We would like to point out an incorrect statement crediting our previous work in the recent paper of Siripong and colleagues (2006). The authors claim that ‘Recent work has suggested that the data-analysis tools used to assess melting profiles on gel-based microarrays can result in poor-quality melting profiles (Pozhitkov et al., 2005), but work by our group (e.g. Urakawa et al., 2002; 2003; El...

The effect of the surface roughness on a moving electron bunch is considered by resorting to a model of a metallic structure with random perturbations on its surface. Based upon this model, analytic expressions have been derived for the average energy emitted per groove ~EPG! and for its standard deviation. For a relativistic bunch, both quantities are shown to be virtually independent of the m...

A considerable amount of uncertainty surrounds the length of human life. The standard deviation in adult life span is about 15 years in the U.S., and theory and evidence suggest it is costly. I calibrate a utility-theoretic model of preferences over length of life and show that one fewer year in standard deviation is worth about half a mean life year. Differences in the standard deviation exace...

Sedentary behaviors are linked to adverse health outcomes, but the total amount of time spent in these behaviors in the United States has not been objectively quantified. The authors evaluated participants from the 2003-2004 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey aged >/=6 years who wore an activity monitor for up to 7 days. Among 6,329 participants with at least one 10-hour day of mo...

tribution of the 5 classes of build in the progeny of various matings show a difference in distribution, in means and in variability as measured by the standard deviation or the coefficient of variability, figures 4 and 5. This greater variability in the progeny of fleshy as compared with slender parents is still shown even whenever allowance is made .for the slightly greater range of classes o...

During the stationary part of neuronal spiking response, the stimulus can be encoded in the firing rate, but also in the statistical structure of the interspike intervals. We propose and discuss two information-based measures of statistical dispersion of the interspike interval distribution, the entropy-based dispersion and Fisher information-based dispersion. The measures are compared with the...

Different procedures to identify data outliers in geochemical data are reviewed and tested. The calculation of [mean+/-2 standard deviation (sdev)] to estimate threshold values dividing background data from anomalies, still used almost 50 years after its introduction, delivers arbitrary estimates. The boxplot, [median+/-2 median absolute deviation (MAD)] and empirical cumulative distribution fu...

Poisson statistics are traditionally used to estimate the mean and standard deviation of the mean in time-range realizations of received photon counts from stationary processes in incoherent-detection lidar systems. However, this approach must be modified if the process under study is measurably nonstationary to account for any additional (and potentially unanticipated) variability. We demonstr...

Panoramic cameras have become popular because they provide impressive and immerse experience of the scene and allow several interesting applications. Among the large variation of panoramic camera systems, we have focused on concentric panoramic imaging with a frame camera. In order to establish the concentric image acquisition, the camera mount must be calibrated so that the projection centre o...

This work describes a different image analysis approach to characterize the uniformity of objects in agglomerates by using the propagation of normal wave fronts. The problem of width uniformity is discussed and its importance for the characterization of composite structures normally found in physics and biology highlighted. The methodology involves identifying each cluster (i.e., connected comp...