Occurrence of Antibiotic-Resistant Staphylococcus spp. in Orange Orchards in Thailand

Background: The widespread indiscriminate application of antibiotics to food crops to control plant disease represents a potential human health risk. In this study, the presence of antibiotic-resistant staphylococci associated with workers and orange orchard environments was determined. A total of 20 orchards (orange and other fruits) were enrolled in the study. Trees in the orange orchards were treated with ampicillin on a pre-determined schedule. Environmental samples (n = 60) included soil, water, and oranges; 152 hand and nasal samples were collected from 76 healthy workers. Antibiotic susceptibility profiles were determined for all staphylococcal isolates. Results: This investigation revealed that of the total Staphylococcus spp. recovered from the orange orchard, 30% (3/10) were resistant to erythromycin, 20% (2/10) were resistant to ampicillin, and 20% (2/10) resistant to both erythromycin and ampicillin. Conclusion: The application of antibiotics to orange trees in open production environments to halt the spread of bacterial disease presents risks to the environment and creates health concerns for Thai farmers using those agents. ARB on crops such as oranges may enter the global food supply and adversely affect public health.

Formation of the model of the open production-and-economic system at the construction enterprise

The research is dedicated to the multi-structural model of the complex system at the construction enterprise as well as the model of structurally functional open production-and-economic system at the construction enterprise. The models are created for the acceptance of the justified managerial decisions and carrying out the applied research aimed at the efficiency of the construction enterprises functioning in the conditions of uncertainty, instability of the internal and external environment and heterogeneity of the indicators, which characterize the enterprise’s activity. The offered models are developed on the basis of the probability theory and the information theory; they are based on the principles of self-organization, openness of the complex systems, synergy and information-and-statistical approach. The concept of the open productive-and-economic system at the construction enterprise is considered, the content of the functions of the complex system at the construction enterprise is described, their stochastic and quasi-determined communications in the uniform information-and-statistical field of functioning are presented. Bit measurement for the whole set of functions, allowing to receive an adequate assessment of the complex open system behavior, is offered for further scientific and applied research, including the development of more exact forecasts and improvement of statistical heterogeneity of indicators.

Frequent Subgraph Mining Based Collaboration Pattern Analysis for Wikipedia

Online knowledge collaborations, where distributed members without hierarchies self-organize themselvesto create valuable contents, are prevalent in many open production systems such as Wikipedia, GitHub andsocial networks. While many existing studies from network science have been brought to analyse the general interactivebehavioural patterns embedded in these systems, how the collaborations influence the achievement outcomes hasnot been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, we mine the collaboration patterns from a micro perspective to deeplyunderstand the relationships between the collaboration among participants and the qualities of theWikipedia articles.In particular, the subgraphs contained in the collaboration networks derived from theWikipedia revision histories aretaken as the fundamental units to analyse the collaboration diversities from the subgraph properties such as size andtopology. In contrast to the predefined static motifs adopted by the previous works, the collaboration subgraphs aredirectly found from Wikipedia dataset by a frequent subgraph mining algorithm GRAMI, which is able to capturethe real dynamic collaboration patterns. Moreover, the relationships between the co-authors in the subgraphs are alsodiscriminated to further explore the collaboration patterns. The experiments exhibit the statistical properties of thecollaboration subgraphs and the efficiency of them as the metrics for the article quality assessments. We concludethat a small group of editors with relative frequent fixed collaboration patterns contribute more to the excellent articlequality than the professional extents of arbitrary individuals in the collaboration group. This discovery confirms thecommonly insight about collaboration that many heads are always better than one and concretely suggests a potentialexplanation for the increasing prevalence and success of the online knowledge collaborations

Open Growth

Open source software (OSS) is well established in sectors as diverse as aviation, health, telecommunications, finance, publishing, education, and government. As nations increasingly rely on knowledge assets to grow, the adoption of OSS will have profound economic consequences. This chapter identifies the mechanisms inherent to OSS production that help fuel innovation in knowledge-based economies. As a collaborative and open production model, OSS is conceptualized as a prototype of open innovation. OSS-related software development jobs are widely diffused throughout the economy, help build a skilled labour force, and offer wages significantly above the national average. OSS is thus believed to be a strong contributor to growth in high-value employment in the US. The authors also posit that, as industries are exposed to the benefits of OSS as a result of the broad diffusion of OSS-related jobs, open innovation processes outside software development may be adopted through a process of learning and imitation.

Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment of DMSO Solvent Recovery from Hazardous Waste Water

The protection of continuous drinking water supply is really important all over the world, also in Hungary. Many kinds of hazardous chemicals could pollute the natural water resources, arsenic is one of the most occurring pollutant in Hungary. Recently, an ethylene-vinyl alcohol copolymer based arsenic removal adsorbent has been developed. During the manufacturing process hazardous waste water is produced, which is burned in the incineration plant, so this open production process needs fresh solvent every time. However, if the different fraction of the waste water is separated by distillation both the volume of the hazardous waste water can be reduced extremely and the recovered solvent and water can be reused in the manufacturing process. Beside analytical measurements Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) was prepared to identify and compare the environmental, economic and social effects of the current technology and the new one. The results proved that the technology closed by distillation is better than the current open one in each aspect of LCSA.

Openness as social praxis

Since the early 2000s, there has been an explosion in the usage of the term open, arguably stemming from the advent of networked technologies — including the Internet and mobile technologies. ‘Openness’ seems to be everywhere, and takes many forms: from open knowledge, open education, open data and open science, to open Internet, open medical records systems and open innovation. These applications of openness are having a profound, and sometimes transformative, effect on social, political and economic life.This explosion of the use of the term has led to multiple interpretations, ambiguities, and even misunderstandings, not to mention countless debates and disagreements over precise definitions. The paper “Fifty shades of open” by Pomerantz and Peek (2016) highlighted the increasing ambiguity and even confusion surrounding this term. This article builds on Pomerantz and Peek’s attempt to disambiguate the term by offering an alternative understanding to openness — that of social praxis. More specifically, our framing can be broken down into three social processes: open production, open distribution, and open consumption. Each process shares two traits that make them open: you don’t have to pay (free price), and anyone can participate (non-discrimination) in these processes.We argue that conceptualizing openness as social praxis offers several benefits. First, it provides a way out of a variety of problems that result from ambiguities and misunderstandings that emerge from the current multitude of uses of openness. Second, it provides a contextually sensitive understanding of openness that allows space for the many different ways openness is experienced — often very different from the way that more formal definitions conceptualize it. Third, it points us towards an approach to developing practice-specific theory that we believe helps us build generalizable knowledge on what works (or not), for whom, and in what contexts.