REFERENCES Blendl, H., E. Kallweit, J. Scheper (1991): Qualitatanbieten: Schweine-fl eisch, AID, 1103, Bonn. Forrest, J.C. (1998): Line speed implementation of various pork quality measures. Home page address: http://www.nsif.com/ Conferences/1998/forrest.htm. Grau, R., R. Hamm (1952): Eine einfache Methode zur Bestimmung der Wasserbindung im Fleisch. Die Fleischwirtschaft, 4, 295-297. Hofmann,...

BACKGROUND Mediation analysis is useful for understanding mechanisms and has been used minimally in the study of the environment and disease. OBJECTIVE We examined mediation of the association between phthalate exposure during pregnancy and preterm birth by oxidative stress. METHODS This nested case-control study of preterm birth (n = 130 cases, 352 controls) included women who delivered in...

Today’s courses in statistical methods, for the most part, focus on the same methods that were taught 30 years ago. The actual practice of statistics has moved beyond these traditional statistical methods. Modern methods including dynamic graphics, nonlinear estimation, resampling and other simulation based inference methods are being used by many scientists and engineers. However, these method...

Berries and berry extracts possess properties that make them important in the prevention of cancer. The high antioxidant levels of these extracts play a role, but components of the berries can have other effects on cell replication and survival. We chose to test the hypothesis that (i) although the antioxidant capacity of raspberry extracts is important for inhibiting the proliferation of tumor...

Various genetic markers have been exploited for fingerprinting the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) in molecular epidemiological studies, mainly through identifying restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLP). In large-scale studies, RFLP typing has practical processing and analysis limitations; therefore, attempts have been made to move towards PCR-based typing techniques. Spolig...

Data from a 2-parameter Weibull distribution (with covariates) is traditionally analyzed on a logarithmic scale to take advantage of the resulting location-scale nature of the transformed data Y1, . . . , Yn. Quantities of interest are the regression parameters β, the scale parameter σ, the p-quantile yp(u) = u′β+σ log(− log(1− p)), the tail probability p(y|u) = P (Y ≤ y|u) = 1−exp(− exp((y−u′β...

BACKGROUND Maintaining thyroid homeostasis during pregnancy is essential for normal fetal growth and development. Growing evidence suggests that phthalates interfere with normal thyroid function. Few human studies have investigated the degree to which phthalates may affect thyroid hormone levels in particularly susceptible populations such as pregnant women. OBJECTIVES We examined the associa...

BACKGROUND Evidence from both animal and human studies suggests that exposure to phthalates may be associated with adverse female reproductive outcomes. OBJECTIVE We evaluated the associations between urinary concentrations of phthalate metabolites and outcomes of assisted reproductive technologies (ART). METHODS This analysis included 256 women enrolled in the Environment and Reproductive ...

How can humans acquire relational representations that enable analogical inference and other forms of high-level reasoning? Using comparative relations as a model domain, we explore the possibility that bottom-up learning mechanisms applied to objects coded as feature vectors can yield representations of relations sufficient to solve analogy problems. We introduce Bayesian analogy with relation...

In a general review of the subject of anhydremia published in 1923, Marriott (1) brought out several of the phenomena which had been shown to accompany severe clinical dehydration: an increase in the proportion of the total solids and in the dried weight of a unit volume of blood, an increase in its specific gravity, in red cell count and hemoglobin, and in the concentration of the serum protei...