Enterococcal bacteremia in a medical center

BACKGROUND: The enterococci have become important nosocomial pathogens. They can cause multiple site infections and enterococcal bacteremia becomes more frequently associated with a high mortality rate. Previous studies of enterococcal bacteremia showed a variety of results. To establish the significance and importance of enterococci as nosocomial pathogens in this hospital, to characterize their clinical pictures and to search for the risk factors for mortality, this retrospective study was performed. METHODS: There were 208 cases of enterococcal bacteremia which occurred from 1988 to 1992. Twenty-seven cases had no medical charts, dismissing possibility of evaluation. Finally, 181 cases of enterococcal bacteremia were analysed. RESULTS: One hundred and eighteen episodes were nosocomial infections. Polymicrobial bacteremia occurred in 68.5% of the patients and the most common co-isolate was Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Those patients (78.5%) with underlying diseases and malignancies were the most common underlying problems. The portal of entry could be found in 69.6 percent of patients, with the gastrointestinal tract the most common sources. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing showed high gentamicin resistance rate (89.5%), and ampicillin still had about 80 percent sensitivity rate. The group who received specific antibiotic therapy for enterococcus showed lower mortality (36.4% versus 47.6%). Only one case had infective endocarditis. Forty-nine patients suffered from septic shock, the cause of 30 deaths. Totally 75 patients died during hospitalization. Besides sepsis, another major cause of death was their underlying diseases itself. CONCLUSIONS: Enterococci have no doubt become important nosocomial pathogens and enterococcal bacteremia were associated with high mortality, especially in elderly patients with underlying diseases such as malignancy or diabetes. When clinically dealing with sepsis from the gastrointestinal or biliary tract, especially when previous cephalosporins therapy showed no response, the possibility of enterococcal bacteremia should always be considered.     

Evaluating the impact of CASE: an empirical comparison of retrospective and cross-sectional survey approaches

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate two methods of assessing the productivity and quality impact of Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) and Fourth Generation Language (4GL) technologies: (1) by the retrospective method; and (2) the cross-sectional method. Both methods involve the use of questionnaire surveys. Developers' perceptions depend on the context in which they are expressed and this includes expectations about the effectiveness of a given software product. Consequently, it is generally not reliable to base inferences about the relative merits of CASE and 4GLs on a cross-sectional comparison of two separate samples of users. The retrospective method that requires each respondent to directly compare different products is shown to be more reliable. However, there may be scope to employ cross-sectional comparisons of the findings from different samples where both sets of respondents use the same reference point for their judgements, and where numerical rather than verbal rating scales are used to measure perceptions.     

Presupposition failure — A comedy of errors

Presuppositions of utterances are the pieces of information you convey with an utterance no matter whether your utterance is true or not. We first study presupposition in a very simple framework of updating propositional information, with examples of how presuppositions of complex propositional updates can be calculated. Next we move on to presuppositions and quantification, in the context of a dynamic version of predicate logic, suitably modified to allow for presupposition failure. In both the propositional and the quantificational case, presupposition failure can be viewed as error abortion of procedures. Thus, a dynamic assertion logic which describes the preconditions for error abortion is the suitable tool for analysing presupposition.     

超细Fe3O4粒子表面包覆酞菁钴性质研究

本文研究了合成载氧体的金属有机化学液相淀积法制造工艺，所得产物经ＴＥＭ、ＸＰＳ、Ｍｏｓｓ－ｂａｕｅｒ谱和Ｂ－Ｈ仪等手段，研究了它的结构和磁性能。实验表明，酞青钴以薄层形式包覆在Ｆｅ＿３Ｏ＿４的表面，封闭了Ｆｅ＿３Ｏ＿４的表面孔洞，稳定了Ｆｅ＿３Ｏ＿４的物相，增强了磁性能。     

RSView32软件平台的应用及扩展

概述了RSView32工控软件的特点和使用方法 ,并通过贵溪冶炼厂的一个液位自动控制系统的人机界面设计说明了如何在控制系统中使用RSView32软件。文章特别介绍了如何用VBA程序设计来扩展其功能     

Replacement of beef fat in Frankfurters by interesterified palm,cottonseed and olive oils

Three interesterified vegetable oils (IVOs) prepared from palm, cottonseed, and olive oil, respectively, have been studied for application to Frankfurters. Beef fat (10%) was replaced by one of the IVOs at 20, 60 or 100%. Fatty acid composition of the lipid fraction in the Frankfurters and saturated/unsaturated ratios were established for all batches. We found that total or partial replacement of beef fat by IVOs did not lead to significant changes in appearance, colour, texture, flavour or sensory score. We conclude that IVOs may be successfully applied as beef fat substitutes in Frankfurters.     

The organisational learning effects of management accounting information under advanced manufacturing technology

This study empirically examined the organisational learning effects of the nonfinancial performance information provided by management accounting information systems (MAISs) under advanced manufacturing technology (AMT). In this study, a target costing system and the frequent and quick reporting of information were considered the facilitators of learning. First, we examined the relationships between AMT level and the amount of nonfinancial performance information produced by MAISs. The empirical results showed that there are significant positive relationships between the level of AMT and nonfinancial performance information. With a systems approach, we also proved the impact of the relationships among AMT levels, nonfinancial performance information and learning facilitators on the organisational performance of a firm. The results of our research suggest that under a high level of AMT, for the provision of information to result in an increase of performance through organisational learning, a target costing system must be introduced and a large amount of information should be provided frequently and quickly. The results of this study also showed that although AMT level may be low, fairly well-arranged facilitators and a moderately large amount of information may be necessary for the improvement of performance. In conclusion, effective organisational learning depends on the provision of relevant information as well as efficient learning support mechanisms.     

Automatic conversion from lexical words to prosodic words for mandarin text-to-speech system

In real speech, not like lexical words (LWs), prosodic words (PWs) are basic rhythmic units. The naturalness of a Text-to-Speech (TTS) system is directly influenced by the segmentation of the PWs. Most of the PWs are the combination of several LWs. In this paper, three Lexical Combination Models are proposed to combine LWs into PWs, including a Directed Acyclic Graph Model, a Segmentation Model and a Markov Model (MM). To cope with the situation where some long LWs should be segmented into two or more PWs, a Lexical Split Model (LSM) is applied to the long LWs. Experimental results prove that relatively constant results with various training data can be obtained from a MM. The Transformation-Based Error Driven Learning (TBED) algorithm, for its high performance of individual property, is applied in combination with the MM to improve the precision of PW segmentation. Experiments show that among the three proposed models, the MM combined with TBED and LSM, leads to the best performance, in which a precision of 93.00% and a recall of 93.23% are achieved. The perception test indicates that by using PWs as the lowest prosodic units a speech sounds more natural and acceptable than by using LWs. This paper is supported by NSFC Project (60503071); 973 Natural Basic Research Program of China (2004CB318102); Postdoctor Science Foundation of P. R. China (20070420275).