Special Considerations in Design of Foundation in Problematic Soils

The ability of a structure to withstand stresses starts from the nature of the soil on which it is built and the suitability of the foundation adopted for the corresponding soil condition. There are different types of problematic soils mostly encountered in practice such as expansive, collapsible and dispersive soils. Expansive soil is highly problematic due to its high rate of swelling and shrinking when they come in contact with moisture. They range from minor cases to severe cases. The minor cases are situations where the depth of the expansive clay is small and the foundation footing can reach beyond it to more stable strata. The severe cases are situations where the expansive clay is considerably deep and would require most preferably the pile foundation. For the purpose of this study, emphasis was placed on the expansive soil. This type of soil is common in North Cyprus due to the nature of its soil and the extremes in its weather conditions. The Haspolat region in the capital Lefkosa was studied. Relevant data such as soil test data, and other documents related to the research subject were obtained and analyzed. A reconnaissance survey was conducted based on an in depth interview with public officials, private sector entities and the inhabitants of Haspolat. Data was obtained from on the spot observation of the site and recorded for analysis. The extent of the depth of expansive soil in the soil strata required the use of raft foundations design in expansive soils. Its initial cost of construction is high but the maintenance cost of the building is minimal since the foundation resists any movement of the expansive soil which would have caused failure

The Study of the Relationship between Managers' Transformational and Transactional Leadership Styles and School Effectiveness in Secondary Schools in Iran

The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between secondary school managers' transformational and transactional leadership styles and school effectiveness and also to study the possibility of school effectiveness based on secondary school managers' transformational and transactional leadership styles in Iran. The participants were selected among managers, teachers, students and parents from Shiraz City, Iran. The Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ-5X) and School Effectiveness Questionnaire (SEQ) were used to measure secondary school managers' leadership styles and school effectiveness respectively. Correlation coefficient (Pearson Correlation) and linear regression were used to analyze the data based on the designed hypotheses for this research. Based on the results of this research, there was a positive correlation with school effectiveness in secondary schools in Shiraz City as the higher the scores in transformational leadership style of managers, the higher the scores were in school effectiveness. Finally, leadership style can be a good and tenable predictor for school effectiveness in Shiraz City. Thus, the findings of the study indicated that managers should practice transformational leadership style for improving the school quality and effectiveness

Learning End-to-End Codes for the BPSK-constrained Gaussian Wiretap Channel

Finite-length codes are learned for the Gaussian wiretap channel in an end-to-end manner assuming that the communication parties are equipped with deep neural networks (DNNs), and communicate through binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) modulation scheme. The goal is to find codes via DNNs which allow a pair of transmitter and receiver to communicate reliably and securely in the presence of an adversary aiming at decoding the secret messages. Following the information-theoretic secrecy principles, the security is evaluated in terms of mutual information utilizing a deep learning tool called MINE (mutual information neural estimation). System performance is evaluated for different DNN architectures, designed based on the existing secure coding schemes, at the transmitter. Numerical results demonstrate that the legitimate parties can indeed establish a secure transmission in this setting as the learned codes achieve points on almost the boundary of the equivocation region

The Study of the Relationship between Managers' Transformational and Transactional Leadership Styles and School Effectiveness in Secondary Schools in Iran

The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between secondary school managers' transformational and transactional leadership styles and school effectiveness and also to study the possibility of school effectiveness based on secondary school managers' transformational and transactional leadership styles in Iran. The participants were selected among managers, teachers, students and parents from Shiraz City, Iran. The Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ-5X) and School Effectiveness Questionnaire (SEQ) were used to measure secondary school managers' leadership styles and school effectiveness respectively. Correlation coefficient (Pearson Correlation) and linear regression were used to analyze the data based on the designed hypotheses for this research. Based on the results of this research, there was a positive correlation with school effectiveness in secondary schools in Shiraz City as the higher the scores in transformational leadership style of managers, the higher the scores were in school effectiveness. Finally, leadership style can be a good and tenable predictor for school effectiveness in Shiraz City. Thus, the findings of the study indicated that managers should practice transformational leadership style for improving the school quality and effectiveness

A Polynomial Time MCMC Method for Sampling from Continuous DPPs

We study the Gibbs sampling algorithm for continuous determinantal point processes. We show that, given a warm start, the Gibbs sampler generates a random sample from a continuous $k$-DPP defined on a $d$-dimensional domain by only taking $\text{poly}(k)$ number of steps. As an application, we design an algorithm to generate random samples from $k$-DPPs defined by a spherical Gaussian kernel on a unit sphere in $d$-dimensions, $\mathbb{S}^{d-1}$ in time polynomial in $k,d$

The Study of the Relationship between Managers' Transformational and Transactional Leadership Styles and School Effectiveness in Secondary Schools in Iran

The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between secondary school managers' transformational and transactional leadership styles and school effectiveness and also to study the possibility of school effectiveness based on secondary school managers' transformational and transactional leadership styles in Iran. The participants were selected among managers, teachers, students and parents from Shiraz City, Iran. The Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ-5X) and School Effectiveness Questionnaire (SEQ) were used to measure secondary school managers' leadership styles and school effectiveness respectively. Correlation coefficient (Pearson Correlation) and linear regression were used to analyze the data based on the designed hypotheses for this research. Based on the results of this research, there was a positive correlation with school effectiveness in secondary schools in Shiraz City as the higher the scores in transformational leadership style of managers, the higher the scores were in school effectiveness. Finally, leadership style can be a good and tenable predictor for school effectiveness in Shiraz City. Thus, the findings of the study indicated that managers should practice transformational leadership style for improving the school quality and effectiveness