Story Of Building Research Articles

Modeling Artificial Light Exposure after Vegetation Trimming at a Marine Turtle Nesting Beach

Light pollution caused by poorly directed artificial lighting has increased globally in recent years. Artificial lights visible along marine turtle nesting beaches can disrupt natural brightness cues used by hatchling turtles to orient correctly to the ocean for their offshore migrations. Natural barriers, such as tall dunes and dense vegetation, that block coastal and inland lights from the beach may reduce this disruption. However, coastal areas are often managed toward human values, including the trimming of vegetation to improve ocean views. We used viewshed models to determine how reducing the dune vegetation height (specifically that of seagrape, Cocoloba uvifera) might increase the amount of artificial light from upland buildings that reaches a marine turtle nesting beach in Southeast Florida. We incorporated three data sets (LiDAR data, turtle nest locations, and field surveys of artificial lights) into a geographic information system to create viewsheds of lighting from buildings across 21 vegetation profiles. In 2018, when most seagrape patches had been trimmed to <1.1 m tall, female loggerhead turtles nested in areas with potential for high light exposure based on a cumulative viewshed model. Viewshed models using random (iterative simulations) and nonrandom selections of buildings revealed that untrimmed seagrape heights (mean = 3.1 m) and especially taller vegetation profiles effectively reduced potential lighting exposure from three building heights (upper story, midstory, and ground level). Even the tallest modeled vegetation, however, would fail to block lights from the upper stories of some tall buildings. Results from this study can support management decisions regarding the trimming of beach dune vegetation, any associated changes in the visibility of artificial lighting from the nesting areas, and modifications to existing lighting needed to mitigate light exposure.

From “My Dovecote” to “My Building”: Intertextuality in Jarrar’s “The Story of My Building”

This paper aims at investigating how Arab American writer Randa Jarrar’s short story “The Story of My Building” (2016) appropriates events, themes, tropes and motifs employed by Russian writer Isaac Babel in his short story “The Story of My Dovecote” (1925) to portray the hard conditions and circumstances that Palestinians endure due to recurrent Israeli military attacks on the Gaza Strip. Jarrar’s story alludes to anti-Semitic violence, known as pogroms, that marred the lives of Jews in Russia in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Through strategic employment of intertextuality, Jarrar’s story vividly portrays how a child’s dream of building a dovecote has turned into a nightmare due to the demolition of his house by Israeli tanks. Borrowing certain episodes from Babel’s story, Jarrar sets up a link between her story and Babel’s, creating a parallelism between Palestinian people’s aches and anguishes at the hands of Israeli military forces at the start of the twenty-first century and Russian Jews’ sufferings and torments at the hands of pogromists almost a century ago. The connection between the stories is made even stronger as each story is narrated by a smart ten-year-old boy who is traumatized by the pillage and carnage he witnesses and experiences. In Jarrar’s story, Israeli tanks destroy the protagonist’s house and kill civilians; similarly, pogromists loot the protagonist’s house and murder his grandfather. Eventually, the two boys are reunited with their families who have taken refuge at a friend’s house. Yet, while Babel’s protagonist does not lose his house, in Jarrar’s story the protagonist’s family along with several other Palestinian families become homeless and displaced..

State Building in Crisis Governance: Donald Trump and COVID-19.

State Building in Crisis Governance: Donald Trump and COVID-19.

Low-story damage detection of buildings using deep neural network from frequency phase angle differences within a low-frequency band

