Books on the topic 'Seismic forces'

<p>Earthquakes can cause considerable fatalities, injuries and financial loss. The forces of nature cannot be blamed, as the problem lies with the structures in seismic regions that may not have been designed or constructed to a sufficient degree to resist earthquake actions or they may have design flaws. This Structural Engineering Document (SED) concerns reinforced concrete and masonry buildings together with geotechnical aspects and presents in a concise and practical way the state of the art of current understanding of building failures due to earthquakes. It classifies the different types of seismic failure, explains the reasons for each failure, describes good practices to avoid such failures and also describes seismic retrofitting/upgrading procedures for pre-earthquake strengthening and post-earthquake repair and/or strengthening techniques for deficient buildings. Carefully selected photographs and diagrams illustrate the different failure types. This document could be considered as quite unique, as this is the first time such material concerning characteristic seismic failures of buildings has been presented together in one single document. It is intended to be a valuable educational reference textbook aimed at all levels of experience of engineers. It provides background information, ideas, guidance and reassurance to engineers in earthquake regions faced with the task of building a safer future for the public and to protect lives. <p> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Oddi3VTtxCM" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Between the 1920s and the 1960s, American mainstream cinematic architecture underwent a seismic shift. From the massive urban movie palace to the intimate streamlined theater, movie theaters became “neutralized” spaces for calibrated, immersive watching. Leading this charge was New York architect Benjamin Schlanger, a fiery polemicist whose designs and essays reshaped how movies were watched. This book examines the impact of Schlanger’s work in the context of changing patterns of spectatorship; his theaters and writing propose that the essence of film viewing lies not only in the text, but in the spaces where movies are shown. As such, this study insists that changing models of cinephilia are determined by physical structure: from the decorations of the palace to the black box of the contemporary auditorium, variations in movie theater design are icons for how twentieth-century viewing has similarly transformed. And by looking backward into cinema’s architectural history, 1970s screen theory becomes clearer as a historical in addition to a theoretical model; the emergence of the apparatus can be found in the immersive powers of the neutralized movie theater. In this book, exhibition practice takes its place as a force that propels spectatorship through time. Ultimately, space and viewing are revealed to be intertwined and mutually constitutive phenomena through which spectatorship’s discourses are all the more clearly seen.

In the twenty-first century, there has been a seismic shift in Indian political, religious and social life. The country's guiding spirit was formerly a fusion of the anti-caste worldview of B.R. Ambedkar; the inclusive Hinduism of Mahatma Gandhi; and the agnostic secularism of Jawaharlal Nehru. Today, that fusion has given way to Hindutva. This now-dominant version of Hinduism blends the militant nationalism of V.D. Savarkar; the Brahmanical anti-minorityism of M.S. Golwalkar; and the global Islamophobia of India's ruling regime. It requires deep cultural analysis and historical understanding, as only the sharpest and most profoundly informed historian can provide. For two decades, Tanika Sarkar has forged a path through the alleys and byways of Hindutva. She has trawled through the writing and iconography of its organisations and institutions, including RSS schools and VHP temples. She has visited the offices and homes of Hindutva's votaries, interviewing men and women who believe fervently in their mission of Hinduising India. And she has contextualised this new ferment on the ground with her formidable archival knowledge of Hindutva's origins and development over 150 years, from Bankimchandra to the Babri mosque and beyond. This riveting book connects Hindu religious nationalism with the cultural politics of everyday India.

As the United States rose to ascendancy in the first decades of the twentieth century, observers abroad associated American economic power most directly with its burgeoning automobile industry. In the 1930s, in a bid to emulate and challenge America, engineers from across the world flocked to Detroit. Chief among them were Nazi and Soviet specialists who sought to study, copy, and sometimes steal the techniques of American automotive mass production, or Fordism. This book traces how Germany and the Soviet Union embraced Fordism amid widespread economic crisis and ideological turmoil. The book recovers the crucial role of activist states in global industrial transformations and reconceives the global thirties as an era of intense competitive development, providing a new genealogy of the postwar industrial order. The book uncovers the forgotten origins of Fordism in Midwestern populism, and shows how Henry Ford's antiliberal vision of society appealed to both the Soviet and Nazi regimes. It explores how they positioned themselves as America's antagonists in reaction to growing American hegemony and seismic shifts in the global economy during the interwar years, and shows how Detroit visitors helped spread versions of Fordism abroad and mobilize them in total war. The book challenges the notion that global mass production was a product of post-World War II liberal internationalism, demonstrating how it first began in the global thirties, and how the spread of Fordism had a distinctly illiberal trajectory.

Simon was not always a crusader, and the majority of his career took place in his ancestral lands in France. His time in Montfort provides a crucial glimpse at the ordinary exercise of aristocratic government on a more intimate scale. His forest lordship furnished lessons of administration that would prove relevant to his rule in the Midi, such as the diplomatic projection of authority, the value of seigneurial continuity, the economic benefit of thriving towns, the necessity of an intensively participating chivalric following, and the advantage of wide ecclesiastical patronage. Similarly, Simon’s brief seisin and subsequent disseisin of the honor of Leicester demonstrated the fragility of his power when many of these elements were lacking. In addition to abstract lessons of governance, his northern lands also provided the financial backing necessary for his crusading career. Thus Simon’s lordship in France and England informed his later government and even made it possible.

