We study a two-person game played on graphs based on the widely studied chip-firing game. Players Max and Min alternately place chips on the vertices of a graph. When a vertex accumulates as many chips as its degree, it fires, sending one chip to each neighbour; this may in turn cause other vertices to fire. The game ends when vertices continue firing forever. Min seeks to minimize the number o...

Damage from a dormant-season windstorm in a 3-year-old Populus research trial differed among four clones and three spacings and between monoclonal and polyclonal plots. Clonal differences in susceptibility to toppling (or leaning) were associated with both above-and below-ground characteristics. Susceptible clones had less taper in the lower stem and more weight in branches on the upper stem. T...

L1-norm is better than L2-norm at dealing with noisy data and yielding blocky models, features crucial in many geophysical applications. In this report, we develop a hybrid-norm solver proposed by Claerbout (2009) to perform L1 regressions. The solver is tested on a 1-D field RMS velocity inversion, a 2-D regularized Kirchhoff migration inversion and a 2-D velocity analysis problem. The results...

This paper presents some basic concepts of linear and non linear fracture mechanics, with particular attention to some aspects related to hard soils and rocks such as the behaviour of cracks in compression. A non-linear method is presented in particular, which allows to simulate the process zone at the crack tip as a cohesive crack, where shear resistance decays from the peak to the residual va...

The high-velocity impact resistance of hot-pressed zirconum diboride with 30 volume percent silicon carbide was studied using a combined experimental and computational approach. Test specimens in the form of 2 mm thick polished disks were impacted with -0.8 mm diameter tungsten carbide spheres at velocities up to 320 d s . The intrinsic flexure strength of the specimens was -1000 MPa. The flexu...

This paper presents an experimental study and theoretical analyses on the monotonic and fatigue performance in bending of a polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) fiber-reinforced engineered cementitious composite (ECC) overlay system. The influence of the interfacial characteristics between overlay and old concrete substrate on the overall bending performance is investigated. The experimental results show th...