BACKGROUND The relationships between cold temperatures and cardio-respiratory mortality in the elderly are well documented. We wished to determine whether similar relationships exist with consultations in the primary care setting and to assess the lag time at which the effects were observed. METHODS Generalized additive models were used to regress time-series of daily numbers of general pract...

El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) has been linked to climate anomalies throughout the world. This paper presents an overview of global ENSO-streamflow teleconnection and identifies regions where the relationship may be exploited to forecast streamflow several months ahead. The teleconnection is investigated by fitting a first harmonic to 24-month El Nino streamflow composites from 581 catchme...

We use time domain analysis techniques to investigate the rapid variability of Cygnus X-1. We show that the cross-correlation functions between hard and soft energy bands reach values very close to unity and peak at a lag of less than 2 millisecond for energies separated by a factor of 10. This confirms that the process that produces X-ray photons at different energies is extremely coherent on ...

In this paper we consider the analysis of semiparametric models for binary panel data with state dependence and serial correlation. A hierarchical approach is used in addressing heterogeneity, dealing with the initial conditions, and incorporating correlation between the covariates and the random effects. We consider a semiparametric specification in which a Markov process smoothness prior is u...

AIM To assess whether the information provided by automated continuous monitoring blood culture systems could aid in the diagnosis of catheter related sepsis. METHODS Serial dilutions of a strain of coagulase negative staphylococcus were inoculated into the BacT/Alert blood culture system. Blood culture results for seven patients with possible catheter related sepsis from coagulase negative s...

We study the problem of learning a combination (e.g. a portfolio) of time series that has large autocorrelation. This is a challenging task as it involves the lag-1 autocovariance matrix of the series, which is difficult to estimate in practice. To address this issue we develop regularized versions of the autocorrelation function based on a robust optimization formulation of the problem. We hig...

We report on observations of correlated behavior between the prompt γ-ray and optical emission from GRB 080319B, which (i) strongly suggest that they occurred within the same astrophysical source region and (ii) indicate that their respective radiation mechanisms were most likely dynamically coupled. Our preliminary results, based upon a new cross-correlation function (CCF) methodology for dete...

This chapter discusses the positive effects of IT investment on firm financial performance when a distinct range of characteristics is examined. The relationship between IT investment and firm performance considering the information intensity of the industry is explored using a distributed lag model. Findings indicate both a positive effect and a positive lag effect of IT investment. The effect...

Immune checkpoints associate with dysfunctional T cells, which have a reduced ability to clear pathogens or cancer cells. T-cell checkpoint blockade may improve patient survival. However, checkpoint molecules on cytokine-induced killer (CIK) cell, a non-specific adoptive immunotherapy, remain unknown. In present study, we detected the dynamic expression of eight major checkpoint molecules (CTLA...