As the November torrential rains swept over coastal British Columbia, heralding the more reactive winter field season, I began to think about landslide hazards. Geoscientists are routinely asked to try to accurately identify hazard and risk based on limited knowledge. On the surface this appears to be a straight forward task, more realistically however, it involves specialized skills, experienc...

A method of reducing general quaternion functions of first degree, i.e., linear quaternion functions, to quaternary canonical form is given. Linear quaternion functions, once reduced to canonical form, can be maintained in this form under functional composition. Furthermore, the composition operation is symbolically identical to quaternion multiplication, making manipulation and reduction of sy...

On top of previous work in automatic violin transcription we present a set of straight forward low level descriptors for assisting the transcription techniques and saving computational cost. Proposed descriptors have been tested against a database of 1500 violin notes and double stops.

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy was employed for the purpose of identifying samples of materials suspected of containing sodium fluoroacetate (Compound 1080). Acquisition of routine proton (1H) and carbon (13C) NMR spectra provided a straight-forward means for determining the presence of Compound 1080 in the samples and thus afforded a simple method for analysis and identification...

Ureteroscopy has evolved in many aspects, particularly in the flexibility and size of ureteroscopes. We have developed a new detachable access sheath to make ureteroscopic procedures more straight-forward and to reduce possible damage to delicate instruments used in the procedure.

We describe a set of straight-forward techniques for the precise ink rendering of lines, hatching patterns, and hatched portraits that we employed in a personal data graphics poster inspired by 18th and 19th century visualizations. We outline our approach and rendering techniques and also discuss the relationship and relevance of our techniques to illustrative visualization.

OBJECTIVES The objective of this work was to apply the two-stage clonal expansion model, with the intention to expand the literature on epidemiological applications of the model and demonstrate the feasibility of incorporating biologically based modelling methods into the widely used retrospective cohort study. METHODS The authors fitted the two-stage clonal expansion model model to three occ...

We introduce additively-weighted straight skeletons as a new generalization of straight skeletons. An additively-weighted straight skeleton is the result of a wavefront-propagation process where, unlike in previous variants of straight skeletons, wavefront edges do not necessarily start to move at the begin of the propagation process but at later points in time. We analyze the properties of add...