Officers were called to East 38th Street and N. Mitthoeffer Road shortly before 10 p.m. where they found a body lying in the roadway.

Kevin Peoples has been mentored by Pete Jenkins, a defensive line master for decades.

Michael Wray won the first US series of Hell's Kitchen, but then his life took a turn for the worse.

A 14-year-old boy is facing charges in connection to a shooting in Centretown.

Zimbabwe market stall owner Aaron Makaya saw a business opportunity when President Emmerson Mnangagwa made face masks mandatory in public places to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

Hear about travel to Joshua Tree National Park in southern California as the Amateur Traveler talks to retired chief ranger from the park, Jeff Ohlfs.

Vancouver resident Hugo Huynh says he's never seen the man who got out of a minivan outside his home early Monday morning and uprooted the young tree.

"Pollinators were the key," says Edgar Mora, reflecting on the decision to recognise every bee, bat, hummingbird and butterfly as a citizen of Curridabat during his 12-year spell as mayor.

The 52nd edition of the Index of Streets, House Numbers & Lots in Hong Kong, Kowloon & New Kowloon, and the 21st edition of the New Territories Lot/Address Cross Reference Table on compact disc are now on sale.

Licences for using the street index and the cross reference table on computer networks are also available for sale.

An online version of the new street index and cross reference table is available on the Land Registry's website or the Integrated Registration Information System Online Services website.

They are designed to facilitate land record searches by correlating property addresses, building names or lot numbers.

The latest edition of the index features 444 amendments, 11 new streets, and the addition of 30 new lots, sections or subsections.

The latest edition of the table features 1,522 amendments, 10 new streets, and 1,146 new lots, sections or subsections.

Click here for order forms.

(Purdue University) Researchers at Purdue University have discovered that male treefrogs reduce their attractiveness to predators and parasites by overlapping their mating calls with their neighbors.

(University of California - Santa Cruz) Restoration ecologist Karen Holl has a simple message for anyone who thinks planting 1 trillion trees will reverse the damage of climate change: 'We can't plant our way out of climate change.'

Residents of Love Street, a section of Jones Town in Kington, say the area has been suffering from a chronic water shortage for more than two months. Daniesha Taylor, who has lived in the community for 30 years, is fearful that the lack of water...

A brook runs through my Grandmas farm, That used to carry gold. My Grandpa -Benjamin- Did not yield the land, To the British, who wanted it dammed. In 1968, they took him in, To have his appendix removed, And Grandma never remarried. My Aunt Alice, Was a witch. She flew in on broomsticks We never […]

It is raining outside. I am reminded that, Rain has rhythm. Rhythm has heart-beat, A beat, a Rat-a-tat-tat, Every city has its gangsters, its’ Street corners, its Unbelievers, every Heart has its beat, and Every beating heart, its’ God, Where folly is a pink bear, An African American, A bionic car round the bend, Sunlight […]

The United States' bellwether stock index, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, climbed another 455 points Friday, posting its first weekly gain in three weeks.

Forget about buying low and selling high. If you are worried about the recent volatility in the stock market, perhaps you should let the weather be your guide.

"24 1⁄2 Almond Tree Grove is the second story in the series In the Vales. A fun, light fantasy story about a young girl who inherits her Grammy's Cottage in the Vales, then starts to remember some of Grammy's favourite stories of her wee friends. The Almond Tree fairies are so helpful to us all, just read my wee story and see. "These stories allow you to enter into a parallel world set within our local community. They will take you on a journey to allow your imagination to tell the tales of the adventurous characters in a variety of unique situ's. The dialogue twists between now and then to provide a rich connection to the character's shenanigans, which motivates the reader to visualise beyond the text to create deeper meaning and connection to self, family and the community we live in."

Grandmothers -- Death -- Fiction.

Polish people -- Genealogy.

London : Dublin, 1843.

[London] : E. & F.N. Spon, 1881.

London : J. & A. Churchill, 1887.

[London?] : [Endell Street Military Hospital?], [1920] (Harlesden, London N.W. 10 : Leveridge & Co.)

London (Charlotte Street, Rathbone Place) : Published as the Act directs ... by Wm. Woollett, engraver to His Majesty, 4 June, 1778.

[between 1700 and 1799]

A Paris (rue St Jacques au dessus de celle des Mathurins au Gd. St. Remy : ches Huquier fils, graveur, [between 1700 and 1799]

Norwich : University of East Anglia : Social Work Today, 1984.

Tree data are ubiquitous because they model a large variety of situations, e.g., the architecture of plants, the secondary structure of RNA, or the hierarchy of XML files. Nevertheless, the analysis of these non-Euclidean data is difficult per se. In this paper, we focus on the subtree kernel that is a convolution kernel for tree data introduced by Vishwanathan and Smola in the early 2000's. More precisely, we investigate the influence of the weight function from a theoretical perspective and in real data applications. We establish on a 2-classes stochastic model that the performance of the subtree kernel is improved when the weight of leaves vanishes, which motivates the definition of a new weight function, learned from the data and not fixed by the user as usually done. To this end, we define a unified framework for computing the subtree kernel from ordered or unordered trees, that is particularly suitable for tuning parameters. We show through eight real data classification problems the great efficiency of our approach, in particular for small data sets, which also states the high importance of the weight function. Finally, a visualization tool of the significant features is derived.

Imad Bou-Hamad, Denis Larocque, Hatem Ben-Ameur

Source: Statist. Surv., Volume 5, 44--71.

