Software development for flexible pavement thickness design based on aastho and road note 31

Nowadays, road and surface failure has become a critical issue in our country on the flexible pavement which reflects to a bad quality and error during design stage. The thickness design of flexible pavement has become crucial element in the overall efficiency of highway structure system to give a good performance and high serviceability under a traffic loading during the expected design period. The objectives of this study are to develop flexible pavement thickness design software for AASHTO and Road Note 31 by using Visual Basic 6.0. The result comparison between both methods was carried out shown in different of thickness and different percentage of cost evaluations between AASHTO and Road Note 31. This computer software could produce the design thickness of each layer for flexible pavement structure in graphical layout for both design methods. Therefore, the users can easily analyze and compared the result obtained to select the best design alternative between AASHTO and Road Note 31 based on cost and thickness different. The result analysis obtained from this computer software also can be saved and view in a report file to be printed or keep as soft copy for reference in the future. Besides, the result analysis obtained by this computer software is also been compared with the manual calculation (theory) and shown that the computer software has the same and exact result with the manual calculation (theory). Thus, the performance of this computer software was successful tested and validated. Therefore, computer software of flexible pavement thickness design is a very useful tool in highway engineering especially to design the thickness of flexible pavement. By applying the computer program, the design stage can be made in a very short time period of design process and help to minimize the error factor compare to manual calculation or conventional method. Computer software also can give a high accuracy and quality of result for pavement thickness design

Toward a harmonious countryside: rural development survey results of the People’s Republic of China

The construction of a New Socialist Countryside (NSC) is among the highlights in the People's Republic of China’s (PRC) 11th Five-Year Plan (2006–2010). The NSC aims to accelerate the development and modernization of the agricultural and rural economy in order to close the widening rural–urban income gap. In an effort to better understand the priorities of and binding constraints to the PRC's rural development, and to aid the development of the NSC, two surveys were undertaken by the Asian Development Bank in six rural areas—Chongqing, Inner Mongolia, Jiangsu, Liaoning, Shaanxi, and Shangdong. The 2007 survey collected village and household information on the first year of the NSC program, and the 2010 survey captured the possible changes after a few years of the program's implementation. A special feature of these surveys is that they allow for comparison of villagers' and village cadres' views on the priorities of the PRC's rural development. This paper summarizes the findings emerging from these surveys, particularly with respect to the challenges and priority areas of the PRC's rural development in 2007 and 2010. Among the key findings are (i) income growth remains the highest priority in the PRC’s rural development agenda; and (ii) lack of capital and lack of necessary job skills are the most binding constraints for growth in agricultural income and nonagricultural income, respectively.China; new socialist countryside; rural development; village survey

Snap Forensics: A Tradeoff between Ephemeral Intelligence and Persistent Evidence Collection

Digital evidence needs to be made persistent so that it can be used later. For citizen forensics, sometimes intelligence cannot or should not be made persistent forever. In this position paper, we propose a form of snap forensics by defining an elastic duration of evidence/intelligence validity. Explicitly declaring such a duration could unify the treatment of both ephemeral intelligence and persistent evidence towards more flexible storage to satisfy privacy requirements

Agree to Disagree: Security Requirements Are Different, But Mechanisms For Security Adaptation Are Not

We describe a dialogue between a proponent and an opponent of the proposition "security is not just another quality attribute in self-adaptive systems". The dialogue is structured in two steps. First, we examine whether security requirements are different from other system-level requirements. Our consensus is that security requirements require specific methods for elicitation, reasoning, and analysis. However, other requirements (such as safety, usability and performance) also require specific techniques. Then, we examine the adaptation mechanisms for security and compare them with other properties. Our consensus is that most adaptation techniques can be applied to maintain security and other requirements alike

Evaluation of biodegradable waste quality by drying for exploring the possibilities of a potential renewable energy source in Yangon city, Myanmar

