Earth-fill dams stability in steady state seepage condition is very important, especially during earthquakes. Numerical software analyses require accurate and realistic modeling of construction stages. Since earth-fill dams are constructed in different layers, so these conditions should be considered in software modeling to achieve a reasonable design. In this study, an earth-fill dam is modele...

This paper details the application of geometric proportional analogies in the sub-classification of polygons within a topographic (land cover) map. The first part of this paper concerns geometric proportional analogies that include attributes (fill-pattern and fillcolour). We describe an extension to the standard theory of analogy that incorporates attributes into the analogical mapping process...

Student contributions to research have been shown to effectively reflect on their communication and critical thinking skills. Short-term research courses offer opportunities for medical students to advance their research experience in subsequent high-demanding long-term research opportunities. The purpose of the present study was to describe the development, implementation, and evaluation of a ...

BACKGROUND Publication of scientific research papers is important for professionals working in academic medical centres. Quantitative measures of scientific output determine status and prestige, and serve to rank universities as well as individuals. The pressure to generate maximum scientific output is high, and quantitative aspects may tend to dominate over qualitative ones. How this pressure ...

INTRODUCTION The Lao People's Democratic Republic (PDR), like almost all countries, is faced with a shortage of qualified health workers in rural and remote areas. The situation has worsened due to the unbalanced distribution of the health workforce, resulting from a tendency to gravitate to more central areas. METHODS This cross-sectional study aimed to assess the proportion and associated f...

BACKGROUND A child's sleep pattern is important in defining his or her mental and physical well-being. Although we have reported previously on the utility of collecting 2 weeks of daily sleep logs, this type of record keeping is often onerous for the parents. Therefore, we established a new questionnaire, called the Japan Children's Study Sleep Questionnaire (JCSSQ), which is used to collect sl...

In this paper we consider a distributed optimization scenario in which agents of a network want to minimize the sum of local convex cost functions, each one depending on a local variable, subject to convex local and coupling constraints, with the latter involving all the decision variables. We propose a novel distributed algorithm based on a relaxation of the primal problem and an elegant explo...

A resolvent formalism is applied to the problem of inelastic scattering of an electron linearly coupled to a set of phonon modes. It is shown how the many phonon mode coupling and excitation can be reduced to a single phonon mode description, consistent with other approaches to the phenomenon of inelastic tunneling in heterostructures. A unifying connection is made with the phenomena of resonan...