Multi-drug resistant (MDR) and extensively drug-resistant (XDR) bacteraemia rates among cancer patients in an oncology hospital in eastern India: an 11-year retrospective observational study.

Background: Trend analysis of bacteraemias caused by multi-drug resistant (MDR) and extensively drug resistant (XDR) bacteria helps to assess efficacy of infection prevention and control (IPC) practices. Data on the trends of MDR and XDR bacteraemias are lacking from cancer patients in India. Aims: To report antibiotic resistance rates over time in bacteraemias and to assess the effect of IPC practices where patient isolation facilities were limited on the rates and trends of MDR and XDR bacteraemias from a cancer centre in eastern India. Methods: A retrospective observational study was conducted in a specialist cancer hospital in India from 2011 to 2021. The study included both patients with haematological and solid organ malignancy. Data on blood cultures and surveillance culture samples were analysed. Blood cultures were processed using BACT/ALERT® (bioMérieux, Marcy-l'Étoile, France) and the identification and antibiotic susceptibilities of bacteria were performed using VITEK® 2 (bioMérieux, Marcy-l'Étoile, France). Surveillance cultures for MDR/XDR bacteria were performed on a subset of patients and processed based on a modified method described previously. Findings: 3rd-generation cephalosporin-resistant Gram negative bacilli were the commonest cause of MDR bacteraemia (57.6%) followed by carbapenem resistant organisms (CRO) (35.7%). Bacteraemias caused by vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE), meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and colistin-resistant Gram negative bacilli were responsible for 1.3%, 2.3% and 3.0% of laboratory confirmed bloodstream infections (BSI) respectively. The ranges of the rates of MDR/XDR BSI per 1000 in-patients during the study period were: MRSA (1-1.18), VRE (0-0.88), 3rd generation cephalosporin-resistant Gram negative bacilli (10.10-20.32), CRO (5.05-13.07) and colistin-resistant Gram negative bacilli (E. coli, Klebsiella, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Acinetobacter spp (0-1.3). Surveillance cultures collected from a subset of patients showed ranges of MRSA detection in 0-2.11%, VRE in 1.67%-7.49%, 3rd generation cephalosporin-resistant Gram negative bacilli in 55%-89.91% and carbapenem resistant Gram negative bacilli in 18.33%-31.11% of patients. Conclusion: This is one of few studies providing trend data for MDR/XDR bacteraemia rates among cancer patients in India over a decade. In a high prevalence setting it was possible to keep the rates of MDR/XDR bacteraemia controlled with IPC strategies and without adequate isolation facilities. The results are of potential interest to policy makers, IPC specialists and clinicians.

Impact of COVID-19 on the mobility patterns: An investigation of taxi trips in Chicago.

The COVID-19 outbreak has impacted urban transportation mobility throughout the world. In this paper, we investigate the impact of COVID-19 on the urban mobility network's structural characteristics. We contribute to the literature by discussing how various community areas in the city traffic network are impacted by the pandemic. We analyze a large dataset on urban mobility from the city of Chicago and derive various insights. Our analysis of the mobility network structure is important because a better understanding of such networks can help control the spread of the disease by reducing interactions among individuals. We find that the pandemic significantly impacted the structure of the mobility network of taxis in Chicago. Our study reveals some important pointers for policymakers that could potentially aid in developing urban transportation policies during the pandemic.

Importance and results of sterility testing of various products in a microbiology laboratory of eastern India.

Components of blood products from Blood bank, stem cells products from Haemotapoietic Stem Cell Transplant unit, CSSD (Central Sterile Supply Department) items, and pharrrmaceutical products, were sterility tested by liquid culture. 2.91% of the total 3122 samples sent for sterility testing from various departments were positive (i.e. showing contamination). CSSD products showed no contamination (0/37); products from blood bank and bone marrow transplant unit showed a contamination rate of 2.03% (47/2307) and 4.64% (31/667) respectively. The average cost of sterility test was Rs. 302 (INR). Sterility test requires stringent aseptic precautions which is resource intensive.

Mentorship and protégé success in STEM fields.

