When patients receive an intervention based on whether they score below or above some threshold value on a continuously measured random variable, the intervention will be randomly assigned for patients close to the threshold. The regression discontinuity design exploits this fact to estimate causal treatment effects. In spite of its recent proliferation in economics, the regression discontinuit...

[1] The shear velocity structure in the lowermost 500 km of the mantle beneath the Caribbean and surrounding areas is determined by seismic tomography applied to a suite of Sd-SKS, ScS-S, (Scd + Sbc)-S, and ScS-(Scd + Sbc) differential times, where (Scd + Sbc) is a pair of overlapping triplication arrivals produced by shear wave interaction with an abrupt velocity increase at the top of the D00...

A discontinuity in a system of ordinary differential equations can create a flow that slides along the discontinuity locus. Prior to sliding, the flow may have collapsed onto the discontinuity, making the reverse flow non-unique, as happens when dry-friction causes objects to stick. Alternatively, a flow may slide along the discontinuity before escaping it at some indeterminable time, implying ...

BACKGROUND The management of esophageal discontinuity remains challenging and often involves complex reconstructive surgeries. METHODS AND RESULTS We describe a unique and successful treatment of esophageal discontinuity using a modification of the natural orifice translumenal surgery (NOTES) approach in a patient presenting with long-standing esophageal discontinuity resulting from an iatrog...

In this paper we propose an extension to the work of Lischinski et al [1] on combining hierarchical radiosity method and discontinuity meshing. The extension proposed here supports higher order radiosity function at the es timation s tep itself. We have carried out this extension using M ultiWavelet basis function s. Unlike th e multi-wavelet radiosity work of Gortler et al [2] which uses reg u...

Ordinary differential equations with discontinuous right-hand side, where the discontinuity of the vector field arises on smooth surfaces of the phase space, are the topic of this work. The main emphasis is the study of solutions close to the intersection of two discontinuity surfaces. There, the so-called hidden dynamics describes the smooth transition from ingoing to outgoing solution directi...

[1] We constrain SH wave velocity structures near the 660-km discontinuity beneath South America and northeast Asia, using triplicated phases near the discontinuity recorded in the epicentral distance range of 10 –35 for three deep events. We then explore mineralogical and compositional models appropriate for explaining the inferred seismic structures between the two regions. SH velocity struct...

Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods have become important numerical tools in computational finance. Many studies have demonstrated the greater efficiency of QMC relative to Monte Carlo (MC) methods, even for pricing high-dimensional exotic derivative securities. Some of these studies have argued the importance of effective dimension in determining the efficiency of QMC. Consequently, dimension redu...