A series of bridge collapse take place in recent years, which cause people to pay more attention to bridge health monitoring and early warning. An intelligent health monitoring system for bridges is proposed after analyzing the functions and characteristics of the current bridge health monitoring system. The paper first introduce main functions of system and key technologies, then mainly introd...

We have introduced an early warning system for volatility regimes regarding Tehran Stock Exchange using Markov Switching GARCH approach. We have examined whether Tehran Stock Market has calmed down or more specifically, whether the surge in volatility during 2007-2010 global financial crises still affects stock return volatility in Iran.  Doing so, we have used a regime switching GARCH model.  ...

Despite the potential of new technologies and the improvements of early-warning systems since the 2004 Tsunami, damage and harm caused by disasters do not stop to increase. There is a clear need for better integrating the fragmented landscape of researchers and practitioners working on different aspects of decision support for disaster risk reduction and response. To demonstrate and discuss the...

OBJECTIVE A driving simulator was used to compare the effectiveness of increasing intensity (looming) auditory warning signals with other types of auditory warnings. BACKGROUND Auditory warnings have been shown to speed driver reaction time in rear-end collision situations; however, it is not clear which type of signal is the most effective. Although verbal and symbolic (e.g., a car horn) war...

A woman is riding an elevator when her fellow passengers start to sneeze. As she wonders what sort of sickness the other riders might be spreading, her immune system swings into action. If the bug being dispersed by the contagious sneezers is one the woman has met before, a battalion of trained immune cells—the foot soldiers of the so-called adaptive immune system—will remember the specifi c in...

Ten patients with Parkinson's disease performed a simple reaction time task in which, on hearing a tone, they pressed a button with the left thumb. In the first experiment tones sometimes occurred unannounced and at other times were preceded (by between 0 and 3200 ms) by a warning signal. The second experiment was identical to the first except that the subject had simultaneously to perform a si...

Positive frequency-dependent selection (FDS) is a selection regime where the fitness of a phenotype increases with its frequency, and it is thought to underlie important adaptive strategies resting on signaling and communication. However, whether and how positive FDS truly operates in nature remains unknown, which hampers our understanding of signal diversity. Here, we test for positive FDS ope...

To accommodate the staggering increase in federal litigation that has occurred in recent years, the federal judicial process has been gradually, but significantly, transformed. The number of federal judges has dramatically increased at both the trial and appellate levels.' The number of law clerks and "staff attorneys" employed in the courts of appeals also has grown dramatically.2 Moreover, an...