Lower stories of buildings are much more vulnerable due to the critically dead load from high stories. Vibration-based damage detection methods are commonly used to quantify damage with indicators and early assess structural deterioration. However, these indicators are usually not directly related to structural performance and can be distorted by the modeling errors or sensing uncertainties. In addition, damage detection of structures can be realized from sensor data by the remaining useful life estimation framework in machine learning. Meanwhile, a machine learning model, which detects structural damage, can be trained by the generated data from a numerical/identified model, e.g., phase angle differences of structural transfer functions. Moreover, the bounded nature of phase angles coincides with the needs of machine learning algorithms, and the combined stiffness and damping changes involved in damaged structures can also be considered in a learning model. Therefore, this study proposes a neural network damage detection method based on frequency response phase angle differences for low-story damage of buildings. In this proposed method, a simplified model is established from identified modal parameters of a structure and optimized using the least-squared stiffness approach, and the transfer function phase angle differences are generated from the model considering the stiffness and damping changes in various damage scenarios. The generated data are exploited to train a deep learning model which predicts the residual stiffness percentages as the condition parameters in the remaining useful life estimation framework. In this study, a numerical example provides detailed procedure to develop the neural network damage detection model and evaluate the effectiveness of the learning model. The proposed method is also employed in a scaled six-story steel-frame building for experimental verification. As seen in the results, the neural network damage detection method can estimate the residual stiffness percentages in the lower stories of a building based on frequency response phase angle differences.

Gross Floor Area Estimation from Monocular Optical Image Using the NoS R-CNN

Gross floor area is defined as the product of number of building stories and its base area. Gross floor area acquisition is the core problem to estimate floor area ratio, which is an important indicator for many geographical analyses. High data acquisition cost or inherent defect of methods for existing gross floor area acquisition methods limit their applications in a wide range. In this paper we proposed three instance-wise gross floor area estimation methods in various degrees of end-to-end learning from monocular optical images based on the NoS R-CNN, which is a deep convolutional neural network to estimate the number of building stories. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to estimate instance-wise gross floor area from monocular optical satellite images. For comparing the performance of the proposed three methods, experiments on our dataset from nine cities in China were carried out, and the results were analyzed in detail in order to explore the reasons for the performance gap between the different methods. The results show that there is an inverse relationship between the model performance and the degree of end-to-end learning for base area estimation task and gross floor area estimation task. The quantitative and qualitative evaluations of the proposed methods indicate that the performances of proposed methods for accurate GFA estimation are promising for potential applications using large-scale remote sensing images. The proposed methods provide a new perspective for gross floor area/floor area ratio estimation and downstream tasks such as population estimation, living conditions assessment, etc.

Damage detection at storey and element levels of high-rise buildings: a hybrid method

Damage detection at storey and element levels of high-rise buildings: a hybrid method

A Physics Story: Literacy technique for learning the language of physics

Illustrations provided by Daniel Murrell , dansmurrell@gmail.com When I began teaching high school physics, I found that many of my students were not just struggling with the mathematics of physics but the way the language was used. Physics is sometimes discussed as being a second language where common words are coded with specific alternate definitions (consider how you use the word “delta”). Furthermore, many of our students are English Language Learners. Thus, providing developmentally appropriate assistance to building scientific vocabulary not only addresses equity issues but can be a highly effective teaching strategy. In this article, I provide an example of one such approach to addressing literacy issues: a vocabulary building story on Convection, Conduction, and Radiation.

KELAIKAN BANGUNAN FASILITAS UMUM UNTUK TEMPAT EVAKUASI TSUNAMI DI KECAMATAN BAITUSSALAM

Tsunami evacuation buildings in the tsunami-prone zone area are essential to minimize the number of fatalities. The purpose of this study is to analyze the behavior of the existing building structures caused by earthquake and tsunami loads in the Baitussalam District. The existing buildings that were reviewed were the SD 1 Lambada Klieng Building and the Syahamah Aceh Putra Foundation Building. The methodology in determining the capacity of the existing structures by conducting a field assessment to obtain data on existing buildings which will then be modeled, both existing buildings and a potential design of buildings using structural analysis software. for analysis. The results of the analysis show that the existing buildings need to be strengthened and redesigned to be able to withstand the effects of earthquake and tsunami loads. The remodeled of the buildings included modifying the column dimensions and also additional building stories. The remodeled of the existing building structures to become the tsunami evacuation structures is safe enough against earthquake loads and tsunami loads that occur.

