Assume there exists information in past data that relates to future trends. This is the case with our physical world. It allows physics models to predict exactly how fast an apple will fall. With historical data in the physical world, such as the apple has been 8m above the surface for a long time and that the apple's stem breaks at t = 0, it is possible to predict where the apple will be in th...

As part of the new macroeconomic modelling project at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, considerable effort has been directed towards constructing an historical estimate of the productive capacity of the New Zealand economy. The technique documented in this paper augments the stochastic-trend estimation approach of the Hodrick-Prescott (1997) filter with information from broad macroeconomic rela...

We used the so called "land-bridge island" or "nested-subsets" theory to test the resilience of a highly fragmented and perturbated waterbird metacommunity, after legal protection of 18 wetlands in the western Mediterranean. Sites were monitored during 28 years and two seasons per year. The metacommunity was composed by 44 species during breeding and 67 species during wintering, including shore...

The article deals with the sacred groves of the Balts in Lithuania and presents the linguistic background, the historical documents from the 12th– 18th century, the key folklore motifs of the topic, as well as selected examples of groves. The article also discusses possible relationships between pre-Christian religious traditions connected with the sacred groves and the ones which have survived...

The Master of Liberal Arts provides the chance to practice the methods of interdisciplinary inquiry that are the hallmark of a rigorous liberal arts education. As a student in the program, one can explore questions of identity through art, literature, and religion; analyze the politics of race in fiction, historical documents, the visual arts, and music; debate ethical choices presented by fict...

Document binarization is an active research area for many years. The choice of the most appropriate binarization algorithm for each case proved to be a very difficult procedure itself. In this paper, we propose a new technique for the validation of document binarization algorithms. Our method is simple in its implementation and can be performed on any binarization algorithm since it doesn’t req...

An enduring problem in electoral systems is that of "disproportionality," i.e., the mismatch between a party's percentage of the popular vote and its percentage of legislative seats. Such disproportionality is quite common and extreme cases are easy to find in the real word. To give just one example, the Liberal Party in Britain polled 13.8% of the national vote in 1979 but was rewarded with on...

This paper addresses a special problem with historical document images where handwritten characters from the reverse side appear as noise on the front side and even interfere with the front side characters. A novel method to extract clear textual images from interfering and overlapping areas of text is presented here. The proposed algorithm is interesting in that, with an observation that the e...

The Master of Liberal Arts provides the chance to practice the methods of interdisciplinary inquiry that are the hallmark of a rigorous liberal arts education. As a student in the program, one can explore questions of identity through art, literature, and religion; analyze the politics of race in fiction, historical documents, the visual arts, and music; debate ethical choices presented by fict...