An abundance of high quality data sets requiring heavy tailed models necessitates reliable methods of estimating the shape parameter governing the degree of tail heaviness. The Hill estimator is a popular method for doing this but its practical use is encumbered by several diiculties. We show that an alternative method of plotting Hill estimator values is more revealing than the standard method...

Multiple-quantile plots provide a powerful graphical method for comparing the distributions of two or more populations. This article develops a method of visualizing triple-quantile plots and their associated confidence tubes, thus extending the notion of a quantile-quantile (QQ) plot to three dimensions. More specifically, we consider three independent one-dimensional random samples with corre...

Background Nucleotide-binding oligomerization domain-containing protein 2 (NOD2) may play an important role in the outcome of kidney cancer patients. To explore the relationship between NOD2 and the prognosis of kidney cancer patients, a databank-based reanalysis was conducted. Materials and Methods Data related to kidney cancer patients at least with survival information, was obtained mainly...

iii Acknowledgements iv Introduction  Data  Identifying the Spatial Pattern and its Dynamics  Methods  Results  Modelling the Spatial Pattern and its Dynamics  Methods  Results  Discussion  Conclusion  Literature Cited  tables . Summary information about the nine study plots  . Estimated parameters for the Poisson cluster processes  figures . Plot   . Plot   3. Pl...

Dissolved inorganic P transport in runoff from agricultural soils is an environmental concern. Models are used to predict P transport but rarely simulate P in runoff from surface-applied manures. Using field-plot data, we tested a previously proposed model to predict manure P in runoff. We updated the model to include more data relating water to manure ratio to manure P released during water ex...

UNLABELLED Spatial scaling is a critical issue in ecology, but how anthropogenic activities like fertilization affect spatial scaling is poorly understood, especially for microbial communities. Here, we determined the effects of long-term fertilization on the spatial scaling of microbial functional diversity and its relationships to plant diversity in the 150-year-old Park Grass Experiment, the...

We present a preliminary search for D-D mixing using the decays D → Kππ, additionally presenting Dalitz-plot distributions and a measurement of the branching ratio for this mode. A new tagging technique is used to produce the doubly Cabibbo-suppressed Dalitz plot, which in turn is used to motivate the method used for the D-mixing search. We analyze 230.4 fb of data collected from the BABAR dete...