The frequency and intensity of natural disasters have been increasing significantly over the past decades and this trend is predicted to continue. Natural disasters have a dramatic impact on human lives and on the socio-economic welfare of entire regions. They were identified in 2011 by the World Bank [The World Bank, 2011] as one of the major risks of the East Asia and Pacific region, which re...

People increasingly use social media to get first-hand news and information. During disasters such as Hurricane Sandy and the tsunami in Japan people used social media to report injuries as well as send out their requests. During social movements such as Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and the Arab Spring, people extensively used social media to organize their events and spread the news. As more peopl...

Hurricane Sandy was one of the deadliest and costliest of hurricanes over the past few decades. Many states experienced significant power outage, however many people used social media to communicate while having limited or no access to traditional information sources. In this study, we explored the evolution of various communication patterns using machine learning techniques and determined user...

Soft or weakly-consolidated sand refers to porous materials composed of particles (or grains) weakly held together form a solid but that can be easily broken when subjected stress. These do not behave as conventional brittle, linear elastic and the transition between these two regimes cannot usually described using poro-elastic models. Furthermore, geotechnical sampling techniques often result ...

In spite of the widespread adoption of virtualization and consolidation, there exists no consensus with respect to how to benchmark consolidated servers that run multiple guest VMs on the same physical hardware. For example, VMware proposes VMmark which basically computes the geometric mean of normalized throughput values across the VMs; Intel uses vConsolidate which reports a weighted arithmet...

We present the Onsager–Stefan–Maxwell thermodiffusion equations, which account for Soret and Dufour effects in multicomponent fluids. Unlike transport laws derived from kinetic theory, this framework preserves structure of isothermal Stefan–Maxwell separating thermodynamic forces that drive diffusion force drives heat flow. The transport-coefficient matrix is symmetric, second law thermodynamic...