The purpose of this paper was to describe whether there are some relationships between amikacin serum levels and central conduction time in brainstem auditory evoked potentials (BAEP) within therapeutic range levels in newborns as index of drug toxicity in brainstem auditory centers in neonatally exposed infants. We performed a cross-sectional study to compare BAEP from 35 infants under amikacin administration and 24 control infants; both examinations were blinded to investigators. Bivariate and partial correlations were calculated between amikacin and BAEP measurements in treated infants. Amikacin determinations were within therapeutic levels. No clinical alterations in BAEP were found and no differences between amikacin-treated and control infants were found. Significant positive Pearson correlation between latency of I-III interwaves interval and amikacin Cmin serum levels was found and was present when calculations were controlled by partial correlations for gestational age at birth and Apgar score at 5 min. The findings suggest that increased amikacin levels in newborns are related to increased latencies in I-III interwave interval in infants, which may be an early index of brainstem effects of subclinical neurotoxicity of amikacin.

a b s t r a c tMachine and Statistical Learning techniques are used in almost all online advertisement systems. The problem of discovering which content is more demanded (e.g. receive more clicks) can be modeled as a multi-armed bandit problem. Contextual bandits (i.e., bandits with covariates, side information or associative reinforcement learning) associate, to each specific content, several features that define the ''context'' in which it appears (e.g. user, web page, time, region). This problem can be studied in the stochastic/ statistical setting by means of the conditional probability paradigm using the Bayes' theorem. However, for very large contextual information and/or real-time constraints, the exact calculation of the Bayes' rule is computationally infeasible. In this article, we present a method that is able to handle large contextual information for learning in contextual-bandits problems. This method was tested in the Challenge on Yahoo! dataset at ICML2012's Workshop ''new Challenges for Exploration & Exploitation 3'', obtaining the second place. Its basic exploration policy is deterministic in the sense that for the same input data (as a time-series) the same results are obtained. We address the deterministic exploration vs. exploitation issue, explaining the way in which the proposed method deterministically finds an effective dynamic trade-off based solely in the input-data, in contrast to other methods that use a random number generator.

ERP systems (Enterprise Resource Planning) have an enormous potential to promote the improvement of the competitive position of companies. Successful implementation of an ERP system can afford to cut operating costs, have tighter demand forecasts, speed production cycles and improve customer service (Umble et al. 2003).However, the results obtained with its implementation aren't often so positive. Studies like the Langenwaltre (2000) indicate that between 40 and 60 % of implementation projects of ERP systems can be classified as failures.Although these data can be questioned, if we regard that too often companies have dealt with these projects without fully assess what should be its rate of return (Umble et al. 2003) or that IT investments involve for business improvements that hardly can be assessed by ROI (Peerstone Research 2004). On the other hand, it also highlights that the positive results in implementing ERP systems doesn't occur automatically but they need to be given certain circumstances linked mainly by the implementation process itself.The participation of the authors of this paper in the implementation of ERP's and methodologies of process improvement, has allowed to set some of the key factors to consider in carrying out this process of integration successfully.

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