Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Relevance of vancomycin-intermediate susceptibility and heteroresistance in methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteraemia.

OBJECTIVES To assess the relevance of vancomycin-intermediate susceptibility (VISA) and heteroresistance (hVISA) in methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteraemia. METHODS We determined vancomycin MICs for 371 saved MRSA blood isolates (2002-03; 2005-06) by Etest and broth microdilution (BMD), screened for hVISA (Etest methods), determined the population analysis profile (PAP)/AUC for isolates with suspected reduced susceptibility (MICs >2 mg/L and/or hVISA-screen-positive versus Mu3 (hVISA control), and stratified patient characteristics and outcome according to susceptibility phenotype: VISA (PAP/AUC >1.3), hVISA (PAP/AUC 0.9-1.3), and susceptible (S-MRSA; PAP/AUC <0.9). RESULTS PAP/AUC revealed 6 (1.6%) VISA and 30 (8.1%) hVISA phenotypes. The Etest MIC was above the susceptibility cut-off (2 mg/L) for all VISA isolates, whereas the BMD MIC was within the susceptibility range in two (33.3%) instances. Eight hVISA isolates (26.7%) with MICs of 2 mg/L were hVISA-screen negative. SCCmec typing revealed SCCmec II in 100% of VISA, 86.7% of hVISA and 75.5% of S-MRSA isolates (P = 0.04). Prior vancomycin use was documented in 100% of VISA, 73.3% of hVISA and 52.2% of S-MRSA cases (P = 0.002). Outcome (compared in 243 vancomycin-treated patients with MICs of 2 mg/L) revealed longer time to clearance in VISA cases [12.1 ± 13.1 days versus 3.3 ± 3.9 (hVISA) and 3.7 ± 5.1 (S-MRSA); P = 0.001], more frequent endocarditis [33.3% versus 9.1% (hVISA; P = 0.1) and 4.2% (S-MRSA; P = 0.001)] and attributable mortality [33.3% versus 9.1% (hVISA; P = 0.1) and 8.4% (S-MRSA); P = 0.08]. CONCLUSIONS No adverse outcome was documented with hVISA phenotype, whereas VISA contributed to vancomycin treatment failure. VISA and hVISA appear to emerge in SCCmec II isolates among vancomycin-exposed patients and are better detected by Etest.
Interference limits resolution of selection pressures from linked neutral diversity

Pervasive natural selection can strongly influence observed patterns of genetic variation, but these effects remain poorly understood when multiple selected variants segregate in nearby regions of the genome. Classical population genetics fails to account for interference between linked mutations, which grows increasingly severe as the density of selected polymorphisms increases. Here, we describe a simple limit that emerges when interference is common, in which the fitness effects of individual mutations play a relatively minor role. Instead, molecular evolution is determined by the variance in fitness within the population, defined over an effectively asexual segment of the genome (a ``linkage block''). We exploit this insensitivity in a new ``coarse-grained'' coalescent framework, which approximates the effects of many weakly selected mutations with a smaller number of strongly selected mutations with the same variance in fitness. This approximation generates accurate and efficient predictions for the genetic diversity that cannot be summarized by a simple reduction in effective population size. However, these results suggest a fundamental limit on our ability to resolve individual selection pressures from contemporary sequence data alone, since a wide range of parameters yield nearly identical patterns of sequence variability.
Evidence to suggest that nightclubs function as human sexual display grounds

Summary Young, sexually mature humans Homo sapiens sapiens of both sexes commonly congregate into particular but arbitrary physical locations and dance. These may be areas of traditional use, such as nightclubs, discotheques or dance-halls or areas that are temporarily commissioned for the same purpose such as at house parties or rock festivals etc. This type of behaviour is seen in a variety of animals although there are no apparent attempts to monopolize particular areas within these locations as is often seen in species that lek. The present studies were conducted in order to investigate this phenomenon in a commercial nightclub environment. Data revealed that more than 80% of people entering the nightclub did so without a partner and so were potentially sexually available. There was also an approx. 50% increase in the number of couples leaving the nightclub as compared to those entering it seen on each occasion this was measured, indicating that these congregations are for sexual purposes. Within the nightclub itself more than 80% of bouts of mixed sex dancing were initiated by a male approaching a female, demonstrating that males are stimulated to approach females rather than vice versa. In consequence, females are placed in competition with each other to attract these approaches. Various female display tactics were measured and these showed that whilst only 20% of females wore tight fitting clothing that revealed more than 40% of their flesh/50% of their breast area and danced in a sexually suggestive manner, these attracted close to half (49%) of all male approaches seen. These data reveal the effectiveness of clothing and dance displays in attracting male attention and strongly indicate that nightclubs are human display grounds, organised around females competing for the attention of males. Females with the most successful displays gain the advantage of being able to choose from amongst a range of males showing interest in them.
Notice of RetractionOptimal portfolio of minimizing CVaR for fractional Brownian motion

The fractional Brownian motion has played an increasingly important role in many elds of application. This paper is to study the application of fractional Brownian motion in optimal portfolio of risk assets. The CVaR explicit formula of portfolio for fractional Brownian motion is derived, then the mathematical model of optimal portfolio and the relative Newton numerical method are presented. In particular, an application to stock markets illustrates this procedure. The results show that the optimal portfolio of fractional Brownian motion is better than the optimal portfolio of standard Brownian motion in two aspects of mean return and extreme loss.
Attitudes of pharmacists towards e-pharmacy application: A work in progress research on medula project

In Turkey, there have been a number of projects conducted to provide health services by information and communication technologies (ICT). The aim of these projects is to provide health services in the best form and establishing a network among patients and health foundations. Although these systems provide useful functionalities in theory, they have been frequently questioned for user acceptance of these functionalities in practice. In this study, a web-based application which is used by pharmacists named as Medula will be investigated for its adoption by pharmacists in Turkey, which is also important for being the first study in pharmaceutical field in the literature. Influencing factors that affect user adoption were identified and measured by a survey study on pharmacists. According to the results, survey items were found reliable and applicable for the next study with a large sample group. It is believed that this study will be a valuable asset for the researchers and developers in pharmaceutical technology adoption studies.
Bud‐burst modelling in Siberia and its impact on quantifying the carbon budget

Vegetation phenology is affected by climate change and in turn feeds back on climate by affecting the annual carbon uptake by vegetation. To quantify the impact of phenology on terrestrial carbon fluxes, we calibrate a bud‐burst model and embed it in the Sheffield dynamic global vegetation model (SDGVM) in order to perform carbon budget calculations.
Quality control for real-time ubiquitous crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing has become a successful paradigm in the past decade, as Web 2.0 users have taken a more active role in producing content as well as consuming it. Recently this paradigm has broadened to incorporate ubiquitous applications, in which the smart-phone users contribute information about their surrounding, thus providing a collective knowledge about the physical world. However the acceptance and openness of such applications has made it easy to contribute poor quality content. Various solutions have been proposed for the Web-based domain, to assist with monitoring and filtering poor quality content, but these methods fall short when applied to ubiquitous crowdsourcing, where the task of collecting information has to be performed continuously and in real-time, by an always changing crowd. In this paper we discuss the challenges for quality control in ubiquitous crowdsorucing and propose a novel technique that reasons on users mobility patterns and quality of their past contributions to estimate user's credibility.
Ethical Dilemmas for the School Counselor: Balancing Student Confidentiality and Parents’ Right to Know

Professional School Counselors have a variety of roles and responsibilities to students, teachers, parents, and administrators. School counselors must collaborate with both the students and other stakeholders – in this case, usually parents and teachers. Consultation and collaboration with stakeholders can be carried out through team meetings or child study teams, with all relevant parties present. Such gatherings, while beneficial to everyone involved, can potentially bring about ethical dilemmas for school counselors. This article will examine the function of child study teams, the counselor’s role as consultant within the team, and what ethical issues might arise in this role. Recommendations for avoiding and resolving such potential dilemmas are provided. According to the American School Counseling Association (2004), it is the responsibility of the school counselor to help a child develop effective coping skills, identify personal strengths and assets, and recognize and express feelings, as well as to provide a foundation for the child’s personal and social growth as he or she progresses through school into adulthood. As part of this process, school counselors must collaborate with both the students and other stakeholders – in this case, usually parents and teachers. Consultation and collaboration with stakeholders can be carried out through team meetings or child study teams, with all relevant parties present. Such gatherings, while beneficial to everyone involved, can potentially bring about ethical dilemmas for school counselors. Various quandaries might arise when a counselor must balance student confidentiality with the provision of essential information to the child study team, as well as taking into account parents’ right to know. As a result of their participation in child study teams, school counselors must often make difficult ethical decisions based on confidentiality, their
Approximation Algorithms for the Euclidean Traveling Salesman Problem with Discrete and Continuous Neighborhoods

In the Euclidean traveling salesman problem with discrete neighborhoods, we are given a set of points P in the plane and a set of n connected regions (neighborhoods), each containing at least one point of P. We seek to find a tour of minimum length which visits at least one point in each region. We give (i) an O(α)-approximation algorithm for the case when the regions are disjoint and α-fat, with possibly varying size; (ii) an O(α3)-approximation algorithm for intersecting α-fat regions with comparable diameters. These results also apply to the case with continuous neighborhoods, where the sought TSP tour can hit each region at any point. We also give (iii) a simple O(log n)-approximation algorithm for continuous non-fat neighborhoods. The most distinguishing features of these algorithms are their simplicity and low running-time complexities.
Allelochemical stress inhibits growth, leaf water relations, PSII photochemistry, non-photochemical fluorescence quenching, and heat energy dissipation in three C3 perennial species

In this study, the effect of two allelochemicals, benzoxazolin-2(3H)-one (BOA) and cinnamic acid (CA), on different physiological and morphological characteristics of 1-month-old C3 plant species (Dactylis glomerata, Lolium perenne, and Rumex acetosa) was analysed. BOA inhibited the shoot length of D. glomerata, L. perenne, and R. acetosa by 49%, 19%, and 19% of the control. The root length of D. glomerata, L. perenne, and R. acetosa growing in the presence of 1.5 mM BOA and CA was decreased compared with the control. Both allelochemicals (BOA, CA) inhibited leaf osmotic potential (LOP) in L. perenne and D. glomerata. In L. perenne, Fv/Fm decreased after treatment with BOA (1.5 mM) while CA (1.5 mM) also significantly reduced Fv/Fm in L. perenne. Both allelochemicals decreased ΦPSII in D. glomerata and L. perenne within 24 h of treatment, while in R. acetosa, ΦPSII levels decreased by 72 h following treatment with BOA and CA. There was a decrease in qP and NPQ on the first, fourth, fifth, and sixth days after treatment with BOA in D. glomerata, while both allelochemicals reduced the qP level in R. acetosa. There was a gradual decrease in the fraction of light absorbed by PSII allocated to PSII photochemistry (P) in R. acetosa treated with BOA and CA. The P values in D. glomerata were reduced by both allelochemicals and the portion of absorbed photon energy that was thermally dissipated (D) in D. glomerata and L. perenne was decreased by BOA and CA. Photon energy absorbed by PSII antennae and trapped by ‘closed’ PSII reaction centres (E) was decreased after CA exposure in D. glomerata. BOA and CA (1.5 mM concentration) decreased the leaf protein contents in all three perennial species. This study provides new understanding of the physiological and biochemical mechanisms of action of BOA and CA in one perennial dicotyledon and two perennial grasses. The acquisition of such knowledge may ultimately provide a rational and scientific basis for the design of safe and effective herbicides.
Application of grid-based C-means clustering algorithm for image segmentation

C-means clustering algorithms have proven effective for image segmentation, but are limited by the following aspects: 1) the determination of a priori number of clusters. If the number of clusters can be incorrectly determined, a good-quality segmented image cannot be assured; 2) the poor real-time performances due to great time-consuming, and 3) the poor typicality of each cluster represented by the clustering prototype. In this paper, a grid-based C-means algorithm is applied to image segmentation, whose advantages over the existing C-means algorithm have demonstrated in some typical datasets. The convergence domain of the grid-based C-means algorithm has further been analyzed as well. Experiments show that the grid-based C-means algorithm outperforms the original C-means algorithm in some typical image segmentation applications.
An Improved Technique to Compute Visual Attention Map based upon Wavelet Domain

Visual system of human beings does not process the complete area of image rather focus upon limited area of visual image. But in which area does the visual attention focused is a topic of hot research nowadays. Research on psychological phenomenon indicates that attention is attracted to features that differ from its surroundings or the one that are unusual or unfamiliar to the human visual system. Detection of visually salient image regions is useful for applications like object segmentation, adaptive compression, and object recognition. Object or region based image processing can be performed more efficiently with information pertaining locations that are visually salient to human perception with the aid of a saliency map. The saliency map is a master topological map having the possible locations of objects or regions which a human perceived as important/salient. In this paper a method for computing the saliency map in wavelet transform domain has been proposed. Earlier works in this domain although calculated the saliency very efficiently but they just involve the approximation components of DWM, the detail components have not been taken care but in many applications these detailed components are of great importance to highlight the smaller but visually important components.
Autoimmune Thyroid Disorders

Purpose of Review. Studies have been published in the field of autoimmune thyroid diseases since January 2005. The review is organized into areas of etiology, autoimmune features, autoantibodies, mechanism of thyroid cell injury, B-cell responses, and T-cell responses. Also it reviews the diagnosis and the relationship between autoimmune thyroid disease, neoplasm, and kidney disorders. Recent Findings. Autoimmune thyroid diseases have been reported in people living in different parts of the world including North America, Europe, Baalkans, Asia, Middle East, South America, and Africa though the reported figures do not fully reflect the number of people infected per year. Cases are unrecognized due to inaccurate diagnosis and hence are treated as other diseases. However, the most recent studies have shown that the human autoimmune thyroid diseases (AITDs) affect up to 5% of the general population and are seen mostly in women between 30 and 50 years. Summary. Autoimmune thyroid disease is the result of a complex interaction between genetic and environmental factors. Overall, this review has expanded our understanding of the mechanism involved in pathogenesis of AITD and the relationship between autoimmune thyroid disease, neoplasm, and kidney disease. It has opened new lines of investigations that will ultimately result in a better clinical practice.
A hierarchy of integrable PDEs in 2+1 dimensions associated with 2 - dimensional vector fields

We study a hierarchy of integrable partial differential equations in 2 + 1 dimensions arising from the commutation of 2 - dimensional vector fields, and we construct the formal solution of the associated Cauchy problems using the Inverse Scattering Transform for one-parameter families of vector fields recently introduced in [1, 2]. Due to the ring property of the space of eigenfunctions, the inverse problem can be formulated in three distinguished ways; in particular, one formulation corresponds to a linear integral equation for a Jost eigenfunction, and another formulation is a scalar nonlinear Riemann problem for suitable analytic eigenfunctions.
CO2NNIE: personalized fuel consumption and CO2 emissions

