introduction one of the most vulnerable water resources against contamination is ground water table. these resources are exposed to contamination in various forms. identifying and controlling contamination in these resources are more difficult and costly than surface waters. also because of the persistence of contamination in these resources, the best way to prevent their contamination is to id...

Bridges are potentially one of the most seismically vulnerable structures in the highway system during earthquake events. It is known that the seismic performance of transportation systems plays a key role in the post-earthquake emergency management. Hence, it is necessary to evaluate both physical and functional aspects of bridge structures. The physical aspects of the seismic performance...

The work group on cardiovascular and endocrine effects was asked to review the current state of knowledge about children's windows of vulnerability to developmental toxicants and to recommend how that information may be used to improve risk assessment and public health. We considered differences between structural defects, where periods of vulnerability are rather well defined, and functional d...

Vulnerability is a measure of the extent to which a community, structure, services or geographic area is likely to be damaged or disrupted by the impact of particular hazard. Current asset management practices focuses on studying factors that affect performance of isolated infrastructure networks and model a set of actions to control the expected performance of these networks. This approach ign...

We present a novel approach to quantify the vulnerability of a complex network, i.e., the capacity of a graph to maintain its functional performance under random damages or malicious attacks. The proposed measure represents a multiscale evaluation of vulnerability, and makes use of combined powers of the links' betweenness. We show that the proposed approach is able to properly describe some ca...

We present an interdisciplinary effort in the field of global environmental change, related to the understanding of the concept of “vulnerability”. We have used functional programming to capture the generic aspects of the myriad of definitions of vulnerability, and have used the resulting formalisation to learn something new about vulnerability and to write some better software for vulnerabilit...

objective: to compare resilience, positive/negative effect, and psychological vulnerability between fertile and infertile men. methods: the research sample consisted of 40 fertile and 40 infertile men who were selected among men who presented to an infertility clinic. to collect data, connor–davidson resilience scale, positive/negative affect schedule, and brief symptoms inventory were used. re...