Scour at bridge piers and abutments

Bibliography: pages 177-184.In this thesis several of the formulae that have been put forward to predict scour are examined and some of their limitations pointed out in an attempt to clarify some of the research work that has been done on scour. The formulae are applied to two known bridge failures and their accuracy in those particular situations examined. The usual methods of scour prevention and protection are discussed

Building Performance - Societal Drive, Programme and Symposium

Society is increasingly looking at the construction industry to mitigate the environmental crisis and solve the housing crisis through wholesale embrace of three broad sets of challenges. The MSc in Building Performance (Energy Efficiency in Design) (MSc BP(EED)) was created in 2017 to provide significant upskilling in the knowledge, skills, and software applications of building design professionals so that they can meet these challenges, while creating compliant, sustainable, super-low energy, new and renovated buildings. The delivery of the programme supports upskilling of employed building design professionals at Masters level, encouraging a minority to develop their capacity and interest in research and consultancy. The Government provides significant support to students in Year 1 through the Springboard fee subsidy

A Comparative Study of the Magnitude, Frequency and Distribution of Intense Rainfall in the United Kingdom

During the 1960s, a study was made of the magnitude, frequency and distribution of intense rainfall over the UK, employing data from more than 120 daily-read rain gauges covering the period 1911 to 1960. Using the same methodology, that study was recently updated utilizing data for the period 1961 to 2006 for the same gauges, or from those nearby. This paper describes the techniques applied to ensure consistency of data and statistical modelling. It presents a comparison of patterns of extreme rainfalls for the two periods and discusses the changes that have taken place. Most noticeably, increases up to 20% have occurred in the north west of the country and in parts of East Anglia. There have also been changes in other areas, including decreases of the same magnitude over central England. The implications of these changes are considered

Use of Studio Methods in the Introductory Engineering Design Curriculum

A number of themes, including interest in first year design courses, commitment to active learning approaches, and desires for changes in course structures and costs have come together in a variety of teaching approaches. Some of these approaches have been referred to as using “studio” methods, although the particular pedagogy appears to vary greatly. In this paper, some of these experiments are briefly reviewed and placed in a larger context of studio education in other disciplines. The paper seeks to differentiate studio education from other active learning approaches. An introductory engineering design course was taught using an architecture studio model for two semesters. The experiment demonstrated that the studio method can be very effective in teaching design concepts, but because students are likely to be unfamiliar with this approach, care must be taken to reassure students regarding grades and expectations

Improving railroad freight car reliability using a new opportunistic maintenance heuristic and other information system improvements

Thesis (Sc. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil Engineering, 1991.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 283-289).by Patrick Little.Sc.D

A study of the wedge cutting force through transversely stiffened plates : an application to ship grounding resistance

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Ocean Engineering, 1994, and Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 1994.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 115-117).by Patrick E. Little.M.S

Exploiting Nonlinear Recurrence and Fractal Scaling Properties for Voice Disorder Detection

Background: Voice disorders affect patients profoundly, and acoustic tools can potentially measure voice function objectively. Disordered sustained vowels exhibit wide-ranging phenomena, from nearly periodic to highly complex, aperiodic vibrations, and increased "breathiness". Modelling and surrogate data studies have shown significant nonlinear and non-Gaussian random properties in these sounds. Nonetheless, existing tools are limited to analysing voices displaying near periodicity, and do not account for this inherent biophysical nonlinearity and non-Gaussian randomness, often using linear signal processing methods insensitive to these properties. They do not directly measure the two main biophysical symptoms of disorder: complex nonlinear aperiodicity, and turbulent, aeroacoustic, non-Gaussian randomness. Often these tools cannot be applied to more severe disordered voices, limiting their clinical usefulness.

Methods: This paper introduces two new tools to speech analysis: recurrence and fractal scaling, which overcome the range limitations of existing tools by addressing directly these two symptoms of disorder, together reproducing a "hoarseness" diagram. A simple bootstrapped classifier then uses these two features to distinguish normal from disordered voices.

Results: On a large database of subjects with a wide variety of voice disorders, these new techniques can distinguish normal from disordered cases, using quadratic discriminant analysis, to overall correct classification performance of 91.8% plus or minus 2.0%. The true positive classification performance is 95.4% plus or minus 3.2%, and the true negative performance is 91.5% plus or minus 2.3% (95% confidence). This is shown to outperform all combinations of the most popular classical tools.

Conclusions: Given the very large number of arbitrary parameters and computational complexity of existing techniques, these new techniques are far simpler and yet achieve clinically useful classification performance using only a basic classification technique. They do so by exploiting the inherent nonlinearity and turbulent randomness in disordered voice signals. They are widely applicable to the whole range of disordered voice phenomena by design. These new measures could therefore be used for a variety of practical clinical purposes.
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Essays in Asset Pricing and Information Economics

The first essay addresses how investors price risk in the stock market when they cannot observe the true long-run growth rate of their consumption and dividend endowments. The model presents a number of import insights into how the ability of long-run risks to explain the equity risk premium is directly related to the quality of investors information sets. The second essay addresses the welfare costs of ambiguity surrounding the probability distribution of shocks driving the growth rate of their consumption endowment. If an investor faces both long-run risk and rare disasters in their consumption edowment, then they would forgoe a large share of their lifetime consumption to absolve ambiguity surrounding disasters, but substantially less to remove ambiguity about long-run risk. The third essay presents a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of a small open economy (SOE) that faces time-varying volatility of news about their total factor productivity and real interest rate. News uncertainty shocks about the interest rate motivate the SOE to deleverage, however, the same class of shocks in total factor productivity have insubstantial effects

Implementing Learning Design to support web-based learning

Preprint AusWeb04 Conference July Australia.In this paper we consider an initial implementation of a system for managing and using IMS Learning Design (LD) to represent online learning activities. LD has been suggested (Koper & Olivier, 2004) as a flexible way to represent and encode learning materials, especially suited to online and web-based learning while neutral to the pedagogy that is being applied. As such it offers a chance to address a gap in the preparation of learning materials and their eventual use by students by providing a formal description of the approach, roles and services needed for a particular unit of learning. The potential in learning design that most interests us is its scope for the exchange of validated and formalised designs and so encouraging reuse. Until full implementations exist this potential cannot be explored and it is hard to predict if learning design will provide value in describing either full courses or in describing isolated activities. The initial work is therefore to implement a system for managing, validating and inspecting learning design building on collaboration between the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University UK (OUUK) and the Educational Technology Expertise Centre (OTEC) at the Open University of the Netherlands (OUNL), who produced a Learning Design Engine CopperCore (http://coppercore.org/) released under Open Source