1,881 research outputs found
Recent Australian Advances in the Radiotherapy of Skin Cancer
This paper is an expository report on some recent and current research on clinical problems in the control of skin cancer in Australia, which has a high prevalence and an increasing incidence of this disease
Sensitivity Analysis for Multiple Comparisons in Matched Observational Studies through Quadratically Constrained Linear Programming
A sensitivity analysis in an observational study assesses the robustness of
significant findings to unmeasured confounding. While sensitivity analyses in
matched observational studies have been well addressed when there is a single
outcome variable, accounting for multiple comparisons through the existing
methods yields overly conservative results when there are multiple outcome
variables of interest. This stems from the fact that unmeasured confounding
cannot affect the probability of assignment to treatment differently depending
on the outcome being analyzed. Existing methods allow this to occur by
combining the results of individual sensitivity analyses to assess whether at
least one hypothesis is significant, which in turn results in an overly
pessimistic assessment of a study's sensitivity to unobserved biases. By
solving a quadratically constrained linear program, we are able to perform a
sensitivity analysis while enforcing that unmeasured confounding must have the
same impact on the treatment assignment probabilities across outcomes for each
individual in the study. We show that this allows for uniform improvements in
the power of a sensitivity analysis not only for testing the overall null of no
effect, but also for null hypotheses on \textit{specific} outcome variables
while strongly controlling the familywise error rate. We illustrate our method
through an observational study on the effect of smoking on naphthalene
exposure
Regression-assisted inference for the average treatment effect in paired experiments
In paired randomized experiments, individuals in a given matched pair may differ on prognostically important covariates despite the best efforts of practitioners.We examine the use of regression adjustment to correct for persistent covariate imbalances after randomization, and present two regression-assisted estimators for the sample average treatment effect in paired experiments. Using the potential outcomes framework, we prove that these estimators are consistent for the sample average treatment effect under mild regularity conditions even if the regression model is improperly specified, and describe how asymptotically conservative confidence intervals can be constructed.We demonstrate that the variances of the regressionassisted estimators are no larger than that of the standard difference-in-means estimator asymptotically, and illustrate the proposed methods by simulation. The analysis does not require a superpopulation model, a constant treatment effect, or the truth of the regression model, and hence provides inference for the sample average treatment effect with the potential to increase power without unrealistic assumptions
The Meaning of Patent Citations: Report on the NBER/Case-Western Reserve Survey of Patentees
A survey of recent patentees was conducted to elicit their perceptions regarding the importance of their inventions, the extent of their communication with other inventors, and the relationship of both importance and communication to observed patent citations. A cohort of 1993 patentees were asked specifically about 2 patents that they had cited, and a third placebo' patent that was similar but which they did not cite. One of the two cited inventors was also surveyed. We find that inventors report significant communication, at least some of which is in forms that suggests spillovers from the cited inventor to the citing inventor. The perception of such communication was substantively and statistically significantly greater for the cited patents than for the placebos. There is, however, a large amount of noise in citations data; it appears that something like one-half of all citations do not correspond to any perceived communication, or even necessarily to a perceptible technological relationship between the inventions. We also find a significant correlation between the number of citations a patent received and its importance (both economic and technological) as perceived by the inventor.
Quantum reservoirs with ion chains
Ion chains are promising platforms for studying and simulating quantum
reservoirs. One interesting feature is that their vibrational modes can mediate
entanglement between two objects which are coupled through the vibrational
modes of the chain. In this work we analyse entanglement between the transverse
vibrations of two heavy impurity defects embedded in an ion chain, which is
generated by the coupling with the chain vibrations. We verify general scaling
properties of the defects dynamics and demonstrate that entanglement between
the defects can be a stationary feature of these dynamics. We then analyse
entanglement in chains composed of tens of ions and propose a measurement
scheme which allows one to verify the existence of the predicted entangled
state.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figure
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