Ning Wang

The Zhoushu section of the Shangshu, reflecting on the dynastic changes from Xia to Shang and from Shang to Zhou, understands “heavenly mandate” as the common element that brings about all changes within a historical continuum. For Zhoushu, it is “heavenly mandate” that makes historical continuity possible. Furthermore, “heavenly mandate” is understood to manifest itself with the hopes of the common people and to be realized by the freewill of the king. Thus historical changes can be accommodated. The Chinese idea of historical identity continued to be enriched after the Chun Qiu Period. But in terms of its characteristic understandings of history, it remained much the same as in the Zhoushu: Interpreting history with a common element recognized therein, with the stress always on continuity though historical changes are accommodated from a humanist perspective.

As a part of user experience, user emotion has rarely been studied in mobile libraries. Specifically, with the proposed emotional model in combination with the Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance Emotion Model and the Five Factor Model, we evaluate user emotions on the mobile library’s three IS features. An experience procedure with three tasks has been designed to collect data. 50 participants were enrolled, and they were asked to fill in questionnaires right after the experience. The correlations among the PAD emotions were examined. Specifically, users have a low perception of pleasure, high perception of arousal, and low perception of dominance. However, these three emotional states were not always significantly correlated with each other. This study extends mobile library research by focusing on users’ emotional experience. Specifically, the detailed PAD emotions have been examined. This study provides a new approach for application developers and managers to evaluate the user experience of an application.

The current humanitarian use of drones is focused on two applications: disaster mapping and medical supply delivery. In response to the growing interest in drone deployment in the aid sector, we sought to develop a resource to support value sensitivity in humanitarian drone activities. Following a bottom-up approach encompassing a comprehensive literature review, two empirical studies, a review of guidance documents, and consultations with experts, this work illuminates the nature and scope of ethical challenges encountered by humanitarian organizations embarking upon innovation programmes. The Framework for the Ethics Assessment of Humanitarian Drones (FEAHD) identifies five values and five key questions related to ethical considerations along the decision chain of humanitarian drone activities. It fills a gap between high-level, principle-based guidance related to humanitarian innovation, and detailed operation-oriented checklists for projects involving the use of drones. In this way, the FEAHD contributes to support value sensitivity in the humanitarian use of drones.

Learning from demonstration is one of the promising approaches for fast robot programming. Most learning systems learn both movements and stiffness profiles from human demonstrations. However, they rarely consider the unknown environment interaction. In this paper, a robot human-like learning framework is proposed, where it can learn human skills through demonstration and complete the interaction task with an unknown environment. Firstly, the desired trajectory was generated by dynamic movement primitive based on human demonstration. Then, an adaptive optimal admittance control scheme was employed to interact with environments with the reference adaptation method. Finally, the experimental study was conducted, and the effectiveness of the framework proposed in this paper was verified via a group of curved surface wiping experiments on a balloon with unknown model parameters.

Pain has not only sensory, but also emotional and cognitive, components. Some studies have explored the effect of pain on time perception, but the results remain controversial. Whether individual pain-related emotional and cognitive factors play roles in this process should also be explored. In this study, we investigated the effect of electrical stimulation–induced pain on interval timing using a temporal bisection task. During each task session, subjects received one of five types of stimulation randomly: no stimulus and 100 and 300 ms of non-painful and painful stimulation. Pain-related emotional and cognitive factors were measured using a series of questionnaires. The proportion of “long” judgments of a 1,200-ms visual stimulus duration was significantly smaller with 300 ms painful stimulation than with no stimulus and 100 ms and 300 ms non-painful stimulation. The point of subjective equality did not differ among sessions, but the average Weber fraction was higher for painful sessions than for no-stimulus session. The pain fear score correlated positively with the PSE under 100 ms non-painful and painful and 300 ms painful stimulation. Pain catastrophizing and pain anxiety scores correlated significantly with the WF under no stimulus and 100 ms non-painful stimulation, respectively. These results suggest that electrical stimulation–induced pain affects temporal sensitivity, and that pain-related emotional and cognitive factors are associated with the processing of time perception.

Increasingly, humanitarian organizations across the globe have been implementing innovative technologies in their practice as they respond to the needs of communities affected by conflicts, disasters, and public health emergencies. However, technological innovation may intersect with moral values, norms, and commitments, and may challenge humanitarian imperatives. Through the examination of an empirical case study on drone mapping, this paper aims to explore three questions: (1) What are the dynamics between aid delivery and technological innovation in the humanitarian enterprise? (2) How are structural problems addressed in an environment in which technology is being portrayed as a force for change? (3) What moral responsibilities towards vulnerable populations should humanitarian stakeholders bear when introducing innovative technologies in humanitarian action. Discussion revolves around the ideology of “technological utopia”, and the normative role of technology in the aid sector - to make substantive impacts, or to produce “success stories”. In conclusion, a call for rigorous ethical analysis to help foster value sensitive humanitarian innovation (VSHI) is made.

