The radial plot in meta-analysis : approximations and applications

Fixed effects meta-analysis can be thought of as least squares analysis of the radial plot, the plot of standardized treatment effect against precision (reciprocal of the standard deviation) for the studies in a systematic review. For example, the least squares slope through the origin estimates the treatment effect, and a widely used test for publication bias is equivalent to testing the significance of the regression intercept. However, the usual theory assumes that the within-study variances are known, whereas in practice they are estimated. This leads to extra variability in the points of the radial plot which can lead to a marked distortion in inferences that are derived from these regression calculations. This is illustrated by a clinical trials example from the Cochrane database. We derive approximations to the sampling properties of the radial plot and suggest bias corrections to some of the commonly used methods of meta-analysis. A simulation study suggests that these bias corrections are effective in controlling levels of significance of tests and coverage of confidence intervals

Polarization Beam Splitter Based on Self-Collimation of a Hybrid Photonic Crystal

A photonic crystal polarization beam splitter based on photonic band gap and self-collimation effects is designed for optical communication wavelengths. The photonic crystal structure consists of a polarization-insensitive self-collimation region and a splitting region. TM- and TE-polarized waves propagate without diffraction in the self-collimation region, whereas they split by 90 degrees in the splitting region. Efficiency of more than 75% for TM- and TE-polarized light is obtained for a polarization beam splitter size of only 17 μm x 17 μm in a wavelength interval of 60 nm including 1.55 μm

A Couplet from Flavored Dark Matter

We show that a couplet, a pair of closely spaced photon lines, in the X-ray spectrum is a distinctive feature of lepton flavored dark matter models for which the mass spectrum is dictated by Minimal Flavor Violation. In such a scenario, mass splittings between different dark matter flavors are determined by Standard Model Yukawa couplings and can naturally be small, allowing all three flavors to be long-lived and contribute to the observed abundance. Then, in the presence of a tiny source of flavor violation, heavier dark matter flavors can decay via a dipole transition on cosmological timescales, giving rise to three photon lines. The ratios of the line energies are completely determined in terms of the charged lepton masses, and constitute a firm prediction of this framework. For dark matter masses of order the weak scale, the couplet lies in the keV-MeV region, with a much weaker line in the eV-keV region. This scenario constitutes a potential explanation for the recent claim of the observation of a 3.5 keV line. The next generation of X-ray telescopes may have the necessary resolution to resolve the double line structure of such a couplet.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, 1 haik

Market Potential and Regional Disparities in Turkey

Regional disparity is one of the important characteristics of Turkish economy. The paper focuses on the explanatory power of market potential on the regional differences in Turkey. Regional divergences in wages and employment are used as the proxies for regional differences. Empirical results reveal that, under various specifications, variation in market potential is an important determinant of regional differences.

Building Morphological Chains for Agglutinative Languages

In this paper, we build morphological chains for agglutinative languages by using a log-linear model for the morphological segmentation task. The model is based on the unsupervised morphological segmentation system called MorphoChains. We extend MorphoChains log linear model by expanding the candidate space recursively to cover more split points for agglutinative languages such as Turkish, whereas in the original model candidates are generated by considering only binary segmentation of each word. The results show that we improve the state-of-art Turkish scores by 12% having a F-measure of 72% and we improve the English scores by 3% having a F-measure of 74%. Eventually, the system outperforms both MorphoChains and other well-known unsupervised morphological segmentation systems. The results indicate that candidate generation plays an important role in such an unsupervised log-linear model that is learned using contrastive estimation with negative samples.Comment: 10 pages, accepted and presented at the CICLing 2017 (18th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics