a deterioration and the consequent status of feeblemindedness, this child must receive treatment different from that given the entirely normal individual. The mentality, both functional and structural, must be determined by an analysis which will reveal the phases where special training is required by the child. This analysis is made by the use of well defined and carefully administered tests. ...

This paper deals with the determination of machine numbers and production schedules in manufacturing environments. In this line, a two-stage fuzzy stochastic programming model is discussed with fuzzy processing times where both deterioration and learning effects are evaluated simultaneously. The first stage focuses on the type and number of machines in order to minimize the total costs associat...

The first aim of this study was to determine the age group at which marathon performance declines in top male and female runners and to compare that to the runners of average ability. Another aim of this of this study was to examine the age-related yearly decline in marathon performance between age group winners and the average marathon finisher. Data from the New York (NYC), Boston, and Chicag...

In this paper we present an elegant pixel-based texture synthesis technique which is able to generate visually pleasing results from source textures of both stochastic and structured nature. Inspired by the observation that the most common artefacts which occur when synthesizing textures are high frequency discontinuities, our technique tries to avoid these artefacts by forcing at least one of ...

Bridge maintenance and replacement optimization methods use deterioration models to predict the future condition of bridge components. The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework for bridge maintenance optimization using a deterioration model that takes into account aspects of the history of the bridge condition and maintenance, while allowing the use of efficient optimization technique...

The deterioration law of the system will usually be assumed to be Markovian, that is, the future process of the system depends only on its state at the present time and not on its past history. This model has been suggested by Klein [1]. There are at least two good reasons for describing deterioration by a Markov model. Firstly, if each component is approximately subject to an exponential failu...

This article argues that a significant shift is taking place in the sociological study of religion, and seeks to outline its main features. In order to do so it returns to Stephen Warner’s classic article of 1993 which drew a contrast between ‘old’ and ‘new’ paradigms in the sociology of religion. It develops Warner’s analysis by setting these paradigms in their European and American contexts r...

The Chilean government commissioned a quasi-experimental study with a pre-/postintervention design that had two general aims: (a) to assess infants' psychoaffective developmental levels (pre-intervention phase) and (b) to evaluate whether an intervention based on the promotion of socioemotional development modifies the infant's psychoaffective development. Sixty-two institutionalized infants an...

Pollinator decline has been linked to landscape change, through both habitat fragmentation and the loss of habitat suitable for the pollinators to live within. One method for exploring why landscape change should affect pollinator populations is to combine individual-level behavioural ecological techniques with larger-scale landscape ecology. A modelling framework is described that uses spatial...