Steel plate shear walls (SPSWs) are a robust lateral load resistance structure because of their high ductility and efficient energy dissipation when subjected to seismic loads. This research investigates the performance an innovative infill web strip (IWS-SPSW) typical unstiffened steel wall (USPSW). As result, two 1:3 scale specimens IWS-SPSW USPSW with single story bay were built cyclic loadi...

Agile methodologies are based on effective communication with the customer. The ideal case is XP’s on-site customer. Unfortunately, in practice customer representatives are too busy to work with the development team all the time. Moreover, frequently there are many of them and each representative has only partial domain knowledge. To cope with this we introduced to our projects a proxy-customer...

14.1 Members Kenji Ono (Team Leader) Jorji Nonaka (Researcher) Mikio Iizuka (Researcher) Chongke Bi (Postdoctoral Researcher) Daisuke Sakurai (Postdoctoral Researcher) Kazunori Mikami (Technical Staff) Tomohiro Kawanabe (Technical Staff) Seiji Fujino (Senior Visiting Scientist) Naohisa Sakamoto (Visiting Scientist) Masahiro Fujita (Visiting Technician) Kentaro Oku (Visiting Technician) Steve Pe...

User stories allow customers to easily communicate desired specifications as part of Agile Software Development methods. When elicited from groups instead of individuals, the number of stories generated and the comprehensiveness of the stories is likely to increase. We present a 2 X 2 study design involving group vs. individual user story brainstorming with one or two sentence vs. unlimited use...

Motivated by the Hankel determinant evaluation of moment sequences, we study a kind of Pfaffian analogue evaluation. We prove an LU -decomposition analogue for skew-symmetric matrices, called Pfaffian decomposition. We then apply this formula to evaluate Pfaffians related to some moment sequences of classical orthogonal polynomials. In particular we obtain a product formula for a kind of q-Cata...

The ‘radioactive dice’ experiment is a commonly used classroom analogue to model the decay of radioactive nuclei. However, the value of the half-life obtained from this experiment differs significantly from that calculated for real nuclei decaying exponentially with the same decay constant. This article attempts to explain the discrepancy and suggests modifications to the experiment to minimize...

Male and female high school and college students viewed a DVD about a love story. Youth who more readily empathized with media characters were more likely to perceive same-sex characters as role models and were better able to understand the story content. The findings suggest that fantasy empathy, in which viewers become deeply involved in narratives, may hold a key regarding the influence of m...