THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ROUSSEAU’S CONCEPT OF AMOUR-PROPRE IN RAWLS

This dissertation defends the view that there is a Rousseauvian interpretation of Rawls’s political philosophy by focusing on the significance of amour-propre in Rawls’s political philosophy. In the first chapter, I introduce my central thesis and chapter arrangements and compare my Rousseauvian interpretation with other interpretations of Rawls. In the second chapter, I introduce Rousseau’s concept of amour-propre and try to defend Rawls’s wide view of amourpropre, according to which, amour-propre has both a positive and a negative form. In the third chapter, I argue that Rousseau’s concept of amour-propre plays a significant role in Rawls’s conception of justice as fairness. Thus, I show that one of the main reasons why parties in the original position would choose Rawls’s two principles of justice over other conceptions of justice is that justice as fairness meets the demands of amour-propre while other conceptions of justice do not. In the fourth chapter, I argue that Rousseau’s concept of amour-propre plays a significant role in Rawls’s stability argument. This argument has three parts. The first part involves showing that Rawls’s moral psychology is an illustration of Rousseau’s thesis that moral sentiments are derived from natural sentiments. The second part argues that Rawls’s congruence argument and his overlapping consensus argument are based on Rousseau’s conception of persons. The third part argues that Rawls’s argument from the absence of special psychology is also grounded in Rousseau’s concept of amour-propre. In the fifth chapter, I argue that Rousseau’s concept of amour-propre plays a significant role in Rawls’s law of peoples by showing that three themes of Rawls’s law of peoples, the two international original positions, the idea of a realistic utopia and the distinction between peoples and states, parallel, and are grounded in, Rousseau’s concept of amour-propre. In the final chapter, I consider two objections against my assumption that the legitimate social bases of self-respect are equal basic rights and liberties and their substantive fair value. I argue that these objections are groundless. I thus conclude that there is a Rousseauvian interpretation of Rawls’s justice as fairness and law of peoples

An Efficient Sparse Identification Algorithm For Stochastic Systems With General Observation Sequences

This paper studies the sparse identification problem of unknown sparse parameter vectors in stochastic dynamic systems. Firstly, a novel sparse identification algorithm is proposed, which can generate sparse estimates based on least squares estimation by adaptively adjusting the threshold. Secondly, under a possibly weakest non-persistent excited condition, we prove that the proposed algorithm can correctly identify the zero and nonzero elements of the sparse parameter vector using a finite number of observations, and further estimates of the nonzero elements almost surely converge to the true values. Compared with the related works, e.g., LASSO, our method only requires the weakest assumptions and does not require solving additional optimization problems. Besides, our theoretical results do not require any statistical assumptions on the regression signals, including independence or stationarity, which makes our results promising for application to stochastic feedback systems. Thirdly, the number of finite observations that guarantee the convergence of the zero-element set of unknown sparse parameters of the Hammerstein system is derived for the first time. Finally, numerical simulations are provided, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method. Since there is no additional optimization problem, i.e., no additional numerical error, the proposed algorithm performs much better than other related algorithms.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2203.02737 by other author

Post-Construction Settlement Calculation and Prediction for Group Piles Foundation of High Speed Railway Bridge

On the basis of and after adjustment to Consolidation Settlement Theory, a calculation method for post-construction settlement for high speed railway group piles foundation is put forward and the calculation formula is deduced accordingly. By the application of Gray System Theory GM (1,1) model, metabolism GM (1,1) model is worked out. Through comparative analysis with settlement observation data of one pier of Yunzaobang major bridge, the post-construction calculation method and Gray System Theory prediction method proposed in this paper are proven applicable in engineering practice

Push and Pull Factors Influencing the Level of Participation of Leisure Skiing in China

Traditionally, winter sports have very limited accessibility and popularity in China. In addition to the growing economy in China and increased affordability by Chinese consumers, obtaining the hosting rights for the 2022 Beijing/Zhangjiakou Winter Olympic Games has brought a heightened opportunity for China to build up facilities and related infrastructures, develop and provide programs, promote interests and participation, and advance business operations of winter sports. Although more people are participating in winter sports today, especially in skiing, many of the newly constructed facilities are often operated in financial deficit and relying on governmental subsidy. Understanding the reasons that cause and channel winter-sport participation would help sport managers to improve program functions and services in an effort to meet or exceed consumer expectations. The purpose of this study was to examine push (i.e., socio-motivation) and pull (i.e., external motivation) factors influencing the level of participation of leisure skiing in China. Based on a comprehensive review of literature (e.g., Alexandris, 2009; Driver, 1983; Zhang et al., 2001) and conducting a test of content validity by a panel of experts, the Scale of Ski Motivation (SSM) measuring socio-motivations of ski participation was developed that had 33 items in a Likert 7-point scale and under seven factors, including nature, egotistic, family, social, exercise, risk, and escape factors. Measuring the ski resort pull factors was based on an adaptation of Nabitz’s (2014) customer preference scale on a ski resort’s offerings, which were of nine factors including condition of slopes, sceneries, equipment, waiting time, accessibility, recreational facilities, safety issues, cost, and training course feature. In addition to the push and pull factors, sociodemographic and skiing resort attendance frequency variables were also included in the survey form. Research respondents (N = 326) were attendees at a major ski resort located in Beijing. Conducting factor analyses and multiple repression analyses, two pull factors, nature and family, were found to be significantly (p \u3c .05) influencing the level of participation of leisure skiing. To a varying extent, five pull factors including accessibility, sceneries, condition of slopes, training course feature, and cost were also found to be significantly (p \u3c .05) influencing the level of attendance at the ski resort when sociodemographic backgrounds of participants were taken into consideration. Discussions are centered on the theoretical and managerial implications on procedures of pushing and pulling consumers to ski resorts at large and increasing winter-sport participating in China

