Methods During a routine control of hospital water, contamination with Legionella spp. was detected. To protect the patients from exposure to Legionella, shower heads were replaced by point-of-use shower filters (H2OK medical filters, Norit Filtrix, The Netherlands). The efficacy of 4 shower filters was tested during 5 weeks. Water samples were taken with and without use of the shower filter an...

The influence of an atmospheric model on shower reconstruction is studied. In the fluorescence detection technique, one of the key measurements is the depth of shower maximum in the atmosphere,Xmax. The altitude corresponding toXmax depends considerably on distributions of atmospheric pressure and temperature, used in the shower reconstruction. In this paper, measured atmospheric profiles at di...

Potential pathogens from shower water and aerosolized shower mist (i.e., shower aerosol) have been suggested as an environmental source of infection for immunocompromised patients. To quantify the microbial load in shower water and aerosol samples, we used culture, microscopic, and quantitative PCR methods to investigate four shower stalls in a stem cell transplant unit at Barnes-Jewish Hospita...

Spectra of local muon densities in high-energy extensive air-showers (EAS) are presented as signature of the primary cosmic ray energy spectrum in the knee region. The KASCADE central detector, with its two layers of multiwire proportional chambers and with a layer of scintillation counters, enables the measurements of muon densities at two different threshold energies. The spectra have been re...

Measurements of electron, muon and hadron lateral distributions of extensive air showers as recorded in the Karlsruhe shower core and array detector experiment are presented. The data cover the energy range from 5 10 eV up to almost 10 eV and extend from the inner core region to distances of 200 m. The electron and muon distributions are corrected for mutual contaminations by taking into accoun...

We study distributed protocols for finding all pairs of similar vectors in a large dataset. Our results pertain to a variety of discrete metrics, and we give concrete instantiations for Hamming distance. In particular, we give improved upper bounds on the overhead required for similarity defined by Hamming distance r > 1 and prove a lower bound showing qualitative optimality of the overhead req...

We calculate microscopically the charge distribution around a vortex in type II superconductors by solving the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equation and the Poisson equation simultaneously. Our calculations show that the charge density depletion occurs in the vortex center and the Friedel oscillation appears over the coherence length when k(F)xi is small. We also calculate the density-density correlati...

Presented here is a technique of propagating uncertainties through the parton shower by means of an alternate event weight. This technique provides a mechanism to systematically quantify the effect of variations of certain components of the parton shower leading to a novel approach to probing the physics implemented in a parton shower code and understanding its limitations. Further, this approa...

We have a cycle of N nodes and there is a token on an odd number of nodes. At each step, each token independently moves to its clockwise neighbor or stays at its position with probability 2 . If two tokens arrive to the same node, then we remove both of them. The process ends when only one token remains. The question is that for a fixed N , which is the initial configuration that maximizes the ...

We present a new method for the reconstruction of the longitudinal profile of extensive air showers induced by ultra-high energy cosmic rays. In contrast to the typically considered shower size profile, this method employs directly the ionization energy deposit of the shower particles in the atmosphere. Due to universality of the energy spectra of electrons and positrons, both fluorescence and ...