Early, pre-code, reinforced concrete structures present undetermined resistance to earthquakes. This situation is particularly unacceptable in the case of essential facilities, such as healthcare structures. Amongst these, the Santa Maria Hospital – finished in 1953 with a total area of 120,000 m – in Lisbon, was designed without explicit consideration for earthquake loading. Given the crucial ...

In recent years, highway bridge load assessment has been recognised as an area through which savings can be made by avoiding unnecessary bridge refurbishment and replacement. Load effects in bridges result from single truck crossings or multiple-truck presence events which are, statistically, not identically distributed. Conventional approaches fit statistical distributions to mixtures of non-i...

The 3D structure of randomly polarized light fields is exemplified by its polarization singularities: lines along which the polarization is purely circular (C lines) and surfaces on which the polarization is linear (L surfaces). We visualize these polarization singularities experimentally in vector laser speckle fields, and in numerical simulations of random wave superpositions. Our results con...

Zipf's law is the most common statistical distribution displaying scaling behavior. Cities, populations or firms are just examples of this seemingly universal law. Although many different models have been proposed, no general theoretical explanation has been shown to exist for its universality. Here, we show that Zipf's law is, in fact, an inevitable outcome of a very general class of stochasti...

, i.e. just above the dissociation threshold, was carefully examined. Rotational distribution observed was compared with statistical one calculated by phase space theory. Two distinct types of rotational distributions were found; one of them exhibits non-statistical distribution while the other is statistical one expected by phase space theory. In the case that a vibronic energy of the initial ...

In this paper we discuss the effects of non-algorithmic load imbalance for three synchronization structures which appear in different algorithms using domain decomposition methods for solving PDE's on a hypercube machine. The synchronization structures are determined from the conditions related to the partitioning of a hypercube. To characterize the load imbalance effects we introduce a factor ...

A modified strip-yield model has been developed to simulate the plasticity-induced crack closure under the constant amplitude (CA) and a single overload loading conditions. The paper focuses on the simulation of the near tip crack profiles and stress distributions during the fatigue process. Detailed information on near-tip stress and displacement fields at the maximum load (Pmax), the minimum ...

Distributed content-based publish/subscribe systems to date suffer from performance degradation and poor scalability caused by uneven load distributions typical in real-world applications. The reason for this shortcoming is due to the lack of a load balancing solution, which have rarely been studied in the context of publish/subscribe. This paper proposes a load balancing solution specific to d...

After a large scale evacuation, authorities need to know the new and frequently changing population distributions in order to meet needs for housing, schools, health care, and other services. This paper reviews literature from the fields of demography and other disciplines to identify available administrative data sets that can form the basis of sound, relevant, and timely county-level populati...