Noroviruses are perhaps the perfect human pathogens. These viruses possess essentially all of the attributes of an ideal infectious agent: highly contagious, rapidly and prolifically shed, constantly evolving, evoking limited immunity, and only moderately virulent, allowing most of those infected to fully recover, therebymaintaining a large susceptible pool of hosts. These characteristics have ...

This article examines the geographical corridors for the establishment of rice in seventeenth-century Dutch Guiana. One corridor of introduction is associated with the expulsion of Dutch planters from Brazil in 1644, whose slaves reestablished longstanding subsistence preferences with their exodus to the colony. Another corridor links its introduction to the African Gold Coast, where rice devel...

An (N ;n,m, {w1, . . . , wt})-separating hash family is a set H of N functions h : X −→ Y with |X| = n, |Y | = m, t ≥ 2 having the following property. For any pairwise disjoint subsets C1, . . . , Ct ⊆ X with |Ci| = wi, i = 1, . . . , t, there exists at least one function h ∈ H such that h(C1), h(C2), . . . , h(Ct) are pairwise disjoint. Separating hash families generalize many known combinator...

Let c(F) be the number of perfect pairs of F and c(G) be the maximum of c(F) over all (near-) one-factorizations F of G. Wagner showed that for odd n, c(Kn) ≥ n∗φ(n) 2 and for m and n which are odd and co-prime to each other, c(Kmn) ≥ 2 ∗ c(Km) ∗ c(Kn). In this note, we establish that both these results are equivalent in the sense that they both give rise to the same lower bound.

V. Chv atal proved that no minimal imperfect graph has a small transversal, that is, a set of vertices of cardinality at most + ! 1 which meets every !-clique and every -stable set. In this paper we prove that a slight generalization of this notion of small transversal leads to a conjecture which is as strong as Berge's Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture for a very large class of graphs, although ...

This paper examines how the fertility of enslaved women was affected by the promise of freedom. Exploiting geographic variation in the effect of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, I demonstrate a negative correlation between fertility and the distance to freedom. This negative correlation is stronger on larger plantations but weaker when the slaveholder is a woman. A similar correlation is not pre...