Ronan Point Apartment Tower Collapse and its Effect on Building Codes

In the early morning hours of May 16, 1968, the occupant of apartment 90 on the 18th floor of the 22-story Ronan Point apartment tower, in London, lit a match to brew her morning cup of tea. The resulting gas explosion initiated a partial collapse of the structure that killed four people and injured 17 (one of whom subsequently died). On investigation, the apartment tower was found to be deeply flawed in both design and construction. The existing building codes were found to be inadequate for ensuring the safety and integrity of high-rise precast concrete apartment buildings. The Larsen–Nielson building system, intended for buildings with only six stories, had been extended past the point of safety. The tower consisted of precast panels joined together without a structural frame. The connections relied, in large part, on friction. The apartment tower lacked alternate load paths to redistribute forces in the event of a partial collapse. When the structure was dismantled, investigators found appallingly poor workmanship at the critical connections between the panels. Subsequently, building codes in many countries have adopted structural integrity or “robustness” provisions that may be directly traced to the Ronan Point collapse.     

Dissociations in Hippocampal and Frontal Contributions to Episodic Memory Performance.

The hippocampus and frontal lobes both contribute to episodic memory performance. In the present study, the authors evaluated the relative contributions of hippocampus, frontal lobes, anterior temporal cortex, and posterior cortex to memory performance in neurodegenerative patients and normal older controls. Subjects (n = 42) were studied with structural MRI and a memory paradigm that measured delayed recall, semantic clustering during recall, recognition discriminability, and recognition response bias. Data were analyzed with multiple regression. Consistent with the authors' hypotheses, hippocampal volumes were the best predictor of delayed recall and recognition discriminability, whereas frontal volumes were the best predictor of semantic clustering and response bias. Smaller frontal volumes were associated with less semantic clustering during recall and a more liberal response bias. Results indicate that hippocampal and frontal contributions to episodic memory can be dissociated, with the hippocampus more important for memory accuracy, and frontal structures more important for strategic processing and decision making. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Working Conditions and Three Types of Well-Being: A Longitudinal Study With Self-Report and Rating Data.

The mean of self-report and observer ratings of working conditions was used to predict 3 types of well-being in 52 young workers: general well-being, job-related well-being, and spillover from work to nonwork domains. Longitudinally, job control predicted spillover. There was no strong evidence for reverse causation. Synchronously, Time 2 job stressors predicted all types of well-being, and job control predicted general well-being. Because dependent variables at Time 1 are controlled for, this indicates short-term effects. Results for stressors are in line with a stress reaction model, indicating a rather quick symptom development but reversibility. The effect of control on spillover, however, suggests a sleeper effect model, with symptoms appearing with delay. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Situated multimodal interaction in S K

In this paper, we give a short overview of the S K system, a flexible and adaptive multimodal dialog system. The system uses a common dialog backbone to realize three interaction scenarios. Through the use of generic methods and knowledge sources for multimodal fusion and fission, we were able to develop a generic dialog system for flexible multimodal interaction.     

A note on the ‘parallel computation thesis’

We prove that in some sense the ‘parallel computation thesis’ is wrong.     

The Internet accessible mathematical computation framework

The Internet Accessible Mathematical Computation (IAMC) framework aims to make it easy to supply mathematical computing powers over the Internet/Web. The protocol-based IAMC framework enables developers to create interoperable clients and servers easily and independently. Presented are conceptual and experimental work on the IAMC framework architecture and major components: the Mathematical Computation Protocol (MCP), a client prototype (Dragonfly), a server prototype (Starfish), a mathematical encoding converter (XMEC), and an open mathematical compute engine interface (OMEI).     

Biomolecular optical data storage and data encryption

The use of bacteriorhodopsin (BR) as an active layer in write-once-read-many optical storage is presented. This novel feature of BR materials may be used on a wide variety of substrates, among them transparent substrates but also paper and plastics. The physical basis of the recording process is polarization-sensitive two-photon absorption. As an example for this new BR application, an identification card equipped with an optical recording strip is presented, which has a capacity of about 1 MB of data. The recording density currently used is 125 kB/cm/sup 2/, which is far from the optical limits but allows operation with cheap terminals using plastic optics. In the examples given, data are stored in blocks of 10 kB each. A special optical encryption procedure allows the stored data to be protected from unauthorized reading. The molecular basis of this property is again the polarization-sensitive recording mechanism. The unique combination of optical storage, photochromism, and traceability of the BR material is combined on the single-molecule level. BR introduces a new quality of storage capability for applications with increased security and anticounterfeiting requirements.