OBJECTIVES Clinical utility of carbapenem antibiotics is under threat because of the emergence of acquired metallo-β-lactamase (MBL) genes. We describe an outbreak in an intensive care unit (ICU) possibly associated with contaminated sinks. DESIGN, SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS Four clusters of gram-negative bacteria harbouring the MBL gene blaIMP-4 were detected in the ICU at Dandenong Hospital b...

Non-immersive perspectives in virtual environments enable flexible paradigms of perception, especially in the context of frames of reference for conferencing and musical audition. Traditional mixing idioms for enabling and disabling various audio sources employ mute and solo functions, that, along with cue, selectively disable or focus on respective channels. Exocentric interfaces which explici...

In this paper we propose a new routing protocol called virtual sink rotation (VSR) routing for large-scale sensor networks. VSR can efficiently handle a large number of sources as well as a large number of sinks with potential mobility. Each sensor node is not required to know the global network topology nor the location awareness. The main ideas underlying the VSR are two folds. First, to alle...

Sink mobility brings new challenges to large-scale sensor networking. It suggests that information about each mobile sink’s location be continuously propagated through the sensor field to keep all sensor nodes updated with the direction for forwarding data reports. Unfortunately frequent location updates from multiple sinks can lead to both excessive drain of sensors’ limited battery power supp...

Data-centric design has been widely adopted in wireless sensor networks thanks to its efficiency, as PUSH and PULL are two common data dissemination algorithms for such networks. The two algorithms work well with only a few sources or a few sinks, respectively. However, when there are many sources and many sinks, both of them become inefficient. In this paper, we take advantage of these two alg...

This paper extends the recent investigation of the string theory landscape [1], where it was found that the decay rate of dS vacua to a collapsing space with a negative vacuum energy can be quite large. The parts of space that experience a decay to a collapsing space, or to a Minkowski vacuum, never return back to dS space. The channels of irreversible vacuum decay serve as sinks for the probab...

Multiple sinks routing is envisioned as a possible solution to the bottleneck research problem in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). In addition to focusing on minimizing the energy consumption in a WSN, it is also equally important to design routing protocols that fairly and evenly distribute the network traffic; in order to prolong the network life time and improve its scalability. In this paper...

Using multiple sinks in a wireless sensor network can significantly decrease the amount of energy spent on communication, so it has been paid much attention in recent years. In this paper, we introduce a new divisible load scheduling strategy to solve the problem how to complete the tasks within the possibly shortest time in multi-sinks wireless sensor network. In this strategy, the tasks are d...

[1] One difficulty for ocean modeling is the lack of velocity data for specifying the initial condition. Diagnostic initialization is widely used; it integrates the model from known temperature (Tc) and salinity (Sc) and zero velocity fields while holding (Tc, Sc) unchanged. After a period (around 30 days) of the diagnostic run, the velocity field (Vc) is established, and (Tc, Sc, Vc) fields ar...

Park green spaces (PGSs) are an important component of urban natural carbon sinks, while their spatial morphological patterns can affect the sequestration capacity themselves. This study selected six typical parks in central district Shanghai and analyzed correlation between indices CO2 concentration distribution PGSs based on ENVI-met BRT models. It further explored interaction mechanisms cycl...