219 research outputs found
The Impact of Employment Discrimination on Job Search Performance
This study is to explore the impact of perceived employment discrimination on job search performance. Based on the trait activation theory, this article proposes that people’s perceived employment discrimination when searching jobs online has a direct effect on job search performance, moderated by self-efficacy of job applicants. A total of 97 valid questionnaires were collected in this study. Through data analysis, we have concluded that the perceived impact of employment discrimination on job search performance is significantly negatively correlated, and job applicants’ self-efficacy is not significant. Such results have implications for the human resource managers and job applicants to adopt positive attitudes to deal with the possible facing discrimination generated during searching a job in the internet era
Growing season net ecosystem CO2 exchange of two desert ecosystems with alkaline soils in Kazakhstan
Central Asia is covered by vast desert ecosystems, and the majority of these ecosystems have alkaline soils. Their contribution to global net ecosystem CO(2) exchange (NEE) is of significance simply because of their immense spatial extent. Some of the latest research reported considerable abiotic CO(2) absorption by alkaline soil, but the rate of CO(2) absorption has been questioned by peer communities. To investigate the issue of carbon cycle in Central Asian desert ecosystems with alkaline soils, we have measured the NEE using eddy covariance (EC) method at two alkaline sites during growing season in Kazakhstan. The diurnal course of mean monthly NEE followed a clear sinusoidal pattern during growing season at both sites. Both sites showed significant net carbon uptake during daytime on sunny days with high photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) but net carbon loss at nighttime and on cloudy and rainy days. NEE has strong dependency on PAR and the response of NEE to precipitation resulted in an initial and significant carbon release to the atmosphere, similar to other ecosystems. These findings indicate that biotic processes dominated the carbon processes, and the contribution of abiotic carbon process to net ecosystem CO(2) exchange may be trivial in alkaline soil desert ecosystems over Central Asia
Attitudes and knowledge about naloxone and overdose prevention among detained drug users in Ningbo, China
Abstract Background To date there has been limited research on both the prevalence of overdose and drug user knowledge about overdose prevention and response methods in China. In addition, there has been no effort to integrate naloxone information and distribution into pre-release services for drug users detained in isolated compulsory detoxification facilities in China. Methods The authors conducted a survey of 279 heroin users in isolated compulsory detoxification centers in Ningbo, China in an attempt to evaluate the possibility of conducting prelease peer naloxone programs in Ningbo isolated compulsory detoxification centers. Respondents' demographic background, history of heroin overdoses, and attitudes/knowledge about overdose prevention and response were collected. Results While drug users in Ningbo's compulsory detoxification centers have limited understandings of how to effectively respond to overdoses, they expressed concern about the possibility of overdose, interest in participating in overdose prevention and response programs, and a willingness to help their peers. In general, there was no significant difference in history and attitudes/knowledge of overdose between male and female participants. Conclusion Based on the findings of this research, our survey provides preliminary evidence that detained drug users have considerable interest in overdose prevention and response information and willingness to help peers. However, drug users in Ningbo isolated compulsory detoxification centers currently have limited understandings of effective ways of helping to prevent overdose deaths
Degeneration-Tuning: Using Scrambled Grid shield Unwanted Concepts from Stable Diffusion
Owing to the unrestricted nature of the content in the training data, large
text-to-image diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion (SD), are capable of
generating images with potentially copyrighted or dangerous content based on
corresponding textual concepts information. This includes specific intellectual
property (IP), human faces, and various artistic styles. However, Negative
Prompt, a widely used method for content removal, frequently fails to conceal
this content due to inherent limitations in its inference logic. In this work,
we propose a novel strategy named \textbf{Degeneration-Tuning (DT)} to shield
contents of unwanted concepts from SD weights. By utilizing Scrambled Grid to
reconstruct the correlation between undesired concepts and their corresponding
image domain, we guide SD to generate meaningless content when such textual
concepts are provided as input. As this adaptation occurs at the level of the
