4,945 research outputs found
Colonial gifts : family politics and the exchange of goods in British India, c.1780 ā1820
This paper situates Anglo-Indian gifts within a spectrum of
emotionally-charged exchange mechanisms through which material
objects circulated in British India. At one end of this spectrum was the
market, perhaps best exemplified by the public auctions at which the
personal possessions of deceased Anglo-Indians were sold to any buyer
who could pay the purchase price set at probate. At the other end
of the spectrum of exchange were gifts, commissions and bequests,
forms of exchange that offered the British colonial elite mechanisms
for combating the powerful centrifugal forces that operated within
Anglo-Indian familiesāmost notably disease, death and distance
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On the Utility of Conjoint and Compositional Frames and Utterance
This paper reports the results of a series of connectionist simulations aimed at establishing the value of different types of contexts as predictors of the grammatical categories of words. A comparison is made between ācompositionalā frames (Monaghan & Christiansen, 2004), and non-compositional or āconjointā frames (Mintz, 2003). Attention is given to the role of utterance boundaries both as a category to be predicted and as a predictor. The role of developmental constraints is investigated by examining the effect of restricting the analysis to utterance-final frames. In line with results reported by Monaghan and Christiansen compositional frames are better predictors than conjoint frames, though the latter provide a small performance improvement when combined with compositional frames. Utterance boundaries are shown to be detrimental to performance when included as an item to be predicted while improving performance when included as a predictor. The utility of utterance boundaries is further supported by the finding that when the analysis is restricted to utterance-final frames (which are likely to be a particularly important source of information early in development) frames including utterance boundaries are far better predictors than lexical frames
On the distribution of life annuities with stochastic interest rates.
In the traditional approach to life contingencies only decrements are assumed to be stochastic. In this contribution we consider the distribution of a life annuity (and a portfolio of life annuities) when also the stochastic nature of interest rates is taken into account. Although the literature concerning this topic is already quite rich, the authors usually restrict themselves to the computation of the first two or three moments. However, if one wants to determine e.g. capital requirements using more sofisticated risk measures like Value-at-Risk or Tail Value-at-Risk, more detailed knowledge about underlying distributions is required. For this purpose, we propose to use the theory of comonotonic risks developed in Dhaene et al. (2002a and 2002b), which has to be slightly adjusted to the case of scalar products. This methodology allows to obtain reliable approximations of the underlying distribution functions, in particular very accurate estimates of upper quantiles and stop-loss premiums. Several numerical illustrations confirm the very high accuracy of the methodology.Comonotonicity; Life annuity; Stochastic interest rates; Stop-loss premium;
PPAK Wide-field Integral Field Spectroscopy of NGC 628: I. The largest spectroscopic mosaic on a single galaxy
We present a wide-field IFS survey on the nearby face-on Sbc galaxy NGC 628,
comprising 11094 individual spectra, covering a nearly circular field-of-view
of ~6 arcmin in diameter, with a sampling of ~2.7 arcsec per spectrum in the
optical wavelength range (3700--7000 AA). This galaxy is part of the PPAK IFS
Nearby Galaxies Survey, (PINGS, Rosales-Ortega et al. 2009). To our knowledge,
this is the widest spectroscopic survey ever made in a single nearby galaxy. A
detailed flux calibration was applied, granting a spectrophotometric accuracy
of \,0.2 mag.
The age of the stellar populations shows a negative gradient from the inner
(older) to the outer (younger) regions. We found an inversion of this gradient
in the central ~1 kpc region, where a somewhat younger stellar population is
present within a ring at this radius. This structure is associated with a
circumnuclear star-forming region at ~ 500 pc, also found in similar spiral
galaxies. From the study of the integrated and spatially resolved ionized gas
we found a moderate SFR of ~ 2.4 Msun yr. The oxygen abundance shows a a
clear gradient of higher metallicity values from the inner part to the outer
part of the galaxy, with a mean value of 12~+~log(O/H) ~ 8.7. At some specific
regions of the galaxy, the spatially resolved distribution of the physical
properties show some level of structure, suggesting real point-to-point
variations within an individual \hh region. Our results are consistent with an
inside-out growth scheme, with stronger star formation at the outer regions,
and with evolved stellar populations in the inner ones.Comment: 31 pages, 22 Figuras, Accepted for Publishing in MNRAS (corrected
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Thermal insulation blanket material
A study was conducted to provide a tailorable advanced blanket insulation based on a woven design having an integrally woven core structure. A highly pure quartz yarn was selected for weaving and the cells formed were filled with a microquartz felt insulation
Discrete Surface Modeling Based on Google Earth: A Case Study
Google Earth (GE) has become a powerful tool for geological, geophysical and
geographical modeling; yet GE can be accepted to acquire elevation data of
terrain. In this paper, we present a real study case of building the discrete
surface model (DSM) at Haut-Barr Castle in France based on the elevation data
of terrain points extracted from GE using the COM API. We first locate the
position of Haut-Barr Castle and determine the region of the study area, then
extract elevation data of terrain at Haut-Barr, and thirdly create a planar
triangular mesh that covers the study area and finally generate the desired DSM
by calculating the elevation of vertices in the planar mesh via interpolating
with Universal Kriging (UK) and Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW). The generated
DSM can reflect the features of the ground surface at Haut-Barr well, and can
be used for constructingthe Sealed Engineering Geological Model (SEGM) in
further step.Comment: Proceedings of IEEE Conference, ICCSNT 2012, in Pres
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