Processing and Functionality Improvements of Layer-By-Layer Assembled Multilayer Super Gas Barrier Nanocoatings

High oxygen barrier materials are becoming increasingly important for food packaging, pressurized systems, and flexible electronics protection. The widely used traditional aluminized plastics and inorganic gas barrier coatings (SiOx and AlxOy) exhibit low transparency and/or flexibility. Layer-by-layer assembly (LbL) provides a costeffective and environmental-friendly alternative, with lower oxygen permeability and greater transparency. This dissertation focuses on improvements of the coating process and development of new functionalities. Four studies are discussed in detail on this topic and two future research directions are also introduced. Layer-by-layer assembled multilayer nanocoatings have been shown to provide excellent oxygen barrier to poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) film, which is commonly used for encapsulation and packaging. Polymer-clay (polyethylenimine (PEI)/vermiculite (VMT)) and all-polymer ((PEI)/poly(acrylic acid) (PAA)) multilayer systems are shown to be equally beneficial as barrier coatings for polyolefin substrates (e.g., polyethylene and polypropylene), which suffer from a high oxygen transmission rate. A 30 bilayer PEI/VMT nanocoating reduces the OTR of biaxially oriented polypropylene (BOPP) by more than 160X, rivaling most inorganic coatings. WVTR is simultaneously reduced by 43%. In addition to VMT, montmorillonite (MMT) clay has been widely used to prepare gas barrier nanocoatings. In an effort to produce high oxygen barrier with fewer deposition steps, pH of the MMT aqueous suspension was reduced. In a PEI/PAA/PEI/MMT iii quadlayer system, the reduced pH of MMT causes the preceding PEI layer to be more charged, which results in more clay deposited. A compromise between high polyelectrolyte diffusion (high pH) and high clay deposition (low pH) was found at pH 6, where the best oxygen barrier is obtained. A 179 μm thick PET substrate, coated with just three quadlayers (44 nm thick), exhibits an undetectable oxygen transmission rate (< 0.005 cm3/(m2 day atm)). In another attempt to achieve better oxygen barrier of the PEI/MMT bilayer (BL) system, a “salty clay” strategy was carried out, where an “indifferent” electrolyte (NaCl) was introduced into the MMT suspension. NaCl alters the ionic strength of the clay suspension and subsequently changes the rheological behavior of clay platelets. As a result, a multilayer film with a more tortuous path and better clay coverage (and alignment) is produced. Lower OTR is achieved as a result of this structural engineering. An 8 BL PEI/MMT film, assembled with a clay suspension containing 5 mM NaCl, exhibits an order of magnitude reduction in OTR relative to its no-salt counterpart. The ability to self-repair after damaging (e.g., cracking) and restore original properties is highly desired for polymers and composites. The PEI/PAA nanocoating has the ability to self-heal after being cracked by stretching. Cracks in the film lead to loss of oxygen barrier. High humidity is employed as an external healing stimulus to repair these cracks. The OTR of a PEI/PAA multilayer nanocoating remains below detection after 10 stretching-healing cycles, which shows this healing process to be highly robust

Processing and Functionality Improvements of Layer-By-Layer Assembled Multilayer Super Gas Barrier Nanocoatings

