Cumulative Ductility Spectra for Seismic Design of Ductile Structures Subjected to Long Duration Motions: Concept and Theoretical Background

A seismic design procedure that does not take into account the maximum and cumulative plastic deformation demands that a structure will likely undergo during severe ground motion could lead to unreliable performance. Damage models that quantify the severity of repeated plastic cycling through plastic energy are simple tools that can be used for practical seismic design. The concept of constant cumulative ductility strength spectra, developed from one such model, is a useful tool for performance-based seismic design. Particularly, constant cumulative ductility strength spectra can be used to identify cases in which low-cycle fatigue may become a design issue, and provides quantitative means to estimate the design lateral strength that should be provided to a structure to adequately control its cumulative plastic deformation demands during seismic response. Design expressions can be offered to estimate the strength reduction factors associated to the practical use of constant cumulative ductility strength spectra.     

Optimal Control of Accelerations in a Base-Isolated Building using Magneto-Rheological Dampers and Genetic Algorithms

This article presents a numerical study aimed at improving effectiveness of the isolation system of an actual building by adding magneto-rheological (MR) dampers that act in parallel to the existing rubber bearings (RB). The building itself is modeled with uniaxial elastic elements. Additional elements that include the RBs and the MR dampers are added at the base of the building and two different genetic algorithms are used to optimize operation of the MR dampers. Maximum acceleration and relative displacement at the top of the building are taken as the variables to be minimized. Records of destructive earthquakes are used as input. A comparison is made between the building responses with RB and the one with the additional control system.     

Approximate Methods for Estimating Hysteretic Energy Demand on Plan-Asymmetric Buildings

The first step in a hysteretic energy-based design approach of performance-based design is the estimation of hysteretic energy demand in the structure. A nonlinear response-history analysis of the multi-degree of freedom model gives an accurate estimation, but it is not suitable for adopting in design. Two alternative methods, based on the concepts of modal pushover analysis (MPA) and 2D-MPA, are proposed in this article for uniaxial plan-asymmetric structures. Application studies show that both methods are efficient. While the 2D-MPA-based method is more accurate, the MPA-based method is more suitable for design adoption. Significant conclusions are given for prospective application of these methods.     

Numerical Investigation of Residual Strength and Energy Dissipation Capacities of Corroded Bridge Members Under Earthquake Loading

Recent damage examples of aged steel bridge infrastructures around the world are so alarming. They intensified the importance of careful evaluation of existing structures for the feasibility of current usage and to ensure public safety. Corrosion and fatigue cracking may be the two most important types of damages in aging structures. Furthermore, recent earthquakes demonstrated potential seismic vulnerability of some types of steel bridges. Corrosion and its effects can trigger the damages caused by earthquakes, and it will be vital to understand the behavior of existing steel bridges which are corroding for decades in future severe seismic events as well. This article comprises the results of nonlinear FEM analysis of many actual corroded plates with different corrosion conditions and proposes a simple and reliable methodology to estimate remaining seismic strength and energy dissipation capacities by measuring only the minimum thickness of a corroded surface, which can be used to make rational decisions about the maintenance management plan of steel infrastructures.     

Increasing Seismic Energy Dissipation of Steel Moment Frames Using Reduced Web Section (RWS) Connection

Connections of steel moment frames are vulnerable to brittle failure. Providing a perforation near the beam-ends is suggested as a potential method to improve seismic behavior of these structures. This article presents a numerical study on the energy dissipation of steel moment connections with perforated beam. Models with elongated circular openings of different dimensions and location are analyzed and compared based on the global and local damage indices, predicted failure time and dissipated energy. Results show that an RWS connection with a proper opening size can develop reasonable inelastic deformations and provide an acceptable seismic improvement to moment-resisting frames.     

Emancipation as a Matter of Style

Abstract

This article will focus upon the relationship between humour, politics and theology. More precisely, it will inquire whether there is some kind of correlation between style of humour and political standpoint in two contemporary Marxist authors that also have an interest in theology, the British literary critic Terry Eagleton and the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj ?i?ek. If Eagleton’s style is characterized by the strategic use of wit, influenced by the late Dominican friar and philosopher Herbert McCabe, ?i?ek’s use of humour in his philosophy is more about the telling of jokes that supposedly illustrate a political predicament, thus creating a humorous disidentification on behalf of the reader with her or his circumstances. The article ends with the suggestion that there is indeed a relationship between humour, politics and eschatology in Eagleton and ?i?ek, but that their different senses of humour also correspond to differing political agendas. But one should beware of generalizing this insight, as all authors might not be as stylistically gifted as those two.     