Electron Density Reconstruction of Solar Coronal Mass Ejections Based on a Genetic Algorithm: Method and Application

We present a new method to reconstruct the three-dimensional electron density of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) based on a genetic algorithm, namely the genetic reconstruction method (GRM). GRM is first applied to model CMEs with different orientations and shapes. A set of analytic model CMEs from Gibson and Low is employed to produce synthetic CME images for GRM reconstruction. Model CMEs with longitudes of 0, 45, 90, 135, 180 degrees and latitudes of 0, 15, 30, 45 degrees are used to test the performance of GRM. The model CMEs are obscured with a simulated occulter of a coronagraph to determine the influence of CME brightness incompleteness. We add random noise to some synthetic CME images to test the performance of GRM. The CME reconstructions are carried out using synthetic data from Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) A and B with a separation angle of 90 degrees and from STEREO A and the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) with a separation angle of 73 degrees. The Pearson correlation coefficient and the mean relative absolute deviation are calculated to analyze the similarities in brightness and electron density between the model and reconstructed CMEs. Comparisons based on the similarity analysis under various conditions stated above give us valuable insights into the advantages and limitations of GRM reconstruction. The method is then applied to real coronagraph data from STEREO A and B, and SOHO on 2013 September 30.Comment: 27 pages, 17 figures, 1 table. Published on Ap

Thickness effect of a thin film on the stress field due to the eigenstrain of an ellipsoidal inclusion

AbstractSolutions of the stress field due to the eigenstrain of an ellipsoidal inclusion in the film/substrate half-space are obtained via the Fourier transforms and Stroh eigenrelation equations. Based on the acquired solutions, the effect of a thin film’s thickness on the stress field is investigated with two types of ellipsoidal inclusions considered. The results in this paper show that if the thickness of the thin film increases, its effect on the stress field will become weaker, and can even be neglected. In the end, a guide rule is introduced to simplify the calculation of similar problems in engineering

The Development of Jingdezhen in the View of Cultural Innovation

Jingdezhen porcelain is famous all over the world. During the development of ceramics, with continuous cultural innovation and technological progress, it created the legends of the city development. But in modern times, the development of Jingdezhen was in trouble. How to reshape the glorious city and realize the sustainable development of the economy? This paper, from the perspective of cultural innovation, Jingdezhen in space, time, technology, brand many dimensions, Jingde town development and urban construction are put forward for sustainable development train of thought.Key words: Cultural innovation; Jingdezhen; Ceramics; Urban developmen

AudioFormer: Audio Transformer learns audio feature representations from discrete acoustic codes

We propose a method named AudioFormer,which learns audio feature representations through the acquisition of discrete acoustic codes and subsequently fine-tunes them for audio classification tasks. Initially,we introduce a novel perspective by considering the audio classification task as a form of natural language understanding (NLU). Leveraging an existing neural audio codec model,we generate discrete acoustic codes and utilize them to train a masked language model (MLM),thereby obtaining audio feature representations. Furthermore,we pioneer the integration of a Multi-Positive sample Contrastive (MPC) learning approach. This method enables the learning of joint representations among multiple discrete acoustic codes within the same audio input. In our experiments,we treat discrete acoustic codes as textual data and train a masked language model using a cloze-like methodology,ultimately deriving high-quality audio representations. Notably,the MPC learning technique effectively captures collaborative representations among distinct positive samples. Our research outcomes demonstrate that AudioFormer attains significantly improved performance compared to prevailing monomodal audio classification models across multiple datasets,and even outperforms audio-visual multimodal classification models on select datasets. Specifically,our approach achieves remarkable results on datasets including AudioSet (2M,20K),and FSD50K,with performance scores of 53.9,45.1,and 65.6,respectively. We have openly shared both the code and models: https://github.com/LZH-0225/AudioFormer.git.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure