Abstract: In recent years, Malaysian Muslims seem to have experienced an upsurge in religious awareness and practices. The increasing trends could be seen from the mode of dressing especially among Muslim women such as wearing hijab niqab; use Arabic words replace Malay daily conversation greeting solat sembahyang, iftar buka puasa Eid Mubarak Selamat Hari Raya mushrooming programs events World...

The article discusses the usefulness of the state space model for analyzing insurance data. State space models can be viewed as as a framework to describe “smoothness” and purge data of “noise.” It is the smooth features in data which are critical for inference and extrapolation. We describe simple state models and apply them to two insurance data sets: one dealing with mortality, the other wit...

We examine two paintings by Piet Mondrian, and suggest that his depiction of tree foliages exhibit fractal patterns of a specific dimension. Our analysis implies that fractality may possess an aesthetic value that affected Mondrian, perhaps in a similar way as it inspired Jackson Pollock, another famous painter who incorporated fractality in several of his paintings. In recent years there has b...

Many recent systems for computer artwork generation with evolutionary algorithms have been interactive, relegating the task of evaluating new genotypes to their users. In contrast, we are interested in fully automating the entire evolutionary cycle applied to art work generation. We set out to produce a program that would generate artwork in the style of the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, who was...

Previous work has shown simulations of self-reproducing cells within the framework of a two-dimensional artificial chemistry. This earlier work used either a set of fixed rules to produce specific behaviors, or atomic enzymes governed by an extended set of meta rules. The difficulty with such enzymes is that their method of operation is outside of the system and thus cannot itself be reprogramm...

The 2017 Olympiad in Leiden hosted two Hex tournaments, board sizes 11×11 and 13×13. Three programs competed in each tournament. These are at present the only annual computer Hex tournaments. 11×11 is the original board size introduced by Piet Hein in 1942. Recently, all 1-move openings on 9×9Hex have been solved by computers, as have two 10×10 openings [9]. So, in recent years the 13×13 compet...

Galway, Ireland Dextran-tyramine Hydrogels for Cartilage Repair: Enhanced Chondrogenicity by Engraftment with Hyaluronic Acid and Heparin Liliana Moreira-Teixeira, Rong Jin, Piet Dijkstra, Clemens A. van Blitterswijk, Jan Feijen, Marcel Karperien Corresponding Author: [email protected] Department of Tissue Regeneration, MIRA Institute for Biomedical Technology and Technical Med...

We study nonparametric estimation of the sub-distribution functions for current status data with competing risks. Our main interest is in the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (MLE), and for comparison we also consider a simpler “naive estimator.” Both types of estimators were studied by Jewell, van der Laan and Henneman [Biometrika (2003) 90 183–197], but little was known about their ...