Building a sustainable community of coastal leaders to deal with sea level rise and inundation

Sea level rise and inundation were stated to be the highest priorities in the community-developed Ocean Research Priorities Plan and Implementation Strategy in 2005. Although they remain stated priorities, very few resources have been allocated towards this challenge. Inundation poses a substantial risk to many coastal communities, and the risk is projected to increase because of continued development, changes in the frequency and intensity of inundation events, and acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise along our vulnerable shorelines. (PDF contains 4 pages) There is an increasing urgency for federal and state governments to focus on the local and regional levels and consistently provide the information, tools, and methods necessary for adaptation. Calls for action at all levels acknowledge that a viable response must engage federal, state and local expertise, perspectives, and resources in a coordinated and collaborative effort. A workshop held in December 2000 on coastal inundation and sea level rise proposes a shared framework that can help guide where investments should be made to enable states and local governments to assess impacts and initiate adaptation strategies over the next decade.

Optimal design of building structures using genetic algorithms

A general framework for multi-criteria optimal design is presented which is well-suited for automated design of structural systems. A systematic computer-aided optimal design decision process is developed which allows the designer to rapidly evaluate and improve a proposed design by taking into account the major factors of interest related to different aspects such as design, construction, and operation.

The proposed optimal design process requires the selection of the most promising choice of design parameters taken from a large design space, based on an evaluation using specified criteria. The design parameters specify a particular design, and so they relate to member sizes, structural configuration, etc. The evaluation of the design uses performance parameters which may include structural response parameters, risks due to uncertain loads and modeling errors, construction and operating costs, etc. Preference functions are used to implement the design criteria in a "soft" form. These preference functions give a measure of the degree of satisfaction of each design criterion. The overall evaluation measure for a design is built up from the individual measures for each criterion through a preference combination rule. The goal of the optimal design process is to obtain a design that has the highest overall evaluation measure - an optimization problem.

Genetic algorithms are stochastic optimization methods that are based on evolutionary theory. They provide the exploration power necessary to explore high-dimensional search spaces to seek these optimal solutions. Two special genetic algorithms, hGA and vGA, are presented here for continuous and discrete optimization problems, respectively.

The methodology is demonstrated with several examples involving the design of truss and frame systems. These examples are solved by using the proposed hGA and vGA.

Stress and load calculation for unknown building

Not available.

The effect of earthquakes on reinforced concrete building design

The building under consideration was the Pasadena Furniture Building, on East Colorado St., Pasadena, California. It is a modern reinforced concrete building that may be classed as a warehouse of flat-slab construction.

Building TRACE (translations censored) theatre corpus: some methodological questions on text selection

Editores:Micaela Muñoz-Calvo; Carmen Buesa-Gómez

Building up a frequency stabilisation based on a wavemeter for a diode laser and characterisation for a digital mirror device for artificial potentials

It has built and characterised a laser and It has learned what each of the components does. It has been able to run the laser in single-mode and stabilised it around a desired setpoint thanks to a PID controller that It has programmed. It has established a communication between the PID controller programmed in LabVIEW and Arduino Due, the DAC that It has chosen after comparing it with another candidate. It has learned some basics of how the LightCrafter 4500 DMD works. The projected light is the composition of the lights of three LED’s, each of which has a certain on-time. The mirrors chose to be in on- or off-stages depending to the amount of intensity that we want for each colour.

Community-based coastal resource management in Orion (Bataan, Philippines) : building community property rights in a fishing community

The Community-based Coastal Resource Management Project in Orion, Bataan, Philippines was started in 1991. The village level fishers organizations have formed a municipal-wide association called the Samahan at Ugnayan ng Pangisdaan sa Orion (SUGPO). It represents 70% of the small-scale fishers in Orion and has taken on the task of rehabilitating the degraded fishing grounds. The experience in Orion indicates that coastal resource management can be successful if the fishers have ownership of the program and the costs and benefits of the program are distributed equally in a manner acceptable to them.