Additional Processing Costs Research Articles

Rapid identification of microorganisms from positive blood cultures by MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry subsequent to very short-term incubation on solid medium

Rapid identification of the causative microorganism is important for appropriate antimicrobial therapy of bloodstream infections. Bacteria from positive blood culture (BC) bottles are not readily available for identification by matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization—time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS). Lysis and centrifugation procedures suggested for direct MALDI-TOF MS from positive BCs without previous culture are associated with additional hands-on processing time and costs. Here, we describe an alternative approach applying MALDI-TOF MS from bacterial cultures incubated very briefly on solid medium. After plating of positive BC broth on Columbia blood agar (n = 165), MALDI-TOF MS was performed after 1.5, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12 and (for control) 24 h of incubation until reliable identification to the species level was achieved (score ≥2.0). Mean incubation time needed to achieve species-level identification was 5.9 and 2.0 h for Gram-positive aerobic cocci (GPC, n = 86) and Gram-negative aerobic rods (GNR, n = 42), respectively. Short agar cultures with incubation times ≤2, ≤4, ≤6, ≤8 and ≤12 h yielded species identification in 1.2%, 18.6%, 64.0%, 96.5%, 98.8% of GPC, and in 76.2%, 95.2%, 97.6%, 97.6%, 97.6% of GNR, respectively. Control species identification at 24 h was achieved in 100% of GPC and 97.6% of GNR. Ethanol/formic acid protein extraction performed for an additional 34 GPC isolates cultivated from positive BCs showed further reduction in time to species identification (3.1 h). MALDI-TOF MS using biomass subsequent to very short-term incubation on solid medium allows very early and reliable bacterial identification from positive BCs without additional time and cost expenditure.

PDMS lab-on-a-chip fabrication using 3D printed templates

The fabrication of conventional PDMS on glass lab-on-a-chip (LOC) devices, using templates printed with a commercial (2299 US$) micro-stereo lithography 3D printer, is demonstrated. Printed templates replace clean room and photolithographic fabrication resources and deliver resolutions of 50 μm, and up to 10 μm in localized hindrances, whereas the templates are smooth enough to allow direct transfer and proper sealing to glass substrates. 3D printed templates accommodate multiple thicknesses, from 50 μm up to several mm within the same template, with no additional processing cost or effort. This capability is exploited to integrate silicone tubing easily, to improve micromixer performance and to produce multilevel fluidics with simple access to independent functional surfaces, which is illustrated by time-resolved glucose detection. The templates are reusable, can be fabricated in under 20 min, with an average cost of 0.48 US$, which promotes broader access to established LOC configurations with minimal fabrication requirements, relieves LOC fabrication from design skills and provides a versatile LOC development platform.

Optimized hash for network path encoding with minimized false positives

The Bloom filter is a space efficient randomized data structure for representing a set and supporting membership queries. Bloom filters intrinsically allow false positives. However, the space savings they offer outweigh the disadvantage if the false positive rates are kept sufficiently low. Inspired by the recent application of the Bloom filter in a novel multicast forwarding fabric, this paper proposes a variant of the Bloom filter, the optihash. The optihash introduces an optimization for the false positive rate at the stage of Bloom filter formation using the same amount of space at the cost of slightly more processing than the classic Bloom filter. Often Bloom filters are used in situations where a fixed amount of space is a primary constraint. We present the optihash as a good alternative to Bloom filters since the amount of space is the same and the improvements in false positives can justify the additional processing. Specifically, we show via simulations and numerical analysis that using the optihash the false positives occurrences can be reduced and controlled at a cost of small additional processing. The simulations are carried out for in-packet forwarding. In this framework, the Bloom filter is used as a compact link/route identifier and it is placed in the packet header to encode the route. At each node, the Bloom filter is queried for membership in order to make forwarding decisions. A false positive in the forwarding decision is translated into packets forwarded along an unintended outgoing link. By using the optihash, false positives can be reduced. The optimization processing is carried out in an entity termed the Topology Manger which is part of the control plane of the multicast forwarding fabric. This processing is only carried out on a per session basis, not for every packet. The aim of this paper is to present the optihash and evaluate its false positive performances via simulations in order to measure the influence of different parameters on the false positive rate. The false positive rate for the optihash is then compared with the false positive probability of the classic Bloom filter.

