BACKGROUND Obesity is a risk factor for a number of chronic diseases. Few longitudinal studies have examined changes in body mass index (BMI [calculated as weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters]). OBJECTIVE To investigate the changes in mean BMI and the prevalence of obesity in a large cohort examined several times during a 20-year period. METHODS Mean BMI, the p...

from the opening article in Die medicinische Reform: "Die Arzte sind die naturlichen Anwalte der Armen und die sociale Frage fallt zu einem erheblichen Theil in ihre Jurisdiction." The continued interest of the issues addressed in Virchow's weekly is shown by the present photomechanical reproduction from East Germany. It comes not many years after a West German edition (Georg Olms Verlag, Hilde...

Marc A. Willaredt, Kerstin Hasenpusch-Theil, Humphrey Gardner, Igor Kitanovic, Vera Hirschfeld-Warneken, Christian Gojak, Karin Gorgas, C. Lulu Bradford, Joachim Spatz, Stefan Woelfl, Thomas Theil, Kerry L. Tucker 1 Interdisciplinary Center for Neurosciences, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany 2 Dept. of Anatomy, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany 3 Centres for Neuroscienc...

from the opening article in Die medicinische Reform: "Die Arzte sind die naturlichen Anwalte der Armen und die sociale Frage fallt zu einem erheblichen Theil in ihre Jurisdiction." The continued interest of the issues addressed in Virchow's weekly is shown by the present photomechanical reproduction from East Germany. It comes not many years after a West German edition (Georg Olms Verlag, Hilde...

In this article, we propose the use of the Mahalanobis depth to construct fully affine equivalent Theil-Sen estimators of parameters in a multiple linear model. Our construction includes the spatial depth-based Theil-Sen estimators as a special case. We exhibit that the efficiency of the proposed estimators relative to the least squares estimators increases with the number of parameters under i...

INTEX is a text processor; it is usually used to parse corpora of several megabytes. It includes several built-in large coverage dictionaries and grammars represented by graphs; the user inay add his/her own dictionaries and gramnlars. These tools am applied to texts in order to locate lexical and syntactic patterns, remove ambiguities , and tag words. INTEX builds collcordances and indexes of ...

Studies on the structure of economic systems are, most frequently, carried out by the methods of informational statistics. These methods, often accompanied by a broad range of indicators (Shannon entropy, Balassa coefficient, Herfindahl specialty index, Gini coefficient, Theil index, etc.) around which a wide literature has been created over time, have a major disadvantage. Their weakness is re...

Statistics is full of models; they are everywhere. Whether designing an experiment, analyzing the results, or predicting, statisticians use models. Models can help us improve estimation. They can help us understand what underlies a process studied. They can help us predict future situations and actions. Economics, engineering, biology, ecology, health sciences, and other research fields, all ar...