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Traditional Chinese villages act as the essential carriers of China's rural heritage. Such villages are considered to retain living practices of intangible heritage through know-how, artistic and folk customs, as well as a well-preserved architectural appearance. However, their conservation is at stake due to degradation, abandonment, and urbanization. Spatial cognition is one way of bringing people to the matter of what is important to conserve (attributes) and why they are important (values). This is done by analysing how people perceive and value rural heritage. Traditional methods of gathering spatial cognition data, such as laborious fieldwork or subjective qualitative analyses, often fall short of providing a holistic representation of real-world experiences. This article presents an innovative method for analysing cognitive features in traditional village spaces using an immersive virtual reality equipped with an eye-tracking system. We selected Cheng and Jitou, two traditional Chinese villages, as our case studies. In two virtual reality environments, we captured accurate 3D cognitive data, including participants' locomotion, gaze point, and sightline. The results indicate that the accessibility of village roads affects the distribution of people's locomotion, which in turn affects the distribution of people's areas of interest; the changes in the rhythm of the sightline scale reflect the rhythm of spatial changes in the villages. By broadening the understanding of spatial cognition in traditional Chinese villages related to people's values, this paper sheds light on an alternative approach to assess the cultural significance of such villages for higher conservation and sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the environmental conditions in China have continued to deteriorate, and the pressure of environmental pollution and ecological deterioration has also increased. To strengthen environmental protection work, we must not only pay attention to the natural causes of environmental pollution but also find the social causes of its occurrence. Only in this way can environmental protection and social construction promote each other and develop together. The relationship between the public's environmental protection awareness (including environmental protection knowledge and environmental awareness) and environmental behavior is a research problem with important theoretical and practical significance. Based on the perspective of planned behavior theory, this paper derives the following research hypothesis: the more the public's knowledge of environmental protection, the deeper their understanding of the importance of environmental issues, which will directly promote the public's adoption of environmental behavior. The richer the environmental behavior, the more likely it will affect the environmental cognition that includes the two dimensions of subjective psychological will and the perception of environmental pollution, and then the environmental behavior. The state of the public's environmental cognition will also directly affect the environmental behavior. This paper analyzes China's CGSS2013 data, and the results show that there is a correlation between environmental protection awareness and environmental behavior. In addition, environmental protection awareness has a greater impact on private environmental behavior than on public environmental behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how aspects of national culture may shape the design and implementation of public policy, using the example of energy policy in China. It focuses on cognitive style and on political and legal culture. China’s energy policies display a combination of pragmatism, incrementalism, internal contradiction and ambiguity. This is consistent with evidence from experimental psychology and history that the development of Chinese and East Asian cognitive styles have taken a path distinct from those of Western civilizations with their Greek philosophical heritage. These variations of cognitive style between cultures are reflected in brain function and genes. Policy implementation also bears features from imperial times in the political culture of China’s Communist Party and the contemporary legal system. These arguments reinforce existing calls for caution when seeking to transfer energy or other public policy approaches between countries with different cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quality inspection, a widely adopted practice in supply chains, measures whether delivered products conform to prespecified quality requirements. Due to potential economic benefits, suppliers may deliberately manipulate products to falsify test results. However, unqualified products could cause severe problems in supply chains or even tragedies, such as China’s tainted milk scandal. In this paper, we propose a belief-desire-intention modeling approach to predict suppliers’ behavior and provide inspection suggestions to buyers to overcome the problem. Assuming access to the production process, our approach can represent suppliers’ knowledge of production and deception to mimic their reasoning processes and predict their deception intentions. This flexible approach can also adapt to environmental changes and deliver effective results. In this paper, we build a prototype system for supply chain quality inspections based on the proposed method. We conduct laboratory experiments to collect data for computational assessments of the performance of the prototype. It is shown that our