Biodegradable waste to fuel becomes a potential renewable energy source to gain environmental and economic benefits in the world. To explore the opportunities of a potential renewable energy source from the biodegradable wastes in Yangon city, the study collected 12 different waste samples from the four districts of Yangon and evaluated the composition of the collected wastes. Then, the study assessed their moisture contents by Halogen Moisture Analyzer and dried 23 prepared waste samples (100 grams, 300 grams and 500 grams in mass) by Binder Laboratory Heating and Drying Oven at 105 degrees C. The study also analyzed the effect of moisture reduction in volume reduction, weight reduction and heating value increase of the biodegradable waste samples after drying. The results showed that about 50% of moisture reduction could contribute approximately 25% of volume reduction, 40% of weight reduction and 200% of heating value increase (initially approximately from 3 Mega joules per kilogram to 8 Mega joules per kilogram). Therefore, if drying could be conducted with a renewable source such as solar energy and a waste heat source from industrial sectors, the dried biodegradable wastes could be beneficial in the energy and environment sector of Yangon city. The objective of the study was to estimate the biodegradable waste quality of Yangon city by drying for a future potential renewable energy source.Web of Science842034202

SEACORM Net - Southeast Asia's coral reef monitoring network

Coral reefs, Information handling, Southeast Asia,

A Contract Perspective on the International Finance Facility

foreign aid, International Finance Facility, contract theory, uncertainty

Enabling error-resilient internet broadcasting using motion compensated spatial partitioning and packet FEC for the dirac video codec

Video transmission over the wireless or wired network require protection from channel errors since compressed video bitstreams are very sensitive to transmission errors because of the use of predictive coding and variable length coding. In this paper, a simple, low complexity and patent free error-resilient coding is proposed. It is based upon the idea of using spatial partitioning on the motion compensated residual frame without employing the transform coefficient coding. The proposed scheme is intended for open source Dirac video codec in order to enable the codec to be used for Internet broadcasting. By partitioning the wavelet transform coefficients of the motion compensated residual frame into groups and independently processing each group using arithmetic coding and Forward Error Correction (FEC), robustness to transmission errors over the packet erasure wired network could be achieved. Using the Rate Compatibles Punctured Code (RCPC) and Turbo Code (TC) as the FEC, the proposed technique provides gracefully decreasing perceptual quality over packet loss rates up to 30%. The PSNR performance is much better when compared with the conventional data partitioning only methods. Simulation results show that the use of multiple partitioning of wavelet coefficient in Dirac can achieve up to 8 dB PSNR gain over its existing un-partitioned method

The Interpretation-Construction Distinction in Patent Law

The ambiguity of claim language is generally considered to be the most important problem in patent law today. Linguistic ambiguity is believed to cause tremendous uncertainty about patent rights. Scholars and judges have accordingly devoted enormous attention to developing better linguistic tools to help courts understand patent claims. In this article, we explain why this diagnosis is fundamentally wrong. Claims are not often ambiguous, and linguistic ambiguity is not a major cause of the uncertainty in patent law today. We shall explain what really causes the uncertainty in patent rights, how the erroneous diagnosis of linguistic ambiguity has led the literature off-track, and what will get us back on track to solving the uncertainty problem

Endogenous Information Structures in Conservation Contracting

Landowners are commonly not only better informed about their private cost of conservation than conservation agencies, but also frequently in a position to spend resources on improving their knowledge about contract-relevant parameters before signing a contract on offer. We extend and generalize the literature on conservation contracting by endogenizing the information structure in a setting where the conservation agency is both asymmetrically informed about the efficiency of the landowner and unable to observe whether the landowner collects information after being offered the contract and before signing it. In this setting, we study the optimal contract the conservation agency should offer to the landowner conditional on the cost of information collection. This contract needs to balance moral hazard and adverse selection problems since by encouraging a landowner to collect information, the conservation agency simultaneously increases the landowner's incentive to misreport his 'type'. We term this the 'information rent effect'. Due to its presence, the terms of conservation contracts have to be significantly altered relative to a contract offered based on exogenous information structure or a contract based purely on information collection.