Background: Periodic or cyclic data of known periodicity are frequently encountered in epidemiological and biomedical research: for instance, seasonality provides a useful experiment of nature while diurnal rhythms play an important role in endocrine secretion. There is, however, little consensus on how to analysis these data and less still on how to measure association or effect size for the o...

Background: The volume of influenza pandemic modelling studies has increased dramatically in the last decade. Many models incorporate now sophisticated parameterization and validation techniques, economic analyses and the behaviour of individuals. Methods: We reviewed trends in these aspects in models for influenza pandemic preparedness that aimed to generate policy insights for epidemic manage...

Background: The aim of this study was to provide a novel approach for estimating the incidence of renal cancer in Germany by using hospitalization data from the years 2005–2006 and to compare these estimates with incidence rates from cancer registries. We used nationwide hospitalization data from the years 2005–2006 including 34.2 million hospitalizations. We used three definitions of potential...

Although 1972 was the year that Winograd published his now classic natural language Study of the blocks world, that fact had not yet penetrated to the ACL. At that time people with AI computational interests were strictly in a minority in the association and it was a radical move to appoint Roger Schank as program chairman for the year's meeting. That was also the year that we didn't have a pre...

Background: In May 2014, Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) infection, with closely related viral genomes, was diagnosed in two Dutch residents, returning from a pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). These patients travelled with a group of 29 other Dutch travellers. We conducted an epidemiological assessment of the travel group to identify likely s...