Research demonstrating that both infants and adults track statistical distributions of acoustic-phonetic cues and use this information when making phonetic category judgements (Maye, Werker, & Gerken, 2002; Clayards, Tanenhaus, Aslin, & Jacobs, 2008) has led to interest in computational models of phonetic category acquisition, which can shed light on the requirements and limitations of statisti...

The fractal distribution is the best statistical model for the size-frequency distributions that result from some lithic reduction processes. Fractals are a large class of complex, self-similar sets that can be described using power-law relations. Fractal statistical distributions are characterized by an exponent, D, called the fractal dimension. I show how to determine whether the size-frequen...

Structural design deeply involves material strengths, which are obviously affected by uncertainty. As far as the material “concrete” is concerned, building codes (Italian codes, Eurocodes, ACI regulations) typically state that it should be identified and classified by means of its conventional characteristic uniaxial compressive cubic strength at 28 days. Although the fundamental importance of ...

A contextual algorithm that is widely used for identifying forest fire pixels uses a threshold derived from statistical examinations of temperature distributions of background pixels. In general, about 3σ (standard deviation) above the mean of these background temperatures is used for the threshold. In case where land cover types are multifaceted in the background pixels, whose distributions of...

Anesthesiology, V 123 • No 6 1227 December 2015 I n this issue of Anesthesiology, Juul et al.1 exhibit a statistical technique that has the potential to substantially improve the analysis of postoperative analgesic requirements. By using a retrospective sample of patients from their institution who had received a standard analgesic regimen, the authors examined the probability of repeated morph...

In every statistical data analysis, somehow surprising observations can occur which deviate strongly from the remaining observations or the assumed model. On the one hand, these observations may contain important pieces of information about the data-generating process. On the other hand, they might simply be measurement or reporting errors. Regardless of which origin the observation has, it is ...