A New Family of Covariate-Adjusted Response Adaptive Designs and their Asymptotic Properties

It is often important to incorporating covariate information in the design of clinical trials. In literature, there are many designs of using stratification and covariate-adaptive randomization to balance on certain known covariate. Recently Zhang, Hu, Cheung and Chan (2007) have proposed a family of covariate-adjusted response-adaptive (CARA) designs and studied their asymptotic properties. However, these CARA designs often have high variabilities. In this paper, we propose a new family of covariate-adjusted response-adaptive (CARA) designs. We show that the new designs have smaller variabilities and therefore more efficient

Public Benefits of Undeveloped Lands on Urban Outskirts: Non-Market Valuation Studies and their Role in Land Use Plans

Over the past three decades, the economics profession has developed methods for estimating the public benefits of green spaces, providing an opportunity to incorporate such information into land-use planning. While federal regulations routinely require such estimates for major regulations, the extent to which they are used in local land use plans is not clear. This paper reviews the literature on public values for lands on urban outskirts, not just to survey their methods or empirical findings, but to evaluate the role they have played--or have the potential to play-- in actual land use plans. Based on interviews with authors and representatives of funding agencies and local land trusts, it appears that academic work has had a mixed reception in the policy world. Reasons for this include a lack of interest in making academic work accessible to policy makers, emphasizing revealed preference methods which are inconsistent with policy priorities related to nonuse values, and emphasis on benefit-cost analyses. Nevertheless, there are examples of success stories that illustrate how such information can play a vital role in the design of conservation policies. Working Paper 07-2

Gold nanorods grown from HgTe nanoparticles directly on various surfaces

Gold nanorods (NRs) are nucleated by HgTe semiconductor nanoparticles. Growth of ~200 X 50 nm2 NRs directly on various surfaces is achieved by using an intermediary polyelectrolyte layer. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy confirms the deposition of gold. An increase in the intensity of the Au NR plasmon resonance is observed with optical extinction spectroscopy. This seeding technique, amenable to many different surfaces, suggests a simple synthetic route to composite materials with interesting electronic and optical properties.Peer reviewedPhysicsChemistr

Biases in the perceived timing of perisaccadic perceptual and motor events

Subjects typically experience the temporal interval immediately following a saccade as longer than a comparable control interval. One explanation of this effect is that the brain antedates the perceptual onset of a saccade target to around the time of saccade initiation. This could explain the apparent continuity of visual perception across eye movements. Thisantedating account was tested in three experiments in which subjects made saccades of differing extents and then judged either the duration or the temporal order of key events. Postsaccadic stimuli underwent subjective temporal lengthening and had early perceived onsets. A temporally advanced awareness of saccade completion was also found, independently of antedating effects. These results provide convergent evidence supporting antedating and differentiating it from other temporal biases

On the Influence of Pulse Shapes on Ionization Probability

We investigate analytical expressions for the upper and lower bounds for the ionization probability through ultra-intense shortly pulsed laser radiation. We take several different pulse shapes into account, including in particular those with a smooth adiabatic turn-on and turn-off. For all situations for which our bounds are applicable we do not find any evidence for bound-state stabilization.Comment: 21 pages LateX, 10 figure

Sagittal Growth of the Nasomaxillary Complex during the Second Trimester of Human Prenatal Development

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/66545/2/10.1177_00220345650440010401.pd

The Gaussian approximation for multi-color generalized Friedman's urn model

The Friedman's urn model is a popular urn model which is widely used in many disciplines. In particular, it is extensively used in treatment allocation schemes in clinical trials. In this paper, we prove that both the urn composition process and the allocation proportion process can be approximated by a multi-dimensional Gaussian process almost surely for a multi-color generalized Friedman's urn model with non-homogeneous generating matrices. The Gaussian process is a solution of a stochastic differential equation. This Gaussian approximation together with the properties of the Gaussian process is important for the understanding of the behavior of the urn process and is also useful for statistical inferences. As an application, we obtain the asymptotic properties including the asymptotic normality and the law of the iterated logarithm for a multi-color generalized Friedman's urn model as well as the randomized-play-the-winner rule as a special case

Hyperbolic planforms in relation to visual edges and textures perception

We propose to use bifurcation theory and pattern formation as theoretical probes for various hypotheses about the neural organization of the brain. This allows us to make predictions about the kinds of patterns that should be observed in the activity of real brains through, e.g. optical imaging, and opens the door to the design of experiments to test these hypotheses. We study the specific problem of visual edges and textures perception and suggest that these features may be represented at the population level in the visual cortex as a specific second-order tensor, the structure tensor, perhaps within a hypercolumn. We then extend the classical ring model to this case and show that its natural framework is the non-Euclidean hyperbolic geometry. This brings in the beautiful structure of its group of isometries and certain of its subgroups which have a direct interpretation in terms of the organization of the neural populations that are assumed to encode the structure tensor. By studying the bifurcations of the solutions of the structure tensor equations, the analog of the classical Wilson and Cowan equations, under the assumption of invariance with respect to the action of these subgroups, we predict the appearance of characteristic patterns. These patterns can be described by what we call hyperbolic or H-planforms that are reminiscent of Euclidean planar waves and of the planforms that were used in [1, 2] to account for some visual hallucinations. If these patterns could be observed through brain imaging techniques they would reveal the built-in or acquired invariance of the neural organization to the action of the corresponding subgroups.Comment: 34 pages, 11 figures, 2 table