Abstract:
This paper presents a non–technical account of the developments in tree–based methods for the analysis of survival data with censoring. This review describes the initial developments, which mainly extended the existing basic tree methodologies to censored data as well as to more recent work. We also cover more complex models, more specialized methods, and more specific problems such as multivariate data, the use of time–varying covariates, discrete–scale survival data, and ensemble methods applied to survival trees. A data example is used to illustrate some methods that are implemented in R.

Yen-Chi Chen.

Source: The Annals of Statistics, Volume 47, Number 4, 2174--2203.

Abstract:
In this paper we study the $alpha $-cluster tree ($alpha $-tree) under both singular and nonsingular measures. The $alpha $-tree uses probability contents within a set created by the ordering of points to construct a cluster tree so that it is well defined even for singular measures. We first derive the convergence rate for a density level set around critical points, which leads to the convergence rate for estimating an $alpha $-tree under nonsingular measures. For singular measures, we study how the kernel density estimator (KDE) behaves and prove that the KDE is not uniformly consistent but pointwise consistent after rescaling. We further prove that the estimated $alpha $-tree fails to converge in the $L_{infty }$ metric but is still consistent under the integrated distance. We also observe a new type of critical points—the dimensional critical points (DCPs)—of a singular measure. DCPs are points that contribute to cluster tree topology but cannot be defined using density gradient. Building on the analysis of the KDE and DCPs, we prove the topological consistency of an estimated $alpha $-tree.

Stephen Berg, Jun Zhu, Murray K. Clayton, Monika E. Shea, David J. Mladenoff.

Source: The Annals of Applied Statistics, Volume 13, Number 4, 2312--2340.

Abstract:
The Wisconsin Public Land Survey database describes historical forest composition at high spatial resolution and is of interest in ecological studies of forest composition in Wisconsin just prior to significant Euro-American settlement. For such studies it is useful to identify recurring subpopulations of tree species known as communities, but standard clustering approaches for subpopulation identification do not account for dependence between spatially nearby observations. Here, we develop and fit a latent discrete Markov random field model for the purpose of identifying and classifying historical forest communities based on spatially referenced multivariate tree species counts across Wisconsin. We show empirically for the actual dataset and through simulation that our latent Markov random field modeling approach improves prediction and parameter estimation performance. For model fitting we introduce a new stochastic approximation algorithm which enables computationally efficient estimation and classification of large amounts of spatial multivariate count data.

Bret Zeldow, Vincent Lo Re III, Jason Roy.

Source: The Annals of Applied Statistics, Volume 13, Number 3, 1989--2010.

Abstract:
Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) is a flexible machine learning algorithm capable of capturing nonlinearities between an outcome and covariates and interactions among covariates. We extend BART to a semiparametric regression framework in which the conditional expectation of an outcome is a function of treatment, its effect modifiers, and confounders. The confounders are allowed to have unspecified functional form, while treatment and effect modifiers that are directly related to the research question are given a linear form. The result is a Bayesian semiparametric linear regression model where the posterior distribution of the parameters of the linear part can be interpreted as in parametric Bayesian regression. This is useful in situations where a subset of the variables are of substantive interest and the others are nuisance variables that we would like to control for. An example of this occurs in causal modeling with the structural mean model (SMM). Under certain causal assumptions, our method can be used as a Bayesian SMM. Our methods are demonstrated with simulation studies and an application to dataset involving adults with HIV/Hepatitis C coinfection who newly initiate antiretroviral therapy. The methods are available in an R package called semibart.

David Corlin Marchand, Ioan Manolescu.

Source: Bernoulli, Volume 26, Number 3, 1665--1705.

Abstract:
We study randomly growing trees governed by the affine preferential attachment rule. Starting with a seed tree $S$, vertices are attached one by one, each linked by an edge to a random vertex of the current tree, chosen with a probability proportional to an affine function of its degree. This yields a one-parameter family of preferential attachment trees $(T_{n}^{S})_{ngeq |S|}$, of which the linear model is a particular case. Depending on the choice of the parameter, the power-laws governing the degrees in $T_{n}^{S}$ have different exponents. We study the problem of the asymptotic influence of the seed $S$ on the law of $T_{n}^{S}$. We show that, for any two distinct seeds $S$ and $S'$, the laws of $T_{n}^{S}$ and $T_{n}^{S'}$ remain at uniformly positive total-variation distance as $n$ increases. This is a continuation of Curien et al. ( J. Éc. Polytech. Math. 2 (2015) 1–34), which in turn was inspired by a conjecture of Bubeck et al. ( IEEE Trans. Netw. Sci. Eng. 2 (2015) 30–39). The technique developed here is more robust than previous ones and is likely to help in the study of more general attachment mechanisms.

Rungie (Family)

Forests and trees sustain and protect us, providing clean air and water, safeguarding biodiversity and acting as a buffer against climate change. For many people, they also offer food, shelter and employment. Here are ten facts about trees you might not be aware of: The  world’s forests store 289 gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon in their biomass alone. Deforestation accounts for up to 20% [...]

The challenge is to maintain and develop the socioeconomic benefits from forests while safeguarding the resource. FAO’s State of the World’s Forests (SOFO) 2014 argues that if the focus of data collection and policy is shifted from trees to people, forests can be sustainably managed to meet society’s growing demands. Read the most important findings: The formal forestry sector employs some 13.2 [...]