proposed approach is more accurate than classic machine learning methods in detecting suppliers’ deceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate Origin-Destination (OD) prediction is significant for effective traffic monitor, which can support operation decision in traffic planning and management field. The enclosed expressway network system like toll gates system in China can collect mounts of trip records which can be gathered for OD prediction. The paper develops a novel neural network, which is named Expressway OD Prediction Neural Network (EODPNN) for toll data-based prediction. The network consists of the following three modules: The Feature Extension Module, the Memory Module, and the Prediction Module. In the process, the attributes data which can reflect the city attribute such as GDP, population, and the number of vehicles are considered to embeded into the notwork to increase the accuracy of the model. For the applicability improvment of the model, we categorize the cities in multiple classes based on their economy and population scales in this paper, which can provide a higher accurate prediction of OD by EODPNN. The results shows that, comparing to the traditional model like ARIMA and SVM, or typical neural networks like Bidirectional Long Short-term Memory, the EODPNN delivers a better prediction performance. The method proposed in this paper has been fully verified and has a potential to transplant to the other OD data-based management systems for a more accurate and flexible prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aiming to solve the safety problems of high-speed railway operation and management, one new method is urgently needed to construct on the basis of the rough set theory and the uncertainty measurement theory. The method should carefully consider every factor of high-speed railway operation that realizes the measurement indexes of its safety operation. After analyzing the factors that influence high-speed railway safety operation in detail, a rough measurement model is finally constructed to describe the operation process. Based on the above considerations, this paper redistricts the safety influence factors of high-speed railway operation as 16 measurement indexes which include staff index, vehicle index, equipment index and environment. And the paper also provides another reasonable and effective theoretical method to solve the safety problems of multiple attribute measurement in high-speed railway operation. As while as analyzing the operation data of 10 pivotal railway lines in China, this paper respectively uses the rough set-based measurement model and value function model (one model for calculating the safety value) for calculating the operation safety value. The calculation result shows that the curve of safety value with the proposed method has smaller error and greater stability than the value function method’s, which verifies the feasibility and effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China’s fast economic growth contributes to the rapid development of its urbanization process, and also renders a series of industrial accidents, which often cause loss of life, damage to property and environment, thus requiring the associated risk analysis and safety control measures to be implemented in advance. However, incompleteness of historical failure data before the occurrence of accidents makes it difficult to use traditional risk analysis approaches such as probabilistic risk analysis in many cases. This paper aims to develop a new methodology capable of assessing regional industrial safety (RIS) in an uncertain environment. A hierarchical structure for modelling the risks influencing RIS is first constructed. The hybrid of evidential reasoning (ER) and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is then used to assess the risks in a complementary way, in which AHP is hired to evaluate the weight of each risk factor and ER is employed to synthesise the safety evaluations of the investigated region(s) against the risk factors from the bottom to the top level in the hierarchy. The successful application of the hybrid approach in a real case analysis of RIS in several major districts of Beijing (capital of China) demonstrates its feasibility as well as provides risk analysts and safety engineers with useful insights on effective solutions to comprehensive risk assessment of RIS in metropolitan cities. The contribution of this paper is made by the findings on the comparison of risk levels of RIS at different regions against various risk factors so that best practices from the good performer(s) can be used to improve the safety of the others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to optimize a desirable fare structure for the public transit service along a bus-subway corridor with the consideration of those factors related to equity in trip, including travel distance and comfort level. The travel distance factor is represented by the distance-based fare strategy, which is an existing differential strategy. The comfort level one is considered in the area-based fare strategy which is a new differential strategy defined in this paper. Both factors are referred to by the combined fare strategy which is composed of distance-based and area-based fare strategies. The flat fare strategy is applied to determine a reference level of social welfare and obtain the general passenger flow along transit lines, which is used to divide areas or zones along the corridor. This problem is formulated as a bi-level program, of which the upper level maximizes the social welfare and the lower level capturing traveler choice behavior is a variable-demand stochastic user equilibrium assignment model. A genetic algorithm is applied to solve the bi-level program while the method of successive averages is adopted to solve the lower-level model. A series of numerical experiments are carried out to illustrate the performance of the models and solution methods. Numerical results indicate that all three differential fare strategies play a better role in enhancing the social welfare than the flat fare strategy and that the fare structure under the combined fare strategy generates the highest social welfare and the largest resulting passenger demand, which implies that the more equity factors a differential fare strategy involves the more desirable fare structure the strategy has. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China is facing severe pressure on its water resources and water environments. Calculating the industrial water efficiency of each province is an important index for the central government to evaluate local governments. In the traditional water resources evaluation index, the industrial water use efficiency and pollutant discharge are evaluated separately. In this paper, we collected industrial input data, output data and pollutant discharge data with a four-stage data envelopment analysis to calculate China's industrial water use efficiency with and without considering pollutant discharge, and then analyzed the factors influencing the industrial water use efficiency. The results show that the eastern coastal provinces of China have the highest water use efficiency and are less affected by pollutant discharge than other provinces. The industrial water use efficiency of the central and western provinces is lower than that of the other provinces, and the industrial water use efficiency in the central provinces is greatly affected by pollutant discharge. Factor endowment, economic development level, scientific and technological progress, industrial structure, proportion of foreign investment, water consumption per 10000 yuan of value-added by industry, industrial sewage treatment capacity and educational investment have a significant influence on the industrial water use efficiency of China. We suggest that the government strengthen the construction of sewage plants and other related infrastructure in central provinces when conducting the industrial transfer of heavy polluting enterprises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predicting and analyzing behaviors of investors is of great value to financial institutions. This paper uses survey data from about 9,000 individual investors across China to explore the predictability of decision behaviors by studying demographic characteristics that are relatively easy to obtain. After applying Pearson’s chi-squared test, Spearman rank correlation test, and several data mining methods, we verified that demographic characteristics are closely linked to decision behaviors, and it would be an economical and feasible solution for financial organizations to build initial behavioral prediction models especially when investors’ behavioral data are insufficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the database data of Chinese industrial enterprises from 2000 to 2007 and the LP method, this paper measures the total factor productivity of enterprises and investigates the effect of different mixed ownership forms on enterprises’ efficiency and the effect of heterogeneous ownership balance on the mixed ownership enterprises’ efficiency. The state-owned enterprise and mixed ownership enterprise are identified by the enterprise’s paid-up capital. The results show that, on the whole, for the mixed ownership enterprise, the higher the diversification degree of the shareholders is, the higher the efficiency becomes, and in different types of industries, the mixed forms of shareholders have different effects on the efficiency of enterprises. The heterogeneous ownership balance and the enterprise efficiency show nonlinear U-type relationships. Both the higher and lower heterogeneous ownership balance degrees will promote the enterprise’s efficiency. However, when the ownership balance degree is in the range of [0.2 0.5], the increase in ownership balance will lead to the decline of enterprise efficiency. Therefore, when introducing non-state-owned capital, state-owned enterprises should take full account of their own characteristics by rationally controlling the shareholding ratio of non-state-owned capital and play the positive role of a mixed ownership structure in corporate governance with appropriate ownership balances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aimed at the complicated problems of attraction characteristics regarding passenger flow in urban rail transit network, the concept of the gravity field of passenger flow is proposed in this paper. We establish the computation methods of field strength and potential energy to reveal the potential attraction relationship among stations from the perspective of the collection and distribution of passenger flow and the topology of network. As for the computation methods of field strength, an optimum path concept is proposed to define betweenness centrality parameter. Regarding the computation of potential energy, Compound Simpson’s Rule Formula is applied to get a solution to the function. Taking No. 10 Beijing Subway as a practical example, an analysis of simulation and verification is conducted, and the results shows in the following ways. Firstly, the bigger field strength value between