Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Emergence of VIM-producing Aeromonas caviae in Israeli hospitals.

OBJECTIVES Resistance to carbapenems in Aeromonas species is rare and mediated mostly by the chromosomal cphA gene. Our aims were to describe the molecular characteristics of the first cases of VIM-producing Aeromonas caviae isolated from human samples. METHODS Carbapenem-resistant Aeromonas (CRA) spp. were isolated from rectal surveillance cultures. Bacterial identification was done by dnaJ sequencing. Detection of metallo-carbapenemase and other β-lactamase genes was done by PCR. Molecular typing was done by PFGE. The genetic environment of the blaVIM gene was determined by sequencing. RESULTS Five CRA were isolated from surveillance cultures in 2010-13; four were from Shaare Zedek Medical Center and one was from Laniado Hospital. All five isolates were identified as A. caviae and comprised four different pulsotypes. MICs ranged from 0.5 to 8 mg/L for imipenem and from 0.25 to 8 mg/L for meropenem. All isolates were resistant to gentamicin, susceptible to amikacin and ciprofloxacin (except one), and were positive for carbapenemase production in the modified Hodge and Carba NP tests. The carbapenemase genes blaVIM-1 and blaVIM-35 were located inside a class I integron with two different sizes to its variable region. CONCLUSIONS This is the first report of blaVIM in A. caviae from human samples and the first report of VIM-producing Gram-negative bacteria in Israel. This finding is alarming as this species may spread via water or sewage systems. Although infection due to Aeromonas spp. is rare, the presence of the gene on a mobile element is of concern due to the potential for dissemination to clinically important Gram-negative pathogens.
How to Start a Conversation and Make Friends

For nearly twenty years, small-talk expert Don Gabor has helped thousands of people communicate with wit, confidence, and enthusiasm with his bestseller "How to Start a Conversation and Make Friends. " This new edition brings the art of having a conversation up to date. By following the simple and dynamic guidelines in this easy-to-read book, you'll be ready to strike up a great conversation with anyone anywhere! And you'll learn how to keep the conversation going by asking the right questions, using body language effectively, and avoiding conversation pitfalls. Packed with charts, hundreds of opening lines, real-life examples, FAQs, helpful hints, and solid professional advice, "How to Start a Conversation and Make Friends" shows you how to: Identify your personal conversational style Talk to people from other countries and cultures Avoid mistakes while on a mobile phone or on-line in chatrooms Boost your personal and professional speaking skills to the next level
Modeling and analysis of content identification

Content fingerprinting provides a compact content-based representation of a multimedia document. An important application of fingerprinting is the identification of modified copies of the original media content. These modifications may be incidental changes that occur during the usage of multimedia, or intentional modifications made by an adversary to avoid detection. Currently, the effectiveness of content identification techniques is often assessed through benchmark databases. To complement these experimental performance evaluations, this paper develops a theoretical framework for analyzing content identification techniques. Beneficial aspects from decision theory and game theory are exploited to gain insights toward optimal system design and parameter selection.
Mantel test in population genetics

The comparison of genetic divergence or genetic distances, estimated by pairwise FST and related statistics, with geographical distances by Mantel test is one of the most popular approaches to evaluate spatial processes driving population structure. There have been, however, recent criticisms and discussions on the statistical performance of the Mantel test. Simultaneously, alternative frameworks for data analyses are being proposed. Here, we review the Mantel test and its variations, including Mantel correlograms and partial correlations and regressions. For illustrative purposes, we studied spatial genetic divergence among 25 populations of Dipteryx alata (“Baru”), a tree species endemic to the Cerrado, the Brazilian savannas, based on 8 microsatellite loci. We also applied alternative methods to analyze spatial patterns in this dataset, especially a multivariate generalization of Spatial Eigenfunction Analysis based on redundancy analysis. The different approaches resulted in similar estimates of the magnitude of spatial structure in the genetic data. Furthermore, the results were expected based on previous knowledge of the ecological and evolutionary processes underlying genetic variation in this species. Our review shows that a careful application and interpretation of Mantel tests, especially Mantel correlograms, can overcome some potential statistical problems and provide a simple and useful tool for multivariate analysis of spatial patterns of genetic divergence.
Case-based Reasoning for the Case Method the Case Method Ajax Manufacturing Company: Filing Re- Ceiving Clerks' Copy of Purchase Order

Eighty-ve years ago, Harvard created a business school to train the leaders of industry and commerce. Within a decade, Harvard had insti-tutionalized case study as its primary teaching method in the business school. Today, the case method is a xture at most business schools. An average MBA student prepares (or is supposed to prepare) up to 600 cases during his or her two years in graduate school. The contrasts between the case method and traditional teaching methods are similar to those between case-based reasoning and rule-based systems. In this paper, we discuss the case method and compare it with the paradigm of case-based reasoning. We describe a computer system designed to extend the case method with the application of case-based reasoning. The implementation of this system requires the development of an indexing scheme and content theory of the goals, strategies, and explanations of business decision making. In 1908, Harvard decided to open a business school. The University of Pennsylvania and Dartmouth already had such schools, but Harvard soon set the standard through the use of the case method. According to Gragg (1954) a business case is: a record of a business issue which actually has been faced by business executives, together with surrounding facts, opinions, and prejudices upon which executive decisions had to depend. These real and particularized cases are presented to students for considered analysis, open discussion and nal decision as to the type of action which should be taken. The case method had ardent proponents in its early days, including the president of Harvard. The case method of business training is deemed the best preparation for business life, because the discussion of questions by the banker, the manufacturer , the merchant, or the transporter consists of discerning the essential elements in a situation and applying to them the principles of organization and trade. His most important work consists of solving problems and for this he must have the faculty of rapid analysis and synthesis. (President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, circa 1920, reprinted in Christensen, 1987].) Given that there were no libraries of cases upon which to draw, Harvard started collecting and writing its own cases { a process which continues to this day. Harvard hired its own MBA graduates to write cases. Early Harvard cases were simple. Here is one in its entirety (reported in Christensen, 1987]). The Ajax Manufacturing Company has, for the past ve years, …
Estimate Gaze Density by Incorporating Emotion

Gaze density estimation has attracted many research efforts in the past years. The factors considered in the existing methods include low level feature saliency, spatial position, and objects. Emotion, as an important factor driving attention, has not been taken into account. In this paper, we are the first to estimate gaze density through incorporating emotion. To estimate the emotion intensity of each position in an image, we consider three aspects, generic emotional content, facial expression intensity, and emotional objects. Generic emotional content is estimated by using Multiple instance learning, which is employed to train an emotion detector from weakly labeled images. Facial expression intensity is estimated by using a ranking method. Emotional objects are detected, by taking blood/injury and worm/snake as examples. Finally, emotion intensity, low level feature saliency, and spatial position, are fused, through a linear support vector machine, to estimate gaze density. The performance is tested on public eye tracking dataset. Experimental results indicate that incorporating emotion does improve the performance of gaze density estimation.
Impact of Customer-Supplier Relationship Change on Engineering Organizations (A Systems Approach)

This research paper studies the customer - supplier relationship change from an "in-house" to an "open market" relationship in the context of the customer's merger with another organization. All the researched engineering organizations operate on the Telecommunications market. This complex environment is analyzed using the Soft System Methodology and results in a system model containing the most relevant functions for the change situation. Besides the theoretical model the paper concludes with recommendations for managing similar situations which can be used by practitioners as best practices.
Polynomial-Time Approximation Schemes for k-Center and Bounded-Capacity Vehicle Routing in Metrics with Bounded Highway Dimension

The concept of bounded highway dimension was developed to capture observed properties of the metrics of road networks. We show that a graph with bounded highway dimension, for any vertex, can be embedded into a a graph of bounded treewidth in such a way that the distance between $u$ and $v$ is preserved up to an additive error of $\epsilon$ times the distance from $u$ or $v$ to the selected vertex. We show that this theorem yields a PTAS for Bounded-Capacity Vehicle Routing in graphs of bounded highway dimension. In this problem, the input specifies a depot and a set of clients, each with a location and demand; the output is a set of depot-to-depot tours, where each client is visited by some tour and each tour covers at most $Q$ units of client demand. Our PTAS can be extended to handle penalties for unvisited clients. We extend this embedding result to handle a set $S$ of distinguished vertices. The treewidth depends on $|S|$, and the distance between $u$ and $v$ is preserved up to an additive error of $\epsilon$ times the distance from $u$ and $v$ to $S$. This embedding result implies a PTAS for Multiple Depot Bounded-Capacity Vehicle Routing: the tours can go from one depot to another. The embedding result also implies that, for fixed $k$, there is a PTAS for $k$-Center in graphs of bounded highway dimension. In this problem, the goal is to minimize $d$ such that there exist $k$ vertices (the centers) such that every vertex is within distance $d$ of some center. Similarly, for fixed $k$, there is a PTAS for $k$-Median in graphs of bounded highway dimension. In this problem, the goal is to minimize the sum of distances to the $k$ centers.
DYNAMIC RESPONSE OF REINFORCED CONCRETE COLUMNS TO MULTIDIRECTIONAL EXCITATIONS

