Patterns of Influenza Vaccination Coverage in the United States from 2009 to 2015

Background: Globally, influenza is a major cause of morbidity, hospitalization and mortality. Influenza vaccination has shown substantial protective effectiveness in the United States. We investigated state-level patterns of coverage rates of seasonal and pandemic influenza vaccination, among the overall population in the U.S. and specifically among children and the elderly, from 2009/10 to 2014/15, and associations with ecological factors. Methods and Findings: We obtained state-level influenza vaccination coverage rates from national surveys, and state-level socio-demographic and health data from a variety of sources. We employed a retrospective ecological study design, and used mixed-model regression to determine the levels of ecological association of the state-level vaccinations rates with these factors, both with and without region as a factor for the three populations. We found that health-care access is positively and significantly associated with mean influenza vaccination coverage rates across all populations and models. We also found that prevalence of asthma in adults are negatively and significantly associated with mean influenza vaccination coverage rates in the elderly populations. Conclusions: Health-care access has a robust, positive association with state-level vaccination rates across different populations. This highlights a potential population-level advantage of expanding health-care access.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figure

How Can Organizations Instill a Continuous Learning Culture to Drive Innovation and Growth?

[Excerpt] The single biggest driver of business impact is the strength of an organization’s learning culture. Living in today’s fast-changing environment, more and more companies are realizing that by instilling a learning culture, the company can achieve a wide variety of business benefits, including innovation, learning agility, market share, and growth. In addition, the current competition among organizations lies beyond the abilities to leverage their current resources and capabilities. In order to win the ‘20s, leaders will need to reinvent and redesign their enterprise as a next generation learning organization. In other words, leaders need to focus on how to ensure their company is looking forward and preparing for the future to drive innovation and increase growth in order to sustain and survive. Despite the numerous business and economic advantages of having a learning culture in an organization, a recent study by the Society of Human Resource Management shows that only around 1 in 10 companies have a true learning culture. Therefore, this report will focus on why learning is essential to innovation and growth, what a learning organization looks like and how companies can build a learning culture

Overpartitions and Bressoud's conjecture, II

The main objective of this paper is to prove Bressoud's conjecture for $j=0$. The case for $j=1$ has been recently proved by Kim. We first obtain an overpartition analogue of Bressoud's conjecture for $j=1$ by using a bijective method. We then show that Bressoud's conjecture for $j=0$ can be derived from the overpartition analogue of Bressoud's conjecture for $j=1$ with the aid of the relation between the partition function $B_0$ in Bressoud's conjecture and the partition function $\bar{B}_1$ established in our previous paper

Overpartitions and Bressoud's conjecture, I

In this paper, we introduce a new partition function $\overline{B}_j$ which could be viewed as an overpartition analogue of the partition function $B_j$ introduced by Bressoud. By constructing a bijection, we showed that there is a relationship between $\overline{B}_1$ and $B_0$ and a relationship between $\overline{B}_0$ and $B_1$. Based on the relationship between $\overline{B}_1$ and $B_0$ and Bressoud's theorems on the Rogers-Ramanujan-Gordon identities and the G\"ollnitz-Gordon identities, we obtain the overpartition analogue of the Rogers-Ramanujan-Gordon identities due to Chen, Sang and Shi and a new overpartition analogue of the Andrews-G\"ollnitz-Gordon identities. On the other hand, by using the relation between $\overline{B}_0$ and $B_1$ and Bressoud's conjecture for $j=1$ proved by Kim, we obtain an overpartition analogue of Bressoud's conjecture for $j=0$, which provides overpartition analogues of many classical partition theorems including Euler's partition theorem. The generating function of the overpartition analogue of Bressoud's conjecture for $j=0$ is also obtained with the aid of Bailey pairs

Empirical determination of charm quark energy loss and its consequences for azimuthal anisotropy

We propose an empirical model to determine the form of energy loss of charm quarks due to multiple scatterings in quark gluon plasma by demanding a good description of production of D mesons and non-photonic electrons in relativistic collision of heavy nuclei at RHIC and LHC energies. Best results are obtained when we approximate the momentum loss per collision $\Delta p_T \propto \alpha \, p_T$, where $\alpha$ is a constant depending on the centrality and the centre of mass energy. Comparing our results with those obtained earlier for drag coefficients estimated using Langevin equation for heavy quarks we find that up to half of the energy loss of charm quarks at top RHIC energy could be due to collisions while that at LHC energy at 2760 GeV/A the collisional energy loss could be about one third of the total. Estimates are obtained for azimuthal anisotropy in momentum spectra of heavy mesons, due to this energy loss. We further suggest that energy loss of charm quarks may lead to an enhanced production of D-mesons and single electrons at low $p_T$ in AA collisions.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, Typographical errors corrected, Key-words and PACS indices added, sequence of figures corrected, references added in section 3, discussions expande