The Internet has provided traditional retailers a new means with which to serve customers. Consequently, many ‘‘bricks-and-mortar’’ retailers have transformed to ‘‘clicks-and-mortar’’ by incorporating Internet sales. Examples of companies making such a transition include Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble, etc. Despite the increasing prevalence of this practice, several fundamental questions re...

Abstract. A seasonal investigation of the occurrence of metacercariae in cyprinoid fish was conducted at the Kwae Noi Bamroongdan Dam, Phitsanulok Province, northern Thailand during December 2008-August 2009. A total 361 cyprinoid fish from 10 species were examined by artificial digestion method evaluating for metacercariae. The metacercariae determined were Haplorchis taichui, Haplorchis pumil...

Ground-based synthetic aperture radar (GBSAR) is a powerful tool used in monitoring structures, such as bridges and dams. However, despite the extremely short range of GBSAR interferometry, the atmosphere effects cannot be neglected. The permanent scatterer technique is an effective operational tool that utilizes a long series of SAR data and detects information with high accuracy. An algorithm...

In the Himalayan region of Nepal, stone masonry has been used for centuries as primary building material structures with or without mud mortar. three distinct remote rural villages, a thorough structural survey approximately 223 buildings was conducted an emphasis on their irregularities. The thickness walls frequently varied between floors, which caused mass Openings in front wall were not sym...

The damming of a river causes dangerous consequences on structure of the environment downstream of the dam, modifying the sediment composition, which impose major adjustments in longitudinal distribution of benthic community. The construction of Engenheiro Sérgio Motta Dam in the Upper Paraná River has caused impacts on the aquatic communities, which are not yet fully known. This work aimed to ...

China's historiographical traditions tell of the successful control of a Great Flood leading to the establishment of the Xia dynasty and the beginning of civilization. However, the historicity of the flood and Xia remain controversial. Here, we reconstruct an earthquake-induced landslide dam outburst flood on the Yellow River about 1920 BCE that ranks as one of the largest freshwater floods of ...

Recently, as a supplement of cement, the utilization of pozzolanic materials in cement and concrete manufacturing has increased significantly. This study investigates the scope to use pozzolanic wastes (slag, palm oil fuel ash and rice husk ash) as an alkali activated binder (AAB) that can be used as an alternative to cement. To activate these materials, sodium hydroxide solution was used at 1....

This paper presents a new isogeometric mortar contact formulation based on an extended finite element interpolation to capture physical pressure discontinuities at the contact boundary. The so called two-half-pass algorithm is employed, which leads to an unbiased formulation and, when applied to the mortar setting, has the additional advantage that the mortar coupling term is no longer present ...