A Probabilistic Study Of Safety Criteria For Design

National Science Foundation Under Grant GK-1812

Alien Registration- Ellingwood, Clyde (Bancroft, Aroostook County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/27184/thumbnail.jp

Community College Chief Academic Officers\u27 Perceptions of the Pipeline for the Presidency

In response to research pointing to a growing executive leadership crisis in community colleges (CCs), with too few strong candidates entering the leadership pipeline for the presidency, I focused this study on individuals already in that pipeline. My goal was to develop an understanding of their perceptions of their own roles in the pipeline and the potential of faculty to enter the pipeline and ultimately achieve a presidency. Utilizing a qualitative research design, I explored the perceptions of eight individuals who occupy the pivotal position of chief academic officer (CAO) within the leadership pipeline at a CC, all recruited from a single state CC system. I carried out my research, in the form of interviews via Zoom and document collection, from March to June 2022. My goal was to gain a better understanding of how CC faculty are poised in executive job searches and how current CC administrators perceive their readiness to seek a position as president of a CC. Key among my findings drawn from the participant interviews and documents were the steps aspiring leaders among the faculty can take to prepare for leadership. First, faculty must be willing to carry out tasks, outside their regular teaching duties, that help them build experience. Second, they should become familiar with areas beyond their departments and the college environment, up through the state legislature. Third, they should seek to earn a doctorate if they have a degree no higher than a master’s degree. Finally, the data revealed that fundraising is an essential aspect of the president’s job. Therefore, as a faculty member moves up through the leadership pipeline, they must become comfortable with this aspect of the position. Through these results, I assembled a list of recommendations for guiding CAOs who want to mentor faculty interested in entering the leadership pipeline, which has implications for practice

Performance-based engineering for multiple hazards: the role of structural reliability and risk assessment

Buildings, bridges and other civil infrastructure facilities are designed by current codes and standards using provisions that invariably are prescriptive in nature. While facilities so designed usually possess adequate levels of safety under design-basis events, other environmental or man-made events may cause them to suffer damage or loss of function, leading to economic losses, with uncertain impacts on the building occupants, owners and the community that they serve. The new paradigm of performance-based engineering enables structural engineers to achieve more reliable and informative prediction of civil infrastructure behavior and control of performance across a range of hazards. When supported by a risk-informed decision framework founded on structural reliability principles, performance-based engineering provides stakeholders with a structured framework for thinking about performance objectives, uncertainty, and how public safety and socio-economic well-being may be threatened by the failure of civil infrastructure to perform under a spectrum of hazards

Alien Registration- Ellingwood, Laura E. (Bancroft, Aroostook County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/27185/thumbnail.jp

Reliability of Wood Systems Subjected to Stochastic Live Loads

Multiple-member wood structural systems are designed using the current National Design Specification with an increase in allowable bending stress of 15% to account for load sharing and partially composite action. Efforts are underway to develop Load and Resistance Factor Design (LRFD) procedures for engineered wood construction to enable design of wood structures to be performed in a similar fashion as design of steel or reinforced concrete structures. The proposed LRFD methodology includes a system factor derived by probabilistic analysis to account explicitly for load sharing among members in a wood structural system. Available statistical data on mechanical properties of individual pieces of lumber along with structural system and stochastic damage accumulation models can be utilized to evaluate system reliability and to develop LRFD design criteria that are consistent with a desired reliability

An approximate dynamic programming approach to food security of communities following hazards

Food security can be threatened by extreme natural hazard events for households of all social classes within a community. To address food security issues following a natural disaster, the recovery of several elements of the built environment within a community, including its building portfolio, must be considered. Building portfolio restoration is one of the most challenging elements of recovery owing to the complexity and dimensionality of the problem. This study introduces a stochastic scheduling algorithm for the identification of optimal building portfolio recovery strategies. The proposed approach provides a computationally tractable formulation to manage multi-state, large-scale infrastructure systems. A testbed community modeled after Gilroy, California, is used to illustrate how the proposed approach can be implemented efficiently and accurately to find the near-optimal decisions related to building recovery following a severe earthquake.Comment: As opposed to the preemptive scheduling problem, which was addressed in multiple works by us, we deal with a non-preemptive stochastic scheduling problem in this work. Submitted to 13th International Conference on Applications of Statistics and Probability in Civil Engineering, ICASP13 Seoul, South Korea, May 26-30, 201