two stations is, the stronger passenger flow attraction is, and the greater probability of the formation of the largest passenger flow of section is. Secondly, there is the greatest passenger flow volume and circulation capacity between two zones of high potential energy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Compared with NO 2 and O 3 exposure, PM 2.5 exposure is the greatest threat to cognitive function. • Cognitive function is spatially correlated. • Both short- and long-term air pollution exposure can affect cognitive function, but long-term damage was more serious. • Air pollution have different effects on the cognitive function of people with different characteristics. • People with low cognitive function are more affected by air pollution exposure. In the field of environmental health, the impact of air pollution on people's cognitive function is receiving increasing attention. Various air pollution exposures and different exposure periods result in different degrees of damage to cognition. This paper first used CFPS cognitive tests to evaluate the cognitive function of 15,163 adults in 25 provinces of China. Next, based on the geographical location of the population, the kriging interpolation method was applied to evaluate the different exposure periods for various air pollutants (PM 2.5 , NO 2 and O 3). Air pollution exposures lasting 3 years and more were referred to in this paper as long-term exposures, while those lasting<3 years were short-term exposures. This paper used an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model to explore the differential effects of various air pollutant exposures and discussed the impact of long- and short-term exposure to pollutants. Subsequently, Moran's index was used to test the spatial connection for cognitive function, and the spatial error model was used for analysis in the spatial autoregressive model. This research also conducted a heterogeneity study on the justice of air pollutant exposure among people with different characteristics. The population was classified according to cognitive function and geographic location using OLS regression and quantile regression, and a propensity score matching (PSM) model was used for cross-validation to explore whether people with different characteristics and attributes were differentially exposed to air pollution. We found that there were significant negative relationships between air pollutant exposure and cognitive function, especially PM 2.5 exposure and long-term exposure. In addition, air pollution had significantly different impacts on cognition based on the different characteristics and attributes of the person exposed. This study helps by analyzing the socioeconomic factors that affect the level of exposure and suggests that groups who are vulnerable to environmental pollution should be protected and the occurrence of injustice reduced. The study also provides a reference for the distribution of pollution sources and the allocation of health resources, which can be useful for population distribution planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study proposes the use of push‐pull‐mooring model to investigate the main factors behind farmers' willingness to withdraw from rural homesteads with unique survey datasets taken from a pilot area in China. Our empirical results, which were derived from partial least squares structural equation modelling, mostly support our theoretical hypotheses, suggesting that policy cognition is a meaningful moderating factor that reflects farmers' individual attitudes, environmental influences, and social norms and plays a significant role in farmers' decision‐making processes. Our findings have strong policy implications for developing a "strategy of rural vitalization" and reforming the current rural homesteads system in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the increasingly serious ecological and environmental crisis, China has upgraded its national strategy from environmental protection to ecological civilization. China has carried out comprehensive publicity and education on ecological civilization. Many universities also arrange ecological civilization courses for students, or infuse ecological civilization into traditional courses. This paper investigates Chinese university students' ecological civilization cognition and behavior. Based on the 13404 questionnaires of 152 universities and using the multinomial logit regression model, the authors explored the relationship between Chinese university students' cognition and behavior. This paper divides the students' ecological civilization cognition into two parts, one being the common-sense cognition that comes from China's long-term public ecological and environmental education and the other one being the cognition of national ecological civilization strategy that comes from the recent intensive and comprehensive political publicity. This paper finds that university students with the latter cognition show a stronger willingness to implement ecological civilization behavior. This result reveals the role of China's political publicity on ecological civilization in terms of influencing its citizens' behavior, and provides inspiration for other countries to publicize environmental politics and promote public environmental protection via mass media. • The multinomial logit regression model is used to analyze the factors of ECB. • ECC is divided into common-sense and national strategy cognition. • China's political publicity has played a certain role in influencing ECB. • Courses involving ecological civilization