SEISMIC RESPONSE CONTROL OF A CABLE-STAYED BRIDGE BY VARIABLE DAMPERS

Cable-stayed bridges exhibit unique responses under a strong motion. It is partly due to the complexity in their damping mechanism. Recently, the benchmark problem of a cable-stayed bridge was developed to clarify the effectiveness of various seismic control strategies. Due to the new development of magnetorheological dampers, the application of variable dampers in bridges becomes possible. In this study, the effectiveness of the nonlinear viscous damping force scheme and the two-step friction damping force scheme are investigated. It is found that the nonlinear viscous damping force scheme is effective to control the response of the cable-stayed bridge with less demand for the damping force capacity of a damper. In addition, the two-step friction damping force scheme shows the improvement over conventional friction damping because the energy dissipation of a damper can be increased.     

Sweet nationalism in bitter days: a commercial representation of Zionism

ABSTRACT. This article identifies several theoretical approaches to the role of culture in the construction of national identity. Embedded in the presently emerging approach, which emphasises the relations between popular culture/consumerism and national identity, this study focuses on a specific consumer good manufactured in Israel in the early 2000s, the height of the second Palestinian Intifada (uprising): small sugar packets bearing portraits of the patriarchs of Zionism. The analysis of this product, employing semiotic analysis, interviews and focus groups, locates it in the five ‘moments’ of du Gay's ‘circuit of culture’ (i.e. identity, representation, production, consumption and regulation). Three main gen e ral arguments were stated, empirically examined and largely sustained: (1) Consumer goods are used not only for constructing national identity but also as a means for ‘healing’ it; (2) in their ‘healing’ capacity, representations of nationalism on consumer goods do not add new elements to representations offered by the ‘high’ official version of nationalism but replicate them in a simplified way; (3) while trivialising the insights and concepts that originated in ‘high’ culture, consumer goods expose the prejudices, stereotypes and rules of inclusion and exclusion that in ‘high’ culture are often hidden in a sophisticated manner.