Cascading failures have become major threats to network robustness due to their potential catastrophic consequences, where local perturbations can induce global propagation of failures. Unlike failures spreading via direct contacts due to structural interdependencies, overload failures usually propagate through collective interactions among system components. Despite the critical need in develo...

The determination of |Vcb| and |Vub| from semileptonic B decay is reviewed with a critical discussion of the theoretical uncertainties. Future prospects and limitations are also discussed.

Considering the vulnerability of double-layer grid space structures to progressive collapse phenomenon, it is necessary to pay special attention to this phenomenon in the design process. Alternate path method is one of the most appropriate and accepted methods for progressive collapse resistant design of structures. Alternate Path Method permits local failure to occur but provides alternate pat...

Habitat fragmentation is the primary cause of the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, but its underlying processes and mechanisms remain poorly understood. Studies of islands and insular terrestrial habitats are essential for improving our understanding of habitat fragmentation. We argue that the Three-Gorges Dam, the largest that humans have ever created, presents a unique grand-scale...

This paper is motivated by the following two related problems in complex networks: (i) control of cascading failures and (ii) mitigation of traffic congestion. Both problems are of significant recent interest as they address, respectively, the security of and efficient information transmission on complex networks. Taking into account typical features of load distribution and weights in real-wor...

The collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC) has reminded us of the importance of structural integrity monitoring for improving disaster preparedness and response. A real-time system based on GPS and optical fibre sensors for monitoring structural integrity of the skyscraper has been proposed. In the designed system, there are 4 RTK GPS receivers atop the skyscraper on the vertices and 4 groups...

This paper presents a dynamic nonlinear numerical simulation of a 5-story full-scale steel frame structure based on Perform-3D. Flexibility-based fiber element and Maxwell model are adopted for structure member simulation after a post analysis of the shaking table test of a 4-story full-scale steel frame. The author simulates the low cyclic reciprocating load test for the steel members with fib...

Let G be a free-by-cyclic group or 2-dimensional right-angled Artin group. We provide an algebraic and geometric characterization for when each aspherical simplicial complex with fundamental isomorphic to has minimal volume entropy equal 0. In the nonvanishing case, we positive lower bound of dimension these two classes groups. Our results rely upon criterion vanishing groups uniform exponentia...