Results from the centers for disease control and prevention's predict the 2013-2014 Influenza Season Challenge

Background: Early insights into the timing of the start, peak, and intensity of the influenza season could be useful in planning influenza prevention and control activities. To encourage development and innovation in influenza forecasting, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) organized a challenge to predict the 2013-14 Unites States influenza season. Methods: Challenge contestants were asked to forecast the start, peak, and intensity of the 2013-2014 influenza season at the national level and at any or all Health and Human Services (HHS) region level(s). The challenge ran from December 1, 2013-March 27, 2014; contestants were required to submit 9 biweekly forecasts at the national level to be eligible. The selection of the winner was based on expert evaluation of the methodology used to make the prediction and the accuracy of the prediction as judged against the U.S. Outpatient Influenza-like Illness Surveillance Network (ILINet). Results: Nine teams submitted 13 forecasts for all required milestones. The first forecast was due on December 2, 2013; 3/13 forecasts received correctly predicted the start of the influenza season within one week, 1/13 predicted the peak within 1 week, 3/13 predicted the peak ILINet percentage within 1 %, and 4/13 predicted the season duration within 1 week. For the prediction due on December 19, 2013, the number of forecasts that correctly forecasted the peak week increased to 2/13, the peak percentage to 6/13, and the duration of the season to 6/13. As the season progressed, the forecasts became more stable and were closer to the season milestones. Conclusion: Forecasting has become technically feasible, but further efforts are needed to improve forecast accuracy so that policy makers can reliably use these predictions. CDC and challenge contestants plan to build upon the methods developed during this contest to improve the accuracy of influenza forecasts. © 2016 The Author(s)

Food safety regimes in Scotland, 1899-1914

No abstract available

Operations of and Future Plans for the Pierre Auger Observatory

Technical reports on operations and features of the Pierre Auger Observatory, including ongoing and planned enhancements and the status of the future northern hemisphere portion of the Observatory. Contributions to the 31st International Cosmic Ray Conference, Lodz, Poland, July 2009.Comment: Contributions to the 31st ICRC, Lodz, Poland, July 200

Neural networks to intrusion detection

Recent research indicates a lot of attempts to create an Intrusion Detection System that is capable of learning and recognizing attacks it faces for the first time. Benchmark datasets were created by the MIT Lincoln Lab and by the International Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining group (KDD). A few competitions were held and many systems developed. The overall preference was given to Expert Systems that were based on Decision Making Tree algorithms. This work is devoted to the problem of Neural Networks as means of Intrusion Detection. After multiple techniques and methodologies are investigated, we show that properly trained Neural Networks are capable of fast recognition and classification of different attacks. The advantage of the taken approach allows us to demonstrate the superiority of the Neural Networks over the systems that were created by the winner of the KDD Cups competition and later researchers due to their capability to recognize an attack, to differentiate one attack from another, i.e. classify attacks, and, the most important, to detect new attacks that were not included into the training set. The results obtained through simulations indicate that it is possible to recognize attacks that the Intrusion Detection System never faced before on an acceptably high level

The Oracle/PeopleSoft Case: Unilateral Effects, Simulation Models and Econometrics in Contemporary Merger Control

An increasingly important part of contemporary merger control both in the US and the EU is unilateral effects analysis, particularly with regard to oligopolistic mergers. In practice, this requires econometric analyses of past market data and, above all, the construction of simulation models in order to quantify the price effects in each specific case. The review of the merger between the software firms Oracle and PeopleSoft in 2003/04 has been the most important instance of parallel application of these sophisticated economic tools by the EU and US authorities so far. This makes an in-depth study of the case going from the controversial issue of market definition to the specificities of the competitive assessment worthwhile. Therefore, we highlight certain similarities as well as (minor) differences between the EU and US proceedings. Interestingly, despite serious initial concerns the transaction was not blocked nor even required to be modified in the two jurisdictions. We derive a number of interesting insights and, in particular, point out problems and lessons associated with the use of sophisticated economic tools in contemporary merger control. In addition to case-specific factors, the major insights encompass the continued relevance of market definition, the need to accompany predictive economic evidence with compatible reasoning and the benefits of including the economics of dynamic and evolutionary competition.Merger control, unilateral effects, econometric analysis, simulation models, market definition

The Oracle/PeopleSoft case: unilateral effects, simulation models and econometrics in contemporary merger control

An increasingly important part of contemporary merger control both in the US and the EU is unilateral effects analysis, particularly with regard to oligopolistic mergers. In practice, this requires econometric analyses of past market data and, above all, the construction of simulation models in order to quantify the price effects in each specific case. The review of the merger between the software firms Oracle and PeopleSoft in 2003/04 has been the most important instance of parallel application of these sophisticated economic tools by the EU and US authorities so far. This makes an in-depth study of the case going from the controversial issue of market definition to the specificities of the competitive assessment worthwhile. Therefore, we highlight certain similarities as well as (minor) differences between the EU and US proceedings. Interestingly, despite serious initial concerns the transaction was not blocked nor even required to be modified in the any of the two jurisdictions. We derive a number of interesting insights and, in particular, point out problems and lessons associated with the use of sophisticated economic tools in contemporary merger control. In addition to case-specific factors, the major insights encompass the continued relevance of market definition, the need to accompany predictive economic evidence with compatible reasoning and the benefits of including the economics of dynamic and evolutionary competition. --Merger control,unilateral effects,econometric analysis,simulation models,market definition

Java Challenge Software Project

Programming contests are a means of exploiting the problem solving capabilities of developers and they provide a forum for display of extraordinary programming skills. The Java Challenge (JC) Software Project is the saga of creating an automated, secure and responsive programming contest system for deployment on the Internet and to collect information about programming practices, habits, and trends in coding in such restricted environment. The methodology followed to design, implement, and evaluate such a system uses new technologies such as the WWW, mail filtering and sandboxing techniques. The current Java Challenge implementation runs the Java Challenge on a Solaris 2.6 platform under specified regulations. The scripts are developed in Perl. The security features of jdkl.2 have been researched and successfully implemented. The mode of entry acceptance is electronic mail in a specified format. Standard Unix features have been used for data archiving and information redirection. The JC software is an application package that conducts programming contests in an automated manner, provides a secure environment for evaluation and does web listing updates automatically