Expert perspectives on using mainstream mobile technology for school-age children who require augmentative and alternative communcation (AAC): a Policy Delphi study

Despite legislation in the U.S.A requiring the use of assistive technology in special education, there remains an underutilization of technology-based speech intervention for young students who require augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). The purpose of this Policy Delphi study was to address three guiding research questions that relate to the feasibility of using mainstream mobile technology, facilitative actions, and stakeholder roles for implementation and utilization of AAC in elementary school settings. Data were collected in two rounds of questionnaires given to experts in special education, assistive technology and speech and language pathology, with experience in AAC. Round 1 included 19 participants, 14 of whom also completed the Round 2 questionnaire. The results indicated that a very strong case can be made that mainstream mobile devices have several advantages over traditional AAC systems, not only in their affordability, but also transparency and social acceptance by providing an ideal medium for inclusion in mainstream settings. A challenge that confronts AAC innovations is the tendency to focus on the technology instead of pedagogical, social and therapeutic goals. Until a perfect AAC system becomes available for mainstream mobile devices that meet individuals’ communicative, educational and physical needs and personal preferences, it is apparent that multimodality will continue to be the model. The utilization of mainstream mobile technology for AAC necessitates certain facilitative actions and stakeholder responsibilities. Team collaboration is essential in supporting AAC use and, when applicable, facilitating the inclusion and mainstreaming of students who use AAC in the general education setting

Investigation of Ultrasonic Pulse Velocity Reduction in Reinforced Concrete Members Exposed to High Temperature

Nowadays, the fire resistance of reinforced concrete members is generally defined by material characteristics at elevated temperatures and temperature functions. However, the influence of steel reinforcement in concrete members exposed to high temperatures on the ultrasonic pulse velocity (UPV) measurements has still been limited. In this paper, the quality of concrete and steel reinforcement/concrete interface was assessed under high temperatures using UPV measurements. The specimens were classified into four categories: the control tested cubes without rebar; tested cubes with plain and ribbed steel rebars. Tested cubes with dimensions of 100x100x100 mm were cast and cured for 28 days at room temperature (20oC). After drying all specimens at 105oC for 48 hours, these cubes were subjected to four different temperature levels ranging from 150oC to 400oC for 4 hours before being cooled to room temperature. According to the measured values of UPV, the higher the temperature attained in specimens, the greater the following changes occurred in concrete: (i) the degradation within the concrete; (ii) the debonding of steel reinforcements in concrete

Experimental study of short concrete columns reinforced with GFRP bars under monotonic loading

The glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) bars are considered as an alternative reinforcement to steel in concrete structures subjected to chloride environment because of their non- corrosive and non-magnetic properties. To examine the applicability of GFRP bars to performance of concrete columns, this work was conducted. The effect of the compressive reinforcement ratio and stirrup spacing on the load carrying capacity of concrete columns reinforced with GFRP bars is experimentally investigated. Nine short concrete columns with dimensions of 150 × 150 × 600 mm were cast and tested until failure under displacement-controlled concentric loading. The experimental results demonstrated that by increasing the reinforcement ratio from 0.37% to 3.24%, the load-bearing capacity of GFRP RC columns was found to increase by an average of 28%. Moreover, the tested results confirmed that the GFRP stirrup spacing had a significant influence on the load-carrying capacity of the columns

Experimental study of short concrete columns reinforced with GFRP bars under monotonic loading

The glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) bars are considered as an alternative reinforcement to steel in concrete structures subjected to chloride environment because of their non- corrosive and non-magnetic properties. To examine the applicability of GFRP bars to performance of concrete columns, this work was conducted. The effect of the compressive reinforcement ratio and stirrup spacing on the load carrying capacity of concrete columns reinforced with GFRP bars is experimentally investigated. Nine short concrete columns with dimensions of 150 × 150 × 600 mm were cast and tested until failure under displacement-controlled concentric loading. The experimental results demonstrated that by increasing the reinforcement ratio from 0.37% to 3.24%, the load-bearing capacity of GFRP RC columns was found to increase by an average of 28%. Moreover, the tested results confirmed that the GFRP stirrup spacing had a significant influence on the load-carrying capacity of the columns

Examining the Part-of-speech Features in Assessing the Readability of Vietnamese Texts

The readability of the text plays a very important role in selecting appropriate materials for the level of the reader. Text readability in Vietnamese language has received a lot of attention in recent years, however, studies have mainly been limited to simple statistics at the level of a sentence length, word length, etc. In this article, we investigate the role of word-level grammatical characteristics in assessing the difficulty of texts in Vietnamese textbooks. We have used machine learning models (for instance, Decision Tree, K-nearest neighbor, Support Vector Machines, etc.) to evaluate the accuracy of classifying texts according to readability, using grammatical features in word level along with other statistical characteristics. Empirical results show that the presence of POS-level characteristics increases the accuracy of the classification by 2-4%

Concrete beams using seawater and sea sand reinforced with steel and GFRP rebars exposed to marine environment: An experimental study

Using fresh water and river sand in concrete mix composition makes a lot of negative impacts on resources and the environment while the source of sea sand and sea water is abundant and less harmful to the environment. However, sea sand and seawater in concrete can cause severe corrosion of the reinforcement, reducing the durability and bearing capacity of the structure. This paper illustrates the results of a comparative study on the flexural behavior of six corroded seawater sea-sand concrete (SWSSC) beams. The corrosion process of two concrete beams reinforced with traditional steel bars and four concrete beams reinforced with a combination of glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) and steel bars was coupled by the effect of seawater exposure and sustained load. It was found that after exposure to a marine environment during the period of 60 months the GFRP bar retains surface integrity, meanwhile, the steel bars were significantly corroded with a cross-sectional area loss of approximately 13.93%. The decrease in bending stiffness, yield load, and ultimate load of the RC beams was found due to the deterioration of SWSSC and corrosion of steel bars.

Neutron Yield from (γ, n) and (γ, 2n) Reactions following 100 MeV Bremsstrahlung in a Tungsten Target

The photonuclear reactions of (γ, xn) or (γ, xnp) types can be used to produce high-intensity neutron sources for research and applied purposes. In this work a Monte-Carlo calculation has been used to evaluate the production yield of neutrons from the (γ, n) and (γ, 2n) reactions following the bremsstrahlung produced by a 100 MeV electron beam on a tungsten target

TextANIMAR: Text-based 3D Animal Fine-Grained Retrieval

3D object retrieval is an important yet challenging task, which has drawn more and more attention in recent years. While existing approaches have made strides in addressing this issue, they are often limited to restricted settings such as image and sketch queries, which are often unfriendly interactions for common users. In order to overcome these limitations, this paper presents a novel SHREC challenge track focusing on text-based fine-grained retrieval of 3D animal models. Unlike previous SHREC challenge tracks, the proposed task is considerably more challenging, requiring participants to develop innovative approaches to tackle the problem of text-based retrieval. Despite the increased difficulty, we believe that this task has the potential to drive useful applications in practice and facilitate more intuitive interactions with 3D objects. Five groups participated in our competition, submitting a total of 114 runs. While the results obtained in our competition are satisfactory, we note that the challenges presented by this task are far from being fully solved. As such, we provide insights into potential areas for future research and improvements. We believe that we can help push the boundaries of 3D object retrieval and facilitate more user-friendly interactions via vision-language technologies.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2304.0573