Common variable immunodeficiency (CVID) is one of the primary immunodeficiency diseases that occur in both children and adults. We present here a nationwide, population-based epidemiological study of CVID across all ages in Taiwan during 2002-2011. Using the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision code 279.06, cases of CVID were identified from Taiwan's National Health Insuranc...

Meningococci can cause clusters of disease. Specimens from 1,616 patients in Germany obtained over 42 months were typed by serogrouping and sequence typing of PorA and FetA and yielded a highly diverse dataset (Simpson's index 0.963). A retrospective spatiotemporal scan statistic (SaTScan) was applied in an automated fashion to identify clusters for each finetype defined by serogroup variable r...

We address the degradation of continuous variable (CV) entanglement in a noisy channel focusing on the set of photon-number entangled states. We exploit several separability criteria and compare the resulting separation times with the value of non-Gaussianity at any time, thus showing that in the low-temperature regime: (i) non-Gaussianity is a bound for the relative entropy of entanglement and...

We show that the sender and the receiver each require coherent devices in order to achieve unconditional continuous variable quantum teleportation (CVQT), and this requirement cannot be achieved with conventional laser sources, linear optics, ideal photon detectors, and perfect Fock state sources. The appearance of successful CVQT in recent experiments is due to interpreting the measurement rec...

BACKGROUND The cohort multiple randomised controlled trial (cmRCT) design provides an opportunity to incorporate the benefits of randomisation within clinical practice; thus reducing costs, integrating electronic healthcare records, and improving external validity. This study aims to address a key concern of the cmRCT design: refusal to treatment is only present in the intervention arm, and thi...

The K-harmonic means clustering algorithm (KHM) is a new clustering method used to group data such that the sum of the harmonic averages of the distances between each entity and all cluster centroids is minimized. Because it is less sensitive to initialization than K-means (KM), many researchers have recently been attracted to studying KHM. In this study, the proposed iSSO-KHM is based on an im...

We report on the analysis and prototype characterization of a dual-electrode electro-optic modulator that can generate both amplitude and phase modulations with a selectable relative phase, termed a quadrature variable modulator (QVM). All modulation states can be reached by tuning only the electrical inputs, facilitating real-time tuning, and the device has shown good suppression and stability...

Unbiased interpretation of noisy single molecular motor recordings remains a challenging task. To address this issue, we have developed robust algorithms based on hidden Markov models (HMMs) of motor proteins. The basic algorithm, called variable-stepsize HMM (VS-HMM), was introduced in the previous article. It improves on currently available Markov-model based techniques by allowing for arbitr...

Functional analysis of low-rate aggression was conducted during extended observation periods and showed behavior to be maintained by positive reinforcement. Treatment consisted of variable-momentary differential reinforcement of other behavior and was successful in reducing problem behavior throughout these extended observation periods.