The study presented in this paper analyses and investigates the possibility of introducing a general rapid methodology based on an artificial neural network (ANN) to assess seismic response existing reinforced concrete (RC) buildings. Starting from investigations carried out buildings located outskirts Bologna, 928 finite element models have been developed basis most recurrent data. input param...

Conventional design of steel plate shear walls SPSWs assumes that 100% of the story shear is resisted by each infill panel. Following this approach, strength provided by the boundary frame moment resisting action, which provides the SPSW with overstrength, is neglected. While this design assumption has a positive impact on seismic performance of SPSWs, no analytical work has been done to quanti...

In this paper, the authors summarize the results of a parametric study devoted to evaluate the seismic behavior of low to medium rise regular special moment-resisting steel frames with hysteretic energy dissipation devices mounted on chevron steel bracing. For that purpose, 270 different building models were designed considering typical story heights and bay widths used in Mexican practice. The...

The discovery of frame-dragging effects in binary pulsar timing experiments requires a compact companion with sufficiently large spin. A pulsar orbiting a fast rotating black hole could provide an appropriate test system. In this paper we address questions concerning the identification of a black hole companion in such a system, the measurability of the frame dragging caused by the rotation of ...

This paper describes the first determination of water-escape velocities in free-ranging sharks. Two approximations are used to estimate the final swimming speed at the moment of penetrating the water surface. Blacktip sharks were videotaped from below the surface and parameters were estimated by analysing the sequences frame by frame. Water-escape velocities averaged 6.3 ms(-1). These velocitie...

Assuming homogeneous conductivity and a limitless medium, a theoretic analysis accomplished by employing a model leads to the conclusion that dipole eccentricity produces a systemnatic error in the magnitude and direction of the instantaneous manifest vectors, the manifest QRS loops and the potential of the central terminal. Exaggeration of the electrical rotation of the heart and other electro...

This paper presents a novel feature descriptor for multiview human action recognition. This descriptor employs the region-based features extracted from the human silhouette. To achieve this, the human silhouette is divided into regions in a radial fashion with the interval of a certain degree, and then region-based geometrical and Hu-moments features are obtained from each radial bin to articul...