OBJECTIVES Few studies have explicitly tested whether the health disadvantage among older blacks is consistent across the entire range of education. We examined racial differences in the cross-sectional association of education with physical and cognitive function performance in older adults. METHODS Participants included over 9500 blacks and whites, aged ≥ 65 years, from the Chicago Health a...

In the absence of relevant prior experience, popular Bayesian estimation techniques usually begin with some form of "uninformative" prior distribution intended to have minimal inferential influence. Bayes rule will still produce nice-looking estimates and credible intervals, but these lack the logical force attached to experience-based priors and require further justification. This paper concer...

Assume that we observe a small set of entries or linear combinations of entries of an unknown matrix A0 corrupted by noise. We propose a new method for estimating A0 which does not rely on the knowledge or an estimation of the standard deviation of the noise σ. Our estimator achieves, up to a logarithmic factor, optimal rates of convergence under the Frobenius risk and, thus, has the same predi...

Data analysis in MRI usually entails a series of processing procedures. One of these procedures is noise assessment, which in the context of this work, includes both the identification of noise-only pixels and the estimation of noise variance (standard deviation). Although noise assessment is critical to many MRI processing techniques, the identification of noise-only pixels has received less a...

OBJECTIVES To compare the severity, size, and depth of glaucomatous visual field defects using standard full threshold (FT), Swedish interactive threshold algorithm (SITA) standard (SS), and SITA fast (SF) algorithms of the Humphrey perimeter. METHODS A prospective observational case series of 77 patients with glaucoma performed FT, SS, and SF 30-2 white-on-white testing programs on the same ...

OBJECTIVE To assess agreement between longitudinal and cross-sectional analyses for determining visual field progression in data from the Ocular Hypertension Treatment Study. METHODS Visual field data from 3088 eyes of 1570 participants (median follow-up, 7 years) were analyzed. Longitudinal analyses were performed using change probability with total and pattern deviation, and cross-sectional...

Let $a_1, \ldots, a_n \in \mathbb{R}$ satisfy $\sum_i a_i^2 = 1$, and let $\varepsilon_1, \varepsilon_n$ be uniformly random $\pm 1$ signs $X \sum_{i=1}^{n} a_i \varepsilon_i$. It is conjectured that \varepsilon_i$ has $\Pr[X \geq 1] 7/64$. The best lower bound so far $1/20$, due to Oleszkiewicz. In this paper we improve 6/64$.