Microbial Air Contamination in an Intensive Care Unit

Unit layout affects every aspect of intensive care services, including patient safety. A previous study has shown that patients admitted to beds adjacent to the sink and to the door of a large bayroom had the highest number of positive blood cultures and the highest blood culture incidence density, respectively. The present study measures microbial air contamination in a medical intensive care unit of a medical center in central Taiwan. Of the 17 rooms, 8 rooms with distinct physical environmental characteristics were selected. Sampling tests were conducted between December 2013 and February 2014 with a microbial air sampler (MAS-100NT). TSA was used for bacteria collection and DG18 for fungi collection. The overall average bacterial and fungal concentrations were 83CFU/m3 and 69CFU/m3, respectively. The ranges were between 8-354 CFU/m3 and 0-1468 CFU/m3, respectively. A significant difference was found in the bacterial concentration (p=.005) between different room locations. The highest concentration was found in the rooms located at the front end of the circulation (99 CFU/m3), while the lowest was found in the rooms located at the rear end of the circulation (55CFU/m3). Differences in fungal concentrations for different room locations did not reach statistical significance. In addition, differences in bacterial and fungal concentrations for rooms with different sink locations did not reach statistical significance. Even though the microbial concentrations generally complied with standards, the results may help designers and hospital administrators develop a healthier environment for patients

John W. Creswell, Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches

Abstract. John W. Creswell was previously a professor in educational psychology in the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He moved to the University of Michigan in 2015 as a professor in the Department of Family Medicine. He has published many articles and close to 27 books on mixed methods. Professor Creswell is also one of the founding members of the Journal of Mixed Methods Research. He was a Fulbright scholar in South Africa in 2008 and Thailand in 2012. In 2011, he served as a visiting professor in the School of Public Health of Harvard University. In 2014, he became the Chairman of the Mixed Methods International Research Association. Professor Creswell has a personal website called “Mixed Methods Research” at http://johnwcreswell.com/. The site contains the information about his background, his own blog, consulting works and published books. He also posted replies questions from academic researchers and practitioners in the blog.Keywords. Research design, Methodology, Methods.JEL. A20, B40, B49

Exploring Continuous Integrate-and-Fire for Adaptive Simultaneous Speech Translation

Simultaneous speech translation (SimulST) is a challenging task aiming to translate streaming speech before the complete input is observed. A SimulST system generally includes two components: the pre-decision that aggregates the speech information and the policy that decides to read or write. While recent works had proposed various strategies to improve the pre-decision, they mainly adopt the fixed wait-k policy, leaving the adaptive policies rarely explored. This paper proposes to model the adaptive policy by adapting the Continuous Integrate-and-Fire (CIF). Compared with monotonic multihead attention (MMA), our method has the advantage of simpler computation, superior quality at low latency, and better generalization to long utterances. We conduct experiments on the MuST-C V2 dataset and show the effectiveness of our approach.Comment: Submitted to INTERSPEECH 202

Microbial Air Contamination in an Intensive Care Unit

Unit layout affects every aspect of intensive care services, including patient safety. A previous study has shown that patients admitted to beds adjacent to the sink and to the door of a large bayroom had the highest number of positive blood cultures and the highest blood culture incidence density, respectively. The present study measures microbial air contamination in a medical intensive care unit of a medical center in central Taiwan. Of the 17 rooms, 8 rooms with distinct physical environmental characteristics were selected. Sampling tests were conducted between December 2013 and February 2014 with a microbial air sampler (MAS-100NT). TSA was used for bacteria collection and DG18 for fungi collection. The overall average bacterial and fungal concentrations were 83CFU/m3 and 69CFU/m3, respectively. The ranges were between 8-354 CFU/m3 and 0-1468 CFU/m3, respectively. A significant difference was found in the bacterial concentration (p=.005) between different room locations. The highest concentration was found in the rooms located at the front end of the circulation (99 CFU/m3), while the lowest was found in the rooms located at the rear end of the circulation (55CFU/m3). Differences in fungal concentrations for different room locations did not reach statistical significance. In addition, differences in bacterial and fungal concentrations for rooms with different sink locations did not reach statistical significance. Even though the microbial concentrations generally complied with standards, the results may help designers and hospital administrators develop a healthier environment for patients

