Deformation Response of Some Earth and Rock-fill Dams

Vertical compressional data obtained from 10 earth and earth rock fill darns built in India has been analysed for during construction and post-construction response. The performance of these darns has been compared with some darns built in USA wherein the construction practices have been similar. The contributions of various factors, namely height of embankment, gradation and plasticity of soil, and placement conditions of moisture and density have been examined. A major portion of the total compression occurred by the end of construction. These compressions were found to be the functions of the height of the embankment. Both the compressions across and along the valley have been found to be small

Architecture of autonomous systems

Automation of Space Station functions and activities, particularly those involving robotic capabilities with interactive or supervisory human control, is a complex, multi-disciplinary systems design problem. A wide variety of applications using autonomous control can be found in the literature, but none of them seem to address the problem in general. All of them are designed with a specific application in mind. In this report, an abstract model is described which unifies the key concepts underlying the design of automated systems such as those studied by the aerospace contractors. The model has been kept as general as possible. The attempt is to capture all the key components of autonomous systems. With a little effort, it should be possible to map the functions of any specific autonomous system application to the model presented here

Beautiful is Good and Good is Reputable: Multiple-Attribute Charity Website Evaluation and Initial Perceptions of Reputation Under the Halo Effect

The halo effect has been extensively used to understand how people make judgments about the quality of an object. Also, the halo effect has been known to occur when people evaluate multi-attribute objects. Although websites consist of multiple attributes and dimensions, prior research in information systems has paid little attention to how people evaluate multi-attribute websites and associated halos. Furthermore, research investigating how initial evaluations of reputation are formed toward unknown objects under the halo effect is scarce. Based on these two research gaps, the purposes of this study are to identify whether there is evidence of salient halos in the evaluation of multi-attribute websites and to theorize initial perceptions of reputation. To accomplish these objectives, we introduce a framework for classifying halos based on attributes and dimensions. Also, this study employs charity websites as a multi-attribute donation channel consisting of three attributes of information content quality (mission information, financial information, and donation information) and four attributes of system quality (navigability, download speed, visual aesthetics, and security). Based on the proposed framework, this study proposes four types of halos that are relevant to charity website evaluation—collective halo (attribute-to-attribute), aesthetics halo (attribute-to-dimension), reciprocal-quality halo (dimension-to-dimension), and quality halo (dimension-to-dimension). The results of structural equation modeling and other analyses provide evidence of the various proposed halos