Biological variation of hematology tests based on the 1999-2002 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey

Objective--Biological variation consists of between-person (BP) and within-person (WP) variation. Estimates of WP coefficients of variation (CVw) and BP coefficients of variation (CVg) for hematology laboratory tests were estimated from the 1999-2002 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Methods--NHANES is a survey of the civilian noninstitutionalized U.S. population that uses a stratified, multistage probability design. Between- and within-person variations were estimated for 18 hematology tests. For WP variation, a nonrandom sample was obtained with a median of 17 days between two test measurements. Between-person variation was estimated from the WP sample and additional participants were matched for age group, gender, and race and ethnicity to the WP sample. Results--The BP and WP variations were estimated on as many as 2,496 and 852 sample participants, respectively. Mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration had the lowest CVg (2.25% for men and 2.40% for women), and mean corpuscular volume had the lowest CVw (0.31% for men and 0.37% for women). The index of individuality (CVw /CVg) ranged from 0.06 for mean corpuscular volume for men and women to 0.62 for segmented neutrophil number for men, and 0.55 for segmented neutrophil percent for women. Women had higher CVw compared with men for hematocrit, hemoglobin, mean corpuscular volume, red blood cell count, and red blood cell distribution width. Several hematology tests' CVw also differed by age group, including mean corpuscular volume; eosinophil, lymphocyte and segmented neutrophil percent; monocyte and segmented neutrophil number; white blood cell count; and red blood cell distribution width.by David A. Lacher, Janet Barletta, and Jeffery P. Hughes, Division of Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys."July 12, 2012.""CS230449."Also available via the World Wide Web as an Acrobat .pdf file (207.41, 12 p.).Includes bibliographical references (p. 6-7)

Distributed resource discovery using a context sensitive infrastructure

Distributed Resource Discovery in a World Wide Web environment using full-text indices will never scale. The distinct properties of WWW information (volume, rate of change, topical diversity) limits the scaleability of traditional approaches to distributed Resource Discovery. An approach combining metadata clustering and query routing can, on the other hand, be proven to scale much better. This paper presents the Content-Sensitive Infrastructure, which is a design building on these results. We also present an analytical framework for comparing scaleability of different distribution strategies

The Options for UK Domestic Water Reduction: A Review

Demand pressure on UK water supplies is expected to increase in the next 20 years driven by increasing population, new housing development and reducing household size. Regionally and locally migration will also afect demand particularly in the South-East. The water reduction trends that will have the greatest reduction effect on UK consumption are: 1. For new homes; metering and new efficiencies in design and construction (e.g. low flush toilets, heating and plumbing efficiences) 2. For established housing; metering and modern washing machines

Optimizing genetics online resources for diverse readers.

PurposeClear and accurate genetic information should be available to health-care consumers at an individualized level of comprehension. The objective of this study is to evaluate the complexity of common online resources and to simplify text content using automated text processing tools.MethodsWe extracted all text from Genetics Home Reference and MedlinePlus in bulk and analyzed content using natural language processing. We applied custom tools to improve the readability and compared readability before and after text optimization.ResultsCommonly used educational materials were more complex than the recommended reading level for the general public. Genetic health information entries from Genetics Home Reference (n = 1279) were written at a median 13.0 grade level. MedlinePlus entries, which are not exclusively genetic (n = 1030), had a median grade level of 7.7. When we optimized text for the 59 actionable conditions by prioritizing medical details using a standard structure, the average reading grade level improved.ConclusionFactors that increase complexity are long sentences and difficult words. Future strategies to reduce complexity include prioritizing relevant details and using more illustrations. Simplifying and providing standardized online health resources would benefit diverse consumers and promote inclusivity

The British Geological Survey's new Geomagnetic Data Web Service

Increasing demand within the geomagnetism community for high quality real-time or near-real-time observatory data means there is a requirement for data producers to have a robust and scalable data processing infrastructure capable of delivering geomagnetic data products over the Internet in a variety of formats. We describe a new software system, developed at BGS, which will allow access to our geomagnetic data products both within our organisation's intranet and over the Internet. We demonstrate how the system is designed to afford easy access to the data by a wide range of software clients and allow rapid development of software utilizing our observatory data

Invisible Pixels Are Dead, Long Live Invisible Pixels!

Privacy has deteriorated in the world wide web ever since the 1990s. The tracking of browsing habits by different third-parties has been at the center of this deterioration. Web cookies and so-called web beacons have been the classical ways to implement third-party tracking. Due to the introduction of more sophisticated technical tracking solutions and other fundamental transformations, the use of classical image-based web beacons might be expected to have lost their appeal. According to a sample of over thirty thousand images collected from popular websites, this paper shows that such an assumption is a fallacy: classical 1 x 1 images are still commonly used for third-party tracking in the contemporary world wide web. While it seems that ad-blockers are unable to fully block these classical image-based tracking beacons, the paper further demonstrates that even limited information can be used to accurately classify the third-party 1 x 1 images from other images. An average classification accuracy of 0.956 is reached in the empirical experiment. With these results the paper contributes to the ongoing attempts to better understand the lack of privacy in the world wide web, and the means by which the situation might be eventually improved.Comment: Forthcoming in the 17th Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES 2018), Toronto, AC