Background Diagnosis of appendicitis is still clinically challenging where resources are limited. The purpose of this study was to develop and externally validate Ramathibodi Appendicitis Score (RAMA-AS) in aiding diagnosis of appendicitis. Methods A two-phase cross-sectional study (i.e., derivation and validation) was conducted at Ramathibodi Hospital (for derivation) and at Thammasat Univer...

OBJECTIVES To determine the fluoroquinolone resistance determinants in Salmonella enterica serovar Schwarzengrund from imported foods. METHODS Antibiotic susceptibility of Salmonella Schwarzengrund to 16 antibiotics was examined using disc agar diffusion and Etest. Quinolone resistance determinants were examined by sequence analysis of gyrA, gyrB, parC and parE, PCR amplification of qnrA, qnr...

Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium SL1344, in which efflux pump genes (acrB, acrD, acrF, tolC) or regulatory genes thereof (marA, soxS, ramA) were inactivated, was grown in the presence of 240 antimicrobial and nonantimicrobial agents in the Biolog Phenotype MicroArray. Mutants lacking tolC, acrB, and ramA grew significantly worse than other mutants in the presence of 48 agents (some of wh...

In this study, the notions of homelessness and unhomeliness are studied in 2 novels by Naipaul: Half a Life (2001) and Magic Seeds (2004). Naipaul has been viewed by many postcolonial critics as an imperially complicit writer, for his controversial views of places and societies, particularly his disdain for non-Western societies. This study examines whether the imperatives of the postcolonial c...

The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) Approach claims that there are some universalities in all languages. Speech acts seem to be present in all languages, but considering this approach, research has not indicated whether request speech act differs from one language to another. Thus, this study intended to investigate whether request strategies are used differently in English and Persian roma...

To date, document clustering by genres or authors has been performed mostly by means of stylometric and content features. With the premise that novels are societies in miniature, we build social networks from novels as a strategy to quantify their plot and structure. From each social network, we extract a vector of features which characterizes the novel. We perform clustering over the vectors o...

Speaker identification is the task of attributing utterances to characters in a literary narrative. It is challenging to automate because the speakers of the majority of utterances are not explicitly identified in novels. In this paper, we present a supervised machine learning approach for the task that incorporates several novel features. The experimental results show that our method is more a...

Identifying plot structure in novels is a valuable step towards automatic processing of literary corpora. We present an approach to classify novels as either having a happy ending or not. To achieve this, we use features based on different sentiment lexica as input for an SVMclassifier, which yields an average F1-score of about 73%.

the present study depicts the analysis of quality of content of six bestselling novels from 1999- 2010. in this study, it has been tried to answer the questions how the power of women is shown (representation) by their female authors and also in these novels what kind of relations between a woman and family is clarified and how their experiences in the family are illustrated. the conceptual fra...

The EMO (Epstein, Macintosh, Oxford) ether vaporizer has received worldwide acceptance as a simple thermo-compensated anaesthetic apparatus. Equipped with a Penlon bellows and a nonrebreathing valve, safe ether-air or methoxyflurane-air anaesthesia can be administered with this machine in almost any geographical location. An extensive bibliography of clinical papers related to the use of this a...