X. Wang

Historical progress is a core belief of the Enlightenment and modernity, also a spiritual catalyst of human emancipation in the past centuries. However, due to the naive understanding of scholars and its misuse by political power, the idea of progress has fallen from a realistic political belief in the pursuit of liberty and democracy to a metaphysical faith and a one-sided ideology. Instead of abandoning the concept itself, this paper will provide a new version for progress. In this version, supported theoretically with ideas from a Marxian critique of the paradox of progress in capitalist society and a Habermasian reconstruction of social evolution and progress, progress shall not be understood as an intrinsic trend of history itself, but a “historical-practical project” of humanity. The intent of rewriting progress is to transcend the dilemma between progressivism and catastrophism while at the same time preserving its positive meaning.

This study aims to explore effective ways to improve college students’ entrepreneurial self-efficacy and intentions through entrepreneurship education. The survey used a random sample of 804 college students in Zhejiang Province, China. The results show that: In terms of the characteristics of entrepreneurial intention, there are significant differences in gender, entrepreneurial experience, entrepreneurial competition experience, and family background of self-employment. There are significant differences in the characteristics of entrepreneurship education in gender, entrepreneurial competition experience, and the family background of self-employment. In the relationship among entrepreneurship education, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and entrepreneurial intention, entrepreneurship education is significantly and positively related to entrepreneurial self-efficacy and entrepreneurial intention. Entrepreneurial self-efficacy is significantly and positively associated with entrepreneurial intention. Entrepreneurial self-efficacy plays a complete mediating role between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention. Entrepreneurial self-efficacy also has a suppressing effect on the relationship between the two. Entrepreneurial competition experience moderates the second half of the mediating effect of entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Finally, the study offers several proposals for the teaching practice of entrepreneurship education.

The sampling-based motion planner is the mainstream method to solve the motion planning problem in high-dimensional space. In the process of exploring robot configuration space, this type of algorithm needs to perform collision query on a large number of samples, which greatly limits their planning efficiency. Therefore, this paper uses machine learning methods to establish a probabilistic model of the obstacle region in configuration space by learning a large number of labeled samples. Based on this, the high-dimensional samples’ rapid collision query is realized. The influence of number of Gaussian components on the fitting accuracy is analyzed in detail, and a self-adaptive model training method based on Greedy expectation-maximization algorithm is proposed. At the same time, this method has the capability of online updating and can eliminate model fitting errors due to environmental changes. Finally, the model is combined with a variety of sampling-based motion planners and is validated in multiple sets of simulations and real world experiments. The results show that, compared with traditional methods, the proposed method has significantly improved the planning efficiency.

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

[Bertrand] Russell, in On Authority, wrote about a kind of hieratic authority which in the past lay in the hands of the clergy, and said that in the West, intellectuals are the descendants of these clergy. He also said that Chinese Confucianism possessed a hieratic authority, which leads us to think that China's intellectuals are the descendants of the Confucians. The knowledge that clergy and Confucians possessed came from a few sacred books, such as the Bible and the Analects. But modern intellectuals, though they may not be wholly human, are at least partly so, and have no sacred books in their hands. They make people believe in them wholly on the basis of knowledge, and this knowledge can itself win people's confidence. The strange thing is, that this latter kind of knowledge cannot bring authority with it

This article discusses a Confucian notion of cosmological life and its eco-philosophical implication. In contrast to the Kantian notion of the man who has exclusive moral worth, existing as the ultimate value-conferrer among beings, Confucian cosmological man understands his/her selfness through the lens of sacred unity with other beings. The modern ecological disaster is arguably caused by the reluctance to recognize the inherent value of nature, which is due to the anthropocentrism partly introduced by the enlightenment notion of humanity. The Confucian cosmological person worships the ultimate value of the cosmos as a unity of heaven, humans, and earth, and in so doing delivers genuine care for the environment, not for the sake of its instrumental but for its inherent value.

In this paper, I discussed the possibility to argue for a human right to internet access in Confucian society. I argued firstly that Confucianism could properly accommodate the concept of human rights, even though it does not have an explicit term for it. Secondly, Confucian concept of min xin, as a similar concept of democracy with differences, is used in Confucianism as a normative concept to lay the foundation of the state and legitimatize the governance. Last but not least, I argued that the roles that min xin are supposed to play in reality are never fully carried out due to the specific hierarchical information structure of Confucian society. I proposed that with internet, the concept of min xin would have to be able to play its roles properly. As such, the arguments that disregard internet access by referting to the protection of the Confucian values might not stand.

In this study, we propose a way to link the scholarly contents of scientific papers by constructing a knowledge graph based on the semantic organization of argumentation units and relations in scientific papers. We carried out an argumentation graph data model aimed at linking multiple discourses, and also developed a semantic annotation platform for scientific papers and an argumentation graph visualization system. A construction experiment was performed using 12 articles. The final argumentation graph has 1,262 nodes and 1,628 edges, including 1,628 intra-article relations and 190 inter-article relations. Knowledge evolution representation, strategic reading, and automatic abstracting use cases are presented to demonstrate the application of the argumentation graph. In contrast to existing knowledge graphs used in academic fields, the argumentation graph better supports the organization and representation of scientific paper content and can be used as data infrastructure in scientific knowledge retrieval, reorganization, reasoning, and evolution. Moreover, it supports automatic abstract and strategic reading.

This study employs a knowledge graph approach to realize the representation and association of information resources, promote the research, teaching, and dissemination of Dunhuang cultural heritage (CH). The Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes is a UNESCO world CH site, and digitization of Dunhuang CH has produced a large amount of information resources. However, these digitized resources continue to lack the systematic granular semantic representation required to correlate Dunhuang cultural heritage information (CHI) in order to facilitate efficient research and appreciation. To respond to this need, new approaches for representing CHI are being developed. This study identifies five facets and their semantic relationship to Dunhuang CH, constructs an ontology model to regulate the entities, attributes, and relationships of Dunhuang CH knowledge, and subsequently processes the resulting data using various techniques (such as semantic annotation and entity association) to facilitate rendering the data in a knowledge graph construction. Finally, we constructed a DH-oriented knowledge graph service platform in order to provide a user friendly visual display and semantic retrieval service.

Evidence accumulation has been the core component in recent development of perceptual and value-based decision-making theories. Most studies have focused on the evaluation of evidence between alternative options. What remains largely unknown is the process that prepares evidence: how may the decision-maker sample different sources of information sequentially, if they can only sample one source at a time? Here we propose a normative framework in prescribing how different sources of information should be sampled proactively to facilitate the decision process: beliefs for different noisy sources are updated in a Bayesian manner and participants can proactively allocate resource for sampling (i.e. saccades) among different sources to maximize the information gain in such process. We show that our framework can account for human participants’ actual choice and saccade behaviors in a two-alternative value-based decision-making task. Moreover, our framework makes novel predictions about the empirical eye movement patterns.

Supporting families of people with developmental disabilities from culturally diverse backgrounds is receiving increased attention in the era of globalisation. However, there is little information about how disability policy and cultural values work together to support families. This article examined how disability policy and Chinese cultural values influence family care of children and young people with developmental disabilities. By comparing qualitative interview data from Chinese families in Taipei (15) and Sydney (10), we analysed how their expression of cultural values in family care differs by policy context, relative to ethics of care claims for recognition, rights and redistribution. We found that positive expressions of Chinese culture in family care fade if policies do not complement them. Policies can alleviate potential tension with cultural values in three ways: reinforcing family capacity to care; ensuring the rights of both family caregivers and people with disabilities; and extending care choices for families. These approaches resonate with ethics of care principles. We argue that culturally responsive disability policy for families means working with cultural values to achieve ethics of care. This implies that incorporating principles of ethics of care could inform cultural responsiveness in disability policy development.