The assessment of the reliability of concrete structures during fire is becoming increasingly important due to the emergence of performance based design codes, the increased interest in decision making with respect to life time optimization of infrastructure, and the direct applicability of reliability calculations for insurance purposes. Most recent studies on the topic of the probabilistic ca...

We find that the high thermal conductivity of carbon nanotubes remains intact under severe structural deformations while the corresponding electrical resistance and thermoelectric power show compromised responses. Similar robust thermal transport against bending is found for boron nitride nanotubes. Surprisingly, for both systems the phonon mean free path exceeds the characteristic length of st...

Attaining the ultimate (Holevo) limit to the classical capacity of a quantum channel requires the receiver to make joint measurements over long code-word blocks. For a pure-state channel, we show that the Holevo limit can be attained by a receiver that uses a multisymbol unitary transformation on the quantum code word followed by separable projective measurements. We show a concatenated coding ...

The concept of the barbarian has been an enduring presence in the antiquarian and archaeological study of European societies. Indeed the idea of the barbarian as an adjective and concept continues to influence both scholarly and popular perceptions of Prehistory, the Ancient World and Early Medieval societies. Moving beyond studies of the shifting attitudes to the barbarian within successive an...

The radiation from the mixed layer into the interior of the ocean of near-inertial oscillations excited by a passing storm in the presence of the beta effect is reconsidered as an initial-value problem. Making use of the fact that the mixed layer depth is much smaller than the total depth of the ocean, the solution is obtained in the limit of an ocean that is effectively infinitely deep. For a ...