Origin Of Formation Research Articles

Testing of Structural Integrity of U-Shaped Sheet Pile in Canal Engineering Using Ground Penetrating Radar

Compared with other piles with the same cross-sectional area, “U-shaped” structural section sheet pile can increase the moment of inertia of the structure’s section. Due to the large excavation depth of the open section of the “Yin Jiang Ji Huai” river canal project in Anhui province, China, the unprotected excavated inclined canal slope covers a large land area, which results in the current situation of high housing demolition costs and a shortage of land resources in densely populated areas. In this study, the non-destructive testing of a U-shaped sheet-pile wall to protect the vertical slope of the underwater expansive soil in the canal project is studied, which is of great significance in reducing the construction area and minimizing the cost of construction. It is necessary to test the structural integrity of the U-shaped sheet pile, which is also vital to ensuring the whole project quality. Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is used to detect the structural integrity of the U-shaped sheet pile in expansive soil. On the basis of identification and conversion of the original GPR data format, the processing methods based on the time-varying automatic gain and wavelet analysis are implemented. This case study proves that the GPR testing method is effective to estimate the quality of the U-shaped sheet pile.

Correlation of ground penetrating radar and 2-D resistivity imaging methods towards shallow subsurface layer at coastal area

There is potential for a long-term subsidence trend on reclaimed land from the shoreline that may cause a geohazard in the future. This study conducted ground penetrating radar (GPR) and the 2-D resistivity method within the residential area in Teluk Kumbar, Pulau Pinang. This residential area is built on reclaimed land about 100 m from the shoreline. The purpose of this study is to identify subsidence in the coastal environment by considering the impact of seasonal variations using both surveys. The influence of wet and dry seasons on GPR and resistivity for the subsurface condition can be determined precisely after evaluating the attenuation of electromagnetic and resistivity values. The resistivity results show three lithology classes: reclaimed soil (>600 Ωm), original soil (<400 Ωm) and hard material (>1000 Ωm) during the dry season. Meanwhile, GPR signals support resistivity results with clear interfaces between reclaimed-original soil and original soil-hard material. GPR signals on layer interfaces have significantly reduced during the wet season due to the increased conductivity. The resistivity results also show decreases as the conductivity increases. Besides, a thick saturated zone of original soil formation has expanded in size during this season with a low resistivity value (<100 Ωm) and weak amplitude reflection. This zone tends to undergo shrink and swell processes due to moisture content changes, which can also correspond to subsidence. Overall, this study provides a good correlation between the performance of geophysical techniques and seasonal changes that accurately characterize the subsurface layer.

Translating and Validating the Community of Inquiry Survey Instrument in Brazil

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have emerged as an affordable way to distribute knowledge and democratize education. The examination of online courses calls for theoretical models and instruments that contemplate its particularities. The community of inquiry (CoI) framework has been used in several studies to analyze the effectiveness of online education and hybrid education, including MOOCs. This study aimed to translate and validate the Community of Inquiry Survey instrument (Arbaugh et al., 2008) into Brazilian Portuguese, and used a two-stage methodological design for translating and validating a questionnaire. In the first stage, we carried out translation, back-translation, and cross-cultural adaptation. We translated the 34 items while maintaining the survey’s original format. In the expert evaluation phase, all items were considered understandable and essential for inclusion in the Brazilian Portuguese version of the CoI instrument. In the second stage, a prospective cross-sectional study was conducted to validate the questionnaire, and data was collected from participants completing the Nursing Assessment MOOC available on the Lúmina platform. A total of 690 responses were gathered. The resulting instrument produced excellent results, and the three presences achieved high reliability indexes, clearly indicating their adequacy. Furthermore, this study proved the validation of the CoI instrument, maintaining the three-factor structure previously reported in the literature corresponding to the three presences: teaching, social, and cognitive presence. We recommend further studies to evaluate the need for excluding or altering cognitive presence items.

