Our study aim was to identify high-risk areas of neonatal mortality associated with bacterial sepsis in the state of São Paulo, Southeast Brazil. We used a population-based study applying retrospective spatial scan statistics with data extracted from birth certificates linked to death certificates. All live births from mothers residing in São Paulo State from 2004 to 2020 were included. Spatial analysis using the Poisson model was adopted to scan high-rate clusters of neonatal mortality associated with bacterial sepsis (WHO-ICD10 A32.7, A40, A41, P36, P37.2 in any line of the death certificate). We found a prevalence of neonatal death associated with bacterial sepsis of 2.3/1000 live births. Clusters of high neonatal mortality associated with bacterial sepsis were identified mainly in the southeast region of the state, with four of them appearing as cluster areas for all birth weight categories (<1500 g, 1500 to <2500 g and ≥ 2500 g). The spatial analysis according to the birth weight showed some overlapping in the detected clusters, suggesting shared risk factors that need to be explored. Our study highlights the ongoing challenge of neonatal sepsis in the most developed state of a middle-income country and the importance of employing statistical techniques, including spatial methods, for enhancing surveillance and intervention strategies.

This article identifies a sub-category of norm contestation I've termed ‘norm weaving’, where actors contest the constitution of norm clusters, instead of the validity of individual norms. This occurs through processes of stretching or reproducing individual strands of existing norm clusters before weaving them together to create behaviour guides in undergoverned issue areas that are greater than the sum of their individual parts. I identify two examples of weaving in the world-leading actions of Fiji and Vanuatu around domestic climate mobilities. Using these two cases, we can see that existing models of norm dynamics need to be developed to better explain and understand weaving-like processes of norm contestation. There are two areas where norm weaving extends our understanding – in how clusters of norms emerge and change, and in how contestation applies to groupings of norms. Clarifying what norm weaving looks like in these cases could open the door to further examples being identified in other contexts and a more complete understanding of how norms operate in global politics.

This article provides a description and an Optimality Theory (OT) analysis of contact-induced changes and variation in contemporary Yoruba syllable structure. The article claims that a major diachronic change has occurred in the syllable structure of Yoruba phonology due to its continued contact with English, resulting in the invention, preservation, and hypercorrection of clusters and codas. I characterize this change in terms of OT constraint re-ranking (Miglio and Moren 2003) and assess the resulting synchronic variation against the indexed constraint approach of Itô and Mester (1995a, b, 1999), the ranked-winners approach of Coetzee (2004), the partial-order co-phonology of Anttila (1997), and the Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) model of Goldwater and Johnson (2003). I show that none of these approaches is able to account independently for the categorical, gradient, and lexically conditioned variation that characterize the contemporary Yoruba syllable structure, but rather that a MaxEnt model augmented with lexical indexation is the most economical model that fits the Yoruba data accurately.

We study the effect of proximity to other wineries on the formation of new wineries and how this effect depends on winemaking history in a location. Clustering is common in the wine industry, but it also depends on other factors, such as proximity to vineyards and high-reputation wineries. Using panel data with annual observations from 1994 to 2014 on 598 zip codes within Washington State, we estimate empirical models that control for proximity to wineries, proximity to vines, proximity to income, and the presence of star wineries. We find that the elasticity of the number of wineries with respect to proximity to wineries outside the zip code hinges on the length of local winemaking history. For locations with 11 or more winery years prior to our sample, the elasticity is at least 0.44. The presence of elite wineries is also found to have an effect, with about 0.5 additional wineries per year starting in a zip code per star winery. The effect of history suggests that policies to seed winery start-ups will help cluster formation, but only with a substantial critical mass of winemaking activity.

