Linguistic Labels and Categorization in Infancy: Do Labels Facilitate or Hinder?

Although it is generally accepted that labels facilitate categorization in infancy, recent evidence suggests that infants and young children are more likely to process visual input when presented in isolation than when paired with nonlinguistic sounds or linguistic labels. These findings suggest that auditory input (when compared to a no‐auditory baseline) may hinder rather than facilitate categorization. This study assessed 8‐month‐olds' (n = 191) and 12‐month‐olds' (n = 81) abilities to form categories when images were paired with nonlinguistic sounds, linguistic labels, and when presented in isolation. Overall, infants accumulated more looking when visual stimuli were accompanied by sounds or labels; however, infants were more likely to categorize when the visual images were presented without an auditory stimulus.     

Popular Humor in the Post-Soviet Period

The question of the uniqueness [svoeobrazie] of Russian philosophy and its distinctive features has been around for more than a century. Since the 1840s, when Russian philosophers set about studying the history of philosophical thought in Russia, the question immediately arose as to whether one could speak of Russian philosophy as a distinctive [samobytnoe] and original phenomenon, or whether it would be more correct to speak of philosophy in Russia, i.e., the existence in Russia of philosophical ideas whose roots lay not in Russia but beyond its borders, while in Russia they are merely disseminated, but not born.     

Functional and dynamic magnetic resonance imaging using vector adaptive weights smoothing

We consider the problem of statistical inference for functional and dynamic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). A new approach is proposed which extends the adaptive weights smoothing procedure of Polzehl and Spokoiny that was originally designed for image denoising. We demonstrate how the adaptive weights smoothing method can be applied to time series of images, which typically occur in functional and dynamic MRI. It is shown how signal detection in functional MRI and the analysis of dynamic MRI can benefit from spatially adaptive smoothing. The performance of the procedure is illustrated by using real and simulated data.     

Steiner systems for two-stage disjunctive testing

The subject of this paper are some constructions of Steiner designs with blocks of two sizes that differ by one. The study of such designs is motivated by a combinatorial lower bound on the minimum number of individual tests at the second stage of a 2-stage disjunctive testing algorithm.     

Adaptive designs for selecting drug combinations based on efficacy–toxicity response

We propose a new adaptive procedure for dose-finding in clinical trials with combination of two drugs when both efficacy and toxicity responses are available. We model the distribution of this bivariate binary endpoint using the bivariate probit model. The analytic formulae for the Fisher information matrix are obtained, that form the basis for derivation of the locally optimal, minimax, Bayesian, and adaptive designs in the framework of optimal design theory.     

Losses of Expected Lifetime in the United States and Other Developed Countries: Methods and Empirical Analyses

Patterns of diversity in age at death are examined using e ^†, a dispersion measure that equals the average expected lifetime lost at death. We apply two methods for decomposing differences in e ^†. The first method estimates the contributions of average levels of mortality and mortality age structures. The second (and newly developed) method returns components produced by differences between age- and cause-specific mortality rates. The United States is close to England and Wales in mean life expectancy but has higher life expectancy losses and lacks mortality compression. The difference is determined by mortality age structures, whereas the role of mortality levels is minor. This is related to excess mortality at ages under 65 from various causes in the United States. Regression on 17 country-series suggests that e ^† correlates with income inequality across countries but not across time. This result can be attributed to dissimilarity between the age- and cause-of-death structures of temporal mortality reduction and intercountry mortality variation. It also suggests that factors affecting overall mortality decrease differ from those responsible for excess lifetime losses in the United States compared with other countries. The latter can be related to weaknesses of health system and other factors resulting in premature death from heart diseases, amenable causes, accidents and violence.     

Predictive event modelling in multicenter clinical trials with waiting time to response

A new analytic statistical technique for predictive event modeling in ongoing multicenter clinical trials with waiting time to response is developed. It allows for the predictive mean and predictive bounds for the number of events to be constructed over time, accounting for the newly recruited patients and patients already at risk in the trial, and for different recruitment scenarios. For modeling patient recruitment, an advanced Poisson-gamma model is used, which accounts for the variation in recruitment over time, the variation in recruitment rates between different centers and the opening or closing of some centers in the future. A few models for event appearance allowing for 'recurrence', 'death' and 'lost-to-follow-up' events and using finite Markov chains in continuous time are considered. To predict the number of future events over time for an ongoing trial at some interim time, the parameters of the recruitment and event models are estimated using current data and then the predictive recruitment rates in each center are adjusted using individual data and Bayesian re-estimation. For a typical scenario (continue to recruit during some time interval, then stop recruitment and wait until a particular number of events happens), the closed-form expressions for the predictive mean and predictive bounds of the number of events at any future time point are derived under the assumptions of Markovian behavior of the event progression. The technique is efficiently applied to modeling different scenarios for some ongoing oncology trials. Case studies are considered.     

Old and novel methods for estimating Feral Pigeons (Columba livia f. domestica) population size: a reply to Amoruso et al. (2013)

In a recent paper Amoruso et al. (2013) proposed a novel method for estimating population size of Feral Pigeons, the Superimposed Urban Strata (SUS) method. In our reply we firstly comment on the lack of a complete review of the available literature. Secondly we point out that the SUS method does not account for birds detection probability and thus it is just a simple index of abundance as many others proposed in recent years. Thirdly, we question the approach used by the authors to evaluate the reliability of their method. To conclude, we believe that the SUS method is not truly innovative and that further investigations are needed before considering it as a reliable way for estimating Feral Pigeons populations size.