Re-framing writing (support): centring audience and purpose in a community nursing course

This presentation examined the collaboration between our Learning Development team and a community nursing course. It began with the question; “Are our demands of students concerning paraphrasing and referencing reasonable?” The assignment was a formal report on a semester-long group project where students partnered with a community agency. The coordinators worried that students (and lecturers) were over emphasising referencing and the technicalities of paraphrasing, to the detriment of engagement with the community nursing process itself. Our LD team eventually realized that the problem was not one of expectations, but rather a genre-audience mismatch. Although the assignment was called a report, the emphasis on integrating scholarly sources made it more like an academic essay, and the tone and length of the report limited its practical use by most partner agencies. Over time, by emphasizing genre, audience and purpose, we have contributed to a gradual loosening of the hold on the original report format. Last year, we provided feedback on a range of digital deliverables, including infographics, videos, and mind maps, each one designed to meet the specific partner agency’s needs. Our model of providing feedback on the report during one-hour in-person meetings has also evolved into a flexible combination of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration with students. We continue to guide students towards thoughtful, transparent source use, but the conversations around referencing and paraphrasing are now more holistic. In this presentation, we’ll share how our discipline-external perspective has supported meaningful student learning about authentic (and impactful) writing for different contexts.

Moving a youth trauma support group online: participatory adaption, usability and pilot test

Abstract Background Posttraumatic stress poses a significant threat to a young person’s development. Internet-based delivery could ameliorate barriers to care, but has mostly been tested with adults. This project aimed to (i) adapt the group intervention Teaching Recovery Techniques for online delivery through a participatory process, (ii) investigate the usability of the online format and (iii) pilot the new format. Methods Adaption recommendations were generated through participatory workshops with service users and providers, and consultation with an advisory panel with professionals and parents. Usability testing was conducted with intervention leaders (n = 5) and youth (n = 5). The public involvement in the project was assessed through a multi-method approach including behavioural observations, questionnaires and field notes. A pilot study (n = 14) is ongoing. Results The workshops focused on safety, participation and learning. Recommendations included an emergency response protocol, communication strategies, and guidance on intervention delivery. Whilst the advisory panel largely agreed, points of disagreement included workshop ideas around personalisation, where the panel conveyed the importance of consistency in manualised interventions. Usability testing highlighted the need for explicit guidance, particularly on safety processes. Conclusions Online delivery of trauma group support requires adaptions to ensure positive group dynamics, learning and safety. Yet, some adaptions resulting from the usability testing were also relevant to the original format, pointing to the need for more extensive use of usability testing across intervention manuals. The young people, parents and professionals involved in the project provided rich and varied perspectives, illustrating the value of broad stakeholder engagement. The ongoing pilot study explores the feasibility of online delivery, including youth perceptions of the format. Key messages • The varied perspectives in the participatory process highlighted the importance of broad stakeholder engagement for interventions to be equally evidence-based and adapted to the target population. • The current pilot study explores the feasibility of online delivery, including youth perceptions of the format, in order to assess the potential for scale up.

Enhancing the Assessment of Gratitude in Mindfulness Research: a Rasch Analysis of the 6-Item Gratitude Questionnaire

ObjectivesThe 6-item gratitude questionnaire (GQ-6) is a widely used measure reported to be reliable and valid under traditional and Rasch investigations. However, recent investigations were inconsistent regarding the item structure of the GQ-6, with three investigations concluding that item 6 be removed. Previous Rasch analyses also did not produce interval conversion tables, a key benefit of this method which provides a means of improving scale accuracy and aligning the scale with the fundamental principles of measurement.MethodsA Partial Credit Rasch Model was used to evaluate psychometric properties of the GQ-6 using a combined sample of 663 respondents from the USA (n = 345) and India (n = 318).ResultsInitial analysis showed significant scale dysfunction, with overall and individual item misfit, local dependency, disordered response thresholds, instances of differential item functioning by age and nationality, along with poor reliability. Through the use of recent advances in the Rasch methodology, locally dependent items were combined into two super-items and the best fit to the Rasch model was obtained with evidence of strict unidimensionality, invariance, and strong reliability. Results indicate the GQ-6 is suitable for individual and group assessment, while also permitting the creation of an ordinal-to-interval conversion algorithm which has been provided here.ConclusionsThis study confirmed the robust psychometric properties of the GQ-6 after minor modifications and provides a means for clinicians and researchers to improve the accuracy of this widely used measure in mindfulness research and other relevant studies without modification of its original response format.

