A New Societal Self-Defense Theory of Punishment—The Rights-Protection Theory

In this paper, I propose a new self-defense theory of punishment, the rights-protection theory. By appealing to the interest theory of right, I show that what we call “the right of self-defense” is actually composed of the right to protect our basic rights. The right of self-defense is not a single, self-standing right but a group of derivative rights justified by their contribution to the protection of the core, basic rights. Thus, these rights of self-defense are both justified and constrained by the basic rights they are supposed to protect. I then explain how this theory responds to a common objection. Opponents argue that, to exercise the right of self-defense, some threat must be present. However, in the context of punishment, the threat has already taken effect or is already gone. Thus, the right of self-defense becomes irrelevant when we punish an offender. I show that this objection is based on an implausibly narrow conception of self-defense. A reasonable conception would allow us to exercise our right of self-defense when there is a present definite threat, a future definite threat, or a potential threat. Thus, we may still exercise our right of self-defense in the context of punishment

The Instrumental Value Arguments for National Self-Determination

David Miller argues that national identity is indispensable for the successful functioning of a liberal democracy. National identity makes important contributions to liberal democratic institutions, including creating incentives for the fulfilment of civic duties, facilitating deliberative democracy, and consolidating representative democracy. Thus, a shared identity is indispensable for liberal democracy and grounds a good claim for self-determination. Because Miller’s arguments appeal to the instrumental values of a national culture, I call his argument ‘instrumental value’ arguments. In this paper, I examine the instrumental value arguments and show that they fail to justify a group’s right to self-determination

Regularized Principal Component Analysis for Spatial Data

In many atmospheric and earth sciences, it is of interest to identify dominant spatial patterns of variation based on data observed at $p$ locations and $n$ time points with the possibility that $p>n$. While principal component analysis (PCA) is commonly applied to find the dominant patterns, the eigenimages produced from PCA may exhibit patterns that are too noisy to be physically meaningful when $p$ is large relative to $n$. To obtain more precise estimates of eigenimages, we propose a regularization approach incorporating smoothness and sparseness of eigenimages, while accounting for their orthogonality. Our method allows data taken at irregularly spaced or sparse locations. In addition, the resulting optimization problem can be solved using the alternating direction method of multipliers, which is easy to implement, and applicable to a large spatial dataset. Furthermore, the estimated eigenfunctions provide a natural basis for representing the underlying spatial process in a spatial random-effects model, from which spatial covariance function estimation and spatial prediction can be efficiently performed using a regularized fixed-rank kriging method. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by several numerical example

CONSUMER ACCEPTANCE OF GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOODS

Results from an Ohio survey indicate that respondents are willing to pay a premium, ranging from 5% for non-GM vegetable oil to 28% for non-GM salmon. Estimated consumer willingness to pay for non-GM foods varies among demographic groups with female, those aged between 35 and 60, and non-White respondents willing to pay a higher premium than others.Consumer/Household Economics, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Voice Conversion Based on Cross-Domain Features Using Variational Auto Encoders

An effective approach to non-parallel voice conversion (VC) is to utilize deep neural networks (DNNs), specifically variational auto encoders (VAEs), to model the latent structure of speech in an unsupervised manner. A previous study has confirmed the ef- fectiveness of VAE using the STRAIGHT spectra for VC. How- ever, VAE using other types of spectral features such as mel- cepstral coefficients (MCCs), which are related to human per- ception and have been widely used in VC, have not been prop- erly investigated. Instead of using one specific type of spectral feature, it is expected that VAE may benefit from using multi- ple types of spectral features simultaneously, thereby improving the capability of VAE for VC. To this end, we propose a novel VAE framework (called cross-domain VAE, CDVAE) for VC. Specifically, the proposed framework utilizes both STRAIGHT spectra and MCCs by explicitly regularizing multiple objectives in order to constrain the behavior of the learned encoder and de- coder. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CD- VAE framework outperforms the conventional VAE framework in terms of subjective tests.Comment: Accepted to ISCSLP 201

Predictors of International Students’ Socio-Cultural Adjustment

International students’ well-being and their adjustment have gained interest from researchers in different areas, including educational psychology, social psychology and counseling psychology. By using the social cognitive model, this study focused on finding the relationships among English fluency, social self-efficacy, cultural values, perceived social support, perceived discrimination and conflict handling styles and how they affect international students’ sociocultural adjustment. A hierarchical regression model found that international students with high social self-efficacy have less socio-cultural adaptation difficulties when they perceived low discrimination. However, when these students perceived high discrimination, they experienced higher socio-cultural adaptation difficulties. International students who valued openness to change reported lower socio-cultural adaptation difficulties. While international students’ English fluency in writing and speaking influenced their social self-efficacy, English fluency as a whole did not influence socio-cultural adaptation after factors such as perceived discrimination, social support, social self-efficacy and values were controlled. Finally, international students using dominate conflict handling style and international students using avoidance conflict handling style showed differences in their conservation value, but different conflict handling styles did not influence the relationship between English fluency and social self-efficacy. Implications are discussed. Limitations of the study and suggestions for future studies are provided

The Dominance of Standard English and its Impact on Academia: The Investigation of EAL Researchers' Submission Experience to English Medium Journals

Research Articl

Introduction to "Law, Politics, and Society in Republican China"

In 2011, the centennial of the 1911 Revolution, the Institute of Modern History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences released a set of publications that includes a narrative history of the Republic of China (Zhonghua minguo shi, 12 volumes), a chronology (Dashiji, 12 volumes), and a collection of Republican biographies (Renwuzhuan, 8 volumes). The result of decades of work since the founding of the Institute’s History of the Republic of China unit in 1956, this monumental set pays tribute to the foundational research of multiple cohorts of Chinese historians on the subject of the revolution. Now that many previously accepted “facts” have been more or less tamed, the moment has come, in China as well as elsewhere, for the field to take up the issue of how best to approach the history of the Republic of China from various perspectives