Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Low Prevalence of Inducible Macrolide, Lincosamide, and Streptogramin B Resistance Phenotype among Methicillin-Susceptible Staphylococcus aureus Isolated from Malaysian Patients and Healthy Individuals

Background Antibiotic resistance among Staphylococcus aureus is of great concern worldwide. This resistance is further complicated by the ability of S. aureus to confer cross-resistance to other antibiotics due to the presence of resistance genes, such as erythromycin resistance methylase (erm) genes, which render the bacterium resistant to macrolide-lincosamide-streptogramin B (MLSB) antibiotics. Resistance to these antibiotics can lead to therapeutic failure, resulting in significant morbidity and mortality in patients with S. aureus infections. Objectives This study was performed to examine the distribution of MLSB-resistant strains of methicillin-susceptible S. aureus (MSSA), which were obtained from hospitalized patients and normal healthy individuals (carriers) using phenotypic methods, such as the double-disk diffusion (D-test) and the genotypic method by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Methods A total of 183 nonduplicative MSSA isolates obtained from hospitalized patients (133) and carriers (50) in our previous studies were randomly selected for the D-test. The guidelines of the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) were used for the interpretation of the results of this test. The detection of ermA, ermB, ermC and msrA genes by PCR was performed for isolates that had positive D-test results and that were resistant to erythromycin. Results Of the 183 MSSA isolates, 97.2% and 98.4% were highly susceptible to erythromycin and clindamycin, respectively. MSLB resistance was detected in four isolates (2.2%). Of the 133 MSSA isolated from hospitalized patients, only 3.0% (4/133) and 2.3% (3/133) exhibited resistance to erythromycin and clindamycin, respectively. With regard to the MLSB resistance phenotypes, only 1.6% and 0.6% exhibited inducible MLSB (iMLSB) and MS phenotypes, respectively. The ermC gene was detected in all three iMLSB phenotypes, and the msrA gene was detected in the MS phenotype. Surprisingly, all MSSA isolates (100%) from carriers exhibited extremely high susceptibility to both antibiotics. Conclusions The prevalence rates of iMLSB MSSA isolates vary according to geographical locations and the local antibiotic policy. The low prevalence rate of iMLSB MSSA isolates could probably be related to the judicious use of antibiotics for treating S. aureus infections in our studied population. Nonetheless, continuous antibiotic surveillance is still necessary to control any emergence of resistance isolates so that targeted therapy and effective control can be implemented accordingly.
Personalized Recommender System for Digital Libraries

The huge amount of information available online has given rise to personalization and filtering systems. Recommender systems RS constitute a specific type of information filtering technique that present items according to user's interests. In this research, a web-based personalized recommender system capable of providing learners with books that suit their reading abilities was developed. Content-based filtering CBF was used to analyze learners' reading abilities while books that are found suitable to learners are recommended with fuzzy matching techniques. The yokefellow cold-start problem inherent to CBF is assuaged by cold start engine. An experimental study was carried out on a database of 10000 books from different categories of computing studies. The outcome tracked over a period of eight months shows that the proposed system induces greater user satisfaction and this attests users' desirability of the system.
Utility of GenBank and the Barcode of Life Data Systems (BOLD) for the identification of forensically important Diptera from Belgium and France

Abstract Fly larvae living on dead corpses can be used to estimate post-mortem intervals. The identification of these flies is decisive in forensic casework and can be facilitated by using DNA barcodes provided that a representative and comprehensive reference library of DNA barcodes is available. We constructed a local (Belgium and France) reference library of 85 sequences of the COI DNA barcode fragment (mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I gene), from 16 fly species of forensic interest (Calliphoridae, Muscidae, Fanniidae). This library was then used to evaluate the ability of two public libraries (GenBank and the Barcode of Life Data Systems – BOLD) to identify specimens from Belgian and French forensic cases. The public libraries indeed allow a correct identification of most specimens. Yet, some of the identifications remain ambiguous and some forensically important fly species are not, or insufficiently, represented in the reference libraries. Several search options offered by GenBank and BOLD can be used to further improve the identifications obtained from both libraries using DNA barcodes.
Double-agent architecture for collaborative supply chain formation

Supply chains have evolved to web-applications that tap on the power of internet to expand their networks online. Recently some research attention is focused on make-to-order supply chain formation where orders are scheduled to be optimally distributed among online manufacturers and suppliers for mutual benefits. A SET model was proposed in [1] using Pareto theories. The model is then extended into a collaborative manner throughout the whole supply chain by incorporating it with the Just-in-Time (JIT) principle, known as CSET. The CSET framework was proposed, and the advantage of time efficiency was shown in [2]. The core of the CSET model is based on intelligent agent technology. Specifically the model is supported by double-agent architecture with each type of agents who makes provisional plans of order distribution by Pareto optimality and JIT coordination respectively. This paper defines such double-agent mechanisms in details, as well as demonstrating its merits via simulation study.
Changes in Smoking Practices and the Process of Nicotine Dependence