Evaluating Travelers’ Response to Social Media Using Facets-based ROI Metrics

Jason L. Stienmetz is a Research Coordinator for the Eric Friedheim Tourism Institute at the University of Florida. Jason is also working towards his Ph.D. in business administration from the Fox School of Business, Temple University. His research interests include destination management, tourism metrics, big data analytics, and smart tourism. Chih Yi Chang is a substitute civilian serviceman in Taiwan Tourism Bureau. He received his Master degree in tourism and hospitality from Temple University in 2014. Chih Yi works as a research assistant at the National Laboratory for Tourism & eCommerce and his research interests include tourism and destination marketing, social media metrics, and Asia-Pacific tourism. Daniel R. Fesenmaier is a Professor and Director of the National Laboratory for Tourism & eCommerce, Department of Tourism, Recreation and Sport Management, University of Florida. He teaches and conducts research focusing on the role of information technology in travel decisions, advertising evaluation, and the design of tourism places.Oral Presentatio

Research on the Foreign Direct Investment Factors of Japanese Hotel Industry in Taiwan-Taking Okura Hotel as an Example

Due to the impact of COVID-19 in 2019, the global hotel industry has been severely impacted by the disconnection of the tourism industry. However, even with the impact of the epidemic, the Japanese hotel industry’s investment in Taiwan has not stopped. What are the factors that drive the Japanese hotel industry to defy the threat of the epidemic and choose Taiwan as its destination for foreign direct investment? This is the research goal of this article. This article intends to adopt Push-Pull-Mooring (PPM)migration theory to construct the possible factors of why the Japanese hotel industry chooses Taiwan as its foreign direct investment destination. These factors consist of three effects to describe Japan Okura hotel’s migration. First, the push effect refers to factors that induce people to leave their place of origin. Second, the pull effect refers to factors that attract people to a destination. Third, the mooring effect refers to intervention variables for push and pull effects that facilitate or inhibit the determination of movement. The finding is that push and pull factors still play an active role in promoting Okura Hotel’s investment in Taiwan, even if the influence of some factors is slightly reduced due to the shift in international conditions. With the development of globalization and high technology, mooring factors are no longer the reason that hinders Japanese Okura’s investment in Taiwan. Combined with push and pull factors, PPM migration model can fully explain why the Japanese hotel industry chooses to conduct foreign direct investment in Taiwan, even if it is affected by COVID-19.It’s just that COVID-19 has not stopped so far, and the unstable situation on both sides of the strait may impact the original PPM model and affect the results of the analysis. It is worth further observation and research by subsequent researchers

Mechanism of thermal field and electric field in resistive random access memory using the high/low-k side wall structure

In the Internet of things (IoT) era, low power consumption memory will be a critical issue for further device development. Among many kinds of next-generation memories, resistive random access memory (RRAM) is considered as having the most potential due to its high performance. To prevent unrecoverable hard break-down of a RRAM device, the RRAM should be collocated with a transistor for external current compliance. With decreasing device cell size, however, the operating voltage of the transistor will become smaller and smaller. Previous study has determined that the forming voltage of RRAM increases when device cell size is reduced, which is a very crucial issue especially when the device is scaled down. We have proposed a high-k sidewall spacer structure in RRAM to solve the dilemma of increasing forming voltages for device cell scaling down. Based on the COMSOL-simulated electrical field distributions in the high-k RRAM. In addition, thermal conductivity of sidewall spacer influenced resistive switching behavior. Suitable thermal conductivity of sidewall materials can enhance resistive switching behavior. Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract