Nationwide Assessment of Urban Surface Water Environment Status in China

In this study, the assessment of nationwide urban water environment status was conducted based upon a method of integrating both 70% of objective water quality and 30% of standard compliance percent compared with national standard limit of GB3838-2002 for Class III. The impact factors on urban water environment status were discussed. The results showed that the status of urban water environment could be graded into 5 types in China. The population density, water resources, urbanized areas and so on were key impact factors on water environment. The study found that population density and urban built-up area had significantly negative effect on urban water environment status, and there was positive relationship between per capita water resources and urban water environment status. The results would provide the guidance for effective governance and management of urban water environment at national level

MEMD-ABSA: A Multi-Element Multi-Domain Dataset for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-based sentiment analysis is a long-standing research interest in the field of opinion mining, and in recent years, researchers have gradually shifted their focus from simple ABSA subtasks to end-to-end multi-element ABSA tasks. However, the datasets currently used in the research are limited to individual elements of specific tasks, usually focusing on in-domain settings, ignoring implicit aspects and opinions, and with a small data scale. To address these issues, we propose a large-scale Multi-Element Multi-Domain dataset (MEMD) that covers the four elements across five domains, including nearly 20,000 review sentences and 30,000 quadruples annotated with explicit and implicit aspects and opinions for ABSA research. Meanwhile, we evaluate generative and non-generative baselines on multiple ABSA subtasks under the open domain setting, and the results show that open domain ABSA as well as mining implicit aspects and opinions remain ongoing challenges to be addressed. The datasets are publicly released at \url{https://github.com/NUSTM/MEMD-ABSA}

Negative thermal expansion in YbMn2Ge2 induced by the dual effect of magnetism and valence transition

AbstractNegative thermal expansion (NTE) is an intriguing property, which is generally triggered by a single NTE mechanism. In this work, an enhanced NTE (αv = −32.9 × 10−6 K−1, ΔT = 175 K) is achieved in YbMn2Ge2 intermetallic compound to be caused by a dual effect of magnetism and valence transition. In YbMn2Ge2, the Mn sublattice that forms the antiferromagnetic structure induces the magnetovolume effect, which contributes to the NTE below the Néel temperature (525 K). Concomitantly, the valence state of Yb increases from 2.40 to 2.82 in the temperature range of 300–700 K, which simultaneously causes the contraction of the unit cell volume due to smaller volume of Yb3+ than that of Yb2+. As a result, such combined effect gives rise to an enhanced NTE. The present study not only sheds light on the peculiar NTE mechanism of YbMn2Ge2, but also indicates the dual effect as a possible promising method to produce enhanced NTE materials

Influence of ambient media technologies on the city image formation

The paper demonstrates the importance of innovative advertising tools and explains the nature of Ambient Media. It analyses the influence of Ambient Media on the image of a city.Статья указывает на важность инновационных инструментов коммуникации, а также объясняет сущность технологии Ambient Media. Анализируется влияние технологии на формирование имиджа города

Shelf Life Prediction of UHT Milk Packaging Based on BP Neural Network

To investigate the effects of initial protein, fat content, and storage temperature on the shelf life of UHT pure milk packaging, three types of UHT pure milk were used as research objects to experimentally measure sample browning index and protein hydrolysis index during storage at 23, 30, and 37 ℃. Integrate the dataset and determine specific input parameters based on its performance on the prediction set, and carry out UHT pure milk packaging shelf life prediction based on BP neural network. The results showed that the fitting degrees of the BP neural network model for the browning index and protein hydrolysis index of UHT milk were 0.9412 and 0.9527, respectively, and compared with traditional multiple linear regression model’s number of 0.8799 and 0.9211, the BP neural network model with optimized hidden layer neuron numbers had higher prediction accuracy for the changes in characteristic indicators during the storage period of UHT pure milk, providing technical support for rapid and accurate prediction of the shelf life of UHT pure milk with different formulas

