Chen Yang

Professor Chen Ning Yang, an eminent contemporary physicist, was Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, from 1955 to 1966, and Albert Einstein Professor of Physics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook until his retirement in 1999. He has been Distinguished Professor-at-Large at the Chinese University of Hong Kong since 1986 and Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, since 1998. Since receiving his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1948, Prof Yang has made great impacts in both abstract theory and phenomenological analysis in modern physics. In 1983, he published "Selected Papers (1945-1980), With Commentary". It has been considered by Freeman Dyson as one of his favorite books. The present book is a sequel to that earlier volume. It is a collection of his personally selected papers (1971-2012) supplemented by his insightful commentaries. Its contents reflect Professor Yang's changing interests after he reached age sixty. It also includes commentaries written by him in 2011 when he is 89 years old. The papers and commentaries in this unique collection comprise a remarkable personal and professional chronicle, shedding light on both the intellectual development of a great physicist and on the nature of scientific inquiry.

Objectives The objective of this research was to develop ethics accreditation standards for hospitals. Research design Our research methods included a literature review, an expert focus group, the Delphi technique and a hospital survey. The entire process was separated into two stages: (1) the development of a draft of hospital ethics accreditation standards; and (2) conducting a nationwide hospital survey of the proposed standards. Results This study produced a tentative draft of hospital ethics accreditation standards comprised of six chapters and 62 standards based on the expert focus group and Delphi technique. The six chapters are: Medical ethics policies, regulations and leadership; The establishment and operation of a medical ethics committee; The establishment and operation of research-related ethics committees; Medical ethics education; Organisational ethical climate; and Respect for patients' rights and establishment of good hospital-patient relationships. The hospital survey indicated that the concept of an organisational ethical climate was new to most hospital managers, most hospitals disliked the idea of having a separate hospital ethics accreditation system, and small hospitals were concerned about their ability to comply with all of the standards. Conclusions Regardless of whether hospital ethics accreditation can be a stand-alone accreditation or just part of existing hospital accreditation programmes, we hope this draft can serve as a good reference for future endeavours by hospital accreditation authorities

Interaction has been regarded as a key design component in online and distance learning. In this study, we convened a student-led, blended mode massive open online course study group to facilitate interactions for learning. Multiple data, including voice recordings, one-on-one interviews, video recordings, and artifacts were collected and analyzed to detect patterns of interaction in both face-to-face and online/Facebook settings, as well as student perceptions of the blended MOOC study group. Findings indicated that, overall, the blended mode MOOC study group was helpful for promoting communication, providing help, resolving problems, and exchanging ideas and information among group members. Moreover, face-to-face meetings and online discussions both might have exerted their unique strengths and functions in different learning situations for different learners. We recommend future studies continue to explore the tenability of the blended mode MOOC study group in different contexts, subject areas, and age groups, as well as examining group dynamics and interactions that transform MOOC learning into interactive, motivating, and fulfilling journeys among study group members.

In contemporary China, physicians tend to require more diagnostic work-ups and prescribe more expensive medications than are clearly medically indicated. These practices have been interpreted as defensive medicine in response to a rising threat of potential medical malpractice lawsuits. After outlining recent changes in Chinese malpractice law, this essay contends that the overuse of expensive diagnostic and therapeutic interventions cannot be attributed to malpractice concerns alone. These practice patterns are due as well, if not primarily, to the corruption of medical decision-making by physicians being motivated to earn supplementary income, given the constraints of an ill-structured governmental policy by the over-use of expensive diagnostic and therapeutic interventions. To respond to these difficulties of Chinese health care policy, China will need not only to reform the particular policies that encourage these behaviors, but also to nurture a moral understanding that can place the pursuit of profit within the pursuit of virtue. This can be done by drawing on Confucian moral resources that integrate the pursuit of profit within an appreciation of benevolence. It is this Confucian moral account that can formulate a medical care policy suitable to China's contemporary market economy.

Over the last quarter-century, China has experienced dramatic changes associated with its development of a market economy. The character of clinical practice is also profoundly influenced by the ways in which reimbursement scales are established in public hospitals. The market distortions that lead to the over-prescription of drugs and the medically unindicated use of more expensive drugs and more costly high-technology diagnostic and therapeutic interventions create the most significant threat to patients. The payment of red packets represents a black-market attempt to circumvent the non-market constraint on physicians' fees for services. These economic and practice pattern changes are taking place as China and many Pacific Rim societies are reconsidering the moral foundations of their professional ethics and their bioethics. The integrity of the medical profession and the trust of patients in physicians can only be restored and protected if the distorting forces of contemporary public policy are altered.

To oversimplify quite a bit, scholars’ presentation of Hegel's teleology constitutes a continuum according to how more-or-less secured the progress towards the goal is supposed to be, which tracks roughly the nature of the end and its necessity. In this article, rather than focus on the end and progress towards it, we will focus on the means and structure of teleological relationships on Hegel's account. This focus follows from an essential feature of Hegel's discussion of teleology in the Logic, in which teleology is introduced to solve a problem in the individuation of entities. It will turn out that the fullest actualization of the end is in the durable means, which is also thereby individuated. And it will turn out that the paradigmatic historical means—the state—is tensed, as it were, between the end and its realization that makes it synchronically historical. This synchronic historicity is missing in the usual progressive and thus diachronic accounts of the teleological process of history. But first we step back even farther (at least historically). We begin by taking up the two most important philosophical accounts of teleology for Hegel, namely those of Aristotle and Kant. Then we go to Hegel's Logic for his reconstruction of teleological processes against the background of the explanatory need for individuation. We focus on four aspects of Hegel's account: that teleology is a structure of reciprocal interaction, that the purpose is an immanent governing principle, that change is the price of immanence, and that the durable means is the teleological object par excellence. Finally, we trace these features through Hegel's account of world history and conclude with some brief remarks on the historicity of the state described in the Philosophy of Right.