Due to advances in technology and data collection techniques, the number of measurements often exceeds the number of samples in ecological datasets. As such, standard models that attempt to assess the relationship between variables and a response are inapplicable and require a reduction in the number of dimensions to be estimable. Several filtering methods exist to accomplish this, including In...

We have recently introduced a new language, called Opus, which provides a set of Fortran language extensions that Mlow for integrated support of task and data parMlelism. It also provides shared data abstractions (SDAs) as a method for communication and synchronization among these tasks. In this paper, we first provide a brief description of the language features and then focus on both the lang...

Survey Ratings At the end of 2008, in its 12th year of publication, The Permanente Journal (TPJ) conducted its fifth reader survey and found continued high satisfaction. Of the 2910 respondents—70% physicians, 15% clinicians, 11% nurses, 4% academics, researchers, leaders, managers—33% rated TPJ “excellent,” 49% “good,” 12% “average,” 4% “fair,” and 2% “poor.” Overall satisfaction was 94% (incl...

We model a massless viscous disk using Smoothed Particle Hydro-dynamics (SPH) and note that it evolves according to the Lynden-Bell & Pringle theory (1974) until a non-axisymmetric instability develops at the inner edge of the disk. This instability may have the same origin as the instability of initially axisymmetric viscous disks discussed by Lyubarskij et al. (1994). To clarify the evolution...

Semi-supervised speaker clustering refers to the use of our prior knowledge of speakers in general to assist the unsupervised speaker clustering process. In the form of an independent training set, the prior knowledge helps us learn a speaker-discriminative feature transformation, a universal speaker prior model, and a discriminative speaker subspace, or equivalently a speaker-discriminative di...

Seniors 85 years of age and older (85+) make up the fastest-growing segment of the Canadian population. There is a need for longitudinal data on the health status of this group. We used data collected as part of the Canadian Study of Health and Aging to examine how health status changed over five years in a large (n = 1799) cohort of Canadians 85+. By the time of the follow-up assessment, 60.1%...