The Unconsoled: The Modern Rogue Trapped in Traumas

Ryder, the protagonist in the novel, suffers many traumatic experiences during his childhood. Though these traumas shadow his life, he doesn’t narrate them directly in the novel. Instead, he unfolds his own experiences through others’ traumatic stories: traumas in Boris’ childhood, in Stephen’s youth, and in Brodsky’s middle-age. Besides, in his adulthood, Ryder reperforms his experienced traumas upon his son Boris and his wife Sophie, which leads to tragedies to both himself and his family. Through his narration, he unconsciously uncovers his own traumatic pain that deprives him of controlling his life. Like the rogue in modern society, he can neither find any consolation from others nor give any consolation to others. To some extent, what Ryder experiences reflects the existing conditions of the unconsoled people in the west in 20th century with endless helplessness and loneliness.

Metacognitive Prompting Improves Understanding in Large Language Models

In Large Language Models (LLMs), there have been consistent advancements in task-specific performance, largely influenced by effective prompt design. While recent research on prompting has enhanced the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, a gap remains in further improving their understanding abilities. In this study, we introduce Metacognitive Prompting (MP), a strategy inspired by human introspective reasoning processes. Using MP, LLMs undergo a systematic series of structured, self-aware evaluations, drawing on both their vast inherent knowledge and new insights. Our experiments involve five prevalent LLMs: Llama2, Vicuna, PaLM, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4, all of which span various general natural language understanding (NLU) tasks from the GLUE and SuperGLUE benchmarks. Results indicate that, although GPT-4 consistently excels in most tasks, PaLM, when equipped with MP, approaches its performance level. Furthermore, across models and datasets, MP consistently outperforms existing prompting methods, including standard and chain-of-thought prompting. This study underscores the potential to amplify the understanding abilities of LLMs and highlights the benefits of mirroring human introspective reasoning in NLU tasks.Comment: 9 pages, in submissio

A Psychoanalytical Approach to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Ethan Brand”

Psychoanalytical criticism to literary works is one of the important ways to uncover the depths of author’s thinking, which also contributes to readers’ understanding of actions, characteristics, plots or even endings of characters in the novel. From the perspective of psychoanalysis, this article focuses on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Ethan Brand” written by him in 1850 to analyze Hawthorne’s unconscious intention of creating this story and the reasons of why he writes in that way instead of another

Cyclist Behavior to Avoid Vehicle Collisions Using Drive Recorder Videos

Since bicycles travel at high speeds and are frequently involved in traffic accidents, reducing bicycle fatalities and injuries is one of the most important issues in traffic safety. In car-to-cyclist collisions, the perpendicular configuration occupies the largest proportion of these collisions. Driver responses in lateral intrusions of cyclists at intersections have been examined [1,2], focusing on the drivers' braking reaction time and the time-to-collisions (TTC). Cyclist behavior can also have a significant intluence on car-to-cyclist collision occurrence. Cyclist bebavior has been investigated in naturalistic conditions and using in-depth accident data. In addition, the videos of drive recorders provide useful information on the cyclist behaviors [3]. This study investigated cyclist behavior with the drive recorder of cars in near-miss incidents and collisions. [From: Introduction

Gender Differences in Cognition among Older Adults in China

In this paper, the authors model gender differences in cognitive ability in China using a new sample of middle-aged and older Chinese respondents. Modeled after the American Health and Retirement Survey (HRS), the CHARLS Pilot survey respondents are 45 years and older in two quite distinct provinces—Zhejiang a high growth industrialized province on the East Coast, and Gansu, a largely agricultural and poor Province in the West. Their measures of cognition in CHARLS relies on two measures that proxy for different dimensions of adult cognition—episodic memory and intact mental status. They relate both these childhood health measures to adult health and SES outcomes during the adult years. They find large cognitive differences to the detriment of women that were mitigated by large gender differences in education among these generations of Chinese people. These gender differences in cognition are especially concentrated within poorer communities in China with gender difference being more sensitive to community level attributes than to family level attributes, with economic resources. In traditional poor Chinese communities, there are strong economic incentives to favor boys at the expense of girls not only in their education outcomes, but in their nutrition and eventually their adult height. These gender cognitive differences have been steadily decreasing across birth cohorts as the economy of China grew rapidly. Among younger cohorts of young adults in China, there is no longer any gender disparity in cognitive ability.

Interactive Effects of Order Assignment Strategy and Information Disclosure on Courier’s Continuance Participation Intention Arising in the On-Demand Logistics

The application of crowdsourcing in logistics is a revolutionary change of urban distribution. The on-demand logistics is one of the typical crowdsourcing logistics modes which is popular in China since 2008, the demand volume of Chinese on-demand logistics was about 18.5 billion in 2019 with annual rate of growth about 37.6%, and the average annual growth rate in recent five years was 73.7%, the market scale reached 131.3 billion yuan with annual rate of growth about 33.8%, and due to the impact of Covid-19, the demand of on-demand logistics is increasing significantly, and the requirement for convenience and personalized services is changing sharply, the accelerating iteration of on-demand logistics patterns causes a downward trend of delivery income that it’s difficult for the platform to balance the operation cost and labor motivation from the perspective of revenue. The prior research in crowdsourcing logistics focuses on the influence of continuance participation intention from the perspectives of external and internal incentive. However, incentive researches are unsuitable for current background of the downwards trend of delivery income comlpetely. And the characteristics of instability, unsafety and unfairness of couriers occupation which were reported by social news not only the reasons of high turnover rate and mismatching of supply-demand, but also point to the problem of management mechanisms such as incentive mechanism, order mechanism and information mechanism. As our knowledge, platform mechanism influence couriers’ daily tasks immediately but the related researches are absent in crowdsourcing logistics, especially considering the order receiving and completing which is the first concern of courier, order mechanism and information mechanism will influence the order receiving and completing directly. Order mechanism means platform assigns orders to courier, it’s the guarantee of matching supply and demand (couriers and orders), as well as the full coverage of the orders. There are different order assignment strategies, from the perspective of the human resources, evaluating performance and seting grades is common strategy, grades is the principles for orders assignment priority to encourage employees with good service quality to stay. In order to guarantee the timeless, some platforms will assign orders from perspective of space. This research summarized the two kinds of order assignment strategies as performance-priority strategy and distance-priority strategy. In performance-priority order assignment strategy, the courier will get an evaluation grade and differentiated orders assignment priority according to their total number of completed orders, total milage, punctuality rate, praise rate and other indicators. The distance-priority order assignment strategy sends orders to the neighboring courier according to the distance from the orders and the stores, and give priority to the closer courier. Information mechanism provides platform labor with assistance, which focuses on the information content of user interface that disclosure by platform. The quantity and accuracy of the information have significant influence on users’ intention and behavior, and the richness of information content as an important dimension of information characteristics affects the information receivers’ behavior immediately. Therefore, according to the operation information in Chinese on-demand logistics platform, this research summarized the information content and conclude two levels of information disclosure in on-demand logistics: one is overall layout information, the number of orders and courier, location layout and real-time traffic information; the other one is individual specific information, order details (distribution revenue goods category, merchant location and time requirements of each order) and transportation capacity details (the level and ranking of each courier on the platform). Each information disclosure includes three aspects: order, capacity and transportation. Detailed information disclosure includes two levels of information: overall layout and individual specific information. Brief information disclosure only includes overall layout information. To abstract differences in orders and information mechanisms specifically, and control other mechanisms (such as incentive mechanism) keep cnsistent better to highlights the effects of the research object, this research designed experiments based on justice theory for Chinese couriers, considered different orders assignment strategy (Performance-priority vs. distance-priority) and information disclosure (detailed information vs. brief information), introduced information justice and distribution justice perception as mediation to investigate the interaction between order assignment strategy and information disclosure, analyzed the moderating path of work experience and proactive personality. With a sample of 340 part-time and full-time couriers, experiment 1 results showed that the interaction between order assignment strategy and information disclosure in on-demand logistics significantly affects the continuance participation intention of couriers, especially under performance-priority order assignment strategy disclosure detailed information(vs. brief information), but under distance-priority order assignment strategy there were no difference in continuance participation intention between detailed and brief information disclosure which showed the ceiling effect of information disclosure, brief information already contains the basis information of distance-priority order assignment strategy, more detailed information would not improve continuous participation intention significantly. Information justice and distributive justice played a significant mediating role, and work experience and proactive personality moderate the above interaction relationships. However, the results of experiment 2 with a sample of 180 part-time couriers indicated that the mediating effect of distributive justice and the moderating effect of proactive personality were both insignificant, which showed the purposefulness and proactiveness characteristcs of part-time couriers, . The research reveals the mechanism of justice perception on continuous participation intention and the process of information understanding and utilization in crowdsourcing logistics platform, provided specific management suggestions for the platform to attract delivery capacity by setting order assignment strategy and information disclosure when the distribution income is gradually stabilized. Furture, more mechanism can be introduced with appropriate justice perception, and more group characteristics of crowdsourcing logistics participants can be considered

Are Large Language Models Ready for Healthcare? A Comparative Study on Clinical Language Understanding

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in various domains, including healthcare. However, the specialized nature of clinical language understanding tasks presents unique challenges and limitations that warrant further investigation. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs, namely GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Bard, within the realm of clinical language understanding tasks. These tasks span a diverse range, including named entity recognition, relation extraction, natural language inference, semantic textual similarity, document classification, and question-answering. We also introduce a novel prompting strategy, self-questioning prompting (SQP), tailored to enhance LLMs' performance by eliciting informative questions and answers pertinent to the clinical scenarios at hand. Our evaluation underscores the significance of task-specific learning strategies and prompting techniques for improving LLMs' effectiveness in healthcare-related tasks. Additionally, our in-depth error analysis on the challenging relation extraction task offers valuable insights into error distribution and potential avenues for improvement using SQP. Our study sheds light on the practical implications of employing LLMs in the specialized domain of healthcare, serving as a foundation for future research and the development of potential applications in healthcare settings.Comment: 19 pages, preprin