Block Construction Research Articles

Solvent-Processed Circularly Polarized Luminescence in Light-Harvesting Coassemblies.

As a kinetic factor, solvent polarity functioning in regulating/enhancing chiroptical properties of supramolecular chiral self-assemblies including handedness, dissymmetry factor, and luminescent color has not been realized. Here, we introduce a delicate solvent control over self-assembly pathways of a dynamer into four soft matters comprising gel, liposome, helix, and particles respectively, where a fluorescent dye as an acceptor was loaded to allow efficient circularly polarized light harvesting. Though no apparent chirality transfer from chiral assemblies to acceptors occurred at ground state based on the circular dichroism spectra, efficient energy transfer at photoexcited state was observed, demonstrating considerable dependence on solvent polarity and constitution. As the acceptor orientated without chiral sense in coassemblies, circularly polarized light migration from donor to acceptor is reasonably expected. In apolar decane, thixotropic gels with left-handed circularly polarized luminescence were given, and luminescent colors could be controlled from green to red (510-600 nm) via adjusting molar fraction of acceptor, affording a high dissymmetry factor at 1 × 10-2 order of magnitude. The crucial role of ordered structures in the emergence of circularly polarized luminescence was also validated. The present work provides a solvent-processed manner to rationally regulate the dissymmetry factor, colors, and handedness by feat of circularly polarized light harvesting and migration, avoiding the tedious construction of a building block and enantiomer library.

Strategy for Scalable Comb Block Polyolefin Synthesis. Efficient Graft of Isotactic Polypropylene to a Commercial Broad Molecular Weight Distribution, Hyperbranched, Ethylene Methylacrylate Copolymer

Judicious selection and use of a readily available, reactive polyolefin backbone can facilitate scalable comb block construction. This can be further assisted by appropriate grafting chemistry. In ...

Testing the superblock deck by dynamic loads

Tyumen oil and gas industry province is being developed with the use of complete block construction. Especially increases the importance of building large blocks with installed equipment and superblocks on a floating mobile base. Styrofoam concrete is used to insulate the superblock deck. According to the developed methods, the adhesion strength of Styrofoam concrete to the superblock deck was tested and its characteristics for vibration resistance after the test were studied. The thermal characteristics of Styrofoam concrete used for superblock deck insulation are established, taking into account the vibration effects during transportation and operation. For testing, the deck fragment was installed in a climate chamber, and heat flow and temperature sensors were fixed to the surface of the fragment. As a result, it was found that dynamic loads reduce the resistance to heat transfer by 8-12 % due to the opening of cracks and the appearance of convective heat exchange. It is shown that the actual thermal resistance of the superblock deck with a thickness of 0.25 m and after exposure to dynamic loads remains at a sufficiently high level.

HalSynteny: a fast, easy-to-use conserved synteny block construction method for multiple whole-genome alignments.

BackgroundLarge-scale sequencing projects provide high-quality full-genome data that can be used for reconstruction of chromosomal exchanges and rearrangements that disrupt conserved syntenic blocks. The highest resolution of cross-species homology can be obtained on the basis of whole-genome, reference-free alignments. Very large multiple alignments of full-genome sequence stored in a binary format demand an accurate and efficient computational approach for synteny block production.FindingshalSynteny performs efficient processing of pairwise alignment blocks for any pair of genomes in the alignment. The tool is part of the HAL comparative genomics suite and is targeted to build synteny blocks for multi-hundred–way, reference-free vertebrate alignments built with the Cactus system.ConclusionshalSynteny enables an accurate and rapid identification of synteny in multiple full-genome alignments. The method is implemented in C++11 as a component of the halTools software and released under MIT license. The package is available at https://github.com/ComparativeGenomicsToolkit/hal/.

Effectiveness of fly ash and cement for compressed stabilized earth block construction

For saving natural resources, reducing pollution and increasing energy efficiency, Compressed Stabilized Earth Block (CSEB) can serve as a suitable alternative to conventional Fired Clay Brick (FCB). In this study, suitability of industrial waste, Fly Ash (FA) is assessed along with cement as stabilizers for producing CSEBs with coarse grained soil. Different combination of cement and FA (5–10% cement and 5–25% FA; by weight of dry soil) was considered to prepare CSEBs for finding the optimum mix composition in terms of strength, durability, deformation characteristics and cost effectiveness. Furthermore, strength and durability test results are compared to the design criteria reported in Indian Standard, Sri Lankan Standard, Standard Australia, British Standard and Malaysian Standard for assessing its viability as construction material. With the increase in cement content, strength of the blocks gradually increases; however, at a definite cement content, addition of FA increases strength up to a certain limit and then begins to drop. Inclusion of 7–8% cement and 15–20% FA is found to provide adequate dry compressive strength (>5 MPa), wet-to-dry compressive strength (>0.33) and enough durability in terms of water absorption (<20%) as recommended by British Standard and Standards Australia. The behavior of the CSEBs were also analyzed through microstructural investigation, where SEM images were taken to ascertain the morphologic and anatomic changes that occurred at different fly ash contents. At a definite cement content, with the increase of FA, peak strain and failure strain increase; thereby indicating an improved straining capacity of the blocks due to inclusion of FA. Moreover, modulus of elasticity improves with increasing amount of cement and FA for both dry and wet state. Furthermore, economic analysis of a typical house constructed with CSEBs and FCBs was performed and compared with literature. Considering all the parameters it can be concluded that CSEBs prepared with cement and fly ash as stabilizers can be used as a sustainable construction material.

PND107 BODY-ORIENTED THERAPY HAS POSITIVE EFFECT ON VISUOSPATIAL ABILITIES IN CHILDREN WITH ADD

it is known that children with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) have deficit of cognitive abilities. The goal of this study was to reveal effect of body-oriented therapy on visuospatial abilities in ADD children. We compared the efficacy of two methods of treatment (body-oriented therapy for children vs. conventional motor exercises) in a randomized controlled pilot study. 16 children with ADD between 6 to 8 years of age were included and randomly assigned to treatment conditions according to a 2×2 cross-over design. The body-oriented therapy included the exercises from yoga and breathing techniques. To assess the visuospatial in children we used 4 subtests from NEPSY (Arrows, Block Construction, Design Copying and Route Finding). Effects of treatment were analyzed by means of an ANOVA for repeated measurements. The ANOVA has revealed (p<.05) that for Block Construction subtest the body-oriented therapy was superior to the conventional motor training, with high range effect size (0.83). We did not find this result for Arrows, Design Copying and Route Finding subtests. The findings from this pilot study suggest that body-oriented therapy has a specific positive effect on the reconstruction of 3-dimensional designs in children with ADD. However, it is necessary to do further research into the impact of body-oriented therapies on the cognitive abilities in ADD children.

ANALISA JOINT ERECTION KONSTRUKSI BAJA BLOCK B05 &amp; B07 KAPAL PATROLI POLISI 63 METER DENGAN MOBILE CRANE 72.000 TON

The construction of modern vessels is already different from traditional ships, modern vessels are usually constructed by block methods where the ship is constructed from the pieces and starts from the centre piece. The construction with this method was used on the police patrol ship 63m . The process of unification of the block was done after the block was finished through the assembly process and also passed several parameters, the parameters that must be achieved and implemented before the process of the joint erection is the identification of the material, scantling Check, welding check, dimension check, readiness of the crane, building berth, number of boat blocks, and Indetification Risk. In the implementation of the block construction unification process using the help of the crane and the Trailer to move the blocks from the jig table to the building birth. The selection of the crane itself is based on the block load, being for the number of eye plates when the joint erection depends on the number and capacity of the crane used. And in this case the load of each eye plate is 35.26 kN and maximum stress 376,30 Mpa in block B05 and then 23, 51 kN in and maximum stress 313,30 Mpa in block B07. After the joint erection is still needed to be checked, the things to be checked are dimensional check, plate and member flatness, member straightness, Visual weld inspection, and non-destructive test according to WPS.

DNA-Based Asymmetric Inverse Electron-Demand Hetero-Diels-Alder.

While artificial cyclases hold great promise in chemical synthesis, this work presents the first example of a DNA-catalyzed inverse electron-demand hetero-Diels-Alder (IEDHDA) between dihydrofuran and various α,β-unsaturated acyl imidazoles. The resulting fused bicyclic O,O-acetals containing three contiguous stereogenic centers are obtained in high yields (up to 99 %) and excellent diastereo- (up to >99:1 dr) and enantioselectivities (up to 95 % ee) using a low catalyst loading. Most importantly, these results show that the concept of DNA-based asymmetric catalysis can be expanded to new synthetic transformations offering an efficient, sustainable, and highly selective tool for the construction of chiral building blocks.

Image decomposition based matrix regression with applications to robust face recognition

The previous matrix regression based methods mainly focus on designing a robust error term to characterize the occlusion and illumination changes. In actually, it is very challenging to give a strong model for solving the original images directly since the images contains rich and complex structure information. To address this problem, we aim to simplify the complex images and propose a simple and robust matrix regression based classification model. In our method, we firstly employ the local gradient distribution to decompose the image into a series of gradient images (LID for short). Each gradient image reveals the local structure information in different gradient orientations. Subsequently, we consider each gradient image as the diagonal block element and construct the diagonal block matrix for image representation. Nuclear norm based matrix regression model (NMR) is then applied to complete the classification tasks. The proposed model can be called ID-NMR for short. We further design a fast ADMM optimization algorithm to solve the proposed ID-NMR due to the fact that the big diagonal block matrix will increase the computational load. Experimental results show that the proposed method performs favorably compared with state-of-the-art regression based classification methods.

Applying the Automated and Robotic Means for Increasing Effectiveness of Construction Projects

The paper considers increasing effectiveness of construction of bricks and blocks by applying mobile masonry robots. On the example of a specific object, the rates for its construction using manual labor and robotic means are considered. The results show that applying robotic means allows reduce costs for bricklaying 3-7 times in comparison with manual labor depending on method of accruing salaries. Other positive effects of using bricklaying automation, such as reducing construction time, increasing the quality of the result and simplification of staff management, are considered.

Hydrogen-Bonding Catalysis of Alkyl-Onium Salts.

The synthetic utility of alkyl-onium salt compounds is widely recognized in the field of organic chemistry. Among the wide variety of onium salts, quaternary ammonium, phosphonium, and tertiary sulfonium salts have been the most useful compounds in organic syntheses. These compounds have been very useful reagents in the construction of organic building blocks. In addition, onium salts are known as reliable catalysts, which are used to promote important organic transformations by serving as phase-transfer and ion-pair catalysts through the activation of nucleophiles. Although phase-transfer catalysis is a major direction for onium salt catalysis, hydrogen-bonding catalysis of alkyl-onium salts, which is promoted via the activation of electrophiles, has recently become a relevant topic in the field of onium salt chemistry. This Minireview introduces new possibilities and future directions for alkyl-onium salt chemistry based on its use in hydrogen-bonding catalysis and on its overall utility.

Recent progress of 1,1-difunctionalization of olefins.

Olefins are a very important class of compounds and broadly used in the construction of various synthetic building blocks and practical industrial production. The difunctionalization of olefins provides one of the most powerful methods for the C-C or C-X bond formation with a rapid increase of the molecular complexity and synthetic value economically and effectively. Compared with the vigorous growth and abundant achievements of 1,2-difunctionalization of olefins, 1,1-difunctionalization is a relatively emerging and inadequately exploited research direction, despite being tremendously attractive from synthetic perspectives. In this minireview, we provide a brief overview of the advancements of 1,1-difunctionalization of olefins in the past twenty years, and prospects of future developments.

Intelligent manufacturing security model based on improved blockchain.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) plays an important role in the development of smart factories. However, the existing IIoT systems are prone to suffering from single points of failure and unable to provide stable service. Meanwhile, with the increase of node scale and network quantity, the maintenance cost presents to be higher. Such a disadvantage can be effectively compensated by the features such as security, privacy, non-tamperability and distributed deployment supported by the blockchain. In this paper, first, an intelligent manufacturing security model based on blockchain was proposed. Due to the high power consumption and low throughput of the traditional blockchain, IoT devices with limited power consumption can not work independently. Therefore, in this paper, a new Merkle Patricia tree (MPT) was adopted to extend the blockchain structure and provide fast query of node status. Second, since the MPT does not support concurrent operation and the data operation performance deteriorates with high data volume, a lock-free concurrent and cache-based Merkle Patricia tree was proposed (CMPT) to support lock-free concurrent data operation, which can improve the data operation efficiency in multi-core system. The experimental results indicate that, compared with the original MPT, the CMPT proposed in this paper effectively reduced the time complexity of data insertion and data query and improved the speed of block construction and data query.

VB-PTC: Visual Block Multi-Record Text Extraction Based on Sensor Network Page Type Conversion

Usually, in addition to the main content, web pages contain additional information in the form of noise, such as navigation elements, sidebars and advertisements. This kind of noise has nothing to do with the main content, it will affect the tasks of data mining and information retrieval so that the sensor will be damaged by the wrong data and interference noise. Because of the diversity of web page structure, it is a challenge to detect relevant information and noise in order to improve the true reliability of sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a visual block construction method based on page type conversion (VB-PTC). This method uses a combination of site-level noise reduction based on hashtree and page-level noise reduction based on linked clusters to eliminate noise in web articles, and it successfully converts multi-record complex pages to multi-record simple pages, effectively simplifying the rules of visual block construction. In the aspect of multi-record content extraction, according to the characteristics of different fields, we use different extraction methods, combined with regular expression, natural language processing and symbol density detection methods which greatly improves the accuracy of multi-record content extraction. VB-PTC can be effectively used for information retrieval, content extraction and page rendering tasks.

