self-centering pier (scp) has been viewed as a remarkable accomplishment which is able to sustain major lateral loading with reduced structure damage in seismic engineering. stiffness deterioration observed in experiment is vital for the seismic performance of self-centering concrete pier. in this contribution, the associated stiffness deterioration with respect to the structural damage is mode...

In this paper, an analytical formula to calculate the radial stiffness of groove elastic support is presented. The influence of structure parameters on radial stiffness and homogeneity of radial stiffness is investigated as well. The accuracy and calculating speed of the analysis formula are compared to that of finite element method (FEM). Findings are as following: The calculating speed of ana...

Fulfilling the production objectives of a grassland-based beef system requires a robust management strategy to secure the best practicable use of forage resources with regard to the cattle demand. To address the challenging issue of designing such strategies, this article describes the application of an ontology of agricultural production systems to the generic conceptual model SEDIVER, which s...

Some studies on child labor have shown that, at the level of the household, greater land wealth leads to higher child labor, thereby casting doubt on the hypothesis that child labor is caused by poverty. This paper argues that the missing ingredient may be an explicit modeling of the labor market. We develop a simple model which suggests the possibility of an inverted-U relationship between lan...

We use the auxiliary principle technique to suggest and analyze an implicit method for solving the equilibrium problems on Hadamard manifolds. The convergence of this new implicit method requires only the speudomonotonicity, which is a weaker condition than monotonicity. Some special cases are also considered.

For architectural design decisions, a high number of goals and constraints has to be considered. For a proper management of their complexity and as a precondition for tool support, they have to be modeled explicitly. Existing approaches fail to provide a predictable, rigor decision-making as well as a to deal with incomplete or even partly contradicting information. This paper presents an appro...

The prevalence of implicit intergroup bias in adults underscores the importance of knowing when during development such biases are most amenable to change. Although research suggests that implicit intergroup bias undergoes little change across development, no studies have directly examined whether developmental differences exist in the capacity for novel implicit associations to form or change....

In this article an explicit method (relying on representation theory) to construct packings in Grassmannian space is presented. Infinite families of configurations having only one non-trivial set of principal angles are found using 2-transitive groups. These packings are proved to reach the simplex bound and are therefore optimal w.r.t. the chordal distance. The construction is illustrated by a...