•Development of CFS concrete composite slabs using different shear connectors.•No interaction, partial interaction and full interaction cases were studied.•Strength, stiffness, displacement ductility ...characteristics were investigated.•Substantial improvement in the strength-to-weight ratio and cost reduction was achieved.•Flexural strengths and degree of shear interaction was investigated.
Composite sections comprising of wisely selected materials has gained popularity in the construction industry, as it may result in utilizing the advantages of two different materials thus resulting in efficient sections, which will not only reduce the dead loads but also provide economical solutions. Cold-formed steel (CFS) concrete composites have been used extensively in building construction, as the inherent weakness of local buckling in the CFS sections under compressive loading is taken care of by the concrete, which has significant compressive strength. This study presents an experimental investigation performed on full-scale simply supported CFS concrete composite slabs under four-point monotonic loading, with an aim to evaluate the effectiveness of the different shear connectors being adopted. The shear connectors were so adopted that they could provide the least possible interaction (for representing the no-interaction condition), partial-interaction and full-interaction between the steel deck sheet and the concrete slab. The performance of the various shear connectors was assessed in terms of strength, stiffness and ductility ratio. Cracking as well as end slippage were also studied. The test results were compared with a conventional RC slab, in terms of structural performance as well as cost and strength-to-weight ratio. The flexural test strengths were compared with the design strength quantified using the Euro Code. The degree of shear interaction was also investigated. It was found that the CFS concrete composite slabs not only performed better structurally but economically as well, in addition to providing significant strength-to-weight ratio, when compared to a conventional RC slab.
Recently, content-based Spam detection frameworks are receiving a significant amount of attention by academic researchers and industrial practitioners. However, the anticipated wide scale ...proliferation is limited (mainly) because of two important shortcomings: (1) high false alarm rate that results in moving legitimate messages into Spam folders, and (2) inability to self-learn a user's profile, as a result, they are unable to identify useful Spam (we call it Good Spam) that might be of great interest to a user's personal or business aspirations. In this paper, we propose USpam, a system that uses ontologies to model features that are extracted rom a user's profile. The features are given to machine learning classifiers J48 and Naive Bayes -- that learn a user centric model of Good Spam or Bad Spam. As a result, the system puts a message into a user's inbox if its contents are relevant to his interests. The USpam is evaluated on NRON Spam datasets, and the results of experiments reveal that false alarms are reduced by 10% to 30% compared with existing prior art without compromising the detection accuracy.
Degradable low-fouling hydrogels are ideal vehicles for drug and cell delivery. For each application, hydrogel degradation rate must be re-optimized for maximum therapeutic benefit. We developed a ...method to rapidly and predictably tune degradation rates of low-fouling poly(oligo(ethylene glycol)methyl ether methacrylate) (P(EG)
x
MA) hydrogels by modifying two interdependent variables: (1) base-catalysed crosslink degradation kinetics, dependent on crosslinker electronics (electron withdrawing groups (EWGs)); and, (2) polymer hydration, dependent on the molecular weight (
M
W
) of poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) pendant groups. By controlling PEG
M
W
and EWG strength, P(EG)
x
MA hydrogels were tuned to degrade over 6 to 52 d. A 6-member P(EG)
x
MA copolymer library yielded slow and fast degrading low-fouling hydrogels suitable for short- and long-term delivery applications. The degradation mechanism was also applied to RGD-functionalized poly(carboxybetaine methacrylamide) (PCBMAA) hydrogels to achieve slow (∼50 d) and fast (∼13 d) degrading low-fouling, bioactive hydrogels.
To tune degradation rates of low-fouling hydrogels, a 6-member P(EG)
x
MA copolymer library with different electronics and hydration levels was developed.
Brand Externalities: A Taxonomy Padela, Shoaib M. Farooq; Wooliscroft, Ben; Ganglmair-Wooliscroft, Alexandra
Journal of macromarketing,
06/2021, Letnik:
41, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Brands are ubiquitous and adorn contemporary marketing systems. Modern branding practices spawn contradictory social mechanisms, value co-creation and value co-destruction. This paper considers the ...societal implications, including personal, psychological, social, ecological, and economic consequences of branding. It posits brand externalities as meaning-led discrepancies and symbolic spill-overs igniting mechanisms detrimental to the integrity of the social system. Brand externalities accompany the assortment of brands in contemporary marketing systems. We propose a taxonomy of brand externalities and elucidate societal consequences of branding upon brand exchange actors themselves, their immediate others, future others and general others. This stakeholder orientation sets a future research agenda and calls for redefining branding from the system’s perspective.
Sobolev’s embedding on time scales Ahmad, Naveed; Baig, Hira Ashraf; ur Rahman, Ghaus ...
Journal of inequalities and applications,
06/2018, Letnik:
2018, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
For
1
≤
p
<
n
, the embeddings of Sobolev spaces
W
Δ
1
,
p
(
Ω
T
n
)
of functions defined on an open subset of an arbitrary time scale
T
n
,
n
≥
1
, endowed with the Lebesgue Δ-measure have been ...developed in (Agarwal et al. in Adv. Differ. Equ. 2006:38121,
2006
) for
n
=
1
and later generalized to arbitrary
n
≥
1
in (Su et al. in Dyn. Partial Differ. Equ. 12(3):241–263,
2015
). In this article we present the embeddings of Sobolev spaces
W
Δ
1
,
p
(
Ω
T
n
)
for
n
≤
p
≤
∞
and then, using these embeddings, we develop general Sobolev’s embedding for the Sobolev spaces
W
Δ
1
,
p
(
Ω
T
n
)
on time scales, where
k
is a non-negative integer and
1
≤
p
≤
∞
.
Data privacy in e-health deals with the protection of sensitive medical information that is collected, stored, and analyzed in electronic health systems. Several organizations publish sensitive ...person-specific data for research purposes. E-health data and related domains are the loci of research. First, in publishing sensitive person-specific datasets, ensuring the privacy of user sensitive information is an issue. Secondly, ascertaining both privacy-preservation and data utility simultaneously are contradictory to each other. In addition, all transactions have the same prior belief that may result in erroneous modeling and privacy breaches. To refrain from the belief of an adversary and to solve the above discussed issues, a semantic privacy guarantee must be ensured before publishing data by any organization. This paper proposes a solution to the former issue, a framework for privacy preservation of structured datasets in ascertaining that an adversary has low confidence in extrapolation. The latter problem is also tackled by the proposed framework that combines stratified sampling with generalization to achieve representative semantic privacy-preservation with high data utility. Moreover, this study presents a mathematical proof that the proposed framework achieves differential privacy. Our experimental results show that our algorithm provides better data utility and privacy simultaneously. The proposed framework achieves 3% and 0.04% higher classification accuracy and low relative error, respectively, compared to state-of-the-art existing privacy-preservation approaches.
Ear is a relatively new biometric among others. Many methods have been used for ear recognition to improve the performance of ear recognition systems. In continuation of these efforts, we propose a ...new ear recognition method based on curvelet transform. Features of the ear are computed by applying Fast Discrete Curvelet Transform via the wrapping technique. Feature vector of each image is composed of an approximate curvelet coefficient and second coarsest level curvelet coefficients at eight different angles. k-NN (k-nearest neighbour) is utilized as a classifier. The proposed method is experimented on two ear databases from IIT Delhi. Results achieved using the proposed method on publicly available ear database are up to 97.77% which show encouraging performance.
The physical and luminescent properties of Sm3+-doped oxide and oxy-fluoride phosphate glasses were investigated. The glass samples with chemical composition of 69P2O5-10BaO-10ZnO-10Gd2O3-1Sm2O3 and ...69P2O5-10BaO-10ZnO-10GdF3-1Sm2O3 were prepared by conventional melt quenching technique. The prepared glass samples were characterized with density, molar volume, refractive index, FTIR, UV-Vis-NIR, photoluminescence, radio luminescence, decay time profile and CIE diagram. The density and refractive index of the oxide glass have higher values as compared to the oxy-fluoride glass. The FTIR spectra show the reduction of O-H group in oxy-fluoride glass. The characteristic peaks of Sm3+ are observed at 360, 372, 402, 438, 419, 473, 944, 1077, 1227, 1373, 1474, 1529 and 1585 nm in UV-VIS-NIR spectra. These peaks are related respectively to the transitions from ground state 6H5/2 to 4D3/2, 6P7/2, 6P3/2, 4I11/2, 6F11/2, 6F9/2, 6F7/2, 6F5/2, 6F3/2, 6H15/2 and 6F1/2 excited states. From photoluminescence and radio-luminescence it is observed that the oxy-fluoride glass samples show better emission intensity than the oxide glass. The Judd-Ofelt theory (J-O theory) was used to find J-O intensity Ωλ (λ = 2,4 and 6) parameters and radiative properties such as transition probability, stimulated emission cross section and branching ratios for titled glasses. The trend observed in the J-O parameters is Ω4 >Ω2 >Ω6. The transition probability, emission cross section and branching ratio have the highest values for the 4G5/2 → 6H7/2 transition. The CIE coordinates of the prepared glass samples are positioned in the orange region and the CCT value is 3776.105 for oxide and oxyfluoride glass. The oxy-fluoride glass has shorter decay time as compared to the oxide glass and it is recorded to be 1.62 and 1.32 ms for oxide and oxy-fluoride respectively. According to the results obtained in this work, it is obvious that these glass samples can be good candidate materials for producing cool orange light.
Display omitted Energy level of Gd3+/Sm3+ system.
(Li
O)
(SrO)
(Nd
O
)
(B
O
)
(Gd
O
)
, where
= 0, 3, 5, 7, and 10 mol%, glass was melt-quenched to test it as a laser source in the near-infrared (NIR) region. The structural modification, absorption ...spectra, Judd-Ofelt (J-O) parameters, luminescence spectra, radiative laser parameters, lifetimes, XRD, and FTIR spectra were studied. Luminescence spectra excited at
= 584 nm revealed the highest intensity peak at 1073 nm due to the transition of
F
→
I
. An important phenomenon of concentration quenching was observed and optimized luminescence was achieved with the sample having the concentration
= 07 mol%. The lifetimes of the donor and acceptor and energy transfer from gadolinium to neodymium were obtained from the luminescence decay kinetics. The findings show that Nd-doped Gd
O
-modified glass materials have potential as NIR laser sources.
In this article, numerical solutions are obtained to observe the influence of thermal radiation on Casson particulate suspension flow past a complex isothermal wavy surface. Rosseland diffusion ...approximation is employed to express the contribution of radiative heat flux over the Casson fluid model. Using coordinate transformations, the two-phase model is converted into a suitable form and then integrated numerically by employing implicit finite-difference method. The numerical results are discussed in detail in terms of shear stress, rate of heat transfer, streamlines, and isotherms. It is found that the rate of heat transfer increases extensively when radiation parameter and mass concentration parameter are penetrated into the mechanism.
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