Despite the enormous media coverage that the issue of year 2000 (Y2K) readiness has received in recent months, the focus of that coverage has been restricted almost exclusively to technological aspects. Non-technical issues have tended to be either ignored completely or given very little attention. Most importantly, not much is known about the organisational processes of preparing to face this ...

I discuss the physics reach of a fixed-target charm experiment which can reconstruct >10 charm decays, three orders of magnitude beyond the largest extant sample. Such an experiment may run at Fermilab shortly after the Year 2000. In addition to “programmatic” charm physics such as spectroscopy, lifetimes, and tests of QCD, this “Charm2000” experiment will have significant sensitivity to new ph...

The Image Reduction and Analysis Facility is a scientific image processing package widely used throughout the astronomical community. IRAF has been developed and distributed by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona since the early 1980’s. Other observatories and projects have written many dozens of layered external application packages. More than ten thousand journal art...

BACKGROUND Predicting long-term survival after admission to hospital is helpful for clinical, administrative and research purposes. The Hospital-patient One-year Mortality Risk (HOMR) model was derived and internally validated to predict the risk of death within 1 year after admission. We conducted an external validation of the model in a large multicentre study. METHODS We used administrativ...

Socioeconomic inequalities in cancer survival have been reported various countries but it is uncertain to what extent they persist with relatively comprehensive health insurance coverage such as Germany. We investigated the association between area-based socioeconomic deprivation on municipality level and for 25 sites used data from seven population-based registries (covering 32 million inhabit...

BACKGROUND Studies have demonstrated a reduction for otitis media (OM) following the introduction of seven-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV7), but this has not been evaluated in the United Kingdom (UK). Moreover, there are limited data on any additional impact of PCV13 introduction in 2010. METHODS We conducted an observational cohort study to investigate the trends in OM incidence ...

Growth of the ageing population, advances in imaging techniques, newly available percutaneous interventions, and emphasis on the central role of the Heart Team in risk assessment and treatment selection combine to place valvular heart disease (VHD) at the centre of developments in cardiovascular medicine and surgery. However, VHD is poorly researched in comparison with other areas of cardiac di...

Current data suggest that advances in cardiovascular (CV) treatment have resulted in significant reduction in CV mortality but also in prolongation of life with disability. Focus on CV prevention is likely to reverse this unfavourable trend. In this review we provide information on the new European guidelines on CV prevention and discuss biomarkers and vascular imaging techniques which can assi...