There are two important principles in treating any disease: firstly, putting together the constellation of symptoms, signs and results of any specific investigations and coming up with a diagnosis or short differential diagnosis; and secondly, planning a rational course of therapy, be this short or long term, medical or surgical. In South Africa we face a third and crucial addition to these pri...

The conditions that can lead to the exploitative depletion of a shared resource, i.e., the tragedy of the commons, can be reformulated as a game of prisoner's dilemma: while preserving the common resource is in the best interest of the group, over-consumption is in the interest of each particular individual at any given point in time. One way to try and prevent the tragedy of the commons is thr...

We examine the performance of a strategy for Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) developed by simulating a discrete approximation to a stochastic differential equation (SDE). We refer to the approach as diffusion MCMC. A variety of motivations for the approach are reviewed in the context of Bayesian analysis. In particular, implementation of diffusion MCMC is very simple to set-up, even in the pres...

B.G. is currently employed with the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in its BIOCONTAM Unit that provides scientific and administrative support to EFSA’s scientific activities in the area of Microbial Risk Assessment. The positions and opinions presented in this article are those of the authors alone and are not intended to represent the views or scientific works of EFSA. The other authors ...

We report an unusual case of an extraaxial ependymoma of the posterior fossa in an adult. MR imaging showed a heterogeneously enhancing extraaxial mass with a cystic component. Ependymoma should be included in the differential diagnosis of uncommon extraaxial masses of the posterior fossa.

We would like to congratulate Lee and Altenmüller for their recent study showing important findings about the characterization of a task-specific dystonia in a young professional percussionist. The authors presented in an elegant way the EMG investigation and treatment approach and the possible differential diagnoses, raising an important question about the need for physicians' awareness of thi...

Ordinary differential equations (ODEs) are widely used to model the dynamic properties of biological networks. Due to the complexity of biological networks and limited quantitative experimental data available, estimating kinetic parameters for these models remains challenging. We present a novel global optimization algorithm, differential simulated annealing (DSA), for estimating kinetic parame...

The classical reduction of order for scalar ordinary differential equations (ODEs) fails for a system of ODEs. We prove a constructive result for the reduction of order for a system of ODEs that admits a solvable Lie algebra of point symmetries. Applications are given for the case of a system of two second-order ODEs which admits a solvable four-dimensional Lie algebra of point symmetries.

During the past 10 years much knowledge has been gained about multiple sclerosis in the pediatric population. This article summarizes the information relevant to the neurologist and pediatric neurologist concerning the diagnosis, differential diagnosis and therapy for pediatric MS.