The assessment of the reliability of concrete structures during fire is becoming increasingly important due to the emergence of performance based design codes, the increased interest in decision making with respect to life time optimization of infrastructure, and the direct applicability of reliability calculations for insurance purposes. Most recent studies on the topic of the probabilistic ca...

Buildings should be designed to resist moderate ground motion with­ out structural damage and resist intense ground motion with controlled damage. However, most codes do not consider both these requirements explicitly and specify a single design earthquake that generally corresponds to intense ground motion. Investigated in this study is the response of one-story, asymmetric-plan systems design...

Quantum entanglement can help to increase the precision of optical phase measurements beyond the shot noise limit (SNL) to the ultimate Heisenberg limit. However, the N-photon parity measurements required to achieve this optimal sensitivity are extremely difficult to realize with current photon detection technologies, requiring high-fidelity resolution of N + 1 different photon distributions be...

In open-pit mine planning, the design of the most profitable ultimate pit limit is a prerequisite to developing a feasible mining sequence. Currently, the design of an ultimate pit is achieved through a computer program in most mining companies. The extraction of minerals in open mining methods needs a lot of capital investment, which may take several decades. Before the extraction, the p...

We address the experimental estimation of Gaussian quantum discord for a two-mode squeezed thermal state, and demonstrate a measurement scheme based on a pair of homodyne detectors assisted by Bayesian analysis, which provides nearly optimal estimation for small value of discord. In addition, though homodyne detection is not optimal for Gaussian discord, the noise ratio to the ultimate quantum ...