliminary measure of consumer psychological capital. A 4-factor model with 23 items explained 61.05% of the total variance in item scores. The aim of test sample 3 was to measure the retest reliability. Test sample 4 was randomly allocated to the modeling sample and validation sample to verify questionnaire reliability and validity. Convergent validity, discriminant validity, and the internal inconsistency coefficients of the questionnaire were assessed in the modeling sample. While processing CFA, we deleted 9 items with small standardized factor loadings. The remaining 14 items in the final revised 4-factor model included self-efficacy, resilience, hope, and optimism. The fit indices of the revised four-factor model and second-order factor model in the modeling sample revealed an acceptable model fit. The convergent validity and discriminant validity of the revised model were good and acceptable, respectively. A cross-validation procedure confirmed the appropriateness of the revised four-factor model and second-order factor model in the validation sample. The cross-validation results confirmed that the fit indices of the revised four-factor model fitted the data well and the second-order factor model in the validation sample reached acceptable values. We concluded that the questionnaire developed in this study had good reliability and stable and acceptable construct validity. It could provide a theoretical basis for measuring psychological capital in food safety co-governance.

A robust adaptive fuzzy nonlinear controller based on dynamic surface and integral sliding mode control strategy is proposed to realize trajectory tracking for a class of quadrotor UAVs. In this study, the composite factors including parametric uncertainties and external disturbances are added to controller design, which make it more realistic. The quadrotor model is divided into two subsystems of attitude and position that make the control design become feasible. The main contributions of the proposed ADSISMC strategy are as follows: The combination of dynamic surface and integral sliding mode makes the system always in sliding stage by finding the appropriate initial position compared with the common sliding mode, and the complexity of explosion in backstepping method is eliminated. By introducing the fuzzy system, the unknown functions and uncertainties can be approximated which significantly improves the robustness and the tracking performance. The switching control strategy is utilized to compensate for the errors between estimated and ideal inputs; the tracking performance of the whole system has been significantly improved. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed control method.

Professionalization, career development prospects, and social value are the three basic components of the status and prospects of community education workers, which influence their choice to continue their careers or not. In China, these problems are complex and lacking in systematic research, and the current situation does not meet the needs of community education. This study interviewed 24 community workers regarding their salaries, working conditions, and training and career advancement opportunities to evaluate this situation in Ningbo City. The findings highlight challenges in the evaluation processes and work motivations of community education workers, including teams without professional knowledge, lack of training opportunities, unsupportive policies, and low salaries. These findings can be used by governments and community workers to find collaborative ways to facilitate community education processes, including the provision of adult education for community educators. New legal policies to raise the status of community educators are also suggested.

Dans les théories traditionnelles de la sociologie du développement, les recherches se concentrent sur deux axes. D’un côté, les théories de la modernisation, qui étudient l’évolution des pays développés, de l’autre, celles du développement, qui s’intéressent aux modèles latino-américains, africains et est-asiatiques. Ces deux axes traditionnels limitent fortement le champ de vision de la sociologie du développement. Nous montrerons que les processus de transition dans les pays socialistes tels que la Chine, l’ex-URSS ou l’Europe de l’Est soulèvent toute une série de débats inédits. Comment analyser la voie de développement propre à des régions et des pays différents ? Comment examiner les relations entre l’État et la société au sein du processus de développement et de transition ? Comment aborder le problème des inégalités sociales au sein de ce processus ? Autant de nouvelles questions – et ce ne sont pas les seules – qui élargissent non seulement le champ de vision de la sociologie du développement, mais qui permettent aussi d’envisager une nouvelle théorie pour cette discipline. Il s’agit d’observer le processus pratique de transition sociale dans les pays de l’ancien bloc communiste. L’objectif ? Restructurer la sociologie du développement autour de trois piliers : les théories de la modernisation, du développement et de la transition.Among the traditional theories in the sociology of development, research generally focuses on two lines. On the one hand, the theories of modernization, which mainly study the evolution of developed countries, on the other hand, the theories of development, which are interested in the patterns spread out by Latin America, Africa and East Asia. Those two directions set serious restrictions on the sociology of development’s scope. We’ll show that the transition processes of socialist countries such as China, ex-USSR or Eastern Europe actually raise a whole series of new debates. How should we analyze the specific way of development of countries or areas that are different ? How examine the relations between State and society during the development and transition process ? How should we deal with the issue of social inequalities during this process ? These new interrogations – and many others – do broaden the sociology of development’s horizons, but also help us build up a new theory for the discipline. We must scrutinize the practical process of social transition in the countries which were part of the former communist bloc, and, in so doing, rebuild the sociology of development on three pillars : the theories of modernization, of development and of transition

User interfaces have the primary role of enabling access to information meeting individual users' needs. However, the user-systems interaction is still rigid, especially in support of complex environments where various types of users are involved. Among the approaches for improving user interface agility, we present a normative approach to the design interfaces of web applications, which allow delivering users personalized services according to parameters extracted from the simulation of norms in the social context. A case study in an e-Government context is used to illustrate the implications of the approach.