Einstein believed that mentors are especially influential in a protégé's intellectual development, yet the link between mentorship and protégé success remains a mystery. We marshaled genealogical data on nearly 40,000 scientists who published 1,167,518 papers in biomedicine, chemistry, math, or physics between 1960 and 2017 to investigate the relationship between mentorship and protégé achievement. In our data, we find groupings of mentors with similar records and reputations who attracted protégés of similar talents and expected levels of professional success. However, each grouping has an exception: One mentor has an additional hidden capability that can be mentored to their protégés. They display skill in creating and communicating prizewinning research. Because the mentor's ability for creating and communicating celebrated research existed before the prize's conferment, protégés of future prizewinning mentors can be uniquely exposed to mentorship for conducting celebrated research. Our models explain 34-44% of the variance in protégé success and reveals three main findings. First, mentorship strongly predicts protégé success across diverse disciplines. Mentorship is associated with a 2×-to-4× rise in a protégé's likelihood of prizewinning, National Academy of Science (NAS) induction, or superstardom relative to matched protégés. Second, mentorship is significantly associated with an increase in the probability of protégés pioneering their own research topics and being midcareer late bloomers. Third, contrary to conventional thought, protégés do not succeed most by following their mentors' research topics but by studying original topics and coauthoring no more than a small fraction of papers with their mentors.

Author Correction: Prior shared success predicts victory in team competitions.

In the version of this article initially published, errors occurred in the Acknowledgments.

Prior shared success predicts victory in team competitions.

Debate over the impact of team composition on the outcome of a contest has attracted sports enthusiasts and sports scientists for years. A commonly held belief regarding team success is the superstar effect; that is, including more talent improves the performance of a team1. However, studies of team sports have suggested that previous relations and shared experiences among team members improve the mutual understanding of individual habits, techniques and abilities and therefore enhance team coordination and strategy2-9. We explored the impact of within-team relationships on the outcome of competition between sports teams. Relations among teammates consist of two aspects: qualitative and quantitative. While quantitative aspects measure the number of times two teammates collaborated, qualitative aspects focus on 'prior shared success'; that is, whether teamwork succeeded or failed. We examined the association between qualitative team interactions and the probability of winning using historical records from professional sports-basketball in the National Basketball Association, football in the English Premier League, cricket in the Indian Premier League and baseball in Major League Baseball-and the multiplayer online battle game Defense of the Ancients 2. Our results show that prior shared success between team members significantly improves the odds of the team winning in all sports beyond the talents of individuals.

Network organization of co-opetitive genetic influences on morphologies of the human cerebral cortex.

OBJECTIVE: The brain can be represented as a network, where anatomical regions are nodes and relations between regions are edges. Within a network, the co-existence of co-operative and competitive relationships between different nodes is called co-opetition. Inter-regional genetic influences on morphological phenotypes (thickness, surface area) of the cerebral cortex display such co-opetitive relationships. However, whether these co-operative and competitive genetic influences are organized similarly has remained elusive. How the collective organization of the co-operative and competitive genetic influences is related to the inter-individual variations of cortical morphological phenotypes has also remained unexplored. APPROACH: We constructed inter-regional genetic influence networks underlying the morphologies (thickness, surface area) of the human cerebral cortex combining the T1 weighted MRI of genetically confirmed 593 siblings and twin-study design. Graph theory was used to characterize the genetic influence networks and the collective organizations of genetic influences were characterized using the theory of structural balance. Principal component (PC) analysis was used to estimate the principal modes of morphological phenotype variations. MAIN RESULTS: The inter-regional co-operative genetic influences are assortative, while competitive influences are disassortative. Co-operative genetic influences are more cohesive and less diverse than the competitive influences. The collective organization of co-opetitive genetic influences partially explains the fifth principal modes of inter-individual variation of cortical morphological phenotypes. Other principal modes were not significantly associated with collective genetic influences. SIGNIFICANCE: Our study furnishes fundamental insight regarding the organization of co-opetitive genetic influences underlying the morphologies of the human cerebral cortex. In future studies, investigation of the alterations of co-opetitive genetic network properties in brain disorders may furnish disorder-specific insight that may be associated with the disease state or lead to vulnerability to those conditions.

The nearly universal link between the age of past knowledge and tomorrow's breakthroughs in science and technology: The hotspot.

Scientists and inventors can draw on an ever-expanding literature for the building blocks of tomorrow's ideas, yet little is known about how combinations of past work are related to future discoveries. Our analysis parameterizes the age distribution of a work's references and revealed three links between the age of prior knowledge and hit papers and patents. First, works that cite literature with a low mean age and high age variance are in a citation "hotspot"; these works double their likelihood of being in the top 5% or better of citations. Second, the hotspot is nearly universal in all branches of science and technology and is increasingly predictive of a work's future citation impact. Third, a scientist or inventor is significantly more likely to write a paper in the hotspot when they are coauthoring than whey they are working alone. Our findings are based on all 28,426,345 scientific papers in the Web of Science, 1945-2013, and all 5,382,833 U.S. patents, 1950-2010, and reveal new antecedents of high-impact science and the link between prior literature and tomorrow's breakthrough ideas.

