The long-term burden of congenital cytomegalovirus: Hospitalisation and mortality in a population-based matched cohort study.

Aim: Congenital cytomegalovirus (cCMV) infection can result in considerable morbidity and mortality. However, the impact of cCMV on health system utilisation beyond infancy is poorly defined. Here we sought to describe the burden of cCMV health service use and mortality using linked population-based datasets.

Infant, maternal and demographic predictors of delayed vaccination: A population-based cohort study.

Background: Receiving vaccines at or close to their due date (vaccination timeliness) is a now key measure of program performance. However, studies comprehensively examining predictors of delayed infant vaccination are lacking. We aimed to identify predictors of short and longer-term delays in diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) vaccination by dose number and ethnicity.

Optimization of a Genetic Algorithm for the Functionalization of Fullerenes.

We present the optimization of a genetic algorithm (GA) that is designed to predict the most stable structural isomers of hydrogenated and hydroxylated fullerene cages. Density functional theory (DFT) and density functional tight binding (DFTB) methods are both employed to compute isomer energies. We show that DFTB and DFT levels of theory are in good agreement with each other and that therefore both sets of optimized GA parameters are very similar.

Mixtures of factor analyzers with common factor loadings: applications to the clustering and visualization of high-dimensional data.

Mixtures of factor analyzers enable model-based density estimation to be undertaken for high-dimensional data, where the number of observations n is not very large relative to their dimension p. In practice, there is often the need to further reduce the number of parameters in the specification of the component-covariance matrices. To this end, we propose the use of common component-factor loadings, which considerably reduces further the number of parameters.

Wet-season dormancy release in seed banks of a tropical leguminous shrub is determined by wet heat.

Background And Aims: Hard-seeded (physical) dormancy is common among plants, yet mechanisms for dormancy release are poorly understood, especially in the tropics. The following questions are asked: (a) whether dormancy release in seed banks of the tropical shrub Parkinsonia aculeata (Caesalpiniaceae) is determined by wet heat (incubation under wet, warm to hot, conditions); and (b) whether its effect is modified by microclimate.

Methods: A seed burial trial was conducted in the wet-dry tropics (northern Australia) to compare dormancy release across different habitats (open, artificial cover, ground cover and canopy cover), burial depths (0, 3 and 20 cm) and burial durations (2, 6 and 14 weeks).