KEY FINDINGS Following a long period of fairly steady increase, the U.S. preterm birth rate declined for the second straight year in 2008 to 12.3 percent, from 12.8 percent in 2006. This marks the first 2-year decline in the preterm birth rate in nearly three decades. Preterm birth rates declined from 2006 to 2008 for mothers of all age groups under age 40, for the three largest race and Hispan...

This study was designed to examine the effect of the fragile X premutation (pM) on cognitive function and behavior. Participants included 14 children (7 males, 7 females) with the fragile X pM and 14 children without the fragile X pM (and without the fragile X full mutation [fM]), each of whom was matched by age and gender with one of the participants from the pM group. The children ranged in a...

BACKGROUND Chile is in the advanced stage of demographic transition with a low natural growth and a progressively aging population. AIM To analyze births by range of maternal age and to establish if population aging is expressed in the women's fertile age range. MATERIAL AND METHODS Trend analysis of births and age-specific birth rates in the period 1990-2004, in the Chilean women populatio...

This project aims to clarify the phylogenetic relationships among the extant species of Varanus in order to elucidate the origins of Varanidae, using DNA sequences. Results obtained for a minimum of 662 nucleotides of 12S rRNA sequence data from each of 21 extant species of Varanus indicate that the Australian varanids form a single monophyletic clade and also suggest that within the Australian...

This paper reviews Bayesian Nonparametric methods and discusses how parametric predictive densities can be constructed using nonparametric ideas.

In this paper, we present a novel method to generate a panoramic background image from a sequence of moving camera images. Our method is based on nonparametric statistics and robust model estimation using meanshift. Each frame is projected to panoramic space by homography matrix which is calculated by SURF(Speeded Up Robust Features) matching. To generate reliable panoramic background image, we...

OBJECTIVE This study investigated attendees' motivation and motives for participation in day centres and their satisfaction with the rehabilitation, while also addressing the influence of day centre orientation (work- or meeting-place orientation), gender and age. METHODS Ninety-three Swedish day centre attendees participated in a cross-sectional study and completed questionnaires about motiv...