Current trends and developments in progressive collapse research on reinforced concrete flat plate structures

Progressive collapse of structures caused by extreme or accidental loads may lead to significant loss of life and property. Considerable research efforts have been made to date to mitigate the probability of progressive collapse and its consequences. This study summarises the fundamentals of progressive collapse in relation to the existing theoretical concepts and understanding. Specifically the existing theories pertinent to progressive collapse of building structures, in particular reinforced concrete (RC) flat plates, are examined from the following four key aspects: (1) definition of progressive collapse from deformation and/or strength perspectives with respect to the failure criteria of structural members and the entire structural system; (2) failure mechanisms of load-bearing systems undergoing progressive collapse with respect to the structural ultimate capacity, which has not been considered in the design process; (3) research methodologies for investigating collapse mechanisms, with emphases on experimental and numerical approaches; and (4) collapse-resistant design principles as covered in several international design standards in which a number of robustness requirements have been recognised. Based on the schematic review of the current trends and developments, gaps and limitations in progressive collapse research are identified and a new research direction is established to advance the progressive collapse study of RC flat plate structures

Il mappamondo cinese di Giulio Aleni [Ai Rulüe] (Brescia, 1582 – Yanping 1649)

I due fogli del mappamondo di Padre Giulio Aleni S.J., conservati a Roma nella Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, editi ed aggiornati a partire dal 1623, furono ispirati ed influenzati dal più famoso mappamondo di Padre Matteo Ricci, dato alle stampe, in diverse edizioni, successivamente alla fine del XVI secolo. Pur essendo successiva, l’edizione di Aleni costituisce un unicum al mondo essendo la prima mappa delle terre allora conosciute scritta in cinese e di dimensioni tali da permettere un’agevole consultazione. È una mappa che, fondendo assieme le conoscenze geografiche occidentali e cinesi, è relativamente fedele, pur con qualche eccezione, ai limiti reali dei continenti, rappresentati, come nel mappamondo di Matteo Ricci, da un punto di vista non eurocentrico

A parallel supercomputer implementation of a biological inspired neural network and its use for pattern recognition

Abstract : A parallel implementation of a large spiking neural network is proposed and evaluated. The neural network implements the binding by synchrony process using the Oscillatory Dynamic Link Matcher (ODLM). Scalability, speed and performance are compared for 2 implementations: Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) running on clusters of multicore supercomputers and NVIDIA graphical processing units respectively. A global spiking list that represents at each instant the state of the neural network is described. This list indexes each neuron that fires during the current simulation time so that the influence of their spikes are simultaneously processed on all computing units. Our implementation shows a good scalability for very large networks. A complex and large spiking neural network has been implemented in parallel with success, thus paving the road towards real-life applications based on networks of spiking neurons. MPI offers a better scalability than CUDA, while the CUDA implementation on a GeForce GTX 285 gives the best cost to performance ratio. When running the neural network on the GTX 285, the processing speed is comparable to the MPI implementation on RQCHP’s Mammouth parallel with 64 notes (128 cores)

Clinical factors of post-chemoradiotherapy as valuable indicators for pathological complete response in locally advanced rectal cancer

OBJECTIVES: Pathological complete response has shown a better prognosis for patients with locally advanced rectal cancer after preoperative chemoradiotherapy. However, correlations between post-chemoradiotherapy clinical factors and pathologic complete response are not well confirmed. The aim of the current study was to identify post-chemoradiotherapy clinical factors that could serve as indicators of pathologic complete response in locally advanced rectal cancer. METHODS: This study retrospectively analyzed 544 consecutive patients with locally advanced rectal cancer treated at Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center from December 2003 to June 2014. All patients received preoperative chemoradiotherapy followed by surgery. Univariate and multivariate regression analyses were performed to identify post-chemoradiotherapy clinical factors that are significant indicators of pathologic complete response. RESULTS: In this study, 126 of 544 patients (23.2%) achieved pathological complete response. In multivariate analyses, increased pathological complete response rate was significantly associated with the following factors: post-chemoradiotherapy clinical T stage 0-2 (odds ratio=2.098, 95% confidence interval=1.023-4.304, p=0.043), post-chemoradiotherapy clinical N stage 0 (odds ratio=2.011, 95% confidence interval=1.264-3.201, p=0.003), interval from completion of preoperative chemoradiotherapy to surgery of >;7 weeks (odds ratio=1.795, 95% confidence interval=1.151-2.801, p=0.010) and post-chemoradiotherapy carcinoembryonic antigen ≤2 ng/ml (odds ratio=1.579, 95% confidence interval=1.026-2.432, p=0.038). CONCLUSIONS: Post-chemoradiotherapy clinical T stage 0-2, post-chemoradiotherapy clinical N stage 0, interval from completion of chemoradiotherapy to surgery of >;7 weeks and post-chemoradiotherapy carcinoembryonic antigen ≤2 ng/ml were independent clinical indicators for pathological complete response. These findings demonstrate that post-chemoradiotherapy clinical factors could be valuable for post-operative assessment of pathological complete response

Ultrathin Gold Nanowire-Functionalized Carbon Nanotubes for Hybrid Molecular Sensing

