INTRODUCTION Ultrasound imaging is increasingly used with motion and force data to quantify tendon dynamics and to understand the functional role of tendons during human and other animal movement. Frequently, tendon dynamics are estimated indirectly from measures of muscle kinematics (by subtracting muscle length from muscle-tendon unit length), but there is mounting evidence that this approach...

The purpose of this study was to compare estimates of genetic parameters for sequential growth of beef cattle using two models and two data sets. Growth curves of Nellore cattle were analyzed using body weights measured at ages 1 (birth weight) to 733 d. Two data samples were created, one with 71,867 records sampled from all herds (MISS), and the other with 74,601 records sampled from herds wit...

Pigmentation is a polygenic trait encompassing some of the most visible phenotypic variation observed in humans. Here we present direct estimates of selection acting on functional alleles in three key genes known to be involved in human pigmentation pathways--HERC2, SLC45A2, and TYR--using allele frequency estimates from Eneolithic, Bronze Age, and modern Eastern European samples and forward si...

Data from 522 lambs of the Timahdit breed representing 13 sires were used to estimate genetic parameters. Traits analyzed were weights at birth (BW), 30 days (W30), 70 days (W70) and 90 days (W90), average daily gains from 10 to 30 days (ADG10-30), 30-70 days (ADG30-70) and 30-90 days (ADG30-90). REML estimates of variance and covariance components were obtained assuming animal models that incl...

Heritability of 2-yr-old heifer calving difficulty score was estimated in nine purebred and three composite populations with a total of 5,986 calving difficulty scores from 520 sires and 388 maternal grandsires. Estimates were 0.43 for direct (calf) genetic effects and 0.23 for maternal (heifer) genetic effects. The correlation between direct and maternal effects was -0.26. Direct effects were ...

Abstract. National statistical offices are often required to provide statistical information about characteristics of the population, such as mean income or unemployment rate, at several administrative or small area levels. Having good area level estimates is important because policies will often be based on this type of information. In this paper we describe how Bayesian hierarchical models ca...

Network meta-analysis (NMA), combining direct and indirect comparisons, is increasingly being used to examine the comparative effectiveness of medical interventions. Minimal guidance exists on how to rate the quality of evidence supporting treatment effect estimates obtained from NMA. We present a four-step approach to rate the quality of evidence in each of the direct, indirect, and NMA estima...

BACKGROUND Naïve-indirect comparisons are comparisons between competing clinical interventions' evidence from separate (uncontrolled) trials. Direct comparisons are comparisons within randomised control trials (RCTs). The objective of this empirical study is to test the null-hypothesis that trends and performance differences inferred from naïve-indirect comparisons and from direct comparisons/R...

Maximum likelihood estimation of a log-concave density has attracted considerable attention over the last few years. Several algorithms have been proposed to estimate such a density. Two of those algorithms, an iterative convex minorant and an active set algorithm, are implemented in the R package logcondens. While these algorithms are discussed elsewhere, we describe in this paper the use of t...