Wood shrinks anisotropically as it loses hygroscopic moisture. While longitudinal shrinkage (parallel to the grain) is nearly negligible in normal wood, transverse shrinkage (across the grain) is significant and characterized as tangential and radial shrinkage. The application of average tangential shrinkage values to a rectangular cross section results in errors, especially for boards cut from...

This paper proposes a novel image denoising technique based on the normal inverse Gaussian (NIG) density model using an extended non-negative sparse coding (NNSC) algorithm. Here, we demonstrate that the NIG density provides a very good fitness to the non-negative sparse data. In denoising process, by exploiting a NIG-based maximum a posteriori estimator (MAP) of an image corrupted by additive ...

This research aims to produce a compressed Earth block (CEB) product locally from soil collected North Jordan. The CEB mixture was further stabilized using oil shale (OS) and ordinary Portland cement (OPC). specimens were thoroughly characterized by studying their mechanical properties (compressive flexural strength) durability characteristics (erosion, absorption, shrinkage tests). Eight mixtu...

This study was conducted to determine whether novel experimental low-shrinkage dimethacrylate co-monomers could provide low polymerization shrinkage composites without sacrifice to degree of conversion, and mechanical properties of the composites. Experimental composites were prepared by mixing 28.6 wt% of bisphenol-A-glycidyl dimethacrylate based resin matrix (bis-GMA) with various weight-frac...

In this dissertation we studied asymptotic properties of shrinkage estimators, and compared their performance with absolute penalty estimators (APE) in linear and partially linear models (PLM). A robust shrinkage M-estimator is proposed for PLM, and asymptotic properties are investigated, both analytically and through simulation studies. In Chapter 2, we compared the performance of shrinkage an...

Purpose. This study tested the null hypothesis that different classes of direct restorative dental materials: silorane-based resin, low-shrinkage and conventional (non-flowable and flowable) resin-based composite (RBC) do not differ from each other with regard to polymerization shrinkage, depth of cure or microhardness. Methods. 140 RBC samples were fabricated and tested by one calibrated opera...