Seismic performance evaluation and risk assessment of typical reinforced concrete frame buildings with masonry infill and conventional vertical extension in Nepal

Many reinforced concrete (RC) frame buildings in Nepal were significantly damaged by the 7.8 magnitude (Mw) earthquake in Nepal on April 25, 2015. To contribute to mitigate future earthquake disasters, the current study focuses on two specific characteristics of residential RC frame buildings in the capital city of Nepal, Kathmandu: the application of brick masonry infill to exterior and partition walls, and the conventional vertical extension of building stories different from the design. Although these factors are likely to significantly affect the seismic performance, their effects are frequently neglected in practical design and construction management in developing countries. Hence, the main objective of this research is to investigate and clarify the seismic performance of RC frame buildings considering the above factors through experimental and numerical investigations. The present paper (1) briefly introduces the characteristics of a typical residential RC frame building in Kathmandu, (2) illustrates the numerical modeling parametrically considering three different contributions of brick masonry infill walls and (3) investigates the seismic performance of the RC frame building considering the effects of the infill wall modeling and the vertical extension through numerical analyses. Consequently, it was found that the consideration of the in-plane stiffness and strength of the infill walls resulted in both positive and negative contributions to the seismic performance of low-rise (up to three stories) and medium-rise (more than three stories) buildings respectively, quantitatively clarifying significant effects of the presence of infill and the vertical extension. These findings contribute to provide realistic solutions to upgrade the seismic performance by utilizing or removing the brick masonry infill walls or by managing the building stories to mitigate future earthquake disasters on typical RC frame buildings not only in Nepal but also in other countries with similar backgrounds.

The Relationship Between Storey of Buildings and Fall Risk.

Purpose: This study examined the association between storey of building and fall risk in older adults' residences and residents' level of fear of falling.Methods: The National Health and Ageing Trends Study (NHATS) collected information that would provide an understanding of basic trends people aged 65 years and older. Using a longitudinal survey, the present study employed the first round of NHATS data that was collected in 2011. In the first round, 12,411 participants were enrolled, and 8,077 interviews were completed. The study sample sizes for falling and worry about falling are 6,153 and 6,142, respectively.Results: Unadjusted analysis revealed that storey of building was a risk factor for fall and worry about falling. There was a higher prevalence for fall and worry about falling when subjects lived in single storey of building compared with the subjects live in multi-storey. Logistic regression analysis showed no highly significant between storey of building and the fall/fear of falling.Conclusion: Several clinical factors independently were indicated pertaining to the fall and worry about falling in older adult's residences.

Behaviour of Multi-Storey RC Building Under Seismic Load Using Pushover Analysis

The current work investigates the behavior of a multi-story RC building under seismic load using pushover analysis, employing two (codes IS code and ACI code) where the special moment resistant frame (SMRF) building is located in a medium-seismicity region of India in Pune City. The G+8 to G+20 storeys of the RC buildings have been chosen for this purpose. The structural analysis programmed SAP2000.V20 was used to create a finite element model of the structure. The different models (5 models) of RC buildings were initially designed to resist seismic loads using the responses spectrum analysis method to determine the RC building’s characteristics. Pushover analysis is used to predict potential weak areas in the structure by tracking the sequence of damages of each and every member in the structure and determining the weak joints (critical joints) in the RC building. and compare the two codes (IS code and ACI code)

An algorithm to calibrate analytical models of multi-story buildings from vibration records