Multilingual Stroop performance: Effects of trilingualism and proficiency on inhibitory control

Previous research suggests that multilinguals' languages are constantly co-activated and that experience managing this co-activation changes inhibitory control function. The present study examined language interaction and inhibitory control using a colour-word Stroop task. Multilingual participants were tested in their three most proficient languages. The classic Stroop effect was detected in all three languages, with participants performing more accurately on congruent than on incongruent trials. Multilinguals were faster and more accurate in the within-language-competition condition than in the between-language-competition condition, indicating that additional processing costs are required when stimulus and response languages differ. Language proficiency influenced speed, accuracy and error patterns in multilingual Stroop task performance. These findings augment our understanding of language processing and inhibitory control in multilingual populations and suggest that experience using multiple languages changes demands on cognitive function.

Thermal pre-treatment of refractory limonite ores to enhance the extraction of nickel and cobalt under heap leaching conditions

A low grade Western Australian slow-leaching limonite ore (Ore G) was selected to investigate the effect of thermal pre-treatment (roasting) upon the extraction kinetics of nickel and cobalt. The optimised thermal treatment conditions were established using batch roasting and bottle roll leaching tests to determine the effectiveness of each treatment relative to the leach performance of the untreated Ore G. The optimum treatment conditions were then applied to Ore G on a larger scale to provide a bulk sample for subsequent column leach tests. The faster leaching kinetics of both nickel and cobalt of the roasted ore were believed to be partially due to extra surface area created through water escape from goethite during the dehydroxylation process. Interestingly, however, the roasted ore consumes essentially the same amount of acid compared to untreated ore per unit of nickel extracted. Thus roasting of selected ores prior to heap leaching is a pre-treatment that could be applied to the vast WA resource of refractory goethitic ores which are currently not economic to process. The economics, however, would need to be assessed on a case by case basis with the additional processing costs needing to be at least off-set by the value of the recovered value metals.

알루미늄 후판을 이용한 Moss Spherical 타입의 LNG탱크 곡면 성형해석 및 스프링백 예측

One of the main methods of building LNG tankers uses the Moss spherical tank design since it can be precisely analyzed with respect to reliability and safety of construction by stress analysis. Aluminum alloy 5083 is generally used in the Moss spherical tank design for the wall in constructing the LNG tanker. This aluminum alloy does not have low temperature brittleness, but has good corrosion resistance, good weldability, and excellent material properties for the application. The Moss spherical tank is constructed with several sections of A5083 thick plate with curved surfaces, which are welded together. It is essential to predict the amount of springback for the deformed thick plates in design to insure a reliable construction because the structure needs to be assembled into a perfect sphere. Unless the initial construction meets the design, there are additional processing costs for reworking to meet the specifications as well as a cost penalty paid to a consumer. In this paper, FE analyses were conducted to predict the amount of springback for various forming conditions and forming processes. The various forming processes were evaluated with respect to reducing springback and compared with the conventional forming process used for curved surfaces of thick Al plate.

A Single Bio-based Catalyst for Bio-fuel and Bio-diesel

Current homogeneous catalysts used for commercial biodiesel synthesis are toxic and flammable. For Feedstock, their reaction requires refined oil which is a human food and expensive. In addition, due to contamination, the main byproduct of their reaction, glycerol is not usable for sale as a high value product and is land filled or burned as waste. Furthermore, the use of these catalysts in conversion of low cost feed-stocks such as waste oil and greases is not economical because their reactions produce soaps and clean up of the soap imposes additional processing cost to the biodiesel synthesis process. On the other hand, heterogeneous catalysts under development for biodiesel synthesis are either derived from non-renewable resources, or have problems with toxicity or stability. The solid heterogeneous bio-based catalysts are based on renewable resources, non-toxic, stable, effective, and low cost and are expected to work well for conversion of low cost feed-stocks such as waste oil and grease such as yellow, brown and black grease. In addition to catalyzing biodiesel synthesis, biobased catalysts can convert cellulosic agricultural waste to biofuel via saccarification followed by fermentation. Due to the abundance of cellulosic biomass in the nature, this reaction has great significance as it will affect the availability of not only biofuel from the fermentation of glucose, but also the availability of all organic chemicals and even hydrogen fuel from biomass. Because the catalytic active site in these catalysts are chemically bound, in contrast to other similar catalysts such as naphthalene sulfonic acid, the catalytic active sites of biobased catalysts will not break down, or leach. As a result, both the biodiesel and the glycerol by product will be free of catalyst contaminants. This allows the biodiesel to be safely burned and the glycerol byproduct to be sold as value-added commodity for pharmaceutical and cosmetic uses.