The results are presented for a preliminary series of analytical and experimental studies of circular reinforced concrete bridge columns subjected to one and two horizontal components of excitation. The purpose of these studies is to assess the effects of multi-direction seismic input, the influence of different ground motion characteristics, and the reliability of various analysis methods. Four identical columns were constructed and tested in pairs using two different ground motion records. Results show that the bi-directional response is for the columns considered similar to that observed under only one component of excitation. Bi-directional response also resulted in a slower accumulation of visible damage and deterioration in performance. Analysis results indicated that elastic and inelastic idealisations were able to predict peak response well, but details of response were difficult to predict with conventional models.
Comparing Outcomes Associated With Dose Manipulations of Enteric-Coated Mycophenolate Sodium Versus Mycophenolate Mofetil in Renal Transplant Recipients

Background. This study assessed the incidence of reported gastrointestinal (GI) complications in patients treated with enteric-coated mycophenolate sodium (EC-MPS) versus mycophenolate mofetil (MMF) and to examine the impact of dose manipulations on biopsy-proven acute rejection (BPAR). Methods. A retrospective study was conducted in 379 renal transplant recipients initiated on EC-MPS or MMF through 3-months posttransplant between the years of 2001 to 2007. Descriptive univariate analyses were used for comparisons of baseline characteristics and outcome measures between the cohorts. A Cox proportional hazards model was used to evaluate the time to a first BPAR event. Results. GI complications occurred at an incidence of 52.8% and 48.9% in the EC-MPS and MMF cohorts, respectively (NS). Patients requiring dose manipulations due to GI complications were 19.7% with EC-MPS and 25.3% with MMF (NS). The mean equimolar dose reduction below 2000 mg was 930±292.13 mg with EC-MPS and 933±173.95 mg with MMF (NS). Patients treated with EC-MPS experienced significantly fewer BPAR episodes than those treated with MMF (14% EC-MPS vs. 23.1% MMF; P =0.0221). Conclusions. In this study, EC-MPS had a similar incidence of GI complications and dose manipulations compared with MMF. Despite similar GI complication rates and dose manipulations, treatment with EC-MPS seemed to result in a lower incidence of BPAR. Based on these observations, more studies need to be conducted to evaluate risks for BPAR relating to mycophenolic acid product.
Combining Candidate and Document Models for Expert Search

We describe our participation in the TREC 2008 Enterprise track and detail our lan- guage modeling-based approaches. For document search, our focus was on query expansion us- ing profiles of top ranked experts and on docu- ment priors. We found that these techniques result in small, but noticeable improvements over our baseline method. For expert search, we combine candidate- and document-based models, and also bring in web evidence. We found that the com- bined models significantly and consistently out- performed our very competitive baseline models.
Coarse Fingerprint Registration Using Orientation Fields

The majority of traditional research into automated fingerprint identification has focused on algorithms using minutiae-based features. However, shortcomings of this approach are becoming apparent due to the difficulty of extracting minutiae points from noisy or low-quality images. Therefore, there has been increasing interest in algorithms based on nonminutiae features in recent years. One vital stage in most fingerprint verification systems is registration, which involves recovering the transformation parameters that align features from each fingerprint. This paper investigates the use of orientation fields for registration; an approach that has the potential to perform robustly for poor-quality images. Three diverse algorithms have been implemented for the task. The first algorithm is based on the generalized Hough transform, and it works by accumulating evidence for transformations in a discretized parameter space. The second algorithm is based on identifying distinctive local orientations, and using these as landmarks for alignment. The final algorithm follows the path of steepest descent in the parameter space to quickly find solutions that are locally optimal. The performance of these three algorithms is evaluated using an FVC2002 dataset.
Evolution of a persistent aphthovirus in cytolytic infections: partial reversion of phenotypic traits accompanied by genetic diversification

Foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) shows a dual potential to be cytolytic or to establish persistent infections in cell culture. FMDV R100, a virus rescued after 100 passages of carrier BHK-21 cells persistently infected with FMDV clone C-S8c1, showed multiple genetic and phenotypic alterations relative to the parental clone C-S8c1. Several FMDV R100 populations have been subjected to 100 serial cytolytic infections in BHK-21 cells, and the reversion of phenotypic and genetic alterations has been analyzed. An extreme temperature sensitivity of R100 reverted totally or partially in some passage series but not in others. The small-plaque morphology reverted to normal size in all cases. The hypervirulence for BHK-21 cells did not revert, and even showed an increase, upon cytolytic passage. Most of the mutations that had been fixed in the R100 genome during persistence did not revert in the course of cytolytic passages, but the extended polyribocytidylate tract of R100 (about 460 residues, versus 290 in C-S8c1) decreased dramatically in length, to the range of 220 to 260 residues in all passage series examined. In passages involving very large viral populations, a variant with two amino acid substitutions (L-144-->V and A-145-->P) next to the highly conserved Arg-Gly-Asp (RGD motif; positions 141 to 143) within the G-H loop of capsid protein VP1 became dominant. A clonal analysis allowed isolation of a mutant with the single replacement A-145-->P. Viral production and growth competition experiments showed the two variants to have a fitness very close to that of the parental virus. The results provide evidence that the repertoire of variants that could potentially become dominant in viral quasispecies may be influenced by the population size of the evolving virus. The net results of a series of persistent-infection passages followed by a series of cytolytic passages was progressive genomic diversification despite reversion or stasis of phenotypic traits. Implications for the evolution of RNA viruses are discussed.
How schools influence students' academic achievements: a behavioral approach with empirical evidence from add health data