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have shown great potential as sensing component in the electrochemical, field effect transistor and optical sensors, because of their extraordinary onedimensional electronic structure, thermal conductivity, tunable and stable near-infrared emission. However, the insolubility of CNTs due to strong van der Waals interactions limits their use in the field of nanotechnology. In this study, we demonstrate that non-covalent ultrathin gold nanowires functionalized multi-walled carbon nanotube (GNW-CNT) hybrid sensing agents show highly efficient and selective immune molecular sensing in electrochemical and near-infrared photoacoustic imaging methods. A detection limit of 0.01 ng/mL for the Alpha-Fetoprotein (AFP) antigen with high selectivity is shown. The extraordinary optical absorption, thermal and electric conductivity of hybrid GNW-CNTs presented in this study could be an effective tactic to integrate imaging, sensing and treatment functionalities

STUDIES OF CHINESE TERMINOLOGY: DIACHRONIC APPROACHES AND CONTEMPORARY APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

La ricerca intende illustrare le modalità applicative attraverso le quali si possono esprimere in lingua cinese le terminologie specialistiche dei campi tecnici e scientifici del XXI secolo. Un percorso che attraversa la storia delle scienze in Cina dal terzo secolo a.C. fino ai nostri giorni, ricostruisce le regole che passo dopo passo, non senza deviazioni e ripensamenti, gli studiosi cinesi hanno stabilito per creare e gestire le loro “parole” composte con innumerevoli caratteri, gli hanzi, simbolo della cultura e della civiltà cinese, icone che ancora oggi “parlano” ai lettori, espressioni grafiche di oggetti e di concetti. La presentazione dell'opera di Feng Zhiwei, uno tra i maggiori esponenti della terminologia cinese contemporanea, ci accompagna nell'approfondimento degli orientamenti degli studi terminologici cinesi e nel confronto con quelli euro americani, a partire dagli studi svolti da Eugen Wüster all'inizio del XX secolo. L'analisi della terminologia cinese nella tecnologia del fotovoltaico e nel mondo economico-finanziario, costituisce il terreno di verifica delle pratiche terminologiche in essere nella lingua cinese e delle tendenze nella costruzione neologica e neonimica.This research aims to illustrate the methodes used for creation of the specialized terminologies in the technical and scientific fields in the XXI century’s Chinese language. A pathway crossing the history of sciences in China from the III century B.C. until our days, reconstructs the rules that step after step the Chinese scholars have established in order to create and manage their “words” with the lot of characters, the hanzi, symbol of the Chinese culture and civilization, icons that still today “speak” to the readers, graphical expressions of objects and concepts. The presentation of the work of Feng Zhiwei, one among the greatest exponents of the contemporary Chinese terminology, is our guideline in a close examination of the Chinese terminological studies’ orientations, in comparison with the euro-americans ones, starting from the studies developed by Eugen Wüster at the beginning of the XX century. The analysis of the Chinese terminology in the photovoltaic technology and in the economic-financial world, constitutes the ground of verification of the actual terminological practices in the Chinese language and the tendencies in the neological and neonymical construction

Consequences of misspecifying across-cluster time-specific residuals in multilevel latent growth curve models

This Monte Carlo study evaluates, in the context of multilevel latent growth curve models, the consequences of under- and overspecifying across-cluster time-specific residuals (i.e., Θb) on the estimation of the fixed effects, their corresponding standard errors, the variances and covariances of the random effects, Type I error rates, and the statistical power of detecting fixed effects. The results show that underspecifying Θb with all elements of Θb fixed at zero results in a large underestimation of the between- and within-level random effect and standard errors of fixed effect estimates, which, in turn, leads to serious bias in significant testing. Underspecifying Θb with diagonal elements of Θb constrained to equality, or overspecifying Θb with diagonal elements of Θb constrained to equality or freely estimated and residual covariances fixed at zero also leads to bias in the estimation of the between- and within-level random effects. Implications of the compensatory relationship occurring at the covariance level are discussed

On the application of the three-step approach to growth mixture models

This series of simulation studies evaluate, in the context of applied research settings, the impact of the parameterization of the covariance structure of the growth mixture model (GMM) on the regression coefficient and standard error estimates in the 3-step method. The results show that the 1-step approach performs better than the 3-step method across the simulation studies. However, the performance of the 3-step method depends slightly or importantly on the parameterization of the GGM from the first step, on the inclusion or not of the predictor at the first step of the analysis, on the population model, and on the type (i.e., logit vs. linear) and size of the regression coefficient estimates

An accelerated and accurate process for the initial guess calculation in Digital Image Correlation algorithm

The Digital Image Correlation (DIC) is now an effective method for measuring displacement in engineering fields. DIC includes a coarse search scheme with pixel-size accuracy for finding an initial guess (IG) followed by an iteration procedure to successively find the accurate/true displacements. The closer IG to the true displacement values, the higher the likelihood of convergence and the more efficient the convergence of the subsequent Newton-Raphson (NR) iteration procedure. This study introduced and verified a novel fuzzy-logic based approximation scheme intending to provide more accurate IG values after the standard full-field IG search scheme. The results based on numerical experiments showed that the novel step of IG searching scheme provided considerably more accurate IG values and reduced the computational costs of finding IG values by up to 88.5% compared to the standard scheme. Furthermore, the overall computational costs including the subsequent NR iteration procedure were reduced by 31.5%, which is substantial. To further test and demonstrate the robustness, accuracy and effectiveness of the novel DIC procedure, a large number of numerical experiments using images simulating a wide range of rigid body motions (rotation, translation) and tensile testing conditions was utilized. The results had a 98.8% accuracy rate and a 99% precision rate. The DIC procedure provided therefore efficient and accurate displacement/deformation measurements in different types of loading conditions which are used for studying the mechanics of acrylic medical bone cements that are of interest in our research laboratory