Prenatal Neurogenesis in Autism Spectrum Disorders.

An ever-increasing body of literature describes compelling evidence that a subset of young children on the autism spectrum show abnormal cerebral growth trajectories. In these cases, normal cerebral size at birth is followed by a period of abnormal growth and starting in late childhood often by regression compared to unaffected controls. Recent work has demonstrated an abnormal increase in the number of neurons of the prefrontal cortex suggesting that cerebral size increase in autism is driven by excess neuronal production. In addition, some affected children display patches of abnormal laminar positioning of cortical projection neurons. As both cortical projection neuron numbers and their correct layering within the developing cortex requires the undisturbed proliferation of neural progenitors, it appears that neural progenitors lie in the center of the autism pathology associated with early brain overgrowth. Consequently, autism spectrum disorders associated with cerebral enlargement should be viewed as birth defects of an early embryonic origin with profound implications for their early diagnosis, preventive strategies, and therapeutic intervention

Bayesian and Frequentist Approaches to Hedonic Modeling in a Geo-Statistical Framework

We compare Least Squares, Maximum Likelihood and Bayesian approaches to estimation in a Hedonic context. The approaches are compared from theoretical and practical perspectives and from the viewpoint of a policy maker or urban planner. The approaches are applied to data on the property market in Bogota, Colombia. We find that no approach is unambiguously better than the others and recommend that choice of estimation technique should be predicated upon the characteristics of the policy problem at hand.Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

A Fast Eigen Solution for Homogeneous Quadratic Minimization with at most Three Constraints

We propose an eigenvalue based technique to solve the Homogeneous Quadratic Constrained Quadratic Programming problem (HQCQP) with at most 3 constraints which arise in many signal processing problems. Semi-Definite Relaxation (SDR) is the only known approach and is computationally intensive. We study the performance of the proposed fast eigen approach through simulations in the context of MIMO relays and show that the solution converges to the solution obtained using the SDR approach with significant reduction in complexity.Comment: 15 pages, The same content without appendices is accepted and is to be published in IEEE Signal Processing Letter