Damage to Agricultural Facilities Caused by the 1993 Kushiro-oki and Hokkaido Nansei-Oki Earthquakes

Two large earthquakes struck Japan during only a 6 month period in 1993: Kushiro-oki on January 15 and Hokkaido Nansei-oki on July 12. Both caused a lot of damage to facilities, including installations such as farm roads, reclaimed farmland, channels, head works, drainage pump stations, pipelines and fill dams. In this paper, we present an outline of the damage to agricultural facilities and its features

Earthquake Damage to Fill Dams

Earthquakes have caused much damage to fill type dams. Research into earthquake damage has contributed to the study of earthquake resistance of dams. However damage to fill dams occurred almost only to small scale earth dams, especially the few cases of heavy damage. This report describes the damage and performance of fill dams more than 15m-high during earthquakes, drawn from literature, data, and field surveys. The results indicate that even stronger earthquakes than the design earthquake intensity did not cause heavy damage to large well-constructed modern dams. The above analysis of the performance of fill dams during earthquakes shows that large scale dams are earthquake resistant

Jet coherence in QCD media: the antenna radiation spectrum

We study the radiation of a highly energetic partonic antenna in a colored state traversing a dense QCD medium. Resumming multiple scatterings of all involved constituents with the medium we derive the general gluon spectrum which encompasses both longitudinal color coherence between scattering centers in the medium, responsible for the well known Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal (LPM) effect, and transverse color coherence between partons inside a jet, leading, in vacuum, to angular ordering of the parton shower. We discuss shortly the onset of transverse decoherence which is reached in opaque media. In this regime, the spectrum consists of independent radiation off the antenna constituents.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, paper shortened and partly rewritten, references added, results unchange

Bridging the Gap between Probabilistic and Deterministic Models: A Simulation Study on a Variational Bayes Predictive Coding Recurrent Neural Network Model

The current paper proposes a novel variational Bayes predictive coding RNN model, which can learn to generate fluctuated temporal patterns from exemplars. The model learns to maximize the lower bound of the weighted sum of the regularization and reconstruction error terms. We examined how this weighting can affect development of different types of information processing while learning fluctuated temporal patterns. Simulation results show that strong weighting of the reconstruction term causes the development of deterministic chaos for imitating the randomness observed in target sequences, while strong weighting of the regularization term causes the development of stochastic dynamics imitating probabilistic processes observed in targets. Moreover, results indicate that the most generalized learning emerges between these two extremes. The paper concludes with implications in terms of the underlying neuronal mechanisms for autism spectrum disorder and for free action.Comment: This paper is accepted the 24th International Conference On Neural Information Processing (ICONIP 2017). The previous submission to arXiv is replaced by this version because there was an error in Equation

Gas pressure sintering of Beta-Sialon with Z=3

An experiment conducted on beta-sialon in atmospheric pressure, using a temperature of 2000 C and 4 MPa nitrogen atmosphere, is described. Thermal decomposition was inhibited by the increase of the nitrogen gas pressure

Synthesis of zinc oxide/silica composite nanoparticles by flame spray pyrolysis

Zinc oxide (ZnO)/silica (SiO2) composite nanoparticles were made by flame spray pyrolysis. The effects of the Zn/Si ratio on particle properties were examined and compared with those of the pure ZnO and SiO2 particles made at the same conditions. Polyhedral aggregates of nano-sized primary particles were obtained in all experiments. The mixed-oxide primary particle size was smaller than that of pure oxides. The primary particles consisted of ZnO nano-crystals and amorphous SiO2, as seen by high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HR-TEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis using the fundamental parameter approach. The XRD size of ZnO was controlled from 1.2 to 11.3 nm by the initial precursor composition and it was consistent with HR-TEM. The composite particles exhibited an excellent thermal stability and little crystalline growth of ZnO (e.g., from 1.9 to 2.2 nm) was observed even after calcination at 600°

Achieving Human Potential Through Geography Education: A Capabilities Approach to Curriculum Making in Schools

This article provides the theoretical underpinnings for an innovative international collaborative project in the field of geography education named GeoCapabilities. The project attempts to respond in new ways to enduring challenges facing geography teachers in schools. These include the need to find convincing expression of geography's contribution to the education of all young people and coping with the apparent divergence of geography in educational settings and its highly disparate expression as a research discipline in university departments. The project also hopes to contribute to the development of a framework for communicating the aims and purposes of geography in schools internationally, because here, too, there is great variety in definitions of national standards and even of disciplinary allegiances (including, e.g., the social studies, humanities, and biological sciences). GeoCapabilities does not seek to flatten such divergences, for one of geography's great strengths is its breadth. The long-term goal is to establish a secure platform for the international development of teachers’ capacities as creative and disciplined innovators. The project encourages teachers to think beyond program delivery and implementation and to embrace their role as the curriculum makers

Sensation Seeking and Gambling Behavior in Adolescence: Can Externalizing Problems Moderate This Relationship?

Gambling is a widespread phenomenon during adolescence. Among different risk factors involved in the onset of adolescent gambling behaviors, one factor that is studied is the sensation seeking personality trait. However, the literature is heterogeneous and a direct relationship between sensation seeking and gaming behaviors has not always been highlighted. This suggests that the relationship can be influenced by other factors. In particular, we explored the moderating role of externalizing problems in this relationship. A total of 363 adolescents (232 males and 131 females) aged 14 to 20 (M = 16.35, SD = 1.36) completed a battery of questionnaires aimed to assess their gambling behaviors, as well as the levels of externalizing problems and sensation seeking. The results showed that sensation seeking was associated with gambling severity, but this relationship was significant when externalizing problems were high and medium. On the contrary, when externalizing problems were low, the relationship between sensation seeking and gambling severity was not significant. Overall, sensation seeking in adolescence can favor the implementation of risk behaviors, such as gambling, but only in association with the presence of externalizing problems. Limitations, strengths, and social and clinical implications of the present study are discussed