Word category conversion causes processing costs: Evidence from adjectival passives

Constructing syntactic representations in language comprehension begins with the identification of word categories. Whether the category information is stored in the mental lexicon is a matter of debate in current linguistic theorizing. The standard view assumes that the syntactic category of a word is lexically specified (lexicalist approach). More recently, it has been proposed within the paradigm of distributed morphology that lexical elements (roots) are stored without any syntactic category information: The syntactic category of a lexical element is determined only by the syntactic context in which it appears (syntactic approach). For processing category-ambiguous words, different hypotheses can be derived from these two accounts. The lexicalist approach predicts that there are productive grammatical processes, such as nominalization and adjectivization, that convert a word of Category A into one of Category B. Such a conversion might be assumed to create additional processing costs. Within the syntactic approach, on the other hand, no additional processing step is expected, because there is no need for any category shift. In a self-paced reading study on so-called adjectival passives, we found evidence of costs predicted under the lexicalist approach (i.e., for a grammatical process that changes the category of a word). More specifically, the present study provides evidence for category conversion from a verbal participle into an adjectival one. We also discuss an alternative explanation for this finding in terms of frequency.

The sources of variability in U.S. food prices

Food prices surged in the United States and around the world between 2006 and 2008. Global increases have been attributed to income growth in the developing world, diversion of farm products from food to industrial usage, speculation in commodity markets, and energy price increases. Although pass-through of farm commodity price increases to retail prices may be mitigated by additional processing costs and food sector organizational structure, food prices in the U.S. have also recently outpaced general price increases. Time series analysis of factors influencing monthly food prices from 1970 through February 2009 suggest that innovations in farm prices and manufacturing wages, rather than consumer incomes or the prices of other food production inputs including fuel play the most significant role in determining food price changes.

Paradigmatic and extraparadigmatic morphology in the mental lexicon

The present study discusses psycholinguistic evidence for a difference between paradigmatic and extraparadigmatic morphology by investigating the processing of Finnish inflected and cliticized words. The data are derived from three sources of Finnish: from single-word reading performance in an agrammatic deep dyslectic speaker, as well as from visual lexical decision and wordness/learnability ratings of cliticized vs. inflected items by normal Finnish speakers. The agrammatic speaker showed awareness of the suffixes in multimorphemic words, including clitics, since he attempted to fill in this slot with morphological material. However, he never produced a clitic — either as the correct response or as an error — in any morphological configuration (simplex, derived, inflected, compound). Moreover, he produced more nominative singular errors for case-inflected nouns than he did for the cliticized words, a pattern that is expected if case-inflected forms were closely associated with their lexical heads, i.e., if they were paradigmatic and cliticized words were not. Furthermore, a visual lexical decision task with normal speakers of Finnish, showed an additional processing cost (longer latencies and more errors on cliticized than on case-inflected noun forms). Finally, a rating task indicated no difference in relative wordness between these two types of words. However, the same cliticized words were judged harder to learn as L2 items than the inflected words, most probably due to their conceptual/semantic properties, in other words due to their lack of word-level translation equivalents in SAVE languages. Taken together, the present results suggest that the distinction between paradigmatic and extraparadigmatic morphology is psychologically real.

