In his editorial, Dr. Levin (1) states that “the report by Mandel et al. substantiates the important and clear finding that screening of men and women more than 50 years of age for colorectal cancer can save lives.” However, the article by Mandel et al. (2) clearly demonstrates that overall mortality was unaffected by screening. The cumulative allcause mortality in the annually screened group w...

Your clients are besieged on a daily basis with health information from a variety of sources— the Internet, newsgroups, blogs, the media, as well as friends and family. Information is often piecemeal, taken out of context, or not based in sound science—and often contradicts other “authorities.” People are increasingly making decisions based on anecdotes and testimonials rather than credible sci...

Experimental data are rarely, if ever, distributed as a normal (Gaussian) distribution, in real world applications. A large set of data—such as the cross sections for particle scattering as a function of energy contained in the archives of the Particle Data Group1—is a compendium of all published data, and hence, unscreened. For many reasons, these data sets have many outliers—points well beyon...

The findings of medical research are often met with considerable scepticism, even when they have apparently come from studies with sound methodologies that have been subjected to appropriate statistical analysis. This is perhaps particularly the case with respect to epidemiological findings that suggest that some aspect of everyday life is bad for people. Indeed, one recent popular history, the...

Understanding how animals interact with their environment is critical for evaluating, mitigating and coping with anthropogenic alteration of Earth's biosphere. Researchers have attempted to understand some aspects of these interactions by examining patterns in animal body mass distributions. Energetic, phylogenetic, biogeographical, textural discontinuity and community interaction hypotheses ha...

Exploratory data analysis is a process of sifting through data in search of interesting information or patterns. Analysts' current tools for exploring data include database management systems, statistical analysis packages, data mining tools, visualization tools, and report generators. Since the exploration process seeks the unexpected in a data-driven manner, it is crucial that these tools are...

Two approaches were designed to identify the echoes of clear air and precipitation when both coexist in very-high-frequency (VHF) radar spectra: contour-based peak-finding methods. The approach was used model a 2D Doppler spectra determine locations multiple spectral humps, find peaks on request. Grouping, sifting, Gaussian fitting performed further for such obtained contour centres yield veloc...

BACKGROUND One important benefit of electronic health information is the improved interface between infectious diseases practice and public health. Electronic communicable disease reporting (CDR), given its legal mandate and clear public health importance, is a significant early step in the sifting and pooling of health data for purposes beyond patient care and billing. Over the next 5-10 years...

Among the main algorithmic problems in the veriication of sequential circuits are the computation of good orders of state variables and transition relation partitions. Existing model checking packages like SMV from CMU, VIS from Berkeley or Rulebase from IBM Haifa provide variants of Rudell's sifting algorithm for the variable ordering problem and greedy-type algorithms for the partition orderi...

The main object of the paper is to prove that if P is a set of primes with sum of reciprocals _cx, where c is a positive constant depending only on K. A lower estimate is given for c and a similar result is achieved in the case when the condition of primality is substituted by the weaker condition that any m elem...