In randomized controlled trials (RCTs), treatment assignment is unconfounded with baseline covariates, allowing outcomes to be directly compared between treatment arms. When outcomes are binary, the effect of treatment can be summarized using relative risks, absolute risk reductions and the number needed to treat (NNT). When outcomes are time-to-event in nature, the effect of treatment on the a...

Estimating an accurate and naturalistic dense depth map from a single monocular photographic image is a difficult problem. Nevertheless, human observers have little difficulty understanding the depth structure implied by photographs. Two-dimensional (2D) images of the real-world environment contain significant statistical information regarding the three-dimensional (3D) structure of the world t...

The accumulation of fire fuels in forests throughout the world contributes significantly to the severity of wildfires. To combat the threat of wildfire, especially in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), US federal land management agencies have implemented a number of forest restoration and wildfire risk reduction programs. In the spirit of revealed preference analyses, the objective of this stu...

In this paper we compare estimates of the left-right positions of political parties derived from an expert survey recently completed by the authors with those derived by the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) from the content analysis of party manifestos. Having briefly described the expert survey, we first explore the substantive policy content of left and right in the expert survey estimate...

Using the UK as a “natural experiment” that allows examination of the effect of the form of payment separately from bidder hostility in a way not easily achievable in the US, we show that the form of payment hypothesis interacts with bid hostility, or “disciplinary bidding” in explaining acquirer wealth effects. Equity financed acquisitions and non-hostile bids generate negative returns, and th...

The pace and direction of evolution in response to selection, drift, and mutation are governed by the genetic architecture that underlies trait variation. Consequently, much of evolutionary theory is predicated on assumptions about whether genes can be considered to act in isolation, or in the context of their genetic background. Evolutionary biologists have disagreed, sometimes heatedly, over ...

BACKGROUND Meta-analysis of continuous outcomes traditionally uses mean difference (MD) or standardized mean difference (SMD; mean difference in pooled standard deviation (SD) units). We recently used an alternative ratio of mean values (RoM) method, calculating RoM for each study and estimating its variance by the delta method. SMD and RoM allow pooling of outcomes expressed in different units...

We characterized the variation in the reconstructed ancestor of 118 HIV-1 envelope gene sequences arising from the methods used for (a) estimating and (b) rooting the phylogenetic tree, and (c) reconstructing the ancestor on that tree, from (d) the sequence format, and from (e) the number of input sequences. The method of rooting the tree was responsible for most of the sequence variation both ...

It is argued that estimating the damage costs of a certain benchmark climate change is not sufficient. What is needed are cost functions and confidence intervals. Although these are contained in the integrated models and their technical manuals, this paper brings them into the open in order to stimulate discussion. After briefly reviewing the benchmark climate change damage costs, region-specif...