The common approach to develop analytical models of multi-story buildings from their vibration records is to match the modal properties identified from the records. However, the models developed by matching only the modal properties do not necessarily represent the real structure. In other words, more than one model can match the recorded motions. Moreover, modal properties do not give information on the distribution of stiffness and damping along the height of the building. In this study, an algorithm is developed to identify the dynamic characteristics of each story of multi-story buildings using the transfer-matrix formulation of the response. The building is considered as the superposition of 1-story structures, put one on top of the other. Starting from the top story and going downward, each story’s natural frequency and damping ratio are identified as it were a 1-story building. A key requirement for this approach is to have vibration records from every story. Since this is not typically the case, we utilize the so-called Mode Shape-Based Estimation (MSBE) method to estimate the vibration time histories at non-instrumented floors. Once vibration records are available at every floor, and starting from the top story, we can calculate the individual frequency and damping ratio of each story (i.e. as if it were a 1-story building) by minimizing the error between the recorded and estimated Fourier amplitude spectra (FAS) of the vibration records in that story. The analytical models calibrated in this way are more accurate, and the system identified is unique. Numerical examples are provided to show the application of the methodology.

Behaviour of Concentrically Braced Steel Frames under Fire Loading

Knowing how a steel structure behaves under fire loading is of vital importance, given a large number of events in recent years have proved the vulnerability of steel structures under this type of hazard. Older concentrically braced frames have been widely used in buildings without observing seismic provisions and details. Although the vulnerability of this type of structural system, here referred to as non-seismic braced frames, has been studied under earthquake loading before, its behaviour under fire loading has not been investigated yet. This paper investigated the behaviour of global and local responses of the mentioned structural system under various uniform fire scenarios. The heating and cooling phases of fire were taken into account for different building stories using the finite element method. The results of analyses showed that the braces buckled at high temperatures due to the large compressive axial forces and expansion of lateral constraints. This phenomenon led to the early loss of lateral resistance of stories, which, in turn, resulted in the failure of columns. Consequently, the underlying floor collapsed under fire. The analysis results contribute to a better understanding of the behaviour of steel braced frames under fire conditions and the corresponding local and global responses.

A Narrative Inquiry into Language-Identity Building Stories of Korean-Immigrant Youth in Canada

A Narrative Inquiry into Language-Identity Building Stories of Korean-Immigrant Youth in Canada

The Indian Council of World Affairs: Revisiting Formative Points of Institutional History

This commentary recounts the important hallmarks of the institutional history of the Indian Council of World Affairs, one of India’s first publicly funded research institutions. It presents a brief account of its long history since 1943, its career in acquiring prominence, its decline and its revival. This commentary takes off from its recently published institutional history (Raghavan, T., & Mishra, V. [2021]. Sapru House: A story of institution building in world affairs).

Transformative or Tokenistic?

Transformative or Tokenistic?

'Thirsty Sugar Lands': Environmental Impacts of Dams and Empire in Puerto Rico Since 1898

Abstract The story of North American dam building is incomplete without the United States' Caribbean territories because the motivations and consequences of building dams there were different from on the mainland. Between 1910 and 1914, the Puerto Rican Irrigation Service built three large dams in the island's south-east to irrigate canefields owned by North American sugar companies. The water harnessed by the South Coast Irrigation Project (SCIP) doubled sugar yields in its district in the decades following the project's completion, generating huge profits for North American sugar interests. However, the sugar boom did not lead to sustained economic growth on the island and did little to increase the standard of living for many Puerto Rican fieldworkers and their families. The project also brought a bumper crop of unforeseen environmental consequences. North American engineers underestimated the vagaries of Puerto Rico's climate. Droughts and extended dry periods led to water shortages that continually menaced irrigation. Stormy weather created another unanticipated problem for the dams. Hurricanes and heavy rains in the mountains north of the sugar lands contributed to high erosion rates that accelerated sediment accumulation in the reservoirs and reduced their storage capacity. Together, drought and siltation threatened to render the dams obsolete. Hydroelectric turbines, installed as an incidental part of the project, provided affordable electricity that powered groundwater pumps to make up for surface water shortages. Groundwater saved the sugar boom, but sediments continued to build in reservoirs, an enduring legacy of US imperialism that is expensive to mitigate. The SCIP preserved socioeconomic and racial inequalities, but re-engineered the island's hydrosphere, turning the parched south-east into a giant canefield and its rivers into repositories for sediments.

