Xiao Liu

Concentrating on the Qingdao Observatory, this paper will explore the role of scientific facility in asserting China’s sovereignty during the first half of the twentieth century. Although scholars have explained the efforts of China’s internationalization in diplomacy through the perspectives of politics, economics and culture, they have not paid attention to science. Therefore, this paper aims to shed some light on how scientific issues were solved via diplomacy during the Republic of China, while further asserting that the focus in negotiations was not confined to science itself, but rather to sovereignty within a scientific context. In this process, the meaning of sovereignty has also been expanded basing on the improvement of nation’s scientific capability. Besides, the participation of different actors involved in sovereignty assertion is investigated by this paper. Although the diplomatic negotiation was held at the international level, the local government and scientific community were main promoters in this case, which calls for attention on the various subjects in sovereignty issue. Consequently, this paper argues that Asian countries, such as Republic of China, could also employ science as a means to negotiate with foreign powers and claim their due rights.

The diffusion of codes is an important processing technology for big data networks. In previous scheme, data analysis was conducted for small samples of big data and complex problems that cannot be processed by big data technology. Due to the limited capacity of intelligence device, a better method is to select a set of nodes to form a connected dominating set to save energy, and constructing CDS is proved to be a complete NP problem. However, it is a challenge to reduce the communication delay and complexity for urgent data transmission in big data. In this paper, an appropriate duty cycle control scheme is proposed to reduce communication delay and complexity while improving energy efficient in CDS-based WSNs. In ADCC scheme, the method for constructing CDS is proposed at lower complexity. Nodes in CDS are selected according to the degree of nodes. Then, duty cycle of dominator nodes in CDS is higher than that of dominated nodes, so the communication delay in the proposed scheme is far less than that of previous scheme. The duty cycle of dominated nodes is small to save energy. This is because the number of dominator nodes in CDS is far less than the number of dominated nodes whose duty cycle is small; thus, the total energy consumption of the network is less than that of the previous scheme. As a result, the performance of energy consumption and communication delay and complex have been improved. Its complexity O∑i=0vm−i+2m−2v−s is reduced a lot for big data. The theoretical analysis shows that compared to the previous scheme, the transmission delay can be reduced 25–92% and the energy efficiency is improved by about 80% while retaining network lifetime.

Exact solutions of epidemic models are critical for identifying the severity and mitigation possibility for epidemics. However, solving complex models can be difficult when interfering conditions from the real-world are incorporated into the models. In this paper, we focus on the generally unsolvable adaptive susceptible-infected-susceptible epidemic model, a typical example of a class of epidemic models that characterize the complex interplays between the virus spread and network structural evolution. We propose two methods based on mean-field approximation, i.e., the first-order mean-field approximation and higher-order mean-field approximation, to derive the exact solutions to ASIS models. Both methods demonstrate the capability of accurately approximating the metastable-state statistics of the model, such as the infection fraction and network density, with low computational cost. These methods are potentially powerful tools in understanding, mitigating, and controlling disease outbreaks and infodemics.

The present study investigated the configuration effect of human capital, social capital, and psychological capital on job performance. The human capital questionnaire, social capital scale, psychological capital scale, and job performance scale were used to survey 458 employees. Results revealed that four antecedent configurations could achieve high task performance, and three antecedent configurations can achieve high contextual performance. The high job performance driving path was characterized by “all roads lead to Rome.” Human capital, social capital, and psychological capital affected job performance in the form of configuration, which reflected the asymmetric causal relationship.

The COVID-19 pandemic spread catastrophically over the world since the spring of 2020. In this paper, a heterogeneous branching process with immigration is established to quantify the human-to-human transmission of COVID-19 in local communities, based on the temporal and structural transmission patterns extracted from public case disclosures by four provincial Health Commissions in China. With proper parameter settings, our branching model matches the actual transmission chains satisfactorily and, therefore, sheds light on the underlying COVID-19 spreading mechanism. Moreover, based on our branching model, the efficacy of home quarantine and social distancing are explored, providing a reference for the effective prevention of COVID-19 worldwide.

Warning signs, as a type of safety signs, are widely applied in our daily lives to informing people about potential hazards and prompting safe behavior. Although previous studies have paid attention to the color of warning signs, they are mostly based on surveys and behavioral experiments. The neural substrates underlying the perception of warning signs with different background colors remain not clearly characterized. Therefore, this research is intended to address this gap with event-related potentials technique. Warning signs with three different background colors were used in the experiment. The results showed that the perceptual differences between different warning signs were present in the form of differential ERPs components though subjects were not required to explicitly attend to the warning signs.

Food safety, ultimately, is a human-centred work. No matter how regulations are coercively released and implemented, the free will and behaviors of human actors (e.g., employees) leads to a real result in food safety. A real motivator of such free will and behaviors is organizational culture that stimulates meaningful organizational actions. Based on such rationale, this conceptual paper with Walmart as an example case sets to discuss the relationships between green organizational culture, corporate social responsibility, and food safety. As organizational culture has been largely discussed in Management and Business literature, green organizational culture and its impacts on socially and environmentally friendly organizational behaviors, as well as public health outcomes like food safety, is wanted. With the clarification of the relationships between these three important constructs, theoretical implications for future research and practical implications for governance and policy-making are well generated.