J Huang

The governance of human genetic resources (HGRs) in China has evolved quickly, driven by national security concerns and the rapid expansion of the biotechnology sector. This review examines the resulting legal and policy framework, with a focus on cross-border data transfers and the management of informed consent. Employing a comprehensive search strategy integrated with bibliometric analysis, this study synthesized theoretical and methodological developments in Chinese HGRs management. Literature searches spanned publications across PubMed, Web of Science, CNKI, Wanfang database, official government websites, and Google. China’s HGRs management has evolved from principle-based legislation to specific administrative regulations. Informed consent has become stricter, with HGRs data classified as sensitive personal information requiring separate consent and the right to withdraw. This orientation enables strict oversight but also defines the limits within which informed consent can function. The number of international cooperation projects declined after 2023 due to refined regulatory classifications and multi-departmental collaboration. HGRs cross-border require a security review and filing by the National Health Commission, with sensitive data subject to additional assessment by the Cyberspace Administration. In contrast, general cross-border flows are primarily managed through security assessments or standard contract filings, with the negative list mechanism and risk-level exemptions being piloted in free trade zones. National security and data sovereignty remain central to China’s HGR governance, shaping strict oversight while limiting the practical reach of informed consent. Cross-border data sharing continues to face challenges, including regulatory discrepancies, privacy risks that extend beyond de-identification, and technical inconsistencies in data formats and annotation standards. Future progress requires enhanced transparency regarding data usage, improved technical interoperability aligned with domestic security requirements, and stronger international coordination through bilateral agreements.

Computer-based training has attracted increasing attention from researchers in recent years. Several studies have found that computer-based training resulted in improved executive functions in adults. However, it remains controversial whether children can benefit from computer-based training and what moderator could influence the training effects. The focus of the present meta-analysis was to examine the effects of computer-based training on EFs in children: working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control. A thorough search of published work yielded a sample of 36 studies with 216 effect sizes. The results indicated that computer-based training showed moderate training effects on improving EFs in children, while training effects of working memory were significantly higher. Furthermore, we found near-transfer effects were marginally significantly higher than far-transfer effects. The standard training method was significantly more effective than training with game elements. In computer-based training, typically developing children had significantly better training effects than atypically developing children. Some additional factors, such as the number of training sessions and age, also modulated the training effects. In conclusion, the present study investigated the effects and moderators of computer-based training for children's EFs. The results provided evidence that computer-based training may serve as an efficient way to improve EFs in children. We also discussed some directions for future computer-based training studies.

We provide an overview of a transdisciplinary project about sustainable forest management under climate change. Our project is a partnership with members of the Menominee Nation, a Tribal Nation located in northern Wisconsin, United States. We use immersive virtual experiences, translated from ecosystem model outcomes, to elicit human values about future forest conditions under alternative scenarios. Our project combines expertise across the sciences and humanities as well as across cultures and knowledge systems. Our management structure, governance, and leadership behaviors have both fostered and constrained our work and must be continuously responsive to changing group dynamics. Our project presents opportunities for substantial contributions to society, including insights and knowledge about complementary ways of knowing, skills training, and professional development, and opportunities for reflexive learning about effective transdisciplinary, translational, and transformative scientific processes.

Previously published studies have reported that 150 min of short-term monocular deprivation temporarily changes perceptual eye dominance. However, the possible mechanisms underlying monocular deprivation-induced perceptual eye dominance plasticity remain unclear. Using a binocular phase and contrast co-measurement task and a multi-pathway contrast-gain control model, we studied the effect of 150 min of monocular pattern deprivation in normal adult subjects. The perceived phase and contrast varied significantly with the interocular contrast ratio, and after MPD, the patched eye became dominant. Most importantly, we focused on the potential mechanisms of the deprivation effect. The data of an averaged subject was best fitted by a model, which assumed a monocular signal enhancement of the PE after the MPD. The present findings might have important implications for investigations of binocular vision in both normal and amblyopic populations.

According to experimental philosophers, the diversity and sensitivity of intuitions have posed a severe threat to the traditional philosophical methodology, which relies extensively on intuitions triggered by thought experiments. However, defenders of traditional armchair philosophical methodology argue that experimental philosophers misunderstand the importance of intuitions for philosophy. What philosophers genuinely rely on are arguments, which provide a reliable foundation for their judgments on thought experiments. However, a recent cross-cultural experiment conducted by Wysocki (2017) indicates that arguments do not affect the judgments about Gettier cases as philosophers once expected. That poses a challenge to those philosophers who contend that judgments are based on arguments. In this paper, we expand the experimental investigation of the effect of arguments on judgments about thought experiments. We report the result of three experiments in which eleven thought experiments drawn from multiple philosophical subdisciplines were used. It turns out that arguments have significant impacts on Chinese participants’ judgments in response to most of these thought experiments. These results present new resources for defending the traditional methodology but also bring new challenges.

Analytic philosophy has been developing in China for over a century, and philosophers shaped by the analytic tradition have grown into an important philosophical community in China. The views of contemporary analytic philosophers in China on central philosophical issues and their similarities and differences with analytic philosophers in English-speaking countries have not been systematically investigated. Bourget and Chalmers have conducted two large-scale online questionnaire surveys on analytic philosophers in English-speaking countries. Inspired by their studies, a survey on analytic philosophers in China was performed. It is found that philosophers in China had no agreement on most issues. According to the comparative analysis with the results of Bourget and Chalmers’ second survey, there were significant differences in views as well as thinking styles between analytic philosophers in China and English-speaking countries. And these differences may be partially explained by cultural factors and academic environments.

Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have catalyzed the development of large-scale data-driven public projects, including digital twin cities. Despite the potential for improving public services, some projects also raise privacy concerns due to the involvement of personal data. News media has long been recognized as an important source of influence on public acceptance of new technologies, but the effects of positive versus negative media exposure on the public’s privacy perceptions remain unclear. This study examines how positive and negative media exposure interact with information sensitivity to shape public perception of AI-powered digital twin cities regarding privacy. Structural equation modelling of data from an online survey (N = 1000) in Singapore demonstrated that perceived public benefits outweighed privacy concerns in shaping personal data disclosure intention to AI-powered digital twin cities. Positive media exposure was associated with lower privacy concerns, while negative media exposure was linked to higher privacy concerns at a similar magnitude. While positive media exposure was associated with higher perceived public benefits, negative media exposure did not significantly influence perceived public benefits. Critically, both positive and negative media exposure moderated the impact of information sensitivity. Specifically, information sensitivity indirectly shaped disclosure intention through lower perceived benefits and higher privacy concerns, but positive media exposure mitigated these effects. Notably, negative media exposure also weakened the link between information sensitivity and privacy concerns, suggesting that media—whether positive or negative—can temper the impact of information sensitivity on privacy concerns.

This study aimed to explore the association between the functioning of family environment and academic burnout of Chinese college students as well as the mediating effects of the interpersonal resource and intrapersonal resource [i.e., positive psychological capital ] in this relationship. A total of 1971 Chinese undergraduates were involved in an online questionnaire survey and data analysis. It was found that family cohesion and adaptability was negatively related to academic burnout. Mediation analyses demonstrated that family cohesion and adaptability did not directly affect academic burnout, but indirectly through increasing PsyCap, and through enhancing peer support and then increasing PsyCap in serial. Meanwhile, the relationship between family cohesion and adaptability and academic burnout was not mediated by peer support alone. These findings highlight the family environment’s crucial role in youth mental health and positive development in the college context.

Salient but irrelevant distractors automatically capture attention in singleton detection search but not in feature search, due to the different search strategies adopt by observers. While state anxiety has been associated with increased salience-driven capture, it remains unclear whether such effects extend to feature search, which relies more on top-down control. The present study addressed this question using an eye-tracking technique, combining the threat of shock with the singleton detection and feature search tasks. Participants were instructed to execute speeded saccades to the target while ignoring a salient irrelevant distractor. To induce state anxiety, unpredictable, unavoidable, and sporadic shocks were administered during threat blocks, while no shocks were administered during safe blocks. The results showed that threat significantly increased oculomotor capture and dwell time on the salient distractor in the feature search task, but had no effect in the singleton detection task. These findings suggest that state anxiety may selectively impair template-based rejection and disengagement mechanisms required for feature search, whereas purely priority-guided selection during singleton detection leaves little room for additional modulation. Our results highlight that task demands determine how threat-induced state anxiety modulates salience-driven capture.

