Provider Education to Increase Knowledge of Sepsis in a Skilled Nursing Facility

Background: Sepsis is a time sensitive, life-threatening syndrome that proceeds through a continuum of devastating events resulting in organ damage and eventual death. Unfortunately, this syndrome impacts millions of individuals worldwide. Interestingly, the population that is most impacted by sepsis are patients admitted to a non-acute care facility such as a skilled nursing facility. Currently, there is no tool or standardized guideline for sepsis identification or prevention within these facilities often resulting in hospital readmission and increased lengths of stay. Methods: Upon completion of a literary review on data bases such as CINAHL Plus with full text, Cochrane Library, Medline (Pro Quest), PubMed Central (PMC) and Google Scholar, a quasi-experimental research study was conducted. The project was completed through the use of pre- and post-interventional design was conducted to determine nursing staff baseline knowledge of sepsis and the impact of an educational sepsis intervention tool. Results: The project documented that 80% of the nurses working within the skilled nursing facility had a limited knowledge of sepsis. Ultimately, the study concluded with the beneficial impact of implementing a sepsis educational presentation tailored for the facility to increase sepsis knowledge. Keywords: Sepsis, awareness, skilled nursing facility, nursing, educational intervention tool

Monitoring the invasion of an exotic tree (Ailanthus altissima) (Mill.) Swingle with Landsat satellite time series imagery in urban forest.

In the Mediterranean area, one the most threat tree to various ecosystems is Ailanthus altissima (Mill.) Swingle. This is an aggressive invasive species common in natural and semi-natural habitat. Monitoring and mapping of invasive species is an important information for the conservation and management of ecosystems. The study of distribution and diffusion of invasive species are useful to assess their environmental impacts, formulate effective control strategies, and forecast potential spread. The main target of this work is to examine the feasibility of mapping the expansion of A. altissima using remote sensing techniques in a highly complex urban forest setting. Remote sensing has been a useful tool to map the invasive plant. We mapped the pattern of ailanthus expansion from 1990 to 2015 in a suburban area of Palermo, the Favorita park, using time series of Landsat image. This images are nowadays available at no cost. We used that images to analyze larger areas but the 30 m resolution does not permit mapping of individual trees; the combinations of dates and medium spatial resolution with the phenology information allowed the detection of the species. Indeed, the ailanthus is a deciduous tree that we compared with the other evergreen vegetation. Time series of Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and supervised classification were used as a dataset in the classification process. These results provide a basis for more detailed investigations on invasive species and the possibility to increase the spatial resolution with the new platforms might lead to further improvements plant species identification and their distribution patterns recognition

Entanglement measures and approximate quantum error correction

It is shown that, if the loss of entanglement along a quantum channel is sufficiently small, then approximate quantum error correction is possible, thereby generalizing what happens for coherent information. Explicit bounds are obtained for the entanglement of formation and the distillable entanglement, and their validity naturally extends to other bipartite entanglement measures in between. Robustness of derived criteria is analyzed and their tightness compared. Finally, as a byproduct, we prove a bound quantifying how large the gap between entanglement of formation and distillable entanglement can be for any given finite dimensional bipartite system, thus providing a sufficient condition for distillability in terms of entanglement of formation.Comment: 7 pages, two-columned revtex4, no figures. v1: Deeply revised and extended version: different entanglement measures are separately considered, references are added, and some remarks are stressed. v2: Added a sufficient condition for distillability in terms of entanglement of formation; published versio

Shaping 1,2,4-Triazolium Fluorinated Ionic Liquid Crystals

The synthesis and thermotropic behaviour of some di-alkyloxy-phenyl-1,2,4-triazolium trifluoromethane-sulfonate salts bearing a seven-carbon atom perfluoroalkyl chain on the cation is herein described. The fluorinated salts presenting a 1,2,4-triazole as a core and differing in the length of two alkyloxy chains on the phenyl ring demonstrated a typical liquid crystalline behaviour. The mesomorphic properties of this set of salts were studied by differential scanning calorimetry and polarized optical microscopy. The thermotropic properties are discussed on the grounds of the tuneable structures of the salts. The results showed the existence of a monotropic, columnar, liquid crystalline phase for the salts tested. An increase in the temperature mesophase range and the presence of two enantiotropic mesophases for the sixteen-atom alkyloxy chain salt can be observed by increasing the length of the alkyloxy chain on the phenyl ring

