The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) requires that schools make “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) towards the goal of having 100 percent of their students become proficient by year 2013-14. Through simulation analyses of Maine and Kentucky school performance data collected during the 1990s, this study investigates how feasible schools would have met the AYP targets if the mandate had been...

The IRAF kpcoude.slit package is specialized for the extraction, sky subtraction, wavelength calibration, and flux calibration of Kitt Peak coude slit spectra. It contains the general tools needed for each of the reduction steps. However, the main emphasis of this package is the task doslit to streamline the complete data reduction. This guide describes what this task does, it’s usage, and para...

We consider the family of holomorphic maps ez + c and show that fibers of postsingularly finite parameters are trivial. This can be considered as the first and simplest class of non-escaping parameters for which we can obtain results about triviality of fibers in the exponential family.

For hypotheses of the type H0 : θ = θ0 vs H1 : θ 6= θ0 we demonstrate the equivalence of a Bayesian hypothesis test using a Bayes factor and the corresponding classical test, for a large class of models, which are detailed in the paper. In particular, we show that the role of the prior and critical region for the Bayes factor test is only to specify the type I error. This is their only role sin...

Let Q be the field of rational numbers and Q[u1, ..., ud, x1, ..., xs] the ring of polynomials in n indeterminates with coefficients in Q and d + s = n (0 ≤ d < n). The indeterminates are divided into two groups: u = (u1, ..., ud) and x = (x1, ..., xs), which are called parameters and variables, respectively. A polynomial set is a finite set of nonzero polynomials in Q[u,x]. The following syste...

This short discussion introduces the new Special Section on Advanced FIA Data Analysis that has been recently created in the Mathematical and Computational Forestry & Natural-Resource Sciences (MCFNS) journal as a result of collaboration between the journal editors and scientists of the U.S. Forest Service, FIA (Forest Inventory Analysis) program. This section contains three papers, all of whic...

There is increasing realisation that malnutrition is a complication of many illnesses, as well as a consequence of inadequate food intake. The report summarised below, provides recommendations and principles to guide health professionals facing dilemmas concerning patients' nutrition and hydration.

Many kinds of computer vision problems can be formalized as statistical estimation problems with nuisance parameters. In the past, such problems have been solved without making any distinction between the nuisance parameters and structural ones. However, a theory of statistics suggests that eliminating the nuisance parameters by assuming a probability distribution on them improves estimation ac...