An area-sampling device for obtaining quantitative samples of the oropharyngeal bacterial flora is described and illustrative data are presented.

Small area estimators are often based on linear mixed models under the assumption that relationships among variables are stationary across the area of interest (Fay–Herriot models). This hypothesis is patently violated when the population is divided into heterogeneous latent subgroups. In this paperwe propose a local Fay–Herriotmodel assisted by a SimulatedAnnealing algorithm to identify the la...

The study examined differences in HIV testing between men who have sex with men only (MSMO) (n=300) and men who have sex with men and women (MSMW) (n=105) and assessed associations with HIV testing among MSMW. A venue-based cross-sectional HIV surveillance study in 2008 (BESURE-MSM2) was examined. Prevalence of HIV testing was similar for MSMO and MSMW. One-on-one counseling (excluding counseli...

time–area method is one of the most widely applied techniques of watershed routing, and can be potentially used as a distributed model. in this paper, a fundamental flaw in the arrangement of subareas in the original time-area histogram is identified for one-dimensional flow. this is conducted on the basis of comparing time-area hydrograph with that of the kinematic wave theorem. accordingly, a...

The knowledge of auxiliary variables for entire population is a necessary task in many agricultural applications; for example a method widely applied to improve the efficiency of crop area estimations is the regression estimator (Cochran, 1977), that exploit the correlation between classified satellite images (auxiliary information) and ground surveys’ data. The regression analysis offer a lot ...

Sixth millennium BC Dalma ceramics from the northwestern and central Zagros have previously been described as beingimpossible to distinguish using decorative style analysis in spite of the great distance between the two regions. In thisstudy, petrographic (thin section) analysis and a small-scale electron microprobe project was carried out on the ceramicsof the two regions, as well as a small s...