Computer generated images and animations are getting more and more common. They are used in many different contexts such as movies, mobiles, medical visualization, architectural visualization and CAD. Advanced ways of describing surface and light source properties are important to ensure that artists are able to create realistic and stylish looking images. Even when using advanced rendering alg...

International comparisons of construction industry performance are notoriously difficult. A recent comparative study, extensive in scope and using an innovative approach, is reviewed and questions raised regarding various aspects of the methodology adopted, the validity of the conclusions drawn and manner in which outcomes were reported. Particular areas of concern include the unequivocal state...

This paper presents a comparative study for three evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to the Optimal Reactive Power Planning (ORPP) problem: evolutionary programming, evolutionary strategy, and genetic algorithm. The ORPP problem is decomposed into Pand Q-optimization modules, and each module is optimized by the EAs in an iterative manner to obtain the global solution. The EA methods for the ORPP pro...

X-ray phase-contrast imaging is an effective approach to drastically increase the contrast and sensitivity of microtomographic techniques. Numerous approaches to depict the real part of the complex-valued refractive index of a specimen are nowadays available. A comparative study using experimental data from grating-based interferometry and propagation-based phase contrast combined with single-d...

The international studies program offers a varied interdisciplinary humanities curriculum, global in scope and designed to increase students’ knowledge about the cultures and traditions, languages, literature and media, history, values, concerns, and aspirations of peoples in different countries and regions of the world. The goal of the program is ultimately also to both broaden students’ compa...

The international studies program offers a varied interdisciplinary humanities curriculum, global in scope and designed to increase students’ knowledge about the cultures and traditions, languages, literature and media, history, values, concerns, and aspirations of peoples in different countries and regions of the world. The goal of the program is ultimately also to both broaden students’ compa...

This article offers a brief comparative look at American and British jurisprudential pending selection reforms, and argues that American states could improve their appointive systems by incorporating modern personnel recruitment and hiring practices. To restore public confidence in the courts, people must believe that judges exercise legitimate authority, undistorted by personal or partisan pre...

The problem of estimating continuous-time autoregressive process parameters from discrete-time data is considered. The basic approach used here is based on replacing the derivatives in the model by discrete-time di erences, forming a linear regression and using the least squares method. It is known, however, that all standard approximations of the highest order derivative give a biased least sq...

We propose a game theoretic model of large elections that incorporates the assumption that mandate matters. This innovation is motivated by empirical evidence that US Representatives with larger victory margins on average vote in a more partisan manner. Without relying on preference for voting, this new model predicts strictly positive limiting turnout rates in a costly voting environment as th...

The pivotal purpose of this paper is to introduce a scheme for watermarking of digital images in which one can embed some secret text in an encrypted manner and a secret image more than once in the host image, starting from different pixel positions based on the key. All this can be done without violating any of the desirable properties of the standard watermarking algorithms. The key plays a p...