Vulnerability assessment of structures encounter many uncertainties like seismic excitations intensity and response of structures. The most common approach adopted to deal with these uncertainties is vulnerability assessment through fragility functions. Fragility functions exhibit the probability of exceeding a state namely performance-level as a function of seismic intensity. A common approach...

In this paper two external schema generation algorithms are presented. These algorithms are defined in the framework of the new external schema definition methodology for OODBs put forward in (Samos, 1995); they generate an external schema from a set of classes selected from those existing in an external schema definition repository. Their main characteristic is that they avoid the generation o...

In the fall of 2007, 2 years shy of her 100th birthday, Nobel laureate and National Academy of Sciences member Rita Levi-Montalcini yearned to start a new research project. Her idea stemmed from studies she had carried out more than half a century earlier, through which she unveiled and characterized the function of NGF. Time had taken its toll on her sight and hearing, but her keen observation...

The ways of placing decision making units (DMUs) in certain clusters are found as a subject in statistics, these ways usually are heuristic. The proposed clustering approach in this article considers preferences of DMUs. This study applies Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) DMUs are clustered by solving multi-objective linear problem (MOLP) and by considering preferences of each DMU at production ...

The project management discipline is expanding within many engineering activities. This discipline can facilitate strivings toward successful accomplishment of an engineering project. Therefore, many academic institutes teach the “project management” program. This study presents a novel approach that educates engineering students to become successful project managers based on contextual learnin...

Ambivalence, the presence of positive and negative reactions toward an object, typically involves the subjective experience of conflict. We investigate the role that the perceived validity of each side of an ambivalent attitude plays in producing subjective ambivalence (SA). Consistent with the metacognitive model of attitudes, we demonstrated that SA is reduced when people doubt either the pos...

The functional perspective on attitudes suggests that individuals will be more persuaded by advertisements that match their individual needs or attitude functions. Although previous research provided correlational support for this functional approach, the current study aimed to provide a stronger, experimental test. A pilot study validated situational manipulations of the value-expressive and k...

We view match as an operator that takes two graph-like structures (e.g., XML schemas) and produces a mapping between the nodes of these graphs that correspond semantically to each other. Semantic schema matching is based on the two ideas: (i) we discover mappings by computing semantic relations (e.g., equivalence, more general); (ii) we determine semantic relations by analyzing the meaning (con...