Seismic Design and Response of Framed Structures with Stiffening Bracing Systems

Stiffening Bracing System (SBS) is proposed as an alternative to conventional braced frames. SBS is intended to reduce the floor accelerations while maintaining uniform inter-story drift along the building height. The system ensures that additional damping devices distributed over the building’s height work efficiently. An iterative design procedure is developed to maintain a desired target performance. The procedure accounts for higher mode effects and supplemental damping. A series of nonlinear response history analyses on braced frames with various heights demonstrated the adequacy of the proposed procedure in achieving target structural performance and seismic demand prediction.     

Traces of Early Austronesian Expansion to East Indonesia? New Discovery of Dentate-Stamped and Lime-Infilled Pottery from Central Sulawesi

This short article report about the new findings of finely made dentate-stamped and lime infilled potteries from the Goa Topogaro site in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. Most of them are red-slipped pottery decorated with dentate-stamped, lime infilled, and can be identified as burial potteries as they are excavated with secondly burials of the Early Metal Age possibly dated around 2000-1800 years ago. When comparing these finds with common decorative patterns seen in early dentate-stamped pottery assemblages in the Philippines, Mariana Islands, and early Lapita sites, the Topogaro dentate-stamped pots lack some common early patterns, but exhibit a wider variety of designs. It is now argued that dentate-stamped decorations at Lapita sites mainly disappeared by around 2800 BP or at least by 2000 BP in the Pacific, but the Topogaro dentate-stamped sherds may indicate that this pottery tradition continued and further developed in Island Southeast Asia or Sulawesi at least until the Early Metal Age. The detailed analysis of these new finds and further comparative study on production technique, variety of design, forms, and styles of both dentate-stamped ceramics in Southeast Asia and Oceania is required.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book Reviews in This Article: The Desert Bible. By Morris S. Seale. The Sense of Unity: The Sufi Tradition in Persian Architecture. By Nader Ardalan and Laleh Bakhtiar. Sayyid Ahmad. A Study of the Religious Reform Movement of Sayyid Ahmad of Rē Bareli. By Muhammad Hedayetullah. The Khilafat Movement in India, 1919-1924. By A. C. Niemeijer. History of Medieval Deccan (1295-1724), Vol. I (Mainly Political and Military Aspects). Edited by H. K. Sherwani and P. M. Joshi. New French Imperialism, 1880-1910: The Third Republic and Colonial Expansion. By James J. Cooke. The U.S.S.R. and the Middle East. Edited by Michael Confino and Shimon Shamir. Survival or Hegemony? The Foundations of Israeli Foreign Policy. By Samuel J. Roberts. Truman, The Jewish Vote and the Creation of. Israel. By John Snetsinger.     

Book reviews

The Persian Land Reform, 1962–1966. By Ann K.S. Lambton. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. xiii+386 pp. $11.75.     

Afghanistan–Pakistan relations: border controversies as counter-terrorist impediments

When the Taliban regime was overthrown in Afghanistan in late 2001, there was much optimism that, with the anticipated and unprecedented economic, political and military engagement of the international community with Afghanistan, the country would become stable. However, resurgent violence indicates that this is not happening. An important reason for the continuing instability lies in the fact that the international effort has failed to address longstanding disagreements between Afghanistan and Pakistan—the Durand Line border dispute and the Pushtunistan issue—which in turn impairs the two countries’ cooperative capacity in the anti-Taliban campaign. Resolution of these disputes would go a long way to help the situation. This article analyses the dynamics of the border dispute, the Pushtunistan issue and the Taliban insurgency as an outgrowth of longstanding historical disputes between Afghanistan and Pakistan.     

Gender earnings and poverty reduction: post-Communist Uzbekistan

Women get less of the material resources, social status, power and opportunities for self-actualization than men do who share their social location – be it a location based on class, race, occupation, ethnicity, religion, education, nationality, or any intersection of these factors. The process of feminization of poverty in Central Asia and Uzbekistan is intimately connected to the cultural and institutional limitations that put a ceiling on women’s involvement in economic activity. This article attempts to study and explore gender in the context of poverty reduction in Uzbekistan, the most populated state of Central Asia, to understand the ways and manner in which poverty and other forms of deprivation demand women’s participation in variety of contexts. The study is primarily an empirical one and is based on an extensive sociological investigation in the field.