The recent increase in gram-negative bacteria coproducing multiple classes of β-lactamases has made it difficult to accurately identify metallo-β-lactamase (MBL) producers. In the present study, six methods for detecting MBL producers were compared using 56 gram-negative bacterial isolates that produce various β-lactamases. Sodium mercaptoacetic acid (SMA) and EDTA were used as inhibitors for a...

We generalize work of Lascoux and Jo zeeak-Pragacz-Weyman on Betti numbers for minimal free resolutions of ideals generated by 2 2 minors of generic matrices and generic symmetric matrices, respectively. Quotients of polynomial rings by these ideals are the classical Segre and quadratic Veronese subalgebras, and we compute the analogous Betti numbers for some natural modules over these Segre an...

ABSTRACT The resistance gene Pi-ta protects rice crops against the fungal pathogen Magnaporthe grisea expressing the avirulence gene AVR-Pita in a gene-for-gene manner. Pi-ta, originally introgressed into japonica rice from indica origin, was previously isolated by positional cloning. In this study, we report the nucleotide sequence of a 5,113-base pair region containing a japonica susceptibili...

The Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA) has developed guidelines in order to help Boards of Directors and executive teams deal with information technology (IT) governance issues. Further, accounting firms offer IT governance advisory services. Prior literature suggests that effective IT governance can provide economic advantages to organizations. It also suggests that organizatio...

This paper presents a stable and fast algorithm for independent component analysis with reference (ICA-R). This is a technique for incorporating available reference signals into the ICA contrast function so as to form an augmented Lagrangian function under the framework of constrained ICA (cICA). The previous ICA-R algorithm was constructed by solving the optimization problem via a Newton-like ...

Existing face recognition systems are based on 2D facial images and exhibit well-known deficiencies. Accordingly, the face recognition research is gradually shifting from classical 2D to sophisticated 3D or hybrid 2D/3D. 3D shape reconstruction from multiview photographs and video sequences (2D images) is an active area of research which can fully leverage the potential of existing 2D image acq...

Twenty five consecutive Saudi patients who underwent treatment of hypertrophic scars using Cica-care silicone gel sheets were included. The scars were secondary to burns or traumatic friction injuries. There were 15 females and 10 males with a mean age of nine years. Patients were given detailed instructions in applying and washing the gel and attended a review clinic regularly. At each visit, ...

Presenting structural damage detection problem as an inverse model-updating approach is one of the well-known methods which can reach to informative features of damages. This paper proposes a model-based method for fault prognosis in engineering structures. A new damage-sensitive cost function is suggested by employing the main concepts of the Modal Assurance Criterion (MAC) on the first severa...