Objectives: This study reviews the impact of living in a high-rise building or in a fl at on an upper storey on the development and health of children. Methods: A literature search was conducted to identify original English (from PubMed, dated 1960–2008) and Japanese (from ‘Ichushi-Web’, dated 1983–2008) studies that have investigated the relationship between high-rise living and children’s dev...

Given the extent of tropical forest deforestation and as a number of conservation programmes and local communities rely on forest fragments, it has become important to understand how fragment exploitation by local communities affects forest structure and function. The effects of forest exploitation on forest structure and status of forest fragments were investigated in 20 nonreserved forest fra...

This paper summarize the principles main methods for structural dynamic identification and presents the experiences in using operational modal analysis techniques in Civil Engineering field. Shown black-box modelling of system for describes the input-output relation of the system and given its application to 11 storey reinforced concrete building. The monitoring, experimental details and data-p...

The traditional Extended Kalman filter (EKF) is a useful tool for structural parameter identification with limited observations. It is, however, not applicable when the excitations on the structure are unknown or the excitation locations are not monitored. A novel Extended Kalman filter approach referred to as the General Extended Kalman filter with unknown inputs (GEKF-UI) is proposed to estim...

As building structures frequently collapse and cause losses of lives and properties, due to excessive vibrations induced during earthquake periods, it is crucial to reduce the structural vibrations. This paper develops a Lyapunov-based controller for Magnetorheological (MR) dampers embedded in building structures to mitigate quake-induced vibrations. In this work, MR dampers are used as semi-ac...

Although the benefits of using timber in midand high-rise construction are undisputed, there are perceived shortcomings with respect to the ductility needed to provide seismic resistance and a corresponding lack of appropriate design guidance. Overcoming these perceived shortcomings will allow timber, and its wood product derivatives, to further expand into the multi-storey construction sector,...

Focuses on the benchmark control problems for seismically excited nonlinear buildings defined by Ohtori et al. (2000). This benchmark study focuses on three typical steel structures, 3-, 9and 20-storey buildings designed for the SAC project for Los Angeles in the California region. The first stage of applying the fuzzy controller to this benchmark study for the 3-storey building is reported. Th...

We use the bootstrap procedure proposed by Storey (2002) and Storey, Taylor, and Siegmund (2004) to estimate the proportion of zero-alpha funds in the population, 0. This resampling approach chooses from the data such that an estimate of the Mean Squared Error ( ) of b0 ( ) dened as (b0 ( ) 0) is minimized. First, we compute b0 ( ) using equation (5) of the paper across a range of values ( = 0...

A method to predict the column size for displacement based design of reinforced concrete frame buildings with higher target inter storey drift is reported here. The column depth derived from empirical relation as a function of given beam section, target inter-story drift, building plan features and common displacement based design parameters is used. Regarding the high drift requirement, a mini...

The aim of this paper is to report on an experimental study about Turkish Earthquake Code on suggested strengthening method. The proposed method uses existing brick infill walls and the strengthening is done with the application of external mesh reinforcement and plaster. 5 nonductile 1/2 scaled, one bay, two storey RC specimens were tested under a reversed cyclic loading. The first two specime...