Communalism as a Theory of Justice and the Human Person in African Culture

Discussions about justice in cross-cultural context give rise to assorted theories. In this paper, issues surrounding communalism as a theory of justice in African culture will be examined with a view to show that its principles of care and fellow feeling could be worked out to address the problem of alienation from society characterizing some members of the contemporary African society. Recognition of the social dynamics of human society and relationships is of essence to communalism. As a theory of justice and a world view, communalism describes the human being as ＂being with others＂ and what that should be. The expression, ＂I am because we are, and because we are, I am＂ is the driving force of the communalistic society. Such a society is characterized by care, love, belongingness, solidarity, and interconnectedness. The aim of this paper is to highlight the manifestations of the idea of justice in communalism using leadership or governance, consensus in decision making, moral rules, punishment for wrong doing, and the equitable distribution of resources. It also aims to show that the communalist idea of justice is integrationist in outlook being constitutive of political and socio-economic elements, which the individual enjoys in practical terms as opposed to the paper rights, which citizens in much of the contemporary societies enjoy. The paper notes that drastic changes have occurred in the socio-economic relations within African societies as a consequence of acculturation subsequent to European colonization and these have had far reaching consequences.

Does Facility Based Sexual and Reproductive Health Services Meet the Needs of Young Persons? Views from Cross Section of Ghanaian Youth

The focus on facility based health setting to provide sexual and reproductive health to the youth has been tested in several settings and achieved varying results. This study examined whether facility based sexual and reproductive health services met the needs of Ghanaian youth. Adopting the descriptive cross sectional design, 170 youths between the ages of 10 and 24 were sampled. A three-stage stratified random sampling technique was adopted. The results of the study are presented using descriptive statistics. The study established that a total of 55.8% (95/170) of the youth had utilized at least one or more of a sexual and reproductive health service in life time. However, only 45.2% (43/95) of youth used or accessed sexual and reproductive health services from a facility based setting. Facility based sexual and reproductive health service provided specifically for the youth is very limited. This calls for the provision of out-of health facility services located within the communities and at strategic places while ensuring confidentiality to the youth. More rigorous research is recommended on a national scale to examine youth preference for the type of facility based and out-of-facility based sexual and reproductive health services to meet the needs of young people.

The Advancement of Low-Carbon Ecological Civili zation in the View of Cultural Ecological System——A Case Study of Ningxia Ningdong Energy-Chemical Base

The status quo of Ningxia Ningdong Energy-Chemical Base was introduced first, and the ecological civilization and low-carbon economy of Ningxia Ningdong Energy-Chemical Base were analyzed. Problems in the exploitation of resources in Ningxia Ningdong Energy-Chemical Base, and major factors which restrain the development, were discussed. Countermeasures were put forward at last.

China English： the Medium of Chinese Culture in the Context of Globalization

The irreversible trend of globalization has great effects on language and culture. In the context of globalization, China English acts as the medium of Chinese culture. It conveys Chinese culture from three perspectives: the unique concepts, the typical thinking mode, and distinctive Chinese personality. In this way, China English enhances the introduction of Chinese culture,thus promoting the soft power of China.

On the Role of Confucian Ethical Thoughts in the Formation of Psychological Personality

As the mainstream ideology in the traditional Chinese social structure,Confucian ethical thoughts have existed for a long time and influenced the social ethical structure and the formation of cultural psychology and personality of Chinese people significantly.Taking the internal relation of the role of Confucian ethical thoughts in the formation of personality as a point of penetration,this paper discusses the internal relation between the shaping of social consciousness by Confucian ethical thoughts and the formation of personality as well as its influence mode,revealing the construction process of psychological personality by Confucian culture.On this basis,we explore the advantages of Confucian social ethics by making full use of its positive factors and promote the improvement of individual's personality with social psychology.