The Linguistic and Rhetorical Legacy of the Prague Spring: Reading the Czechoslovak Communist Party Daily,Rudé právo,from the Late 1980s

This study uses a corpus-informed lexicological approach to analyse texts published in the Czechoslovak Communist Party daily Rudé právo during the final years of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. The analysis aims to uncover how far such texts represented a departure from or a reaffirmation of the norms of the pre-Gorbachev era and, in particular, the role that they played in the Party’s attempt to control interpretations of the 1968 Prague Spring. The investigation also considers ways in which the texts sought to construct a ‘new’ reality in the light of the changes in the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries. The article maintains that the ‘authoritative discourse’ model represents an especially useful analytical framework for evaluating the impact of ideological language in the context of the Communist system. The model both helps to explain the relative acquiescence of most of the population, and also to track the extent to which the ‘coded’ message of the approved discourse was successful in slowing the demise of the regime.     

Command Celebrities: The Rise and Fall of Hanzelka and Zikmund

In the 1950s and 1960s, the travellers, explorers, authors, and filmmakers Ji?í Hanzelka and Miroslav Zikmund became celebrities both in Czechoslovakia and abroad. The Communist cultural authorities actively supported the transformation of the two men into cultural icons, which could be exploited as a model for the suppression of ‘old’, ‘decadent’, and indeed ‘popular’ culture, and as a tool for recruiting members of the intellectual, cultural, and social elites into its service. Hanzelka and Zikmund’s multimedia travelogues, as well as their dashing public personae, blended in a unique way the ‘high’ and ‘low’, the accessible and unreachable, the familiar and the exotic, in the officially promoted culture of the time. But in the later 1960s, as Hanzelka and Zikmund’s political loyalties towards some form of reform socialism became more blatant, the two men fell into disfavour, and they found themselves banished from the public sphere following the events of 1968 until the regime fell in 1989. This article investigates how the curious ‘command celebrity’ of ‘H&Z’ straddled socialist ideology and capitalist consumerism, political affirmation and cultural critique.     

‘Raw Individualists’: American Soldiers on the Bataan Death March Reconsidered

Abstract

The Bataan Death March has entered historical consciousness as one of the four great Japanese atrocities during WWII. Along with the Rape of Nanjing, the Burma-Siam Death Railway, and the Rape of Manila, it stands as one of the ultimate measures of twentieth-century wartime barbarity. Both primary and secondary sources share a central preoccupation with Japanese behaviour and therefore assume American prisoners were little more than a passive presence during this episode. In this essay I examine the Bataan Death March from a new vantage point, asking salient questions that lead to modi?ed understanding: who were these Americans, and what kind of soldiers, at war’s dawn for the US, did they make? What features of their cultural make-up help explain their behaviour? What were the fault lines in the allied, Filipino-American force that faced the Japanese Army? This article explores the numerous problems the American forces in the Philippines faced: the hybrid nature of the army, the tension between career soldiers and recent draftees and poor training and leadership. These problems, American soldiers’ cultural predisposition, and military inexperience all combined to render them signi?cantly more vulnerable to Japanese cruelty on the Death March than they otherwise would have been.     

Nuclear energy development in postwar West Germany: Struggles over cooperation in the Federal Republic's first reactor station

In the 1950s, a small group of political, scientific and business leaders in West Germany were determined to build a center for nuclear reactor research and development. They characterized the venture as a three-way partnership, intending to set an example for a scientific-technical age. The project was eventually carried out, but not without much conflict. The attempts at cooperation show parties with divergent sets of criteria that they only inadequately reconciled, and the struggles display their conflicted understandings of both the public-private boundary and the scientific role. New archival material lets us inspect more accurately the workings of the proposed collaboration. It shows how the conflicts developed in practice, despite all parties' expressions of commitment to cooperation.