Multihazards Scenario Generator: A Network-Based Simulation of Natural Disasters.

The impact of natural disasters has been increasing in recent years. Despite the developing international interest in multihazard events, few studies quantify the dynamic interactions that characterize these phenomena. It is argued that without considering the dynamic complexity of natural catastrophes, impact assessments will underestimate risk and misinform emergency management priorities. The ability to generate multihazard scenarios with impacts at a desired level is important for emergency planning and resilience assessment. This article demonstrates a framework for using graph theory and networks to generate and model the complex impacts of multihazard scenarios. First, the combination of maximal hazard footprints and exposed nodes (e.g., infrastructure) is used to create the hazard network. Iterative simulation of the network, defined by actual hazard magnitudes, is then used to provide the overall compounded impact from a sequence of hazards. Outputs of the method are used to study distributional ranges of multihazards impact. The 2016 Kaikoura earthquake is used as a calibrating event to demonstrate that the method can reproduce the same scale of impacts as a real event. The cascading hazards included numerous landslides, allowing us to show that the scenario set generated includes the actual impacts that occurred during the 2016 events.

Separating morphologically similar pollen types using basic shape features from digital images: A preliminary study(1.).

PREMISE OF THE STUDY: One of the many advantages offered by automated palynology systems is the ability to vastly increase the number of observations made on a particular sample or samples. This is of particular benefit when attempting to fully quantify the degree of variation within or between closely related pollen types. • METHODS: An automated palynology system (Classifynder) has been used to further investigate the variation in pollen morphology between two New Zealand species of Myrtaceae (Leptospermum scoparium and Kunzea ericoides) that are of significance in the New Zealand honey industry. Seven geometric features extracted from automatically gathered digital images were used to characterize the range of shape and size of the two taxa, and to examine the extent of previously reported overlap in these variables. • RESULTS: Our results indicate a degree of overlap in all cases. The narrowest overlap was in measurements of maximum Feret diameter (MFD) in grains oriented in polar view. Multivariate statistical analysis using all seven factors provided the most robust discrimination between the two types. • DISCUSSION: Further work is required before this approach could be routinely applied to separating the two pollen types used in this study, most notably the development of comprehensive reference distributions for the types in question.

Statistical evaluation of the New Zealand food safety authority sampling protocol for imported food.

The New Zealand Food Safety Authority sampling protocol for compliance inspection of imported food products is evaluated for its ability to provide consumer protection. The sampling protocol involves both partial testing of imported consignments and complete skipping inspection of consignments based on the quality history. The risk posed by the strategies of partial testing and skipping inspection of imports is evaluated using the average outgoing quality limit and other performance measures. The cost dimension of sampling inspection is also considered. Suggestions for improvement, which include tightening the skipping inspection parameters, are made.

Modeling human mortality using mixtures of bathtub shaped failure distributions.

Aging and mortality is usually modeled by the Gompertz-Makeham distribution, where the mortality rate accelerates with age in adult humans. The resulting parameters are interpreted as the frailty and decrease in vitality with age. This fits well to life data from 'westernized' societies, where the data are accurate, of high resolution, and show the effects of high quality post-natal care. We show, however, that when the data are of lower resolution, and contain considerable structure in the infant mortality, the fit can be poor. Moreover, the Gompertz-Makeham distribution is consistent with neither the force of natural selection, nor the recently identified 'late life mortality deceleration'. Although actuarial models such as the Heligman-Pollard distribution can, in theory, achieve an improved fit, the lack of a closed form for the survival function makes fitting extremely arduous, and the biological interpretation can be lacking. We show, that a mixture, assigning mortality to exogenous or endogenous causes, using the reduced additive and flexible Weibull distributions, models well human mortality over the entire life span. The components of the mixture are asymptotically consistent with the reliability and biological theories of aging. The relative simplicity of the mixture distribution makes feasible a technique where the curvature functions of the corresponding survival and hazard rate functions are used to identify the beginning and the end of various life phases, such as infant mortality, the end of the force of natural selection, and late life mortality deceleration. We illustrate our results with a comparative analysis of Canadian and Indonesian mortality data.

A randomized, placebo-controlled phase I trial of DNA prime, recombinant fowlpox virus boost prophylactic vaccine for HIV-1.

An HIV-vaccine consisting of a DNA prime, recombinant fowlpox virus (rFPV) boost was evaluated in a double-blind placebo controlled trial. One milligram of pHIS-HIV-B expressing mutated gag, pol, env, vpu, tat and rev was administered at weeks 0 and 4 boosted by 5 x 10(7) pfu rFPV-HIV-B expressing gag/pol at week 8. The vaccine regimen was safe, but there was no difference between vaccine (n = 18) and placebo recipients (n = 6) for Gag or Pol-specific T-cell immune responses at week 9.