INTRODUCTION: Pre-crisis planning is one of the important issues facing managers and planners, especially in the field of crisis management. In recent years, the world has faced an increasing number of natural and man-made disasters, such as earthquakes. Moreover, the growing effect of disasters on communities has highlighted the need for efficient and effective emergency logistics operations i...

Conservation scientists emphasize the importance of maintaining a connected network of protected areas to prevent ecosystems and populations from becoming isolated, reduce the risk of extinction, and ultimately sustain biodiversity. Keeping protected areas connected in a network is increasingly recognized as a conservation priority in the current era of rapid climate change. Models that identif...

BACKGROUND Many recommended clinical preventive services are delivered at low rates. Decision-makers who wish to improve delivery rates, but face competing demands for finite resources, need information on the relative value of these services. This article describes the results of a systematic assessment of the value of clinical preventive services recommended for average-risk patients by the U...

Conservation priority setting based on phylogenetic diversity has frequently been proposed but rarely implemented. Here, we define a simple index that measures the contribution made by different species to phylogenetic diversity and show how the index might contribute towards species-based conservation priorities. We describe procedures to control for missing species, incomplete phylogenetic re...

Disinfection by-products (DBPs) are formed when disinfectants such as chlorine, chloramine, and ozone react with organic and inorganic matter in water. The observations that some DBPs such as trihalomethanes (THMs), di-/trichloroacetic acids, and 3-chloro-4-(dichloromethyl)-5-hydroxy-2(5H)-furanone (MX) are carcinogenic in animal studies have raised public concern over the possible adverse heal...

We address the following seemingly simple question: what is the Bayes-optimal scorer for a bipartite ranking risk? The answer to this question helps elucidate the relationship between bipartite ranking and other established learning problems. We show that the answer is non-trivial in general, but may be easily determined for certain special cases using the theory of proper losses. Our analysis ...

A general model is proposed for studying ranking problems. We investigate learning methods based on empirical minimization of the natural estimates of the ranking risk. The empirical estimates are of the form of a U -statistic. Inequalities from the theory of U -statistics and U processes are used to obtain performance bounds for the empirical risk minimizers. Convex risk minimization methods a...

Point-source environmental hazards are often identified by examination of unusual clusters of disease cases. The very large number of potential clusters give rise to the statistical problem of "multiple inference," i.e., the more clusters examined, the greater the risk of "false-positive" associations emerging by chance alone. This paper first distinguishes the situation of clusters identified ...