OBJECTIVES Few studies have explicitly tested whether the health disadvantage among older blacks is consistent across the entire range of education. We examined racial differences in the cross-sectional association of education with physical and cognitive function performance in older adults. METHODS Participants included over 9500 blacks and whites, aged ≥ 65 years, from the Chicago Health a...

In the absence of relevant prior experience, popular Bayesian estimation techniques usually begin with some form of "uninformative" prior distribution intended to have minimal inferential influence. Bayes rule will still produce nice-looking estimates and credible intervals, but these lack the logical force attached to experience-based priors and require further justification. This paper concer...

Assume that we observe a small set of entries or linear combinations of entries of an unknown matrix A0 corrupted by noise. We propose a new method for estimating A0 which does not rely on the knowledge or an estimation of the standard deviation of the noise σ. Our estimator achieves, up to a logarithmic factor, optimal rates of convergence under the Frobenius risk and, thus, has the same predi...

Data analysis in MRI usually entails a series of processing procedures. One of these procedures is noise assessment, which in the context of this work, includes both the identification of noise-only pixels and the estimation of noise variance (standard deviation). Although noise assessment is critical to many MRI processing techniques, the identification of noise-only pixels has received less a...

in the present work a ph-dependent cloud point extraction procedure using ph-sensitive hydrogel polymer was applied for preconcentration and spectrophotometric determination of the hg(ii) as its thio micher's ketone complex. central composite design (ccd) and response surface method were applied to design the experiments and find out the optimum conditions. four factors entitled concentration o...