Seismic building codes such as the Uniform Building Code (UBC) do not allow the equivalent lateral force (ELF) procedure to be used for structures with vertical irregularities. The purpose of this study is to investigate the definition of irregular structures for different vertical irregularities: stiffness, strength, mass, and that due to the presence of nonstructural masonry infills. An ensemble of 78 buildings with various interstory stiffness, strength, and mass ratios is considered for a detailed parametric study. The lateral force-resisting systems (LFRS) considered are special moment-resisting frames (SMRF). These LFRS are designed based on the forces obtained from the ELF procedure. The results from linear and nonlinear dynamic analyses of these engineered buildings exhibit that most structures considered in this study performed well when subjected to the design earthquake. Hence, the restrictions on the applicability of the equivalent lateral force procedure are unnecessarily conservative for certain types of vertical irregularities considered.

Abstract:We investigate the phenomenology of a simplified model of flavoured Dark Matter (DM), with a dark fermionic flavour triplet coupling to the left-handed SU(2) L quark doublets via a scalar mediator. The DM-quark coupling matrix is assumed to constitute the only new source of flavour and CP violation, following the hypothesis of Dark Minimal Flavour Violation. We analyse the constraints from LHC searches, from meson mixing data in the K, D, and B d,s meson systems, from thermal DM freeze-out, and from direct detection experiments. Our combined analysis shows that while the experimental constraints are similar to the DMFV models with DM coupling to right-handed quarks, the multitude of couplings between DM and the SM quark sector resulting from the SU(2) L structure implies a richer phenomenology and significantly alters the resulting impact on the viable parameter space.

DNA fingerprinting is one of the greatest discoveries of science in the century. Since its discovery, the technique is being widely used in varied fields such as deciphering the genetics of an organism, cracking ancestral belongingness, neonatal diagnosis, diagnosis of genetic disorder, and many others. However, it has revolutionized the field of criminal justice system by its uniqueness and individualization capabilities. Currently, DNA fingerprinting is considered to be the most irrefutable evidence to be produced before the court of law.Since its inception, the technique has undergone tremendous advancements, and the progress is being observed continuously. However, with the advent of time a consensus stepby-step protocol book describing the technology currently used is lacking. Most of the books available in the same field either describe the obsolete technique of RFLP for DNA examination or manual DNA extraction procedures. Currently, the technological advancement has seen DNA extraction through automation, and RAPID DNA technology has also arrived. Hence, we felt the need of a timely updated laboratory manual in the current field.In this context, the laboratory manual is structured to clear all doubts of the examiners as well as students regarding conventional and advanced forensic DNA typing experiments. It will be handy for the beginners as well as for the experts in the field of DNA fingerprinting for smooth conduction of the experiments, interpretation, and analysis of results. The uniqueness of the manual involves (a) step-by-step protocol for each experiments; (b) description of each chemicals and reagents and their corresponding principal/functional role; (c) separate experiments for DNA extraction from varied types of biological samples of forensic interest; (d) description of advanced automatic and semiautomatic techniques for DNA extraction; (e) inclusion of real case studies and statistical analysis; and (f) precaution and troubleshooting for each experiment.Every possible effort has been made to present the protocol book in a very simpler form for easy understanding of students, scientists, and DNA examiners. We have tried our best to incorporate all our experience and expertise to bring out the form of this manual. Throughout the writing process, we have faced lots of hurdles and problems; however, all of them have been overcome due to God's grace, self-belief, and support from family and friends. We are really thankful to each and every one for their support and encouragement during the process of writing. We hope the manual will be of great use for the readers in their career.Wishing the readers all the best for a successful experiment!!!!

This research work purposes an automated system for recognizing license plate technique using Convolutional Neural Network. On Indian roads there are variety of number plate format and variety of fonts are used in vehicles and the most common vehicle number plate used yellow or white as background and black used as foreground color. The proposed model can be partitioned into four parts-1) Digitization of image 2) character segmentation 3) Padding and Resize 4) Character Recognition. Here, Character Segmentation is done using connected component analysis. After that convolutional neural Network is used for recognition of characters. In the proposed system, Character segmentation and resize and padding of the image is done using MATLAB and Character Recognition part is done using PYTHON. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been tested on real car images. The proposed system is mainly applicable to West Bengal cars' license plates. Experimental verification is done using a dataset of 45 images in different environmental conditions. General TermsImage processing, convolutional neural network.

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