Previously published data confirming differences in creatine kinase (EC 2.7.3.2) among various race and gender subgroups in the Los Angeles area have been re-examined with use of recently proposed statistical criteria for defining separate reference intervals. Results indicate that one criterion may be too lenient, whereas another is clearly too restrictive in suggesting the need for separate i...

Analysis has been performed on fracture initiation near a crack in a brittle material with strength described by Weibull statistics. This nonlocal fracture model allows for a direct correlation between near crack-tip stresses and failure. Predictions are made for both the toughness and average fracture initiation angle of a crack under mixed-mode loading. This is pertinent for composites and is...

The consistency method has been established as the standard strategy for extracting high quality translation rules in statistical machine translation (SMT). However, no attention has been drawn to why this method is successful, other than empirical evidence. Using concepts from graph theory, we identify the relation between consistency and components of graphs that represent word-aligned senten...

Distance predicting functions may be used in a variety of applications for estimating travel distances between points. To evaluate the accuracy of a distance predicting function and to determine its parameters, a goodness-of-fit criteria is employed. AD (Absolute Deviations), SD (Squared Deviations) and NAD (Normalized Absolute Deviations) are the three criteria that are mostly employed in prac...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Eligibility criteria determine the external validity (generalizability) of the results of randomized controlled trials. To increase the number of outcome events, and hence statistical power, some recent stroke prevention trials have required additional vascular risk factors for eligibility. METHODS To assess the merits of additional eligibility criteria in stroke preven...

We present two novel bounds for the classification error that, at the same time, can be used as practical training criteria. Unlike the bounds reported in the literature so far, these novel bounds are based on a strict distinction between the true but unknown distribution and the model distribution, which is used in the decision rule. The two bounds we derive are the squared distance and the Ku...

This paper is to introduce our participation in the WMT13 shared tasks on Quality Estimation for machine translation without using reference translations. We submitted the results for Task 1.1 (sentence-level quality estimation), Task 1.2 (system selection) and Task 2 (word-level quality estimation). In Task 1.1, we used an enhanced version of BLEU metric without using reference translations to...

OBJECTIVE To develop predictive criteria for successful weaning of patients from mechanical assistance to ventilation, based on simple clinical tests using discriminant analyses and neural network systems. DESIGN Retrospective development of predictive criteria and subsequent prospective testing of the same predictive criteria. SETTING Medical ICU of a 300-bed teaching Veterans Administrati...

BACKGROUND Published methods for assessing remission in schizophrenia are variable and none have been definitively validated or standardized. Andreasen et al (2005) suggest systematic operational criteria using eight PANSS items for which patients must score < or = 3 (mild) for at least six months. METHODS Using data from a one year, multi-site clinical trial (n = 675) remission criteria were...