The influence of lexical familiarity on ERP responses during sentence comprehension in language learners

Previous research on event-related potentials (ERPs) on second language processing has revealed a great degree of plasticity in brain mechanisms of adult language learners. Studies with natural and artificial languages show that the N400 as well as the P600 component appear in learners after sufficient training. The present experiment tests if and which ERP components in response to syntactic and thematic processes generalize to unfamiliar lexical material in adult language learners. Learners of a miniature version of Japanese were presented with correct and incorrect sentences, half of which contained an unfamiliar word in the crucial sentence position. Incorrect sentences were either case-marking violations or word category violations. When all words were familiar, case-marking violations elicited a biphasic N400—P600 pattern and word category violations led to an early negativity that was followed by a P600. When the case violation occurred on an unfamiliar noun, only a P600 was seen. Word category violations that involved unknown verbs led to an early negativity and only to a reduced P600. The results suggest a high degree of nativelikeness for the learners during processing of familiar sentences. Unfamiliar words seem to entail additional processing costs and specifically lead to difficulties in the domain of case processing.

Design and optimization of a buried channel PMOS integrable in a Si 1− xGe x BiCMOS process

A strained Si 1− x Ge x -channel PMOSFET, fully integrable in a standard Si 1− x Ge x BiCMOS process is proposed. It uses an n +-polysilicon emitter of the bipolar transistor as the gate, and has a p-type Si 1− x Ge x channel, making it a truly buried channel device. It uses only two extra masks and a few minor changes in the baseline BiCMOS flow, keeping the additional processing cost low. The basic device design is systematically optimized to get the best compromise among hole confinement in Si 1− x Ge x , layer stability and channel hole mobility. Optimization was done using Ge fraction dependent process and device simulation parameters for the first time. A novel, semi-analytical approach to model the effect of Ge fraction on hole current was used. The impacts of Si cap layer thickness, Si 1− x Ge x film thickness, channel doping and Ge fraction were investigated. During process and device design, care was taken to ensure that the Si 1− x Ge x layer remains strained as well as the standard available devices are not impacted by additional process steps. The optimized device shows a 2× gain in transconductance and in drain current over the standard PMOS device available in the baseline process.

Dual-Damascene Cu/Low-k Interconnect Fabrication Scheme Using Dissoluble Hard Mask Material

A Cu-low- dual-damascene scheme is developed by employing a dissoluble hard mask material, AlO. High-selectivity etching, over 15, is achieved by using the AlO hard mask. After the etching, the remaining AlO dissolves in a postetch cleaning solution, making additional processing costs minimal. By using this scheme, the line-to-line capacitance reduces by 10% because no ashing is applied after low- trench etching. Low-temperature deposition of AlO is found to be the key for the dissoluble property. When the deposition temperature is or less, a wide range of conventional postetch cleaning solutions can be used to remove the remaining AlO hard mask.

Disease and Biosecurity

There are large differences between the prices of animal products in regions with comparative advantage in livestock production and regions where production costs are higher. In particular, prices for many animal products are much higher in The European Union (EU) and The United States of America (USA) than in regions with extensive grazing areas or low-priced animal feed grains, e.g. Australia, South America and Southern Africa. These price differentials provide strong financial incentives for trade in animal products between these regions. However, trade is constrained by three main factors: 1.The perishability of many animal products, resulting in additional processing costs (e.g. freezing) which may also reduce the value of the product and higher transport costs.2.The fact that in many markets, high prices have been used as an element of agricultural support policy. These are partly maintained by levies on imported products.3.Zoosanitary restrictions to control the risk of introducing livestock and human disease agents in animal products.

Spatial Color Indexing and Applications

We define a new image feature called the color correlogram and use it for image indexing and comparison. This feature distills the spatial correlation of colors and when computed efficiently, turns out to be both effective and inexpensive for content-based image retrieval. The correlogram is robust in tolerating large changes in appearance and shape caused by changes in viewing position, camera zoom, etc. Experimental evidence shows that this new feature outperforms not only the traditional color histogram method but also the recently proposed histogram refinement methods for image indexing/retrieval. We also provide a technique to cut down the storage requirement of the correlogram so that it is the same as that of histograms, with only negligible performance penalty compared to the original correlogram. We also suggest the use of color correlogram as a generic indexing tool to tackle various problems arising from image retrieval and video browsing. We adapt the correlogram to handle the problems of image subregion querying, object localization, object tracking, and cut detection. Experimental results again suggest that the color correlogram is more effective than the histogram for these applications, with insignificant additional storage or processing cost.

