Avoiding disclosure of individually identifiable health information: a literature review

Achieving data and information dissemination without arming anyone is a central task of any entity in charge of collecting data. In this article, the authors examine the literature on data and statistical confidentiality. Rather than comparing the theoretical properties of specific methods, they emphasize the main themes that emerge from the ongoing discussion among scientists regarding how best to achieve the appropriate balance between data protection, data utility, and data dissemination. They cover the literature on de-identification and reidentification methods with emphasis on health care data. The authors also discuss the benefits and limitations for the most common access methods. Although there is abundant theoretical and empirical research, their review reveals lack of consensus on fundamental questions for empirical practice: How to assess disclosure risk, how to choose among disclosure methods, how to assess reidentification risk, and how to measure utility loss.public use files, disclosure avoidance, reidentification, de-identification, data utility

Patchy promiscuity:machine learning applied to predict the host specificity of <i>Salmonella enterica </i>and <i>Escherichia coli</i>

Supporting data for Patchy promiscuity: machine learning applied to predict the host specificity of Salmonella enterica and Escherichia coli, as published in <em>Microbial Genomics</em

Cortical regions activated by spectrally degraded speech in adults with single sided deafness or bilateral normal hearing

Those with profound sensorineural hearing loss from single sided deafness (SSD) generally experience greater cognitive effort and fatigue in adverse sound environments. We studied cases with right ear, SSD compared to normal hearing (NH) individuals. SSD cases were significantly less correct in naming last words in spectrally degraded 8- and 16-band vocoded sentences, despite high semantic predictability. Group differences were not significant for less intelligible 4-band sentences, irrespective of predictability. SSD also had diminished BOLD percent signal changes to these same sentences in left hemisphere (LH) cortical regions of early auditory, association auditory, inferior frontal, premotor, inferior parietal, dorsolateral prefrontal, posterior cingulate, temporal-parietal-occipital junction, and posterior opercular. Cortical regions with lower amplitude responses in SSD than NH were mostly components of a LH language network, previously noted as concerned with speech recognition. Recorded BOLD signal magnitudes were averages from all vertices within predefined parcels from these cortex regions. Parcels from different regions in SSD showed significantly larger signal magnitudes to sentences of greater intelligibility (e.g., 8- or 16- vs. 4-band) in all except early auditory and posterior cingulate cortex. Significantly lower response magnitudes occurred in SSD than NH in regions prior studies found responsible for phonetics and phonology of speech, cognitive extraction of meaning, controlled retrieval of word meaning, and semantics. The findings suggested reduced activation of a LH fronto-temporo-parietal network in SSD contributed to difficulty processing speech for word meaning and sentence semantics. Effortful listening experienced by SSD might reflect diminished activation to degraded speech in the affected LH language network parcels. SSD showed no compensatory activity in matched right hemisphere parcels

Cryopreservation of a soil microbiome using a Stirling 1 cycle approach - a genomic assessment

Soil microbiomes are dynamic systems that respond to biotic and abiotic environmental factors such as those presented at seasonal scales or due to long-term anthropogenic regime shifts. These can affect the composition and function of microbiomes. Investigation of microbiomes can uncover hidden microbial roles in health and disease and discover microbiome-based interventions. Collections of soil samples are kept by various institutions in either a refrigerated or occasionally frozen state, but conditions are not optimised to ensure the integrity of soil microbiome. In this manuscript, we describe cryopreservation with a controlled rate cooler and estimate the genomic content of an exemplar soil sample before and after cryopreservation. The first hypothesis was to test the genomic integrity of the microbiome. We also enriched the soil sample with a liquid medium to estimate the growth of bacteria and compared their growth before and after cryopreservation. Sequence-based rRNA metabarcoding was used to demonstrate that the controlled rate cooler maintains intact the DNA content of the microbiome. Two methods of cryopreservation were applied and compared with control aliquots of soil. An optimised cryopreservation of soil samples is essential for the development of microbiome research in order to retain stable, functionally intact microbiomes. Our results showed that metabarcoding of 16S and ITS rRNA were useful methods to estimate successful cryopreservation. The soil microbiome after enrichment with liquid medium exhibited a similar response of cryopreserved soil and this was estimated with the comparison of the ten most abundant bacterial taxa. These findings support a successful process of cryopreservation and are promising for future use of this technology. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first report of cryopreservation of soil using a Stirling cycle cooling approach