An Integrated Strategy for the Cultural Adaptation of Evidence-Based Interventions

Background: The importance of adapting evidence-based health interventions to enhance their congruence with the beliefs of ethno-cultural communities is well recognized. Although a systematic cultural adaptation process is available, it lacks specific instructions on how to adapt interventions so that they are aligned with cultural beliefs. In this paper, we present an integrated strategy that operationalizes the adaptation process by describing specific practical instructions on how to align interventions with cultural beliefs. Methods: The strategy integrates concept and intervention mapping, and uses mixed methods for gathering data from community representatives. The data pertain to a community’s cultural beliefs and values related to a health problem, acceptability of evidence-based interventions targeting the problem, and aspects of the interventions that should be modified to enhance their fit with cultural beliefs. A step-by-step protocol is described to guide application of the integrated strategy for cultural adaptation. Conclusions: The strength of the integrated strategy relies on the use of concept and intervention mapping approaches for specifying a step-by-step protocol to actively engage community representatives in the cultural adaptation of interventions. Future research should evaluate the utility of this strategy.

A Research of the Course “Taishan Cultural Communication with the World” under Blended Learning Model and Outcome-Based Education Concept

The course “Taishan Cultural Communication with the World” has been online and offline teaching and learning for two terms based on the theoretical ideas: Blended Learning and Outcome-Based Education. This paper uses the data from one semester to state how to carry out the program and the good results. At the same time disadvantages are also the points that should be taken into consideration. From the teaching and learning practice, students have benefited from the online videos, complementary materials and discussions;they need to be guided as well, especially the guidance offline to make up. Furthermore, the balance of time online and offline is a great challenge.

Personalized targeted therapy for esophageal squamous cell carcinoma

Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma continues to heavily burden clinicians worldwide. Researchers have discovered the genomic landscape of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, which holds promise for an era of personalized oncology care. One of the most pressing problems facing this issue is to improve the understanding of the newly available genomic data, and identify the driver-gene mutations, pathways, and networks. The emergence of a legion of novel targeted agents has generated much hope and hype regarding more potent treatment regimens, but the accuracy of drug selection is still arguable. Other problems, such as cancer heterogeneity, drug resistance, exceptional responders, and side effects, have to be surmounted. Evolving topics in personalized oncology, such as interpretation of genomics data, issues in targeted therapy, research approaches for targeted therapy, and future perspectives, will be discussed in this editorial.

A Corpus-based Contrastive Study of Cultural Difference——A Case Study of Passive Voice Used in English and Chinese

Passive voice is a common linguistic phenomenon both in Chinese and in English, while it is used differently in each language system. This paper takes the grammar features of passive voice in both Chinese and English as an example, collecting corpus data of passive voice in the two languages, to comparatively analyze the cultural difference reflected from the usage of languages. Getting to know this kind of cultural difference would help us to better understand linguistic phenomena in second language acquisition, and to master them better.

White matter abnormalities in young males with antisocial personality disorder Evidence from voxel-based morphometry-diffeomorphic anatomical registration using exponentiated lie algebra analysis

Voxel-based morphometry-diffeomorphic anatomical registration using exponentiated lie algebra analysis was used to investigate the structural characteristics of white matter in young males with antisocial personality disorder （APD） and healthy controls without APD. The results revealed that APD subjects, relative to healthy subjects, exhibited increased white matter volume in the bilateral prefrontal lobe, right insula, precentral gyrus, bilateral superior temporal gyrus, right postcentral gyrus, right inferior parietal Iobule, right precuneus, right middle occipital lobe, right parahippocampal gyrus and bilateral cingulate, and decreased volume in the middle temporal cortex and right cerebellum. The white matter volume in the medial frontal gyrus was significantly correlated with antisocial type scores on the Personality Diagnostic Questionnaire in APD subjects. These experimental findings indicate that white matter abnormalities in several brain areas may contribute to antisocial behaviors in APD subjects.

