scholarly journals Clientelism by Design: Personnel Politics under Xi Jinping

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 87-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jérôme Doyon
Keyword(s):  
Xi Jinping ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Institutional Level ◽  
Personality Cult ◽  
Personnel Turnover ◽  
The Individual ◽  
High Level ◽  
Personnel Policies ◽  
Party State ◽  
The Way

Since Xi Jinping took power in late 2012, analysts have puzzled over how best to define his political trajectory. Is he consolidating power and building a personality cult around himself, or is he strengthening the Party as an organisation? I tackle this issue by focusing on the transformation of personnel policies under Xi. I highlight an increasing concentration of power in the hands of Party leaders at all echelons. At the institutional level, the Party increasingly controls the management and disciplining of officials. At the level of the individual cadres themselves, promotion processes are increasingly managed behind closed doors and less importance is being given to objective criteria for cadre advancement. The age-based rules which structured the promotion of officials and ensured a high level of personnel turnover within the party state are also de-emphasised. I argue that these changes are paving the way for a more clientelist and aging party state.

China

2019 ◽  
pp. 247-268
Author(s):  
Zhengxu Wang ◽  
Anastas Vangeli
Keyword(s):  
Xi Jinping ◽  
New Era ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
General Secretary ◽  
Party State ◽  
Formal Rules

In China, the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s rules govern the terms and tenures of party and state leaders. This chapter recounts the evolution of the party-state’s term-related rules from the Mao (1949–78) to the Deng (1980s–90s) and post-Deng (1990s–2012) eras. Formal rules developed from the 1980s through the 2010s to govern the tenure of party leaders and officials, which led to formal and predictable elite turnovers within the system, up to its very top level. By the turn of century, the paramount leader, who concurrently serves as general secretary of the Party, state president, and chairman of the Central Military Commission, had been brought under the same set of rules. The current president Xi Jinping appears to have opened a new era in which the rules governing the tenure and replacement of the top leader will have to be rewritten. We examine the various possibilities lying ahead.

Hierarchical switching in a multi-dimensional task space is not induced by specific task cues

2001 ◽  
Vol 209 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Kleinsorge ◽  
Herbert Heuer ◽  
Volker Schmidtke
Keyword(s):  
Specific Task ◽  
Task Space ◽  
Basic Pattern ◽  
Task Representation ◽  
Switching Mechanism ◽  
Factorial Combination ◽  
Individual Task ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

Summary. When participants have to shift between four tasks that result from a factorial combination of the task dimensions judgment (numerical vs. spatial) and mapping (compatible vs. incompatible), a characteristic profile of shift costs can be observed that is suggestive of a hierarchical switching mechanism that operates upon a dimensionally ordered task representation, with judgment on the top and the response on the bottom of the task hierarchy ( Kleinsorge & Heuer, 1999 ). This switching mechanism results in unintentional shifts on lower levels of the task hierarchy whenever a shift on a higher level has to be performed, leading to non-shift costs on the lower levels. We investigated whether this profile depends on the way in which the individual task dimensions are cued. When the cues for the task dimensions were exchanged, the basic pattern of shift costs was replicated with only minor modifications. This indicates that the postulated hierarchical switching mechanism operates independently of the specifics of task cueing.

Reverence, Revision and Creaturely Life: Whitehead’s Political Theology of Enjoyment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beatrice Marovich
Keyword(s):  
Political Theology ◽  
Free Society ◽  
Actual Entity ◽  
Symbolic Code ◽  
Strategic Motivation ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

‘The art of free society’, A.N. Whitehead declares in his essay on symbolism, is fundamentally dual. It consists of both ‘maintenance of the symbolic code’ and a ‘fearlessness of [its] revision’. This tension, on the surface paradoxical, is what Whitehead believes will prevent social decay, anarchy, or ‘the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows’. Bearing in mind Whitehead’s own thoughts on the nature of symbolism, this chapter argues that the figure of the creature has been underappreciated in his work as a symbol. It endeavors to examine and contextualize the symbolic potency of creatureliness in Whitehead’s work, with particular attention directed toward the way the creature helps him to both maintain and revise an older symbolic code. In Process and Reality, ‘creature’ serves as Whitehead’s alternate name for the ‘individual fact’ or the ‘actual entity’—including (perhaps scandalously, for his more orthodox readers) the figure of God. What was Whitehead’s strategic motivation for deploying this superfluous title for an already-named category? In this chapter, it is suggested that his motivation was primarily poetic (Whitehead held the British romantic tradition in some reverence) and so, in this sense, always and already aware of its rich symbolic potency.

