BACKGROUND Prolonged empiric antibiotics therapy in neonates results in several adverse consequences including widespread antibiotic resistance, late onset sepsis (LOS), necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), prolonged hospital course (HC) and increase in mortality rates. OBJECTIVES To assess the risk factors and the outcome of prolonged empiric antibiotic therapy in very low birth weight (VLBW) ne...

ALBANY, July 19 — New Pay rates for more than 21,000 State jobs in 70 different titles were announced by J. Earl Kelly, Director of Classification and Compensation, State Department of Civil Service. This brings to 45,000 the number of positions now reallocated to the new State pay scale, with about 31.000 more to come about August 1, Mr. Kelly said. The new rates have been approved by State Bu...

The interest to study the effects of inbreeding in natural populations has increased in the last years. Several microsatellite-derived metrics have recently been developed to infer inbreeding from multilocus heterozygosity data without requiring detailed pedigrees that are difficult to obtain in open populations. Internal relatedness (IR) is currently the most widespread used index and its main...

We are working on the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL)[3] algorithms to design automatically reactive situated agents limited to only local perceptions. Unfortunately, as good RL algorithms suffer from combinatorial explosion, their use is generally limited to simple problems. As shown on the tile-world example of figure 1, we propose to overcome these difficulties by making the hypothesis, a...

Bacterial growth is often limited by availability of nutrients. Soil, water, and even host environments such as macrophages can be nutrient poor, lacking essential building blocks for growth, including carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. The ratios of these elements differ according to the local ecology, so each one of them is limiting in different environments (4, 28). When presented with any ty...

An industrial weigh belt feeder is used to transport solid materials into a manufacturing process at a constant feedrate. It exhibits nonlinear behavior because of motor friction, saturation, and quantization noise in the sensors, which makes standard autotuning methods difficult to implement. This paper proposes and experimentally demonstrates two types of fuzzy logic controllers for an indust...

New self-sensing cementitious composites embedded in the highway pavement for vehicle detection and weigh during motion is fabricated. Smart carbon fiber (CF) reinforced cement-based materials with high sensitive property are used as sensors. These smart may be able to detect traffic sense weight motion, thanks their piezoresistive property. Cement-based sensors capability was investigated a re...