Towards a standardized method for broth microdilution susceptibility testing of Haemophilus parasuis

Currently, there is no agreed method available for broth microdilution susceptibility testing of Haemophilus parasuis, one of the most important bacterial pathogens in pig production. Therefore, the aim of this study was to develop a method that could be easily performed by diagnostic laboratories and that appears suitable for a harmonized susceptibility testing. Growth determinations using one type strain and three field isolates revealed no visible growth of H. parasuis in media which have proven to be suitable for susceptibility testing of fastidious organisms. Therefore, a new medium, cation-adjusted Mueller-Hinton broth (CAMHB) plus NADH and sterile filtered heat-inactivated chicken serum, was developed. The reproducibility of MICs obtained in this medium was evaluated and statistically analyzed, considering a model with two different variables (precondition of five identical MICs and MIC mode accepting a deviation of ±1 dilution step, respectively). No significant differences for both variables were seen between two time points investigated and between results obtained with the recently proposed test medium broth (TMB). Nearly all MICs of quality control strains were in the acceptable range. Subsequently, 47 H. parasuis isolates representing 13 serovars were tested with the newly developed medium and TMB. Statistical analysis of all isolates and 15 antimicrobial agents and antimicrobial combinations showed no significant difference between MICs obtained in supplemented CAMHB and TMB. Because of a simplified implementation in routine diagnostic and a lower chance of interference between medium components and antimicrobial agents, supplemented CAMHB is recommended with an incubation time of 24 h

Regulatory (pan-)genome of an obligate intracellular pathogen in the PVC superphylum.

Like other obligate intracellular bacteria, the Chlamydiae feature a compact regulatory genome that remains uncharted owing to poor genetic tractability. Exploiting the reduced number of transcription factors (TFs) encoded in the chlamydial (pan-)genome as a model for TF control supporting the intracellular lifestyle, we determined the conserved landscape of TF specificities by ChIP-Seq (chromatin immunoprecipitation-sequencing) in the chlamydial pathogen Waddlia chondrophila. Among 10 conserved TFs, Euo emerged as a master TF targeting >100 promoters through conserved residues in a DNA excisionase-like winged helix-turn-helix-like (wHTH) fold. Minimal target (Euo) boxes were found in conserved developmentally-regulated genes governing vertical genome transmission (cytokinesis and DNA replication) and genome plasticity (transposases). Our ChIP-Seq analysis with intracellular bacteria not only reveals that global TF regulation is maintained in the reduced regulatory genomes of Chlamydiae, but also predicts that master TFs interpret genomic information in the obligate intracellular α-proteobacteria, including the rickettsiae, from which modern day mitochondria evolved

United We Stand, Divided We Fall: Historical Trajectory of Strategic Renewal Activities at Scandinavian Airlines System, 1946-2012

Although the second half of the twentieth century saw the rise and fall of ‘multi-flag companies’ in the civil aviation industry, our understanding of how some managed to buck the trend and achieve longevity remains limited. This paper advances business history and strategic management research by examining the strategic renewal activities of Scandinavian Airlines (formerly Scandinavian Airlines System) during the period 1946-2012. The study sheds light on the key roles of private and state owners, rivals as well as banks, in critical financial phases are discussed in terms of longevity in the company. The longevity of the business stems from the leaders’ ability to develop as anticipated and respond to change in their competitive arena in close interaction with the owners. Thus, incumbent firms that strategically renew themselves prior to or during market reform, such as deregulation, enhance their chances of developing the size of their networks and revenue streams. Our main contribution to business history and strategic management literatures is the development of context-specific stages, which shed light on the evolution of strategic renewal activities and shifts from older processes and routines towards customer service and efficiency

D’Enfert, Renaud et Lebeaume, Joël (sous la direction de) (2015), Réformer les disciplines. Les savoirs scolaires à l’épreuve de la modernité. 1945 – 1985.

