The recent Mw 9.0 off the Pacific coast of Tohoku Earthquake and its aftershocks generated widespread strong shakings as large as ∼3000 Gal along the east coast of Japan. Here we systematically analyze temporal changes of material properties and nonlinear site response in the shallow crust associated with the Tohoku main shock, using seismic data recorded by the Japanese Strong Motion Network K...

This article develops ground-motion models (GMMs) by using a support vector regression (SVR) for western part of China. These SVR GMMs constitute mathematical equations that can predict the peak ground acceleration (PGA) and response spectral at different periods. Given earthquake magnitude (Mw), hypocentral distance (Rhypo) shear-wave velocity averaged over top 30 m soil (Vs30), predicted valu...

According to the requirements of nuclear safety regulations, power plants must be equipped with seismic instrumentation systems, which are mainly used for monitoring alarm and automatic shutdown during an earthquake. Both second third generation NPPs adopt Peak Ground Acceleration (PGA). However, among acceleration characteristics, isolated prominent single high frequency peaks have no decisive...

A new nonstationary model is applied to represent seismic ground acceleration records. The model can be obtained by modulating both the amplitude and the frequency of a stationary process. It is not included in the class of oscillatory processes. Accelerograms recorded during the 1985 Michoacan earthquake in Mexico City are used to calibrate and evaluate the usefulness of the proposed and other...

We evaluated the ability of Doppler echocardiography to assess left ventricular performance in six open-chest dogs studied under various conditions. Intravenous infusions of nitroglycerin were used to vary preload, atrial pacing was used to control heart rate, and changes in inotropic state were induced by two different doses of dobutamine (5 and 10 micrograms/kg/min iv) and by administration o...

To address a variety of questions pertaining to the interactions between physical activity, musculoskeletal loading and musculoskeletal health/injury/adaptation, simple methods are needed to quantify, outside a laboratory setting, the forces acting on the human body during daily activities. The purpose of this study was to develop a statistically based model to estimate peak vertical ground rea...

Endurance Time Method (ET) is a dynamic analysis in which structures are subjected to intensifying accelerograms that are optimized in a way that seismic performance of structures can be estimated at different hazard levels with the best possible accuracy. For the currently available ET accelerograms, regardless of the shaking characteristic, an excitation level is recognized as a representativ...

BACKGROUND Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a versatile technique for examination of the cardiovascular system but only recently has assessment of myocardial ischaemia in coronary artery disease (CAD) become possible, for example by demonstrating abnormalities of regional ventricular contraction during stress. Global ventricular function during stress was assessed by MRI of aortic flow, whic...

and Applied Analysis 3 island of Taiwan. In this study, the chosen Kaohsiung Luchu science park is one of the major parks located in the southern part of Taiwan. This park has a total area of 571 hectares, which started construction in the year of 2001 and was completed in 2010. Various hightech industries, such as integrated circuits, precision machines, optoelectronic components, computer per...