Reverse logistics pricing strategy for a green supply chain: a view of customers’ environmental awareness

The effectiveness of a reverse logistics strategy is contingent upon the successful execution of activities related to materials and product reuse. Green supply chain (GSC) in reverse logistics aims to minimize byproducts from ending up in landfills. This paper considers a retailer responsible for recycling and a manufacturer responsible for remanufacturing. Customer environmental awareness (CEA) is operationalized as customer word-of-mouth effect. We form three game theoretic models for two different scenarios with different pricing strategies, i.e. a non-cooperative pricing scenario based on Stackelberg equilibrium and Nash equilibrium, and a joint pricing scenario within a cooperative game model. The paper suggests that stakeholders are better off making their pricing and manufacturing decision in cooperation

Study on the vertical well seepage model in composite carbonate reservoirs

Introduction: Carbonate reservoirs are widely distributed throughout the world. Due to the good physical properties of the reservoirs, they are easily contaminated by mud during drilling opening, so they are often put into production after acidification. After acidification, the near-well reservoir’s physical property is improved, while the far-well reservoir’s physical property remains unchanged. Such reservoirs are commonly called composite reservoirs. Composite carbonate reservoir seepage law is more complicated.Methods: In this paper, the point source function of a triple-medium composite reservoir is established using the source function theory, Laplace transform, perturbation transform, and linear superposition principle of partial differential equation.Results: Second, the vertical well seepage model of a composite reservoir is obtained through the new point source function.Discussion: Finally, the correctness of the model is verified, and the sensitivity analysis of the key parameters affecting the seepage law is carried out. The applicability of the model established in this paper is demonstrated by two wells in the field. This paper provides a theoretical basis for vertical well test analysis of composite reservoirs

The 2018 Fiji M_w 8.2 and 7.9 deep earthquakes: One doublet in two slabs

The cold Fiji-Tonga subduction zone accounts for >75% of cataloged deep earthquakes but none of the largest ten in the last century. On 19 August 2018 and 06 September 2018, a deep earthquake doublet with moment magnitude (M_w) 8.2 and 7.9 struck the Fiji area, providing a rare opportunity to interrogate the behaviors of great deep earthquakes in cold slabs. While the aftershock productivity of the 2018 M_w 8.2 event is similar to the 2013 Okhotsk M_w 8.3 event in a cold slab, the inferred compact rupture dimensions of both the M_w 8.2 and 7.9 events appear to be similar to the 1994 Bolivia earthquake in a warm slab. This seems to contradict the traditional view that slab temperature controls deep earthquakes. However, we find that neither event was confined within the cold Tonga slab core: the M_w 8.2 ruptured mostly in the warmer rim of the Tonga slab and the M_w 7.9 occurred in a warm relic slab leaning on top of the Tonga slab. The Fiji doublet demonstrates local slab temperature as the critical factor for deep earthquakes, and reveals complex interaction of subducted slabs in Tonga

Abundant aftershock sequence of the 2015 M_w7.5 Hindu Kush intermediate-depth earthquake

The 2015 M_w7.5 Hindu Kush earthquake occurred at a depth of 213 km beneath the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan. While many early aftershocks were missing from the global earthquake catalogues, this sequence was recorded continuously by eight broad-band stations within 500 km. Here we use a waveform matching technique to systematically detect earthquakes around the main shock. More than 3000 events are detected within 35 d after the main shock, as compared with 42 listed in the Advanced National Seismic System catalogue (or 196 in the International Seismological Centre catalogue). The aftershock sequence generally follows the Omori's law with a decay constant p = 0.92. We also apply the recently developed double-pair double-difference technique to relocate all detected aftershocks. Most of them are located to the west of the hypocentre of the main shock, consistent with the westward propagation of the main-shock rupture. The aftershocks outline a nearly vertical southward dipping plane, which matches well with one of the nodal planes of the main shock. We conclude that the aftershock sequence of this intermediate-depth earthquake shares many similarities with those for shallow earthquakes and infer that there are some common mechanisms responsible for shallow and intermediate-depth earthquakes

The Relationship Between Big Five Personality Traits and Psychotic Experience in a Large Non-clinical Youth Sample: The Mediating Role of Emotion Regulation