Patient-derived organoids for therapy personalization in inflammatory bowel diseases

Inflammatory bowel diseases(IBDs)are chronic inflammatory disorders of the intestinal tract that have emerged as a growing problem in industrialized countries.Knowledge of IBD pathogenesis is still incomplete,and the most widely-accepted interpretation considers genetic factors,environmental stimuli,uncontrolled immune responses and altered intestinal microbiota composition as determinants of IBD,leading to dysfunction of the intestinal epithelial functions.In vitro models commonly used to study the intestinal barrier do not fully reflect the proper intestinal architecture.An important innovation is represented by organoids,3D in vitro cell structures derived from stem cells that can self-organize into functional organ-specific structures.Organoids may be generated from induced pluripotent stem cells or adult intestinal stem cells of IBD patients and therefore retain their genetic and transcriptomic profile.These models are powerful pharmacological tools to better understand IBD pathogenesis,to study the mechanisms of action on the epithelial barrier of drugs already used in the treatment of IBD,and to evaluate novel target-directed molecules which could improve therapeutic strategies.The aim of this review is to illustrate the potential use of organoids for therapy personalization by focusing on the most significant advances in IBD research achieved through the use of adult stem cells-derived intestinal organoids.

Fog-Based Secure Framework for Personal Health Records Systems

The rapid development of personal health records(PHR)systems enables an individual to collect,create,store and share his PHR to authorized entities.Health care systems within the smart city environment require a patient to share his PRH data with a multitude of institutions’repositories located in the cloud.The cloud computing paradigm cannot meet such a massive transformative healthcare systems due to drawbacks including network latency,scalability and bandwidth.Fog computing relieves the load of conventional cloud computing by availing intermediate fog nodes between the end users and the remote servers.Assuming a massive demand of PHR data within a ubiquitous smart city,we propose a secure and fog assisted framework for PHR systems to address security,access control and privacy concerns.Built under a fog-based architecture,the proposed framework makes use of efficient key exchange protocol coupled with ciphertext attribute based encryption(CP-ABE)to guarantee confidentiality and fine-grained access control within the system respectively.We also make use of digital signature combined with CP-ABE to ensure the system authentication and users privacy.We provide the analysis of the proposed framework in terms of security and performance.

Web-based GIS System for Real-time Field Data Collection Using Personal Mobile Phone

Recently, use of mobile communicational devices in field data collection is increasing such as smart phones and cellular phones due to emergence of embedded Global Position System GPS and Wi-Fi Internet access. Accurate timely and handy field data collection is required for disaster management and emergency quick responses. In this article, we introduce web-based GIS system to collect the field data by personal mobile phone through Post Office Protocol POP3 mail server. The main objective of this work is to demonstrate real-time field data collection method to the students using their mobile phone to collect field data by timely and handy manners, either individual or group survey in local or global scale research.

Recommending Personalized POIs from Location Based Social Network

Location based social networks（ LBSNs） provide location specific data generated from smart phone into online social networks thus people can share their points of interest（ POIs）. POI collections are complex and can be influenced by various factors,such as user preferences,social relationships and geographical influence. Therefore,recommending new locations in LBSNs requires to take all these factors into consideration. However,one problem is how to determine optimal weights of influencing factors in an algorithm in which these factors are combined. The user similarity can be obtained from the user check-in data,or from the user friend information,or based on the different geographical influences on each user＇s check-in activities. In this paper,we propose an algorithm that calculates the user similarity based on check-in records and social relationships,using a proposed weighting function to adjust the weights of these two kinds of similarities based on the geographical distance between users. In addition,a non-parametric density estimation method is applied to predict the unique geographical influence on each user by getting the density probability plot of the distance between every pair of user＇s check-in locations. Experimental results,using foursquare datasets,have shown that comparisons between the proposed algorithm and the other five baseline recommendation algorithms in LBSNs demonstrate that our proposed algorithm is superior in accuracy and recall,furthermore solving the sparsity problem.

