Based on our field investigations of landslide hazards in the Wenchuan earthquake, some findings can be reported: (1) the multi-aspect terrain facing empty isolated mountains and thin ridges reacted intensely to the earthquake and was seriously damaged; (2) the slope angles of most landslides was larger than 45°. Considering the above disaster phenomena, the reasons are analyzed based on shakin...

Pigeons categorized a moving target in terms of its speed and direction in an adaptation of the randomization procedure used to study human categorization behavior (Ashby & Maddox, 1998). The target moved according to vectors that were sampled with equal probabilities from two slightly overlapping bivariate normal distributions with the dimensions of speed and direction. On the average, pigeons...

Recombination generates new combinations of existing genetic variation and therefore may be important in adaptation and evolution. We investigated whether there was natural genetic variation for recombination frequencies and whether any such variation was environment related and possibly adaptive. Crossing over and gene conversion frequencies often differed significantly in a consistent directi...

stabilization of earth slopes with various proposed methods is one of the important concerns of geotechnical engineering. in this practice, despite numerous developments, design conservativeness and high costs of stabilization are the issues yet to be addressed. this paper not only deals with pile location optimization but also studies the effects of the pile length by using line segments slip ...

Direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation based on the array of three-component electromagnetic vector-sensors is considered within a biquaternion framework. A relationship is established between the biquaternion covariance and the combination of both complex covariance and cross-product. By exploiting this relationship, the DOA estimates can finally be obtained by diagonalizing the biquaternion co...

We survey the progress (or lack thereof!) that has been made on some questions about the p-adic slopes of modular forms that were raised by the first author in [Buz05], discuss strategies for making further progress, and examine other related questions.

block-flexure is the most common mode of toppling failure in natural and excavated rock slopes. in such failure, some rock blocks break due to tensile stresses and some overturn under their own weights and then all of them topple together. in this paper, first, a brief review of previous studies on toppling failures is presented. then, the physical and mechanical properties of experimental mode...