Otherness and empathy—implications of Lévinas ethics for social work education

This paper examines the concept of otherness in Lévinas’ ethics and raises related issues regarding the limits of empathy on philosophical grounds. This study also identifies and discusses a number of linguistic, social and cultural barriers that can establish such limits on practical grounds. This paper raises various considerations for social work educators teaching empathy. Such considerations suggest that social work educators could adopt a stance of ‘understanding and not understanding’ and a dialectical approach in using knowledge and skills. Furthermore, this study challenges the common assumption that empathy leads to compassionate action. Apart from empathy, moral commitment is necessary to engage in such action. This article discusses such moral commitment in relation to Lévinas’ notions of face and responsibility that place ethics before knowledge. Hence, the present study brings the attention of social work educators back to the importance of nourishing virtue and the moral character of students.     

Permuting incomplete paired data: a novel exact and asymptotic correct randomization test

Various statistical tests have been developed for testing the equality of means in matched pairs with missing values. However, most existing methods are commonly based on certain distributional assumptions such as normality, 0-symmetry or homoscedasticity of the data. The aim of this paper is to develop a statistical test that is robust against deviations from such assumptions and also leads to valid inference in case of heteroscedasticity or skewed distributions. This is achieved by applying a clever randomization approach to handle missing data. The resulting test procedure is not only shown to be asymptotically correct but is also finitely exact if the distribution of the data is invariant with respect to the considered randomization group. Its small sample performance is further studied in an extensive simulation study and compared to existing methods. Finally, an illustrative data example is analysed.     

村田雄二郎的清廷国家观述论

堪称当代日本中国学代表的村田雄二郎出版了大量涉华著述,从社会学、政治学等角度对鸦片战争至清末的清廷国家观的变迁做了阐释,由"天朝定制"、"家国同构"、"地方自治与中央集权"等论点构成了其理论架构,与我国史学界的相关研究相比,角度新颖,确有可借鉴之处。另一方面,日本学者的立场也不乏偏颇之处,作者在对其批驳的基础上提出了自己的观点。     

Anticipating modernity: the Jewish ‘welfare state’ in biblical and medieval times

The impact of religion on social policies and its role in the development, structuring and functioning of welfare states has only recently attracted significant attention. Studies of the relationship between religion and the welfare state have given little consideration to whether the religious precepts and values of the major religions, and the ways of life which they have shaped, are consistent with the idea of the welfare state. This paper shows that the elements of the definition of the modern welfare state were reflected in Jewish communal life as either prescribed by Jewish law (halakha) or lived during both ancient and medieval times, and that communal life was ‘welfare‐state‐like‘. In doing so this paper demonstrates that the idea of the welfare state is consistent with Judaism.     

Model-based clustering of multivariate skew data with circular components and missing values

Motivated by classification issues that arise in marine studies, we propose a latent-class mixture model for the unsupervised classification of incomplete quadrivariate data with two linear and two circular components. The model integrates bivariate circular densities and bivariate skew normal densities to capture the association between toroidal clusters of bivariate circular observations and planar clusters of bivariate linear observations. Maximum-likelihood estimation of the model is facilitated by an expectation maximization (EM) algorithm that treats unknown class membership and missing values as different sources of incomplete information. The model is exploited on hourly observations of wind speed and direction and wave height and direction to identify a number of sea regimes, which represent specific distributional shapes that the data take under environmental latent conditions.     

从抽象的“普世价值”看社会主义核心价值体系

"普世价值"之争在一定程度上给社会思想带来矛盾和困惑,对此,必须坚持唯物史观,科学揭示"普世价值"的实质,为建设我国社会主义核心价值体系营造良好的社会舆论环境。     

建设中国特色社会主义共同理想与思政工作

党的十七大报告指出,要将社会主义核心价值体系融入到精神文明教育及国民教育全过程中,并将其转变为人们的自觉追求。在新形势下,贯彻落实十七大精神,坚持社会主义荣辱观,明确思政工作的目标与任务,培养社会主义建设者与接班人,形成中国特色社会主义共同理想,具有深远意义。本文论述了构建中国特色社会主义共同理想思政工作的意义与途径。     

现代新儒家与中华民族精神内涵

现代新儒家对中华民族精神内涵的认识是不尽相同的,但中华民族精神蕴含在中华儒家文化之中是其理论共识。儒家的＂和谐＂与＂理性＂、＂内圣外王＂之道、人文精神、＂极高明而道中庸＂及＂心性之学＂等,都是中华民族精神固有的内涵。现代新儒家致力于从儒家文化视角来解读中华民族精神,是有失公正性的,不加分析地全盘肯定儒家文化及其蕴含的民族精神,也是不符合历史辩证法的。现代新儒家力图从深层的精神内核来认识儒家文化和中华民族精神,是中华民族自我认识过程的深化和发展,也是继续研究中华民族精神不可或缺的重要文化资源。     

General results for the Kumaraswamy-G distribution

For any continuous baseline G distribution [G.M. Cordeiro and M. de Castro, A new family of generalized distributions, J. Statist. Comput. Simul. 81 (2011), pp. 883–898], proposed a new generalized distribution (denoted here with the prefix ‘Kw-G’ (Kumaraswamy-G)) with two extra positive parameters. They studied some of its mathematical properties and presented special sub-models. We derive a simple representation for the Kw-G density function as a linear combination of exponentiated-G distributions. Some new distributions are proposed as sub-models of this family, for example, the Kw-Chen [Z.A. Chen, A new two-parameter lifetime distribution with bathtub shape or increasing failure rate function, Statist. Probab. Lett. 49 (2000), pp. 155–161], Kw-XTG [M. Xie, Y. Tang, and T.N. Goh, A modified Weibull extension with bathtub failure rate function, Reliab. Eng. System Safety 76 (2002), pp. 279–285] and Kw-Flexible Weibull [M. Bebbington, C.D. Lai, and R. Zitikis, A flexible Weibull extension, Reliab. Eng. System Safety 92 (2007), pp. 719–726]. New properties of the Kw-G distribution are derived which include asymptotes, shapes, moments, moment generating function, mean deviations, Bonferroni and Lorenz curves, reliability, Rényi entropy and Shannon entropy. New properties of the order statistics are investigated. We discuss the estimation of the parameters by maximum likelihood. We provide two applications to real data sets and discuss a bivariate extension of the Kw-G distribution.