Mid-parental heights are widely used to help assess an individual child's growth. However, the methods in use vary, and most make no allowance for extremes of parental height. This study aimed to examine the actual distribution of parental heights in a survey population and the relation with their children's heights. The heights of 419 representatively sampled children aged 8-9 years were compa...

This study analyses the physical stature of runaway apprentices and military deserters based on advertisements collected from 18-century newspapers, in order to explore the biological welfare of colonial and early-national Americans. The results indicate that heights declined somewhat at mid-century, but increased substantially thereafter. The findings are generally in keeping with trends in mo...

Definition 1. An (archimedean) absolute value on a field k is a real valued function ‖ · ‖ : k → [0,∞) with the following three properties: (1) ‖x‖ = 0 if and only if x = 0. (2) ‖xy‖ = ‖x‖ · ‖y‖. (3) ‖x+ y‖ ≤ ‖x‖+ ‖y‖. A nonarchimedean absolute value satisfies the extra condition that (3’) ‖x+ y‖ ≤ max{‖x‖, ‖y‖}. If k is a field, we denote Mk the set of absolute values on k. As an abuse of nota...