Dynamics between antibiotic drug use and resistance : An economic approach

In Europe, the emergence and spread of antibiotic resistance (AMR) has become a serious public health threat. Rational antibiotic policy, combined with enforcement of infection control practices are key strategies to combat AMR in the hospital setting. Using timeseries analysis, we calculated potential savings resulting from changes in prescribing behaviour and improved compliance with hand hygiene. According to our calculations, a saving of 14 would be achieved by reducing use of third-generation cephalosporins by one defined daily dose and further savings of almost 60 would be achieved by increasing hospital-wide use of alcohol-based hand rub by one litre. --Economic model,Externality,Antibiotics use,MRSA

Determining role of Krein signature for 3D Arnold tongues of oscillatory dynamos

Using a homotopic family of boundary eigenvalue problems for the mean-field $\alpha^2$-dynamo with helical turbulence parameter $\alpha(r)=\alpha_0+\gamma\Delta\alpha(r)$ and homotopy parameter $\beta \in [0,1]$, we show that the underlying network of diabolical points for Dirichlet (idealized, $\beta=0$) boundary conditions substantially determines the choreography of eigenvalues and thus the character of the dynamo instability for Robin (physically realistic, $\beta=1$) boundary conditions. In the $(\alpha_0,\beta,\gamma)-$space the Arnold tongues of oscillatory solutions at $\beta=1$ end up at the diabolical points for $\beta=0$. In the vicinity of the diabolical points the space orientation of the 3D tongues, which are cones in first-order approximation, is determined by the Krein signature of the modes involved in the diabolical crossings at the apexes of the cones. The Krein space induced geometry of the resonance zones explains the subtleties in finding $\alpha$-profiles leading to spectral exceptional points, which are important ingredients in recent theories of polarity reversals of the geomagnetic field.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, presented at the GAMM 2008, Bremen, Germany Introduction extended, refs adde

Transfer Learning for OCRopus Model Training on Early Printed Books

A method is presented that significantly reduces the character error rates for OCR text obtained from OCRopus models trained on early printed books when only small amounts of diplomatic transcriptions are available. This is achieved by building from already existing models during training instead of starting from scratch. To overcome the discrepancies between the set of characters of the pretrained model and the additional ground truth the OCRopus code is adapted to allow for alphabet expansion or reduction. The character set is now capable of flexibly adding and deleting characters from the pretrained alphabet when an existing model is loaded. For our experiments we use a self-trained mixed model on early Latin prints and the two standard OCRopus models on modern English and German Fraktur texts. The evaluation on seven early printed books showed that training from the Latin mixed model reduces the average amount of errors by 43% and 26%, respectively compared to training from scratch with 60 and 150 lines of ground truth, respectively. Furthermore, it is shown that even building from mixed models trained on data unrelated to the newly added training and test data can lead to significantly improved recognition results

Age estimates of isochronous reflection horizons by combining ice core, survey, and synthetic radar data.

Ice core records and ice-penetrating radar data contain complementary information on glacial subsurface structure and composition, providing various opportunities for interpreting past and present environmental conditions. To exploit the full range of possible applications, accurate dating of internal radar reflection horizons and knowledge about their constituting features is required. On the basis of three ice core records from Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica, and surface-based radar profiles connecting the drilling locations, we investigate the accuracies involved in transferring age-depth relationships obtained from the ice cores to continuous radar reflections. Two methods are used to date five internal reflection horizons: (1) conventional dating is carried out by converting the travel time of the tracked reflection to a single depth, which is then associated with an age at each core location, and (2) forward modeling of electromagnetic wave propagation is based on dielectric profiling of ice cores and performed to identify the depth ranges from which tracked reflections originate, yielding an age range at each drill site. Statistical analysis of all age estimates results in age uncertainties of 5 10 years for conventional dating and an error range of 1 16 years for forward modeling. For our radar operations at 200 and 250 MHz in the upper 100 m of the ice sheet, comprising some 1000 1500 years of deposition history, final age uncertainties are 8 years in favorable cases and 21 years at the limit of feasibility. About one third of the uncertainty is associated with the initial ice core dating; the remaining part is associated with radar data quality and analysis

Ideological and Temporal Components of Network Polarization in Online Political Participatory Media

Political polarization is traditionally analyzed through the ideological stances of groups and parties, but it also has a behavioral component that manifests in the interactions between individuals. We present an empirical analysis of the digital traces of politicians in politnetz.ch, a Swiss online platform focused on political activity, in which politicians interact by creating support links, comments, and likes. We analyze network polarization as the level of intra- party cohesion with respect to inter-party connectivity, finding that supports show a very strongly polarized structure with respect to party alignment. The analysis of this multiplex network shows that each layer of interaction contains relevant information, where comment groups follow topics related to Swiss politics. Our analysis reveals that polarization in the layer of likes evolves in time, increasing close to the federal elections of 2011. Furthermore, we analyze the internal social network of each party through metrics related to hierarchical structures, information efficiency, and social resilience. Our results suggest that the online social structure of a party is related to its ideology, and reveal that the degree of connectivity across two parties increases when they are close in the ideological space of a multi-party system.Comment: 35 pages, 11 figures, Internet, Policy & Politics Conference, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, 25-26 September 201