Job Satisfaction and Its Determinants among Chinese Rural-to-urban Migrant Workers

Job satisfaction has been proved to be negatively correlated with labor mobility (Freeman, 1977). China faces a huge labor shortage and this problem worsens as migrant workers stay at their home provinces. This paper examines job satisfaction and its determinants among Chinese rural-urban migrant workers. This analysis is based on a number of previous theoretical and empirical studies. Data is used from the Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP) 2002 Rural-urban Migrant Household Survey. Migrant workers’ job satisfaction is proved to be much more sensitive to expected future income, and this paper ascertains the positive relations between expected future income and job satisfaction. Unlike previous studies, this paper finds that the greater the geographical distance is between a rural-urban migrant worker’ home province and current working province, the lower the migrant worker’ job satisfaction. However, the job satisfaction can be augmented if migrant workers have many friends in their working cities. Additionally, migrant workers’ job satisfaction is an inverted U-shaped curve in educational attainment. Being discriminated against by urban workers lowers migrant workers’ job satisfaction. This study carries some policy implications – softening institutional restrictions, enhancing the enforcement of the Labor Law, and emphasizing education in rural China – which may abbreviate the rift of the great labor shortage

Magnon dark modes and gradient memory

Extensive efforts have been expended in developing hybrid quantum systems to overcome the short coherence time of superconducting circuits by introducing the naturally long-lived spin degree of freedom. Among all the possible materials, single-crystal yttrium iron garnet has shown up very recently as a promising candidate for hybrid systems, and various highly coherent interactions, including strong and even ultra-strong coupling, have been demonstrated. One distinct advantage of these systems is that the spins are in the form of well-defined magnon modes, which allows flexible and precise tuning. Here we demonstrate that by dissipation engineering, a non-Markovian interaction dynamics between the magnon and the microwave cavity photon can be achieved. Such a process enables us to build a magnon gradient memory to store information in the magnon dark modes, which decouple from the microwave cavity and thus preserve a long life-time. Our findings provide a promising approach for developing long-lifetime, multimode quantum memories.Comment: 18 pages, 12 figure

Beyond Fairness: Age-Harmless Parkinson's Detection via Voice

Parkinson's disease (PD), a neurodegenerative disorder, often manifests as speech and voice dysfunction. While utilizing voice data for PD detection has great potential in clinical applications, the widely used deep learning models currently have fairness issues regarding different ages of onset. These deep models perform well for the elderly group (age $>$ 55) but are less accurate for the young group (age $\leq$ 55). Through our investigation, the discrepancy between the elderly and the young arises due to 1) an imbalanced dataset and 2) the milder symptoms often seen in early-onset patients. However, traditional debiasing methods are impractical as they typically impair the prediction accuracy for the majority group while minimizing the discrepancy. To address this issue, we present a new debiasing method using GradCAM-based feature masking combined with ensemble models, ensuring that neither fairness nor accuracy is compromised. Specifically, the GradCAM-based feature masking selectively obscures age-related features in the input voice data while preserving essential information for PD detection. The ensemble models further improve the prediction accuracy for the minority (young group). Our approach effectively improves detection accuracy for early-onset patients without sacrificing performance for the elderly group. Additionally, we propose a two-step detection strategy for the young group, offering a practical risk assessment for potential early-onset PD patients