OBJECTIVES To investigate phenotypically and genotypically the presence of MDR efflux pumps in 21 clinical isolates of Staphylococcus haemolyticus collected over a period of 10 years. METHODS MICs of different antibiotics and biocides were determined by the broth dilution method in the presence/absence of carbonyl cyanide-m-chlorophenylhydrazone (CCCP), an efflux pump inhibitor. PCR followed ...

The presence of SXT/R391-related integrating conjugative elements (ICEs) in bacterial strains isolated from fish obtained from marine aquaculture environments in 2001 to 2010 in the northwestern Iberian Peninsula was studied. ICEs were detected in 12 strains taxonomically related to Vibrio scophthalmi (3 strains), Vibrio splendidus (5 strains), Vibrio alginolyticus (1 strain), Shewanella haliot...

BACKGROUND Health care-associated infections (HAIs) are a significant problem in hospitals, and environmental surfaces have been implicated as a source of HAIs in the hospital environment. Furthermore, Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria can persist on dry environmental surfaces for as long as several months. Poorly cleaned surfaces may serve as vehicles for microbes, which may then be tra...

In this paper we will propose the question and answering task, called Question and Answering Challenge (QAC), and its first evaluation. This will be carried out as a sub-task of NTCIR3 Workshop scheduled in October 2002. In QAC, we aimed to encourage the development of practical Q&A systems in a general domain and focus on research of user interaction and information extraction. User interactio...

The introduction of the Quadrilateral Area Coordinate (QAC) membrane elements has generated more heat than light on the subject of why distorted membrane elements perform very poorly. The canonical guidelines for construction of robust elements are continuity and completeness. It is known that isoparametric (or parametric) quadrilateral membrane elements satisfy the continuity requirements alwa...

Even though online communities enjoy a growing number of members, their success and popularity are regularly diminished by infringements of user trust. Consequently, community operators implement IT-based trust-promoting features to regain user trust. Not knowing if their efforts are effective, for community operators the question remains: how do trust-promoting IT-features contribute to user p...

This paper proposes two new Information Retrieval performance metrics based on multigrade relevance, called Q-measure and R-measure, which are akin to Cumulative Gain and Average Weighted Precision but are arguably more reliable. We then show how Qmeasure can be applied to Question Answering involving ranked lists of exact answers, and discuss its advantages over Reciprocal Rank through an expe...