Cyclospora cayetanensis among expatriate and indigenous populations of West Java, Indonesia.

From January 1995 through July 1998, we investigated the occurrence of Cyclospora cayetanensis infection associated with gastrointestinal illness or diarrhea in foreign residents and natives of West Java, Indonesia. We found that C. cayetanensis was the main protozoal cause of gastrointestinal illness and diarrhea in adult foreign residents during the wet season. The parasite rarely caused illness in the indigenous population or in children

Estimation of the genetic contribution of presenilin-1 and -2 mutations in a population-based study of presenile Alzheimer disease

Two closely related genes, the presenilins ( PS ), located at chromosomes 14q24.3 and 1q42.1, have been identified for autosomal dominant Alzheimer disease (AD) with onset age below 65 years (presenile AD). We performed a systematic mutation analysis of all coding and 5'-non-coding exons of PS -1 and PS -2 in a population-based epidemiological series of 101 unrelated familial and sporadic presenile AD cases. The familial cases included 10 patients of autosomal dominant AD families sampled for linkage analysis studies. In all pat

A complexity approach to defining urban energy systems

Urban energy systems have been commonly considered to be socio-technical systems within the boundaries of an urban area. However, recent literature challenges this notion in that it urges researchers to look at the wider interactions and influences of urban energy systems wherein the socio-technical sphere is expanded to political, environmental and economic realms as well. In addition to the inter-sectoral linkages, the diverse agents and multilevel governance trends of energy sustainability in the dynamic environment of cities make the urban energy landscape a complex one. There is a strong case then for establishing a new conceptualisation of urban energy systems that builds upon these contemporary understandings of such systems. We argue that the complex systems approach can be suitable for this. In this paper, we propose a pilot framework for understanding urban energy systems using complex systems theory as an integrating plane. We review the multiple streams of urban energy literature to identify the contemporary discussions and construct this framework that can serve as a common ontological understanding for the different scholarships studying urban energy systems. We conclude the paper by highlighting the ways in which the framework can serve some of the relevant communities

Discovering interaction between oaks and carabid beetles on a local scale by point pattern analysis

The understanding of habitat demands of single species needs an explicit habitat element approach which includes both the effect of intensity of the habitat element on the species population and the spatial effect of that habitat element in a given matrix (e.g., forest or water). An established tool in ecological research for this purpose is the point pattern analysis, which yields information on relationships between organisms and habitat elements, as well as on interactions among individuals. However, the application of this tool seems to be restricted so far to locally fixed species and habitat elements. As our model system consists of carabid beetles and single old oak trees in a Scots pine forest, we needed to address the issue of fauna mobility in point pattern analysis. We adopted a random field approach to transform the lattice beetle traps data to point data. For the resulting bivariate point pattern we applied the toroidal shift test to verify the independence of tree and beetle distribution. To overcome the problem of irregular window shape, we reconstructed the oak data to obtain a point pattern in a larger rectangular window to make toroidal shifts possible. We could justify a positive spatial association between oak tree and carabid beetle distributions. By our results, specific spatial fields of oak influence on the beetle species can be derived which may allow for beetles supporting management measures like an increase of oak tree proportion and a more regular spatial distribution of single admixed oak trees. Those measures may increase the ecological effect of C. coriaceus as an antagonist for pest insects in mono-cultured Scots pine forests