User stories are a widespread instrument for representing requirements. They describe small user-oriented parts of the system and guide the daily work of developers. Often however, user stories are too coarse, so that misunderstandings or dependencies remain unforeseeable. Granularity of user stories needs to be investigated more, but at the same time is a hard-to-grasp concept. This paper inve...

In major cities around the world, urbanization and rising land prices have been driving an increase in real estate development adjacent to, and above in many cases, railway lines and other transportation corridors. Structure-borne sound and vibrations from traffic can be are annoying to human occupants; if high, they can also be disruptive to operation of manufacturing facilities, medical facil...

The inelastic response of beam-column connections significantly affects the seismic performances of steel frames. Accurate models of beam-column connections are important both in understanding the seismic behavior and in design. An effective approach towards developing accurate models for connections is self-learning simulation, which is presented in this paper. The latter simulation method has...

In the building construction, framed structures are frequently used due to ease of construction and rapid progress of work. Masonry infill panels have been widely used as interior and exterior partition walls for aesthetic reasons and functional needs. When infill walls are omitted in a particular storey, a soft storey is formed compared to much stiffer other stories. The masonry infill has bee...

Domain encoding is a common technique to compress the columns of a column store and to accelerate many types of queries at the same time. It is based on the assumption that most columns contain a relatively small set of distinct values, in particular string columns. In this paper, we argue that domain encoding is not the end of the story. In real world systems, we observe that a substantial amo...

I report on special features of a course on statistics and probabilities at my university, where future teachers of mathematics in primary school are instructed on en-active representations of statistical situations and on their analogue modelling. I also report on empirical work with future mathematics teachers of primary school in Baden Württemberg who have been instructed to introduce simple...

This study presents a novel method for accurately predicting the dynamic behavior of multistory frame buildings under earthquake ground motion. The proposed allows approximately estimating inter-story drift ratio, crucial parameter strongly associated with building damage, its distribution along height, and maximum value location. An equivalent continuous beam model rotation at base, consisting...