Random walks with long-tailed increments have many important applications in insurance, finance, queueing networks, storage processes, and the study of extreme events in nature and elsewhere. See, for example, Embrechts et al. (1997), Asmussen (1998, 1999) and Greiner et al. (1999) for some background. In this paper we study the distribution of the maximum of such a random walk over a random ti...

Hendra virus is a recently emerged bat-borne zoonotic agent with high lethality in horses and humans in Australia. This is a rare disease and the determinants of bat to horse transmission, including the factors that bring these hosts together at critical times, are poorly understood. In this cross-disciplinary study climatic and vegetation primary productivity variables are compared for the dis...

For patients suffering from rare diseases it is often hard to find an expert clinician. Existing registries rely on manual registration procedures and cannot easily be kept up to date. A prototype data collection system for discovering experts on rare diseases using MEDLINE has been successfully deployed. Initial manual analyses demonstrate proof of concept and deliver promising results. Examin...

M. M. Ali,* P. V. Nagamani,1 N. Sharma,1 R. T. Venu Gopal,2 M. Rajeevan,3 G. J. Goni4 and Mark A. Bourassa5 1Department of Space, National Remote Sensing Centre, Hyderabad, India 2Ministry of Earth Sciences, Indian National Center for Ocean Information Services, Hyderabad, India 3Ministry of Earth Sciences, New Delhi, India 4Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, National Oceanic...

High throughput assays tend to be expensive per subject. Often studies are limited not so much by the number of subjects available as by assay costs, making assay choice a critical issue. We have developed a framework for assay choice that maximises the number of true disease causing mechanisms 'seen', given limited resources. Although straightforward, some of the ramifications of our methodolo...

INTRODUCTION Langerhans' cell histiocytosis is a proliferative histiocytic disorder of unknown cause originating from dendritic cells. CASE PRESENTATION The authors report a case of Langerhans' cell histiocytosis in a 48-year-old man with multisystemic disease presentation, including liver involvement. CONCLUSION Hepatic involvement is an uncommon feature in this rare disease and there is n...

One challenge of economics is that the systems treated by these sciences have no perfect metronome in time and no perfect spatial architecture—crystalline or otherwise. Nonetheless, as if by magic, out of nothing but randomness one finds remarkably fine-tuned processes in time. We present an overview of recent research joining practitioners of economic theory and statistical physics to try to b...

The purpose of this article is to present in elementary mathematical and statistical terms a simple way to quickly and effectively teach and understand case-control studies, as they are commonly done in dynamic populations-without using the rare disease assumption. Our focus is on case-control studies of disease incidence ('incident case-control studies'); we will not consider the situation of ...

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