How Belief in a Just World Benefits Mental Health: The Effects of Optimism and Gratitude

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Past research suggests that individuals’ belief in a just world (BJW) is closely connected with their mental health. To clarify the underlying mechanism, the current study proposes that BJW encourages optimism and gratitude which then mediates the relation- ship between BJW and mental health as indicated by subjective well-being (SWB) and depression. A sample of 1,200 undergraduates yields results indicating that (a) BJW influences optimism, gratitude, SWB, and depression after controlling for gender, age, income, and personality; (b) optimism and gratitude mediate BJW effects by increasing SWB and decreasing depression. The issues of BJW’s adaptive functions are discussed

Pore-scale numerical simulation of spontaneous imbibition in porous media containing fractures

Spontaneous imbibition is an essential mechanism for recovering oil from low-permeability fractured water-driven reservoirs. To accurately capture the migration interface of oil-water two-phase flow under these conditions, this study employs phase field theory coupled with Cahn-Hilliard and Navier-Stokes equations. We conduct a numerical pore-scale investigation on countercurrent imbibition in low-permeability fractured porous media. The results show that pore-scale spontaneous imbibition can be divided into four stages. In the first stage, oil-water film is formed when oil contacts with water, and this contact line moves under the action of capillary force. In the second stage, the oil film at the end of the oil cluster ruptures to form isolated oil droplets. In the third stage, these oil droplets are surrounded by water and gradually transported outward. In the final stage, oil droplets accumulate in the fractures and are collectively expelled from the matrix. In the process of oil droplet migration, the phenomenon of sticking occurs under the influence of water extrusion and the internal structure of the matrix, which leads to the formation of residual oil. The increased complexity of open boundary and fracture development strengthens the imbibition effect by elevating the degree of spontaneous imbibition pore utilization, thus improving the oil utilization efficiency. The above findings can provide a numerical modeling reference for the study of spontaneous imbibition in fractured porous media, and at the same time, has some guiding significance for the development of low-permeability reservoirs.Document Type: Original articleCited as: Yang, L., Jiang, X., Li, M., Gong, F., Dong, G., Li, X. Pore-scale numerical simulation of spontaneous imbibition in porous media containing fractures. Capillarity, 2024, 10(2): 48-56. https://doi.org/10.46690/capi.2024.02.0

Towards a Mechanistic Interpretation of Multi-Step Reasoning Capabilities of Language Models

Recent work has shown that language models (LMs) have strong multi-step (i.e., procedural) reasoning capabilities. However, it is unclear whether LMs perform these tasks by cheating with answers memorized from pretraining corpus, or, via a multi-step reasoning mechanism. In this paper, we try to answer this question by exploring a mechanistic interpretation of LMs for multi-step reasoning tasks. Concretely, we hypothesize that the LM implicitly embeds a reasoning tree resembling the correct reasoning process within it. We test this hypothesis by introducing a new probing approach (called MechanisticProbe) that recovers the reasoning tree from the model's attention patterns. We use our probe to analyze two LMs: GPT-2 on a synthetic task (k-th smallest element), and LLaMA on two simple language-based reasoning tasks (ProofWriter & AI2 Reasoning Challenge). We show that MechanisticProbe is able to detect the information of the reasoning tree from the model's attentions for most examples, suggesting that the LM indeed is going through a process of multi-step reasoning within its architecture in many cases.Comment: This work is published in EMNLP 202

Resonance modes of plasmonic nanorod metamaterials and their applications

Plasmonic nanorod metamaterials exhibit transversal and longitudinal resonance modes. It is found that the resonance intensity of the transversal modes (T-Modes) excited by the p- polarized wave is obviously larger than the intensity for the s- polarized wave at the wavelength of the transversal resonance, and the resonance intensity of the longitudinal modes (L-Modes) excited by the s- polarized wave is clearly larger than the intensity for the p- polarized wave at the longitudinal resonance wavelength, indicating a distinct polarization characteristics, which results from excitation of the different resonance modes of surface plasmons at different wavelengths. Moreover, the polarization behavior in near field regions for the different resonance modes has been demonstrated by the electric field distributions of the plasmonic nanorods based on FDTD simulation. In addition, the working wavelength of the polarizer can be tuned by the diameter and length of the silver nanorods in the visible spectral range, higher extinction ratios and lower insertion losses can be achieved based on the different resonance modes associated with the different polarizations. The polarizers will be a promising candidate for its potential applications in integration of nanophotonic devices

Association between acute kidney injury and prognoses of cardiac surgery patients: Analysis of the MIMIC-III database

BackgroundAcute kidney injury (AKI) is the most common major complication of cardiac surgery field. The purpose of this study is to investigate the association between acute kidney injury and the prognoses of cardiac surgery patients in the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III (MIMIC-III) database.MethodsClinical data were extracted from the MIMIC-III database. Adult (≥18 years) cardiac surgery patients in the database were enrolled. Multivariable logistic regression analyses were employed to assess the associations between acute kidney injury (AKI) comorbidity and 30-day mortality, 90-day mortality and hospital mortality. Different adjusting models were used to adjust for potential confounders.ResultsA total of 6,002 patients were involved, among which 485 patients (8.08%) had comorbid AKI. Patients with AKI were at higher risks of prolonged ICU stay, hospital mortality, 90-day mortality (all P < 0.001), and 30-day mortality (P = 0.008). AKI was a risk factor for hospital mortality [Model 1, OR (95% CI) = 2.50 (1.45–4.33); Model 2, OR (95% CI) = 2.44 (1.48–4.02)], 30-day mortality [Model 1, OR (95% CI) = 1.84 (1.05–3.24); Model 2, OR (95% CI) = 1.96 (1.13–3.22)] and 90-day mortality [Model 1, OR (95% CI) = 2.05 (1.37–3.01); Model 2, OR (95% CI) = 2.76 (1.93–3.94)]. Higher hospital mortality, 30-day mortality and 90-day mortality was observed in higher KDIGO grade for cardiac surgery patients with AKI (all P < 0.05).ConclusionComorbid AKI increased the risk of hospital mortality, 30-day mortality, and 90-day mortality of cardiac surgery patients in the MIMIC-III database

Near-field coupling and resonant cavity modes in plasmonic nanorod metamaterials

Plasmonic resonant cavities are capable of confining light at the nanoscale, resulting in both enhanced local electromagnetic fields and lower mode volumes. However, conventional plasmonic resonant cavities possess large Ohmic losses at metal-dielectric interfaces. Plasmonic near-field coupling plays a key role in a design of photonic components based on the resonant cavities because of the possibility to reduce losses. Here, we study the plasmonic near-field coupling in the silver nanorod metamaterials treated as resonant nanostructured optical cavities. Reflectance measurements reveal the existence of multiple resonance modes of the nanorod metamaterials, which is consistent with our theoretical analysis. Furthermore, our numerical simulations show that the electric field at the longitudinal resonances forms standing waves in the nanocavities due to the near-field coupling between the adjacent nanorods, and a new hybrid mode emerges due to a coupling between nanorods and a gold-film substrate. We demonstrate that this coupling can be controlled by changing the gap between the silver nanorod array and gold substrate

Porous-ZnO-Nanobelt Film as Recyclable Photocatalysts with Enhanced Photocatalytic Activity

Abstract In this article, the porous-ZnO-nanobelt film was synthesized by oxidizing the ZnSe-nanobelt film in air. The experiment results show that the porous-ZnO-nanobelt film possesses enhanced photocatalytic activity compared with the ZnO-nanobelt film, and can be used as recyclable photocatalysts. The enhanced photocatalytic activity of the porous-ZnO-nanobelt film is attributed to the increased surface area. Therefore, turning the 1D-nanostructure film into porous one may be a feasible approach to meet the demand of photocatalyst application.</p

Relaxation behavior study on PET and PET/Ti

The relaxation behavior of neat PET and PET/Ti3N4 nanocomposites was investigated by means of internal friction. The temperature dependence of internal friction exhibit two relaxation peaks i.e. α and β peaks, and both heights of the peaks first increase and then decrease with increasing concentration of Ti3N4 nanoparticles. However, the peak temperature and activation energy for α and β peaks show different change trends with increasing concentration of Ti3N4 nanoparticles, which associated with the changes of nucleation and crystallization of the PET due to the addition of nanoparticles. Further increasing the concentration of Ti3N4 nanoparticles, a third peak, α′ located at the temperature between α and β peaks appears in the PET/Ti3N4 nanocomposites, which may be a physical aging peak