Performance based earthquake design

Every Civil Engineering structure or building is unique in nature unlike other engineering products which are produced in a massive scale using the same technique again and again. The present Project is an effort to understand Performance Based Design Approach. In this Work an four storey office building is designed using STAAD.Pro and a nonlinear static analysis is carried out using point plastic hinge model. After the building is designed it is imported to SAP platform in order to model point plastic hinges and carry out Pushover Analysis. The designed building was modeled and the hinges or possible failure locations were assigned. The stiffness of the building was increased due to the slab present and this was incorporated in the model using diaphragm. The Floor Centre of Mass was calculated and an incremental Inverted triangular loading was applied to this central load and the base shear along with displacement of this building was recorded until the building reached a state of collapse. The Displacement controlled Pushover Analysis was carried out and the Pushover Curve were obtained for the building in both the direction i.e. X and Y. The Pushover curve is analyzed for various percentage of displacement. As per FEMA 356 typical values of roof drifts for the three performance levels are as follows. i) Immediate Occupancy: Transient drift is about 1% with negligible permanent drift. ii) Life Safety: Transient drift is about 2% with 1% permanent drift. iii) Collapse Prevention: 4% inelastic drift, transient or permanent. The Capacity Spectrum, Demand Spectrum and Performance point of the building was found in both the direction using the analysis carried out in SAP 2000 (v14). From the Performance point it was found that the Base Shear carried by the building is well above the design base shear and the building can take a lateral force up to 10% of the seismic weight of the building. The Displacement obtain was less than 1% and hence the chances of crossing the elastic state for the building was very less. Very Rare chances are there for the building to cross Life safety performance level. In the collapse state the failure was due to the collapse of ground floor Columns which is a serious issue and should be looked for further research. The Building designed as per Indian standards was found to be well above Life safety performance level considering Designed Based Earthquake

Statistical Literacy among Practicing Clinicians from India: A Brief Survey

Objectives: To understand statistical literacy among practicing clinicians as well as to take suggestions on its implementation in medical curriculum. Methods: A web based online survey was conducted among practising clinicians of India. The questionnaire consisted of 30 questions in three parts. Part A included questions on general information (5 questions), Part B included questions on application of statistical concepts (20 questions), and Part C asked for opinions on integration of biostatistics in medical curriculum (5 questions). Part B questions were rated on a 5-point Likert scale in which 1 indicated no confidence and 5 indicated complete confidence. Results: A total of 416 clinicians responded to the questionnaire. Complete confidence in the use of SPSS software was seen in 15.8% whereas 26.7% had no confidence in it. The highest confidence was seen in statistical equations like graphical representation of data (44.7%), and sensitivity and specificity (45.2%) whereas lowest confidence was seen in COX proportional hazard regression (12.9%) and ROC curves (11.7%). Out of 416 clinicians, 136 (32.4%) had done training in statistics at undergraduate level, 128 (30.5%) did self-learning and 152 (37.1%) had received no formal training

Prevalence of elderly patients who refuse to get discharge from coronary intensive care unit in a tertiary care hospital of North India: a pilot study

Background: The elderly population ≥60 years is increasing as the life span is increasing. So is the number of elderly patients who are refusing to get discharge from the hospital is also increasing. Authors are conducting this study in the elderly population who want to stay against medical advice.The aim to find the prevalence of elderly patients who refuse to get discharge from Coronary Care Unit (CCU) in a Tertiary care hospital of North IndiaMethods: A retrospective, observational study conducted in patients of age ≥60 years admitted to the coronary intensive care unit of a tertiary health care centre who refused discharge from the unit, were included in the study. Results: Of the 575 patients 44(7.65%) were willing to stay against medical advice. Of these 24(54.5%) were males and 20(45.5%) females. 6(13.6%) patients were terminally ill suffering from malignancies. Among all the patients who were willing to stay against medical advice, 8(18.2%) were covered by some health insurance scheme of either State or Central Government. 3(6.8%) patients were discharged after 24 hours, 22(50%) patients after 48 hours, 14(31.9%) patients after 72 hours and 5(11.3%) patients after 96 hours of advising discharge from hospital.Conclusions: As the intensive care beds at tertiary healthcare level are limited, the treatment of other salvageable sick patients who need the intensive care is affected by the unnecessary stay in hospital. Apart from the worsened nurse to patient ratio this increases the cost of treatment. This is need of hour to provide safe environment for the elderly outside the hospital settings and increase resources to provide better homecare

A New Simulation Metric to Determine Safe Environments and Controllers for Systems with Unknown Dynamics

We consider the problem of extracting safe environments and controllers for reach-avoid objectives for systems with known state and control spaces, but unknown dynamics. In a given environment, a common approach is to synthesize a controller from an abstraction or a model of the system (potentially learned from data). However, in many situations, the relationship between the dynamics of the model and the \textit{actual system} is not known; and hence it is difficult to provide safety guarantees for the system. In such cases, the Standard Simulation Metric (SSM), defined as the worst-case norm distance between the model and the system output trajectories, can be used to modify a reach-avoid specification for the system into a more stringent specification for the abstraction. Nevertheless, the obtained distance, and hence the modified specification, can be quite conservative. This limits the set of environments for which a safe controller can be obtained. We propose SPEC, a specification-centric simulation metric, which overcomes these limitations by computing the distance using only the trajectories that violate the specification for the system. We show that modifying a reach-avoid specification with SPEC allows us to synthesize a safe controller for a larger set of environments compared to SSM. We also propose a probabilistic method to compute SPEC for a general class of systems. Case studies using simulators for quadrotors and autonomous cars illustrate the advantages of the proposed metric for determining safe environment sets and controllers.Comment: 22nd ACM International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (2019

The Effect of Time and pH on Hemolysis During Cardiopulmonary Bypass

Articlehttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/96979/1/UMURF-Issue05_2008-ABansal.pd

An Uncommon But Lethal Poison

Amitraz, a centrally acting alpha-2 adrenergic agonist, is increasingly being used for treatment of ectoparasitic infestation in cattle. Its effects in humans may mimic organophosphate poisoning. We report a case of poisoning after suicidal ingestion of Amitraz. The patient presented in a deeply comatose state with respiratory depression, bradycardia and mydriasis (instead of miosis, the more common presentation in previous reports). He recovered completely within 24 hours with adequate supportive measures. The importance of this case report is highlighted by the increasing use of this compound, the life-threatening presentation, the excellent prognosis with early recognition and supportive management and the limited human toxicological data

Cross-cutting principles for planetary health education

Since the 2015 launch of the Rockefeller Foundation Lancet Commission on planetary health,1 an enormous groundswell of interest in planetary health education has emerged across many disciplines, institutions, and geographical regions. Advancing these global efforts in planetary health education will equip the next generation of scholars to address crucial questions in this emerging field and support the development of a community of practice. To provide a foundation for the growing interest and efforts in this field, the Planetary Health Alliance has facilitated the first attempt to create a set of principles for planetary health education that intersect education at all levels, across all scales, and in all regions of the world—ie, a set of cross-cutting principles