Model tests on single batter piles subjected to lateral soil movement

A series of laboratory tests have been carried out to investigate the lateral response of battered piles under lateral soil movement. Model tests were carried out using instrumented rigid aluminium piles. The piles were embedded in homogeneous sand soil at batter angles &beta = 0°, ±10° and ±20° were subjected to two types of lateral soil movement profile. The results obtained from the study are presented in terms of the bending moment, shear force, soil reaction, pile rotation and lateral deflections along the length of the batter pile. The results of model tests on single vertical and batter piles under horizontal loads showed that the batter angle (&beta) significantly influenced the response of the batter piles. Regardless of the value of sand density, bending moment and deflection with batter angles &beta = +10° or positive batter piles were higher compared then vertical piles and negative batter piles

Relay Backpropagation for Effective Learning of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Learning deeper convolutional neural networks becomes a tendency in recent years. However, many empirical evidences suggest that performance improvement cannot be gained by simply stacking more layers. In this paper, we consider the issue from an information theoretical perspective, and propose a novel method Relay Backpropagation, that encourages the propagation of effective information through the network in training stage. By virtue of the method, we achieved the first place in ILSVRC 2015 Scene Classification Challenge. Extensive experiments on two challenging large scale datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method is not restricted to a specific dataset or network architecture. Our models will be available to the research community later.Comment: Technical report for our submissions to the ILSVRC 2015 Scene Classification Challenge, where we won the first plac

Can adenine nucleotides predict primary nonfunction of the human liver homograft?

Sixty-eight primary liver grafts were analyzed to see whether adenine nucleotides (AN: ATP, ADP, and AMP) or purine catabolites (PC: adenosine, inosine, hypoxanthine, and xanthine) of tissue or effluent can predict primary graft nonfunction. AN, PC, and nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, oxidized form (NAD+) of the tissue before (pretransplant) and after graft reperfusion (post-transplant) and of the effluent were analyzed. The graft outcome was classified into two groups (group A: successful, n = 64; group B: primary nonfunctioning, n = 4). No significant differences were observed in pretransplant measurements between groups A and B, whereas ATP, ADP, total AN, total AN + total PC (T) and NAD+, in post-transplant tissues, were significantly higher in group A. Xanthine in the effluent was significantly higher in group B than in group A. ATP, ADP, total AN, T, and NAD+ in post-transplant tissue were significantly associated with primary graft nonfunction by logistic regression analysis

The Brain Computer Interface: A Review and Some New Concepts

Over the past decade, many laboratories have begun to explore brain computer interface (BCI) technology as a new communication option for those with neuromuscular impairments that prevent them from using conventional augmentative communication methods. This work outlines the potential benefits of BCI, summarises a number of developments which have been made in recent years and provides an overview of the fundamental requirements which must be acknowledged for the successful progression of BCI technology. A novel proposal for a unique BCI system is also detailed

A Time-Space Tradeoff for Triangulations of Points in the Plane

In this paper, we consider time-space trade-offs for reporting a triangulation of points in the plane. The goal is to minimize the amount of working space while keeping the total running time small. We present the first multi-pass algorithm on the problem that returns the edges of a triangulation with their adjacency information. This even improves the previously best known random-access algorithm

Prevalence and correlates of substance use among persons with mental disorders in a Nigerian Psychiatric Hospital

Few studies in Nigeria have investigated the relationship between psychiatric disorders and substance use. Yet, evidence worldwide suggests that substance related problems might be a major burden among persons with psychiatric disorders. One hundred and five persons with mental illness (105) were evaluated for substance use with the Alcohol, Smoking, and Substance Involvement screening test (ASSIST). A questionnaire was used to elicit Sociodemographic variables. A high proportion had initiated tobacco (50.9%) and cannabis (34.5%) during adolescent. Factors associated with hazardous drug consumption were male sex (p<0.05), younger age (p<0.05)  unemployment (p<0.01) being unmarried (p<0.05) and lower educational level (p<0.05). Routine screening and brief interventions for substance use in psychiatric facilities should be critical components of mental health service delivery

Time Dependent Mechanical Crack Closure as a Potential Rapid Source of Post-Seismic Wave Speed Recovery: Insights From Experiments in Carrara Marble

