INTRODUCTION Several factors influence the final placement of a medical student candidate on an emergency medicine (EM) residency program's rank order list, including EM grade, standardized letter of recommendation, medical school class rank, and US Medical License Examination (USMLE) scores. We sought to determine the correlation of these parameters with a candidate's final rank on a residency...

The rank function rank(·) is neither continuous nor convex which brings much difficulty to the solution of rank minimization problems. In this paper, we provide a unified framework to construct the approximation functions of rank(·), and study their favorable properties. Particularly, with two families of approximation functions, we propose a convex relaxation method for the rank minimization p...

A sequence of linear, monotonic, and nonmonotonic test problems is used to illustrate sampling-based uncertainty and sensitivity analysis procedures. Uncertainty results obtained with replicated random and Latin hypercube samples are compared, with the Latin hypercube samples tending to produce more stable results than the random samples. Sensitivity results obtained with the following procedur...

BACKGROUND High intake of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSB) is linked to increased weight, energy intake, and diabetes. Even though the increasing interest on beverages and water intake, there are few dietary tools carefully validated. The purpose of this paper is to compare a fluid intake 7-day diary against a 24-h recall questionnaire to estimate the fluid consumption in overweight and obese wo...

In order to further investigate the relationships of brain atrophy, age, and dementia, computed tomographic (CT) scans on two groups of subjects aged 65-80 years were rank-ordered according to ventricular and sulcal size. Each group contained subjects with mild senile dementia of the Alzheimer type (SDAT) and matched controls. In both experiments there was a strong correlation between these ran...