Nonparametric tests of conditional treatment effects

We develop a general class of nonparametric tests for treatment effects conditional on covariates. We consider a wide spectrum of null and alternative hypotheses regarding conditional treatment effects, including (i) the null hypothesis of the conditional stochastic dominance between treatment and control groups; ii) the null hypothesis that the conditional average treatment effect is positive for each value of covariates; and (iii) the null hypothesis of no distributional (or average) treatment effect conditional on covariates against a one-sided (or two-sided) alternative hypothesis. The test statistics are based on L1-type functionals of uniformly consistent nonparametric kernel estimators of conditional expectations that characterize the null hypotheses. Using the Poissionization technique of Giné et al. (2003), we show that suitably studentized versions of our test statistics are asymptotically standard normal under the null hypotheses and also show that the proposed nonparametric tests are consistent against general fixed alternatives. Furthermore, it turns out that our tests have non-negligible powers against some local alternatives that are n−½ different from the null hypotheses, where n is the sample size. We provide a more powerful test for the case when the null hypothesis may be binding only on a strict subset of the support and also consider an extension to testing for quantile treatment effects. We illustrate the usefulness of our tests by applying them to data from a randomized, job training program (LaLonde, 1986) and by carrying out Monte Carlo experiments based on this dataset

New analytic results for electroweak baryon number violation

Real-time anomalous fermion number violation has been investigated for massless chiral fermions in spherically symmetric SU(2) Yang-Mills gauge field backgrounds which can be weakly dissipative or even nondissipative. Restricting consideration to spherically symmetric fermion fields, a relation has been found between the spectral flow of the Dirac Hamiltonian and two characteristics of the background gauge field. This new result may be relevant to electroweak baryon number violation in the early universe.Comment: 7 pages with jhep3.cls, based on a talk at the International Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics, Budapest, 200

AUTOTEM - Automated geometry meshing and heat conduction calculation

Temperature distribution for an arbitrary irregular body is calculated by AUTOTEM, which generates required input data automatically by computer. Temperature distribution is calculated for a two-dimensional plane section in /x,y/ coordinates or for an axisymmetric irregular body in /r,z/ coordinates

An experimental study of the concatenated Reed-Solomon/Viterbi channel coding system performance and its impact on space communications

The need for efficient space communication at very low bit error probabilities to the specification and implementation of a concatenated coding system using an interleaved Reed-Solomon code as the outer code and a Viterbi-decoded convolutional code as the inner code. Experimental results of this channel coding system are presented under an emulated S-band uplink and X-band downlink two-way space communication channel, where both uplink and downlink have strong carrier power. This work was performed under the NASA End-to-End Data Systems program at JPL. Test results verify that at a bit error probability of 10 to the -6 power or less, this concatenated coding system does provide a coding gain of 2.5 dB or more over the Viterbi-decoded convolutional-only coding system. These tests also show that a desirable interleaving depth for the Reed-Solomon outer code is 8 or more. The impact of this "virtually" error-free space communication link on the transmission of images is discussed and examples of simulation results are given