Statistical disclosure control: Applications in healthcare

Statistical disclosure control is a progressive subject which offers techniques with which tables of data intended for public release can be protected from the threat of disclosure. In this sense disclosure will usually mean information on an individual subject being revealed by the release of a table. The techniques used centre around detecting potential disclosure in a table and then removing this disclosure by somehow adjusting the original table. This thesis has been produced in conjunction with Information and Services Division (Scotland) (ISD) and therefore will concentrate on the applications of statistical disclosure control in the field of healthcare with particular reference to the problems encountered by ISD. The thesis predominately aims to give an overview of current statistical disclosure control techniques. It will investigate how these techniques would work in the ISD scenario and will ultimately aim to provide ISD with advice on how they should proceed in any future update of their statistical disclosure control policy. Chapter 1 introduces statistical disclosure and investigates some of the legal and social issues associated with the field. It also provides information on the techniques which are used by other organisations worldwide. Further there is an introduction to both the ISD scenario and a leading computing package in the area, Tau-Argus. Chapter 2 gives an overview of the techniques currently used in statistical disclosure control. This overview includes technical justification for the techniques along with the advantages and disadvantages associated with using each technique. Chapter 3 provides a decision rule approach to the selection of disclosure control techniques described in Chapter 2 and much of Chapter 3 revolves around a description of the implications derived from the choices made. Chapter 4 presents the results from an application of statistical disclosure control techniques to a real ISD data set concerned with diabetes in children in Scotland. The results include a quantification of the information lost in the table when the disclosure control technique is applied. The investigation concentrated on two and three- dimensional tables and the analysis was carried out using the Tau-Argus computing package. Chapter 5 concludes by providing a summary of the main findings of the thesis and providing recommendations based on these findings. There is also a discussion of potential further study which may be useful to ISD as they attempt to update their statistical disclosure control policy

The physics of the B Factories

“The Physics of the B Factories” describes a decade long effort of physicists in the quest for the precise determination of asymmetry — broken symmetry — between particles and anti-particles. We now recognize that the matter we see around us is the residue — one part in a billion — of the matter and antimatter that existed in the early universe, most of which annihilated into the cosmic background radiation that bathes us. But the question remains: how did the baryonic matter-antimatter asymmetry arise? This book describes the work done by some 1000 physicists and engineers from around the globe on two experimental facilities built to test our understanding of this phenomenon, one at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, USA, and a second at the KEK Laboratory, Tsukuba, Japan, and what we have learned from them in broadening our understanding of nature. Why is our universe dominated by the matter of which we are made rather than equal parts of matter and antimatter? This question has puzzled physicists for decades. However, this was not the question we addressed when we wrote the paper on CP violation in 1972. Our question was whether we can explain the CP violation observed in the K meson decay within the framework of the renormalizable gauge theory. At that time, Sakharov’s seminal paper was already published, but it did not attract our attention. If we were aware of the paper, we would have been misled into seeking a model satisfying Sakharov’s conditions and our paper might not have appeared. In our paper, we discussed that we need new particles in order to accommodate CP violation into the renormalizable electroweak theory, and proposed the six-quark scheme as one of the possible ways introducing new particles. We thought that the six-quark scheme is very interesting, but it was just a possibility. The situation changed when the tau-lepton was found and it was followed by the discovery of the Upsilon particle. The existence of the third generation became reality. However, it was still uncertain whether the mixing of the six quarks is a real origin of the observed CP violation. Theoretical calculation of CP asymmetries in the neutral K meson system contains uncertainty from strong interaction effects. What settled this problem were the B Factories built at SLAC and KEK. These B Factories are extraordinary in many ways. In order to fulfill the requirements of special experiments, the beam energies of the colliding electron and positron are asymmetric, and the luminosity is unprecedentedly high. It is also remarkable that severe competition between the two laboratories boosted their performance. One of us (M. Kobayashi) has been watching the development at KEK very closely as the director of the Institute of Particle and Nuclear Studies of KEK for a period of time. As witnesses, we appreciate the amazing achievement of those who participated in these projects at both laboratories. The B Factories have contributed a great deal to our understanding of particle physics, as documented in this book. In particular, thanks to the high luminosity far exceeding the design value, experimental groups measured mixing angles precisely and verified that the dominant source of CP violation observed in the laboratory experiments is flavor mixing among the three generations of quarks. Obviously we owe our Nobel Prize to this result. Now we are awaiting the operation of the next generation Super B Factories. In spite of its great success, the Standard Model is not an ultimate theory. For example, it is not thought to be possible for the matter dominance of the universe to be explained by the Standard Model. This means that there will still be unknown particles and unknown interactions. We have a lot of theoretical speculations but experimental means are rather limited. There are great expectations for the Super B Factories to reveal a clue to the world beyond the Standard Model

The Physics of the B Factories

This work is on the Physics of the B Factories. Part A of this book contains a brief description of the SLAC and KEK B Factories as well as their detectors, BaBar and Belle, and data taking related issues. Part B discusses tools and methods used by the experiments in order to obtain results. The results themselves can be found in Part C

The 26th Annual Precise Time and Time Interval (PTTI) Applications and Planning Meeting

This document is a compilation of technical papers presented at the 26th Annual PTTI Applications and Planning Meeting. Papers are in the following categories: (1) Recent developments in rubidium, cesium, and hydrogen-based frequency standards, and in cryogenic and trapped-ion technology; (2) International and transnational applications of Precise Time and Time Interval technology with emphasis on satellite laser tracking, GLONASS timing, intercomparison of national time scales and international telecommunications; (3) Applications of Precise Time and Time Interval technology to the telecommunications, power distribution, platform positioning, and geophysical survey industries; (4) Applications of PTTI technology to evolving military communications and navigation systems; and (5) Dissemination of precise time and frequency by means of GPS, GLONASS, MILSTAR, LORAN, and synchronous communications satellites

The Belle II Physics Book

We present the physics program of the Belle II experiment, located on the intensity frontier SuperKEKB $e^+e^-$ collider. Belle II collected its first collisions in 2018, and is expected to operate for the next decade. It is anticipated to collect 50/ab of collision data over its lifetime. This book is the outcome of a joint effort of Belle II collaborators and theorists through the Belle II theory interface platform (B2TiP), an effort that commenced in 2014. The aim of B2TiP was to elucidate the potential impacts of the Belle II program, which includes a wide scope of physics topics: B physics, charm, tau, quarkonium, electroweak precision measurements and dark sector searches. It is composed of nine working groups (WGs), which are coordinated by teams of theorist and experimentalists conveners: Semileptonic and leptonic B decays, Radiative and Electroweak penguins, phi_1 and phi_2 (time-dependent CP violation) measurements, phi_3 measurements, Charmless hadronic B decay, Charm, Quarkonium(like), tau and low-multiplicity processes, new physics and global fit analyses. This book highlights "golden- and silver-channels", i.e. those that would have the highest potential impact in the field. Theorists scrutinised the role of those measurements and estimated the respective theoretical uncertainties, achievable now as well as prospects for the future. Experimentalists investigated the expected improvements with the large dataset expected from Belle II, taking into account improved performance from the upgraded detector.Comment: 689 page

The Physics of the B Factories

“The Physics of the B Factories” describes a decade long effort of physicists in the quest for the precise determination of asymmetry — broken symmetry — between particles and anti-particles. We now recognize that the matter we see around us is the residue — one part in a billion — of the matter and antimatter that existed in the early universe, most of which annihilated into the cosmic background radiation that bathes us. But the question remains: how did the baryonic matter-antimatter asymmetry arise? This book describes the work done by some 1000 physicists and engineers from around the globe on two experimental facilities built to test our understanding of this phenomenon, one at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, USA, and a second at the KEK Laboratory, Tsukuba, Japan, and what we have learned from them in broadening our understanding of nature