Occupational Injury and Its Correlated Factors among Small-Scale Industry Workers in Towns of Bale Zone, Southeast Ethiopia.

Introduction In developing countries, the laborer forces have managed many of the industrial works. As a result, the process of the work has put the health and lives of workers at risk. Thus, this study was designed to assess occupational injury and its correlated factors among small-scale industry workers in the towns of Bale Zone, Southeast Ethiopia. Methods An institution-based cross-sectional study design was employed among five hundred ninety small-scale industries in towns of Bale zone, Southeast Ethiopia, in March to April 2016. Multistage sampling was applied to recruit the study subjects. Data were collected through interviewer-administered questionnaires. A structured questionnaire addressing the objectives of the study was used. EpiData was used for data entry, and the data were exported to SPSS windows version 20 for analysis. Descriptive statistics like frequency and percentage were used for the prevalence, whereas binary and multiple logistic regressions were employed to identify the predictors of the outcome variable. Results A total of 574 workers from different small-scale industries, including woodwork, metalwork, and concrete block construction, participated in the study with a response rate of 97.3%. In this study, among the total participants of the study, 43.2% (248), 30% (172), and 21.6% (124) of them had encountered lifetime, last one year, and six months occupational injury, respectively. Taking health and safety training, presence of any things on the floor that can cause accidents and occupational risk perception were independent predictors of occupational injury. The presence of any things on the floor that can cause accidents and having a low-risk perception increases occupational injury by 12.69 [AOR: 12.69, (1.67–96.13)] and 2.84 [AOR: 2.84, (1.80–4.49)], respectively. Conclusion About one in three occupational injuries occurred among small-scale industry workers. Health and safety training should be provided for every worker in small-scale industries. Supportive supervision focusing awareness creation, economic stability, and health care from health office, social and labor affair office, and other concerned body is highly recommended. District or town health office should address the identified factors to promote the health of the workers.

Confecção de bloco de concreto para vedação com substituição parcial do agregado miúdo por serragem

Due to the disturbances generated in the construction and industry provided by the generation of waste, recycling becomes an alternative for the disposal of waste generated. The case study aims at the recycling of saw dust from the lumber industry which is an undesirable residue, currently having as sole option of use, its final burning or disposal. The reuse of this residue contributes to the constitution of a new raw material, making possible its use as civil construction material as concrete blocks. It is studied the construction of non-structural concrete block, in its manufacture the content of the addition of the saw dust is used in partial substitution to the mineral aggregate. The compressive strength, moisture content and water absorption were determined. The analysis of the result allows to conclude that the use of saw dust as a small aggregate in the confection of concrete blocks up to 5% in mass caused weight reduction, and meets the requirements of the standard for masonry of sealing as for resistance and water absorption. Also, a decrease in compressive strength compared to the reference concrete block is observed

Identifying protein-protein interface via a novel multi-scale local sequence and structural representation

BackgroundProtein-protein interaction plays a key role in a multitude of biological processes, such as signal transduction, de novo drug design, immune responses, and enzymatic activities. Gaining insights of various binding abilities can deepen our understanding of the interaction. It is of great interest to understand how proteins in a complex interact with each other. Many efficient methods have been developed for identifying protein-protein interface.ResultsIn this paper, we obtain the local information on protein-protein interface, through multi-scale local average block and hexagon structure construction. Given a pair of proteins, we use a trained support vector regression (SVR) model to select best configurations. On Benchmark v4.0, our method achieves average Irmsd value of 3.28Å and overall Fnat value of 63%, which improves upon Irmsd of 3.89Å and Fnat of 49% for ZRANK, and Irmsd of 3.99Å and Fnat of 46% for ClusPro. On CAPRI targets, our method achieves average Irmsd value of 3.45Å and overall Fnat value of 46%, which improves upon Irmsd of 4.18Å and Fnat of 40% for ZRANK, and Irmsd of 5.12Å and Fnat of 32% for ClusPro. The success rates by our method, FRODOCK 2.0, InterEvDock and SnapDock on Benchmark v4.0 are 41.5%, 29.0%, 29.4% and 37.0%, respectively.ConclusionExperiments show that our method performs better than some state-of-the-art methods, based on the prediction quality improved in terms of CAPRI evaluation criteria. All these results demonstrate that our method is a valuable technological tool for identifying protein-protein interface.