knowledge can promote ECB. • Personal characteristics should be taken into account for educational system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognition and symbolic thinking are viewed as important features of modern human behavior. Engraved objects are seen as a hallmark of cognition and symbolism, and even as evidence for language. Accumulated evidences including engraved bones, ochre, ostrich eggshells and stone artifacts were unearthed from Africa, Europe, Levant even Siberia Paleolithic sites. But the archaeological evidence for this, including beads, ornaments, burials, performed objects and engraved objects, is rarely discovered in the Pleistocene of East Asia. The present paper reports an engraved stone object unearthed in the Early Late Paleolithic levels about 30 ka BP at the Shuidonggou site (SDG) in northwestern China. It was unearthed in the 1980's excavation from Lower culture unit of SDG1 but was identified in 2011 when the first author of this article observed the collection from the 1980's excavations stored in the Institute of Archaeology of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region for further detailed lithic analysis. This lithic artifact is the first engraved non-organic object of the Paleolithic period found in China. In order to clarify the details of the incisions and to document the human intentional modifications, we used a KEYENCE VHX-600 Digital Microscope to measure and observe all the incisions in 3-dimensional perspective. Comparing the natural cracks and analyzing many details of the incisions, we argue that incisions on this stone artifact are the result of intentional behaviors by ancient humans. Also, we exclude the possible other causes including animal-induced damages, post-depositional phenomenon and unintentional by-products. Combining all these features, we suggest that the incisions were made by an intentional behavior and were probably of a non-utilitarian character. Because the nature of most other engraved objects in China is debate, we cannot get a clear scenario of the emergence and progress of modern human behavior in North China. But we infer the possible existence of a counting or recording system, or other symbolic behaviors, which reflect considerably evolved cognitive capacities or modern human behavior in the Early Late Paleolithic of East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper examines the usage patterns of two passive constructions, the emerging zao construction and the conventional bei construction, in Chinese media language where the distributional ratio of the zao construction to the bei construction is conspicuously higher than in other genres. The difference is especially dramatic in Internet news headlines. To account for the uses, we adopt a corpus-driven constructionist approach, seeking to identify the semantics of the two constructions by means of collostructional analysis. Based on the corpus data, we argue that the two constructions differ primarily in the speaker/writer''s subjective experience of the event in which the patient is affected. Specifically, we invoke the psychological constructs of empathy and sympathy to account for the respective functions of the two passive constructions. The genre-specific usage patterns of the two constructions in the Internet news headlines are attributed to the pragmatic manipulation of semantics for the purpose of constructing stance and creating sensationalism. Cognitive psychological insights on human emotion, cognition and morality are discussed in support of embodied semantics and pragmatics. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Food safety is a worldwide problem, mainly caused by environmental pollution, production and management of enterprises, government supervision failure and other reasons. Blockchain technology, as an emerging technology, has strong pertinency and applicability to food traceability due to its characteristics of decentralization, traceability and immutability. Therefore, it is expected to be effectively applied in food safety management and improve the guarantee level of food safety. However, for some reasons, blockchain has not been widely used in food safety management. So further study on the advantages and challenges of its application is beneficial to the sustainable development of food enterprises, consumers and the government. Its application can provide traceable information for food companies, consumers and governments. This can not only ensure the food safety of enterprises, but also improve the level of government supervision, so as to establish the trust between consumers, enterprises and the government, which improves the efficiency and level of food safety management. Based on the information adoption model, this study takes 202 text data related to blockchain and food safety on the Zhihu platform as the research object. On the basis of summarizing part of the public opinions, this paper puts forward the viewpoints of argument on the application of blockchain in food safety management. Then, Tobit regression is used to conduct a quantitative analysis on the influencing factors of the acceptance and adoption of relevant text content on Zhihu platform. Finally, it is found that four factors are significant at a confidence level of 0.1, specifically as follows. The two viewpoints of Advantages of Blockchain Technology and High Costs have significant promotion effects on the public's recognition and adoption but two viewpoints of Promotion of National Policy Opinions and Blockchain Requires Supervision have significant negative effects