Due to lack of the proper and well behavior of steel moment-resisting connections subjected to the great and major earthquakes, excessive researches have been conducted to mitigate the damages on the primary elements and connections. Therefore, elimination of residual drift and increasing the plastic rotation capacity for the connectors in the panel zone are required. The main purpose of this s...

Whether level 1 predictors should be centered per cluster has received considerable attention in the multilevel literature. While most agree that there is no one preferred approach, it has also been argued that cluster mean centering is desirable when the within-cluster slope and the between-cluster slope are expected to deviate, and the main interest is in the within-cluster slope. However, we...

self-centering pier (scp) has been viewed as a remarkable accomplishment which is able to sustain major lateral loading with reduced structure damage in seismic engineering. stiffness deterioration observed in experiment is vital for the seismic performance of self-centering concrete pier. in this contribution, the associated stiffness deterioration with respect to the structural damage is mode...

This paper presents a family of methods for data translation in feature space, to be used in conjunction with kernel machines. The translations are performed using only kernel evaluations in input space. We use the methods to improve the numerical properties of kernel machines. Experiments with synthetic and real data demonstrate the effectiveness of data centering and highlight other interesti...

The experience of past prominent earthquakes establishes the fact that the structure’s catastrophes and casualties can be dramatically decreased through the use of self-centering systems. A promising post-tensioned self-centering yielding braced system (PT-SCYBS) has been developed, comprising of two main components, including the post-tensioned wires, exhibiting the desirable self-centering pr...

OBJECTIVES With an increasing number of studies highlighting regional social capital (SC) as a determinant of health, many studies are using multi-level analysis with merged and averaged scores of community residents' survey responses calculated from community SC data. Sufficient examination is required to validate if the merged and averaged data can represent the community. Therefore, this stu...