Estimation of the fast polarization direction of shear seismic waves that deviate from horizontal axis is a valuable approach to investigate the characteristics of the lower crust and uppermost mantle structures. The lattice preferred orientation of crystals, which is generally parallel to the downward or upward flow of the mantle or crust, is an important reason for the occurrence of fast axis...

Recent tendencies in concrete technology have been towards to high- performance concrete with a low water-cement ratio. However, high performance concretes have some problems. One of the problems is early-age cracking due to autogenous shrinkage. This study presents the results of an experimental investigation carried out to evaluate the autogenous shrinkage of high-strength concrete. Accordi...

Wood shrinks anisotropically as it loses hygroscopic moisture. While longitudinal shrinkage (parallel to the grain) is nearly negligible in normal wood, transverse shrinkage (across the grain) is significant and characterized as tangential and radial shrinkage. The application of average tangential shrinkage values to a rectangular cross section results in errors, especially for boards cut from...

This paper proposes a novel image denoising technique based on the normal inverse Gaussian (NIG) density model using an extended non-negative sparse coding (NNSC) algorithm. Here, we demonstrate that the NIG density provides a very good fitness to the non-negative sparse data. In denoising process, by exploiting a NIG-based maximum a posteriori estimator (MAP) of an image corrupted by additive ...

Geomagnetic field is a one of the candidates for creation of anisotropy in azimuth distribution of extensive air showers over the entered cosmic rays to the atmosphere. Here we present the question: Is there any azimuth anisotropy flux in the upper level of the atmosphere due to the geomagnetic field over the entered cosmic-rays? The obtained answer is: yes. This investigation showed an agreeme...

This study was conducted to determine whether novel experimental low-shrinkage dimethacrylate co-monomers could provide low polymerization shrinkage composites without sacrifice to degree of conversion, and mechanical properties of the composites. Experimental composites were prepared by mixing 28.6 wt% of bisphenol-A-glycidyl dimethacrylate based resin matrix (bis-GMA) with various weight-frac...

In this dissertation we studied asymptotic properties of shrinkage estimators, and compared their performance with absolute penalty estimators (APE) in linear and partially linear models (PLM). A robust shrinkage M-estimator is proposed for PLM, and asymptotic properties are investigated, both analytically and through simulation studies. In Chapter 2, we compared the performance of shrinkage an...