Effects of Arching on Measurement of Embedded Pressure Cell in Embankment Dam

Field observation and monitoring earth structures is vital to design the structure safely and efficiently. Among different types of instruments, earth pressure cells (EPCs) are used to measure soil pressure in embankment dams, which are not proved to be entirely satisfactory. Presence of cells and installation methods usually affect the accuracy of total stress measurements. Since earth pressure cells are prone to damage by large and sharp stones or by using heavy compaction rollers, one excavates a trench and place EPC within fine grained soil which is compacted with light-weight machines. This nonconformity results in local arching between the installation trench and surrounding fill that transmits stress from flexible zone (installation trench) to surrounding fill. As a result the measured soil stress is less than real one. Moreover, pressure cell underestimates the stress in non homogeneous dams for the reason that transversal arching occurs between the core and shell. In this study numerical analyses were conducted to evaluate the contribution of local and transversal arching in stress underestimation and to further clarify the arching trend in the dam height. According to the obtained results, it is possible to calibrate the registered total stress during construction procedure in an earthfill dam

Factors affecting post graduate students' attitude and behavioral intention toward online shopping

The increasing use of the internet in Malaysia provides a developing prospect for e- marketers. Such marketers’ awareness of the factors affecting Malaysian’s shopping attitudes and intentions is crucial to further develop their marketing strategies in converting potential customers into active ones, while maintaining the existing online customers. Attitude is an important determinant of online shopping behaviour and represents the best estimates of future behavior available to market researchers. Among all the theories, the decomposed theory of planned behavior model determines particular salient beliefs that might influence information technology usage and will predict the behavioral intention more reliable. This study sets out to examine the factors influencing students’ online shopping attitudes and intentions at University Technology Malaysia through a five-point likert scale questionnaire. Also present study examined the mediating role of attitude between independent variables and behavioral intention. In this research the non- probability and simple random sampling were chosen and the data were collected from 375postgraduate students in university. Data were analyzed by structural equation modelling using the partial least squares (PLS) approach. During the analysis, several methods were used such as, reliability and validity analysis and t-test. The results of the study showed that perceived usefulness and compatibility were significantly and positively correlated with the attitude of students towards online shopping and also trust as an extent factor indicated to have positive influence on mediator, while perceived ease of use did not provide the significant relationship on attitude. Moreover, it was found that attitude fully mediate the relationship between trust and behavioural intention and also perceived usefulness and behavioral intention, whereas, attitude partially mediates the relation between perceived ease of use and behavioral intention and also compatibility and behavioural intention. This study provides e-retailers with an assessment of attitude and intention of students segment market to enhance their existing marketing strategies and identify the new emergence of opportunity

Karkheh Storage Dam Cutoff Wall Analysis and Design

Karkheh dam cut-off wall with an area of about 150000 m2 is the largest plastic concrete cut-off wall ever built in the world. The wall was designed on the basis of seepage and material behavior analysis. The design and construction of the wall was a great challenge in which in different stages, major design modifications were made based on existing construction facilities, updated geological conditions and cost optimization. The philosophy of “design as you go” was tried to be perfectly accomplished in this project. The cut-off wall connections to the dam body and other appurtenant structures such as power tunnels; diversion culvert and spillway were designed and constructed to provide a tight and deformable interface. In this paper, the analysis results are briefly described. The technical specification of execution and material is also summarized

Towards a Systematic Approach for Driving Micro-Level Software Development Process

Software developers encounter many new and usually difficult problems in their every day work. Solving every new problem requires taking an appropriate strategy and careful planning, that needs full concentration and focus on the problem and enough consciousness about the current state of development. However, due to many factors, such as working on more than one task at the same time, the high degree of granularity of tasks, interruptions and the complexity of problems, developers usually have difficulties in obtaining the required concentration and focus on their current local problems and making progress in their work. This paper proposes a novel approach, which lets a developer follows a systematic step by step problem solving process in order to be focused on only one target in every moment while all needed details from the past and future steps are present to her. Moreover, this approach helps a developer to better understand the software development process and discover new ways for improving it

Querypoint Debugging (Semi-Automated Inspection of Buggy Execution)

Debugging is a hard and time-consuming programming task that appears in the most stages of software development and maintenance. Therefore, any improvement in the debugging practice can significantly reduce the time and costs of software production. In this dissertation, our focus is on locating defects, a major debugging task. We first analyze the widely-used and new approaches to locating-defects. From this analysis we identify several main problems in these approaches that cause accidental difficulty. In order to better understand the locating-defects process, we systematically analyze this process based on modeling the developer’s mental model. From this analysis, we develop a model that explains how a developer progresses in this stage : a developer’s general strategy is to reduce the suspicious interval on the buggy execution until locating a fault. There are three basic types of movement : controlled forward navigation, search, and causality backward navigation. We propose Querypoint Debugging as a new approach to debugging that attempts to abstract away a developer’s inspection from one particular execution. We show how querypoints are defined for various types of movement, how they are processed, and how they solve most issues existing in the available debugging approaches. We have built two prototypes of the querypoint idea. The first prototype is a general querypoint debugger for Java which is supposed to support various types of querypoints. We demonstrate how a buggy painting application can be debugged using this debugger. The second prototype is one querypoint, lastChange, that is integrated to a famous JavaScript debugger, Firebug. With this prototype, we show that querypoints can be smoothly integrated with traditional debuggers. Moreover, the idea can be implemented even for weakly-typed languages such as JavaScript. We end this dissertation with providing a solution to a special but an important problem which particularly appears in JavaScript debuggers. Anonymous JavaScript functions are a major challenge for tool developers. After analyzing and classifying anonymous JavaScript functions in 10 large projects, we proposed an efficient algorithm that can successfully name 99 percent of anonymous functions

Model-Based Debugging

Software Debugging is still one of the most challenging and time consuming aspects of software development. Monitoring the software behavior and finding the causes of this behavior are located at the center of debugging process. Although many tools and techniques have been introduced to support developers in this part, we still have a long way from the ideal point. In this paper, we first give a detailed explanation of the main issues in this domain and why the available techniques and tools have been incapable of solving these issues completely. Then we explain how employing models can be helpful in solving stated problems. Finally, a detailed sketch of our approach based on using runtime models of executing software is described

Query-point Debugging

Software Debugging is still one of the most challenging and time consuming aspects of software development. Monitoring the software behavior and finding the causes of this behavior are located at the center of debugging process. Although many tools and techniques have been proposed to support developers in this job, none of them could replace or improve the traditional debugging methods. This paper presents Query-Point debugging as a new debugging approach and explains how it can facilitate debugging for developers