This study deals with modeling of production risk by means of a two-step procedure. In contrast to earlier studies of production risk, we do not immediately adopt restrictive functional forms for the risky production technology. We first test for the presence of production risk. If production risk is found to be present, the mean and risk functions are estimated separately. This allows the use ...

Language production is often argued to be adapted to addressees’ needs. As an instance of this, speakers produce fewer speech accompanying hand gestures if the speaker and the addressee cannot see each other. Yet there is also empirical evidence that speakers tend to base their language production on their own perspective, rather than their addressee’s. Therefore, speakers may gesture different...

An experimental study was conducted to investigate the potential use of phosphogypsum (PG) to produce self-leveling underlayments. The study was designed in two stages. Initially a phosphoanhydrite (PA) was produced by heating phosphogypsum at temperatures of 350 °C, 450 °C, 550 °C, and 650 °C. Two periods of heating were applied (2 and 4 h). The formation of anhydrite was determined by thermog...

The surface of a thin liquid film with nonconstant curvature flattens as a result of capillary forces. While this leveling is driven by local curvature gradients, the global boundary conditions greatly influence the dynamics. Here, we study the evolution of rectangular trenches in a polystyrene nanofilm. Initially, when the two sides of a trench are well separated, the asymmetric boundary condi...

There are few studies conducted on the short-term effects of land leveling on soil water holding capacity. The objectives of this study were to analyze the short-term effects of land leveling on the magnitudes, variances, spatial variability, and distributions of surface (0-20 cm) and subsurface (20-40 cm) soil properties of bulk density, field capacity, permanent wilting point, water holding c...

Resource allocation and leveling are among the top challenges in project management. Due to the complexity of projects, resource allocation and leveling have been dealt with as two distinct subproblems solved mainly using heuristic procedures that cannot guarantee optimum solutions. In this paper, improvements are proposed to resource allocation and leveling heuristics, and the Genetic Algorith...

This paper is an attempt to shed light on the effects of modernization, urbanization, monolingual educational system, and mass media as well as the process of globalization on dialect leveling among Persian dialects. In so doing, the first part of the paper elaborates on the relationship between globalization and sociolinguistics, and on the concept of standardization. Also, it discusses some ...