Steel Plate Shear Wall (SPSW) is an emerging seismic load-resistant system that, compared to other systems, enjoys the advantages of stable ductile behavior, fewer detailing requirements, rapid constructability, and economy. American seismic provisions decree that a SPSW should be designed as a moment frame with a web infill plate. Specifically, in case of buildings taller than 160 ft, it decre...

An irreversible investment opportunity has value V governed by Brownian motion with upward drift and random expiration. Human subjects choose in continuous time when to invest. If she invests before expiration, the subject receives V −C: the final value V less a given avoidable cost C. The optimal policy is to invest when V first crosses a threshold V ∗ = (1+w∗)C, where the option premium w∗ is...

BACKGROUND The results of Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) on time-to-event outcomes that are usually reported are median time to events and Cox Hazard Ratio. These do not constitute the sufficient statistics required for meta-analysis or cost-effectiveness analysis, and their use in secondary analyses requires strong assumptions that may not have been adequately tested. In order to enhance ...

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my adviser Michael Zieve for teaching me to fish. I would like to thank Jeffrey Lagarias for helpful feedback in writing this thesis. I would like to thank my family (Peter, Susan, and Holly), my beautiful girlfriend Becky, and the community of Michigan graduate students for keeping me sane.

[1] The strong jet, with a speed between 500 and 600 m/s, is inferred in the equatorial region of Saturn by combining the nadir and limb observations of Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) aboard the Cassini spacecraft. A similar jet was discovered on Jupiter (F. M. Flasar et al., 2004a). These discoveries raise the possibility that intense jets are common in the equatorial stratospheres of ...

In this paper statistical and time series models are used for determining the random drift of a dynamically Tuned Gyroscope (DTG). This drift is compensated with optimal predictive transfer function. Also nonlinear neural-network and fuzzy-neural models are investigated for prediction and compensation of the random drift. Finally the different models are compared together and their advantages a...

PURPOSE Age-related changes in motion sensitivity have been found to relate to reductions in various indices of driving performance and safety. The aim of this study was to investigate the basis of this relationship in terms of determining which aspects of motion perception are most relevant to driving. METHODS Participants included 61 regular drivers (age range 22-87 years). Visual performan...

semi-active base isolation system has been proposed mainly to mitigate the base drift of isolated structures while in most cases, its application causes the maximum acceleration of superstructure to be increased. in this paper, designing optimal semi-active base isolation system composed of linear base isolation system with low damping and magneto-rheological (mr) damper has been studied for co...

We show that deceleration in hazard functions (mortality curves) and the resulting mortality plateaus are an intrinsic property of time-to-event traits that are affected by many underlying genetic and environmental factors. We argue that just demonstrating that a mortality curve decelerates with age and reaches a plateau provides little information about the underlying biology associated with l...

In this paper a class of quartic trigonometric Bézier curve, called QT Bézier curve, with two shape parameters is presented. These curves not only inherit most properties of the usual quartic Bézier curves in the polynomial space, but also enjoy some other advantageous properties for shape modelling. The shape of the curve can be adjusted by altering the values of shape parameters while the con...