Evaluation of Changes in the Characteristic Flavor of Ultra-high Temperature Sterilized Milk under the Effects of Temperature and Light

In order to study changes in the characteristic flavor of ultra-high temperature sterilized (UHT) milk under the influence of storage temperature and light, headspace solid phase microextraction (SPME) combined with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) was used to detect the volatile flavor components of the product. Descriptive sensory evaluation, orthogonal partial least squares-discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) and entropy weight method were used to determine the relationship between major characteristic flavors and characteristic substances. The effects of temperature and light flux on the flavor changes of different formulations of UHT milk were analyzed, and a model for comprehensive analysis of the characteristic flavors of UHT milk was developed based on the effects of initial unsaturated fatty acid content, temperature and light flux. The results of this research provide support for the quality control of different formulations of UHT milk

Patterns of human social contact and contact with animals in Shanghai, China

East Asia is as a principal hotspot for emerging zoonotic infections. Understanding the likely pathways for their emergence and spread requires knowledge on human-human and human-animal contacts, but such studies are rare. We used self-completed and interviewer-completed contact diaries to quantify patterns of these contacts for 965 individuals in 2017/2018 in a high-income densely-populated area of China, Shanghai City. Interviewer-completed diaries recorded more social contacts (19.3 vs. 18.0) and longer social contact duration (35.0 vs. 29.1 hours) than self-reporting. Strong age-assortativity was observed in all age groups especially among young participants (aged 7–20) and middle aged participants (25–55 years). 17.7% of participants reported touching animals (15.3% (pets), 0.0% (poultry) and 0.1% (livestock)). Human-human contact was very frequent but contact with animals (especially poultry) was rare although associated with frequent human-human contact. Hence, this densely populated area is more likely to act as an accelerator for human-human spread but less likely to be at the source of a zoonosis outbreak. We also propose that telephone interview at the end of reporting day is a potential improvement of the design of future contact surveys

Streptococcal Toxic Shock Syndrome Caused by Streptococcus suis Serotype 2

BACKGROUND: Streptococcus suis serotype 2 ( S. suis 2, SS2) is a major zoonotic pathogen that causes only sporadic cases of meningitis and sepsis in humans. Most if not all cases of Streptococcal toxic shock syndrome (STSS) that have been well-documented to date were associated with the non-SS2 group A streptococcus (GAS). However, a recent large-scale outbreak of SS2 in Sichuan Province, China, appeared to be caused by more invasive deep-tissue infection with STSS, characterized by acute high fever, vascular collapse, hypotension, shock, and multiple organ failure. METHODS AND FINDINGS: We investigated this outbreak of SS2 infections in both human and pigs, which took place from July to August, 2005, through clinical observation and laboratory experiments. Clinical and pathological characterization of the human patients revealed the hallmarks of typical STSS, which to date had only been associated with GAS infection. Retrospectively, we found that this outbreak was very similar to an earlier outbreak in Jiangsu Province, China, in 1998. We isolated and analyzed 37 bacterial strains from human specimens and eight from pig specimens of the recent outbreak, as well as three human isolates and two pig isolates from the 1998 outbreak we had kept in our laboratory. The bacterial isolates were examined using light microscopy observation, pig infection experiments, multiplex-PCR assay, as well as restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLP) and multiple sequence alignment analyses. Multiple lines of evidence confirmed that highly virulent strains of SS2 were the causative agents of both outbreaks. CONCLUSIONS: We report, to our knowledge for the first time, two outbreaks of STSS caused by SS2, a non-GAS streptococcus. The 2005 outbreak was associated with 38 deaths out of 204 documented human cases; the 1998 outbreak with 14 deaths out of 25 reported human cases. Most of the fatal cases were characterized by STSS; some of them by meningitis or severe septicemia. The molecular mechanisms underlying these human STSS outbreaks in human beings remain unclear and an objective for further study