The Yuletide Factor: Cause for Perpetual Comfort and Joy brilliantly rises to the level of Tim Huff’s previous best-selling and award-winning works, Bent Hope and Dancing with Dynamite, challenging a status quo population to look for, and become, “Christmas people,” every day of the year. But, make no mistake; this is not just “another” Christmas book, but rather one that will be equally at home in a springtime picnic basket or on a summertime dock chair as it will in a December stocking hung by the chimney with care. Beyond its exhilarating collection of seasonal short stories, The Yuletide Factor takes readers on a timeless journey, touching down when and where even nuances of the Christmas spirit have left indelible legacies, often at the unlikeliest of times and in the most improbable of places. Prepare yourself for an unpredictable adventure in faith, an unapologetic summons for goodness, a fascinating exploration of the human spirit, and a tender invitation to the soul.

This book presents research work into the reliability of drinking water pipes. The infrastructure of water pipes is susceptible to routine failures, namely leakage or breakage, which occur in an aggregative manner in pipeline networks. Creating strategies for infrastructure asset management requires accurate modeling tools and first-hand experience of what repeated failures can mean in terms of socio-economic and environmental consequences. Devoted to the counting process framework when dealing with this issue, the author presents preliminary basic concepts, particularly the process intensity, as well as basic tools (classical distributions and processes). The introductory material precedes the discussion of several constructs, namely the non-homogeneous birth process, and further as a special case, the linearly extended Yule process (LEYP), and its adaptation to account for selective survival. The practical usefulness of the theoretical results is illustrated with actual water pipe failure data.

本书精选了人们最关注的与生活相关的最新科技问题1400余条,将其按照物理和化学、空间、地球、气候和天气、矿物、能源、环境、生物、植物、动物、人体、健康与药物、度量、工具和武器等分类,通过查阅权威资料,一一做答。