Prevalence of vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) was investigated in Korean livestock 4 years after the ban of avoparcin in feed additives. VRE were isolated from approximately 16.7% of the chicken samples (57 strains from 342 meat samples) and 1.9% of the pig samples (4 from 214 fecal samples). No VRE, however, was isolated from 110 bovine fecal samples. All the 61 VRE isolates were vanA-type Enterococcus faecium expressing a high-level resistance to vancomycin, and showed resistance to teicoplanin as well except two poultry isolates. In addition, the VRE isolates had heterogeneous pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) patterns of SmaI-digested DNA, although identical or closely related profiles were observed among strains isolated from the same farm. Although the chicken isolates were all poultry type with G at position 8,234 of the vanX gene, the pig isolates were all swine type with T at position 8,234 of the vanX gene.

The amount of XML documents is increasing rapidly. In order to analyze the information represented in XML documents efficiently, researches on XML document clustering are actively in progress.The key issue is how to devise the similarity measure between XML documents to be used for clustering. Since XML documents have hierarchical structure, it is not appropriate to cluster them by using a general document similarity measure. Previous works on similarity measure for XML document clustering have no consideration for the semantic information as they consider only the structural information. In this paper, we propose the novel similarity measure that concurrently considers both structural and semantic information of XML document. Our experiments show that the proposed method improve accuracy on the clustering from the semantic point of view, compared to the previous works.

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Regional rainfall quantile depends on the identification of hydrologically homogeneous regions.Various variables relevant to precipitation can be used to form regions. Since the type and number of variables may lead to improve the efficiency of partitioning, it is important to select those precipitation related variables, which represent most of the information from all candidate variables. Multivariate analysis techniques can be used for this purpose. Procrustes analysis which can decrease the dimension of variables based on their correlations, are applied in this study. 42 rainfall related variables are decreased into 21 ones by Procrustes analysis. Factor analysis is applied to those selected variables and then 5 factors are extracted. Fuzzy-c means technique classifies 68 stations into 6 regions. As a result, the GEV distributions are fitted to 6 regions while the lognormal and generalized logistic distributions are fitted to 5 regions. For the comparison purpose with previous results, rainfall quantiles based on generalized logistic distribution are estimated by at-site frequency analysis, index flood method, and regional shape estimation method.

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