University of Missouri

About: University of Missouri is a education organization based out in Columbia, Missouri, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 41427 authors who have published 83598 publications receiving 2911437 citations. The organization is also known as: Mizzou & Missouri-Columbia.

Inferences on the Parameters of the Weibull Distribution

Abstract: The problems of estimation and testing hypotheses regarding the parameters in the Weibull distribution are considered in this paper. The following results are given: 1. Exact confidence intervals for the parameters based upon maximum likelihood estimators are presented. 2. A table of unbiasing factors (depending upon sample size) for the maximum likelihood estimator of the shape parameter is given. 3. Tests of hypotheses regarding the parameters and the power of the test regarding the shape parameter are developed and presented. 4. Sample sizes at which large sample theory may be useful are presented.

A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Avoidance (Relative to Approach) Personal Goals

Abstract: The results from this research supported our primary hypothesis that the adoption of avoidance (relative to approach) personal goals varies as a function of individualism-collectivism (across representations of this distinction). Interdependent self-construals were positively related and independent self-construals were negatively related to adoption of avoidance goals (Study 1), Asian Americans adopted more avoidance goals than non-Asian Americans (Study 2), andpersonsfrom South Korea and Russia adopted more avoidance goals than those in the United States (Studies 3 and 4, respectively). Studies 3 and 4 investigated andfound supportfor our secondary hypothesis that avoidance personal goals are a negative predictor of subjective well-being in individualistic (the United States), but not collectivistic (South Korea and Russia), countries. The findings are discussed in terms of other approach-avoidance constructs and motivational processes.

Women Engineering Students and Self‐Efficacy: A Multi‐Year, Multi‐Institution Study of Women Engineering Student Self‐Efficacy

Abstract: As our nation's need for engineering professionals grows, educators and industry leaders are increasingly becoming concerned with how to attract women to this traditionally male career path. Self-efficacy has been shown to be related to positive outcomes in studying and pursuing careers in non-traditional fields. This paper describes the results of two years of engineering self-efficacy data collected from women engineering students at five institutions across the U.S. This study adds to the growing body of self-efficacy literature via its multi-year, multi-institution design and helps to clarify the impact of the engineering curriculum on self-efficacy. Results indicate that while women students show positive progress on some self-efficacy and related subscales, they show a significant decrease on feelings of inclusion from the first to second measurement period and further suggest a relationship between ethnicity and feelings of inclusion. Additionally, correlations show that self-efficacy is related to women students' plans to persist in this predominantly male discipline.

Genomic scale profiling of nutrient and trace elements in Arabidopsis thaliana

Abstract: Understanding the functional connections between genes, proteins, metabolites and mineral ions is one of biology's greatest challenges in the postgenomic era. We describe here the use of mineral nutrient and trace element profiling as a tool to determine the biological significance of connections between a plant's genome and its elemental profile. Using inductively coupled plasma spectroscopy, we quantified 18 elements, including essential macro- and micronutrients and various nonessential elements, in shoots of 6,000 mutagenized M2 Arabidopsis thaliana plants. We isolated 51 mutants with altered elemental profiles. One mutant contains a deletion in FRD3, a gene known to control iron-deficiency responses in A. thaliana. Based on the frequency of elemental profile mutations, we estimate 2-4% of the A. thaliana genome is involved in regulating the plant's nutrient and trace element content. These results demonstrate the utility of elemental profiling as a useful functional genomics tool.

Automatic Tuberculosis Screening Using Chest Radiographs

Abstract: Tuberculosis is a major health threat in many regions of the world. Opportunistic infections in immunocompromised HIV/AIDS patients and multi-drug-resistant bacterial strains have exacerbated the problem, while diagnosing tuberculosis still remains a challenge. When left undiagnosed and thus untreated, mortality rates of patients with tuberculosis are high. Standard diagnostics still rely on methods developed in the last century. They are slow and often unreliable. In an effort to reduce the burden of the disease, this paper presents our automated approach for detecting tuberculosis in conventional posteroanterior chest radiographs. We first extract the lung region using a graph cut segmentation method. For this lung region, we compute a set of texture and shape features, which enable the X-rays to be classified as normal or abnormal using a binary classifier. We measure the performance of our system on two datasets: a set collected by the tuberculosis control program of our local county's health department in the United States, and a set collected by Shenzhen Hospital, China. The proposed computer-aided diagnostic system for TB screening, which is ready for field deployment, achieves a performance that approaches the performance of human experts. We achieve an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 87% (78.3% accuracy) for the first set, and an AUC of 90% (84% accuracy) for the second set. For the first set, we compare our system performance with the performance of radiologists. When trying not to miss any positive cases, radiologists achieve an accuracy of about 82% on this set, and their false positive rate is about half of our system's rate.