We propose a system for calculating the personalized annual fuel consumption and CO2 emissions from transportation. The system, named CO2NNIE, estimates the fuel consumption on the fastest route between the frequent destinations of the user. The travel time and fuel consumption estimated are based on 3.8 billion GPS records from 16 thousand cars and 198 million records from 218 cars annotated with fuel consumption data, respectively. The fuel consumption estimates from the system are validated using fuel-pump data. We find that estimates have good accuracy, i.e., are generally within 10% of the actual fuel consumption (4.6% deviation on average). We conclude, that the system provides new detailed information on CO2 emissions and fuel consumption for any make and model.
A General Asymptotic Scheme for the Analysis of Partition Statistics

We consider statistical properties of random integer partitions. In order to compute means, variances and higher moments of various partition statistics, one often has to study generating functions of the form P(x)F(x), where P(x) is the generating function for the number of partitions. In this paper, we show how asymptotic expansions can be obtained in a quasi-automatic way from expansions of F(x) around x = 1, which parallels the classical singularity analysis of Flajolet and Odlyzko in many ways. Numerous examples from the literature, as well as some new statistics, are treated via this methodology. In addition, we show how to compute further terms in the asymptotic expansions of previously studied partition statistics.
Gait Planning and Control of A Novel Biped Robot

A novel biped robot and its control strategy are presented. The robot has cylindrical bar distributing in lateral plane as it's feet, which can acts as a pivot when walking. Then the robot can realize completely dynamic walking. The hybrid dynamic model is developed and gait is planned using strategy of time-invariant. By the finite-time nonlinear controller, the robot realizes stable dynamic walking. Simulation results show that a stable limit cycle of dynamic walking is achieved, and proposed control strategy is feasible. Based on analysis of the relationship between walking velocity and robot configuration, a velocity control strategy is presented and validated by simulation.
Everyday problems vs. UbiComp: a case study

It is widely accepted that ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) prototyping is one of the methods that can be used to anticipate how future systems are to be designed and what problems can be solved with computational devices. This paper discusses a number of small-scale projects in which researchers attempted to apply some of the UbiComp methodologies to finding solutions to fairly simple problems that surface during everyday campus life. The process aims at finding ways to discover how pervasive technology can affect even the most trivial aspects of human lives as well as trying to make more profound changes. The projects discussed in this paper include a tool for measuring and communicating campus room occupancy, a mobile mode-of-transport detector and a context-aware application for reducing domestic carbon footprint. The applications illustrate the vast possibilities that present mobile platforms offer to the UbiComp researcher and, most importantly, the opportunity to create large numbers of prototypes by numerous users that can be easily evaluated. The authors claim that the software fulfils many UbiComp prototyping requirements and gives great opportunities for field studies. Furthermore, the wide availability of prototyping techniques suggests that computer enthusiasts are now easily immersed in the experience of the UbiComp of the present and the future face of computing can be shaped by many. If, however, one is to verify the applicability of the prototyped systems, even more users must be involved in the UbiComp experience.
Critical behaviour of non-equilibrium q-state systems

We present two classes of non-equilibrium models with critical behaviour. Each model is characterized by an integer q>1, and is defined on configurations of q-valued spins on regular lattices. The definitions of the models are very similar to the updating rules in Wolff's algorithm for the Potts model, but both classes break detailed balance, except for q=2 and q= infinity . In the first case both models reduce to the Ising model, while one of them reduces to percolation (more precisely, to the general epidemic process) for q= infinity . Locations of the critical point and critical exponents are estimated in two dimensions.
A Perceptually Correct 3D Model for Live 3D TV

3D modeling of a scene is essential for the generation of 3D video from multiple images. In this paper, we present a perceptually correct 3D modeling scheme. "Perceptually correct" means that it may not represent the physically correct object shape but it can generate perceptually almost-correct views of the object. A perceptually correct 3D model is an approximation of the physically correct 3D model, but it can be constructed more easily and stably from images. The quality of 3D video generated using a perceptually correct 3D model could be better than that generated using a physically correct model, when the models are constructed from images. A live 3D TV system for soccer scene has been developed based on the modeling scheme.