A Case Study of Bluetooth Technology as a Supplemental Tool in Contact Tracing.

We present results from a 7-day trial of a Bluetooth-enabled card by the New Zealand Ministry of Health to investigate its usefulness in contact tracing. A comparison of the card with traditional contact tracing, which relies on self-reports of contacts to case investigators, demonstrated significantly higher levels of internal consistency in detected contact events by Bluetooth-enabled cards with 88% of contact events being detected by both cards involved in an interaction as compared to 64% for self-reports of contacts to case investigators. We found no clear evidence of memory recall worsening in reporting contact events that were further removed in time from the date of a case investigation.

Evolution of a wild-plant tobamovirus passaged through an exotic host: Fixation of mutations and increased replication.

is a group of viruses that have become serious pathogens of crop plants. As part of a study informing risk of wild plant virus spill over to crops, we investigated the capacity of a solanaceous-infecting tobamovirus from an isolated indigenous flora to adapt to new exotic hosts. Yellow tailflower mild mottle virus (YTMMV) (genus , family ) was isolated from a wild plant of yellow tailflower (, family Solanaceae) and initially passaged through a plant of , then one of where a single local lesion was used to inoculate a plant.

A novel member of the Tombusviridae from a wild legume, Gompholobium preissii.

As part of an investigation into viruses of wild plants in Australia, a contiguous sequence of 3935 nucleotides was obtained after shotgun sequencing of RNA isolated from an asymptomatic wild legume, Gompholobium preissii. Phylogenetic analysis of the sequence revealed that it most closely resembled that of Trailing lespedeza virus 1 (TLV1), a virus isolated from a wild legume in America. The proposed virus, named Gompholobium virus A, and TLV1 are genetically closest to viruses in the genera Alphacarmovirus and Pelarspovirus, family Tombusviridae, but they share features distinguishing them from both groups.

A log-linear modelling approach to assessing the consistency of ego reports of dyadic outcomes with applications to fertility and sexual partnerships.

We propose a log-linear model to assess the consistency of ego reports of dyadic outcomes. We do so specifically in the context where males and females report on shared events, and we demonstrate how inconsistencies can be assessed by using a log-linear model that estimates separate mixing totals for each set of reports. This modelling approach immediately allows us to determine where inconsistencies in reports occur.

Catharanthus mosaic virus: A potyvirus from a gymnosperm, Welwitschia mirabilis.

A virus from a symptomatic plant of the gymnosperm Welwitschia mirabilis Hook. growing as an ornamental plant in a domestic garden in Western Australia was inoculated to a plant of Nicotiana benthamiana where it established a systemic infection. The complete genome sequence of 9636 nucleotides was determined using high-throughput and Sanger sequencing technologies.

Population constraints on pooled surveys in demographic hazard modeling.

In non-experimental research, data on the same population process may be collected simultaneously by more than one instrument. For example, in the present application, two sample surveys and a population birth registration system all collect observations on first births by age and year, while the two surveys additionally collect information on women's education. To make maximum use of the three data sources, the survey data are pooled and the population data introduced as constraints in a logistic regression equation.

networksis: A Package to Simulate Bipartite Graphs with Fixed Marginals Through Sequential Importance Sampling.

The ability to simulate graphs with given properties is important for the analysis of social networks. Sequential importance sampling has been shown to be particularly effective in estimating the number of graphs adhering to fixed marginals and in estimating the null distribution of graph statistics. This paper describes the package for R and how its simulate and simulate_sis functions can be used to address both of these tasks as well as generate initial graphs for Markov chain Monte Carlo simulations.