Individual performance and leader's laterality in interactive contests.

Left-handedness is known to provide an intrinsic and tactical advantage at top level in many sports involving interactive contests. Again, most of the renowned leaders of the world are known to have been left-handed. Leadership plays an important role in politics, sports and mentorship. In this paper we show that Cricket captains who bat left-handed have a strategic advantage over the right-handed captains in One Day International (ODI) and Test matches. The present study involving 46 left-handed captains and 148 right-handed captains in ODI matches, reveal a strong relation between leader's laterality and team member performance, demonstrating the critical importance of left-handedness and successful leadership. The odds for superior batting performance in an ODI match under left-handed captains are 89% higher than the odds under right-handed captains. Our study shows that left-handed captains are more successful in extracting superior performance from the batsmen and bowlers in ODI and Test matches; perhaps indicating left-handed leaders are better motivators as leaders when compared to right-handed captains.

The Advantage of Playing Home in NBA: Microscopic, Team-Specific and Evolving Features.

The idea that the success rate of a team increases when playing home is broadly accepted and documented for a wide variety of sports. Investigations on the so-called "home advantage phenomenon" date back to the 70's and ever since has attracted the attention of scholars and sport enthusiasts. These studies have been mainly focused on identifying the phenomenon and trying to correlate it with external factors such as crowd noise and referee bias. Much less is known about the effects of home advantage in the "microscopic" dynamics of the game (within the game) or possible team-specific and evolving features of this phenomenon. Here we present a detailed study of these previous features in the National Basketball Association (NBA). By analyzing play-by-play events of more than sixteen thousand games that span thirteen NBA seasons, we have found that home advantage affects the microscopic dynamics of the game by increasing the scoring rates and decreasing the time intervals between scores of teams playing home. We verified that these two features are different among the NBA teams, for instance, the scoring rate of the Cleveland Cavaliers team is increased ≈0.16 points per minute (on average the seasons 2004-05 to 2013-14) when playing home, whereas for the New Jersey Nets (now the Brooklyn Nets) this rate increases in only ≈0.04 points per minute. We further observed that these microscopic features have evolved over time in a non-trivial manner when analyzing the results team-by-team. However, after averaging over all teams some regularities emerge; in particular, we noticed that the average differences in the scoring rates and in the characteristic times (related to the time intervals between scores) have slightly decreased over time, suggesting a weakening of the phenomenon. This study thus adds evidence of the home advantage phenomenon and contributes to a deeper understanding of this effect over the course of games.

Social embeddedness in an online weight management programme is linked to greater weight loss.

The obesity epidemic is heightening chronic disease risk globally. Online weight management (OWM) communities could potentially promote weight loss among large numbers of people at low cost. Because little is known about the impact of these online communities, we examined the relationship between individual and social network variables, and weight loss in a large, international OWM programme. We studied the online activity and weight change of 22,419 members of an OWM system during a six-month period, focusing especially on the 2033 members with at least one friend within the community. Using Heckman's sample-selection procedure to account for potential selection bias and data censoring, we found that initial body mass index, adherence to self-monitoring and social networking were significantly correlated with weight loss. Remarkably, greater embeddedness in the network was the variable with the highest statistical significance in our model for weight loss. Average per cent weight loss at six months increased in a graded manner from 4.1% for non-networked members, to 5.2% for those with a few (two to nine) friends, to 6.8% for those connected to the giant component of the network, to 8.3% for those with high social embeddedness. Social networking within an OWM community, and particularly when highly embedded, may offer a potent, scalable way to curb the obesity epidemic and other disorders that could benefit from behavioural changes.

Emergence of overlap in ensembles of spatial multiplexes and statistical mechanics of spatial interacting network ensembles.

Spatial networks range from the brain networks, to transportation networks and infrastructures. Recently interacting and multiplex networks are attracting great attention because their dynamics and robustness cannot be understood without treating at the same time several networks. Here we present maximal entropy ensembles of spatial multiplex and spatial interacting networks that can be used in order to model spatial multilayer network structures and to build null models of real data sets. We show that spatial multiplexes naturally develop a significant overlap of the links, a noticeable property of many multiplexes that can affect significantly the dynamics taking place on them. Additionally, we characterize ensembles of spatial interacting networks and we analyze the structure of interacting airport and railway networks in India, showing the effect of space in determining the link probability.

Atypical combinations and scientific impact.

