We introduce the Skill Plot, a method that it is directly relevant to a decision maker who must use a diagnostic test. In contrast to ROC curves, the skill curve allows easy graphical inspection of the optimal cutoff or decision rule for a diagnostic test. The skill curve and test also determine whether diagnoses based on this cutoff improve upon a naive forecast (of always present or of always...

There are several conceptual definitions of resilience pertaining to environmental systems and, even if resilience is clearly defined in a particular context, it is challenging to quantify. We identify four characteristics of the response of a system function to disturbance that relate to "resilience": (1) degree of return of the function to a reference level; (2) time taken to reach a new quas...

BACKGROUND The Health and Retirement Study is a national sample of Americans older than 50 years and their spouses. The present study evaluated cross-sectional and longitudinal data from January 2000 through December 2006. The objective of the study was to evaluate the roles of spouse-rated vs self-rated health as predictors of all-cause mortality among adults older than 50 years. METHODS A t...

Electrical Mechanical Systems for Command, Control, Communications. Essentially the area under the curve defined by the PDF of the PDF from t.The reduction of system reliability due to accumulated damage is quantitatively. THE reliability of a mechanical system may be defined as the.The estimation of reliability of mechanical systems under variable constraints. The probability density function ...

Although great effort is made in clinical trials to demonstrate statistical superiority of one intervention vs. another, insufficient attention is paid regarding the clinical relevance or clinical significance of the observed outcomes. Effect sizes are not always reported. Available absolute effect size measures include Cohen's d, area under the curve, success rate difference, attributable risk...

Applied to delay discounting data, Area-Under-the-Curve (AUC) provides an atheoretical index of the rate of delay discounting. The conventional method of calculating AUC, by summing the areas of the trapezoids formed by successive delay-indifference point pairings, does not account for the fact that most delay discounting tasks scale delay pseudoexponentially, that is, time intervals between de...

The pharmacokinetics of ofloxacin were investigated in eight healthy male volunteers. A single infusion (200 mg over 0.5 h) was performed on day 1, followed by a washout period of 2 weeks. Repeated administrations were performed for 4 days (200 mg every 12 h). Pharmacokinetic parameters were determined from the plasma decay curves of the single and the last of the multiple administrations. Oflo...

In this study, we evaluated the repeatability of pupil responses to colored light stimuli in healthy subjects using a prototype chromatic pupillometer. One eye of 10 healthy subjects was tested twice in the same day using monochromatic light exposure at two selected wavelengths (660 and 470 nm, intensity 300 cd/m(2)) presented continuously for 20 s. Pupil responses were recorded in real-time be...

The present study examined the growth hormone (GH) response to repeated bouts of maximal sprint cycling and the effect of cycling at different pedaling rates on postexercise serum GH concentrations. Ten male subjects completed two 30-s sprints, separated by 1 h of passive recovery on two occasions, against an applied resistance equal to 7.5% (fast trial) and 10% (slow trial) of their body mass,...

In this paper, we report on the process of preparing and configuring the AUC Schlumbeger cluster to join two grid communities in SC2002 and SC2003. It is also to report on the role of Globus; Grid manifesto protocol, in grid enabling the cluster to compete in the IEEE-ACM Super Computing Challenges’ test beds, which were held in Maryland 2002, and Phoenix 2003. The paper refers to the results a...