Since 2016, drones have been deployed in various development projects in sub-Saharan Africa, where trials, tests, and studies have been rolled out in countries, including Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi, Ghana, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The use cases of drones vary, ranging from imagery collection to transportation of vaccines, lab samples, blood products, and other medical supplies. A wide range of stakeholders is involved, including governments, international organizations, educational institutions, as well as industry. Based on a field study conducted in 2019, this article investigates how drones are used for medical supply delivery in Malawi-a country where the community is underserved for healthcare and related infrastructure underdeveloped, while airspace is largely open and regulations generally relaxed. The objective of presenting this case study is to contribute to the evidence regarding the rapid deployment of medical cargo drones across the African continent, and to spark critical reflections over the utility, suitability, and impacts of incorporating drones in the existing health supply chain systems in resource-poor settings. The discussion revolves around two aspects: 1) the emergent “African Drone Rise”-is it ok “as it is Africa”? and 2) the normative role of technology in the aid sector-is it “a solution looking for a problem”? In conclusion, a call for more structured guidance for the systematic examination and evaluation of the medical cargo drone case is raised.

With the rise of the “humanitarian drone” in recent years, drones have become one of the most controversial public interest technologies that have gained increasing media attention. It is worth noting that, although there is a perception in the aid sector that drones hold the promise to reinvent the health supply logistics, to date, routine drone delivery is still relatively new and largely unproven. This paper presents a recent field study conducted in 2019, where drones were deployed in Malawi to help address the last mile challenge in medical supply delivery, and where a noticeable mentality of “killing two birds with one stone” around the attempt of using drones in resource-poor settings is observed. The objective of the paper is to shed light, through a real-world case study and from the ethical perspective, on the impacts of implementing such a systemic change in the existing health supply chain systems. As conclusion, a call for more reflexive approaches for the critical examination, as well as more structured guidance for the responsible evaluation, of medical cargo drones is raised.

The noticeable turn to technology in humanitarian action raises issues related to humanitarianism, sovereignty, as well as equality and access for at-risk populations in disaster zones or remote areas lacking sufficient healthcare services. On a technical level, practical challenges include heightened risks of data safety and security, and the potential malicious use of technology. On a societal level, humanitarian innovation may disrupt relations between different stakeholders, may widen inequality between those with access and those without, and may threaten privacy, disproportionately affecting the vulnerable population. Drawing on the empirical findings of a case study of the 2015 Nepal earthquake, this paper presents an in-depth normative analysis to identify contextualised ethical considerations, and illuminate the wider debate about how technological innovation in the aid sector should be operationalised. In conclusion, on the normative level, a prudent attitude in adopting novel technology in the aid sector is required; while on the operational level, proposals for actionable ethical standards to guide and safeguard sector-wide innovation practices are needed.

In order to improve the iris classification rate, a novel biogeography-based optimization algorithm based on local search and nonuniform variation was proposed in this paper. Firstly, the linear migration model was replaced by a hyperbolic cotangent model which was closer to the natural law. And, the local search strategy was added to traditional BBO algorithm migration operation to enhance the global search ability of the algorithm. Then, the nonuniform variation was introduced to enhance the algorithm in the later iteration. The algorithm could achieve a stronger iris classifier by lifting weaker similarity classifiers during the training stage. On this base, the convergence condition of NBBO was proposed by using the Markov chain strategy. Finally, simulation results were given to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed iris classification method.

This article examines the transformation of property rights over fishery resources in Longlake, China, where a gradual evolutionary process from a common property regime to a state property regime occurred between the late 1970s and the late 1980s. It explores the active role played by economic actors as well as the underlying economic, political, and sociocultural forces in transforming both formal and informal property rules. Stressing the different ways formal and informal property rules change, this article contributes to our understanding of property rights transformation and institutional change in general.

Social interaction, especially for older people living alone is a challenge currently facing human-robot interaction (HRI). There has been little research on user preference towards HRI interfaces. In this paper, we took both objective observations and participants’ opinions into account in studying older users with a robot partner. The developed dual-modal robot interface offered older users options of speech or touch screen to perform tasks. Fifteen people aged from 70 to 89 years old, participated. We analyzed the spontaneous actions of the participants, including their attentional activities and conversational activities, the temporal characteristics of these social behaviours, as well as questionnaires. It has been revealed that social engagement with the robot demonstrated by older people was no different from what might be expected towards a human partner. This study is an early attempt to reveal the social connections between human beings and a personal robot in real life.

Had only from the early feminist social status and rights of women, the pursuit of development to the differences between women and men and the women's own recognition of the unique construction of identity. In the era of globalization, migration and cultural identity of the nation's more to gender studies of fuzzy multi-development of this condition, topics at the forefront of contemporary gender studies is that female homosexuality and the resulting strange phenomena. Both theoretical research projects has begun to attract the attention of domestic scholars, and the status quo may be carried out with appropriate domestic comparative study. Continuing its author's previous work on cultural studies, the present essay offers a theoretic reflection on the origin and development of Western feminism in the context of cultural studies. To the author, contemporary feminism has long shifted its emphasis from pursuing women's social right and position onto the level of identifying themselves as female and constructing their own unique identity different from male. In the current age of globalization, the large-scale immigration and the obscurity of national and cultural identity enable gender study to develop in a pluralistic orientation. The main focus of contemporary gender studies is put on lesbian and queer studies, which have already attracted the attention of domestic scholars and which will be further carried out in comparison with the current Chinese practice