Effect of the Polarity of Solvents on Periodic Precipitation: Formation of Hierarchical Revert Liesegang Patterns.

Liesegang pattern (LP) is one example of self-organized periodic precipitation patterns in nonequilibrium systems. Several studies have demonstrated that the LP morphology can track physicochemical environmental conditions (e.g., temperature); however, the polarity effect has not been explored to date. In this study, a copper chromate system is used to reveal the impact of solvent polarity on the evolving LP structure using water/organic solvent mixtures. In the typical case of using water/dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) mixtures, two drastic changes in LP morphology with increasing DMSO contents were found: (i) increasing frequency of the original structure and (ii) formation of a hierarchical pattern with the appearance of another, lower-frequency structure. Furthermore, the simulation model operating with a bimodal size distribution, allowing both homogeneous and heterogeneous precipitations showed good agreement with the experimental results. Therefore, this study demonstrated that LP can be tailored by solvent polarity and can be used for designing hierarchical precipitation patterns in a straightforward manner.

Making Industrial Pittsburgh Modern: Environment, Landscape, Transportation, Energy, and Planning

Making Industrial Pittsburgh Modern: Environment, Landscape, Transportation, Energy, and Planning

The painful pursuit of weight-loss pleasure in The Biggest Winner 4

The current article provides the first attempt to use Lévi-Strauss’s theory of binary opposition in the study of a reality TV programme, which is the Arab version of the American reality format The Biggest Loser. The major aim of this article is to reveal the stigmatization of obesity and the promotion of the thin body type in MBC’s The Biggest Winner 4. To reach this aim, a qualitative content analysis is applied to the journeys and fourteen episodes of the programme, whereby the utterances and behaviours of the different participants are coded in search of themes related to fatness and thinness using NVivo 12. The analysis comes to unveil the existence of two levels of dual reconstruction. The first superficial opposition exists between fatness and thinness, and the second binary opposition is established between pain and pleasure, which involve the opposing feelings associated with the first binary opposites of fatness and thinness. The two levels of binary opposition evidence that the narrative of the programme is predicated on building a contradiction between the pain of fatness and the pleasure of thinness to add drama to the reality show and distance Arab viewers from overweight bodies. The major finding of the study is that The Biggest Winner, despite being localized and given an Arab flavour, still echoes the same anti-fat rhetoric of the original American format and serves to promote the American cultural ideal of thinness in the Arab world.

Safety of International Professional Sports Competitions During the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Association Football Experience

Major sporting events were suspended during the most acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Competitions are resuming with enhanced hygiene protocols and altered mechanics. While risks for players and staff have been studied, the impact of large-scale tournaments on the communities that host them remains largely unstudied. CONMEBOL Copa América is one of the first wide-scale international tournaments to be conducted in its original format since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The tournament saw 10 national teams compete in four Brazilian cities during a period of heightened viral transmission. The analysis of over 28,000 compulsory PCR tests showed that positive cases did not lead to the uncontrolled spread of the disease among staff and players. More importantly, the data indicate that locally hired staff were not exposed to increased risk while working. The Copa América experience shows that international sporting competitions can be conducted safely even under unfavourable epidemiological situations.

Filter-GAN: Imbalanced Malicious Traffic Classification Based on Generative Adversarial Networks with Filter

In recent years, with the rapid development of Internet services in all walks of life, a large number of malicious acts such as network attacks, data leakage, and information theft have become major challenges for network security. Due to the difficulty of malicious traffic collection and labeling, the distribution of various samples in the existing dataset is seriously imbalanced, resulting in low accuracy of malicious traffic classification based on machine learning and deep learning, and poor model generalization ability. In this paper, a feature image representation method and Adversarial Generative Network with Filter (Filter-GAN) are proposed to solve these problems. First, the feature image representation method divides the original session traffic into three parts. The Markov matrix is extracted from each part to form a three-channel feature image. This method can transform the original session traffic format into a uniform-length matrix and fully characterize the network traffic. Then, Filter-GAN uses the feature images to generate few attack samples. Compared with general methods, Filter-GAN can generate more efficient samples. Experiments were conducted on public datasets. The results show that the feature image representation method can effectively characterize the original session traffic. When the number of samples is sufficient, the classification accuracy can reach 99%. Compared with unbalanced datasets, Filter-GAN has significantly improved the recognition accuracy of small-sample datasets, with a maximum improvement of 6%.

