A Heuristic Solution of the Identifiability Problem of the Age-Period-Cohort Analysis of Cancer Occurrence: Lung Cancer Example

Background: The Age–Period–Cohort (APC) analysis is aimed at estimating the following effects on disease incidence: (i) the age of the subject at the time of disease diagnosis; (ii) the time period, when the disease occurred; and (iii) the date of birth of the subject. These effects can help in evaluating the biological events leading to the disease, in estimating the influence of distinct risk factors on disease occurrence, and in the development of new strategies for disease prevention and treatment. Methodology/Principal Findings: We developed a novel approach for estimating the APC effects on disease incidence rates in the frame of the Log-Linear Age-Period-Cohort (LLAPC) model. Since the APC effects are linearly interdependent and cannot be uniquely estimated, solving this identifiability problem requires setting four redundant parameters within a set of unknown parameters. By setting three parameters (one of the time-period and the birth-cohort effects and the corresponding age effect) to zero, we reduced this problem to the problem of determining one redundant parameter and, used as such, the effect of the time-period adjacent to the anchored time period. By varying this identification parameter, a family of estimates of the APC effects can be obtained. Using a heuristic assumption that the differences between the adjacent birth-cohort effects are small, we developed a numerical method for determining the optimal value of the identification parameter, by which a unique set of all APC effects is determined and the identifiability problem is solved

A recent strong X-ray flaring activity of 1ES 1959+650 with possibly less efficient stochastic acceleration

We present an X-ray flaring activity of 1ES 1959+650 in 2015 August-2016 January, which was the most powerful and prolonged during the 10.75 yr period since the start of its monitoring with X-ray Telescope onboard Swift. A new highest historical 0.3-10 keV count rate was recorded three times that makes this object the third BL Lacertae source exceeding the level of 20 counts s-1. Along with the overall variability by a factor of 5.7, this epoch was characterized by fast X-ray flares by a factor of 2.0-3.1, accompanied with an extreme spectral variability. The source also shows a simultaneous flaring activity in the optical - UV and 0.3-100 GeV bands, although a fast γ-ray flare without significant optical - X-ray counterparts is also found. In contrast to the X-ray flares in the previous years, the stochastic acceleration seems be less important for the electrons responsible for producing X-ray emission during this flare that challenges the earlier suggestion that the electrons in the jets of TeV-detected BL Lacertae objects should undergo an efficient stochastic acceleration resulting in a lower X-ray spectral curvature

The long-term Swift observations of the high-energy peaked BL Lacertae source 1ES 1959+650

We present the results based on the monitoring of the high-energy peaked BL Lacertae object 1ES 1959+650 by the Swift satellite during 2005-2014. Our timing study shows that the source was highly variable on longer (weeks-to-months) time-scales with the 0.3-10 keV fluxes ranging by a factor of 8. It sometimes showed a significant intra-day variability in the course of ∼1 ks, detected mainly in the epochs of higher brightness states. The flux variability exhibited an erratic character and no signatures of periodic variations are revealed. The X-ray spectra were mainly curved with broad ranges of photon index, curvature parameter, hardness ratio, synchrotron spectral energy distribution (SED) peak location which exhibited a significant variability with the flux at different time-scales. Our study of multi-wavelength cross-correlations shows that the one-zone synchrotron self-Compton scenario was not always valid for 1ES 1959+650. The X-ray flares were sometimes not accompanied with an increasing activity in the γ-ray or lower-energy parts of the spectrum and vice versa. Similar to the prominent `orphan' TeV event in 2002, significant flares in the high-energy and very high energy bands in 2009 May and 2012 May were not accompanied by those in the synchrotron part of the spectrum. Similar to other TeV-detected high-energy peaked BLLs, the stochastic acceleration of the electrons from the magnetic turbulence close to the shock front may be more important for our target compared to other scenarios since it showed mainly broader synchrotron SEDs during the X-ray flares expected when the stochastic mechanism is more efficient

On the

The z-distribution of pulsars in the vicinity of the Sun is investigated using data from the ATNF pulsar catalogue and the recent model for the Galactic distribution of free electrons (NE2001). It is found that the z-distribution of pulsars with $L>10$ mJy kpc2 is exponential with a characteristic scale height of about 350 pc. Evidence of pulsar oscillations in the direction perpendicular to the Galactic plane is presented

New runaway OB stars with HIPPARCOS

A Monte Carlo method for detection of runaway OB stars from observational data is proposed. 61 runaway OB star candidates have been detected by an analysis of Hipparcos proper motions. The peculiar tangential and total transverse velocities have been determined for these stars. A list of the detected runaway star candidates is presented. The evidence of a discrepancy between photometric and parallactic distances of runaway OB star candidates is presented