Let F={P1,...,Pm} be a family of sets. A partial order P(F, <) on F is naturally defined by the condition Pi< Pj iff Pi is contained in Pj. When the elements of F are disks (i.e. circles together with their interiors), P(F, <) is called a circle order; if the elements of F are n-polygons, P(F, <) is called an n-gon order. In this paper we study circle orders and n-gon orders. The crossing numbe...

Canonical orderings and their relatives such as st-numberings have been used as a key tool in algorithmic graph theory for the last decades. Recently, a unifying link behind all these orders has been shown that links them to well-known graph decompositions into parts that have a prescribed vertex-connectivity. Despite extensive interest in canonical orderings, no analogue of this unifying conce...

BACKGROUND New algorithms for disease outbreak detection are being developed to take advantage of full electronic medical records (EMRs) that contain a wealth of patient information. However, due to privacy concerns, even anonymized EMRs cannot be shared among researchers, resulting in great difficulty in comparing the effectiveness of these algorithms. To bridge the gap between novel bio-surve...

BACKGROUND Antibiotics are often administered to terminally ill patients until death, and antibiotic use contributes to the emergence of multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs). We investigated antibiotic use and the isolation of MDROs among patients who died in general medical wards. METHODS All adult patients who died in the general internal medicine wards at four acute care hospitals between...