Attenuating Initial Beliefs: Increasing the Acceptance of Anthropogenic Climate Change Information by Reflecting on Values

Anthropogenic climate change information tends to be interpreted against the backdrop of initial environmental beliefs, which can lead to some people being resistant toward the information. In this article (N = 88), we examined whether self‐affirmation via reflection on personally important values could attenuate the impact of initial beliefs on the acceptance of anthropogenic climate change evidence. Our findings showed that initial beliefs about the human impact on ecological stability influenced the acceptance of information only among nonaffirmed participants. Self‐affirmed participants who were initially resistant toward the information showed stronger beliefs in the existence of climate change risks and greater acknowledgment that individual efficacy has a role to play in reducing climate change risks than did their nonaffirmed counterparts.     

The Human Right to Leisure in Old Age: Reinforcement of the Rights of an Aging Population

The right to leisure is recognized as a human right under the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The actual meaning and material content of this human right is subject to debate. The aim of this study is to examine the extent and the context to which this human right is specifically recognized with regard to older persons. Methodologically, this study textually analyzed 17 different international older persons’ human rights documents. The findings reveal that in the majority of these documents there is no reference to the right to leisure. In the remaining documents, the right to leisure is mostly referred to indirectly or in a narrow legal construction. These findings support the notion that despite the growing body of knowledge regarding the importance of meaningful leisure in old age—and its empowering and anti-ageist nature—this knowledge has not transformed into a legal human rights discourse.     

Sequential Hypothesis Tests for Identifying the Minimum Dose with a Threshold Effect

We propose a procedure to identify a lowest dose having greater effect than a threshold dose under the assumption of monotonicity of dose mean response in dose response test. So, we use statistics based on contrasts among sample means and apply a group sequential procedure to our procedure to identify effectively the dose. If we can identify the dose at an early step in the sequential test, since we can terminate the procedure with a few observations, the procedure is useful from an economical point of view. In a simulation studies, we compare the superiority among these procedures based on three contrasts.     

从俞平伯晚年自省和“李希凡自述”想到的(之三)——回应俞平伯晚年的红学研究反思

俞平伯先生晚年的红学自省是真实可信的,应引起红学界高度重视,他的红学研究思想的重大变化同1954年那场对他的批评有内在的因果关系。对当年那场"批俞评红"不能全盘否定,不能只讲负面问题,全面否定其正确性和必要性。现在红学研究的一些乱象正是当年批判过了的错误研究思想、研究方法的泛滥。这种泛滥同对当年的全盘否定不无关系。     

Confession Governance and Verdicts in China’s Criminal Justice

The objective phenomenon of reliance on confessions is the source of many problems in the practice of criminal justice in China. Although successive amendments to the law have endeavored to improve the handling of confessions, they have been unable to resolve the dilemma of a rigid management mode, incompatible management strategies, and conflicting attitudes towards management. This paper has made a multi-dimensional reinterpretation of it from the judges’ perspective, including functional analysis, cultural interpretation and immediate considerations. It reveals that behind its functions of offering moral comfort or allowing evasion of responsibility, confession, as a medium of physical and intellectual management, has the more important function of supplementing and improving the legitimacy of criminal verdicts. The remolding of the legitimacy of criminal verdicts with the coordinated improvement of the management of confessions will change the mode of association between those who currently govern confession and those they govern and will clash with the current closed mode of criminal justice management, thereby promoting a transformation in the governance of criminal justice.     

留守儿童的救赎之路——观念与公约的碰撞

留守儿童是当前我国一个庞大而特殊的弱势群体。解决留守儿童问题,有赖于养育儿童观念的改变;遵守联合国《儿童权利公约》,确保不违背儿童父母的意愿使儿童和父母分离;给予农民工"国民待遇",取消户籍差别。     

守望学术良知,爱护学术生态——论学术失范语境下高校社科学报的自律与发展

保持自律,恪守学术道德是学术期刊编辑的职责所在,更是高校社科学报构建良好学术生态系统的关键所在。在当前我国学术生态环境的部分恶化的语境下,面对批评与困境,增强高校社科学报的自律,提高学报编辑的综合素质,实现学术个体、学术群体与社会全体的联动机制,是提高高校社科学报的质量,促进其健康成长,营造和谐学术生态环境的不二选择。     

The Ethical Challenges of Socially Responsible Science

Social responsibility is an essential part of the responsible conduct of research that presents difficult ethical questions for scientists. Recognizing one’s social responsibilities as a scientist is an important first step toward exercising social responsibility, but it is only the beginning, since scientists may confront difficult value questions when deciding how to act responsibly. Ethical dilemmas related to socially responsible science fall into at least three basic categories: 1) dilemmas related to problem selection, 2) dilemmas related to publication and data sharing, and 3) dilemmas related to engaging society. In responding to these dilemmas, scientists must decide how to balance their social responsibilities against other professional commitments and how to avoid compromising their objectivity. In this article, we will examine the philosophical and ethical basis of social responsibility in science, discuss some of the ethical dilemmas related to exercising social responsibility, and make five recommendations to help scientists deal with these issues.     

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.