Fearless Friday Naima Scott & Caroline Lewis

In this week’s edition of Fearless Friday, SURGE is honoring Naima Scott and Caroline Lewis for all the work they have done in our community as well as working on this year’s Vagina Monologues. [excerpt

Comparative performance of isolated and fixed-base reinforced concrete structures

The earthquake transmits to the structure a large quantity of energy that causes damage to structures. The seismic isolation technique can absorb a large quantity of the seismic energy. The seismic isolation concept is a new technique in earthquake engineering, its principle is quite simple, and it consists to create a discontinuity between the foundation and the superstructure, so that seismic energy cannot be completely transmitted into the structure.Therefore, this article includes a numerical application of the nonlinear static method, the capacity spectrum method (CSM), on two types of structures, fixed base structure and isolated base structure. The CSM is one of the methods used for the evaluation of seismic performance. Its principle consists in superimposing a curve which represents the capacity of the structure originated from a non-linear static analysis (Pushover), with a curve representing the solicitation brought by the earthquake. The intersection of these two curves represents the point performance, which evaluates the maximum displacement of the structure in the plastic domain

Policy Reforms and Incentives in Rice Production in Bangladesh

We estimate an institutional production function to capture incentive induced growth in total factor productivity (TFP) of rice production in Bangladesh. The incentive component of TFP assists in explaining how farmers responded to the changes in incentives which were introduced during the major policy reforms undertaken in the 1980s and the 1990s.Bangladesh, Reforms, Agriculture, TFP, Incentives.

Le Nouveau Management Public dans l’Administration Publique Marocaine

Depuis son émergence au Royaume-Uni dans les années 1980, le Nouveau Management Public (NMP) constitue la base des principales réformes pour la modernisation de la gestion publique dans plusieurs pays du monde. Le Maroc s’est engagé dans ce chantier de réformes dans une perspective de changer la gestion publique classique par la nouvelle gestion publique. Le présent article a pour objectif d’abord, d’essayer de circonscrire le concept « Nouveau Management Public », puis identifier les principales pratiques de ce nouveau mode de gestion dans l’administration publique marocaine. À la lumière d’une revue de littérature des recherches théoriques sur cette nouvelle doctrine managériale, suivie d’une étude mobilisant la documentation existante sur les principales réformes du secteur public adoptées par le Maroc, les résultats obtenus soulignent que le NMP consiste à transposer les principes et méthodes de la gestion privée dans les organismes publics. Ces principes et méthodes commencent à s’enraciner dans l’administration publique marocaine dans le but de moderniser la gestion publique et atteindre la performance

Design and implementation of a smart dual axis sun tracker based on astronomical equations

This paper presents a new design algorithm for stand-alone solar tracking system based on ATMEL Microcontroller. The proposed idea of the design is based on astronomical equations to determine the position of the sun in the sky at any time of the day to calculate the tilt angle and polar angle for the two axis tracking purposes. The system is capable of tracking the sun properly at any position on the earth because of the general nature of the algorithm used in the design. At the same time the system reliability, cost effectiveness, precision and flexibility are taken into consideration