This paper proposes a behavioral model to study how schools influence students’ educational behavior and academic achievements. The school quality is then defined into two dimensions: the amount of market-valued skills schools impart and how well schools cultivate an educational identity. Using data from Add Health in the US, I test the major hypotheses from the theoretical model. On the one hand, school resources (average class size and teacher supply) and student-level curriculum have some effects on the math GPA scores. On the other hand, educational identity indicators (school-level happiness and participation at school teams, clubs or organizations) and the previous math GPA scores are significant determinants in students’ observable effort level such as absenteeism behavior, and through this channel both determinants indirectly influence math GPA achievement. These empirical results inform us that an identity-based behavioral model adds to a rational expectation educational choice model in understanding the widening academic achievement gap between adolescents from different socioeconomic backgrounds. The paper presents the limitation of using school resources to study the school quality and advocates a richer set of school quality measures.
A framework for applying explanations of alcohol-related aggression to naturally occurring aggressive behavior

This paper provides a framework in which theories/explanations of alcohol-related aggression are identified and operationalized in such a way that they can be applied systematically to naturally occurring aggressive behavior associated with alcohol use. Summaries of explanations are provided along with a brief discussion of how these explanations might be assessed using real-world data. Explanations are grouped by whether they are based on: (a) the effects of alcohol; (b) the drinking set or setting; or (c) expectations and other characteristics of individual drinkers. These explanations are then assessed in terms of relevance and applicability to two examples of naturally occurring incidents of aggression, one based on unobtrusive observation, the second elicited as part of a telephone interview study.
Horizontol dissemination of TEM- and SHV-typr beta-lactamase genes-carrying resistance plasmids amongst clonical isolates of Enterobacteriaceae

The extended-spectrum β-lactamase (ESBL)-producing bacteria have been isolated at increasing frequency worldwide. Expression of ESBL is often associated with multidrug resistance and dissemination by resistance plasmids. During a two-month period in 2000, 133 clinical isolates of enterobacterial strains were randomly collected from outpatients and inpatients at a university hospital in Turkey. The ESBL producing strains were determined by double-disk synergy (DDS) testing. Twenty ESBL producing strains (15%) including Escherichia coli (n = 9), Klebsiella pneumoniae (n = 7), Klebsiella oxytoca (n = 2) and Enterobacter aerogenes (n = 2) were detected and further analyzed for their resistance transfer features, plasmid profile and nature of the resistance genes. Plasmid transfer assays were performed using broth mating techniques. TEM- and SHV- genes were analyzed by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and hybridization using specific probes. EcoRI restriction enzyme analyses of R plasmids were used in the detection of epidemic plasmids. Fourteen plasmid profiles (A, B1, B2, C1, and C2 to L) were obtained with EcoRI restriction enzyme analysis. Most of these plasmids were detected to carry both TEM- and SHV-derived genes by PCR, and confirmed by localizing each gene by hybridization assay. Epidemiological evidence indicated that there was an apparent horizontal dissemination of conjugative R plasmids among multidrug-resistant enterobacterial genera and species in this hospital.
Mining temporal mobile sequential patterns in location-based service environments

In recent years, a number of studies have been done on location-based service (LBS) due to the wide applications. One important research issue is the tracking and prediction of users' mobile behavior. In this paper, we propose a novel data mining algorithm named TMSP-Mine for efficiently discovering the temporal mobile sequential patterns (TMSPs) of users in LBS environments. To our best knowledge, this is the first work on mining the mobile sequential patterns associated with moving paths and time intervals in LBS environments. Furthermore, we propose novel location prediction strategies that utilize the discovered TMSPs to effectively predict the next movement of mobile users. Finally, we conducted a series of experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed method under different system conditions by varying various parameters.
Merged capacitor switching based SAR ADC with highest switching energy-efficiency

A modified merged capacitor switching (MCS) scheme is proposed for the successive approximation register (SAR) analogue-to-digital converter (ADC). The conventional MCS technique previously applied to a pipelined ADC improves signal processing speed and, with use in the SAR ADC, this scheme achieves lowest switching energy among existing switching schemes. The MCS scheme achieves 93.4% less switching energy as compared to the conventional architecture.