Using a sample of 949 Scottish farms with finishing cattle, the spatial distribution of Escherichia coli O157-positive farms was investigated using disease mapping models. The overall prevalence of E. coli O157-positive farms was estimated as 22%. The regions used in this study were the 16 postcode areas of Scotland. For each region, the posterior relative risk (RR) was estimated as a model-bas...

The V-type nerve agents (VX and VR) are among the most toxic substances known. The high toxicity and environmental persistence of VX make the development of novel decontamination methods particularly important. The enzyme phosphotriesterase (PTE) is capable of hydrolyzing VX but with an enzymatic efficiency more than 5 orders of magnitude lower than with its best substrate, paraoxon. PTE has pr...

The kinetics of chemical hydrolysis including neutral, acid- and base-catalyzed hydrolysis of 4-methylumbelliferyl caprylate (MUCAP) salmonella reagent were studied at different temperatures. The rate constants and activation parameters were determined by following the build-up of fluorescence peak of the hydrolysis product 4-methylumbelliferone (4-MU). The time scale of esterase enzyme hydroly...

The rate of growth of the partial quotients of an irrational number is studied relative to the rate of approximation of the number by its convergents. The focus is on the Hausdorff dimension of exceptional sets on which different growth rates are achieved. In this note we look at the rate of growth of the partial quotients ai of the irrational number x = [a1, a2, . . . ] = 1 a1 + 1 a2 + 1 a3 + ...

Nowadays, a lot of efforts have been applied to find an appropriate catalyst for generating hydrogen from NaBH4. Hence in the current study, various nanostructures of TiO2 were employed to obtain an insight into how the different support catalysts effect on the hydrolysis rate of NaBH4. For this aim, disordered filaments (DF-NTs) and ordered free-standing TiO2 nanotubes (FS-NTs) were fabricated...

We derive the relative entropy between two Markov transition rate matrices from sample path considerations. This relative entropy is interpreted as a \level 2.5" large deviations action functional. That is, the level two large deviations action functional for empirical distributions of continuous-time Markov chains can be derived from the relative entropy using the contraction mapping principle...

Fusion of the information provided by distributed sensors is important in the future pervasive computing systems. The objective of this paper is to quantify the relative amount of information delivered by individual sensors in a distributed sensor system. To formalize our approach, we consider the problem of fusing the statistical information obtained using low-rate sensor recordings viðnÞ in o...

A new method is presented for the reconstruction of the radiocarbon production rate from the measured relative abundance of ∆14C. The method treats the carbon cycle as a linear Fourier filter and thus allows for the correct and unambiguous inversion of the carbon cycle. The 14C production rate, as reconstructed by the Fourier filter method, agrees with the results obtained by the traditional it...

This paper presents two investigations into articulation rate, or the distribution of segmental duration, in a Finnish language speech corpus. The first study, rank ordering of short utterances according to their component words’ articulation rate, reveals that 75 % or more of Finnish utterances can be expected show some level of final lengthening. Also initial shortening, or accelerated speaki...

The aims of the study were to investigate the effect of poly(ε -caprolactone) (PCL) and nano- SiO2 within the thermoplastic starch (TPS) blends on the rate and extent of starch enzymatic hydrolysis using enzymes α-amylase and amyloglucosidase. The results of this study have revealed that blends with nano-SiO2 content at 6 wt% exhibited a significantly reduced rate and exte...