A Comprehensive Programme for the Resettlement of Climate Refugees

The placement of environmentally displaced persons is imminent.Involving as many countries as possible in the resettlement of environmentally displaced persons,while protecting their culture and human rights,are the primary goal of the resettlement program.However,countries may refuse to participate in resettlement programs if their interests are not fully considered.The rights of the environmentally displaced persons cannot be protected.The model involves the interests of all parties to ensure the wide participation of all countries in the world.Then,we use quantitative assessment to assess the risk of cultural loss and protect culture and human rights of environmentally displaced persons by controlling this risk.Firstly,in order to calculate the number of people who are likely to be environmentally displaced persons in the future,we build a prediction model based on Markov Chain.By analyzing the average altitude of each country and the predicted sea level rise,we calculate the number of countries likely to be submerged over time.Combining the projected future population of each country,we calculate the total number of people at risk of becoming environmentally displaced persons.Secondly,we link the number of environmentally displaced persons that countries should place with the two goals of human rights protection.Establish Double-Score model to allocate the number of people that each country should place reasonably.The model takes into account countries’carbon emissions and their suitability for migration.The two integral indexes in the model are as follows:Score of carbon dioxide emission.The higher a country’s score,the more responsibility it has to accommodate environmentally displaced persons.The index is converted from the country’s per capita carbon emissions and total carbon emissions,using the Paris Climate Agreement’s calculation of carbon emissions.Score of suitability for immigration.The lower the Score of a country,the higher the Score of carbon emission can be deducted.Meanwhile,the better a country’s cultural and human rights protection of environmentally displaced persons,the higher the score.We encourage countries to actively protect the human rights and culture of refugees.As a part of its commitment to the Paris Climate Agreement,the countries of the world must keep their total score below the set threshold.

Proactive Personalized Services Through Fog-Cloud Computing in Large-Scale IoT-Based Healthcare Application

With the development of medical sensors and IoT, personalized service assisted elder and patient living is a critical service in IoT-based healthcare application. However, the scale and complexity of personalized service is increasing because of ubiquitous deployment of various kinds of medical sensors, which cause response time increase and resource waste. Therefore, leveraging the advantage of complex event processing(CEP) in data stream processing, we propose a hierarchical fog-cloud computing CEP architecture for personalized service to accelerate response time and reduce resource waste. Firstly, we introduce the proposed architecture, which includes sensor layer, fog layer and cloud layer. Secondly, we propose a series of optimizations for the architecture, there are a partitioning and clustering approach and a communication and parallel processing policy to optimize the fog and cloud computing. Finally, we implement a prototype system based on the architecture named Fog Cep Care. Experimental result shows that Fog Cep Care is superior to the traditional IoT-based healthcare application.

A Study on the Participation of Foreign Students in Local Cultural and Folk Activities in Wenzhou

The number of foreign students studying in Wenzhou, China has increased dramatically as a result of the Belt and Road Initiative. Learning the motivations and leisure constraints of foreign students' participation in local cultural and folk activities in Wenzhou is beneficial to promoting cultural adaptation, strengthening Chinese cultural self-confidence, and improving Wenzhou's international image. Based on the hierarchical model of leisure constraints (personal constraints, interpersonal constraints, and structural constraints), this study has tended to focus on the leisure constraints for foreign students participating in local folk and cultural activities in Wenzhou. A total of seven participants were included in the analysis.

Personal, Situational and Socio-Cultural Factors as Correlates of Intimate Partner Abuse in Nigeria

This study established the relationships between personal, situational and socio-cultural factors and intimate partner abuse among couples in Nigeria. A multiple regression statistical procedure was employed in analyzing the data collected from 200 participants randomly selected from five ministries in Ibadan, Oyo state, Nigeria. Results obtained indicated that the three variables when combined effectively predicted intimate partner abuse (F-ratio of 5.756 significant at 0.05 alpha level). Taken separately, situational and socio-cultural factors contributed significantly to the prediction (t = 2.146, p t = 2.284, p (t = 1.705, p > 0.05). On the basis of these findings it was suggested that counselling psychologists should design intervention strategies to promote life-skills training in schools and out-of-schools settings. These include age-appropriate content on sexuality, conflict resolution, building healthy relationships and personal safety. Also, it was suggested that couples should be informed on the long-term health and social consequences of physical and sexual abuse.