Keyhole-induced Porosity in Laser Manufacturing Processes: Formation Mechanism and Dependence on Scan Speed

Laser welding and laser-based powder-bed fusion additive manufacturing in the deep penetration (keyhole) mode are promising technologies for the synthesis of metal components. The significant potential of these technologies remains latent because of structural defects (porosity), which significantly degrade the structural integrity and performance of the end products. Practical strategies for reducing those defects are addressed through fundamental understanding of their formation. In this study, pore formation of hydrodynamic origin is investigated, including the dynamics and mechanisms of the formation based on the above mentioned technologies. The pore volume and frequency of pore appearance, depending on the amplitude and frequency of capillary vibrations, are considered. Physical analysis is performed to obtain the scanning velocity values for the maximum and zero amplitudes and the frequency of capillary waves. A comparison between calculated curves and experimental data confirms both the capillary origin of the pores and the estimated scanning speeds at which the parameters of the pores exhibit their maximum values or vanish. The results obtained may facilitate in the selection of the optimal scanning speed when designing a pore-free technology.

Engaging Families and Addressing Adverse Childhood Experiences in Early Head Start

Supporting parenting and home environments for children through collaborations with families is a critical function of Early Head Start (EHS)/Head Start (HS) providers. Building a strong partnership with caregivers allows educators to identify family strengths and identifying areas of concern in parenting and home environments, such as those linked to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). Family Map Inventory (FMI) is a tool used to screen for ACEs among children birth to 5 years-of-age while respecting the family needs. The effectiveness of FMI in its original paper format (p-FMI) has been validated. This study examined the validity of a new, web-based Family Map Inventory (e-FMI) by (1) comparing the distribution of ACEs risks captured in e-FMI with the traditional p-FMI, and (2) investigating the association of ACEs captured through e-FMI and parental warmth. Further, this study documented decreases in ACEs risks after center-based EHS services.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu by Aoife Mary Dempsey