Improved oxides for production of lead/acid battery plates

For many years, the plates of lead/acid batteries have been produced from leady oxide, a mixture of finely divided lead (`free-lead') and lead monoxide. Although this material is generally satisfactory, it suffers from the disadvantages that it is variable in composition and requires complicated and lengthy processing after pasting to remove the residual free-lead. Plates made from leady oxide also require cycling before they achieve their full performance, and this can result in either depressed initial capacity or additional processing cost. There is a growing trend towards the use of pure lead monoxide (β-PbO) for the production of positive plates. This material is particularly valuable in valve-regulated batteries where cell-to-cell uniformity is essential for proper control of battery performance. It also reduces processing cost since it does not require time-consuming curing to remove free-lead. Red lead (Pb3O4) is also being more widely used in industrial batteries since it reduces formation time, and improves initial and high-rate performance. The methods of production of leady oxide, β-PbO and red lead are briefly reviewed and the characteristics of battery-grade materials are described. Particular emphasis is placed on optimum particle-size distribution, and how this can affect the battery performance. The benefits in processing and performance are described together with information on how pure litharge and red lead are used in battery plates.

Magnetic‐field augmented sedimentation of micron‐sized iron particles in a hydrocarbon

The production of liquid hydrocarbon from syngas by the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis is accelerated by iron or cobalt catalysts. When this process is performed in a slurry bubble column reactor, fine catalyst particles are distributed in the liquid phase and these must be separated from the product before it can be further refined. Sedimentation is the most common and simple chemical engineering unit operation for separating suspended solids from liquids. It can be easily accomplished by holding the suspension in a settling tank for a period of time without incurring additional processing costs. However, sedimentation velocities are inversely proportional to particle size; if the solid particles are very small, the sedimentation velocity may be so low that the processing time is unacceptably long. This article deals with the effect of exposure to a magnetic field on the settling velocities of suspensions of iron particles in a hydrocarbon liquid. The results reveal that magnetic flocculation can substantially increase the settling velocities for catalyst particles in hydrocarbon liquids produced in the Fischer-Tropsch process.

More reliable shear-wave data from VSPs using the CIPHER technique

It has long been recognized that fracture systems in rocks can significantly influence the flow of fluids in the subsurface. The observation of seismic shear waves, recorded with three-component multilevel geophones in boreholes, provides information on seismic anisotropy, which may be caused primarily by preferred orientations of microcracks (Crampin 1986). However, as a complementary tool to standard P-wave vertical seismic profiles (VSPs) (Hardage 1985; CasselI 1984), shearwave VSPs with horizontal vibrators require additional survey time and processing costs.

Performance analysis of locking policies with limited wait depth

The performance of a transaction processing system with the standard two-phase locking (2PL) concurrency control (CC) method (with the general waiting policy upon a lock conflict) may be degraded significantly due to transaction blocking in a high lock contention environment. In the limit this effect leads to the thrashing phenomenon, i.e., the majority of the transactions in the system become blocked. Limiting the wait depth of blocked transactions is an effective method to increase the number of active transactions in the system and to prevent thrashing, but this is at the cost of additional processing due to transaction restarts. The no-waiting (or immediate restart) policy limits the wait-depth to zero, while cautious waiting and the running priority policies use different methods to limit the wait depth to one. A variant of the wait depth limited (WDL) policy [8] also limits the wait depth to one, while attempting to minimize the wasted processing incurred by transaction aborts. A unified methodology to analyze the performance of the 2PL CC method with limited wait depth policies in a system with multiple transaction classes is described in this paper. The analysis is based on Markov chains representing the execution steps of each transaction in isolation, but as affected by hardware resource and data contention with other transactions in the system. Since the transition rates of the Markov chain are not known a priori, an iterative solution method is developed, which is then applied to the running priority and WDL policies. Simulation is used for validating the accuracy of the approximate analytic solutions. Of interest are the conservation laws governing the rate at which locks are transferred among transactions, which can be used to verify the correctness of the analysis.