High oxygen barrier materials are becoming increasingly important for food packaging, pressurized systems, and flexible electronics protection. The widely used traditional aluminized plastics and inorganic gas barrier coatings (SiOx and AlxOy) exhibit low transparency and/or flexibility. Layer-by-layer assembly (LbL) provides a costeffective and environmental-friendly alternative, with lower oxygen permeability and greater transparency. This dissertation focuses on improvements of the coating process and development of new functionalities. Four studies are discussed in detail on this topic and two future research directions are also introduced. Layer-by-layer assembled multilayer nanocoatings have been shown to provide excellent oxygen barrier to poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) film, which is commonly used for encapsulation and packaging. Polymer-clay (polyethylenimine (PEI)/vermiculite (VMT)) and all-polymer ((PEI)/poly(acrylic acid) (PAA)) multilayer systems are shown to be equally beneficial as barrier coatings for polyolefin substrates (e.g., polyethylene and polypropylene), which suffer from a high oxygen transmission rate. A 30 bilayer PEI/VMT nanocoating reduces the OTR of biaxially oriented polypropylene (BOPP) by more than 160X, rivaling most inorganic coatings. WVTR is simultaneously reduced by 43%. In addition to VMT, montmorillonite (MMT) clay has been widely used to prepare gas barrier nanocoatings. In an effort to produce high oxygen barrier with fewer deposition steps, pH of the MMT aqueous suspension was reduced. In a PEI/PAA/PEI/MMT iii quadlayer system, the reduced pH of MMT causes the preceding PEI layer to be more charged, which results in more clay deposited. A compromise between high polyelectrolyte diffusion (high pH) and high clay deposition (low pH) was found at pH 6, where the best oxygen barrier is obtained. A 179 μm thick PET substrate, coated with just three quadlayers (44 nm thick), exhibits an undetectable oxygen transmission rate (< 0.005 cm3/(m2 day atm)). In another attempt to achieve better oxygen barrier of the PEI/MMT bilayer (BL) system, a “salty clay” strategy was carried out, where an “indifferent” electrolyte (NaCl) was introduced into the MMT suspension. NaCl alters the ionic strength of the clay suspension and subsequently changes the rheological behavior of clay platelets. As a result, a multilayer film with a more tortuous path and better clay coverage (and alignment) is produced. Lower OTR is achieved as a result of this structural engineering. An 8 BL PEI/MMT film, assembled with a clay suspension containing 5 mM NaCl, exhibits an order of magnitude reduction in OTR relative to its no-salt counterpart. The ability to self-repair after damaging (e.g., cracking) and restore original properties is highly desired for polymers and composites. The PEI/PAA nanocoating has the ability to self-heal after being cracked by stretching. Cracks in the film lead to loss of oxygen barrier. High humidity is employed as an external healing stimulus to repair these cracks. The OTR of a PEI/PAA multilayer nanocoating remains below detection after 10 stretching-healing cycles, which shows this healing process to be highly robust

Moderating Effect of Ownership Concentration on the relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility and Earnings Management: Evidence from China

Recent financial scandals have shown that earnings management has seriously damaged the interests of stakeholders, while the importance that a company pays to stakeholders is a manifestation of its corporate social responsibility. This paper mainly studies the relationship between corporate social responsibility and earnings management and considers the influence of the ownership structure, which has both theoretical and practical significance in improving the level of corporate governance. This research selects 555 companies in the report released by RANKINS and CSMAR from 2012 to 2018 and uses STATA 16.0 to examine the relationship. The possible impact of equity concentration on CSR-EM is further analysed. The results demonstrate that corporate social responsibility is negatively associated with earnings management and it has a stronger adverse influence on real earnings management when compared with accrual earnings management. As the moderating variable, ownership concentration has positively adjusted the negative link of CSR-EM. It is suggested that companies should take ownership concentration into consideration when organizing the firm. When the shareholding is too concentrated, the company may fulfill its social responsibility for speculative purposes, and the possibility of earnings manipulation will increase. The contribution of this paper is twofold. The use of moderating variable enriches the literature among corporate social responsibility, earnings management and ownership concentration, which makes the research more in-depth. In addition, as the biggest developing financial market, China faces severe agency conflicts. All industries in China are taken as the research sample, which makes the results more realistic

Artificial Text Detection with Multiple Training Strategies

As the deep learning rapidly promote, the artificial texts created by generative models are commonly used in news and social media. However, such models can be abused to generate product reviews, fake news, and even fake political content. The paper proposes a solution for the Russian Artificial Text Detection in the Dialogue shared task 2022 (RuATD 2022) to distinguish which model within the list is used to generate this text. We introduce the DeBERTa pre-trained language model with multiple training strategies for this shared task. Extensive experiments conducted on the RuATD dataset validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Moreover, our submission ranked second place in the evaluation phase for RuATD 2022 (Multi-Class).Comment: Accepted by Dialogue-2022 Conference. 7 pages, 2 figures, 2 table

A One-Size-Fits-All Approach to Improving Randomness in Paper Assignment

The assignment of papers to reviewers is a crucial part of the peer review processes of large publication venues, where organizers (e.g., conference program chairs) rely on algorithms to perform automated paper assignment. As such, a major challenge for the organizers of these processes is to specify paper assignment algorithms that find appropriate assignments with respect to various desiderata. Although the main objective when choosing a good paper assignment is to maximize the expertise of each reviewer for their assigned papers, several other considerations make introducing randomization into the paper assignment desirable: robustness to malicious behavior, the ability to evaluate alternative paper assignments, reviewer diversity, and reviewer anonymity. However, it is unclear in what way one should randomize the paper assignment in order to best satisfy all of these considerations simultaneously. In this work, we present a practical, one-size-fits-all method for randomized paper assignment intended to perform well across different motivations for randomness. We show theoretically and experimentally that our method outperforms currently-deployed methods for randomized paper assignment on several intuitive randomness metrics, demonstrating that the randomized assignments produced by our method are general-purpose.Comment: 24 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables, neurips 2023 spotligh

