No abstract

SUMMARYThe authors developed a buckling-restrained brace that enables increased design freedom at both ends of the core plate and strict quality control while providing stable hysteresis characteristics even under high strains. The buckling-restrained brace can be formed by welding a core plate covered with unbonded material to a pair of mortar-filled channel steels (steel mortar planks) as a restraining part. The use of this approach enables visual confirmation of the status of the mortar filling and also facilitates standardizing structural members and member-by-member quality control. Specimens of a buckling-restrained brace with different steel mortar plank heights are fabricated to adjust the restraining force, along with specimens with different core plate width-to-thickness ratios. The tests were conducted to reveal the hysteretic characteristics of the braces, as well as their cumulative plastic strain energy, elastoplastic properties, and stiffening properties. A performance evaluation formula as well as a buckling-restrained brace design method using the test results is proposed.

SUMMARYThis paper presents the results of a pilot test conducted for evaluating the energy dissipation behaviour of shear panels made of low yield steel whose 0-2 per cent offset yield stress is 120 MPa. A total of six full-scale shear panels were tested with the loading condition, stiffener spacing, and magnitude of axial force as test variables. The shear panels tested yielded at a shear force that is approximately 4 of the yield shear force of equivalent shear panels made of common mild steel. Shear panels with proper stiffener arrangement exhibited stable hysteresis, thus ensuring large energy dissipation capacity. Sufficient strain hardening was observed in the shear panels tested, with their energy dissipation capacity about 1.5 times larger than that of an equivalent linear-elastic and perfect-plastic system. Plate buckling did not lead the shear panels to immediate degradation in their energy dissipation capacity. Post-buckling resistance was found to be a subject that requires further studies for quantifying the performance of shear panels made of low yield stress steel as hysteretic dampers.

No abstract

This paper first reviews the concept of the damage‐controlled structure (DCS) which is a kind of passive damping technology, proposed before the Hyogoken‐Nanbu Earthquake in Japan and the Northridge Earthquake in the USA. The philosophy, the necessity and the potential of the damage‐controlled structure are stated in the first two sections of this paper. Second, a modified shear‐bending beam model and a rational dynamic analysis method of three‐dimensional frame for the damage‐controlled structure with passive energy dissipation devices are reviewed. Thirdly, a series of dynamic loading test results of modeled damage‐controlled steel frame with hysteretic dampers are presented. Finally, a number of actual example building projects which exemplify the current seismic design trend using the passive damping technology in Japan are reviewed.

BackgroundPoor outcomes have been reported for stroke patients admitted outside of regular working hours. However, few studies have adjusted for case severity. In this nationwide assessment, we examined relationships between hospital admission time and disabilities at discharge while considering case severity.Methods and ResultsWe analyzed 35 685 acute stroke patients admitted to 262 hospitals between April 2010 and May 2011 for ischemic stroke (IS), intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH), or subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH). The proportion of disabilities/death at discharge as measured by the modified Rankin Scale (mRS) was quantified. We constructed 2 hierarchical logistic regression models to estimate the effect of admission time, one adjusted for age, sex, comorbidities, and number of beds; and the second adjusted for the effect of consciousness levels and the above variables at admission. The percentage of severe disabilities/death at discharge increased for patients admitted outside of regular hours (22.8%, 27.2%, and 28.2% for working‐hour, off‐hour, and nighttime; P<0.001). These tendencies were significant in the bivariate and multivariable models without adjusting for consciousness level. However, the effects of off‐hour or nighttime admissions were negated when adjusted for consciousness levels at admission (adjusted OR, 1.00 and 0.99; 95% CI, 1.00 to 1.13 and 0.89 to 1.10; P=0.067 and 0.851 for off‐hour and nighttime, respectively, versus working‐hour). The same trend was observed when each stroke subtype was stratified.ConclusionsThe well‐known off‐hour effect might be attributed to the severely ill patient population. Thus, sustained stroke care that is sufficient to treat severely ill patients during off‐hours is important.

Graphical novels such as comics and mangas are well known all over the world. The digital transition started to change the way people are reading comics, more and more on smartphones and tablets and less and less on paper. In the recent years, a wide variety of research about comics has been proposed and might change the way comics are created, distributed and read in future years. Early work focuses on low level document image analysis: indeed comic books are complex, they contains text, drawings, balloon, panels, onomatopoeia, etc. Different fields of computer science covered research about user interaction and content generation such as multimedia, artificial intelligence, humancomputer interaction, etc. with different sets of values. We propose in this paper to review the previous research about comics in computer science, to state what have been done and to give some insights about the main outlooks.

Comics and manga are one of the most important forms of publication and play a major role in spreading culture all over the world. In this paper we focus on balloons and their association to comic characters or more generally text and graphic links retrieval. This information is not directly encoded in the image, whether scanned or digital-born, it has to be understood according to other information present in the image. Such high level information allows new browsing experience and story understanding (e.g. dialog analysis, situation retrieval). We propose a speech balloon and comic character association method able to retrieve which character is emitting which speech balloon. The proposed method is based on geometric graph analysis and anchor point selection. This work has been evaluated over various comic book styles from the eBDtheque dataset and also a volume of the Kingdom manga series.