The field of earthquake engineering is rapidly moving towards the use of sophisticated computational methods in engineering practice. This development is motivated by improved capabilities to numerically simulate nonlinear structural behavior during strong ground motion and the observation from recent earthquakes that the actual performance implied by simplified design guidelines is unclear. In...

We formulate a Multi-Element generalized Polynomial Chaos (ME-gPC) method to deal with long-term integration and discontinuities in stochastic differential equations. We first present this method for Legendre-chaos corresponding to uniform random inputs, and subsequently we generalize it to other random inputs. The main idea of ME-gPC is to decompose the space of random inputs when the relative...

The threshold filter is a frequently used technique in ultrasound B-scan to reject the small echoes contributed from backscattering that blur the tissue interface and reduce the image contrast. Note that using the threshold based on one value would simultaneously destroy local waveform features of the reflection echoes with amplitudes larger than threshold value. To resolve this problem, we dev...

Linear threshold elements are the basic building blocks of artificial neural networks. A linear threshold element computes a function that is a sign of a weighted sum of the input variables. The weights are arbitrary integers; actually, they can be very big integers-exponential in the number of the input variables. However, in practice, it is difficult to implement big weights. In the present l...

|r(xi + ex)− r(xi)| ≤M2 ‖ex‖ , |fx(xi + ex)− fx(xi)| ≤M3 ‖ex‖ for some positive number M1,M2, and M3. ri (xi), E(si|xi), fx(xi) are p-th order differentiable and the p-th order derivatives are bounded. Corresponding Author: Arthur Lewbel, Department of Economics, Boston College, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA, 02467, USA. (617)-552-3678, [email protected], https://www2.bc.edu/∼lewbel/. ...

We consider repairable threshold schemes (RTSs), which are threshold schemes that enable a player to securely reconstruct a lost share with help from their peers. We summarise and, where possible, refine existing RTSs and introduce a new parameter for analysis, called the repair metric. We then explore using secure regenerating codes as RTSs and find them to be immediately applicable. We compar...

The Spearman-Kärber method can be used to estimate the threshold value or difference limen in two-alternative forced-choice tasks. This method yields a simple estimator for the difference limen and its standard error, so that both can be calculated with a pocket calculator. In contrast to previous estimators, the present approach does not require any assumptions about the shape of the true unde...

This paper compares two methods for extracting room acoustic parameters from reverberated speech and music. An approach which uses statistical machine learning, previously developed for speech, is extended to work with music. For speech, reverberation time estimations are within a perceptual difference limen of the true value. For music, virtually all early decay time estimations are within a d...

Objectives. To better understand the consequences of whole or partial reliance on test scores as a screening mechanism for college or university admissions or for job placement or promotion. Methods. We introduce a simple hurdles/threshold model to study one particular mechanism that has been recently proposed to generate a ‘‘compromise’’ between race-normed or gender-normed standards for accep...