The rate of nosocomial C. difficile in Rhode Island is among the highest in the country. Colonization with C. difficile is uncommon but can lead to falsely identifying a patient as having C. difficile infection. Additionally, unrecognized C. difficile colonization may act as a reservoir in the hospital. During a 19-day period, rectal swabs obtained for routine VRE surveillance were cultured for C. difficile. Overall, 51 (7.9%) of 649 patients had C. difficile by culture. The majority (n=36, 71%) of patients from whom a rectal swab grew C. difficile did not have a sample sent to the clinical laboratory. Hence, at least 5.5% of the 649 patients were colonized. One patient was classified as having hospital-acquired C. difficile since the clinical specimen was sent to the clinical laboratory on hospital day 4. This patient was culture positive on admission and hence misclassified as having hospital- acquired C. difficile.C. difficile is a complication of antibiotic therapy. Certain antibiotics are associated with a higher rate of developing C. difficile. The charts of 54 patients with nosocomial C. difficile were reviewed and very few had received a high-risk antibiotic. Seven (13%) of 54 patients had not received any antibiotics in the hospital prior to the positive stool test for C. difficile. Moreover, 6 of the 7 had no documentation of receiving an antibiotic in the 56 days prior to admission suggesting that they might be colonized with C. difficile.The rate of nosocomial C. difficile in the state of Rhode Island is among the highest in the country. Multiple factors impact the occurrence of nosocomial C. difficile. Improvement in a single factor may not lead to a decrease in the rate. We report the results of a multidisciplinary team that implemented multiple interventions, which led to a 42% reduction of nosocomial C. difficile at The Miriam Hospital.Hospital antibiograms, because they are typically derived from samples obtained from hospitalized patients, may overestimate the prevalence of methicillin resistance in S. aureus in individuals presenting to the hospital for surgery. Because hospital antibiograms are commonly used to justify empiric perioperative prophylactic antibiotic selection prior to surgery, this may lead to unnecessary treatment with broad-spectrum antibiotics such as vancomycin. In a single-institution study, we observed that in our hospital antibiogram the proportion of S. aureus that are methicillin-resistant (MRSA) was significantly higher (45%) than isolates in preoperative nasal cultures obtained at the same hospital in outpatients prior to their lower extremity joint replacement surgery (13%) mean difference 0.32, [95% CI 0.25, 0.39], p less then 0.0001. These data suggest that hospital antibiograms may overstate the true prevalence of MRSA in those at risk for MRSA surgical site infections who present from the outpatient setting.In this report, we propose a large-area, scalable and reconfigurable single-shot optical fabrication method using phase-controlled interference lithography (PCIL) to realize submicrometer chiral woodpile photonic structures. This proposed technique involves a 3 + 3 double-cone geometry with beams originated from a computed phase mask displayed on a single spatial light modulator. Simulation studies show the filtering response of such structures for linearly polarized plane wave illumination, with structural features tunable through a single parameter of interference angle. Further, these single chiral woodpile structures show dual chirality on illumination with both right circularly and left circularly polarized light through simulation. Experimentally fabricated patterns on photoresist show resemblance to the desired chiral woodpile structures.We present a fibre laser broadly tunable in a wavelength range from 1058 nm to 1640 nm based on a new type of metallic resonant leaky-mode diffraction grating and three fibre-pigtailed semiconductor optical amplifiers. For TM polarization in Littrow configuration, the grating has experimentally measured diffraction efficiency into the -1st reflected order of more than 90 % over a spectral range of 1417 nm to 1700 nm. The laser covered a spectral range of 331 nm within a tuning band of 558 nm without any adjustment of optics and its tuning range was limited by amplification bands of available semiconductor optical amplifiers.We demonstrate an energetic dual-wavelength ultrashort pulsed source by exploiting the inherent features of the newly discovered process of soliton self-mode conversion (SSMC) in a multimode fiber. The generated pulses are at wavelengths of 1205 nm and 1273 nm, respectively, and the pulse energies are approximately 30 nJ. The natural group-velocity-locking feature of SSMC ensures minimal relative timing jitter, hence highlighting the utility of exploiting the new degrees of freedom afforded by field of multimode nonlinear fiber optics. The relative timing jitter is evaluated by measuring the power fluctuations of generated sum-frequency signals. When compared to a conventional fiber based dual-wavelength source based on traditional frequency-shifted solitons, the relative timing jitter is found to be reduced by greater than 11 dB. Erastin Since this process is wavelength-agnostic within the transparency window of optical fibers, our source provides an attractive means of achieving integrated multi-color ultrashort pulse sources for a variety of applications.Super-resolved angular displacement estimation is of crucial significance to the field of quantum information processing. Here we report an estimation protocol based on a Sagnac interferometer fed by a coherent state carrying orbital angular momentum. In a lossless scenario, through the use of parity measurement, our protocol can achieve a 4ℓ-fold super-resolved output with quantum number ℓ; meanwhile, a shot-noise-limited sensitivity saturating the quantum Cramér-Rao bound is reachable. We also consider the effects of several realistic factors, including nonideal state preparation, photon loss, and inefficient measurement. Finally, with mean photon number N¯=2.297 and ℓ = 1 taken, we experimentally demonstrate a super-resolved effect of angular displacement with a factor of 7.88.