Novelty is an essential feature of creative ideas, yet the building blocks of new ideas are often embodied in existing knowledge. From this perspective, balancing atypical knowledge with conventional knowledge may be critical to the link between innovativeness and impact. Our analysis of 17.9 million papers spanning all scientific fields suggests that science follows a nearly universal pattern: The highest-impact science is primarily grounded in exceptionally conventional combinations of prior work yet simultaneously features an intrusion of unusual combinations. Papers of this type were twice as likely to be highly cited works. Novel combinations of prior work are rare, yet teams are 37.7% more likely than solo authors to insert novel combinations into familiar knowledge domains.

Anomalous diffusion and long-range correlations in the score evolution of the game of cricket.

We investigate the time evolution of the scores of the second most popular sport in the world: the game of cricket. By analyzing, event by event, the scores of more than 2000 matches, we point out that the score dynamics is an anomalous diffusive process. Our analysis reveals that the variance of the process is described by a power-law dependence with a superdiffusive exponent, that the scores are statistically self-similar following a universal Gaussian distribution, and that there are long-range correlations in the score evolution. We employ a generalized Langevin equation with a power-law correlated noise that describes all the empirical findings very well. These observations suggest that competition among agents may be a mechanism leading to anomalous diffusion and long-range correlation.

Is coaching experience associated with effective use of timeouts in basketball?

Experience is an important asset in almost any professional activity. In basketball, there is believed to be a positive association between coaching experience and effective use of team timeouts. Here, we analyze both the extent to which a team's change in scoring margin per possession after timeouts deviate from the team's average scoring margin per possession-what we called timeout factor, and the extent to which this performance measure is associated with coaching experience across all teams in the National Basketball Association over the 2009-2012 seasons. We find that timeout factor plays a minor role in the scoring dynamics of basketball. Surprisingly, we find that timeout factor is negatively associated with coaching experience. Our findings support empirical studies showing that, under certain conditions, mentors early in their careers can have a stronger positive impact on their teams than later in their careers.

Statistical characterizers of transport in communication networks.

We identify the statistical characterizers of congestion and decongestion for message transport in model communication lattices. These turn out to be the travel time distributions, which are Gaussian in the congested phase, and logarithmic normal in the decongested phase. Our results are demonstrated for two-dimensional lattices, such the Waxman graph, and for lattices with local clustering and geographic separations, gradient connections, as well as for a one-dimensional ring lattice with random assortative connections. The behavior of the distribution identifies the congested and decongested phase correctly for these distinct network topologies and decongestion strategies. The waiting time distributions of the systems also show identical signatures of the congested and decongested phases. The distributions are explained using a stochastic differential equation to model the transport.

Queue-length synchronization in communication networks.

We study the synchronization in the context of network traffic on a 2-d communication network with local clustering and geographic separations. The network consists of nodes and randomly distributed hubs where the top five hubs ranked according to their coefficient of betweenness centrality (CBC) are connected by random assortative and gradient mechanisms. For multiple message traffic, messages can trap at the high CBC hubs, and congestion can build up on the network with long queues at the congested hubs. The queue lengths are seen to synchronize in the congested phase. Both complete and phase synchronization are seen, between pairs of hubs. In the decongested phase, the pairs start clearing and synchronization is lost. A cascading master-slave relation is seen between the hubs, with the slower hubs (which are slow to decongest) driving the faster ones. These are usually the hubs of high CBC. Similar results are seen for traffic of constant density. Total synchronization between the hubs of high CBC is also seen in the congested regime. Similar behavior is seen for traffic on a network constructed using the Waxman random topology generator. We also demonstrate the existence of phase synchronization in real internet traffic data.

Gradient mechanism in a communication network.

We study the efficiency of the gradient mechanism of message transfer in a two-dimensional communication network of regular nodes and randomly distributed hubs. Each hub on the network is assigned some randomly chosen capacity and hubs with lower capacities are connected to the hubs with maximum capacity. The average travel times of single messages traveling on the lattice decrease rapidly as the number of hubs increase. The functional dependence of the average travel times on the hub density shows q-exponential behavior with a power-law tail. We also study the relaxation behavior of the network when a large number of messages are created simultaneously at random locations and travel on the network toward their designated destinations. For this situation, in the absence of the gradient mechanism, the network can show congestion effects due to the formation of transport traps. We show that if hubs of high betweenness centrality are connected by the gradient mechanism, efficient decongestion can be achieved. The gradient mechanism is less prone to the formation of traps than other decongestion schemes. We also study the spatial configurations of transport traps and propose minimal strategies for their elimination.