How is loudness expressed metaphorically in Chinese? In this study, using the lexical and corpus-based approaches to metaphor studies, I examine linguistic manifestations of five loudness metaphors with the following source concepts: HEIGHT, BRIGHTNESS, SIZE, THICKNESS, and WEIGHT. On the one hand, the lexical approach shows words with lexicalized loudness senses and their compounding patterns in the dictionaries, which suggest different levels of conventionality, semantic differentiation and conflation, and implicit similarities between Chinese and English. On the other hand, the corpus-based approach reveals frequent, novel, and reduplicative uses of words, implicit instantiations of loudness metaphors, antonymic asymmetries, and interactions between loudness metaphors and other sound metaphors. It is further shown that, with evidence from lexicalized senses of words in the dictionaries and metaphorical uses of words in the corpora, there exist both explicit and implicit similarities between Chinese and English loudness metaphors, which are motivated by the conceptual associations between the target concept LOUDNESS and its source concepts. Furthermore, the figurative uses of 嗓 săng “larynx” and 气 qì “vital energy” for loudness in Chinese indicate that metaphorical and metonymic expressions are a window into exploring how we think and speak in a cultural context.

Previous research has demonstrated that regular exercise modulates motor cortical plasticity and cognitive function, but the influence of short-term high-intensity interval training remains unclear. In the present study, the effect of short-term HIIT on neuroplasticity and executive function was assessed in 32 sedentary females. Half of the participants undertook 2 weeks of HIIT. Paired-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation was used to measure motor cortical plasticity via short intracortical inhibition and intracortical facilitation. We further adapted the Stroop task using functional near-infrared spectroscopy to evaluate executive function in the participants. The results indicated that, compared with the control group, the HIIT group exhibited decreased ICF. In the Stroop task, the HIIT group displayed greater activation in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and left orbitofrontal cortex even though no significant difference in task performance was observed. These findings indicate that short-term HIIT may modulate motor cortical plasticity and executive function at the neural level.

Considered second only to Confucius in the history of Chinese thought, Mencius (371?-289 b.c.), was a moral philosopher whose arguments, while pragmatically rooted in the political and social conditions of his time, go beyond particular situations to probe their origins and speculate on their larger implications. His writings constitute a living tradition in China and the world at large. Sinological studies of Mencius have long emphasized philological and archaeological research, situating the texts mainly in Chinese history. Critical appraisal of the texts lends itself to Western traditions of interpretation. In Mencian Hermeneutics, Chun-chieh Huang utilizes both approaches to offer a historical and universal understanding of Mencius. Huang builds from the premise that Mencius' thinking and all Chinese thought are sociopolitical in tone and humanistic and metaphysical in nature and range. The strength of Mencius' thought lies in the organic mutuality of these factors. His arguments are shaped by the politics, literature, and economics of his age. At the same time, the concrete programs he proposed and his sharp criticisms of alternative policies are rooted in the metaphysical soil of man and the world, human solidarity and cosmic symbiosis, and human nature within the natural world. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 analyzes the concrete as opposed to the theoretical character of Mencius' thought. Huang demonstrates the organic unity of his intellectual system with its concepts of linkage between innermost to outermost, self to social, rightness vs. profit, and his political ideal of populist government through familial empathy. Part 2 deals with the long historical odyssey of Mencius' work in China's interpretive tradition, an exegetical process similar in its origins to Western hermeneutics. In comparing and analyzing these approaches to Mencius, Huang seeks to show that Chinese hermeneutics is more than an activity of intellectual curiosity about the ancient world, but is instead a means to sociopolitical action, an application in society of the fruits of personal cultivation. Mencian Hermeneutics will be of interest to Chinese area specialists, sociologists, literary scholars, and philosophers. Chun-chieh Huang is a professor of history and chairman of the Commission of General Education at National Taiwan University in Taipei. He is the author of five books on Confucianism and five books on Taiwan.

Handwritten text recognition is considered as the most challenging task for the research community due to slight change in different characters’ shape in handwritten documents. The unavailability of a standard dataset makes it vaguer in nature for the researchers to work on. To address these problems, this paper presents an optical character recognition system for the recognition of offline Pashto characters. The problem of the unavailability of a standard handwritten Pashto characters database is addressed by developing a medium-sized database of offline Pashto characters. This database consists of 11352 character images. Enriched feature extraction techniques of histogram of oriented gradients and zoning-based density features are used for feature extraction of carved Pashto characters. K-nearest neighbors is considered as a classification tool for the proposed algorithm based on the proposed feature sets. A resultant accuracy of 80.34% is calculated for the histogram of oriented gradients, while for zoning-based density features, 76.42% is achieved using 10-fold cross validation.