A number of recent studies have used Meehl's (1995) taxometric method to determine empirically whether one should model assessment-related constructs as categories or dimensions. The taxometric method includes multiple data-analytic procedures designed to check the consistency of results. The goal is to differentiate between strong evidence of categorical structure, strong evidence of dimension...

We describe a quantitative methodology to characterize the vulnerability of U.S. urban centers to terrorist attack, using a place-based vulnerability index and a database of terrorist incidents and related human casualties. Via generalized linear statistical models, we study the relationships between vulnerability and terrorist events, and find that our place-based vulnerability metric signific...

Five experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that people understand conditional statements ("if p then q") as indicating a high conditional probability P(q/p). Participants estimated the probability that a given conditional is true (Experiments 1A, 1B, and 3) or judged whether a conditional was true or false (Experiments 2 and 4) given information about the frequencies of the relevant...

Estimation of causal effects of time-varying exposures using longitudinal data is a common problem in epidemiology. When there are time-varying confounders, which may include past outcomes, affected by prior exposure, standard regression methods can lead to bias. Methods such as inverse probability weighted estimation of marginal structural models have been developed to address this problem. Ho...

The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not imply the expression of any opinion on the part of the United Nations Secretariat.

The longitudinal rank-order stability of cognitive ability increases dramatically over the life span. Theoretical perspectives differ in their emphasis on genetic mechanisms in explaining the longitudinal stability of cognition and how stability changes with development. However, the patterns of stability of genetic and environmental influences on cognition over the life span remain poorly unde...

Single-molecule force spectroscopy has emerged as a powerful tool for studying the folding of biological macromolecules. Mechanical manipulation has revealed a wealth of mechanistic information on transient and intermediate states. To date, the majority of state assignment of intermediates has relied on empirical demarcation. However, performing such experiments in the presence of different osm...

In the last decades, the use of the epidemiological prevalence ratio (PR) instead of the odds ratio has been debated as a measure of association in cross-sectional studies. This article addresses the main difficulties in the use of statistical models for the calculation of PR: convergence problems, availability of tools and inappropriate assumptions. We implement the direct approach to estimate...

Maximum likelihood estimation of mixed effect baseline category logit models for multinomial longitudinal data can be prohibitive due to the integral dimension of the random effects distribution. We propose to use multidimensional unfolding methodology to reduce the dimensionality of the problem. As a by-product, readily interpretable graphical displays representing change are obtained. The met...