Antibacterial Performance of a Cu-bearing Stainless Steel against Microorganisms in Tap Water

This document is the Accepted Manuscript of the following article: Mingjun Li, Li Nan, Dake xu, Guogang Ren, Ke Yang, ‘Antibacterial Performance of a Cu-bearing Stainless Steel against Microorganisms in Tap Water’, Journal of Materials Science & Technology, Vol. 31 (3): 243-251, March 2015, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmst.2014.11.016, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License CC BY NC-ND 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).Tap water is one of the most commonly used water resources in our daily life. However, the increasing water contamination and the health risk caused by pathogenic bacteria, such as Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli have attracted more attention. The mutualism of different pathogenic bacteria may diminish antibacterial effect of antibacterial agents. It was found that materials used for making pipe and tap played one of the most important roles in promoting bacterial growth. This paper is to report the performance of an innovative type 304 Cu-bearing stainless steel (304CuSS) against microbes in tap water. The investigation methodologies involved were means of heterotrophic plate count, contact angle measurements, scanning electron microscopy for observing the cell and subtract surface morphology, atomic absorption spectrometry for copper ions release study, and confocal laser scanning microscopy used for examining live/dead bacteria on normal 304 stainless steel and 304CuSS. It was found that the surface free energy varied after being immersed in tap water with polar component and Cu ions release. The results showed 304CuSS could effectively kill most of the planktonic bacteria (max 95.9% antibacterial rate), and consequently inhibit bacterial biofilms formation on the surface, contributing to the reduction of pathogenic risk to the surrounding environments.Peer reviewe

Improving Implicit Sentiment Learning via Local Sentiment Aggregation

Recent well-known works demonstrate encouraging progress in aspect-based sentiment classification (ABSC), while implicit aspect sentiment modeling is still a problem that has to be solved. Our preliminary study shows that implicit aspect sentiments usually depend on adjacent aspects' sentiments, which indicates we can extract implicit sentiment via local sentiment dependency modeling. We formulate a local sentiment aggregation paradigm (LSA) based on empirical sentiment patterns (SP) to address sentiment dependency modeling. Compared to existing methods, LSA is an efficient approach that learns the implicit sentiments in a local sentiment aggregation window, which tackles the efficiency problem and avoids the token-node alignment problem of syntax-based methods. Furthermore, we refine a differential weighting method based on gradient descent that guides the construction of the sentiment aggregation window. According to experimental results, LSA is effective for all objective ABSC models, attaining state-of-the-art performance on three public datasets. LSA is an adaptive paradigm and is ready to be adapted to existing models, and we release the code to offer insight to improve existing ABSC models.Comment: Source Code: https://github.com/yangheng95/PyABS

InstOptima: Evolutionary Multi-objective Instruction Optimization via Large Language Model-based Instruction Operators

Instruction-based language modeling has received significant attention in pretrained language models. However, the efficiency of instruction engineering remains low and hinders the development of instruction studies. Recent studies have focused on automating instruction generation, but they primarily aim to improve performance without considering other crucial objectives that impact instruction quality, such as instruction length and perplexity. Therefore, we propose a novel approach (i.e., InstOptima) that treats instruction generation as an evolutionary multi-objective optimization problem. In contrast to text edition-based methods, our approach utilizes a large language model (LLM) to simulate instruction operators, including mutation and crossover. Furthermore, we introduce an objective-guided mechanism for these operators, allowing the LLM to comprehend the objectives and enhance the quality of the generated instructions. Experimental results demonstrate improved fine-tuning performance and the generation of a diverse set of high-quality instructions.Comment: Accepted by EMNLP Finding

Clinical observation of phacoemulsification in patients with previous trabeculectomy

AIM: To observe the clinical effect of transparent corneal incision phacoemulsification in cataract patients who had undergone different kinds of glaucoma filtration surgeries.<p>METHODS: Totally 43 cases(50 eyes), in which 23 patients with primary angle-closure glaucoma(group A, 26 eyes)and 20 patients with primary open angle glaucoma(group B, 24 eyes), all had undergone glaucoma filtration surgery for more than 6 months. Visual acuity, intraocular pressure, slit lamp, gonioscope, corneal endothelial cell counts, <i>etc</i>., were done before surgery.And transparent corneal incision phacoemulsification combined with artificial lens implantation operation were preformed, postoperative follow-up of 3 to 12 months, visual acuity, intraocular pressure, corneal endothelial cell counts and vision field, <i>etc</i>. were observed and recorded.<p>RESULTS: The visual acuity of 50 eyes(100%)increased with different degree postoperatively, 41 eyes(82%)with postoperative visual acuity ≥0.3; average preoperative intraocular pressure: group A 18.08±5.08mmHg(1mmHg=0.133kpa), group B 14.48±3.52mmHg; Postoperative follow-up average intraocular pressure: group A 13.65±3.51mmHg, group B 14.28±3.41 mmHg, intraocular pressure changed significantly pre and post-operation in group A(<i>P</i><0.05), there was no significant difference between pre and post-operation in group B(<i>P</i>>0.05); Postoperative intraocular pressure of 1 eye in group A and 3 eyes in group B rose within three days post-operation, the intraocular pressure fluctuated between 21-33mmHg, with drug therapy and drug withdral when intraocular pressure epistrophy; Intraocular pressure was stable in the follow-up process.Corneal endothelial cell density: pre-operation group A was 2 293.57±352.24(cells/mm²), group B 2 658.14±458.69(cells/mm²), post- operation group A 2 175.95±379.16(cells/mm²), group B 2 442.97±477.30(cells/mm²), cell loss rate: 5.13% in group A, and 8.10% in group B. Postoperative visual acuity was related to vision field damage in patients, the more visual field damage, the longer the duration. <p>CONCLUSION: Visual function restore is stable in transparent corneal incision phacoemulsification in cataract patients who underwent glaucoma filtration surgeries; the intraocular pressure can be controlled effectively, and can further reduce the intraocular pressure of angle-closure glaucoma. Preoperative comprehensive evaluation of the affected eye and appropriate technique selection are benefit to the improvement of operation effect and the reduction of complications