This paper first introduces briefly the disasters resulting from major earthquakes and analyze the risk function by examining its variables. It shows that, for earthquake risk, the future is more hazardous than the present and the past The paper then offers a comprehensive list of counter-measures against earthquake risk, from the simple ones dealing with the variables to insurance, reinsurance...

The moment magnitude M 7.8 earthquake in 1906 profoundly changed the rate of seismic activity over much of northern California. The low rate of seismic activity in the San Francisco Bay region (SFBR) since 1906, relative to that of the preceding 55 yr, is often explained as a stress-shadow effect of the 1906 earthquake. However, existing elastic and visco-elastic models of stress change fail to...

The irregularity and randomness of distributed energy sources’ (DERs) output power characteristic usually brings difficulties for grid analysis. In order to reliably and deterministically evaluate intermittent distributed generation’s active power output, a credible capacity index for active distribution network (ADN) is proposed. According to the definition, it is a certain interval that the s...

Large-margin discriminative training of hidden Markov models has received significant attention recently. A natural and interesting question is whether the existing discriminative training algorithms can be extended directly to embed the concept of margin. In this paper, we give this question an affirmative answer by showing that the sigmoid bias in the conventional minimum classification error...

We analyze the seismic moment-frequency relation in various depth ranges and for different seismic regions, using Flinn-Engdahl’s regionalization of global seismicity. Three earthquake lists of centroid-moment tensor data have been used: the Harvard catalog, the USGS catalog, and the HUANG et al. (1997) catalog of deep earthquakes. The results confirm the universality of the b-values and the ma...

BACKGROUND Since myocardial blood flow changes dynamically after reperfusion and since both hyperemia and impairment in microvascular function exist within the acutely reperfused bed, we sought to investigate the role of myocardial contrast echocardiography (MCE) in (1) defining the temporal variability in perfusion patterns after reflow and relating these to microsphere-derived blood flow; (2)...

Multi-car elevator (MCE for short) systems have been receiving increasing attention these days. An MCE has two or more cars in one shaft. It is difficult to control MCEs by using algorithms developed for single-car elevator systems, because MCEs need to avoid collision of the cars of the same shaft. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to control MCE systems, and show the effectiveness of our...

This paper explores several data mining and time series analysis methods for predicting the magnitude of the largest seismic event in the next year based on the previously recorded seismic events in the same region. The methods are evaluated on a catalog of 9,042 earthquake events, which took place between 01/01/1983 and 31/12/2010 in the area of Israel and its neighboring countries. The data w...

BACKGROUND Distinguishing ischemic from nonischemic origin in patients presenting with acute heart failure (AHF) not resulting from acute myocardial infarction has both therapeutic and prognostic implications. The aim of the study was to assess whether myocardial contrast echocardiography (MCE) can identify underlying coronary artery disease (CAD) as the cause of AHF. METHODS AND RESULTS Fift...

The maximal clique enumeration (MCE) problem has numerous applications in biology, chemistry, sociology, and graph modeling. Though this problem is well studied, most current research focuses on finding solutions in large sparse graphs or very dense graphs, while sacrificing efficiency on the most difficult medium-density benchmark instances that are representative of data sets often encountere...