Seismic Earth Pressures of Retaining Wall from Large Shaking Table Tests

To ascertain seismic response of retaining wall in the Wenchuan earthquake, large shaking table tests are performed and an acceleration record is acted in 3 directions. In the tests, acceleration time history recorded at Wolong station in the Wenchuan earthquake is used to excite the model wall. Results from the tests show that the location of dynamic resultant earth pressure is 0.35–0.49 H from toe of the wall for road shoulder retaining wall on rock foundation, 0.33–0.42 H for embankment retaining wall on rock foundation, and 0.46–0.77 H for road shoulder retaining wall on soil foundation. Besides, dynamic earth pressure increases with the increase of ground shaking from 0.1 g to 0.9 g and the relationship is nonlinear. The distribution is closed to for PGA less than 0.4 g but larger for PGA larger than and equal to 0.4 g, especially on the soil foundation. After the comparison of measured earth pressures and theoretical results by pseudodynamic method and pseudostatic method, results of the former are consistent with those of the shaking table test, but results of the latter method are smaller than measured

The Development of LLMs for Embodied Navigation

In recent years, the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) has attracted increasing attention due to their potential in a variety of practical applications. The application of LLMs with Embodied Intelligence has emerged as a significant area of focus. Among the myriad applications of LLMs, navigation tasks are particularly noteworthy because they demand a deep understanding of the environment and quick, accurate decision-making. LLMs can augment embodied intelligence systems with sophisticated environmental perception and decision-making support, leveraging their robust language and image-processing capabilities. This article offers an exhaustive summary of the symbiosis between LLMs and embodied intelligence with a focus on navigation. It reviews state-of-the-art models, research methodologies, and assesses the advantages and disadvantages of existing embodied navigation models and datasets. Finally, the article elucidates the role of LLMs in embodied intelligence, based on current research, and forecasts future directions in the field. A comprehensive list of studies in this survey is available at https://github.com/Rongtao-Xu/Awesome-LLM-E

Study on the failure behaviour of Advanced High Strength Steel considering stamping history

The stamping history has a significant impact on the structural performance of ultra-high strength steel parts. In this paper the material hardening and fracture characteristics of QP1180-EL ultra-high strength steel were tested through experimental methods, and the GISSMO damage model parameters were calibrated based on experiment results. A full process simulation analysis was conducted on the stamping process of a bumper beam, and the damage accumulated during the stamping forming process was evaluated based on the GISSMO damage model. The structural performance differences of bumper beam in three-point bending load case were compared and studied under three conditions: without stamping history, with stamping history but except for damage, and with stamping history. The results show that considering thickness reduction, strain, and stress during the forming process can improve the accuracy of predicting structural peak forces, and considering damage during stamping process can further improve the accuracy of predicting structural failure behaviour

New Developments in Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering

Based on the review on the advances of several important problems in geotechnical seismic engineering, the authors propose the initial analysis theory of time-frequency-amplitude (known as TFA for short), in an effort to realize the organic combination of time and frequency information and develop a groundbreaking concept to the traditional idea in the geotechnical seismic engineering area

MLIP: Efficient Multi-Perspective Language-Image Pretraining with Exhaustive Data Utilization

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) has achieved remarkable success, leading to rapid advancements in multimodal studies. However, CLIP faces a notable challenge in terms of inefficient data utilization. It relies on a single contrastive supervision for each image-text pair during representation learning, disregarding a substantial amount of valuable information that could offer richer supervision. Additionally, the retention of non-informative tokens leads to increased computational demands and time costs, particularly in CLIP's ViT image encoder. To address these issues, we propose Multi-Perspective Language-Image Pretraining (MLIP). In MLIP, we leverage the frequency transform's sensitivity to both high and low-frequency variations, which complements the spatial domain's sensitivity limited to low-frequency variations only. By incorporating frequency transforms and token-level alignment, we expand CILP's single supervision into multi-domain and multi-level supervision, enabling a more thorough exploration of informative image features. Additionally, we introduce a token merging method guided by comprehensive semantics from the frequency and spatial domains. This allows us to merge tokens to multi-granularity tokens with a controllable compression rate to accelerate CLIP. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our design.Comment: ICML 202

The dynamic capabilities of county-level government in China during the outbreak of large-scale epidemics: a study based on three cases

BackgroundAfter China entered the stage of normalized epidemic prevention and control, county-level government became the leading force and responsible body for prevention and control. In some counties, the epidemic was initially sporadic but later evolved into large-scale transmission. This situation posed a severe challenge to their dynamic capabilities. The dynamic capacity of county-level government largely determines the effectiveness of dealing with large-scale epidemics.MethodsThis study selected three counties with a large-scale outbreak of COVID-19 in 2022 as samples for multi-case analysis, and used insight ability, integration ability, learning ability and innovation ability as dimensions for comparative analysis. Data and information were collected from the official websites of these three county-level governments using the octopus collector.ResultsThe dynamic capabilities of county-level government are related to the results of large-scale epidemic prevention and control. This topic has been less explored in existing research. Compared to Si County and Linshui County, Jiutai District clearly lacks dynamic capabilities in large-scale epidemic prevention and control. The different abilities of county-level government play different roles in epidemic prevention and control.ConclusionCounty-level government are at the weakest stress point in the hierarchical structure of China's power system. They are at the forefront of public crisis management playing an important role, which further increase their pressure. Enhancing the dynamic capabilities of county-level government can greatly help them effectively respond to crises and alleviate their vulnerability

Smoking susceptibility and its predictors among adolescents in China: Evidence from Ningbo City

Susceptibility to smoking is a risk factor of actual adolescent smoking behaviors. This study aimed to estimate the rate of smoking susceptibility and its predictors in China with a sample of 4,695 junior high school students in Ningbo, China. Core questions from the Global Youth Tobacco Survey (GYTS) were adapted to the China context and administered to these students. The rate of smoking susceptibility, measured by “Do you foresee yourself taking up smoking in the next 12 months”, is 6.1%. Results from logistic regression suggested that among boys, adolescents’ health knowledge that smoking can cause lung cancer (OR=2.73), the belief that smoking can help people relax (OR=2.32), and self-report of never having seen anti-smoking information on campus (OR=1.80) predicted increased susceptibility to smoking. Conversely, the belief that boys who smoke are less attractive (OR=0.64), that parents will have a problem with their child smoking (OR=0.50), having no friends or classmates who smoke (OR=0.22), and not seeing teachers smoke in the previous week (OR=0.61) predicted decreased susceptibility to smoking. Findings for girls were similar. This study suggested the need for comprehensive programs aiming to improve family, peer, and school environments to decrease smoking susceptibility among adolescents