MICs of 21 beta-lactams were determined by agar dilution against 283 penicillin-susceptible (pen-S), 122 intermediate (pen-I) and 23 fully penicillin-resistant (pen-R) pneumococci. MICs of all beta-lactams increased with increasing MICs of penicillin. Clometocillin was the most active penicillin against pen-I or pen-R pneumococci. All oral cephalosporins except cefuroxime and cefpodoxime were l...

We propose Imaginary Devices, a set of freehand gestures that mimic the use of physical input devices. Imaginary Devices allow users to choose the input modality best suited for the task at hand, such as a steering wheel for a driving game or a joystick for a flight simulator. Exploiting the skills that users have acquired using physical input devices, they can instantly begin interacting with ...

Leaders today seem to be suffering from what might be called a failure of the imagination. We seem to be continually finding ourselves in situations where the leaders say something like “no one could have imagined that this would happen.” For example: Who could imagined that Hurricane Katrina would breach the levies in New Orleans; who could have imagined that an insurgency would arise from the...

The wear mechanism of plasma electrolytic nitrocarburised (PEN/C) 316L stainless steel samples was studied after a pin on disc wear test. The surface morphology of samples after application of PEN/C process was studied using scanning electron microscope technique. The sliding tracks resulting from the wear tests on the treated specimens indicated no signs of plastic deformation and adhesive wea...

purpose: to compare the tono-pen and schiotz tonometers in measurement of intraocular pressure (iop) in patients with primary congenital glaucoma. methods: this study was conducted on 38 eyes of 20 patients with primary congenital glaucoma. all measurements were performed under general anesthesia. one minute after receiving halothane 3% iop was determined by tono-pen and then by schiotz tonomet...

PURPOSE A Delphi consensus development process was used to identify best practices for the safe use of insulin pen devices in hospitals. METHODS A panel of healthcare professionals with experience in patient safety activities and development of insulin-use guidelines was selected. In round 1 of a 4-round Delphi process, panelists were asked to identify key concepts and practices relating to s...

A large collection of reproductions of calligraphy on paper was scanned into images to enable web access for both the academic community and the public. Calligraphic paper digitization technology is mature, but technology for segmentation, character coding, style classification, and identification of calligraphy are lacking. Therefore, computational tools for classification and quantification o...

In Chinese calligraphy cao shu is regarded as a kind of free form art which differs from other styles greatly in its less constrained strokes and brush textures. In this paper we present a framework for synthesizing cao shu realistically. In our system, we adopt different brush texture patches (BTPs) collected from hand-written artworks to represent the solid and hollow strokes appearing in cao...