Round Robin Test for composite-to-brick shear bond characterization

The paper presents the experience of a working group within the RILEM Technical Committee 223-MSC ??Masonry Strengthening with Composite materials??, aimed at developing a standardized, reliable procedure for characterizing the bonding mechanism of masonry elements strengthened with composite materials under shear actions. Twelve laboratories from European universities and research centers were involved. Two different set-ups were compared, for single-lap and double-lap shear tests (the latter in two versions). Four kinds of fiber fabrics, i.e., glass, carbon, basalt and steel, were applied with epoxy resins (wet lay-up system) to clay brick units, for a total of 280 monotonic tests. The results provided information regarding the response of externally bonded-to-brick composites in terms of observed failure mechanisms, load capacity, effective transfer length, and bond shear stress?Cslip behavior. The test results of the 12 laboratories constitute a set of statistically representative data which may conveniently be used for setting appropriate design provisions and guidelines.     

Scheme-Based Alethic Realism: Agency,the Environment,and Truthmaking

This paper presents a position called Scheme-based Alethic Realism, which reconciles a realist position on the nature of truth with a pluralistic Kantian perspective that allows for multiple environments in which truthmaking relationships are established. We argue that truthmaking functions are constrained by a stable phenomenal world and a stable cognitive architecture. This account takes truth as normatively distinct from epistemic justification while relativizing the truth conditions of our statements to what we call Frameworks. The pluralistic aspect allows that these stable elements, while constraining representational and linguistic schemes, do not define a single framework for truthmaking relations. We strengthen this position by considering themes on situated rational agency from cognitive science and artificial intelligence, arguing that whatever enables or supports rational action within a particular environment must figure into some account of truth and truthmaking, and vice versa.     

What Should Default Reasoning be,by Default?

This is a position paper concerning the role of empirical studies of human default reasoning in the formalization of AI theories of default reasoning. We note that AI motivates its theoretical enterprise by reference to human skill at default reasoning, but that the actual research does not make any use of this sort of information and instead relies on intuitions of individual investigators. We discuss two reasons theorists might not consider human performance relevant to formalizing default reasoning: (a) that intuitions are sufficient to describe a model, and (b) that human performance in this arena is irrelevant to a competence model of the phenomenon. We provide arguments against both these reasons. We then bring forward three further considerations against the use of intuitions in this arena: (a) it leads to an unawareness of predicate ambiguity, (b) it presumes an understanding of ordinary language statements of typicality, and (c) it is similar to discredited views in other fields. We advocate empirical investigation of the range of human phenomena that intuitively embody default reasoning. Gathering such information would provide data with which to generate formal default theories and against which to test the claims of proposed theories. Our position is that such data are the very phenomena that default theories are supposed to explain.     

Reactivity towards water of silicon nitride: Energy of interaction and hydration dehydration mechanism

The heat of adsorption and adsorbed amounts of H₂O_(vap) have been measured on an industrial crystalline Si₃N₄ outgassed at 400 and 800° C. A nearly uniform surface is present after the 400° C thermal treatment, where H₂O is adsorbed via hydrogen bonding to surface OH and NH groups with a heat of adsorption of 50 kJ mol^–1. After 800° C thermal treatment, which involves the dehydration and condensation of OH and NH groups, water is readily dissociated at the surface (–H > 50 kJ mol^–1) and the pristine surface is formed on which water is hydrogen bonded again. No hydrophobic patches are detected. The results are discussed in comparison with SiO₂ behaviour in similar conditions.     

Contact force estimation and regulation in active pantographs: An algebraic observability approach

In this paper we extend our previous work concerning the regulation of the contact force in active train pantographs with wire‐actuators. In particular, we suggest a second‐order sliding mode based control scheme that avoids the direct measurement of the contact force, which is quite unpractical in real applications. The idea is to estimate the contact force using the measured displacements of the upper and lower pantograph frames. Unlike the contact force, the frames displacements can be measured accurately and reliably in practice. The estimation method, based on the algebraic observability theory, entails the use of real‐time sliding‐mode differentiators. It makes use explicitly of the mechanical characteristics of the upper frame only. The considered second‐order sliding mode control scheme also includes proper linear compensating cascade filters devoted to cope with the de‐stabilizing effects of the resonant wire actuator. We show that such a control scheme can be effectively combined with the given contact force estimation method. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley and Sons Asia Pte Ltd and Chinese Automatic Control Society     

Normative Communication Models for Agent

An agent message is an attempted action upon the information state of the receiver that, if successful, would cause the receiver to move to a new information state. A model of normative communication can define when messages are not merely unsuccessful but instead are illegal or impossible actions upon the receiver’s internal state. The model uses the preconditions of the other core message types, coupled with a model of task interdependencies, agent roles, and belief-desire-intention elements, to define the preconditions for sending a canonical not-understood error message. By defining the space of messages that are legal actions on an agent’s internal state, a normative communication model also defines a set of ‘reasons’ that can accompany the error message. A not-understood error message signals a mismatch between agent interaction models and the accompanying reason opens the possibility for agents to realign their respective models. The paper discusses the matters arising from this possibility. This approach assumes that normative communication behavior reflects normative domain behavior. It also assumes that each agent accesses the normative model, in contrast with more centralized frameworks for defining normative interaction among agents and identifying interaction errors.     

Characterization of the Cuban biopharmaceutical industry from collaborative networks

Scientometrics - Studies of scientific collaboration have introduced the concepts of collaborative networks. These networks may represent the social structure of a community of researchers or...     

Dealing with trajectory streams by clustering and mathematical transforms

Nowadays, almost all kind of electronic devices leave traces of their movements (e.g. smartphone, GPS devices and so on). Thus, the huge number of this “tiny” data sources leads to the generation of massive data streams of geo-referenced data. As a matter of fact, the effective analysis of such amounts of data is challenging, since the possibility to extract useful information from this peculiar kind of data is crucial in many application scenarios such as vehicle traffic management, hand-off in cellular networks, supply chain management. Moreover, spatial data streams management poses new challenges both for their proper definition and acquisition, thus making the overall process harder than for classical point data. In particular, we are interested in solving the problem of effective trajectory data streams clustering, that revealed really intriguing as we deal with sequential data that have to be properly managed due to their ordering. We propose a framework that allow data pre-elaboration in order to make the mining step more effective. As for every data mining tool, the experimental evaluation is crucial, thus we performed several tests on real world datasets that confirmed the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach.