This paper reports the findings of research examining the blast resistance of bridge piers that are designed in accordance with current knowledge and specifications to ensure ductile seismic performance. Blast testing was conducted on 1/4 scale ductile RC columns, and nonductile RC columns retrofitted with steel jacketing. The seismically designed RC and steel jacketed RC columns did not exhibi...

A thin, solid, circular wood disk, cut from the transverse plane of a tree stem, can be modeled as a cylindrically orthotropic elastic material. It is known that a stress singularity can occur at the center of a cylindrically orthotropic disk subjected to uniform pressure. If a solid cylindrically orthotropic disk is subjected to sinusoidal pressure distributions, then other stress singularitie...

Construction managers are decision makers who administer nontrivial processes. The replacement of highly experienced construction managers and other construction professionals is a laborious process for the industry. This paper introduces a conceptual framework for the construction management practice that serves as the foundation for the development of situational simulations. Situational simu...

U.S. Class I railways maintain their infrastructure through a mix of ordinary maintenance and periodic renewal of infrastructure components. Different railways use different proportions of ordinary maintenance and periodic renewal with little consensus as to the best combination. Furthermore, the cost-effectiveness of emphasizing one method over the other has not been analyzed using empirical d...

We conducted a systematic international review of tobacco smoking habits among medical students. Particular attention was paid to countries where smoking rates have been historically well-documented in local journals, but were less often included in larger international review articles. The methodology involved a search of relevant medical subject headings, after which the reference lists of jo...

INTRODUCTION Serious games (SGs) are interactive and entertaining digital software with an educational purpose. They engage the learner by proposing challenges and through various design elements (DEs; eg, points, difficulty adaptation, story). Recent reviews suggest the effectiveness of SGs in healthcare professionals' and students' education is mixed. This could be explained by the variabilit...

A direct adaptive neurocontroller is proposed to reduce structure response to earth vibrations by actively creating an equal but opposite force to that of the first mode force of the structure. While earthquake forces are generally considered to be unpredictable, the short-term predictions by the proposed neurocontrol architecture significantly reduce structure vibrations. To demonstrate its ge...

This research involves the development of a tool that can be used to assess the changes in traffic safety tendencies that result from changes in traffic flow. The tool uses data from single inductive loop detectors, converting 30-second observations of volume and occupancy for multiple freeway lanes into traffic flow regimes. Each regime has a specific pattern of crash types, which were determi...

The integrator delay zero (IDZ) model presented by Litrico and Fromion is a simple way to model a canal for control purposes that extends the classical integrator delay model. This analytical model gives a very good frequency domain approximation of the Saint-Venant transfer matrix for a pool possibly in backwater conditions. The present paper shows how this model can be used to model an irriga...

Literature regarding evaporation from soil, wet plant surfaces, and sprinkler droplets was examined, normalized, and inter­ preted. Much of the evaporation literature is difficult to compare and interpret; this paper offers comparisons and discussions of various findings by others as well as by the writers. Techniques of measuring and estimating evaporation from irrigation and rainfall are disc...