Scientists need a better and larger set of tools to validate land-use change models, because it is essential to know a model’s prediction accuracy. This paper describes how to use the relative operating characteristic (ROC) as a quantitative measurement to validate a land-cover change model. Typically, a crucial component of a spatially explicit simulation model of land-cover change is a map of...

Relative survival, a method for assessing prognostic factors for disease-specific mortality in unselected populations, is frequently used in population-based studies. However, most relative survival models assume that the effects of covariates on disease-specific mortality conform with the proportional hazards hypothesis, which may not hold in some long-term studies. To accommodate variation ov...

Results: At entry into foster care, children ranged in age from 11 to 76 months, were evenly divided by sex, and had a mean VABS score of 79.5 signifying functioning below the average range. At 6 months children gained an average of 7.87 points on their VABS score. By 12 months children showed an average change of 9.65 points, for a mean VABS score of 94.5, well within the nationally normed ave...

Background Plain English summaries (PESs) are a valuable tool for making research findings available and accessible to patients and the public. They provide brief descriptions of research written in non-specialist language. The National Institute for Health Research Journals Library (NIHRJL) currently requires authors to provide a 250 word PES. This is published online as part of the final, ope...

Out-of-school peer educators [PE] are resourceful in transmitting reproductive health information but their retention remains a contentious issue. This study aimed to assess motivation and sustainability of out-of-school PEs in disseminating reproductive health information among adolescents. A structured questionnaire was used to interview 406 PEs in Mbeya region, Tanzania. Focus Group Discussi...

We present a new continuity correction to the P value for local maxima of a statistical parametric map that bridges the gap between small FWHM, when the Bonferroni correction is accurate, and large FWHM, when random field theory is accurate. The new method, based on discrete local maxima, is always an upper bound (like the Bonferroni), but lower and hence more accurate for large FWHM, without i...

ATM networks will carry a wide variety of data over the same packet switching network. A majority of this traac is expected to be real-time video generated by video on demand, video conferencing systems, etc. We study the characteristics of video data compressed using standard coding algorithms namely, JPEG, MPEG and also popular ones such as the video conferencing software NV. A wide range of ...

We study the formation of localized shocks in one-dimensional driven diffusive systems with spatially homogeneous creation and annihilation of particles (Langmuir kinetics). We show how to obtain hydrodynamic equations that describe the density profile in systems with uncorrelated steady state as well as in those exhibiting correlations. As a special example of the latter case, the Katz-Lebowit...

There is a considerable heterogeneity in blood cell telomere length (TL) for individuals of similar age and recent studies have revealed that TL changes by time are dependent on TL at baseline. TL is partly inherited, but results from several studies indicate that e.g. life style and/or environmental factors can affect TL during life. Collectively, these studies imply that blood cell TL might f...

We compute the Donaldson-Thomas invariants of a local elliptic surface with section. We introduce a new computational technique which is a mixture of motivic and toric methods. This allows us to write the partition function for the invariants in terms of the topological vertex. Utilizing identities for the topological vertex proved in [4], we derive product formulas for the partition functions....