A study on visual impact assessment of the external form of unified houses in rural China

ABSTRACT Under the background of promoting rural revitalization in China, the construction of unified houses has become an important trend of rural development. However, controversy has never ceased over its results. This research set the external form of unified houses as its research object and surveyed forty-two rural unified housing programs distributed in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shandong provinces. Five physical features (namely, building stories, roof type, courtyard area, window-wall ratio, and residential landscape area) were taken as the research dimensions to evaluate the influence of these features on respondents’ visual impact assessment by means of photo stimulation. Through analyzing the data obtained from experiments, the difference of rural families with different demographic characteristics in their visual impact assessment has been explored. The results show that all the five physical features would influence rural residents’ visual impact assessment of the external form of unified house; families with different demographic characteristics also differ in their visual impact assessment. This research provides constructive reference for the better development of unified housing program in rural China.

Effects of infill walls on load resistance of multi-story RC frames to mitigate progressive collapse

To study the effects of infill wall on progressive collapse resistance of reinforced concrete (RC) frames with slabs, a macro finite element (FE) model was built using general purpose software OpenSees. The FE model was validated by existing test results. Then, the model was subsequently used to predict the progressive collapse potential of eight-story RC frame including slabs and infill walls. The numerical studies demonstrated that the inclusion of the slabs and infill walls could increase the ultimate load and initial stiffness by 70% and 169%, respectively, compared with the bare frame. The infill walls not only changed the load resisting path but also effectively improved the load redistribution ability of the frame. To evaluate the reliability of using a two-story sub-structure to investigate the progressive collapse behavior of a multi-story building, the resistance of each story of a multi-story building in case of column missing is compared. It was found that the resistance of each story was similar, except the first story. Finally, a series of parameter studies were carried out to quantify the effects of opening ratio, thickness and compressive strength of the infill walls on the progressive collapse performance of RC frame.

Fragility curves for seismic damage assessment in regular and irregular MRFs using improved wavelet-based damage index

In the conventional performance‐based earthquake engineering framework, fragility curves are mapped to a function of story drift ratio or spectral acceleration corresponding to the first mode. Based on the fragility curves, the probability of structural healthy status can be estimated. Practically, it is difficult to measure story drift and expensive to develop an automative measuring system. Therefore, this paper strives to develop fragility curves by using wavelet-based refined damage-sensitive feature (rDSF), considering higher mode contributions. These fragility curves can be obtained from absolute acceleration responses recorded at each story of buildings. As irregularities have important and significant effects on behaviour and seismic performance of Moment Resisting Frames (MRFs) especially in the field of structural health monitoring, in the next step, we extend the fragility curves for irregular MRFs. To this end, an efficient and more precise rDSF using Morlet and cmorfb-fc wavelets are extended to map fragility curves. The correlation coefficient between rDSF and maximum story drift ratio is evaluated as a criterion to determine the effects of irregularity. The 6-story steel benchmark MRF was manufactured to consider a stiffness reduction irregularity caused by the deference in story height and ductility of beam-column members. To assemble rDSFs, acceleration responses recorded both from the regular and irregular MRFs were analyzed by using incremental dynamic analysis, subjected to different ground motion sets. Moreover, a system identification method is used to identify the natural frequencies of each MRF. Based on the acquired results, it can be concluded that the MRFs including higher first story and weak columns-strong beams changes with a higher probability of damages lead to damage occurrence at lower seismic intensities and also lower maximum story drift ratios as compared with those of reference MRF. Moreover, the results show that the fragility curves estimated by wavelets-based rDSF, especially by using cmorfb-fc wavelet-based rDSF, due to lower probability of damages (varied between 27% and 81% for different damage states) have more efficiency than the fragility curves derived from Morlet wavelet-based DSF, considering only the first mode, for all the MRFs of interest. Furthermore, global fragility curves lead to a total assessment of the MRFs, while for a more accurate damage diagnosis, the rDSF-base fragility curves computed for each story can be used.