Objectives: The aim of this study is to seek an effective way to support smoking cessation by analyzing any change to the pattern of nicotine dependence according to the change in time. Methods: The study was conducted with 800 male smokers who had participated in smoking cessation programs at public health centers from July 16, 2005 to July 15, 2008. Latent growth curve modeling approach was used for data analysis. Results: From the developmental trajectory of individual nicotine dependence, while nicotine dependence of smokers with high nicotine dependence in the first year was slightly decreased in the third year, smokers with low nicotine dependence in the year showed dramatically lower nicotine dependence in the third year. Compared with those who did not successfully quit smoking, the initial value of nicotine dependence of those who successfully quit smoking in the first and the second year was low. Over the years, nicotine dependence was decreased. Conclusion: From this study it was demonstrated that nicotine dependence was reduced through the practice of smoking cessation and reduced nicotine dependence was a factor which affects successful smoking cessation. These results indicate that multiple attempts to quit smoking finally reduces nicotine dependence. Reduced nicotine dependence is likely to increase the possibility of successful smoking cessation.
Evaluating the Diversity of Top-N Recommendations

In this paper we examine the diversity of recommendation algorithms, that is, their ability to recommend a broad range of relevant choices to the end-user. We tackle the question of how to evaluate recommendation algorithm diversity, critiquing methodologies that have been used in the state-of-the-art and proposing an alternative methodology that examines the extent to which the recommendation is concentrated in a sub-set of the catalogue.
Active composite right/left-handed leaky-wave antennas

A high-gain active CRLH LWA has been presented. Different modifications in the layout of the microstrip CRLH LW structure most commonly used up to now have been proposed. A remarkable reduction in the cross-polar component, increasing the XPD in more than 28 dB, and a beam forming from fan-beam to pencil-beam radiation pattern have been demonstrated. By means of the proper amplifier choice, the proposed maximum directivity design of the 2D active CRLH LWA can also be extended to different current distributions and may therefore be used for static or dynamic beam forming
MOSDEN: A Scalable Mobile Collaborative Platform for Opportunistic Sensing Applications

Mobile smartphones along with embedded sensors have become an efficient enabler for various mobile applications including opportunistic sensing. The hi-tech advances in smartphones are opening up a world of possibilities. This paper proposes a mobile collaborative platform called MOSDEN that enables and supports opportunistic sensing at run time. MOSDEN captures and shares sensor data across multiple apps, smartphones and users. MOSDEN supports the emerging trend of separating sensors from application-specific processing, storing and sharing. MOSDEN promotes reuse and re-purposing of sensor data hence reducing the efforts in developing novel opportunistic sensing applications. MOSDEN has been implemented on Android-based smartphones and tablets. Experimental evaluations validate the scalability and energy efficiency of MOSDEN and its suitability towards real world applications. The results of evaluation and lessons learned are presented and discussed in this paper.
The deployment of end-to-end available bandwidth estimation mechanism in web-based application

Bandwidth is one of the most common terms in digital communication as it represents the supported amount of data that a link or network path can send per unit of time. Multimedia application's performance is directly impacted by available bandwidth because these applications have diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Internet is now a necessary technology in our daily life, and because of mobile communication systems people can access the network anytime and anywhere, resulting in an increase in the number of users. Such evolution brings new services that will require more data rates. As a result of this load, some services and users in the network will demand for certain data rate which cannot be guaranteed. In the past, there have been several proposals that provide some mechanism for bandwidth estimation based on the size of web message and TCP/IP stack. However, these solutions tend to provide unreliable bandwidth estimation due to TCP/IP buffering. This paper proposes a bandwidth estimation mechanism (BEM) that is capable of providing reliable estimation of the available bandwidth to users or applications. The experimental results validate the intrusiveness and the ability of the proposed BEM to provide accurate bandwidth estimates.
Review Synthesis for Micro-Review Summarization

Micro-reviews is a new type of user-generated content arising from the prevalence of mobile devices and social media in the past few years. Micro-reviews are bite-size reviews (usually under 200 characters), commonly posted on social media or check-in services, using a mobile device. They capture the immediate reaction of users, and they are rich in information, concise, and to the point. However, the abundance of micro-reviews, and their telegraphic nature make it increasingly difficult to go through them and extract the useful information, especially on a mobile device. In this paper, we address the problem of summarizing the micro-reviews of an entity, such that the summary is representative, compact, and readable. We formulate the summarization problem as that of synthesizing a new ``review'' using snippets of full-text reviews. To produce a summary that naturally balances compactness and representativeness, we work within the Minimum Description Length framework. We show that finding the optimal summary is NP-hard, and we consider approximation and heuristic algorithms. We perform a thorough evaluation of our methodology on real-life data collected from Foursquare and Yelp. We demonstrate that our summaries outperform individual reviews, as well as existing summarization approaches.
Sleep apnoea in heart failure

Studies from the USA have reported that sleep apnoea is common in congestive heart failure (CHF), with Cheyne–Stokes respiration (CSR) being the most frequent type of sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) in these patients. Within the present study, the authors sought to assess the prevalence and type of SDB among CHF patients in Germany. A total of 203 CHF patients participated in this prospective multicentre study. All patients were stable in New York Heart Association classes II and III and had a left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) <40%. The patients were investigated by polygraphy and all data were centrally analysed. Patient enrolment was irrespective of sleep-related symptoms. The majority of patients were male with a mean age of 65 yrs and hospitalised. Of the 203 patients, 145 (71%) had an apnoea/hypopnoea index >10·h−1, obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) occurred in 43% (n = 88) and CSR in 28% (n = 57) of patients. The prevalence of sleep-disordered breathing is high in patients with stable severe congestive heart failure from a European population. As sleep-disordered breathing may have a negative impact on the prognosis of congestive heart failure, a sleep study should be performed in every patient with congestive heart failure and a left ventricular ejection fraction of <40%. This diagnostic approach should probably be adopted for all of these patients irrespective of the presence of sleep-related symptoms.
A hierarchical unsupervised growing neural network for clustering gene expression patterns

MOTIVATION We describe a new approach to the analysis of gene expression data coming from DNA array experiments, using an unsupervised neural network. DNA array technologies allow monitoring thousands of genes rapidly and efficiently. One of the interests of these studies is the search for correlated gene expression patterns, and this is usually achieved by clustering them. The Self-Organising Tree Algorithm, (SOTA) (Dopazo,J. and Carazo,J.M. (1997) J. Mol. Evol. , 44, 226-233), is a neural network that grows adopting the topology of a binary tree. The result of the algorithm is a hierarchical cluster obtained with the accuracy and robustness of a neural network. RESULTS SOTA clustering confers several advantages over classical hierarchical clustering methods. SOTA is a divisive method: the clustering process is performed from top to bottom, i.e. the highest hierarchical levels are resolved before going to the details of the lowest levels. The growing can be stopped at the desired hierarchical level. Moreover, a criterion to stop the growing of the tree, based on the approximate distribution of probability obtained by randomisation of the original data set, is provided. By means of this criterion, a statistical support for the definition of clusters is proposed. In addition, obtaining average gene expression patterns is a built-in feature of the algorithm. Different neurons defining the different hierarchical levels represent the averages of the gene expression patterns contained in the clusters. Since SOTA runtimes are approximately linear with the number of items to be classified, it is especially suitable for dealing with huge amounts of data. The method proposed is very general and applies to any data providing that they can be coded as a series of numbers and that a computable measure of similarity between data items can be used. AVAILABILITY A server running the program can be found at: http://bioinfo.cnio. es/sotarray.
Investigating Qualities of Teachers' Feedback Conversations for Fostering Reasoning and Feeling of Self-Worth in Learners: A tool called Feedback Mapping

Teacher feedback has been identified throughout the educational literature as a powerful classroom intervention. However few tools exist that allow teachers to understand their own feedback practice. This study details a m ethod for evaluating the feedback experiences of students. The feedback conversations of middle school science teachers were coded for length, initiation, reasoning, roles and critical position, and relationships between these qualities and student sense of self-worth wer e examined. Finding showed that feedback conversations tended to be short, rarely contained evidence of constructivist learning or reasoning, and teachers rarely expressed a critical position. It was also found that feedback experiences of students were tied to student self-w orth indicated by overall score in the class. From what is learned, a process called Feedback Map ping is developed to visually capture this information and future recommendations for use of this process as a formative teaching tool for practitioners are made.
A replication of the Nelson and Mitroff experiment in teaching "bothsides" thinking

A replication of Nelson and Mitroff's 1974 experiment in using computer gaming to teach Bothsides thinking was conducted in The Netherlands. Their results were not confirmed with regard to the attitude change of participants. The programmed well-defined problem did not trigger "bothsides" thinking, and, in our opinion, does not fit this mode of decision-making. In addition, we found the list of questions for measuring the "change of mind" of the players neither valid nor reliable. The provisional conclusions of the research reported here are that (1) an ill-defined rather than a well-defined problem is needed, (2) the problem should be relevant and realistic, (3) an analysis of the process of thinking while playing the game is a better measure of eventual changes in the mode of thinking of the participants than postgame pencil-and-paper attitude tests.
ALRP: scalability study of ant based local repair routing protocol for mobile adhoc networks

