Improving nutritional status through behavioral change: lessons from Madagascar

This paper provides evidence of the effects of a large-scale intervention that focuses on the quality of nutritional and child care inputs during the early stages of life. The empirical strategy uses a combination of double-difference and weighting estimators in a longitudinal survey to address the purposive placement of participating communities and estimate the effect of the availability of the program at the community level on nutritional outcomes. The authors find that the program helped 0-5 year old children in the participating communities to bridge the gap in weight for age z-scores and the incidence of underweight. The program also had significant effects in protecting long-term nutritional outcomes (height for age z-scores and incidence of stunting) against an underlying negative trend in the absence of the program. Importantly, the effect of the program exhibits substantial heterogeneity: gains in nutritional outcomes are larger for more educated mothers and for villages with better infrastructure. The program enables the analysis to isolate responsiveness to information provision and disentangle the effect of knowledge in the education effect on nutritional outcomes. The results are suggestive of important complementarities among child care, maternal education, and community infrastructure

Influence of Earthquake-Tsunami Sequence Induced Corrosion on Residual Seismic Capacity of Concrete Structures

Field investigations have highlighted the high likelihood of chloride ingress in reinforced concrete (RC) buildings submerged by seawater and covered by mud during an earthquake-tsunami (EQ-TS) sequence. Chloride attack through EQ-induced cracks or spalling can cause a high corrosion rate in the reinforcement, thereby compromising the long-term durability of the structure and its performance in future events. Typically, this deterioration process is neglected when assessing the future performance of frame structures in tectonically-active coastal regions. This study demonstrates the influence of EQ-TS-induced corrosion on the residual seismic capacity of modern RC frame structures. The analyses show an undesirable component-level failure mode switch to a shear-dominated mechanism. The median collapse fragility of the frame is also seen to be significantly influenced by the reinforcement corrosion. The outcome of this study raises questions on the post-tsunami management of both modern and older-type RC frame structures

A Bayesian approach for estimating the post-earthquake recovery trajectories of electric power systems in Japan

Post-disaster recovery modelling of engineering systems has become an important facet of catastrophe risk modelling and management for natural hazards. The post-disaster recovery trajectory of a civil infrastructure system can be quantified using (a) the initial post-disaster functionality level, Qo; (b) rapidity, h (i.e., the rate of functionality restoration); and (c) recovery time, Rt. This study uses a Bayesian estimation approach to derive a set of probabilistic models to estimate Qo, Rt, and h of electric power networks (EPNs) using post-earthquake recovery data from 16 large earthquakes in Japan between 2003 and 2022. The considered predictor (explanatory) variables include earthquake magnitude, year of occurrence, seismic intensity, and exposed population (PEX). Apart from being a simple and efficient stand-alone tool, the proposed data-driven models can be a useful benchmarking tool for simulation-based approaches for EPN recovery modelling

Accuracy and Uncertainty Analysis of Selected Methodological Approaches to Earthquake Early Warning in Europe

Earthquake early warning (EEW) is becoming an increasingly attractive real‐time strategy for mitigating the threats posed by potentially devastating incoming seismic events. As efforts accelerate to develop practical EEW‐based solutions for earthquake‐prone countries in Europe, it is important to understand and quantify the level of performance that can be achieved by the underlying seismological algorithms. We conduct a conceptual study on EEW performance in Europe, which explicitly focuses on the accuracy and associated uncertainties of selected methodological approaches. Twenty‐three events from four diverse European testbeds are used to compare the quality of EEW predictions produced by the Virtual Seismologist and PRobabilistic and Evolutionary early warning SysTem algorithms. We first examine the location and magnitude estimates of the algorithms, accounting for both bias and uncertainty in the resulting predictions. We then investigate the ground‐shaking prediction capabilities of the source‐parameter estimates, using an error metric that can explicitly capture the propagation of uncertainties in these estimates. Our work highlights the importance of accounting for EEW parameter uncertainties, which are often neglected in studies of EEW performance. Our findings can be used to inform current and future implementations of EEW systems in Europe. In addition, the evaluation metrics presented in this work can be used to determine EEW accuracy in any worldwide setting

Comparing the Performance of Regional Earthquake Early Warning Algorithms in Europe

Several earthquake early warning (EEW) algorithms have been developed worldwide for rapidly estimating real-time information (i.e., location, magnitude, ground shaking, and/or potential consequences) about ongoing seismic events. This study quantitatively compares the operational performance of two popular regional EEW algorithms for European conditions of seismicity and network configurations. We specifically test PRobabilistic and Evolutionary early warning SysTem (PRESTo) and the implementation of the Virtual Seismologist magnitude component within SeisComP, VS(SC), which we use jointly with the SeisComP scanloc module for locating events. We first evaluate the timeliness and accuracy of the location and magnitude estimates computed by both algorithms in real-time simulation mode, accounting for the continuous streaming of data and effective processing times. Then, we focus on the alert-triggering (decision-making) phase of EEW and investigate both algorithms’ ability to yield accurate ground-motion predictions at the various temporal instances that provide a range of warning times at target sites. We find that the two algorithms show comparable performances in terms of source parameters. In addition, PRESTo produces better rapid estimates of ground motion (i.e., those that facilitate the largest lead times); therefore, we conclude that PRESTo may have a greater risk-mitigation potential than VS(SC) in general. However, VS(SC) is the optimal choice of EEW algorithm if shorter warning times are permissible. The findings of this study can be used to inform current and future implementations of EEW systems in Europe