Recensio

\uab Pas de la dynamite, mais du tabac \ubb. L\u2019enqu\ueate de 1885 contre les anarchistes en Suisse romande

Cet ouvrage est l\u2019\ue9dition critique et comment\ue9e d'un dossier manuscrit, trouv\ue9 dans les Archives f\ue9d\ue9rales suisses de Berne, contenant les proc\ue8s-verbaux des auditions qui ont eu lieu entre f\ue9vrier et mai 1885 en Suisse romande par le juge Berdez, en occasion de la grande enqu\ueate contre les anarchistes ordonn\ue9e par le gouvernement f\ue9d\ue9ral, la premi\ue8re de ce genre en Suisse. Dans le cadre d\u2019une pression internationale anti-anarchiste toujours plus pouss\ue9e, le pr\ue9texte pour lancer une investigation est fourni alors par le faux bruit que les anarchistes, dont une partie avait trouv\ue9 en Suisse un pays de refuge, songeaient \ue0 faire sauter le palais f\ue9d\ue9ral avec de la dynamite. Au fil des auditions des \uab soup\ue7onn\ue9es \ubb, le ridicule de ces accusations ressort progressivement, agr\ue9ment\ue9 d\u2019\ue9pisodes exhilarants comme la recherche de caisses de dynamite qui se r\ue9v\ue8lent contenir du tabac \u2026 Les r\ue9ponses sarcastiques des militants exp\ue9riment\ue9s, celles h\ue9sitantes des plus jeunes, parfois intimid\ue9s, et celles melliflues des espions, bien reconnaissables, nous donnent un aper\ue7u de la vie quotidienne et de la mentalit\ue9 de ces militants. Si cet ouvrage n'est qu'une premi\ue8re contribution \ue0 une \ue9tude de l\u2019\ue9norme quantit\ue9 de documents d\ue9pos\ue9s \ue0 Berne (pi\ue8ces saisies, rapports, correspondances), nous croyons qu'il sert \ue0 jeter de la lumi\ue8re sur un \ue9pisode peu connu de l'histoire de l'anarchisme, qui a pourtant impliqu\ue9 des militants tr\ue8s c\ue9l\ue8bres comme Jean Grave, \uc9lis\ue9e Reclus et Adh\ue9mar Schwitzgu\ue9bel. La composition sociale essentiellement ouvri\ue8re du mouvement anarchiste de cette \ue9poque en Suisse romande et l\u2019importance \ue0 son int\ue9rieur de migrants en provenance de France, Italie, Allemagne et Suisse al\ue9manique sont parmi les premiers \ue9l\ue9ments qui ressautent

Social network aggregation using face-recognition

With the rapid growth of the social web an increasing number of people started to replicate their off-line preferences and lives in an on-line environment. Consequently, the social web provides an enormous source for social network data, which can be used in both commercial and research applications. However, people often take part in multiple social network sites and, generally, they share only a selected amount of data to the audience of a specific platform. Consequently, the interlinkage of social graphs from different sources getting increasingly important for applications such as social network analysis, personalization, or recommender systems. This paper proposes a novel method to enhance available user re-identification systems for social network data aggregation based on face-recognition algorithms. Furthermore, the method is combined with traditional text-based approaches in order to attempt a counter-balancing of the weaknesses of both methods. Using two samples of real-world social networks (with 1610 and 1690 identities each) we show that even though a pure face-recognition based method gets outperformed by the traditional text-based method (area under the ROC curve 0.986 vs. 0.938) the combined method significantly outperforms both of these (0.998, p = 0.0001) suggesting that the face-based method indeed carries complimentary information to raw text attributes

How to translate a book within an hour - Towards general purpose programmable human computers with CrowdLang

In this paper we present the programming language and framework CrowdLang for engineering complex computation systems incorporating large numbers of networked humans and machines agents. We evaluate CrowdLang by developing a text translation program incorporating human and machine agents. The evaluation shows that we are able to simply explore a large design space of possible problem solving programs with the simple variation of the used abstractions. Furthermore, an experiment, involving 1918 different human actors, shows that the developed mixed human-machine translation program significantly outperforms a pure machine translation in terms of adequacy and fluency whilst translating more than 30 pages per hour and that the program approximates the professional translated gold-standard to 75% using the automatic evaluation metric METEOR. Last but not least, our evaluation illustrates that our new human computation pattern staged-contest with pruning outperforms all other refinements in the translation task