Restrained Shrinkage of Fly Ash Based Geopolymer Concrete and Analysis of Long Term Shrinkage Prediction Models

The research presented in this manuscript describes the procedure to quantify the restrained shrinkage of geopolymer concrete (GPC) using ring specimen. Massive concrete structures are susceptible to shrinkage and thermal cracking. This cracking can increase the concrete permeability and decrease the strength and design life. This test is comprised of evaluating geopolymer concrete of six different mix designs including different activator solution to fly ash ratio and subjected to both restrained and free shrinkage. Test results obtained from this experimental setup was plotted along with the available empirical equation to observe the shrinkage strain of GPC and a model was suggested to predict the shrinkage strain of GPC. It was found from this study that along with activator solution to fly ash ratio the final compressive strength of GPC plays an important role on shrinkage strai

SDI water quality assessment guidelines

Presented at the 15th annual Central Plains irrigation conference and exposition proceedings on February 4-5, 2003 at the City Limits Convention Center in Colby, Kansas.Includes bibliographical references

Filtration and maintenance considerations for SDI systems

Presented at the Central Plains irrigation short course and exposition on February 17-18, 1998 at the Camino Inn in North Platte, Nebraska.Includes bibliographical references

The impact of silver nanoparticles on microbial communities and antibiotic resistance determinants in the environment.

Nanosilver (NAg) is currently one of the major alternative antimicrobials to control microorganisms. With its broad-spectrum efficacy and lucrative commercial values, NAg has been used in medical devices and increasingly, in consumer products and appliances. This widespread use has inevitably led to the release and accumulation of the nanoparticle in water and sediment, in soil and even, wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). This Article describes the physical and chemical transformations of NAg as well as the impact of the nanoparticle on microbial communities in different environmental settings; how the nanoparticle shifts not only the diversity and abundance of microbes, including those that are important in nitrogen cycles and decomposition of organic matters, but also their associated genes and in turn, the key metabolic processes. Current findings on the microbiological activity of the leached soluble silver, solid silver particulates and their respective transformed products, which underpin the mechanism of the nanoparticle toxicity in environmental microbes, is critically discussed. The Article also addresses the emerging evidence of silver-driven co-selection of antibiotic resistance determinants. The mechanism has been linked to the increasing pools of many antibiotic resistance genes already detected in samples from different environmental settings, which could ultimately find their ways to animals and human. The realized ecological impact of NAg calls for more judicial use of the nanoparticle. The generated knowledge can inform strategies for a better 'risks versus benefits' assessment of NAg applications, including the disposal stage

A Certification Framework for Cloud Security Properties: The Monitoring Path

In this paper we describe the structure and functionality of a certification integrated framework aimed to support the certification of security properties of a Cloud infrastructure (IaaS), a platform (PaaS), or the software layer (SaaS). Such framework will bring service users, service providers and cloud suppliers to work together with certification authorities in order to ensure security properties and certificates validity in the continuously evolving cloud environment. For this purpose, the framework relies on multiple types of evidence gathering with respect to security, e.g., testing services, monitoring agents or trusted computing proofs. In this paper we will focus only on the monitoring case and will illustrate its use. Yet, this framework is designed to be able to follow models for hybrid, incremental and multi-layer security certification since cloud security has to build upon the entire cloud stack

Transfer Learning with Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for Pneumonia Detection using Chest X-ray

Pneumonia is a life-threatening disease, which occurs in the lungs caused by either bacterial or viral infection. It can be life-endangering if not acted upon in the right time and thus an early diagnosis of pneumonia is vital. The aim of this paper is to automatically detect bacterial and viral pneumonia using digital x-ray images. It provides a detailed report on advances made in making accurate detection of pneumonia and then presents the methodology adopted by the authors. Four different pre-trained deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)- AlexNet, ResNet18, DenseNet201, and SqueezeNet were used for transfer learning. 5247 Bacterial, viral and normal chest x-rays images underwent preprocessing techniques and the modified images were trained for the transfer learning based classification task. In this work, the authors have reported three schemes of classifications: normal vs pneumonia, bacterial vs viral pneumonia and normal, bacterial and viral pneumonia. The classification accuracy of normal and pneumonia images, bacterial and viral pneumonia images, and normal, bacterial and viral pneumonia were 98%, 95%, and 93.3% respectively. This is the highest accuracy in any scheme than the accuracies reported in the literature. Therefore, the proposed study can be useful in faster-diagnosing pneumonia by the radiologist and can help in the fast airport screening of pneumonia patients.Comment: 13 Figures, 5 tables. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2003.1314

Combining SLA prediction and cross layer adaptation for preventing SLA violations

Abstract. Service-based Applications (SBA) are deployed in highly dy-namic and distributed settings, where various parts of the constituent components- services and their infrastructure- are controlled by dif-ferent third parties. In such a loosely coupled environment, adaptation capabilities are needed to manage deviations and unforeseen situations which might lead to negative consequences (e.g. contractual penalties). Current approaches either focus on cross-layer-adaptation or the pre-vention of SLA violations. In contrast to this, the approach presented in this paper combines both. The paper presents an architecture as a generic framework for the management of arising problems during ser-vice execution. Multiple adaptation mechanisms are available to react on adaptation needs, acting on different layers of the SBA (including e.g. the composition layer and the infrastructure layer). The final goal of the cross-layer adaptation capability is to avoid the violation of agreed Service Level (in SLAs) and thus ensure the benefits of SBAs for both customers and providers.