Reviewed by: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu by Aoife Mary Dempsey Meaghan Scott (bio) Aoife Mary Dempsey, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2022), pp. x + 224, $88 hardcover. In Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Aoife Mary Dempsey examines Le Fanu's legacy, providing fresh interpretations of his short stories and novels within their original publication contexts and setting his work in the context of historical, political, and biographical frameworks. Dempsey maintains that while previous "interpretations of Le Fanu's life and works have typically focused upon his religious affiliation or his proclivity for the supernatural," her book provides a critical revision of Le Fanu's writing within context—be it material, market, historical, or personal—"yield[ing] fresh [End Page 476] insight into a variegated writer, in many ways a writer unbound by any singular genre" (10). Since many of Le Fanu's works were initially published in the Dublin University Magazine (D.U.M.), Dempsey keeps the periodical at the forefront of her analyses of the fiction published within it. Dempsey begins with Le Fanu's short stories in the first chapter, "Material Culture, Serialisation and Lateral Reading: Le Fanu's Short Stories in Context," directing our attention to "The Watcher" (1847) and "The Fatal Bride" (1848) in particular. Dempsey acknowledges that while "'The Watcher' has received merited critical attention to date and indeed is one of Le Fanu's finest stories … it is rarely considered in its original publication format in the D.U.M. or alongside its companion piece, 'The Fatal Bride'" (45). Identifying "The Watcher" as one of the most well-known Le Fanu short stories, Dempsey contends, "'The Fatal Bride' is one of his least known, entirely out of print until a 2014 edition by Swan River Press that saw the two stories republished as a pair for the first time" (45). Insights such as this, stemming from her examination of Le Fanu's works within their original publication contexts, appear frequently throughout this book, each a precise and contextual analysis of Le Fanu's oeuvre. In the second chapter, "Immaterial Spaces: Le Fanu's Unhomely Houses," Dempsey transitions to Le Fanu's novels, such as The House by the Church-yard (1861–63). In focusing on the novels, she draws readers' attention to personal aspects of Le Fanu's life. As Dempsey says, "By the time he published 'An Authentic Narrative of a Haunted House' in 1862, Le Fanu was widowed, orphaned and the new owner and editor of the Dublin University Magazine … as well as maintaining interests in several other Dublin newspapers" (70). Dempsey claims that Le Fanu's stylistic approach to his novels became more "domestically focused" in this period (70). Furthermore, "The theme of disruption to homelife and all that is familiar and safe can be linked to the pervasive socio-political disturbances that occurred in the years after the famine" (77). Dempsey closes this chapter with an analysis of Le Fanu's Carmilla (1871–72), alluding to the apparent strangeness of it among Le Fanu's works but contending that his "imagining of the vampire as a member of a dispossessed gentry, a homeless figure and a threat to the stable domestic life fits into the broader pattern of his work during the 1860s and into the 1870s at the confluence of shifting power dynamics and the threat of colonial insurrection" (107). Dempsey's multifaceted approach to (re)interpreting Le Fanu's works provides readers with a deeper understanding of and appreciation for this nineteenth-century author and the complexities surrounding and influencing his writing. The third and fourth chapters discuss aspects of Le Fanu's legacy via his authorial networking habits and the state of his manuscripts. In chapter [End Page 477] 3, "Fictional Networks: Le Fanu's Literary Legacy," Dempsey traces Le Fanu's "personal connections with well-known Victorian peers" and his "influence on some of the most prominent authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries," such as Charlotte Brontë, Bram Stoker, and James Joyce (110). Le Fanu's connection with Charles Dickens is emphasized since Le Fanu wrote for Dickens's periodicals over an extended period of his career. But mapping Le Fanu's...

GNPI: Graph normalization to integrate phylogenetic information for metagenomic host phenotype prediction

Microorganisms play important roles in our lives especially on metabolism and diseases. Determining the probability of human suffering from specific diseases and the severity of the disease based on microbial genes is the crucial research for understanding the relationship between microbes and diseases. Previous could extract the topological information of phylogenetic trees and integrate them to metagenomic datasets, thus enable classifiers to learn more information in limited datasets and thus improve the performance of the models. In this paper, we proposed a GNPI model to better learn the structure of phylogenetic trees. GNPI maintained the original vector format of metagenomic datasets, while previous research had to change the input form to matrices. The vector-like form of the input data can be easily adopted in the baseline machine learning models and is available for deep learning models. The datasets processed with GNPI help enhance the accuracy of machine learning and deep learning models in three different datasets. GNPI is an interpretable data processing method for host phenotype prediction and other bioinformatics tasks.

Mary as a New Eve in the Thought of St Paul

AbstractAlthough the theme of Mary as a new or second Eve is first explicitly found in the writings of Justin Martyr, there is an antecedent probability that it is of apostolic origin and familiar to St Paul. I argue that this theme helps to interpret several passages in the Pauline corpus that have remained without adequate explanation. The first and principal passage discussed is 1 Cor. 11:11-12, where the phrase ‘the man by the woman’ is put in parallel with the original formation of the woman ‘from the man’. Once it is thus accepted that St Paul understood the Virgin Mary through this typological lens, three others passages are seen to yield a more coherent and richer sense: ‘made of a woman’ in Gal. 4:4; ‘saved through child-bearing’ in 1 Tim. 2:14-15; and ‘each in his own “tagma”’ in 1 Cor. 15:23.

Fears of Compassion Scales: Cross-Cultural Adaptation and Validity Evidence for Use in Brazil

Fears of compassion are associated with harmful mental health effects, with research increasing worldwide. As a measure to assess this construct, the Fears of Compassion Scales were developed, with adapted versions in several countries. This study aimed to perform the cultural adaptation and search for evidence of validity of the Fears of Compassion Scales for use in Brazil. After the translation and cultural adaptation process, two online surveys were conducted. In the first, 284 adults (mean age = 36.47) answered the Fears of Compassion Scales and a sociodemographic questionnaire. Through Exploratory Factor Analysis and Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega tests, the three scales showed good internal consistency indices and confirmed the original format of the instrument, with a one-factor solution. One item of scale 1 did not fit and was excluded, while a new item in scale 2, developed through focus groups, showed good fit indices. In the second data collection, 381 women (mean age = 31.56) answered the Fears of Compassion Scales, the Self-Compassion Scale, and the Psychological Well-Being Scale. Confirmatory factor analyses corroborated the format proposed in the first analysis, and convergent and divergent validity data were confirmed. The results indicate that the Fears of Compassion Scales are suitable for use in Brazil. The instrument tends to contribute to studies on the theme, providing a better understanding of its functioning and enabling future interventions to improve access to compassion and all its benefits.

High-Temperature Gaseous Reaction of Cesium with Siliceous Thermal Insulation: The Potential Implication to the Provenance of Enigmatic Fukushima Cesium-Bearing Material.

Here, we report an investigation of the gas–solid reaction between cesium hydroxide (CsOH) and siliceous (calcium silicate) thermal insulation at high temperature, which is postulated as the origin for the formation mechanism of cesium-bearing material emitted from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. A developed reaction furnace consisting of two heating compartments was used to study the reaction at temperatures of 873, 973, and 1073 K. Under the influence of hydrogen-steam atmospheric conditions (H2/H2O = 0.2), the reaction between cesium hydroxide vapor and solid thermal insulation was confirmed to occur at temperatures of 973 and 1073 K with the formation of dicalcium silicate (Ca2SiO4) and cesium aluminum silicate (CsAlSiO4). Water-dissolution analyses of the reaction products have demonstrated their stability, in particular, CsAlSiO4. Constituent similarity of the field-observed cesium-bearing materials near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants with CsAlSiO4 suggests for the first time that gaseous reaction between CsOH with calcium silicate thermal insulation could be one of the original formation mechanisms of the cesium-bearing materials.

Calculation and application of partition coefficients of light hydrocarbons in oil-based mud system

To find out the relationship between the oil-based mud, the formation fluid and the extracted gas, we use a thermodynamic approach based on static headspace gas chromatography technique to calculate the partition coefficients of 47 kinds of light hydrocarbons compounds between nC5 and nC8 in two kinds of oil-based mud-air systems, and reconstruct the original formation fluid composition under thermodynamic equilibrium. The oil-based drilling mud has little effect on the formation fluid compositions in the range of nC5–nC8 (less than 1% for low-toxicity oil-based mud and less than 10% for oil-based mud). For most light hydrocarbon compositions, the partition coefficients obtained by vapor phase calibration and the direct quantitative methods have errors of less than 10%, and the partition coefficients obtained by direct quantitative method are more accurate. The reconstructed compositions of the two kinds of crude oil have match degrees of 91% and 89% with their real compositions, proving the feasibility and accuracy of reconstructing the composition of original formation fluid by using partition coefficients of light hydrocarbon compositions between nC5 and nC8.

A proposed approach for the key generation in cryptography to enrich the data confidentiality while sharing data over the network

Data sharing over network has been threat in the digital world. To provide the security to the data being passed over the network various system has been defined. Most widely used systems are cryptography and steganography. Cryptography is the art of converting the data to some another format which will not be understandable by the intruders. The most important phase while sharing data over network using cryptography is the key generation and key distribution. General cryptography techniques either uses public key or uses public and private key both. The major focus of the propose method is not to commute keys with the data being shared over network. Proposed approach defines a method which will get feedback from the receiver and system will identify whether the receiver is undeniable or not. If the receiver is undeniable then only the data will be decrypted to the original to the original format. In this paper we have surveyed many traditional algorithms related to symmetric key and asymmetric key cryptography. Many mathematical operations are being applied to generate the complex keys to ensure security. This approach defines the complexity with almost no mathematical complexity and using no traditional approach for the key generation which are widely known.