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Understanding the seismic resistance mechanisms and safety limits of cross-laminated timber (CLT) buildings and performing an accurate evaluation of their seismic performance is critical in earthquake-prone areas such as Japan, the US, and Italy to ensure that human lives are protected against major earthquakes. However, the knowledge from shaking table tests of full-scale CLT buildings is limited, and most tests' maximum interstory drift is less than 4%. As a first step toward collapse analysis, this study replicated a full-scale two-story shake table experiment with a maximum interstory drift of 8.77%. The analysis software was developed by the authors and modified to consider the restoring force and the P–δ effect to replicate seismic behavior at large deformation. The skeleton curve parameters were employed in the analysis model and then changed. The results that matched the experimental results well were searched comprehensively by performing data assimilation. As a result, both the overall behavior (story shear force–interstory drift relationship) and the detailed behavior (uplift displacement of CLT wall foot of the first story) were consistent with the experimental results, indicating that the proposed analytical method can replicate the seismic behavior of CLT buildings even at large deformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has put in the foreground the dramatic actuality of global and local inequalities, undermining neo-liberal, communitarian, democratic or cosmopolitan projects of collective identity. In the light of intersecting inequalities such as class, race/ethnicity and gender, an explosion of Sinophobia, social stigma and physical attacks targeting people of East Asian and Southeast Asian appearance or heritage has been widely reported in Euro-American media. This article will focus on the case of Italy during the initial stage of the pandemic in early 2020. Italy has not only been the first European country to be exposed to the pandemic and to undergo national lockdown but also a country where the wave of racist assaults started in late January 2020, even before the first clusters have been detected. The critical investigation of Italian media discourses will highlight how deep-rooted, colonialist and ambivalent assumptions about the 'Oriental', 'Asian', 'Chinese' and 'yellow' other may have been crucial to the reproduction of racism against specific people, cultures and civilizations, regardless of nationality, class and gender. It will refer in particular to the concept of 'yellowness', resulting from a process of bio-cultural racialization within the hegemonic frame of 'Western', 'White' or 'Italian' identity. Furthermore, it will indicate how this process of racialized othering has emerged, but has also been contested, within the specific context of citizenship, Asian immigrants and governmental actions in contemporary Italy. The overall aim is not so much to denounce higher levels of racism in Italy compared to other Euro-American countries; rather, this article refers to the Italian case to stress how both global and local trajectories do mutually overlap to shape, and eventually to transform, a national context, offering further insights on the glo-calization of the civilizational 'West'/'East' divide in the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY The 2009 L'Aquila, Italy, earthquake ( Mw 6.3) produced an unprecedented number of seismological records for a normal faulting event, and hence represents an important case study of damaging moderate magnitude earthquakes occurring in densely inhabited areas. We have investigated the source process of the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake in both the low- and broad-band frequency ranges by analysing the teleseismic and strong motion data. A low-frequency (<0.5 Hz) source model has been determined by waveform inversion of teleseismic and near-field strong motion data, yielding slip distributions with a major asperity located about 8 km southeast of the hypocentre. The broad-band (0.2-10 Hz) source characteristics were estimated using the empirical Green's function method providing the strong motion generation area of about 42 km2 located southeast of the hypocentre below the village of Onna. This coincides with the location of the asperity from the inversion analysis, indicating that the low-frequency and broad-band ground motions produced during the earthquake were generated at similar locations on the fault plane. The position of the strong motion generation area also correlates well with the distribution of observed macroseismic (MCS) intensities reported by INGV. The maximum macroseismic intensities of IX-X were reported southeast of the epicentre, with an intensity of X measured in Onna. The source properties of the 2009 L'Aquila mainshock reveal the estimated size of the strong motion generation area to be in agreement with predictions made using empirical source scaling relation for inland crustal earthquakes, implying a stress drop of approximately 10 MPa. This further indicates that the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake involved a stress drop similar to that of previously recorded earthquakes in the Central and Southern Apennines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a cross-sectional study which suggested that anxious and depressive temperaments have a significant role in stress self-management. The study examined relationship between temperament, job stress and overcommitment using a scale of effort-reward imbalance (ERI) model and the Temperament Evaluation of Memphis, Pisa, Paris and San Diego-Autoquestionnaire version (TEMPS-A). It states the study provided insights into the occupational health and workplace adaptability.