 Evaluate the impact on pipe performance and life expectancy of the transition (1991) from wall thickness class to pressure class designations in the manufacture and design standards for ductile iron pipes.  Study and compare historical failure rates of ductile iron pipes in a geographically diverse group of water utilities from North America and Australia.  Evaluate reliability and capabili...

This paper introduces the idea of a non-kinship-based Universal-family firm, an organizational form we developed based on interpreting historical writings in their socio-economic context. We analyzed Luke’s gospel with an eye toward drawing implications for the stewardship-agency debate in the contemporary family business literature. Our paper makes contributions at two important levels. In add...

For quantitative determination of lignin, we have invasive (gravimetric determination i. e. ASTM, TAPPI, SCAN) and non-invasive methods on our disposal. Invasive methods are not suitable for historical documents. On the other hand, several spectroscopic techniques are in use, based on IR and UV spectroscopy. The absorption of light of λ > 300 310 nm by pure cellulose is minimal and most UVspect...

This paper presents a scheme for generating paper texture of historical documents. A new entropy based segmentation algorithm is used to decompose the image of documents into the image of the paper background and the printing of the document. Statistical analysis allows filling in the gaps from the printing, yielding a blank sheet of paper with similar texture to the original document.

Hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity are two gender-specific personality dimensions that represent adherence to extremely traditional gender-role ideologies. The present studies were conducted to develop and validate a gender-neutral measure of adherence to these extreme stereotypic gender beliefs. From a pool of 142 potential items, item analyses resulted in an internally consistent 57-item Hy...

In this paper, we propose a novel junction detection method in handwritten images, which uses the stroke-length distribution in every direction around a reference point inside the ink of texts. Our proposed junction detection method is simple and efficient, and yields a junction feature in a natural manner, which can be considered as a local descriptor. We apply our proposed junction detector t...

Congenital and acquired forms of paralysis have usually been left in the hands of the family physician, supplemented by occasional visits to the nerve specialist or the shop for orthopsedic appliances ; and the treatment has been on the routine lines of electricitj* in some form, massage, hydrotherapeutics and nervine tonics. Hitherto the ordinary surgeon has shunned this class of case as much ...

Hundreds of millions of pages of microfilmed historical documents are not being digitised at this time due to insufficient individual demand to garner appropriate commercial attention and investment. This paper demonstrates that the cost of digitisation and online delivery can be lowered dramatically using a novel application of recent technological advancements in imaging, data processing and ...

A convertible bond is defined to be (e.g., Jorion [10]) a bond issued by a corporation that can be converted into the equity of that corporation at certain times using a predetermined exchange ratio. This entails the creation of new shares issued by the corporation if and when conversion occurs, and the existing shares are diluted by the creation of the new shares. The option to convert is sole...

Can part of Africa’s current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question empirically, I combined data from ship records with data from various historical documents reporting slave ethnicities, and construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during Africa’s slave trades between 1400 and 1900. I find a strong robust negative correlation b...