Previously measured uncertainty shocks using the U.S. data show a hump-shape time path: Uncertainty rises for two years before its decline. Current literature on the effects uncertainty on macroeconomics, including housing, has not accounted for this observation. Consequently, the literature on uncertainty and macroeconomics is divided on the effects and the propagation mechanism of uncertainty...

This paper presents a numerical study on the mechanism of chloride migration in concrete. Unlike most of existing work, this study utilises multicomponent ionic transport models to reflect the influence of ionic interactions by coupling both mass conservation and Poisson’s equations. A series of 2-D, 3-phase models with different shapes and volume fractions of aggregates are developed to simula...

A laboratory study was made of the effects of crushed particles, both coarse and fine aggregate, on the stability of bituminous-aggregate mixtures. Crushed limestone and varying percentages of crushed and uncrushed gravel were used as the coarse aggregate while variation in the shape of the fine aggregate was obtained by using rounded natural sand and crushed-stone sand. These aggregates were u...

AIM To study the relationship between erythrocyte aggregation and physical parameters: temperature and pH. MATERIAL AND METHODS Aggregation was evaluated using computerized image analysis by Aggregate Shape Parameter (ASP), defined as the ratio of the aggregate projected area to its square perimeter, and erythrocyte aggregation index (EAI). EAI was measured and compared at different temperatu...

Aggregate size and shape measurements are increasingly becoming important issues in the mining, comminution, materials handling, and construction industries. Screening or sieving methods, today’s standard method of sizing stone materials, are simply too inefficient for some applications, excessively time consuming and costly for others, and do not provide enough data for yet other applications....

Although 125I-fibrinogen becomes associated with washed platelets from normal human subjects during ADP-induced shape change and aggregation, 125I-fibrinogen did not become associated with washed plateletes from a thrombasthenic subject during ADP-induced shape change and the platelets did not aggregate. Platelets from control and thrombasthenic subjects were treated with chymotrypsin, which is...

This paper introduces a new shape-based image reconstruction technique applicable to a large class of imaging problems formulated in a variational sense. Given a collection of shape priors (a shape dictionary), we define our problem as choosing the right elements and geometrically composing them through basic set operations to characterize desired regions in the image. This combinatorial proble...

In this paper we introduce a novel approach for inferring articulated spine models from images. A low-dimensional manifold embedding is created from a training set of prior mesh models to establish the patterns of global shape variations. Local appearance is captured from neighborhoods in the manifold once the overall representation converges. Inference with respect to the manifold and shape pa...