Currently there is a lack of quantitative information regarding the driving factors of vegetation dynamics in post-Soviet Central Asia. Insufficient knowledge also exists concerning vegetation variability across sub-humid to arid climatic gradients as well as vegetation response to different land uses, from natural rangelands to intensively irrigated croplands. In this study, we analyzed the en...

This work extends the Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation (INLA) method to latent models outside the scope of latent Gaussian models, where independent components of the latent field can have a near-Gaussian distribution. Two important class of models that can be addressed with our proposed method are non-Gaussian random effects models and dynamic models with non-Gaussian error term for the...

We estimate how capital gains realizations respond to marginal tax rates on capital gains using a panel of aggregate data for U.S. states for the years 1957 through 2007. In specifications controlling for state fixed effects and year fixed effects, where identification comes from difference-in-differences variation in effective state marginal tax rates, our point estimate of the elasticity of c...

In The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray (1994) claim, based on evidence from crosssectional regressions, that differences in wages in the U.S. labor market are predominantly explained by general intelligence. Cawley, Heckman, and Vytlacil (1999), using evidence from random effects panel regressions, reject this claim, in part because returns to general intelligence vary by racial and gender su...

Similarity measure and visualization are two of the most interesting tasks in time series data mining and attract much attention in the last decade. Some representations have been proposed to reduce high dimensionality of time series and the corresponding distance functions have been used to measure their similarity. Moreover, visualization techniques are often based on such representations. On...

The in situ dry matter (DM) disappearance of corn silages in two maturity stages (milk grain and half milk line) of known in vivo and in vitro digestibility was determined, with the main purpose of comparing digestibility values with the ruminal disappearance at 24 and 48h of incubation. A secondary goal was the description of their ruminal digestion kinetics, from which the effective degradabi...

We analyzed data from 50 states and the District of Columbia from 1960 to 2005 to study how the unemployment rate and the divorce rate are related. Unemployment is positively related to divorce in a bivariate analysis, but the association is not significant when state and year fixed effects are included in the statistical model. When the sample is divided into time periods, unemployment is nega...

This paper estimates the impact of climate change on the prevalence of criminal activity in the United States. The analysis is based on a panel of monthly crime, temperature, and precipitation data for 2,972 U.S. counties over the 50-year period from 1960 to 2009. I identify the effect of weather on monthly crime by using a semi-parametric bin estimator and controlling for county-by-month and c...

Failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) has been used to identify the critical risk events and predict a system failure to avoid or reduce the potential failure modes and their effect on operations. The risk priority number (RPN) is the classical method to evaluate the risk of failure in conventional FMEA. RPN, which ranges from 1 to 1000, is a mathematical product of three parameters—severit...