Seismological observations indicate strong variations in wave velocities around faults both co-seismically during earthquakes, and post-seismically. Recovery is commonly associated with a reduction in crack damage. Here, we explore the recovery associated with time-dependent mechanical closure of cracks. We report results from laboratory experiments conducted on dry cores of Carrara marble at room temperature. We deformed cylindrical samples in the semi-brittle regime to induce crack damage before subjecting them to hydrostatic and triaxial stress conditions for extended periods of time while recording dilatancy and wave speeds repeatedly. We report wave speed increases of up to 40% of the damage-induced wave speed drop in samples subject to hydrostatic loading. Moreover, we report the occurrence of significant wave speed increases contemporaneously with time-dependent creep in triaxially loaded samples. Wave speed recovery during creep is only observed below a threshold creep strain rate, a result we interpret as a transition from brittle to plastic creep with decreasing strain rate. We interpret the wave speed increase in terms of reduced crack density and increased contact area within the crack array, and show that around 40% of the total crack surface has to be closed to justify the observed wave speed recoveries. We propose that mechanical crack closure is driven by the viscous relaxation of the bulk rock under the influence of locked-in stresses at low confining pressure, and of the external stresses at higher confining pressure. Our study shows that mechanical crack closure is a significant source of time-dependent wave speed recovery

Compactive Deformation of Sandstone under Crustal Pressure and Temperature Conditions

The transition from macroscopically brittle to macroscopically ductile deformation in porous sandstones is known to be pressure dependent, with compactive, ductile behavior occurring only once significant effective pressures have been reached. Within the crust, such effective pressures are associated with burial depths in the range 0.5 to 6 km, where the temperature is likely 35 ◦C to 200 ◦C. To test the importance of such elevated temperature on the strength and deformability of sandstone, a series of constant strain rate, triaxial deformation experiments were performed on three different water saturated sandstones at either ambient temperature or 150 ◦C. For each sandstone, an effective pressure range was used which spanned both the brittle and ductile deformation regimes, up to a maximum of 120 MPa. In the brittle regime, we observed a temperature‐dependent lowering of the yield stress of between 8 and 17%. Within the ductile regime, we observed an even greater reduction in the yield stress of between 9 and 37%. A further notable observation is that the transition from dilatant, brittle behavior to compactive, ductile behavior tends to occur at a lower effective pressure at elevated temperature. The weakening observed at elevated temperature can be explained by a reduction in fracture toughness, which is shown mathematically to cause greater weakening in the ductile regime than in the brittle regime. The apparent reduction in toughness at elevated temperature is potentially driven by a combination of a reduction in surface energy and, to a minor extent, an increase in subcritical crack growth rate

The impact of a psychiatry clinical rotation on the attitude of Nigerian medical students to psychiatry

Objective: Undergraduate medical students have ingrained and often negative attitudes towards psychiatry as a field and as a career. This in turn has affected recruitment of graduate medical students into the specialty. Little is known about the impact of psychiatry rotations during undergraduate medical training on students’ attitudes about psychiatry and eventual specialty choice in developing countries. This study examined the impact of a psychiatry clinical rotation on medical students’ attitudes to psychiatry and possible career choice. Method: Eighty-one and one hundred and six fifth year medical students completed the ATP-30, socio-demographic and career choice questionnaires at the beginning and the end of a four week clinical rotation respectively. Results: The overall attitude of the students to psychiatry was favourable at the beginning of the rotation with significant improvement following the rotation (p=0.003). Significant improvement in attitude was observed among female and younger students. Students who indicated preference for specialties other than psychiatry showed a greater improvement in their attitude to psychiatry following the rotation (p= 0.011). The rotation however did not enhance students’ preference for psychiatry as a future career. Conclusion: The four-week clinical rotation in psychiatry resulted in increased mean attitudinal score, but not in enhanced preference for psychiatry as a career.Keywords: Psychiatry; Attitude; Medical students; Nigeri

A matter of words: NLP for quality evaluation of Wikipedia medical articles

Automatic quality evaluation of Web information is a task with many fields of applications and of great relevance, especially in critical domains like the medical one. We move from the intuition that the quality of content of medical Web documents is affected by features related with the specific domain. First, the usage of a specific vocabulary (Domain Informativeness); then, the adoption of specific codes (like those used in the infoboxes of Wikipedia articles) and the type of document (e.g., historical and technical ones). In this paper, we propose to leverage specific domain features to improve the results of the evaluation of Wikipedia medical articles. In particular, we evaluate the articles adopting an "actionable" model, whose features are related to the content of the articles, so that the model can also directly suggest strategies for improving a given article quality. We rely on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and dictionaries-based techniques in order to extract the bio-medical concepts in a text. We prove the effectiveness of our approach by classifying the medical articles of the Wikipedia Medicine Portal, which have been previously manually labeled by the Wiki Project team. The results of our experiments confirm that, by considering domain-oriented features, it is possible to obtain sensible improvements with respect to existing solutions, mainly for those articles that other approaches have less correctly classified. Other than being interesting by their own, the results call for further research in the area of domain specific features suitable for Web data quality assessment