on the public's recognition and adoption. Based on the regression results and combined with the current technological level and development status of blockchain technology, this study provides relevant policy suggestions, which has a positive effect on improving food sustainability. • Focus on the public's arguments in the Q&A community. • Refer to theories related to information adoption. • Study the impact of arguments in the text on the public recognition and adoption. • Contribute to promoting the application of blockchain in food safety management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The industry of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) tourism continues to grow, and social media can serve as an essential tool to promote this trend. Although ICH tourism development is outstanding in China, the language structure and restricted use of social media render ICH difficult for non-Chinese speakers to understand. Using content analysis, this study investigates the structure and relationships among cognitive elements of ICH tourism based on 9074 blogs posted between 2011 and 2020 on Weibo.com, one of the most popular social media platforms in China. The main analysis process consisted of matrix construction, dimension classification, and semantic network analysis. Findings indicated that the cognitive image of ICH tourism on social media can be divided into seven dimensions: institutions, ICH and inheritors, tourism products, traditional festivals and seasons, tourism facilities and services, visitors, and regions. This network vividly illustrates ICH tourism and depicts the roles of organizers, residents, inheritors, and tourists. Among these elements, institutions hold the greatest power to regulate and control ICH tourism activities, and folklore appears to be the most common type of ICH resource that can be developed into tourism activities. Practically, the results offer insight for policymakers regarding ways to better balance the relationships among heritage protection, the business economy, and people's well-being. Such strategies can promote the industrialization of ICH tourism. In addition, through content analysis, this paper confirms the effectiveness of social media in providing a richer understanding of ICH tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influencing factors of the low-carbon consumption behavior of urban residents have become popular. This paper explored the factors of consumers' low-carbon behavior through a questionnaire survey. Using Hangzhou as a case study city, which yields 786 valid responses, the results indicated that urban consumers generally had a high perception of low-carbon behavior. At the same time, low-carbon cognition and low-carbon intention had a positive impact on residents' low-carbon behavior. In particular, the level of awareness of global warming adjusted residents' understanding of low-carbon behavior. From a policy point of view, this research contributes to insights into the promotion of guiding residents' low-carbon behavior and improving the response to global warming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the environmental issues behind solar energy and green procurement (GP) have received increasing attention, industries still struggle to identify key barriers hindering GP and analyze the interrelationships among them. Most of the previous studies ignored the cognition uncertainty in assessing the barriers to GP, and failed to consider the impact of barrier strength on the interrelationships among barriers. This paper proposes a rough weighted method that integrates the advantages of DEMATEL (Decision-Making and Trial Evaluation Laboratory) and ISM (Interpretive Structural Modeling). Variable rough precision theory is introduced to control the cognition uncertainty and vagueness in assessing the barriers. This novel approach is then applied to analyze the interrelationships among barriers to GP in China's photovoltaic (PV) industry. The analysis results show that internal obstacles (e.g. company's unawareness) are more important than external obstacles (e.g. lack of legislation). However, external obstacles (especially weak incentive policies) should be solved first by policy-makers because internal obstacles are found to be caused by external obstacles. Finally, comparative studies are employed to prove the effectiveness of the proposed method. Further studies are expected to apply the proposed method to different industries and promote the development of GP. Image 10953 • Variable precision rough number is introduced to manipulate vagueness and cognition uncertainty. • The impact of barrier strength on interrelationships among barriers is considered. • A hierarchical structure of barriers and interactions among barriers is graphically presented. • The method is validated with a case study of photovoltaic industry in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper investigates the significance of visual and auditory metaphors as used in the main Daoist classics the Laozi 老子 and Zhuangzi 莊子. While both works disparage the role of the senses, they nonetheless employ a large number of metaphors related to the sense experience. It is the contention of the author that examining these metaphors against the backdrop of the main modern theories dealing with characteristics of vision and hearing is crucial for a better understanding of how the authors of both works envisioned the ideal relation between man and the Way (dao 道) as well as their views on authority and authenticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]