colincaprani.com

Well worth a look for the prefabrication and impeccable logistical planning evident from the video. But it’s not that new…the Empire State Building took 18 months in total!

I just came across Himmelblau’s function (226 hits) for testing optimization routines. It has four local minima and one maxima so it provides a good test:

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I’m pleased to say my implementation of the Nelder-Meade Simplex Algorithm (on my C++ page here (240 hits)) was able to optimize it for each minima (depending on the starting locations of course). I did have a weird problem though – starting a solution at (0,0) failed, even though the minima are not equidistant from the origin. Go figure!

DIT has released details of its new scholarship programme, the DIT Fiosraigh Scholarship Programme 2010 (for more details see here (196 hits)). Of particular interest to recent graduates is the Dean of Graduate Students Award. This will support the successful candidate with €16k+fees+€2k expenses per year, for up to 4 years. A minimum degree of 2:1 is required.The closing date is 15 September 2010.

Candidates interested in pursuing PhD research in Bridge Loading: statistics and dynamics should send a CV to info@colincaprani.com (482 hits).

Candidates interested in self-funding research to MSc level are also invited to send their CVs.

Again, some motivation is given in the chart below, and in this post (196 hits).

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Sometimes its useful to re-motivate ourselves. A sobering TIME magazine photo-essay reminds us why we research and try to continually improve the design process:

The Worst Bridge Collapses in the Past 100 Years (453 hits)

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Mianus Bridge, Greenwich, Conn. (June 28, 1983)

Another collection is here:
http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/news-seven-quaking-bridges-collapsed-costing-lives (582 hits)

The University of Nevada at Reno (UNR) is carrying out a large-scale shake-table testing of a four-span bridge, at the UNR Earthquake Engineering Laboratory, on 15 June, 2010 at 10:00 Pacific Time, (18:00 UTC). In itself this is an incredible endevour, but the best thing is that they are webcasting the event live.

For details of the bridge and the test set-up, see here:
http://nees.unr.edu/4-spanbridges/UNR Web AnnouncementCompositeBridge.pdf (117 hits)

and the link for the webcast is:
http://nees.unr.edu/projects/4span.html (158 hits)

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Four Span Bridge Test