Critical Constructability Principles for Girder Bridge Construction in Malaysia

Implementing constructability concepts in a project can bring many benefits such as reduced project cost & duration, enhanced project quality, and improved site management. There were numerous research on the constructability concept since its introduction in late 1970. However, there are limited studies that identified the critical constructability principles for infrastructure projects. This study identified the critical design stage constructability principles for girder type river bridge construction in Malaysia. Based on extensive literature review and unstructured interviews with the experts in bridge construction, 54 constructability principles were identified. Questionnaires were distributed to professional engineers and G6 & G7 contractors in Malaysia to rate the 54 constructability principles in term of their importance or impact in enhancing the constructability of bridge construction based on 5-point Likert scale. The received 143 responses were analysed using factor analysis which is a data reduction tool of SPSS. Varimax method of orthogonal approach was adopted for factor rotation. Factor analysis had helped to generate 11 principal components or critical constructability principles. Cronbach’s Alpha reliability test also indicated good reliability of the questionnaire scale. The identified critical constructability principles can provide guidelines to the construction practitioners at the design stage to enhance the performance of bridge construction

Constructability Research Trends: A Review and Future Directions

Implementing constructability concepts in a project can bring many benefits such as reduced project cost & duration, enhanced project quality, and improved site management. There were numerous research on constructability concepts since its introduction in late 1970. However, there are limited contemporary literature to review the research on constructability in a structured way. Therefore, this paper aims to review the literature with respective to the constructability concepts. The trend of constructability development, limitations of current research, research gaps and future direction will be briefly presented. Constructability development internationally will be discussed first before the limitation of the constructability research conducted in Malaysia are presented. The literature review reveals that the constructability research in Malaysia are still limited. Apart from building projects, there is a need for more constructability studies with respect to infrastructure projects. The trend of constructability development had moved towards the use of quantitative models. For future direction, quantitative models related to infrastructure projects in Malaysia can be developed. There is a potential of the quantitative models to be embedded with Building Information Modelling (BIM) so that automated assessment is made possible

TriECCC: Trilingual Corpus of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for Speech Recognition and Translation Studies

This paper presents an extended work on the trilingual spoken language translation corpus of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), namely TriECCC. TriECCC is a simultaneously spoken language translation corpus with parallel resources of speech and text in three languages: Khmer, English, and French. This corpus has approximately [Formula: see text] thousand utterances, approximately [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], and [Formula: see text] h in length of speech, and [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] million words in text, in Khmer, English, and French, respectively. We first report the baseline results of machine translation (MT), and speech translation (ST) systems, which show reasonable performance. We then investigate the use of the ROVER method to combine multiple MT outputs and fine-tune the pre-trained English–French MT models to enhance the Khmer MT systems. Experimental results show that the ROVER is effective for combining English-to-Khmer and French-to-Khmer systems. Fine-tuning from both single and multiple parents shows the effective improvement on the BLEU scores for Khmer-to-English/French and English/French-to-Khmer MT systems

Evaluation of an Epitypified Ophiocordyceps formosana

The substantial merit of Cordyceps s.l. spp. in terms of medicinal benefits is largely appreciated. Nevertheless, only few studies have characterized and examined the clinical complications of the use of health tonics containing these species. Here, we epitypified C. formosana isolates that were collected and characterized as Ophiocordyceps formosana based on morphological characteristics, molecular phylogenetic analyses, and metabolite profiling. Thus, we renamed and transferred C. formosana to the new protologue Ophiocordyceps formosana (Kobayasi & Shimizu) Wang, Tsai, Tzean & Shen comb. nov. Additionally, the pharmacological potential of O. formosana was evaluated based on the hot-water extract from its mycelium. The relative amounts of the known bioactive ingredients that are unique to Cordyceps s.l. species in O. formosana were found to be similar to the amounts in O. sinensis and C. militaris, indicating the potential applicability of O. formosana for pharmacological uses. Additionally, we found that O. formosana exhibited antioxidation activities in vitro and in vivo that were similar to those of O. sinensis and C. militaris. Furthermore, O. formosana also displayed conspicuously effective antitumor activity compared with the tested Cordyceps s.l. species. Intrinsically, O. formosana exhibited less toxicity than the other Cordyceps species. Together, our data suggest that the metabolites of O. formosana may play active roles in complementary medicine

Observation of a ppb mass threshoud enhancement in \psi^\prime\to\pi^+\pi^-J/\psi(J/\psi\to\gamma p\bar{p}) decay

The decay channel $\psi^\prime\to\pi^+\pi^-J/\psi(J/\psi\to\gamma p\bar{p})$ is studied using a sample of $1.06\times 10^8$ $\psi^\prime$ events collected by the BESIII experiment at BEPCII. A strong enhancement at threshold is observed in the $p\bar{p}$ invariant mass spectrum. The enhancement can be fit with an $S$-wave Breit-Wigner resonance function with a resulting peak mass of $M=1861^{+6}_{-13} {\rm (stat)}^{+7}_{-26} {\rm (syst)} {\rm MeV/}c^2$ and a narrow width that is $\Gamma<38 {\rm MeV/}c^2$ at the 90% confidence level. These results are consistent with published BESII results. These mass and width values do not match with those of any known meson resonance.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Chinese Physics

Precision measurement of the branching fractions of J/psi -> pi+pi-pi0 and psi' -> pi+pi-pi0

We study the decays of the J/psi and psi' mesons to pi+pi-pi0 using data samples at both resonances collected with the BES III detector in 2009. We measure the corresponding branching fractions with unprecedented precision and provide mass spectra and Dalitz plots. The branching fraction for J/psi -> pi+pi-pi0 is determined to be (2.137 +- 0.004 (stat.) +0.058-0.056 (syst.) +0.027-0.026 (norm.))*10-2, and the branching fraction for psi' -> pi+pi-pi0 is measured as (2.14 +- 0.03 (stat.) +0.08-0.07 (syst.) +0.09-0.08 (norm.))*10-4. The J/psi decay is found to be dominated by an intermediate rho(770) state, whereas the psi' decay is dominated by di-pion masses around 2.2 GeV/c2, leading to strikingly different Dalitz distributions.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure

Precision Measurement of the Mass of the τ\tau Lepton

An energy scan near the $\tau$ pair production threshold has been performed using the BESIII detector. About $24$ pb$^{-1}$ of data, distributed over four scan points, was collected. This analysis is based on $\tau$ pair decays to $ee$, $e\mu$, $eh$, $\mu\mu$, $\mu h$, $hh$, $e\rho$, $\mu\rho$ and $\pi\rho$ final states, where $h$ denotes a charged $\pi$ or $K$. The mass of the $\tau$ lepton is measured from a maximum likelihood fit to the $\tau$ pair production cross section data to be $m_{\tau} = (1776.91\pm0.12 ^{+0.10}_{-0.13}$) MeV/$c^2$, which is currently the most precise value in a single measurement.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure