1,107 research outputs found
Gender and conflict in the Middle East - An interview with Nadje Al-Ali
An interview about gender and conflict in the Middle eas
Forensic identification: the Island Problem and its generalisations
In forensics it is a classical problem to determine, when a suspect
shares a property with a criminal , the probability that . In
this paper we give a detailed account of this problem in various degrees of
generality. We start with the classical case where the probability of having
, as well as the a priori probability of being the criminal, is the
same for all individuals. We then generalize the solution to deal with
heterogeneous populations, biased search procedures for the suspect,
-correlations, uncertainty about the subpopulation of the criminal and
the suspect, and uncertainty about the -frequencies. We also consider
the effect of the way the search for is conducted, in particular when this
is done by a database search. A returning theme is that we show that
conditioning is of importance when one wants to quantify the "weight" of the
evidence by a likelihood ratio. Apart from these mathematical issues, we also
discuss the practical problems in applying these issues to the legal process.
The posterior probabilities of are typically the same for all reasonable
choices of the hypotheses, but this is not the whole story. The legal process
might force one to dismiss certain hypotheses, for instance when the relevant
likelihood ratio depends on prior probabilities. We discuss this and related
issues as well. As such, the paper is relevant both from a theoretical and from
an applied point of view
Groundwater quality monitoring in Denmark
As the drinking water supply in Denmark is totally based on groundwater, monitoring of the groundwater quality is extremely important to the Danish community. With more than 62% of the total land area under agricultural use the Danish Government has determined that the entire area is vulnerable to nitrate polution, and therefore the groundwater monitoring programme should cover the entire country. The Danish groundwater monitoring programme comprises water supply well monitoring, the groundwater monitoring network and agricultural watershed monitoring (Figs 1, 2) and is described on www.groundwater.dk. The programme is part of the National Action Programme for the Water Environment and Nature, NOVANA (Svendsen & Norup 2004; Svendsen et al. 2005). Groundwater quality monitoring is carried out on the basis of data from approximately 6200 public water supply wells. Furthermore, a detailed analytical programme is carried out on 1415 well screens from the monitoring network comprising 70 catchment areas, and on 100 shallow screens from the five agricultural watersheds (Svendsen et al. 2005). The detailed quality monitoring includes analyses for 97 chemical elements, comprising 26 main elements, 14 heavy metals, 23 organic micro-pollutants and 34 pesticides and metabolites
Evaluation of temporal surveillance system sensitivity and freedom from bovine viral diarrhea in Danish dairy herds using scenario tree modelling
BACKGROUND: The temporal sensitivity of the surveillance system (TemSSe) for Bovine Viral Diarrhea (BVD) in Danish dairy herds was evaluated. Currently, the Danish antibody blocking ELISA is used to test quarterly bulk tank milk (BTM). To optimize the surveillance system as an early warning system, we considered the possibility of using the SVANOVIR ELISA, as this test has been shown to detect BVD-positive herds earlier than the blocking ELISA in BTM tests. Information from data (2010) and outputs from two published stochastic models were fed into a stochastic scenario tree to estimate the TemSSe. For that purpose we considered: the risk of BVD introduction into the dairy population, the ELISA used and the high risk period (HRP) from BVD introduction to testing (at 90 or 365Â days). The effect of introducing one persistently infected (PI) calf or one transiently infected (TI) milking cow into 1 (or 8) dairy herd(s) was investigated. Additionally we estimated the confidence in low (PLow) herd prevalence (<8/4109 infected herds) and the confidence in complete freedom (PFree) from BVD (< 1/4109). RESULTS: The TemSSe, the PLow, and the PFree were higher, when tests were performed 365Â days after BVD introduction, than after 90Â days. Estimates were usually higher for the SVANOVIR than for the blocking ELISA, and when a PI rather than a TI was introduced into the herd(s). For instance, with the current system, the median TemSSe was 64.5Â %, 90Â days after a PI calf was introduced into eight dairy herds. The related median PLow was 72.5Â %. When a PI calf was introduced into one herd the median TemSSe was 12.1Â %, while the related PFree was 51.6Â %. With the SVANOVIR ELISA these estimates were 99.0Â %; 98.9Â %, 43.7Â % and 62.4Â %, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: The replacement of the blocking ELISA with the SVANOVIR could increase the TemSSe, the PLow and PFree remarkably. Those results could be used to optimize the Danish BVD surveillance system. Furthermore, the approach proposed in this study, for including the effect of the HRP within the scenario tree methodology, could be applied to optimize early warning surveillance systems of different animal diseases
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