“It was a cute little white, squash-shaped cartoon character created by Al Capp in his comic strip “Li’l Abner,” in 1948, see figure 1. Shmoos bred like rabbits and could produce any object at the drop of a hat. Since they loved to please humans, they would willingly pump out milk, eggs, filet mignon, caviar, or anything else if requested. At first glance Shmoos seemed to herald the arrival of ...

Value at risk (VaR) is the standard measure of market risk used by financial institutions. Interpreting the VaR as the quantile of future portfolio values conditional on current information, the conditional autoregressive value at risk (CAViaR) model specifies the evolution of the quantile over time using an autoregressive process and estimates the parameters with regression quantiles. Utilizin...

Computer Assisted Visual Interactive Recognition (CAVIAR) draws on sequential pattern recognition, image database, expert systems, pen computing, and digital camera technology. It is designed to recognize wild flowers and other families of similar objects more accurately than machine vision and faster than most laypersons. The novelty of the approach is that human perceptual ability is exploite...

This work develops a pedestrian detection system using a feature space based on level lines, called Movement Feature Space (MFS). Besides detecting the movement in the scene, this feature space defines the descriptors used by the classifiers to identify pedestrians. Locations hypotheses of pedestrian are performed by a cascade of boosted classifiers. The validation of these regions of interest ...

The paddlefish (Polyodon spathula) is a primitive fish that is found in several large rivers of the Mississippi River drainage. The status of paddlefish populations in these large rivers is debatable due to several factors including habitat loss, contaminants and commercial fishing (Sparrowe 1986; Gundersen and Pearson 1992). The roe of female paddlefish is used to make domestic caviar and comm...

This paper studies the performance of nonparametric quantile regression as a tool to predict Value at Risk (VaR). The approach is flexible as it requires no assumptions on the form of return distributions. A monotonized double kernel local linear estimator is applied to estimate moderate (1%) conditional quantiles of index return distributions. For extreme (0.1%) quantiles, where particularly f...

BACKGROUND Keloids are thick fibrous scars that are refractory to treatment and unique to humans. The lack of keloid animal models has hampered development of effective therapies. The authors' goal was to develop an animal model of keloids using grafted engineered skin substitutes composed of keloid-derived cells. To demonstrate the model's utility, differences between deep and superficial kelo...

Engineering of biologic skin substitutes has progressed over time from individual applications of skin cells, or biopolymer scaffolds, to combinations of cells and scaffolds for treatment, healing, and closure of acute and chronic skin wounds. Skin substitutes may be categorized into three groups: acellular scaffolds, temporary substitutes containing allogeneic skin cells, and permanent substit...