model's weights, the SD, after DT, can be grafted onto other conditional
diffusion frameworks like ControlNet to shield unwanted concepts. In addition
to qualitatively showcasing the effectiveness of our DT method in protecting
various types of concepts, a quantitative comparison of the SD before and after
DT indicates that the DT method does not significantly impact the generative
quality of other contents. The FID and IS scores of the model on COCO-30K
exhibit only minor changes after DT, shifting from 12.61 and 39.20 to 13.04 and
38.25, respectively, which clearly outperforms the previous methods
Decoupled measurement and modeling of interface reaction kinetics of ion-intercalation battery electrodes
Ultrahigh rate performance of active particles used in lithium-ion battery
electrodes has been revealed by single-particle measurements, which indicates a
huge potential for developing high-power batteries. However, the
charging/discharging behaviors of single particles at ultrahigh C-rates can no
longer be described by the traditional electrochemical kinetics in such
ion-intercalation active materials. In the meantime, regular kinetic measuring
methods meet a challenge due to the coupling of interface reaction and
solid-state diffusion processes of active particles. Here, we decouple the
reaction and diffusion kinetics via time-resolved potential measurements with
an interval of 1 ms, revealing that the classical Butler-Volmer equation
deviates from the actual relation between current density, overpotential, and
Li+ concentration. An interface ion-intercalation model is developed which
considers the excess driving force of Li+ (de)intercalation in the charge
transfer reaction for ion-intercalation materials. Simulations demonstrate that
the proposed model enables accurate prediction of charging/discharging at both
single-particle and electrode scales for various active materials. The kinetic
limitation processes from single particles to composite electrodes are
systematically revealed, promoting rational designs of high-power batteries
Backward Reasoning in Large Language Models for Verification
Chain-of-Though (CoT) prompting has shown promising performance in various
reasoning tasks. Recently, Self-Consistency \citep{wang2023selfconsistency}
proposes to sample a diverse set of reasoning chains which may lead to
different answers while the answer that receives the most votes is selected. In
this paper, we propose a novel method to use backward reasoning in verifying
candidate answers. We mask a token in the question by and ask the LLM
to predict the masked token when a candidate answer is provided by \textit{a
simple template}, i.e., ``\textit{\textbf{If we know the answer of the above
question is \{a candidate answer\}, what is the value of unknown variable ?}}'' Intuitively, the LLM is expected to predict the masked token
successfully if the provided candidate answer is correct. We further propose
FOBAR to combine forward and backward reasoning for estimating the probability
of candidate answers. We conduct extensive experiments on six data sets and
three LLMs. Experimental results demonstrate that FOBAR achieves
state-of-the-art performance on various reasoning benchmarks.Comment: Preprin
Gradient-Regulated Meta-Prompt Learning for Generalizable Vision-Language Models
Prompt tuning, a recently emerging paradigm, enables the powerful
vision-language pre-training models to adapt to downstream tasks in a parameter
-- and data -- efficient way, by learning the ``soft prompts'' to condition
frozen pre-training models. Though effective, it is particularly problematic in
the few-shot scenario, where prompt tuning performance is sensitive to the
initialization and requires a time-consuming process to find a good
initialization, thus restricting the fast adaptation ability of the
pre-training models. In addition, prompt tuning could undermine the
generalizability of the pre-training models, because the learnable prompt
tokens are easy to overfit to the limited training samples. To address these
issues, we introduce a novel Gradient-RegulAted Meta-prompt learning (GRAM)
framework that jointly meta-learns an efficient soft prompt initialization for
better adaptation and a lightweight gradient regulating function for strong
cross-domain generalizability in a meta-learning paradigm using only the
unlabeled image-text pre-training data. Rather than designing a specific prompt
tuning method, our GRAM can be easily incorporated into various prompt tuning
methods in a model-agnostic way, and comprehensive experiments show that GRAM
brings about consistent improvement for them in several settings (i.e.,
few-shot learning, cross-domain generalization, cross-dataset generalization,
etc.) over 11 datasets. Further, experiments show that GRAM enables the
orthogonal methods of textual and visual prompt tuning to work in a
mutually-enhanced way, offering better generalizability beyond the uni-modal
prompt tuning methods.Comment: Accepted by ICCV 202
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