The evolution of building codes typically produce design provisions that are expected to create safer and more accurate designs. We as engineers expect building codes to advance the state of the art with each successive edition. The 2009 International Building Code (IBC) and the Building Code Requirements for Structural Concrete (ACI 318-08) have significant revisions affecting the design of ti...

imam khomeini, the leader of the islamic revolution in pointing to the important events of contemporary history of iran i.e coming together of the shi'a clergies & safavid state, tobacco uprising, constitutional revolution, reza shah era, movement of nationalization of oil industry, 15th khordad uprising (1963) and so on – has noticed to the actual and positive role of the clergies in main...

This paper estimates reduced-form Phillips curves for Brazil with a framework of time series with unobserved components, in the spirit of Harvey (2011). However, we allow for expectations to play a key role using data from the Central Bank of Brazil’s Focus survey. Besides GDP, we also use industrial capacity utilization rate and IBC-Br index, as measures of economic activity. Our findings supp...

To improve accuracy and reliability, Boolean combination (BC) can efficiently integrate the responses of multiple biometric systems in the ROC space. However, BC techniques assume that recognition systems are conditionally-independent and that their ROC curves are convex. These assumptions are rarely valid in practice, where systems face complex environments, and are designed using limited enro...