In Pericchi and Pereira (2012)it is argued against the traditional way on which testing is based on fixed significance level, either using p-values (with fixed levels of evidence, like the 5% rule) or α values. We instead, follow an approach put forward by DeGroot (1975), on which an optimal test is chosen by minimizing type I and type II errors. Morris DeGroot in his authoritative book (1975),...

CTT is best suited for traditional testing situations, either in group or individual settings, in which all the members of a target population, e.g., persons seeking college admission, are administered the same or parallel sets of test items. These item sets can be presented to the examinee in either a paper-and-pencil or a computer format. Regardless of format, it is important for the measurem...

Although Construct validity theory (CVT) did not formally enter the scene until psychology was into its eighth decade as an established independent discipline, it might be argued that the history of test-related validity as an area of scholarship is as old as the discipline itself. That is to say, the story of the history of disciplinary psychology is in many ways a story about psychological me...

The angular momentum of galaxies is routinely ascribed to a process of tidal torques acting during the early stages of gravitational collapse, and is predicted from the initial mass distribution using second-order perturbation theory and the Zel’dovich approximation. We have tested this theory for a flat hierarchical cosmogony using a large N -body simulation with sufficient dynamic range to in...

I compare theoretical models of massive star formation with observations of the Orion Hot Core, which harbors one of the closest massive protostars. Although this region is complicated, many of its features (size, luminosity, accretion disk, H II region, outflow) may be understood by starting with a simple model in which the star forms from a massive gas core that is a coherent entity in approx...

While the concept of mixed-methods research is more usually associated with combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, this paper outlines a study that mixed methods by undertaking qualitative theory testing and derivation when examining the relationship between health promotion theory and hospital nursing practice. Thus, it is concerned with relating the metatheoretical aspects of the ...

Property testing deals with tasks where the goal is to distinguish between the case that an object (e.g., function or graph) has a prespecified property (e.g., the function is linear or the graph is bipartite) and the case that it differs significantly from any such object. The task should be performed by observing only a very small part of the object, in particular by querying the object, and ...

We address the problem of detecting deviations of binary sequence from randomness,which is very important for random number (RNG) and pseudorandom number generators (PRNG). Namely, we consider a null hypothesis H0 that a given bit sequence is generated by Bernoulli source with equal probabilities of 0 and 1 and the alternative hypothesis H1 that the sequence is generated by a stationary and erg...

This lecture is based on two papers; a first paper that was written with Melanie Becker [1] and a second paper that we wrote with our collaborators Joe Polchinski and Arkady Tseytlin [2]. M-theory is our most promising candidate of being a quantum theory in eleven dimensions that includes gravity. Although we do not have a complete answer to the question what M-theory is we understand several a...

Computer adaptive testing is the study of scoring tests and questions based on assumptions concerning the mathematical relationship between examinees’ ability and the examinees’ responses. Adaptive student tests, which are based on item response theory (IRT), have many advantages over conventional tests. We use the least square method, a well-known statistical method, to reach an estimation of ...