While rural freeways generally have lower crash rates, interactions between driver behavior, traffic and geometric characteristics, and adverse weather conditions may increase the crash risk along some freeway sections. This paper examines the safety effects of roadway geometrics on crash occurrence along a freeway section that features mountainous terrain and adverse weather. Starting from pre...

The fiscal and financial reforms carried out in Mexico in 2000 have encouraged a widespread presence of rating agencies and have allowed several States and Municipalities to raise funds through bond offerings in the capital market. Any local government in Mexico intending to access credit and capital markets must count with at least one credit rating from one of the three main agencies: FitchRa...

Prior studies document significant abnormal stock returns contemporaneous with ratings changes. These findings suggest that ratings changes have information content. It is commonly assumed that stock investors use ratings changes to predict future performance, but in this study we investigate the possibility that investors use ratings changes to reinterpret previously released information (i.e....

From an anthropological point of view, the whole concept of a ‘path of progress’ in astronomical discovery is anathema, since it implicitly downgrades other cultural perspectives, such as the many ‘indigenous cosmologies’ that still exist in the modern world. By doing so, one risks provoking those who hold them and—as is most obvious in places such as Hawaii where the two ‘world-views’ come int...

Mineral Resource downgrades can be prevented by integrating better structural geological interpretations into project evaluations. Geological modelling for estimation is presented as a systematic process of analysis at the deposit-scale using drill-sampled grade data. The initial step in this to use Maximum Intensity Projection (MIP) rendering interpret axial symmetry and its orientation from i...

Since the introduction of the material point method to the graphics community, researchers tend to focus on defining the weighting function as a direct relation between a particle and the grid nodes in its immediate vicinity, e.g. a quadratic B-spline function, as shown in Figure 1a. GIMP is another alternative which downgrades the C requirement to C and then uses a convolution to resume the C ...