Statistical learning (SL) is increasingly invoked as a set of general-purpose mechanisms upon which language learning is built during infancy and childhood. Here we investigated the extent to which SL is related to adult language processing. In particular, we asked whether SL proclivities towards relations that are more informative of English are related to efficiency in reading English sentenc...

OBJECTIVE To examine the potential for publication bias, data availability bias, and reviewer selection bias in recently published meta-analyses that use individual participant data and to investigate whether authors of such meta-analyses seemed aware of these issues. DESIGN In a database of 383 meta-analyses of individual participant data that were published between 1991 and March 2009, we s...

In urban areas, buildings are often used as landmarks for localization. Reliable and efficient recognition of buildings is crucial for enabling this functionality. Motivated by the applications which would enhance visual localization and navigation capabilities we propose in this paper a hierarchical approach for building recognition. In the first recognition stage the model views are indexed b...

We examine statistical models, including the workhorse linear instrumental variables model, in which the mapping from the reduced form distribution to the structural parameters of interest is singular. The singularity of this mapping implies certain fundamental restrictions on the finite sample properties of point estimators: they cannot be unbiased, quantile-unbiased, or translation equivarian...

The key point limits to define the statistical model describing the data distribution. Hence, it turns out that the characteristics related to the so-called Inverse Tully-Fisher relation and the Direct relation are maximum likelyhood (ml) estimators of different statistical models, and we obtain coherent distance estimates as long as the same model is used for the calibration of the TF relation...

Soil erosion poses economic and environmental concerns in many tropical uplands. Agroforestry has been proposed as a sustainable land use that can mitigate soil erosion and promote the economic welfare of small farmers. To evaluate such claims, we must (a) develop a composite measure of effectiveness, such as a soil conservation index, and (b) define it in terms understood by the farmers who ul...

Methods to calculate bias-adjusted estimates for meta-analyses are becoming more popular. The objective of this paper is to use the structural approach to bias and causal diagrams to show that (i) the current use of the bias-adjusted estimating tools may sometimes introduce bias rather than reduce it and (ii) the Cochrane collaboration risk of bias tool, which was designed for randomized studie...