Attention Sustainability Impact on Social Status in the Class

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-46
Author(s):  
Stanislava Varadinova
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Communication Skills ◽  
School Dropout ◽  
Learning Material ◽  
Early School ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way ◽  
Positive Environment

The attention sustainability and its impact of social status in the class are current issues concerning the field of education are the reasons for delay in assimilating the learning material and early school dropout. Behind both of those problems stand psychological causes such as low attention sustainability, poor communication skills and lack of positive environment. The presented article aims to prove that sustainability of attention directly influences the social status of students in the class, and hence their overall development and the way they feel in the group. Making efforts to increase students’ attention sustainability could lead to an increase in the social status of the student and hence the creation of a favorable and positive environment for the overall development of the individual.

Territorial Distribution of Alcohol and Drug Addictions Mortality Concerning Regional Disparities in the Slovak Republic from Year 1996 to Year 2015

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Mortality Rate ◽  
Slovak Republic ◽  
Regional Disparities ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Extreme Position ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Female Sex ◽  
Male Sex ◽  
The Individual ◽  
High Level

BACKGROUND: This paper deals with territorial distribution of the alcohol and drug addictions mortality at a level of the districts of the Slovak Republic. AIM: The aim of the paper is to explore the relations within the administrative territorial division of the Slovak Republic, that is, between the individual districts and hence, to reveal possibly hidden relation in alcohol and drug mortality. METHODS: The analysis is divided and executed into the two fragments – one belongs to the female sex, the other one belongs to the male sex. The standardised mortality rate is computed according to a sequence of the mathematical relations. The Euclidean distance is employed to compute the similarity within each pair of a whole data set. The cluster analysis examines is performed. The clusters are created by means of the mutual distances of the districts. The data is collected from the database of the Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic for all the districts of the Slovak Republic. The covered time span begins in the year 1996 and ends in the year 2015. RESULTS: The most substantial point is that the Slovak Republic possesses the regional disparities in a field of mortality expressed by the standardised mortality rate computed particularly for the diagnoses assigned to the alcohol and drug addictions at a considerably high level. However, the female sex and the male sex have the different outcome. The Bratislava III District keeps absolutely the most extreme position. It forms an own cluster for the both sexes too. The Topoľčany District bears a similar extreme position from a point of view of the male sex. All the Bratislava districts keep their mutual notable dissimilarity. Contrariwise, evaluation of a development of the regional disparities among the districts looks like notably heterogeneously. CONCLUSIONS: There are considerable regional discrepancies throughout the districts of the Slovak Republic. Hence, it is necessary to create a common platform how to proceed with the solution of this issue.

Quantitative indicators of air traffic controllers’ attitude to the danger of errors

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-78
Author(s):  
O. M. Reva ◽  
V. V. Kamyshin ◽  
S. P. Borsuk ◽  
V. A. Shulhin ◽  
A. V. Nevynitsyn
Keyword(s):  
Human Factor ◽  
Differential Method ◽  
Air Traffic ◽  
Professional Activity ◽  
Aviation Accidents ◽  
Air Traffic Controllers ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Level Of Significance ◽  
The Individual ◽  
High Level

The negative and persistent impact of the human factor on the statistics of aviation accidents and serious incidents makes proactive studies of the attitude of “front line” aviation operators (air traffic controllers, flight crewmembers) to dangerous actions or professional conditions as a key component of the current paradigm of ICAO safety concept. This “attitude” is determined through the indicators of the influence of the human factor on decision-making, which also include the systems of preferences of air traffic controllers on the indicators and characteristics of professional activity, illustrating both the individual perception of potential risks and dangers, and the peculiarities of generalized group thinking that have developed in a particular society. Preference systems are an ordered (ranked) series of n = 21 errors: from the most dangerous to the least dangerous and characterize only the danger preference of one error over another. The degree of this preference is determined only by the difference in the ranks of the errors and does not answer the question of how much time one error is more dangerous in relation to another. The differential method for identifying the comparative danger of errors, as well as the multistep technology for identifying and filtering out marginal opinions were applied. From the initial sample of m = 37 professional air traffic controllers, two subgroups mB=20 and mG=7 people were identified with statisti-cally significant at a high level of significance within the group consistency of opinions a = 1%. Nonpara-metric optimization of the corresponding group preference systems resulted in Kemeny’s medians, in which the related (middle) ranks were missing. Based on these medians, weighted coefficients of error hazards were determined by the mathematical prioritization method. It is substantiated that with the ac-cepted accuracy of calculations, the results obtained at the second iteration of this method are more ac-ceptable. The values of the error hazard coefficients, together with their ranks established in the preference systems, allow a more complete quantitative and qualitative analysis of the attitude of both individual air traffic controllers and their professional groups to hazardous actions or conditions.

scholarly journals Automatic Labeled Dialogue Generation for Nursing Record Systems

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
Tittaya Mairittha ◽  
Nattaya Mairittha ◽  
Sozo Inoue
Keyword(s):  
Data Augmentation ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Generative Models ◽  
Abstract Knowledge ◽  
Augmentation Techniques ◽  
Nursing Record ◽  
Long Short Term Memory ◽  
The Individual ◽  
High Level ◽  
Embedding Methods

