Sign of the Times, December 2002-January 2003

Newsletter produced by the Division of Deaf Services

Parameter estimation for the distribution of single cell lag times.

In Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment, it is vital to understand how lag times of individual cells are distributed over a bacterial population. Such identified distributions can be used to predict the time by which, in a growth-supporting environment, a few pathogenic cells can multiply to a poisoning concentration level. We model the lag time of a single cell, inoculated into a new environment, by the delay of the growth function characterizing the generated subpopulation. We introduce an easy-to-implement procedure, based on the method of moments, to estimate the parameters of the distribution of single cell lag times. The advantage of the method is especially apparent for cases where the initial number of cells is small and random, and the culture is detectable only in the exponential growth phase.

Sign of the Times, January 2007

Newsletter produced by Deaf Services Commission of Iowa

Sign of the Times, July-August 2006

Newsletter produced by Deaf Services Commission of Iowa

Sign of the Times, September 2006

Newsletter produced by Deaf Services Commission of Iowa

Sign of the Times, October 2006

Newsletter produced by Deaf Services Commission of Iowa

Sign of the Times, November 2006

Newsletter produced by Deaf Services Commission of Iowa

Sign of the Times, December 2006

Newsletter produced by Deaf Services Commission of Iowa

Sign of the Times, May 2008

Newsletter produced by Deaf Services Commission of Iowa

Sign of the Times, March 2007

Newsletter produced by Deaf Services Commission of Iowa

Sign of the Times, February 2007

Newsletter produced by Deaf Services Commission of Iowa

Persecution perpetuated: The medieval origins of anti-semitic violence in Nazi Germany

How persistent are cultural traits? This paper uses data on anti-Semitism in Germany and finds continuity at the local level over more than half a millennium. When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was unknown. Many contemporaries blamed the Jews. Cities all over Germany witnessed mass killings of their Jewish population. At the same time, numerous Jewish communities were spared these horrors. We use plague pogroms as an indicator for medieval anti-Semitism. Pogroms during the Black Death are a strong and robust predictor of violence against Jews in the 1920s, and of votes for the Nazi Party. In addition, cities that saw medieval anti-Semitic violence also had higher deportation rates for Jews after 1933, were more likely to see synagogues damaged or destroyed in the Night of Broken Glass in 1938, and their inhabitants wrote more anti-Jewish letters to the editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer.