Pavement deterioration modeling and design of a composite pavement distress index for Kentucky interstate highways and parkways.

Pavement deterioration is one of the most important driver for prioritizing pavement management and preservation (PMP) projects. The primary goal of this thesis is to provide reasonable predictive functions from multiple linear regression (MLR) models and artificial neural networks (ANN) that can be adopted by Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC). Furthermore, we use analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to design a composite pavement distress index in order to help Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC) prioritizing PMP projects based on 11 different distress indices. Numerical results show that the MLR models provide relatively high R square values of approximately 0.8. Both MLR and ANN models have small average squared errors (ASE). Finally, for all nine distress indices studied in this thesis, MRL models are recommended to KYTC due to their simplicity, interpretability along with robust performance that is comparable to the ANN model. Finally, a priority rating method is developed using analytical hierarchy process and it integrates 11 pavement distress indices into one priority score. A case study shows that the propose AHP-based rating method overcomes the drawback of KYTC’s current rating system for overemphasizing the international roughness index (IRI) among all distress indices

Polymorphisms of the IGF1R gene and their genetic effects on chicken early growth and carcass traits

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The insulin-like growth factor I receptor (IGF1R) has an important effect on growth, carcass, and meat quality traits in many species. However, few studies on associations of the <it>IGF1R </it>gene with growth and carcass traits have been reported in chickens. The objectives of the present study were to study the associations of the <it>IGF1R </it>gene with chicken early growth and carcass traits using a neutral test, variation scan of the gene, genetic diversity, linkage disequilibrium and association analyses.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The tree generated from the amino acid sequences of 15 species showed that the <it>IGF1R </it>gene was conservative in the whole evolution among the mammalian animals and chickens. In a total of 10,818 bp of sequence, 70 single nucleotide polymorphisms were identified in the chicken <it>IGF1R </it>gene. The allelic and genotypic frequency distribution, genetic diversity and linkage disequilibrium of 18 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the Xinghua and White Recessive Rock chickens showed that six of them were possibly associated with growth traits. Association analyses showed that the A17299834G SNP was significantly associated with chicken carcass body weight, eviscerated weight with giblets, eviscerated weight, body weights at 28, 35, and 56 d of age, leg length at 56 d of age, and daily weight gain at 0–4 weeks. The haplotypes of the A17307750G and A17307494G were associated with early growth traits. The haplotypes of the A17299834G and C17293932T were significantly associated with most of the early growth traits and carcass traits.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>There were rich polymorphisms in the chicken <it>IGF1R </it>gene. Several SNPs associated with chicken early growth traits and carcass traits were identified in the <it>IGF1R </it>gene by genetic diversity, linkage disequilibrium, and association analyses in the present study.</p

Transforming Programs between APIs with Many-to-Many Mappings

Transforming programs between two APIs or different versions of the same API is a common software engineering task. However, existing languages supporting for such transformation cannot satisfactorily handle the cases when the relations between elements in the old API and the new API are many-to-many mappings: multiple invocations to the old API are supposed to be replaced by multiple invocations to the new API. Since the multiple invocations of the original APIs may not appear consecutively and the variables in these calls may have different names, writing a tool correctly to cover all such invocation cases is not an easy task. In this paper we propose a novel guided-normalization approach to address this problem. Our core insight is that programs in different forms can be semantics-equivalently normalized into a basic form guided by transformation goals, and developers only need to write rules for the basic form to address the transformation. Based on this approach, we design a declarative program transformation language, PATL, for adapting Java programs between different APIs. PATL has simple syntax and basic semantics to handle transformations only considering consecutive statements inside basic blocks, while with guided-normalization, it can be extended to handle complex forms of invocations. Furthermore, PATL ensures that the user-written rules would not accidentally break def-use relations in the program. We formalize the semantics of PATL on Middleweight Java and prove the semantics-preserving property of guided-normalization. We also evaluated our language with three non-trivial case studies: i.e. updating Google Calendar API, switching from JDom to Dom4j, and switching from Swing to SWT. The result is encouraging; it shows that our language allows successful transformations of real world programs with a small number of rules and little manual resolution