A mobile ad hoc network is a dynamic mobile wireless network that can be formed without the need for any pre-existing wired or wireless infrastructure. One of the main challenges in an ad hoc network is the design of robust routing algorithms that adapt to the frequent and randomly changing network topology. So there is a great need for a new routing protocol that have low routing message overhead to enhance the performance of MANET. The reduction of routing message overhead will decrease the wasted portions of bandwidth that used for exchange routing messages between nodes, and increase the bandwidth available for transferring data, which in turn increases the network throughput and decreases the latency. This paper proposes a new ant agent based Local repair routing protocol (ALRP) that decreases both of the routing message overhead and the average end to end delay by on average 28%, 14% respectively less than the well known AODV routing protocol. This led to increase the throughput by 24% more than AODV routing protocol.
Improving TFRC Performance against Bandwidth Change during Handovers

TCP-friendly rate control (TFRC) is a congestion control mechanism that can compete fairly with TCP while maintaining a much smoother transmission rate. The smoothness is achieved at the cost of responsiveness, which makes it slow to settle down when handed-over to a different network. In this paper we will study how to improve the TFRC performance when the available bandwidth is changed during a handover. An enhancement is proposed that can eliminate most of the heavy packet loss during a bandwidth-decreased handover. The definition and conditions of a smooth TFRC handover is also provided. The improvement over the original TFRC is proved with simulation results.
he reality of cross-disciplinary energy research in the United ingdom : A social science perspective

Cross-disciplinary research is essential in understanding and reducing energy usage, however the reality of this collaboration comes with many challenges. This paper provides an insight into the integration of social science in energy research, drawing on the expertise and first hand experiences of a range of social science researchers (predominantly Early Career Researchers (ECRs)) working on UK cross-disciplinary projects in energy demand. These researchers, participants in a workshop dedicated to understanding the integration of social science in energy research, identified four groups of challenges to successful integration: Differing expectations of the role of social scientists; Working within academia; Feeling like a valued member of the team; and Communicating and comprehension between disciplines. Suggestions of how to negotiate those challenges included: Management and planning; Increasing contact; Sharing experience; and Understanding team roles. The paper offers a definition of ‘success’ in cross-disciplinary energy research from the perspective of social science ECRs, comprising external, internal and personal components. Using the logics of interdisciplinarity, this paper suggests that integration of the social sciences in the projects discussed may be partial at best and highlights a need to recognise the challenges ECRs face, in order to achieve full integration and equality of disciplines. ublis © 2016 The Authors. P
Reasoning about the Reliability of Diverse Two-Channel Systems in Which One Channel Is "Possibly Perfect"

This paper refines and extends an earlier one by the first author [1]. It considers the problem of reasoning about the reliability of fault-tolerant systems with two “channels” (i.e., components) of which one, A, because it is conventionally engineered and presumed to contain faults, supports only a claim of reliability, while the other, B, by virtue of extreme simplicity and extensive analysis, supports a plausible claim of “perfection. ” We begin with the case where either channel can bring the system to a safe state. The reasoning about system probability of failure on demand (pfd) is divided into two steps. The first concerns aleatory uncertainty about 1) whether channel A will fail on a randomly selected demand and 2) whether channel B is imperfect. It is shown that, conditional upon knowing pA (the probability that A fails on a randomly selected demand) and pB (the probability that channel B is imperfect), a conservative bound on the probability that the system fails on a randomly selected demand is simply pA X pB. That is, there is conditional independence between the events “A fails” and “B is imperfect. ” The second step of the reasoning involves epistemic uncertainty, represented by assessors' beliefs about the distribution of (pA, pB), and it is here that dependence may arise. However, we show that under quite plausible assumptions, a conservative bound on system pfd can be constructed from point estimates for just three parameters. We discuss the feasibility of establishing credible estimates for these parameters. We extend our analysis from faults of omission to those of commission, and then combine these to yield an analysis for monitored architectures of a kind proposed for aircraft.
Addendum: Regularization and variable selection via the elastic net

We missed an important reference in Section 3.4. In page 309 we stated that ‘. which is based on the recently proposed algorithm LARS of Efron et al. (2004). They proved that, starting from zero, the lasso solution paths grow piecewise linearly in a predictable way. They proposed a new algorithm called LARS to solve the entire lasso solution path efficiently by using the same order of computations as a single OLS fit. ’ The following sentence should have been included. The piecewise linearity of the lasso solution path was first proved by Osborne et al. (2000), who also described an efficient algorithm for calculating the complete lasso solution path. Reference Osborne, M. R. , Presnell, B. and Turlach, B. A. (2000) A new approach to variable selection in least squares problems. IMA J. Numer. Anal. , 20, 389–403.