BACKGROUND Asthma prevalence is high in the inner city, and morbidity has been associated with cockroach and mouse allergens. OBJECTIVE To characterize the relationships among pests, allergens, pesticides, and asthma in New York City public housing. METHODS In 324 apartments, dust samples collected from beds and kitchens were analyzed for cockroach (Bla g 2) and mouse (mouse urinary protein...

In e-commerce, online retailers are usually suffering from professional malicious users (PMUs), who utilize negative reviews and low ratings to their consumed products on purpose threaten the for illegal profits. PMUs difficult be detected because they masking strategies disguise themselves as normal users. Specifically, there three challenges PMU detection: 1) do not conduct any abnormal or in...

This paper is about object deformations observed throughout a sequence of images. We present a statistical framework in which the observed images are defined as noisy realizations of a randomly deformed template image. In this framework, we focus on the problem of the estimation of parameters related to the template and deformations. Our main motivation is the construction of estimation framewo...

Phosphorus (P) can limit crop production in many soils, and soil testing is used to guide fertilizer recommendations. The Mehlich III (M3) soil test is widely used in North America, followed by colorimetric analysis for P, or by inductively coupled plasma-based spectrometry (ICP) for P and cations. However, differences have been observed in M3 P concentrations measured by these methods. Using 3...

There is considerable concern about pollution of surface waters with P. Although most of the research has focused on inorganic P in surface runoff, it has recently become possible to easily follow the fate of soluble organic P forms in soils and waters. Two experiments were performed to compare the relative mobility and soil fixation affinity of orthophosphate monoesters, orthophosphate diester...

We tackle the problem of template estimation when data have been randomly transformed under an isometric group action in the presence of noise. In order to estimate the template, one often minimizes the variance when the influence of the transformations have been removed (computation of the Fréchet mean in quotient space). The consistency bias is defined as the distance (possibly zero) between ...

Automatic estimation of facial features is necessary for model–based coding of videophone sequences at very low bit rates. In this contribution, algorithms for the estimation of eye, eyebrow and nose features are presented. For estimation of eye features, deformable template matching with a simplified cost function is used. For the estimation of eyebrow features, a segmentation algorithm is pro...

A common approach for the analysis of anatomical variability relies on the estimation of a representative template of the population, followed by the study of this population based on the parameters of the deformations going from the template to the population. The Large Deformation Diffeomorphic Metric Mapping framework is widely used for shape analysis of anatomical structures, but computing ...

On May 24th 2012, Scotland passed the Alcohol (Minimum Pricing) Bill. Minimum unit pricing (MUP) is an intervention that raises the price of the cheapest alcohol to reduce alcohol consumption and related harms. There is a growing literature on industry's influence in policymaking and media representations of policies, but relatively little about frames used by key claim-makers in the public MUP...