Expansion and Rehabilitation of the State Fish Pier in Gloucester, Massachusetts

The State Fish Pier in Gloucester, Massachusetts, has been expanded and rehabilitated to provide an upgraded facility to support the local fishing industry. Expansion consisted of a new Finger Pier and solid fill extension of the existing pier. Rehabilitation consisted of replacing a deteriorated wharf with a new higher load carrying wharf. Subsurface conditions ranged from rock outcrops exposed at low tide at some locations to thick marine deposits overlying rock at other locations. Foundation support for the new Finger Pier and rehabilitated wharf consisted of concrete filled steel pipe piles, a portion of which had to he socketed into bedrock due to lack of soil overburden. Compression and tension load tests were performed to verify the pile design capacities

Groupwise Structural Parcellation of the Cortex: A Sound Approach Based on Logistic Models

International audienceCurrent theories hold that brain function is highly related with long-range physical connections through axonal bundles, namely extrinsic connectivity. However, obtaining a groupwise cortical parcella-tion based on extrinsic connectivity remains challenging. Current par-cellation methods are computationally expensive; need tuning of several parameters or rely on ad-hoc constraints. Furthermore, none of these methods present a model for the cortical extrinsic connectivity. To tackle these problems, we propose a parsimonious model for the extrinsic con-nectivity and an efficient parcellation technique based on clustering of tractograms. Our technique allows the creation of single subject and groupwise parcellations of the whole cortex. The parcellations obtained with our technique are in agreement with anatomical and functional par-cellations in the literature. In particular, the motor and sensory cortex are subdivided in agreement with the human homunculus of Penfield. We illustrate this by comparing our resulting parcels with an anatomical atlas and the motor strip mapping included in the Human Connectome Project data

A century of trends in adult human height

Being taller is associated with enhanced longevity, and higher education and earnings. We reanalysed 1472 population-based studies, with measurement of height on more than 18.6 million participants to estimate mean height for people born between 1896 and 1996 in 200 countries. The largest gain in adult height over the past century has occurred in South Korean women and Iranian men, who became 20.2 cm (95% credible interval 17.5-22.7) and 16.5 cm (13.3-19.7) taller, respectively. In contrast, there was little change in adult height in some sub-Saharan African countries and in South Asia over the century of analysis. The tallest people over these 100 years are men born in the Netherlands in the last quarter of 20th century, whose average heights surpassed 182.5 cm, and the shortest were women born in Guatemala in 1896 (140.3 cm; 135.8-144.8). The height differential between the tallest and shortest populations was 19-20 cm a century ago, and has remained the same for women and increased for men a century later despite substantial changes in the ranking of countries

Rising rural body-mass index is the main driver of the global obesity epidemic in adults

Body-mass index (BMI) has increased steadily in most countries in parallel with a rise in the proportion of the population who live in cities 1,2 . This has led to a widely reported view that urbanization is one of the most important drivers of the global rise in obesity 3�6 . Here we use 2,009 population-based studies, with measurements of height and weight in more than 112 million adults, to report national, regional and global trends in mean BMI segregated by place of residence (a rural or urban area) from 1985 to 2017. We show that, contrary to the dominant paradigm, more than 55 of the global rise in mean BMI from 1985 to 2017�and more than 80 in some low- and middle-income regions�was due to increases in BMI in rural areas. This large contribution stems from the fact that, with the exception of women in sub-Saharan Africa, BMI is increasing at the same rate or faster in rural areas than in cities in low- and middle-income regions. These trends have in turn resulted in a closing�and in some countries reversal�of the gap in BMI between urban and rural areas in low- and middle-income countries, especially for women. In high-income and industrialized countries, we noted a persistently higher rural BMI, especially for women. There is an urgent need for an integrated approach to rural nutrition that enhances financial and physical access to healthy foods, to avoid replacing the rural undernutrition disadvantage in poor countries with a more general malnutrition disadvantage that entails excessive consumption of low-quality calories. © 2019, The Author(s)

Solvers for Nonlinear Algebraic Equations: Where Are We Today?

The aim of this paper is to summarize the state-of-the-art in solving systems of nonlinear algebraic equations. We are interested in two aspects of the problem. First, the existing solvers and their robustness. Second, the existing test-problem libraries and their adequacy. We explore both issues from the engineering-oriented perspective (e.g. by approaching the solvers as black-box software). Experimental data illustrating our main points is presented and discussed

Terrorism Knowledge Discovery Project: a Knowledge Discovery Approach to Addressing the Threats of Terrorism

Abstract. Ever since the 9-11 incident, the multidisciplinary field of terrorism has experienced tremendous growth. As the domain has benefited greatly from recent advances in information technologies, more complex and challenging new issues have emerged from numerous counter-terrorism-related research communities as well as governments of all levels. In this paper, we describe an advanced knowledge discovery approach to addressing terrorism threats. We experimented with our approach in a project called Terrorism Knowledge Discovery Project that consists of several custom-built knowledge portals. The main focus of this project is to provide advanced methodologies for analyzing terrorism research, terrorists, and the terrorized groups (victims). Once completed, the system can also become a major learning resource and tool that the general community can use to heighten their awareness and understanding of global terrorism phenomenon, to learn how best they can respond to terrorism and, eventually, to garner significant grass root support for the government’s efforts to keep America safe.