824 research outputs found
GET WELL: an automated surveillance system for gaining new epidemiological knowledge
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The assumption behind the presented work is that the information people search for on the internet reflects the disease status in society. By having access to this source of information, epidemiologists can get a valuable complement to the traditional surveillance and potentially get new and timely epidemiological insights. For this purpose, the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control collaborates with a medical web site in Sweden.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We built an application consisting of two conceptual parts. One part allows for trends, based on user specified requests, to be extracted from anonymous web query data from a Swedish medical web site. The second conceptual part permits tailored analyses of particular diseases, where more complex statistical methods are applied to the data. To evaluate the epidemiological relevance of the output, we compared Google search data and search data from the medical web site.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In the paper, we give concrete examples of the output from the web query-based system. We also present results from the comparison between data from the search engine Google and search data from the national medical web site.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The application is in regular use at the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control. A system based on web queries is flexible in that it can be adapted to any disease; we get information on other individuals than those who seek medical care; and the data do not suffer from reporting delays. Although Google data are based on a substantially larger search volume, search patterns obtained from the medical web site may still convey more information from an epidemiological perspective. Furthermore we can see advantages with having full access to the raw data.</p
Charmed quark component of the photon wave function
We determine the c-anti-c component of the photon wave function on the basis
of (i) the data on the transitions e+ e- -> J/psi(3096), psi(3686), psi(4040),
psi(4415), (ii) partial widths of the two-photon decays eta_{c0}(2979),
chi_{c0}(3415), chi_{c2}(3556) -> gamma-gamma, and (iii) wave functions of the
charmonium states obtained by solving the Bethe-Salpeter equation for the
c-anti-c system. Using the obtained c-anti-c component of the photon wave
function we calculate the gamma-gamma decay partial widths for radial
excitation 2S state, eta_{c0}(3594) -> gamma-gamma, and 2P states
chi_{c0}(3849), chi_{c2}(3950) -> gamma-gamma.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figure
Inheritance patterns in citation networks reveal scientific memes
Memes are the cultural equivalent of genes that spread across human culture
by means of imitation. What makes a meme and what distinguishes it from other
forms of information, however, is still poorly understood. Our analysis of
memes in the scientific literature reveals that they are governed by a
surprisingly simple relationship between frequency of occurrence and the degree
to which they propagate along the citation graph. We propose a simple
formalization of this pattern and we validate it with data from close to 50
million publication records from the Web of Science, PubMed Central, and the
American Physical Society. Evaluations relying on human annotators, citation
network randomizations, and comparisons with several alternative approaches
confirm that our formula is accurate and effective, without a dependence on
linguistic or ontological knowledge and without the application of arbitrary
thresholds or filters.Comment: 8 two-column pages, 5 figures; accepted for publication in Physical
Review
Diversity of habitats and bacterial communities support landscape-scale multifunctionality differently across seasons
Abstract In this study, we demonstrate how changes in the diversity of habitat and bacterial communities affect landscape multifunctionality. Habitat diversity may beget species diversity by increasing niche availability and resource complementarity. Species diversity, in turn, generally promotes multifunctionality, i.e. the simultaneous performance of multiple ecosystem functions. However, the relationship between habitat diversity and functioning remains to be explicitly explored. In order to test the relationship between habitat diversity and multifunctionality we constructed experimental landscapes of four different habitats common in shallow-water sediment ecosystems: cyanobacterial mats, Ruppia maritima meadows, silty mud and sandy beach. We manipulated the diversity of these habitats over three consecutive seasons and measured bacterial diversity, benthic microalgal diversity and four functions related to marine nitrogen cycling (gross primary production, nitrogen fixation, denitrification and uptake of dissolved inorganic nitrogen). Our results showed that higher habitat and bacterial diversity, but not benthic microalgal diversity, increased landscape multifunctionality. However, the relative importance of habitat and bacterial diversity varied with season. Habitat diversity was generally the strongest driver, affecting multifunctionality directly in summer and indirectly via bacterial diversity in autumn. In spring, neither of the two aspects of diversity was important. Our study demonstrates the importance of considering temporal differences in both habitat and species diversity for landscape multifunctionality, and the importance of direct and indirect effects in mediating ecosystem functions. Habitat homogenization in concert with loss in biodiversity can thus be a driving force of declining ecosystem functioning and the services they underpin
Quark--antiquark states and their radiative transitions in terms of the spectral integral equation. {\Huge II.} Charmonia
In the precedent paper of the authors (hep-ph/0510410), the states
were treated in the framework of the spectral integral equation, together with
simultaneous calculations of radiative decays of the considered bottomonia. In
the present paper, such a study is carried out for the charmonium
states. We reconstruct the interaction in the -sector on the basis of
data for the charmonium levels with , , ,
, , and radiative transitions
, , ,
and , ,
. The levels and their wave functions
are calculated for the radial excitations with . Also, we determine the
component of the photon wave function using the annihilation
data: , , , , , and perform the calculations of the partial widths of
the two-photon decays for the states: , ,
, and states:
, , . We discuss the status of the recently observed states
X(3872) and Y(3941): according to our results, the X(3872) can be either
or , while Y(3941) is .Comment: 24 pages, 9 figure
Optical Properties of Deep Ice at the South Pole - Absorption
We discuss recent measurements of the wavelength-dependent absorption
coefficients in deep South Pole ice. The method uses transit time distributions
of pulses from a variable-frequency laser sent between emitters and receivers
embedded in the ice. At depths of 800 to 1000 m scattering is dominated by
residual air bubbles, whereas absorption occurs both in ice itself and in
insoluble impurities. The absorption coefficient increases approximately
exponentially with wavelength in the measured interval 410 to 610 nm. At the
shortest wavelength our value is about a factor 20 below previous values
obtained for laboratory ice and lake ice; with increasing wavelength the
discrepancy with previous measurements decreases. At around 415 to 500 nm the
experimental uncertainties are small enough for us to resolve an extrinsic
contribution to absorption in ice: submicron dust particles contribute by an
amount that increases with depth and corresponds well with the expected
increase seen near the Last Glacial Maximum in Vostok and Dome C ice cores. The
laser pulse method allows remote mapping of gross structure in dust
concentration as a function of depth in glacial ice.Comment: 26 pages, LaTex, Accepted for publication in Applied Optics. 9
figures, not included, available on request from [email protected]
Imaging Oxygen Distribution in Marine Sediments. The Importance of Bioturbation and Sediment Heterogeneity
The influence of sediment oxygen heterogeneity, due to bioturbation, on diffusive oxygen flux was investigated. Laboratory experiments were carried out with 3 macrobenthic species presenting different bioturbation behaviour patterns:the polychaetes Nereis diversicolor and Nereis virens, both constructing ventilated galleries in the sediment column, and the gastropod Cyclope neritea, a burrowing species which does not build any structure. Oxygen two-dimensional distribution in sediments was quantified by means of the optical planar optode technique. Diffusive oxygen fluxes (mean and integrated) and a variability index were calculated on the captured oxygen images. All species increased sediment oxygen heterogeneity compared to the controls without animals. This was particularly noticeable with the polychaetes because of the construction of more or less complex burrows. Integrated diffusive oxygen flux increased with oxygen heterogeneity due to the production of interface available for solute exchanges between overlying water and sediments. This work shows that sediment heterogeneity is an important feature of the control of oxygen exchanges at the sediment–water interface
The AMANDA Neutrino Telescope
With an effective telescope area of order m for TeV neutrinos, a
threshold near 50 GeV and a pointing accuracy of 2.5 degrees per muon
track, the AMANDA detector represents the first of a new generation of high
energy neutrino telescopes, reaching a scale envisaged over 25 years ago. We
describe early results on the calibration of natural deep ice as a particle
detector as well as on AMANDA's performance as a neutrino telescope.Comment: 12 pages, Latex2.09, uses espcrc2.sty and epsf.sty, 13 postscript
files included. Talk presented at the 18th International Conference on
Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics (Neutrino 98), Takayama, Japan, June 199
Carbon dynamics of the Weddell Gyre, Southern Ocean
The accumulation of carbon within the Weddell Gyre and its exchanges across the gyre boundaries are investigated with three recent full-depth oceanographic sections enclosing this climatically important region. The combination of carbonmeasurements with ocean circulation transport estimates from a box inverse analysis reveals that deepwater transports associated with Warm Deep Water (WDW) and Weddell Sea Deep Water dominate the gyre’s carbon budget, while a dual-cell vertical overturning circulation leads to both upwelling and the delivery of large quantities of carbon to the deep ocean. Historical sea surface pCO2 observations, interpolated using a neural network technique, confirm the net summertime sink of 0.044 to 0.058 ± 0.010 Pg C / yr derived from the inversion. However, a wintertime outgassing signal similar in size results in a statistically insignificant annual air-to-sea CO2 flux of 0.002± 0.007 Pg C / yr (mean 1998–2011) to 0.012 ± 0.024 Pg C/ yr (mean 2008–2010) to be diagnosed for the Weddell Gyre. A surface layer carbon balance, independently derived fromin situ biogeochemical measurements, reveals that freshwater inputs and biological drawdown decrease surface ocean inorganic carbon levels more than they are increased by WDW entrainment, resulting in an estimated annual carbon sink of 0.033 ± 0.021 Pg C / yr. Although relatively less efficient for carbon uptake than the global oceans, the summertime Weddell Gyre suppresses the winter outgassing signal, while its biological pump and deepwater formation act as key conduits for transporting natural and anthropogenic carbon to the deep ocean where they can reside for long time scales
The AMANDA Neutrino Telescope and the Indirect Search for Dark Matter
With an effective telescope area of order 10^4 m^2, a threshold of ~50 GeV
and a pointing accuracy of 2.5 degrees, the AMANDA detector represents the
first of a new generation of high energy neutrino telescopes, reaching a scale
envisaged over 25 years ago. We describe its performance, focussing on the
capability to detect halo dark matter particles via their annihilation into
neutrinos.Comment: Latex2.09, 16 pages, uses epsf.sty to place 15 postscript figures.
Talk presented at the 3rd International Symposium on Sources and Detection of
Dark Matter in the Universe (DM98), Santa Monica, California, Feb. 199
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