Elastic effects of vacancies in strontium titanate: Short- and long-range strain fields, elastic dipole tensors, and chemical strain

We present a study of the local strain effects associated with vacancy defects in strontium titanate and report the first calculations of elastic dipole tensors and chemical strains for point defects in perovskites. The combination of local and long-range results will enable determination of x-ray scattering signatures that can be compared with experiments. We find that the oxygen vacancy possesses a special property -- a highly anisotropic elastic dipole tensor which almost vanishes upon averaging over all possible defect orientations. Moreover, through direct comparison with experimental measurements of chemical strain, we place constraints on the possible defects present in oxygen-poor strontium titanate and introduce a conjecture regarding the nature of the predominant defect in strontium-poor stoichiometries in samples grown via pulsed laser deposition. Finally, during the review process, we learned of recent experimental data, from strontium titanate films deposited via molecular-beam epitaxy, that show good agreement with our calculated value of the chemical strain associated with strontium vacancies.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures, 4 table

Carrier mobility and scattering lifetime in electric double-layer gated few-layer graphene

We fabricate electric double-layer field-effect transistor (EDL-FET) devices on mechanically exfoliated few-layer graphene. We exploit the large capacitance of a polymeric electrolyte to study the transport properties of three, four and five-layer samples under a large induced surface charge density both above and below the glass transition temperature of the polymer. We find that the carrier mobility shows a strong asymmetry between the hole and electron doping regime. We then employ ab-initio density functional theory (DFT) calculations to determine the average scattering lifetime from the experimental data. We explain its peculiar dependence on the carrier density in terms of the specific properties of the electrolyte we used in our experiments.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

A simple method for N-M interaction diagrams of circular reinforced concrete cross sections

A novel analytical method is derived for the ultimate capacity interaction diagram (i.e., axial compression, N - bending moment resistance, M) of reinforced concrete (RC) columns with circular cross section. To this aim, the longitudinal rebar arrangement is replaced with a thin steel ring equivalent to the total steel area; moreover, according to modern design approaches, simplified stress–strain relationships for concrete and reinforcing steel are used. Illustrative applications demonstrate that the ultimate capacity computed by the proposed analytical approach agrees well with the results obtained by rigorous methods based on consolidated numerical algorithms. The new solution allows for a rapid, accurate assessment of circular cross section capacity by means of hand calculations; this is especially useful at the conceptual design stage of various structural and geotechnical systems. The method can be easily extended to more general configurations, such as multiple steel rings and composite concrete-steel sections

Cortisol-induced SRSF3 expression promotes GR splicing, RACK1 expression and breast cancer cells migration

Recent data have demonstrated that triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) with high glucocorticoid receptor (GR) expression are associated to therapy resistance and increased mortality. Given that GR alternative splicing generates mainly GRα, responsible of glucocorticoids action, we investigated its role in the regulation of RACK1 (Receptor for Activated C Kinase 1), a scaffolding protein with a GRE (Glucocorticoid Response Element) site on its promoter and involved in breast cancer cells migration and invasion. We provide the first evidence that GRα transcriptionally regulates RACK1 by a mechanism connected to SRSF3 splicing factor, which promotes GRα, essential for RACK1 transcriptional regulation and consequently for cells migration. We also establish that this mechanism can be positively regulated by cortisol. Hence, our data elucidate RACK1 transcriptional regulation and demonstrate that SRSF3 involvement in cells migration implies its role in controlling different pathways thus highlighting that new players have to be considered in GR-positive TNBC

Assessing the potential implementation of earthquake early warning for schools in the Patras region, Greece

Earthquake early warning (EEW) is currently deemed a credible approach to seismic resilience enhancement in modern societies, especially if part of a more holistic earthquake mitigation strategy involving other risk reduction tools such as structural upgrading/retrofit. Yet, there remains a strong need to 1) assess the feasibility of EEW in various seismotectonic contexts, considering specific target applications/end users; and 2) develop next-generation decision-support systems relying on interpretable probabilistic impact-based estimates toward more risk-informed decision-making on EEW installation/alert triggering. These challenges are addressed in this paper, which showcases a series of recent significant EEW contributions by the authors. First, we present the results of a state-of-the-art feasibility study for EEW in schools performed across the Patras region of Greece, attempting to spatially combine traditional seismologically-driven EEW decision criteria (i.e., warning time) with proxy risk-oriented measures for earthquake impact (i.e., building fragility and the number of exposed school students). These results show that, under certain conditions, EEW could be effective for the schools in the considered case-study region. We then demonstrate an advanced end-user-centred approach for improved risk-informed decision-making on triggering EEW alerts. The proposed methodology integrates earthquake-engineering-related seismic performance assessment procedures and metrics with multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) within an end-to-end probabilistic framework. The performance-based earthquake engineering component of such a framework facilitates the computation of various damage/loss estimates (e.g., repair cost, downtime, and casualties) by combining target-structure-specific models of seismic response, fragility, and vulnerability with real-time ground-shaking estimates. Additionally, the incorporated MCDM methodology enables explicit consideration of end-user preferences (importance) towards the estimated consequences in the context of alert issuance. The developed approach is demonstrated using an archetype school building for the case-study region, for which we specifically investigate the optimal decision (i.e., “trigger” or “don't trigger” an EEW alert) across a range of ground-motion intensity measures. We find that the best action for a given level of ground shaking can vary as a function of stakeholder preferences