Objective: Despite a long history of interest in personality traits and psychosis, the association between personality traits and psychotic experiences in the general population is not yet well understood. One possible factor that could influence the degree of distress from psychotic experiences is emotion regulation. The purpose of this study was to explore whether the association between personality and psychotic symptoms is already apparent in non-clinical youth as well as the mediating role of emotion regulation strategies between personality traits and psychotic experiences.Methods: Three thousand one hundred and forty seven college students were surveyed via self-report questionnaires measuring the Five-Factor model of personality, emotion regulation strategies, and psychotic experiences.Results: Neuroticism was found to be significantly positively correlated with psychotic experiences, while Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness were found to be significantly negatively correlated. Both the suppression and reappraisal strategies mediated the relationship between personality traits and psychotic experiences.Conclusion: Our findings suggest that youth with certain personality traits are more likely to have psychotic experiences. The reappraisal emotion regulation strategy could serve as a protective factor against the distress of psychotic experiences

Secrets of RLHF in Large Language Models Part II: Reward Modeling

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become a crucial technology for aligning language models with human values and intentions, enabling models to produce more helpful and harmless responses. Reward models are trained as proxies for human preferences to drive reinforcement learning optimization. While reward models are often considered central to achieving high performance, they face the following challenges in practical applications: (1) Incorrect and ambiguous preference pairs in the dataset may hinder the reward model from accurately capturing human intent. (2) Reward models trained on data from a specific distribution often struggle to generalize to examples outside that distribution and are not suitable for iterative RLHF training. In this report, we attempt to address these two issues. (1) From a data perspective, we propose a method to measure the strength of preferences within the data, based on a voting mechanism of multiple reward models. Experimental results confirm that data with varying preference strengths have different impacts on reward model performance. We introduce a series of novel methods to mitigate the influence of incorrect and ambiguous preferences in the dataset and fully leverage high-quality preference data. (2) From an algorithmic standpoint, we introduce contrastive learning to enhance the ability of reward models to distinguish between chosen and rejected responses, thereby improving model generalization. Furthermore, we employ meta-learning to enable the reward model to maintain the ability to differentiate subtle differences in out-of-distribution samples, and this approach can be utilized for iterative RLHF optimization

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Association between Parents’ Relationship, Emotion-Regulation Strategies, and Psychotic-like Experiences in Adolescents

This study aimed to examine the association between the psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) and emotion-regulation (ER) strategies of adolescents and their parents’ relationship, and we hypothesized that the parents’ relationship moderates the link between ER strategies and PLEs. We recruited a total of 2708 first-year college students (1659 males and 1049 females) aged 15–20 years (mean = 17.9). Participants completed assessments of PLEs, their use of ER strategies, and reported their parents’ relationship as harmonious, conflicting, or divorced. Regression analyses indicated that the lower the use of the emotion-reappraisal strategy, the greater the use of the emotion-suppression strategy and that parental conflict or divorce predicted the number of PLEs endorsed and the level of distress from the PLEs. The parents’ relationship moderated the association between ER strategies and distress from PLEs. Among those who reported parental conflict or divorce, their lower use of the reappraisal strategy predicted their experiencing higher levels of distress from their PLEs. This study suggested the direct and interactive influence of the parents’ relationship and ER strategies on the presence of PLEs and PLE-related distress levels among adolescents, which may represent potential intervention targets

Densifying and Optimizing the Water Level Series for Large Lakes from Multi-Orbit ICESat-2 Observations

Satellite laser altimetry has been widely used for monitoring surface height changes in inland waters. However, constructing time series of water levels is partially limited in temporal resolution only based on the individual orbit of altimeter observations. To densify and optimize the time series of altimetry-based water levels is crucial to the scientific understanding of lake hydrologic dynamics. This paper focuses on synthesizing the multi-orbit on-lake observations from the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite 2 (ICESat-2) to densify and refine the water level time series for large lakes. The approach of synthesizing water level time series has been validated through experiments applied to 18 large lakes worldwide, resulting in an average R of 0.93, RMSE of 0.14 m, MAE of 0.12 m, NSE of 0.67, and CV of 2.86, according to the hydrologic gauge stations. The evaluation results demonstrate that our approach can provide an effective solution for densifying the water level series of large lakes covered by multi-orbit ICESat-2 observations. Further, the approach can be extended to monitor the high-frequency variation of other lakes covered by the multiple ICESat-2 orbits. This approach provides the potential of generating higher-frequency estimates of water levels based on satellite altimetry, which could not only help to reveal the characteristics of the seasonal dynamics of lakes but also be used to investigate the abrupt water level changes due to hydrological extreme events (e.g., floods, droughts, etc.)