Since 1962, the Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC) of the Food and Agriculture Organisation/World Health Organisation has been responsible for developing standards, guidelines and other recommendations on the quality and safety of food to protect the health of consumers and to ensure fair practices in food trade. The mission of the CAC remains relevant, but a number of factors have shown the n...

The decline in importance of private defined benefit plans in relation to defined contribution plans in the United States is a major issue of interest to pension actuaries. This decline has been attributed to numerous factors: costs of government regulation, societal and cultural changes, changed employer attitudes, and employees’ lack of understanding of defined benefit plans. It has also caus...

This paper introduces a discrete event simulation for crew assignments and crew movements as a result of train traffic, labor rules, government regulations and optional crew schedules. The software is part of a schedule development system, FRCOS (Freight Rail Crew Optimization System), that was co-developed by Canadian National (CN) Rail and Circadian Technologies, Inc. The simulation allows ve...

The catastrophic nature of seismic risk is attributed to spatiotemporal correlation of seismic losses of buildings and infrastructure. For seismic risk management, such correlated seismic effects must be adequately taken into account, since they affect the probability distribution of aggregate seismic losses of spatially distributed structures significantly, and its upper tail behavior can be o...

To understand the seismic damage characteristics of bottom frame-wall buildings and to study their seismic performance, the seismic damage outcomes of  bottom frame-wall structures in Du jiang weir by the Wen chuan earthquake on May 12,2008, China were field observed and studied. The assesment of the seismic damage to the bottom frame-wall masonry in Du jiang weir urban showed that the damage t...

Subsurface modeling from seismic and borehole data is important for reservoir prediction, geophysical exploration, and production. A reasonable model should honor borehole rock properties and conform to seismic structural and stratigraphic features. Such a subsurface model can be difficult to build in cases complicated by faults and unconformities. Automatic and semiautomatic methods have been ...

S U M M A R Y We use idealized subduction megathrust models to examine aseismic, frictional fault creep throughout the interseismic period. We consider rate-dependent and rateand state-dependent friction. When there is significant post-seismic creep surrounding locations of coseismic slip, the creep rates surrounding an asperity may be lower than the plate convergence rate late in the seismic c...

A geophysical seismic survey was conducted in the summer of 2001 off the northeastern coast of Sakhalin Island, Russia. The area of seismic exploration was immediately adjacent to the Piltun feeding grounds of the endangered western gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus). This study investigates relative abundance, behavior, and movement patterns of gray whales in relation to occurrence and proximi...

The instrumental seismic intensity of Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) uses three types of filters which consist of high-cut, low-cut and period functions. An extended function of the low-cut filter is used to evaluate the effect of long-period range on seismic intensity in the paper. An asymptotic filter processing of acceleration in the extended function is proposed to express seismic intens...

A stochastic approach to seismic inversion using the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) is proposed. Seismic depth and time image data are used as the input for EnKF stochastic seismic inversion. The sonic log is used to estimate source wavelet and create initial models for the inversion, which provides an efficient integration of sonic log data and seismic data. We use both travel time and waveform...