In situ measurements in existing bridges and structures are an important part of developing valid models. The complexity of the mechanisms and the environment makes it important to isolate the decisive parameters and to simplify them with a minimum of distortion. This can be done by studying real structures and try to imitate the observations with mathematical models and laboratory measurements...

To better understand the characteristics of athletes who tend to underperform under pressure, we investigated how (a) working memory (WM) capacity and (b) responsiveness of the dopamine system shape real-life performance under pressure. We expected that athletes with smaller WM capacity or a more responsive dopamine system (as operationalized with a risk-taking measure) are especially prone to ...

The amount of phylogenetically informative sequence data in GenBank is growing at an exponential rate, and large phylogenetic trees are increasingly used in research. Tools are needed to construct phylogenetic sequence matrices from GenBank data and evaluate the effect of missing data. Supermatrix Constructor (SUMAC) is a tool to data-mine GenBank, construct phylogenetic supermatrices, and asse...

It is demonstrated that the fragmentation functions at large momentum fraction play a key role in hard hadron production from relativistic proton-proton collisions. We find that this region of the fragmentation functions is not strongly constrained by the electron-positron data. This freedom can be used (together with the transverse-momentum distribution of partons) to reproduce hard pion-to-pr...

A new combining criterion, the Multiplicative Proportional Deviative Influence (MPDI) is presented for combining or aggregating multi-expert numerical judgments in Yes-or-No type illstructured group decision making situations. This newly proposed criterion performs well in comparison with the widely used aggregation means: the Arithmetic Mean (AM), and Geometric Mean (GM), especially in better ...

BACKGROUND Although its incidence has been steadily decreasing in Western countries, gastric cancer remains a leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide. The detection rate of early-stage cancers is improving; nevertheless, the majority of cases is still diagnosed at later stages with a poor prognosis. Furthermore, the results that can be achieved with surgery have reached a plateau of effectiven...