The integration of digital voice assistants in nursing residences is becoming increasingly important to facilitate nursing productivity with documentation. A key idea behind this system is training natural language understanding (NLU) modules that enable the machine to classify the purpose of the user utterance (intent) and extract pieces of valuable information present in the utterance (entity). One of the main obstacles when creating robust NLU is the lack of sufficient labeled data, which generally relies on human labeling. This process is cost-intensive and time-consuming, particularly in the high-level nursing care domain, which requires abstract knowledge. In this paper, we propose an automatic dialogue labeling framework of NLU tasks, specifically for nursing record systems. First, we apply data augmentation techniques to create a collection of variant sample utterances. The individual evaluation result strongly shows a stratification rate, with regard to both fluency and accuracy in utterances. We also investigate the possibility of applying deep generative models for our augmented dataset. The preliminary character-based model based on long short-term memory (LSTM) obtains an accuracy of 90% and generates various reasonable texts with BLEU scores of 0.76. Secondly, we introduce an idea for intent and entity labeling by using feature embeddings and semantic similarity-based clustering. We also empirically evaluate different embedding methods for learning good representations that are most suitable to use with our data and clustering tasks. Experimental results show that fastText embeddings produce strong performances both for intent labeling and on entity labeling, which achieves an accuracy level of 0.79 and 0.78 f1-scores and 0.67 and 0.61 silhouette scores, respectively.

scholarly journals Opportunities and Challenges of Green-Lean: An Integrated System for Sustainable Construction

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 4460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammadsoroush Tafazzoli ◽  
Ehsan Mousavi ◽  
Sharareh Kermanshachi
Keyword(s):  
Cost Savings ◽  
Integrated Approach ◽  
Integrated System ◽  
Waste Minimization ◽  
Sustainable Construction ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Safety Improvement ◽  
The Individual ◽  
High Level ◽  
Industry Professionals

Although the two concepts of lean and sustainable construction have been developed due to different incentives, and they do not pursue the same exact goals, there exists considerable commonality between them. This paper discusses the potentials for integrating the two approaches and their practices and how the resulting synergy from combining the two methods can potentially lead to higher levels of fulfilling the individual goals of each of them. Some limitations and challenges to implementing the integrated approach are also discussed. Based on a comprehensive review of existing papers related to sustainable and lean construction topics, the commonality between the two approaches is discussed and grouped in five categories of (1) cost savings, (2) waste minimization, (3) Jobsite safety improvement, (4) reduced energy consumption, and (5) customers’ satisfaction improvement. The challenges of this integration are similarly identified and discussed in the four main categories of (1) additional initial costs to the project, (2) difficulty of providing specialized expertise, (3) contractors’ unwillingness to adopt the additional requirements, and (4) challenges to establish a high level of teamwork. Industry professionals were then interviewed to rank the elements in each of the two categories of opportunities and challenges. The results of the study highlight how future research can pursue the development of a new Green-Lean approach by investing in the communalities and meeting the challenges of this integration.

scholarly journals Children’s Astronomy. Development of the Shape of the Earth Concept in Polish Children between 5 and 10 Years of Age

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 75
Author(s):  
Jan Amos Jelinek
Keyword(s):  
Mental Model ◽  
Cultural Influences ◽  
Test Results ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Spherical Earth ◽  
The Individual ◽  
High Level ◽  
Cognitive Problems ◽  
Teaching Situations ◽  
Model Approach

The Earth’s shape concept develops as consecutive cognitive problems (e.g., the location of people and trees on the spherical Earth) are gradually resolved. Establishing the order of problem solving may be important for the organisation of teaching situations. This study attempted to determine the sequence of problems to be resolved based on tasks included in the EARTH2 test. The study covered a group of 444 children between 5 and 10 years of age. It captured the order in which children solve cognitive problems on the way to constructing a science-like concept. The test results were compared with previous studies. The importance of cultural influences connected to significant differences (24%) in test results was emphasised. Attention was drawn to the problem of the consistency of the mental model approach highlighted in the literature. The analysis of the individual sets of answers provided a high level of consistency of indications referring to the same model (36%), emphasising the importance of the concept of mental models.

Skiing all the way to the polls: Exploring the popularity of personalized posts on political Instagram accounts

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 1096-1110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anders Olof Larsson
Keyword(s):  
Political Engagement ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Way

While research has gauged the degree to which political actors focus on their personal rather than their more public sides in their communication efforts, few studies have assessed the extent to which personalized content succeeds in gaining traction among online followers. The current study does just that, focusing on the Instagram accounts operated by Norwegian parties and party leaders. Results indicate that party leaders emerge as more successful than parties in gaining attention through ‘likes’ and comments and that they offer personalized content to higher degrees than the parties they represent. While personalized content might lead to increased political engagement among citizens, the fact that personalization ‘works’ in terms of gaining attention might also skew political PR and marketing towards excessive use of such themes.

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