To Be or Not To Be Humorous? Cross Cultural Perspectives on Humor

open access articleHumor seems to manifest differently in Western and Eastern cultures, although little is known about how culture shapes humor perceptions. The authors suggest that Westerners regard humor as a common and positive disposition; the Chinese regard humor as a special disposition particular to humorists, with controversial aspects. In Study 1, Hong Kong participants primed with Western culture evaluate humor more positively than they do when primed with Chinese culture. In Study 2a, Canadians evaluate humor as being more important in comparison with Chinese participants. In Study 2b, Canadians expect ordinary people to possess humor, while Chinese expect specialized comedians to be humorous. The implications and limitations are discussed

Can you forgive? It depends on how happy you are

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.This paper examined how individual group status and happiness influence forgiveness. In Study 1, happiness was treated as a trait difference: highly happy people, compared with very unhappy people, were found to be more willing to forgive murderers. More important, an interaction effect between happiness and group status on forgiveness was found, that is, highly happy people tended to be more forgiving when either ingroup or outgroup mem- bers were killed; unhappy people, however, tended to be less forgiving about murder when ingroup rather than outgroup members were killed. In Study 2, happiness was treated as an emotional state difference: happiness, rather than sadness, was found to bring greater forgiveness. Moreover, consistent with the interaction effect displayed in Study 1, happy participants tended to forgive more when ingroup or outgroup members were hurt; sad partici- pants tended to forgive less when ingroup members rather than outgroup members were hurt. Implications for connections between happiness, group membership, and forgiveness are discussed

On almost perfect linear Lee codes of packing radius 2

More than 50 years ago, Golomb and Welch conjectured that there is no perfect Lee codes $C$ of packing radius $r$ in $\mathbb{Z}^{n}$ for $r\geq2$ and $n\geq 3$. Recently, Leung and the second author proved that if $C$ is linear, then the Golomb-Welch conjecture is valid for $r=2$ and $n\geq 3$. In this paper, we consider the classification of linear Lee codes with the second-best possibility, that is the density of the lattice packing of $\mathbb{Z}^n$ by Lee spheres $S(n,r)$ equals $\frac{|S(n,r)|}{|S(n,r)|+1}$. We show that, for $r=2$ and $n\equiv 0,3,4 \pmod{6}$, this packing density can never be achieved.Comment: The extended abstract of an earlier version of this paper was presented in the 12th International Workshop on Coding and Cryptography (WCC) 202

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

Numerical simulation of clouds and precipitation depending on different relationships between aerosol and cloud droplet spectral dispersion

The aerosol effects on clouds and precipitation in deep convective cloud systems are investigated using the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model with the Morrison two-moment bulk microphysics scheme. Considering positive or negative relationships between the cloud droplet number concentration (Nc) and spectral dispersion (ɛ), a suite of sensitivity experiments are performed using an initial sounding data of the deep convective cloud system on 31 March 2005 in Beijing under either a maritime (‘clean’) or continental (‘polluted’) background. Numerical experiments in this study indicate that the sign of the surface precipitation response induced by aerosols is dependent on the ɛ−Nc relationships, which can influence the autoconversion processes from cloud droplets to rain drops. When the spectral dispersion ɛ is an increasing function of Nc, the domain-average cumulative precipitation increases with aerosol concentrations from maritime to continental background. That may be because the existence of large-sized rain drops can increase precipitation at high aerosol concentration. However, the surface precipitation is reduced with increasing concentrations of aerosol particles when ɛ is a decreasing function of Nc. For the ɛ−Nc negative relationships, smaller spectral dispersion suppresses the autoconversion processes, reduces the rain water content and eventually decreases the surface precipitation under polluted conditions. Although differences in the surface precipitation between polluted and clean backgrounds are small for all the ɛ−Nc relationships, additional simulations show that our findings are robust to small perturbations in the initial thermal conditions. Keywords: aerosol indirect effects, cloud droplet spectral dispersion, autoconversion parameterization, deep convective systems, two-moment bulk microphysics schem

MC-Nonlocal-PINNs: handling nonlocal operators in PINNs via Monte Carlo sampling

We propose, Monte Carlo Nonlocal physics-informed neural networks (MC-Nonlocal-PINNs), which is a generalization of MC-fPINNs in \cite{guo2022monte}, for solving general nonlocal models such as integral equations and nonlocal PDEs. Similar as in MC-fPINNs, our MC-Nonlocal-PINNs handle the nonlocal operators in a Monte Carlo way, resulting in a very stable approach for high dimensional problems. We present a variety of test problems, including high dimensional Volterra type integral equations, hypersingular integral equations and nonlocal PDEs, to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.Comment: 23pages, 13figure

Adhesion at Diamond /Metal Interfaces: A Density Functional Theory Study

To understand the basic material properties required in selecting a metallic interlayer for enhanced adhesion of diamondcoatings on the substrates, the interfaces between diamond and metals with different carbide formation enthalpies (Cu, Ti, and Al) are studied using density functional theory. It is found that the work of separation decreases, while the interface energy increases, with the carbide formation enthalpy ΔHf (Tiys (Ti\u3eCu\u3eAl), is needed to achieve a higher overall interface strength. In addition, when the surface energy is larger than the interface energy, a wetted diamond/metal interface is formed during diamondnucleation, providing the strongest adhesion compared to other growth modes. These results indicate that a strong carbide-forming ability and a large surface energy of the interlayer promote nucleation and enhance the adhesion and interface strength of the coating/substrate system

Predicting the Hydrogen Pressure to Achieve Ultralow Friction and Diamondlike Carbon Surfaces from First Principles

Hydrogen atmosphere can significantly change the tribological behavior at diamond and diamondlike carbon (DLC) surfaces and the friction-reducing effect depends on the partial pressure of hydrogen. We combined density functional theory modeling and thermodynamic quantities to predict the equilibrium partial pressures of hydrogen at temperature T, PH2 (T), for a fully atomic hydrogen passivated diamondsurface. Above the equilibrium PH2 (T), ultralow friction can be achieved at diamond and DLC surfaces. The calculation agrees well with friction tests at various testing conditions. We also show that PH2 (T) increases with temperature; therefore, the temperature effect observed in friction tests should first be treated as an equilibrium factor rather than a kinetic factor

Supervised Sparsity Preserving Projections for Face Recognition

Recently feature extraction methods have commonly been used as a principled approach to understand the intrinsic structure hidden in high-dimensional data. In this paper, a novel supervised learning method, called Supervised Sparsity Preserving Projections (SSPP), is proposed. SSPP attempts to preserve the sparse representation structure of the data when identifying an efficient discriminant subspace. First, SSPP creates a concatenated dictionary by class-wise PCA decompositions and learns the sparse representation structure of each sample under the constructed dictionary using the least squares method. Second, by maximizing the ratio of non-local scatter to local scatter, a Laplacian discriminant function is defined to characterize the separability of the samples in the different sub-manifolds. Then, to achieve improved recognition results, SSPP integrates the learned sparse representation structure as a regular term into the Laplacian discriminant function. Finally, the proposed method is converted into a generalized eigenvalue problem. The extensive and promising experimental results on several popular face databases validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach