in this commentary, we argue that financial incentives are only one of many key components that employers should consider when designing and implementing a workplace wellness program. strategies such as social encouragement and providing token rewards may also be effective in improving awareness and engagement. should employers choose to utilize financial incentives, they should tailor them to ...

Prefabricated engineered solid wood panel construction systems can sequester and store CO2. Modular cross-laminated timber (CLT, also called cross-lam) panels form the basis of low-carbon, engineered construction systems using solid wood panels that can be used to build residential infill developments of 10 storeys or higher. Multi-apartment buildings of 4 to 10 storeys constructed entirely in ...

A thin layer of ductile fiber-reinforced mortar material referred to as Engineered Cementitious Composites, or ECC has been experimentally investigated as a seismic retrofit for unreinforced masonry infill walls in non-ductile reinforced concrete frames. Compression tests of masonry prisms retrofitted with 13mm of ECC were conducted representing the compression strut of a masonry infill under i...

A test chamber was projected and built (according to ISO 16000-9 Standard) to simulate atmospheric conditions experienced by rubber infill (when applied in synthetic turf pitches) and measure accurately the airborne emissions of pollutants such as dusts and volatile organic compounds (VOC), as well as pollutants present in leachates. It should be pointed out that standard ISO 16000-9 is only co...

A multi proxy approach was applied in the reconstruction of the architecture of Medieval horse stable architecture, the maintenance practices associated with that structure as well as horse alimentation at the beginning of 13th century in Central Europe. Finally, an interpretation of the local vegetation structure along Morava River, Czech Republic is presented. The investigated stable experien...

Apopular approach to handling constraints in surrogate-based optimization is through the additionof penalty functions to an infill sampling criterion that seeks objective improvement. Typical samplingmetrics, such as expected improvement tend to have multimodal landscapes and can be difficult to search. When the problem is transformed using a penalty approach the search can become riddled with ...

The use of surrogate models or metamodeling has lead to new areas of research in simulation-based design optimization. Metamodeling approaches have advantages over traditional techniques when dealing with the noisy responses and=or high computational cost characteristic of many computer simulations. This paper focuses on a particular algorithm, Efficient Global Optimization (EGO) that uses krig...

This study attempts to measure and characterize urban sprawl using its multiple dimensions in the Jamnagar city, India. The study utilized the multi-date satellite images acquired by CORONA, IRS 1D PAN & LISS-3, IRS P6 LISS-4 and Resourcesat-2 LISS-4 sensors. The extent of urban growth in the study area was mapped at 1:25,000 scale for the years 1965, 2000, 2005 and 2011. The growth of urban ar...

In order to improve the energy dissipation of the masonry infilled frame structure while decreasing the stiffening and strengthening effects of the infill panels, a new dry stacked panel (DSP) semi-interlocking masonry (SIM) infill panel has been developed. In this paper, the material properties of DSP and a traditional unreinforced masonry (URM) panel have been evaluated experimentally. A seri...