Moniliophthora Pod Rot (MPR) caused by the fungus Moniliophthora roreri (Cif.) Evans et al., is one of the main limiting factors of cocoa production in Latin America. Currently insufficient information on the biology and epidemiology of the pathogen limits the development of efficient management options to control MPR. This research aims to elucidate MPR development through the following daily ...

OBJECTIVES There are a few accepted and intensively applied statistical methods used to study associations of ambient air pollution with health conditions. Among the most popular methods applied to assess short term air health effects are case-crossover (using events) and time-series methodologies (using counts). A few other techniques for studying counts of events have been proposed, including...

Wildlife managers tasked with understanding habitat and resource selection at the population level attempt to characterize patterns in nature that aid inform conservation. Resource functions (RSFs), such as discrete choice analyses, are standard convention effects of attributes on patterns. These tools invaluable for wildlife management conservation have proven successful numerous studies. Howe...

The welfare of sheep transported by sea is a pertinent issue for Australia’s agriculture industry and subject concern amongst the general public. Evaluating effect transport on livestock requires an accurate system reporting. This study piloted animal monitoring protocol during two voyages from Australia to Middle East. Sheep health behaviour were analysed determine if could detect responses vo...

Psycholinguistic data are often analyzed with repeated-measures analyses of variance (ANOVA), but this paper argues that mixed-effects (multilevel) models provide a better alternative method. First, models are discussed in which the two random factors of participants and items are crossed, and not nested. Traditional ANOVAs are compared against these crossed mixed-effects models, for simulated ...

A novel PCR restriction analysis method using the RNA polymerase beta-subunit- coding gene (rpoB) was employed to both detect and identify Helicobacter pylori in biopsy specimens and culture isolates. The rpoB DNAs (458 bp) were specifically amplified by PCR with the Helicobacter-specific primers (HF and HR). Based on the determined rpoB sequences of the culture isolates, an H. pylori-specific ...

Longitudinal studies are used in mental health research and services studies. The dominant approaches for longitudinal data analysis are the generalized linear mixed-effects models (GLMM) and the weighted generalized estimating equations (WGEE). Although both classes of models have been extensively published and widely applied, differences between and limitations about these methods are not cle...

The empirical (sandwich or robust) covariance matrix, usually used in conjunction with Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE) and Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMM), is biased towards zero for small sample sizes. As a consequence of this bias Type I error rates are usually higher than the nominal levels. Several small sample bias corrections have been proposed in the literature. The purpose...

Animal models are generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) used in evolutionary biology and animal breeding to identify the genetic part of traits. Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation (INLA) is a methodology for making fast non-sampling based Bayesian inference for hierarchical Gaussian Markov models. In this paper we demonstrate that the INLA methodology can be used for many versions of Bayes...