The fundamental period is one of the most critical parameters for the seismic design of structures. There are several literature approaches for its estimation which often conflict with each other, making their use questionable. Furthermore, the majority of these approaches do not take into account the presence of infill walls into the structure despite the fact that infill walls increase the st...

Natural rock joints infilled with soil materials may show a reduced shear strength, which influences rock mass stability. The aim of this paper is to experimentally investigate the shear behaviour of infilled rock joints, taking into account joint surface characteristics and the properties of the joint and infill materials. A new model for predicting the shear strength of infilled joints is pre...

The work presented herein sets out to investigate numerically, by means of nonlinear finite element analysis, the effect of un-reinforced concrete or masonry infill walls on the overall structural response of reinforced concrete frames under static monotonic and seismic loading. For this purpose, a nonlinear finite element package purpose built for the analysis of concrete structures is employe...

In spatial modeling the presence of measurement error, or “nugget”, can have a big impact on the sample behavior of the parameter estimates. This article investigates the nugget effect on maximum likelihood estimators for a onedimensional spatial model: Ornstein-Uhlenbeck plus additive white noise. Consistency and asymptotic distributions are obtained under infill asymptotics, in which a compac...

We present a Resource-Aware Model-Based Optimization framework RAMBO that leads to efficient utilization of parallel computer architectures through resource-aware scheduling strategies. Conventional MBO fits a regression model on the set of already evaluated configurations and their observed performances to guide the search. Due to its inherent sequential nature, an efficient parallel variant c...

An important determinant of health system performance is contracting. Providers often respond to financial incentives, despite the ethical underpinnings of medicine, and payers can craft contracts to influence performance. Yet contracting is highly imperfect in both single-payer and multi-payer health systems. Arguably, in a competitive, multi-payer environment, contractual innovation may occur...

The Application of Reusable Software Components Project (ARSC) formulated an experiment design, data collection plan, and procedures in preparation for a reuse experiment. The reuse experiment is currently in progress and the experiment planning and the results to date are presented. While the design, plan, and procedures were developed to support the investigation of software reuse, they, as w...

This paper presents an analytical approach to describe the behavior and mode of failure of infill masonry structures strengthened with fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) materials. The approach is used to simulate the response of strengthened infill masonry walls under the effect of out-of-plane uniformly distributed pressure simulating wind pressure. The approach includes a finite element analysis...

Different definitions of risk too easily lead to differences in the type and level of risk accepted by varying stakeholders involved in the remediation process and redevelopment of contaminated sites as a whole. This can be rooted in the way risk information is interpreted and evaluated: technical risk definitions are largely evidential and based on engineering or technical contents, whereas so...

We review what is known about amphibian limb regeneration from the prospective of developing strategies for the induction of regeneration in adult mammals. Prominent in urodele amphibian limb regeneration is the formation of a blastema of undifferentiated cells that goes on to reform the limb. The blastema shares many properties with the developing limb bud; thus, the outgrowth phase of regener...