Fire disasters in informal settlements (also referred to as slums, shantytowns, favelas, etc.) are a major challenge worldwide, with single incident being able displace thousands of people. Numerous factors including dwelling spacing, material type, topography, weather, fuel loads, roads, and more influence fire spread. Conducting large-scale experiments quantify understand these phenomena is d...

Structured settlement underwriting is the underwriting of medically impaired lives for the purchase of an annuity to fund the settlement. Other than risk assessment, structured settlement (SS) underwriting has little in common with traditional life insurance underwriting. Most noteworthy of these differences is the relative lack of actuarial data on which to base decisions about mortality and t...

Previous comparative analyses of gross and net settlement have focused on the credit risk of the central counterparty in net settlement arrangements, and on the incentives for participants to alter the risk of the portfolio under net settlement. By modeling the trading economy that generates the demand for payment services, we are able to show some largely unexplored advantages of net settlemen...

this interdisciplinary paper aims at guangzhou’s development and its effects on surface andgroundwater quality taking the new city axis as an example. qualitative morphological analyses, field mappings, interviews and water sampling of standard in-situ and various hydrochemical parameters were conducted between 2007 and 2009 in order to examine the following research questions: which types of l...

Informal settlements suffer sanitation challenges of inadequate toilet facilities and a high accumulation rate faecal sludge due to land crises dense populations. However, settlement people who struggle with informal living, either way, manage keep their toilets running. This research explores management practices by in settlements. It took Notun-Bazar Char Khulna as case, purposefully sampled ...

Due to the scarcity of useable land in Hong Kong, it is a common practice to reclaim land from the sea. The reclaimed land usually undergoes a long period of settlement that may affect building structures and underground facilities such as water supply and sewage systems built on the land. Measurements of land settlement can provide valuable data for assessing the impacts of land settlement and...

As nuclear families have become increasingly less stable over the past quarter century, married couples have been faced with the difficult task of negotiating the terms by which marriage is ended. For parents, divorce involves questions revolving around the care and sustenance of children. In this paper we investigate whether observed divorce settlements indicate that parents make trade-offs in...

Data fusion exists in different forms in different scientific communities. The term is used by the image community to address the problem of sensor fusion, where images from different sensors are combined. The term is also used by the database community for parts of the interoperability problem. The logic community uses the term for knowledge fusion. Usually, they can be classified into three l...

Monitoring urban growth and measuring urban sprawl is essential for improving urban planning and development. In this paper, we introduce a supervised approach for the delineation of urban areas using commonly available topographic data and commercial GIS software. The method uses a supervised parameter optimization approach along with buffer-based quality measuring method. The approach was dev...