Due to the scarcity of useable land in Hong Kong, it is a common practice to reclaim land from the sea. The reclaimed land usually undergoes a long period of settlement that may affect building structures and underground facilities such as water supply and sewage systems built on the land. Measurements of land settlement can provide valuable data for assessing the impacts of land settlement and...

The landscapes of the Near East show both the first settlements and the longest trajectories of settlement systems. Mounding is a characteristic property of these settlement sites, resulting from millennia of continuing settlement activity at distinguished places. So far, however, this defining feature of ancient settlements has not received much attention, or even been the subject of systemati...

Large value payment and securities settlement systems are important components of an economy's nancial system. Many such systems are operated by central banks and are liquidity intensive. Central banks often provide inexpensive liquidity to facilitate settlement. This leads to a number of policy questions about the provision of such liquidity. To answer these questions, central banks need to un...

For sessile marine invertebrates with complex life cycles, habitat choice is directed by the larval phase. Defining which habitat-linked cues are implicated in sessile invertebrate larval settlement has largely concentrated on chemical cues which are thought to signal optimal habitat. There has been less effort establishing physical settlement cues, including the role of surface microtopography...

Progressive collapse is a chain reaction of failures propagating throughout a portion of the structure disproportionate to the original local failure occurring when a sudden loss of a critical load‐bearing element initiates a structural element failure, eventually resulting in partial or full collapse of the structure. Both General Services Administration (GSA) and United States Department of D...

Granular materials are widely used in industrial processes despite their complex and poorly understood mechanical behaviour both in static and dynamic regimes. A prototypical example is the settlement and compaction of a granular bed under vibrational loading. The elementary mechanisms of this process are still unclear and there is presently no established theory or methodology to predict the s...

The collapse of the Bronze Age Harappan, one of the earliest urban civilizations, remains an enigma. Urbanism flourished in the western region of the Indo-Gangetic Plain for approximately 600 y, but since approximately 3,900 y ago, the total settled area and settlement sizes declined, many sites were abandoned, and a significant shift in site numbers and density towards the east is recorded. We...

Due to urbanization and population increase, need for metro tunnels, has been considerably increased in urban areas. Estimating the surface settlement caused by tunnel excavation is an important task especially where the tunnels are excavated in urban areas or beneath important structures. Many models have been established for this purpose by extracting the relationship between the settlement a...

At present, reducing subgrade settlement of soft soil foundation is a key problem in high-speed railway construction. Pile-slab structure is a widely-utilized form of foundation structure to reduce the subgrade settlement in China. In order to save the engineering cost for high-speed railway construction in developing countries, the author developed a pile-slab structure and named it as the new...

Progressive collapse is a situation where local failure of a primary structural component leads to the collapse of adjoining members which, in turn, leads to additional collapse. Hence, the total damage is disproportionate to the original cause. The most common local failure in framed structure is assumed to be column failure. In this paper, a new approach for dynamic column removal in framed s...