Comunicazione italiana nel mondo: interviste a distanza. Prove d'Europa a Radio Colonia

L’Europa è di casa a Radio Colonia, l’emittente italiana del WDR, Westdeutscher Rundfunk, l’ente radiotelevisivo pubblico del Land Nord Reno-Westfalia, che il primo dicembre scorso ha celebrato il mezzo secolo di vita. Il suo direttore, Tommaso Pedicini, ricorda i motivi che portarono alla nascita della Radio, nel 1961, in un periodo in cui esplodeva il fenomeno dell’emigrazione italiana in Germania ed i Gastarbeiter (“lavoratori ospiti”) italiani avevano bisogno di una voce amica. Da allora molti sono stati i cambiamenti, ma Radio Colonia è rimasta la finestra italiana nel panorama radiofonico tedesco, impegnata in particolare, dopo l’avvio nel 1999 della Funkhaus Europa, a coltivare i temi del plurilinguismo e dell’integrazione degli immigrati

Human factors assessments of the STS-57 SpaceHab-1 mission

SpaceHab-1 (STS-57) was the first of six scheduled Commercial Middeck Augmentation Module (CMAM) missions seeking to offer entrepreneurial companies an opportunity to use the resource of microgravity. The SpaceHab module, which occupies about one-fourth of the payload bay, is approximately 2-3/4 meters (9 feet) long and 4 meters (13.5 feet) in diameter. It provides a shirt-sleeve working environment and contains the storage space equivalent of 50 middeck lockers, considerably over and above the number of experiments that can be carried in the orbiter middeck alone. A modified Spacelab tunnel links the SpaceHab module to the middeck. While in orbit, the orbiter payload bay doors remain open, exposing the padded exterior of the lab and tunnel to space until preparation for reentry at the end of the flight. The crew for SpaceHab-1 was comprised of four males and two females, each of whom participated in some part of the human factors assessment (HFA) evaluation. The HFA was one of over twenty experiments manifested on this maiden flight of the SpaceHab module. HFA consisted of HFA-EPROC, HFA-LIGHT, HFA-SOUND, HFA-QUEST, and HFA-TRANS. The goal of HFA-EPROC was to assess the advantages and disadvantages of paper versus computer presentation for procedural tasks. The next two evaluations investigated the module's lighting and acoustic environment. HFA-TRANS sought to evaluate the design of the SpaceHab tunnel and to characterize translation through it. HFA-QUEST represented a consolidation of the in-flight questions generated by the HFA principal investigators involved in the acoustic, lighting, and translation studies

The UK Crop Microbiome Cryobank: a utility and model for supporting Phytobiomes research

Plant microbiomes are the microbial communities essential to the functioning of the phytobiome—the system that consist of plants, their environment, and their associated communities of organisms. A healthy, functional phytobiome is critical to crop health, improved yields and quality food. However, crop microbiomes are relatively under-researched, and this is associated with a fundamental need to underpin phytobiome research through the provision of a supporting infrastructure. The UK Crop Microbiome Cryobank (UKCMC) project is developing a unique, integrated and open-access resource to enable the development of solutions to improve soil and crop health. Six economically important crops (Barley, Fava Bean, Oats, Oil Seed Rape, Sugar Beet and Wheat) are targeted, and the methods as well as data outputs will underpin research activity both in the UK and internationally. This manuscript describes the approaches being taken, from characterisation, cryopreservation and analysis of the crop microbiome through to potential applications. We believe that the model research framework proposed is transferable to different crop and soil systems, acting not only as a mechanism to conserve biodiversity, but as a potential facilitator of sustainable agriculture systems