Bacterial ‘Cell’ Phones: Do cell phones carry potential pathogens?

Cell phones are important companions for professionals especially health care workers (HCWs) for better communication in hospital. The present study compared the nature of the growth of potentially pathogenic bacterial flora on cell phones in hospital and community. 75% cell phones from both the categories grew at least one potentially pathogenic organism. Cell phones from HCWs grew significantly more potential pathogens like MRSA (20%), Acinetobacter species (5%), Pseudomonas species (2.5%) as compared to the non HCWs. 97.5% HCWs use their cell phone in the hospital, 57.5% never cleaned their cell phone and 20% admitted that they did not wash their hands before or after attending patients, although majority (77.5%) knows that cell phones can have harmful colonization and act as vector for nosocomial infections. It is recommended, therefore, that cell phones in the hospital should be regularly decontaminated. Moreover, utmost emphasis needs to be paid to hand washing practices among HCWs

Parameterization and R-Peak Error Estimations of ECG Signals Using Independent Component Analysis

Principal component analysis (PCA) is used to reduce dimensionality of electrocardiogram (ECG) data prior to performing independent component analysis (ICA). A newly developed PCA variance estimator by the author has been applied for detecting true, actual and false peaks of ECG data files. In this paper, it is felt that the ability of ICA is also checked for parameterization of ECG signals, which is necessary at times. Independent components (ICs) of properly parameterized ECG signals are more readily interpretable than the measurements themselves, or their ICs. The original ECG recordings and the samples are corrected by statistical measures to estimate the noise statistics of ECG signals and find the reconstruction errors. The capability of ICA is justified by finding the true, false and actual peaks of around 25–50, CSE (common standards for electrocardiography) database ECG files. In the present work, joint approximation for diagonalization of the eigen matrices (Jade) algorithm is applied to 3-channel ECG. ICA processing of different cases is dealt with and the R-peak magnitudes of the ECG waveforms before and after applying ICA are found and marked. ICA results obtained indicate that in most of the cases, the percentage error in reconstruction is very small. The developed PCA variance estimator along with the quadratic spline wavelet gave a sensitivity of 97.47% before applying ICA and 98.07% after ICA processing

E-waste Management-Suggested Solutions

Electronic waste has been identified as discarded computers, old television sets, electronic equipment, entertainment devices, mobile phones, and refrigerators. This definition mostly include used electronics. Because loads of surplus electronics are frequently not eliminated including goods, recyclable, and non-recyclable so several people apply the term "e-waste" broadly to all surplus electronics. Rapid changes in technology, changes in media, falling prices, and planned obsolescence have resulted in a fast-growing surplus of electronic waste around the globe. This paper has an objective to present an overview of the problem and tries to advocate some concrete solutions to tackle the issue

Deep Over-sampling Framework for Classifying Imbalanced Data

Class imbalance is a challenging issue in practical classification problems for deep learning models as well as traditional models. Traditionally successful countermeasures such as synthetic over-sampling have had limited success with complex, structured data handled by deep learning models. In this paper, we propose Deep Over-sampling (DOS), a framework for extending the synthetic over-sampling method to exploit the deep feature space acquired by a convolutional neural network (CNN). Its key feature is an explicit, supervised representation learning, for which the training data presents each raw input sample with a synthetic embedding target in the deep feature space, which is sampled from the linear subspace of in-class neighbors. We implement an iterative process of training the CNN and updating the targets, which induces smaller in-class variance among the embeddings, to increase the discriminative power of the deep representation. We present an empirical study using public benchmarks, which shows that the DOS framework not only counteracts class imbalance better than the existing method, but also improves the performance of the CNN in the standard, balanced settings

Synthesis, Characterization and Biological Evaluation of Novel 2,4-Dioxothiazolidine Derivatives as Potential Antimicrobial Agents

Objective: To develop a series of 2,4-dioxothiazolidine derivatives of aryl substituted cinnamic acid, characterization by elemental and spectral (IR, 1H-NMR) studies and antimicrobial study.Method: All compounds were synthesized from pure & standard substrates. Reactions were monitored by TLC & Melting points were determined by decibel melting point apparatus. The IR spectra were recorded on Perkin Elmer IR spectrophotometer using KBr pellets. Proton nuclear magnetic resonance spectra (1H NMR) were recorded on Brucker Avance II 400 NMR spectrophotometer. Antimicrobial activity was performed by measuring zone of inhibition.Results: All the synthesized compounds were purified and give very good spectra of IR & NMR. Compunds were studied for their antimicrobial activity in comparison to the standard drugs. Thz 9 was found the most active compound in this series, where Ciprofloxacin was used as a standard drug for antibacterial activity and Clotrimazole for antifungal activity.Conclusion: Compound Thz9 exhibited highest antimicrobial activity due to substitution of aryl ring by electron releasing methoxy groups at -ortho and -para position. Compound Thz9 was found more active than all other dimethoxy substituted compounds, the reason behind it may be that dimethoxy substitutions at -ortho and -para position on aryl ring enhanced the binding of molecule with the target. Almost in all compounds propyl ester has higher activity than methyl, ethyl esters, which means that heavy carbon chain ester increase the antimicrobial activity.Â

Determining 241Pu in environmental samples: case studies in alpine soils

A procedure was developed for determining 241Pu activity in environmental samples. This beta emitter isotope of plutonium was measured by ultra low level liquid scintillation, after several separation and purification steps that involved the use of a highly selective extraction chromatographic resin (Eichrom-TEVA). Due to the lack of reference material for 241Pu, the method was nevertheless validated using four IAEA reference sediments with information values for 241Pu. Next, the method was used to determine the 241Pu activity in alpine soils of Switzerland and France. The 241Pu/239,240Pu and 238Pu/239,240Pu activity ratios confirmed that Pu contamination in the tested alpine soils originated mainly from global fallout from nuclear weapon tests conducted in the fifties and sixties. Estimation of the date of the contamination, using the 241Pu/241Am age-dating method, further confirmed this origin. However, the 241Pu/241Am dating method was limited to samples where Pu-Am fractionation was insignificant. If any, the contribution of the Chernobyl accident is negligibl