Just as he mounted, there came a breath of wind. It was not much, but it was enough. The nearby tree suddenly dumped the snow from its branches, sending up a cloud of powdery white. The chilling load plopped onto the back of Ben, who stood beneath. With a startled yelp, the red-and-white patched border collie shot forward, directly underneath Snowstorm. Chaos ensued. Whinnying shrilly, Snowstorm lurched backward. Instinctively, Josephine dodged sideways right to the ridge's edge to avoid a collision, and one of her groping hooves found nothing but thin air behind. Slipping on the wet rocks, the mare lunged forward. She succeeded in regaining her footing, but not before the sudden, jolting movements dislodged Father's one-handed grip on her mane. Clawing desperately for a handhold, Father tumbled from Josephine's back and disappeared over the edge of the ridge. Following five peaceful years, foreclosure threatens the Whitlock family's farm. After Father's accident, Nathanael and William take upon themselves the responsibility of coming up with a solution. Their ideas, however, are continually thwarted by an unseen opponent, and a ferocious predator threatens the farm throughout the duration of the thirty-day trial.

Wing Shadows Over Tennessee is a volume of poetry that tills and furrows through a planting of metaphors, myths, and memories. At the plow the poet turns words and shapes from the landscape of Walden Ridge, the Cumberland Plateau where the gardener works with a language that tries to capture how poems grow and harvested through the writing process. The vocabulary of birds and the barks of dogs speak through a cathedral of trees as the poet wanders among the seasons.

The authority on building empirical models and the fitting of such surfaces to data—completely updated and revised Revising and updating a volume that represents the essential source on building empirical models, George Box and Norman Draper—renowned authorities in this field—continue to set the standard with the Second Edition of Response Surfaces, Mixtures, and Ridge Analyses, providing timely new techniques, new exercises, and expanded material. A comprehensive introduction to building empirical models, this book presents the general philosophy and computational details of a number of important topics, including factorial designs at two levels; fitting first and second-order models; adequacy of estimation and the use of transformation; and occurrence and elucidation of ridge systems. Substantially rewritten, the Second Edition reflects the emergence of ridge analysis of second-order response surfaces as a very practical tool that can be easily applied in a variety of circumstances. This unique, fully developed coverage of ridge analysis—a technique for exploring quadratic response surfaces including surfaces in the space of mixture ingredients and/or subject to linear restrictions—includes MINITAB® routines for performing the calculations for any number of dimensions. Many additional figures are included in the new edition, and new exercises (many based on data from published papers) offer insight into the methods used. The exercises and their solutions provide a variety of supplementary examples of response surface use, forming an extremely important component of the text. Response Surfaces, Mixtures, and Ridge Analyses, Second Edition presents material in a logical and understandable arrangement and includes six new chapters covering an up-to-date presentation of standard ridge analysis (without restrictions); design and analysis of mixtures experiments; ridge analysis methods when there are linear restrictions in the experimental space including the mixtures experiments case, with or without further linear restrictions; and canonical reduction of second-order response surfaces in the foregoing general case. Additional features in the new edition include: New exercises with worked answers added throughout An extensive revision of Chapter 5: Blocking and Fractionating 2k Designs Additional discussion on the projection of two-level designs into lower dimensional spaces This is an ideal reference for researchers as well as a primary text for Response Surface Methodology graduate-level courses and a supplementary text for Design of Experiments courses at the upper-undergraduate and beginning-graduate levels.

In 1849, Virginia began a bold railroad expansion toward the Ohio River and its lucrative trade connections. The project's plan covered 423 miles and called for piercing two mountain chains with three railroads. The Blue Ridge Railroad was the shortest of these but crossed the most mountainous terrain. At times, hired slaves, who prepared the tracks, and Irish immigrants, who blasted the tunnels, faced challenges that seemed almost insurmountable. Many were killed by explosions and falling rock. Those deaths often resulted in labor strikes. The unrest slowed progress and haunted chief engineer Claudius Crozet for seven years. In this first full-length history of the Blue Ridge Railroad, award-winning author Mary E. Lyons uses a wealth of historical documents to describe construction on what Crozet called "dangerous ground."