The mumps resurgence has frequently been reported around the world in recent years, especially in many counties mumps vaccines have been widely used. This study aimed to describe the spatial epidemiological characteristics of mumps in Jiangsu, and provide a scientific basis for the implementation and adjustment of strategies to prevent and control mumps. The epidemiological characteristics were described with ratio or proportion. Spatial autocorrelation, Tango's flexible spatial scan statistics, and Kulldorff's elliptic spatiotemporal scan statistics were applied to identify the spatial autocorrelation, detect hot and cold spots of mumps incidence, and aggregation areas. A total of 172 775 cases were reported from 2004 to 2020 in Jiangsu. The general trend of mumps incidence is declining with a bimodal seasonal distribution identified mainly in summer and winter, respectively. Children aged 5–10 years old are the main risk group. A migration trend of hot spots from southeast to northwest over time was found. Similar high-risk aggregations were detected in the northwestern parts through spatial-temporal analysis with the most likely cluster time frame around 2019. Local medical and health administrations should formulate and implement targeted health care policies and allocate health resources more appropriately corresponding to the epidemiological characteristics of mumps.

Cyclosporiasis is an illness characterised by watery diarrhoea caused by the food-borne parasite Cyclospora cayetanensis. The increase in annual US cyclosporiasis cases led public health agencies to develop genotyping tools that aid outbreak investigations. A team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) developed a system based on deep amplicon sequencing and machine learning, for detecting genetically-related clusters of cyclosporiasis to aid epidemiologic investigations. An evaluation of this system during 2018 supported its robustness, indicating that it possessed sufficient utility to warrant further evaluation. However, the earliest version of CDC's system had some limitations from a bioinformatics standpoint. Namely, reliance on proprietary software, the inability to detect novel haplotypes and absence of a strategy to select an appropriate number of discrete genetic clusters would limit the system's future deployment potential. We recently introduced several improvements that address these limitations and the aim of this study was to reassess the system's performance to ensure that the changes introduced had no observable negative impacts. Comparison of epidemiologically-defined cyclosporiasis clusters from 2019 to analogous genetic clusters detected using CDC's improved system reaffirmed its excellent sensitivity (90%) and specificity (99%), and confirmed its high discriminatory power. This C. cayetanensis genotyping system is robust and with ongoing improvement will form the basis of a US-wide C. cayetanensis genotyping network for clinical specimens.

Experimentally revealing dynamic evolution and growth behavior of small solute clusters in alloys remains a technical challenge. To date, the coalescence of the solute clusters has seldom been experimentally addressed. To address the challenge, we used atom probe tomography (APT) to access boundary information of solute clusters and identify those in close contact. By systematically investigating the population and size evolution of the clusters in close contact with aging time, we unveiled important information regarding the clusters in coalescence with the exsitu experimental technique. In this work, the maximum separation method was employed to identify clusters in APT datasets of naturally aged Al–Zn–Mg alloy. Coalescence was found to significantly contribute to the growth of small clusters and remained predominant for the formation and growth of large Guinier–Preston II ${\rm \lpar G}{\rm P}_{{\eta }^{\prime}}\rpar$ zones after 3 months aging.

We report the sputter deposition of Cu-7V and Cu-27V (at.%) alloy films in an attempt to yield a “clean” alloy to investigate nanocrystalline stability. Films grown in high vacuum chambers can mitigate processing contaminates which convolute the identification of nanocrystalline stability mechanism(s). The initial films were very clean with carbon and oxygen contents ranging between ~0.01 and 0.38 at.%. Annealing at 400 °C/1 h facilitated the clustering of vanadium at high-angle grain boundary triple junctions. At 800 °C/1 h annealing, the Cu-7V film lost its nanocrystalline grain sizes with the vanadium partitioned to the free surface; the Cu-27V retained its nanocrystalline grains with vanadium clusters in the matrix, but surface solute segregation was present. Though the initial alloy and vacuum annealing retained the low contamination levels sought, the high surface area-to-volume ratio of the film, coupled with high segregation tendencies, enabled this system to phase separate in such a manner that the stability mechanisms that were to be studied were lost at high temperatures. This illustrates obstacles in using thin films to address nanocrystalline stability.