Effective Increasing of NPP Reliability Introducing the Active Monitoring System of Block Construction Stress-Strain State

All nuclear power facilities are unique facilities and are simultaneously identified according to STO 1.1.1.02.009.0873-2017 "Ensuring Safety in the Operation of Buildings and Structures of Nuclear Power Plants" as hazardous production facilities with an increased level of responsibility. In this connection, according to the authors, as well as international and domestic experts, the sixth protective barrier should be promptly introduced into the NPP safety system in the form of a system of active monitoring of irreplaceable load-bearing and enclosing structures of the reactor and turbine compartment. The paper substantiates the fact that the current monitoring systems do not allow reliable and effective assessment of the level of VAT of structures, as well as do not allow to assess the level of "residual" stresses, the presence of which in practice may also lead to pre-emergency and emergency situations. To solve this problem the article develops an innovative system of VAT monitoring of both metal and reinforced concrete bearing structures, which is completely devoid of shortcomings of traditional monitoring systems, and which also has a number of undeniable advantages. The proposed monitoring system is developed on the basis of the Forster effect, which is based on the dependence of the relative magnetic permeability of ferromagnetic media on the level of operating stresses in the material. The authors obtained patent No. 2295118 for the developed monitoring system, which testifies to the level of efficiency of innovative solution of this problem. In general, the use of the proposed system as the sixth barrier of protection will in practice prevent any external, pre-accident or emergency situation at the NPP with simultaneous increase of safety and reliability of operation of the NPP after the extension of its operation life.

An investigation into the construction industry’s view on fire prevention in high-rise buildings post Grenfell

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore contemporary attitudes amongst UK construction professionals regards fire safety post the Grenfell Tower disaster. Specifically, the research examines practitioner’s perceptions of fire safety design, material specification, construction and maintenance of high-rise blocks throughout a building’s whole life cycle. Design/methodology/approach A multi-methodology approach was adopted that utilises a mix of research methods. Extant literature and media content is used as a secondary data source, providing a more insightful interpretivist analysis – the results of which guided the development of the survey’s main question set. Primary survey data are sourced from structured interviews and questionnaires completed by participating industry professionals and built environment undergraduate students using non-representative sampling methods. In addition, a Grenfell Tower special advisory panel member was interviewed to add further validity to the overall findings. Findings The quantitative findings present evidence to suggest that the Grenfell disaster (and media storm that has surrounded this event) has raised the general level of fire safety knowledge and competency amongst construction professionals. However, qualitative feedback from the special advisory panel member suggests specific fire prevention knowledge remains elusive within both industry and taught programmes at Higher Education Institutes. As a consequence, changes in the taught curriculum are proposed together with an extension of the role of facilities managers in practice to cover fire safety in greater depth. Originality/value This paper provides thoughtful insights into the contemporary discourse on fire safety within the UK construction industry. The research also provides critical suggestions to both industry and policy makers which seek to prevent a repeat tragedy occurring again.

Clinical Utility of Two- and Three-Dimensional Visuoconstructional Tasks in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Early Alzheimer's Disease.

The aim of this study was to investigate whether different types of visuoconstructional abilities are useful to distinguish individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) from healthy controls (HCs). We selected 20 patients with MCI and 14 with AD diagnosis based on standard criteria. The neuropsychological performance of MCI and AD groups were compared with that of a group of 11 HCs using a standard neuropsychological battery and visuoconstructional tasks that differed difficulty and type of implicated skills (graphomotor vs. non-graphomotor): two-dimensional (Clock Drawing Test, CDT; Block Design, BD; and Visual Puzzles, VP) and three-dimensional Block Construction (TBC). AD group scored significantly lower than HCs in BD, VP and TBC tasks, but no significant differences were found between HCs and MCI. CDT (copy condition) scores did not differ significantly among the groups. The receiver operating characteristic analysis showed that BD [sensitivity (se)=.85, specificity (sp)=.90, Youden index (J)=.76], VP (se=.78 and sp=.72, J=.51) and TBC (se=.71, sp=100, J=.71) were accurate tasks to discriminate between AD and HCs. Moreover, BD tasks (se=.85, sp=.70, J=.55) and TBC (se=.71, sp=.80, J=.51) showed fair accuracy to differentiate between MCI and AD groups. These findings indicate that non-graphomotor visuoconstructional tasks are already impaired in the early stages of AD, but are preserved in MCI individuals when compared with HCs.