In recent decades, interest in the resistance of buildings and structures to progressive collapse has been increasingly sparked research communities. Although several experimental, numerical, analytical projects on robustness building frames under a column removal scenario have implemented, some aspects this problem remain understudied. These encompass failure mechanisms reinforced concrete wit...

Acute heart failure due to myocarditis is not common in Takayasu arteritis, let alone in combination with thrombosis affecting both ventricles and pulmonary arteries. The concomitant infection of non-tuberculosis mycobacterium further complicates the clinical scenario and poses challenges for implementation of tailored treatments. This case report describes a teenage girl with a history of inte...

Using Lyapunov stability theory, an adaptive backstepping controller is presented in this paper for optimal descent tracking. Unlike the traditional approach, the proposed control law can cope with input saturation and failure which enables the embedded autonomy of lander system. In addition, this control law can also restrain the unknown bounded terms (i.e., disturbance). To show the controlle...

Protection schemes for WDM mesh networks (dedicated-path, shared-path, etc.) are typically based on the single-failure scenario. When fiber-cut rate and network maintenance frequency are high, the network operator needs novel methods to handle multiple, near-simultaneous failures where different network components (including fiber spans) may have different failure rates. Service reliability det...

While most robots in human robot interaction scenarios take instructions from humans, the ideal would be that humans and robots collaborate with each other. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Communicating with Computer program proposes the collaborative blocks world scenario as a testbed for this. This scenario requires the human and the computer to communicate through natural langu...

Cyber attacks are an emerging threat to critical infrastructure systems worldwide. We focus on water, recognizing that water is vital for human health and to the function of other critical infrastructures. A cyber attack targets control and monitoring systems of a water utility, known as supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, and disrupts water operations. Current research is...

Many papers have studied the probability of majority cycles, also called the Condorcet paradox, using the impartial culture or related distributional assumptions. While it is widely acknowledged that the impartial culture is unrealistic, conclusions drawn from the impartial culture are nevertheless still widely advertised and reproduced in textbooks. We demonstrate that the impartial culture is...

Given the time, cost and risk associated with drug development, biopharmaceutical companies typically need to have a portfolio of drugs in development to be successful. Current pressures of cost and speed to market are driving the need for more effective means of assessing the value and risks of such drug portfolios. This paper presents research to generate a prototype computer tool developed t...

Ten Do It Better, Do They? An Empirical Analysis of an Old Football Myth In this paper we investigate how the expulsion of a player influences the outcome of a football match. Common sense implies a negative impact for the affected team. However, an old football myth suggests that such an expulsion might also be beneficial since it increases the team spirit as well as the efforts of the affecte...