明清时期徽州涉林契约文书初探

徽州文书是研究徽州社会历史重要的、直接的文献。徽州地区多山少田,自古以来林业资源丰富。明清时期,这一地区的林业生产和林业贸易等活动更加活跃,这些林事活动在明清时期徽州的契约文书中都有所反映。对明清时期徽州契约文书做简单分类,对涉及到林业的部分代表性契约文书进行初步分析,借此对从文献角度研究我国林业史以及林业区域史提供一点启发。     

农业市场化条件下农产品地理标志保护的困境与出路

在分析农业市场化与农产品地理标志保护之目标契合的基础上,探讨了农业市场化条件下农产品地理标志保护之困境及其出路。分析认为,目前国内农产品地理标志保护的困境在于多重保护模式下地名商标和农产品地理标志冲突严重,因而采取专门法保护的模式有利于使农产品地理标志得到更完备的保护,以促进农业发展、农民增收。     

Correlates of wife assault in Hong Kong Chinese families

The objective of this study was the risk factors of wife assault in Hong Kong Chinese families. The sample included 107 battered women from a refuge for battered women. Factor analysis revealed risk factors like dominance, stress, poor anger management, aggressive personality, conflict, lack of empathy, masculine gender role stress, sense of insecurity, relationship distress, and violent socialization. Correlation analysis indicated that dominance, spousal conflict, and sense of insecurity increase the likelihood of carrying out minor physical assault and using psychological aggression, while aggressive personality predicts severe physical assault and injury. The risk factors were explained in terms of traditional Chinese concepts of gender role expectations of men and women and face orientations. The present study provides some evidence relating to the risk factors of wife assault in Chinese families.     

Changes in psychosocial and work-related characteristics among Clubhouse members: a preliminary report

The aim of this study was to explore the changes in work-related abilities of members after attending the Clubhouse program for 12 weeks. The extent to which the changes would contribute to members' performance on simulated work tasks was also investigated. A total of 39 people with mental illnesses, primarily schizophrenia, attending Phoenix Clubhouse participated in the study. Seventeen were newly recruited members to the Clubhouse. The other 22, who served as the control group, were existing members who had been attending the Clubhouse for more than three months. All the participants were assessed by the McCarron-dial System (Observational Emotional Inventory-Revised, McCarron Assessment of Neuromuscular Development), Cognistat, Chinese Work Personality Profile, WHO Disability Assessment Schedule and WHOQOL-Bref-HK at the baseline and 12 weeks after attending the Clubhouse program. They were required to complete a set of simulated work tasks after 12 weeks. New members showed significant improvement in emotional-coping abilities (impulsive-frustration and depression-withdrawal) and work personality (task orientation, social skills, and team work) after attending the Clubhouse program for 12 weeks. The increase in emotional-coping skills (depression-withdrawal) was found to contribute to better performance on typing tasks, whereas emotional coping (anxiety) contributed to better performance on cleansing tasks. Three months' participation in the Clubhouse program appears to have positive effects on emotional-coping abilities and work personality. The emotional-coping abilities were found to predict good performance in simulated clerical and maintenance jobs. Recommendations and suggestions for further research are discussed.     

Robustness of automated data choices of smoothing parameter in image regularization

Statistical image restoration techniques are oriented mainly toward modelling the image degradation process in order to recover the original image. This usually involves formulating a criterion function that will yield some optimal estimate of the desired image. Often these techniques assume that the point spread function is known when the image is restored and indeed when we estimate the smoothing parameter. However in practice this assumption may not hold. This paper investigates empirically the effect of mis-specifying the point spread function on some data-based estimates of the regularization parameter and hence on the image reconstructions. Comparisons of image reconstruction quality are based on the mean absolute difference in pixel intensities between the true and reconstructed images.     

Effects of DISCOVER on the Career Maturity of Middle School Students

This study evaluated the effects of DISCOVER (American College Testing [ACT], 1991), a computer-assisted career guidance system, on the career maturity of 38 students (22 girls and 16 boys) enrolled in a rural middle school. Students randomly assigned to the treatment group worked with DISCOVER for approximately 1 hour a day over a 2-week period, whereas students in the control group did not have access to the DISCOVER program. Results indicated significant gains in career maturity among students in the treatment group (p <.05).     

Global supplier development considering risk factors using fuzzy extended AHP-based approach

Global supplier development is a multi-criterion decision problem which includes both qualitative and quantitative factors. The global supplier selection problem is more complex than domestic one and it needs more critical analysis. The aim of this paper is to identify and discuss some of the important and critical decision criteria including risk factors for the development of an efficient system for global supplier selection. Fuzzy extended analytic hierarchy process (FEAHP) based methodology will be discussed to tackle the different decision criteria like cost, quality, service performance and supplier's profile including the risk factors involved in the selection of global supplier in the current business scenario. FEAHP is an efficient tool to handle the fuzziness of the data involved in deciding the preferences of different decision variables. The linguistic level of comparisons produced by the customers and experts for each comparison are tapped in the form triangular fuzzy numbers to construct fuzzy pair-wise comparison matrices. The implementation of the system is demonstrated by a problem having four stages of hierarchy which contains different criteria and attributes at wider perspective. The proposed model can provide not only a framework for the organization to select the global supplier but also has the capability to deploy the organization's strategy to its supplier.     

Chinese widowers' self-perception of growth: an exploratory study

Presence of growth after traumatic events was introduced to the academic community about a decade ago (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1995). From the conventionally neglected perspective of Chinese widowers, this paper reports seventeen Chinese widowers' views on growth after conjugal loss. Findings seem to suggest that Chinese widowers would define growth as human learning, a definition probably influenced by Confucian teachings. Furthermore, contrary to claims made by Tedeschi and Calhoun (2004), it was found that growth may occur for some individuals without the presence of distress if the individuals have either a stable philosophy of life and death or optimism to buffer their distress or a sense of responsibility to suppress their distress.