Gustav Ritter von Wex, sein Leben und Werk

Summary: The regulation works of Danube river along Vienna city around 1870 are described as a monumental European project of the 19th century. The publications of the project head Gustav von Wex (1811-1892) are thereby reviewed, given that he therein considered the historical bases, the imperial decision, the project outline and the advances of the works. In addition, the scientific works of von Wex are also described and put into a historical context. Finally, the biography of von Wex is presented along with the problems in searching successfully his portrait. This historical work is intended to add to the early developments in river engineering of Europ

Gender Matters! Analyzing Global Cultural Gender Preferences for Venues Using Social Sensing

Gender differences is a phenomenon around the world actively researched by social scientists. Traditionally, the data used to support such studies is manually obtained, often through surveys with volunteers. However, due to their inherent high costs because of manual steps, such traditional methods do not quickly scale to large-size studies. We here investigate a particular aspect of gender differences: preferences for venues. To that end we explore the use of check-in data collected from Foursquare to estimate cultural gender preferences for venues in the physical world. For that, we first demonstrate that by analyzing the check-in data in various regions of the world we can find significant differences in preferences for specific venues between gender groups. Some of these significant differences reflect well-known cultural patterns. Moreover, we also gathered evidence that our methodology offers useful information about gender preference for venues in a given region in the real world. This suggests that gender and venue preferences observed may not be independent. Our results suggests that our proposed methodology could be a promising tool to support studies on gender preferences for venues at different spatial granularities around the world, being faster and cheaper than traditional methods, besides quickly capturing changes in the real world

Tests of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov type for exponential data with unknown scale, and related problems

SUMMARY Let D^, D^+ and D^− denote Kolmogorov-Smirnov typo one-sample statistics to test good ness of fit in the presence of unknown nuisance parameters; then the distributions of D^, D^+ and D^− depend on the population sampled and the estimator used. Simulation has been the primary tool for studying these statistics. Recently, Durbin obtained the distributions of D^, D^+ and D^− in terms of a Fourier transform for a wide class of underlying populations, and produced explicit results for the exponential case. In this paper, the distribution functions of D^, D^+ and D^− for the exponential case are derived from general results for order statistics, and computationally efficient approximations to these distribution functions are obtained. In the course of this derivation, Bonferroni inequalities of Kounias, and Sobel & Uppuluri are generalized. Certain problems of goodness-of-fit testing in the presence of nuisance parameters, whose solutions make use of existing tables, are also discussed. These problems include the Pareto, Rayleigh, power function, and uniform distribution

Drift accumulation at river bridges

River hydrodynamicsInteraction with structure

Overtopping and breaching of dikes – Breach profile and breach flow

River hydrodynamicsUnsteady open channel flow and dam brea

Impulse wave generation: Comparison of free granular with mesh-packed slides

Slides generating impulse waves are currently generated using either block models or free granular material impacting a water body. These procedures were mainly developed to study plane impulse waves, i.e., wave generation in a rectangular channel. The current VAW, ETH Zurich, research is directed to the spatial impulse wave features, i.e., waves propagating in a wave basin. The two wave generation mechanisms mentioned above complicate this process for various reasons, including experimental handling, collection of slide material in the wave basin, poor representation of prototype conditions for the block model, and excessive temporal duration for free granular slides. Impulse waves originating from slides with free granular material and mesh-packed slides are compared in this paper. Detailed test series are presented, so that the resulting main wave features can be compared. The results highlight whether the simplified procedure involving mesh-packed slides really applies in future research, and specify advantages in terms of impulse wave experimentation.ISSN:2077-131

Absorption of Ultrashort Laser Pulses in Strongly Overdense Targets

We report on the first absorption experiments of sub-10 fs high-contrast Ti:Sa laser pulses incident on solid targets. The very good contrast of the laser pulse assures the formation of a very small pre-plasma and the pulse interacts with the matter close to solid density. Experimental results indicate that p-polarized laser pulses are absorbed up to 80 percent at 80 degrees incidence angle. The simulation results of PSC PIC code clearly confirm the observations and show that the collisionless absorption works efficiently in steep density profiles