OBJECTIVES Analyze changes that have occurred among U.S. hospitals over a 17-year period, 1975 through 1991, in the percentage of Staphylococcus aureus resistant to beta-lactam antibiotics and associated with nosocomial infections. DESIGN Retrospective review. The percentage of methicillin-resistant S aureus (MRSA) was defined as the number of S aureus isolates resistant to either methicillin...

In this paper, we propose a new,loose semantics for place/transition nets based on transition systems and generalizing the reachability graph semantics. The loose semantics of a place/transition net reflects all its possible refinements and is given as a category of transition systems with alternative sequences of events over the net. The main result states that each plain morphism between two ...

Reading psychiatric research literature of the last several decades frequently gives the impression of fragmentation, where old research topics are abandoned for newer ones without proper follow-up that would place the existing data into a coherent structure. Such perspective is increasingly relevant though, as medical research draws more and more on methods that allow exploratory analyses of l...

Renaming is a classic distributed coordination task in which a set of processes must pick distinct identifiers from a small namespace. In this paper, we consider the time complexity of this problem when the namespace is linear in the number of participants, a variant known as loose renaming. We give a non-adaptive algorithm withO(log logn) (individual) step complexity, where n is a known upper ...

The indigenous South African mussel Perna perna gapes during periods of aerial exposure to maintain aerobic respiration. This behaviour has no effect on the body temperatures of isolated individuals, but when surrounded by conspecifics, beneficial cooling effects of gaping emerge. It is uncertain, however, whether the presence of the invasive mussel Mytilus galloprovincialis limits the ability ...

Recently, asymptotic values of 2-color Ramsey numbers for loose cycles and also loose paths were determined. Here we determine the 2-color Ramsey number of 3-uniform loose paths when one of the paths is significantly larger than the other: for every n > ⌊ 5m 4 ⌋ , we show that R(P n,P m) = 2n + ⌊m + 1 2 ⌋ .

Following the end-Permian mass extinction, ammonoids were among the fastest clades to recover (Brayard et al., 2006), with at least two diversification phases during the Early Triassic. Diversification first peaked during the Smithian and was followed by a marked extinction phase at the end of this (sub-)stage. It was then followed by a second and massive evolutionary radiation during the Spath...

Although chromatography using a variety of novel bed configurations (e.g. fluidized beds, expanded beds, simulated moving beds, annular rotating beds, etc.) has been of recent interest, the majority of practical applications of analytical and preparative chromatography employ a stationary adsorbent bed into which a feed slug is charged periodically, similar to the technique first described by M...

INTRODUCTION Fair distribution of hospital beds across various regions is a controversial subject. Resource allocation in health systems rarely has focused on those who need it most and, in addition, is often influenced by political interests. The study assesses the distribution of hospital beds in different regions in Tehran, Iran, during 2010-2012. METHODS This cross-sectional study was con...