Effects of Wall-Soil-Structure Interaction on Seismic Response of Retaining Wall

Retaining walls have suffered damages under past earthquakes. Usually the analyses do not consider the retained soil’s interaction with the wall, which takes place during dynamic conditions. The consideration makes the wall-soil system more flexible than the wall alone. The conditions of separation of wall (during interactions) again change the dynamic characteristics of the assumed wall-soil system that needs to be addressed. The paper presents a study on the behavior of the retaining wall under static as well as seismic conditions considering above aspects. The wall-soil interaction model incorporates the modeling of interface between them. The system is idealized as a plane strain twodimensional model and base acceleration in the form of typical earthquake motion (Uttarkashi, October 20, 1991, India) is represented as external loading. The study concludes with important results, which are useful for researchers, scientists and those involved in analyses and design of retaining walls

Students' Preferences Between Blackboard Teaching and PowerPoint Presentations: A Cross-Sectional Survey

INTRODUCTION: With evolution of technology, teachers have, or are shifting to various methods other that blackboard teaching (e.g. PowerPoint, Over Head Projectors, Integrated Learning, Online Apps, etc)AIM: To assess students’ Preferences between blackboard teaching and PowerPoint Presentations among different university students in the city of Melbourne, AustraliaMATERIALS AND METHOD: Data was collected using a pre-tested and pre-validated questionnaire and distributed online to students studying in various Universities in Melbourne, Australia. Statistical tests involved the Shapiro-Wilk test, Independent samples t-test, multivariate linear regression and the Pearson’s correlation coefficient. The analysis was done using SPSS version 21.0.RESULTS: There were a total of 827 complete responses (response rate: 82.6%) and females formed a majority of the study population (62%). Majority of the students (53.1%) preferred PowerPoint presentations as compared to blackboard teaching (46.9%), although the difference was minimal; responses of females was statistically significant (p=0.02). Significant differences (p=0.03) were also observed as 58.8 % students considered blackboard teaching more interesting as compared to PowerPoint Lectures.CONCLUSION: Students preferred PowerPoint presentations as compared to Blackboard teaching and the teachers should aim to make it as interesting as possible and allow student interaction in between

Percutaneous release of trigger finger and its functional outcome

Background: An overview of percutaneous release for trigger finger and its functional outcomes. Methods: The present prospective controlled analytical study was conducted after taking approval from center human ethical committee. A written and informed consent was obtained. There were 50 patients who reported to outpatient department (OPD) with symptoms suggestive of trigger thumb/ finger, were subjected to the study. Results: Most of the patients belonged to the age group of 41-50 years. Majority of patients were females (56%) and males were (44%). Most of the patients had the right 1st digit involved (32%), followed by left 1st and right 3rd digit (18% each). Before the release of affected digit, 56% were grade 3, 26% were grade 4 and only 18% were grade 1. Complete resolution immediately after the procedure was seen in 82% cases. Pre procedure, mean VAS of 8.4 reduced to mean VAS of 6.2 immediate post procedure. At 48 hours post procedure, mean VAS of 3.06 and mean VAS of 1.12 was seen at 1-month post procedure period. At 3 months post procedure, mean VAS of 0.42. 94% cases had no complications. Conclusions: Percutaneous release of trigger finger is a safe and effective procedure associated with favorable functional outcomes. It provides an alternative treatment option for patients who have failed conservative management or prefer a minimally invasive approach

SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR BUILDING CONTAINER CLUSTER

The present disclosure provides a method and container management system for building container cluster. The container management system based on user requirement may automate hardening of operating system and configure network and storage for adding new container. The container management system obtains and configures load balancer VIP without any manual intervention. Thereafter, the container management system performs end-to-end validation by deploying test application and validating the test application. Thus, the present disclosure reduces time consumption for building container clusters based on the user requirement

Effect of Loading Rate on Creep Properties of HgCdTe Epitaxial Films

Nanoindentation creep studies were performed on Hg1-xCdxTe (x~0.29) epitaxial films using different loading rates of 0.5 mN.s-1, 1 mN.s-1, 2 mN.s-1 and 4 mN.s-1, keeping a constant peak load of 10 mN. A constant hold time of 20 sec at peak load was maintained for all experiments. The effect of loading rate on creep behaviour of material has been investigated. Creep displacement had shown increasing trend with increase of loading rates. Stress exponents were extracted using creep curve fitting with an empirical equation. A strong dependence of loading rate on stress exponent was observed. The value of stress exponent was found varying in the range 0.60-1.76, 0.96-2.23, 0.98-2,87 and 0.90-2.81 for loading rates 0.5 mN.s-1, 1 mN.s-1, 2 mN.s-1 and 4 mN.s-1, respectively. The change of stress exponent was attributed to change of creep mechanism. Hardness and elastic modulus were extracted from load-displacement curves and it was found that with the increase of the loading rate hardness increases, while elastic modulus remains constant. A correlation between variation of hardness and creep displacement has also been presented

TwiRGCN: Temporally Weighted Graph Convolution for Question Answering over Temporal Knowledge Graphs

Recent years have witnessed much interest in temporal reasoning over knowledge graphs (KG) for complex question answering (QA), but there remains a substantial gap in human capabilities. We explore how to generalize relational graph convolutional networks (RGCN) for temporal KGQA. Specifically, we propose a novel, intuitive and interpretable scheme to modulate the messages passed through a KG edge during convolution, based on the relevance of its associated time period to the question. We also introduce a gating device to predict if the answer to a complex temporal question is likely to be a KG entity or time and use this prediction to guide our scoring mechanism. We evaluate the resulting system, which we call TwiRGCN, on TimeQuestions, a recently released, challenging dataset for multi-hop complex temporal QA. We show that TwiRGCN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art systems on this dataset across diverse question types. Notably, TwiRGCN improves accuracy by 9--10 percentage points for the most difficult ordinal and implicit question types.Comment: 9 pages + references + appendi

Revelation of graphene-Au for direct write deposition and characterization

Graphene nanosheets were prepared using a modified Hummer's method, and Au-graphene nanocomposites were fabricated by in situ reduction of a gold salt. The as-produced graphene was characterized by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HR-TEM). In particular, the HR-TEM demonstrated the layered crystallites of graphene with fringe spacing of about 0.32 nm in individual sheets and the ultrafine facetted structure of about 20 to 50 nm of Au particles in graphene composite. Scanning helium ion microscopy (HIM) technique was employed to demonstrate direct write deposition on graphene by lettering with gaps down to 7 nm within the chamber of the microscope. Bare graphene and graphene-gold nanocomposites were further characterized in terms of their composition and optical and electrical properties