The main milestones of the formation and development of astronomical science in Kharkiv during 1883–1945 are reconstructed on the example of the activities of the astronomical observatory of Kharkiv University. During this period, the outstanding worldview science in Kharkiv has achieved significant success: the works of Kharkiv astronomers have received world recognition; a well-known scientific planetary school has been established at the Observatory; the scientific community highly appreciated the research on the physics and chemistry of the Moon, the giant and small planets of the Solar System. The primary goal of the research is to inscribe the history of the university Observatory into the European and world context. Its purpose is to summarize the results of a comprehensive historical ad scientific study of the development of astronomical research in Kharkiv at the end of the 19th century – the first half of the 20th century and identification of ways of further scientific research. The completed research, which continues the problems of works devoted to the study of the history of astronomical science in Ukraine, focuses on expanding the well-known source base by attracting new retro-information resources. In particular, the monograph used a significant array of archival primary sources from almost twenty archival and library institutions of different countries. Most of them were introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, which allowed to determine and specify the sequence of stages of development of astronomical science in Kharkiv during the research period, to clarify and identify the little-known circumstances of the observatory life. The methodological basis of the study is the principles of historism, objectivity and a systematic approach to studying the problem. To solve specific problematic tasks in the monograph, general scientific and specially historical methods were used which allowed to study, analyze and summarize the presented factual material in a complex manner. The main sections of the monograph represent the dynamics of replenishment of the instrumental base of the university observatory, the chronology of the construction of the observatory complex of buildings at the location of the modern Scientific Research Institute of Astronomy of the V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. According to the author’s periodization, the stages of formation of subjects and directions of scientific work of university astronomers have been analyzed, including: seismic observations with the help of horizontal Rebeur-Paschwitz pendulums, research of the activity of the Sun, astrometric observations on the Repsold meridian circle of for the purpose of compiling a catalog of zodiac stars, studying lunar eclipses and meteor showers. The participation of university astronomers in the creation of the plan of the city of Kharkiv and its connection with the general network of precise geometric leveling of the Military Topographic Department of the General Staff; the organization of observations by an expedition of Kharkiv astronomers of the total Solar eclipse of 1914 in Henichesk; the creation of the School-workshop of precision mechanics at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Kharkiv University were considered; information on the participation of Kharkiv astronomers in the events of the civil war during the Ukrainian Revolution was documented. The scientific research activity of Kharkiv astronomers during 1920-1930-s which was devoted to carrying out important astrometric works on meridian observations of star declinations by absolute methods and observations of Kopf-Rentz stars according to the programs of the International Astronomical Union; the initiation of the creation of the Catalog of faint stars; research in astrophysics aimed at studying the physical conditions on the Moon and the Sun, planets and the interstellar environment; performing long series of spectrophotometric observations of the Moon, Jupiter, Mars and Saturn under different conditions of observation; study of the kinematics of stellar systems of different order, the physical parameters and evolution of stars, the morphology of the Galaxy, the nature of the stellar subsurfaces and atmospheres, dust and gas nebulae, new stars and the variability of stars have been considered; the directions of solid works carried out in the field of celestial mechanics, devoted to the dynamics of the minor planets of the Jupiter group, the definition and improvement of the orbits of minor planets have been clarified. The development of amateur astronomy in Kharkiv, in particular, the functioning of circles and societies that directed their activities to the dissemination of astronomical knowledge, was highlighted; the participation of their representatives in astronomical observations at the Kharkiv Astronomical Observatory was emphasized. Reconstructed the development of historical events in the 1930s related to the involvement of Soviet and Western astronomers in the processes of political confrontation between the USSR and the Western world; investigated the course of circumstances that prevented the implementation of the project of creating a new modern astronomical center of national importance – the central Ukrainian observatory in Kharkiv; the participation of an expedition of Kharkiv astronomers in the observation of the «great Soviet eclipse» – the total solar eclipse of 1936 – in the North Caucasus is highlighted; established the facts of political «purges» and repressions by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs ( the NKVD) in the Kharkiv Astronomical Observatory. The activity of the Kharkiv Astronomical Observatory has been documented and authentic biographical information about its representatives during the Nazi occupation of 1941–1943, the period of the German-Soviet war, has been presented; the unpopular facts of the forced collaboration of some scientists are highlighted; the process of recovery and reconstruction of the Kharkiv Astronomical Observatory after the liberation of the city is characterized. With the aim of researching the personal history of Kharkiv astronomy of the studied period, the monograph presents the results of a historical and biographical study of facts of life and scientific heritage of scientists who fully devoted themselves to Science, laid the foundations for the future development of many directions of modern astronomical research, made a significant contribution to the treasury of the national and European astronomical science, whose activities were connected with the Kharkiv Astronomical Observatory, in particular: Grigory Levytsky, Ludwig Struve, Mykola Evdokymov, Otto Struve, Mykola Barabashov, Boris Gerasimovich, Vasil Fesenkov, Oleksiy Razdolsky, Boris Ostashchenko-Kudryavtsev, Nicholas Bobrovnikov, Paraskovia Parkhomenko, Mstislav Savron, Boris Semeykin, Kostyantyn Savchenko and others (25 biographical essays are presented). A significant part of the mentioned factual material was also introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. A separate section of the monograph provides chronologically structured information that reflects the sequence of research work of the Kharkiv Astronomical Observatory employees during the period under study: from astrometric observations of stars and seismic research to spectrohelioscopic and spectroheliographic observations of the Sun and the initiation of the Kharkiv school of planetary science. It is assumed that the materials of the monograph will be used in research work devoted to the study of the process of institutionalization of astronomical research in Kharkiv at the end of the 19th century – the first half of the 20th century.