The Physiological Mechanism of Improved Formaldehyde Resistance in Petunia hybrida Harboring a Mammalian cyp2e1 Gene

AbstractCytochrome P450 CYP2E1 is mainly present in hepatocytes in the livers of mammals, where it plays an important role in the metabolism of xenobiotic organic substances. Previous studies showed that transgenic petunia (Petunia hybrid) plants harboring a mammalian cyp2e1 gene (designated cyp2e1-transgenic petunia) exhibited increased resistance to formaldehyde stress. In this study, we used cyp2e1-transgenic petunia plants to analyze physiological indexes related to formaldehyde stress responses. The results indicated that under formaldehyde stress, the malondialdehyde content in cyp2e1-transgenic petunia plants was lower than in β-glucuronidase gene (gus)-transgenic and wild-type petunia plants. The activities of both superoxide dismutase and peroxidase in the cyp2e1-transgenic plants were higher than in gus-transgenic and wild-type plants. The alcohol dehydrogenase activity was slightly increased and more glutathione was consumed. Additionally, under formaldehyde stress, the levels of plant hormones including indole-3-acetic acid, zeatin and abscisic acid in cyp2e1-transgenic petunia plants displayed decreasing trends, whereas the level of gibberellic acid displayed an increasing trend. In contrast, the indole-3-acetic acid, zeatin and abscisic acid levels in gus-transgenic and wild-type petunia plants displayed increasing trends, whereas the gibberellic acid level displayed a decreasing trend. At 72h after incubation of 0.5g of cyp2e1-transgenic petunia plants in 40mL of treatment solution containing formaldehyde at 50mg · L−1, the formaldehyde content remaining in the treatment solution was close to zero while approximately half of original formaldehyde remained in the treatment solutions containing gus-transgenic and wild-type petunia plants

BatchNorm-based Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection

In weakly supervised video anomaly detection (WVAD), where only video-level labels indicating the presence or absence of abnormal events are available, the primary challenge arises from the inherent ambiguity in temporal annotations of abnormal occurrences. Inspired by the statistical insight that temporal features of abnormal events often exhibit outlier characteristics, we propose a novel method, BN-WVAD, which incorporates BatchNorm into WVAD. In the proposed BN-WVAD, we leverage the Divergence of Feature from Mean vector (DFM) of BatchNorm as a reliable abnormality criterion to discern potential abnormal snippets in abnormal videos. The proposed DFM criterion is also discriminative for anomaly recognition and more resilient to label noise, serving as the additional anomaly score to amend the prediction of the anomaly classifier that is susceptible to noisy labels. Moreover, a batch-level selection strategy is devised to filter more abnormal snippets in videos where more abnormal events occur. The proposed BN-WVAD model demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on UCF-Crime with an AUC of 87.24%, and XD-Violence, where AP reaches up to 84.93%. Our code implementation is accessible at https://github.com/cool-xuan/BN-WVAD

Assessing Knowledge Editing in Language Models via Relation Perspective

Knowledge Editing (KE) for modifying factual knowledge in Large Language Models (LLMs) has been receiving increasing attention. However, existing knowledge editing methods are entity-centric, and it is unclear whether this approach is suitable for a relation-centric perspective. To address this gap, this paper constructs a new benchmark named RaKE, which focuses on Relation based Knowledge Editing. In this paper, we establish a suite of innovative metrics for evaluation and conduct comprehensive experiments involving various knowledge editing baselines. We notice that existing knowledge editing methods exhibit the potential difficulty in their ability to edit relations. Therefore, we further explore the role of relations in factual triplets within the transformer. Our research results confirm that knowledge related to relations is not only stored in the FFN network but also in the attention layers. This provides experimental support for future relation-based knowledge editing methods.Comment: Work in progres

Association between a Polymorphism of Aminolevulinate Dehydrogenase (ALAD) Gene and Blood Lead Levels in Japanese Subjects

This cross-sectional study investigated the relationship between the aminolevulinate dehydrogenase (ALAD) genotype and blood lead levels among 101 Japanese workers. Blood lead concentration measurement, biomarkers, and genotyping were performed. The minor allele frequency (MAF) for ALAD (ALAD2) was 0.08. Although the blood lead level in the subjects with heterozygous GC genotype was significantly higher than those with homozygous GG genotype, there were no significant differences for hemoglobin, hematocrit, serum and urinary ALA levels among genotypes. ALAD2 genotype was significantly associated with the blood lead concentration, even in the environmental lead exposed subjects. Further confirmation with a large sample size is needed