Electron interference and entanglement in coupled 1D systems with noise

We estimate the role of noise in the formation of entanglement and in the appearance of single- and two-electron interference in systems of coupled one-dimensional channels semiconductors. Two cases are considered: a single-particle interferometer and a two-particle interferometer exploiting Coulomb interaction. In both of them, environmental noise yields a randomization of the carrier phases. Our results assess how that the complementarity relation linking single-particle behavior to nonlocal quantities, such as entanglement and environment-induced decoherence, acts in electron interferometry. We show that, in a experimental implementation of the setups examined, one- and two-electron detection probability at the output drains can be used to evaluate the decoherence phenomena and the degree of entanglement.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures. v2: added some references and corrected tex

Clean Positive Operator Valued Measures

In quantum mechanics the statistics of the outcomes of a measuring apparatus is described by a positive operator valued measure (POVM). A quantum channel transforms POVM's into POVM's, generally irreversibly, thus loosing some of the information retrieved from the measurement. This poses the problem of which POVM's are "undisturbed", namely they are not irreversibly connected to another POVM. We will call such POVM clean. In a sense, the clean POVM's would be "perfect", since they would not have any additional "extrinsical" noise. Quite unexpectedly, it turns out that such cleanness property is largely unrelated to the convex structure of POVM's, and there are clean POVM's that are not extremal and vice-versa. In this paper we solve the cleannes classification problem for number n of outcomes n<=d (d dimension of the Hilbert space), and we provide a a set of either necessary or sufficient conditions for n>d, along with an iff condition for the case of informationally complete POVM's for n=d^2.Comment: Minor changes. amsart 21 pages. Accepted for publication on J. Math. Phy

FDA-Approved Fluorinated Heterocyclic Drugs from 2016 to 2022

The inclusion of fluorine atoms or heterocyclic moiety into drug structures represents a recurrent motif in medicinal chemistry. The combination of these two features is constantly appearing in new molecular entities with various biological activities. This is demonstrated by the increasing number of newly synthesized fluorinated heterocyclic compounds among the Food and Drug Administration FDA-approved drugs. In this review, the biological activity, as well as the synthetic aspects, of 33 recently FDA-approved fluorinated heterocyclic drugs from 2016 to 2022 are highlighted

Private quantum decoupling and secure disposal of information

Given a bipartite system, correlations between its subsystems can be understood as information that each one carries about the other. In order to give a model-independent description of secure information disposal, we propose the paradigm of private quantum decoupling, corresponding to locally reducing correlations in a given bipartite quantum state without transferring them to the environment. In this framework, the concept of private local randomness naturally arises as a resource, and total correlations get divided into eliminable and ineliminable ones. We prove upper and lower bounds on the amount of ineliminable correlations present in an arbitrary bipartite state, and show that, in tripartite pure states, ineliminable correlations satisfy a monogamy constraint, making apparent their quantum nature. A relation with entanglement theory is provided by showing that ineliminable correlations constitute an entanglement parameter. In the limit of infinitely many copies of the initial state provided, we compute the regularized ineliminable correlations to be measured by the coherent information, which is thus equipped with a new operational interpretation. In particular, our results imply that two subsystems can be privately decoupled if their joint state is separable.Comment: Child of 0807.3594 v2: minor changes v3: presentation improved, one figure added v4: extended version with a lot of discussions and examples v5: published versio

Synthesis and Antibacterial Activity of Mono- and Bi-Cationic Pyridinium 1,2,4-Oxadiazoles and Triazoles

One of the main causes of mortality in humans continues to be infectious diseases. Scientists are searching for new alternatives due to the fast increase in resistance of some harmful bacteria to the frontline antibiotics. To effectively treat pathogenic infections, it is crucial to design antibiotics that can prevent the development of pathogenic resistance. For this purpose, a set of 39 quaternary pyridinium and bis-pyridinium salts with different lengths of side alkyl or fluorinated chains, heterocyclic spacers, and counter ions were tested on diverse reference bacterial ATCC (American Type Culture Collection) strains, such as S. aureus and E. coli. Subsequently, 6 out of the 39 pyridinium salts showing relevant MIC (Minimum Inhibitory Concentration) values were tested on clinically isolated, resistant strains of S. aureus, S. epidermids, S. haemolyticus, K. pneumoniae, A. baumannii, and P. aeruginosa. Additional tests have been performed to assess if the minimum concentration detected through MIC assay may limit the growth of biofilms

The Quantum Reverse Shannon Theorem based on One-Shot Information Theory

The Quantum Reverse Shannon Theorem states that any quantum channel can be simulated by an unlimited amount of shared entanglement and an amount of classical communication equal to the channel's entanglement assisted classical capacity. In this paper, we provide a new proof of this theorem, which has previously been proved by Bennett, Devetak, Harrow, Shor, and Winter. Our proof has a clear structure being based on two recent information-theoretic results: one-shot Quantum State Merging and the Post-Selection Technique for quantum channels.Comment: 30 pages, 4 figures, published versio