• Computers and Concrete
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.469-479
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• 2018

The Brazilian tensile strength of concrete samples is a key parameter in fracture mechanics since it may significantly change the quality of concrete materials and their mechanical behaviors. It is well known that porosity is one of the most often used physical indices to predict concrete mechanical properties. In the present work the influence of porosity shape on concrete tensile strength characteristics is studied, using a bonded particle model. Firstly numerical model was calibrated by Brazilian experimental results and uniaxial test out puts. Secondly, Brazilian models consisting various pore shapes were simulated and numerically tested at a constant speed of 0.016 mm/s. The results show that pore shape has important effects on the failure pattern. It is shown that the pore shape may play an important role in the cracks initiation and propagation during the loading process which in turn influence on the tensile strength of the concrete samples. It has also been shown that the pore size mainly affects the ratio of uniaxial compressive strength to that of the tensile one in the simulated material samples.

• International Journal of High-Rise Buildings
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.137-154
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• 2019

Singapore has seen a phenomenal and an unprecedented transformation from a swampland to a high density urban environment since its independence in 1965, made possible largely and single-handedly by the sustained efforts of its government. Indeed, urban space is a key vehicle for achieving urban social, environmental, economic, and cultural sustainability. The dense urban context in Singapore has seen an emergence and increase in elevated spaces in the form of sky-gardens, sky-bridges and sky-courts in a range of building types, seemingly seeking to tie together the different horizontal and vertical components of the city. This paper, therefore, examines the effectiveness of elevated urban spaces and pedestrian networks in Singapore and their ability to contribute to the horizontal to vertical transitions, and consequently to the urban vitality and accessibility. It does this through the analysis of two key developments: Marina Bay Sands and the Jurong Gateway. In particular, it considers the implications of certain constraints placed on urban spaces by their inherent location at height, in addition to the familiar privatization of public spaces, over-management of spaces, and their somewhat utilitarian characteristics. The paper argues that some of these issues may pose detrimental effects on the publicness of these spaces that in turn may lead to such spaces being underused and therefore adding redundancies and further stress to Singapore's urban land. Finally, the paper outlines key strategies that may help overcome the aforementioned issues, including the disjuncture associated with elevated spaces such that they may become a seamless extension of the urban spaces on ground.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.149-179
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• 2012

This study explores the reporting tendencies of project managers when sending a status reports to their respective senior managers in information systems development project. It also examines the effect of selective reporting on report quality and systems development performance. The research model is proposed based on literature survey as well as key points from Iacovou et al. [2009] which is an extension of selective reporting in information systems project. Analysis of responses from 257 project managers in information systems industry indicates that pessimistic reporting by project managers has negative effect on both report quality (mediator variable) and systems development performance, while optimistic reporting has no significant effect on systems development performance. The CEO interest has an impact on the senior manager's power, which in turn leads to optimistic reporting by project managers. The senior manager's character has an impact on the senior manager's leadership, which in turn leads to pessimistic reporting. No direct relationship exists either between CEO interest and optimistic reporting or between senior manager's character and pessimistic reporting. In addition, trust toward the senior managers is significantly related to pessimistic reporting. Finally, report tendencies are also found to be affected by the active/passive characteristics of project managers.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.9 no.7
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• pp.135-144
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• 2022

The relationship between applying knowledge management and accepting environmentally managed accounting is more complicated than previous studies suggested. Knowledge management is both an antecedent and a consequence of implementing environmentally managed accounting in the workplace. Nonetheless, none of the prior studies have systematically investigated this relationship. The current article attempted to scrutinize the reciprocated multifaceted tie between environmental managerial accounting and knowledge management by utilizing the methods of directed graph searches as well as directed acyclic graphs. The research data was gathered from 342 publicly-listed corporations in Vietnam's key stock markets. The empirical findings disclose that implementing knowledge management can lead to adopting environmental managerial accounting in business, which is, in turn, an antecedent of accepting knowledge management. More importantly, the current research found that the adoption of knowledge management is the first factor to affect the research model. Nonetheless, the usage of knowledge management in business can, in turn, have a positive effect back to the implementing extent of environmental managerial accounting. The findings are beneficial to scientists and particularly to executives by shedding new insight into this reciprocated bond, which can lead executives to make sound decisions regarding knowledge management and environmental managerial accounting for businesses to acquire competitive advantages.

• BMB Reports
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.120-125
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• 2000

M2PI is an active single chain mini-proinsulin with a 9-residue linker containing the turn-forming sequence 'YPGDV' between the B- and A-chains, but which retains about 50% of native insulin receptor binding activity. The refolding efficiency of M2PI is higher than proinsulin by 20-40% at alkaline pH, and native insulin is generated by the enzymatic conversion of M2PI. The solution structure of M2PI was determined by NMR spectroscopy. The global structure of M2PI is similar to that of native insulin, but the flexible linker between the B- and A-chains perturbed the N-terminal A-chain and C-terminal B-chain. The helix in the N-terminal A-chain is partly perturbed and the ${\beta}$-turn in the B-chain is disrupted in M2PI. However, the linker between the two chains was completely disordered indicating that the designed turn was not formed under the experimental conditions (20% acetic acid). Considering the fact that an insulin analogue, directly cross-linked between the C-terminus of the B-chain and the N-terminus of the A-chain, has negligible binding activity, a flexible linker between the two chains is sufficient to keep binding activity of M2PI, but the perturbed secondary structures are detrimental to receptor binding.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.349-361
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• 2015

Higher-mode vertical vortex-induced vibrations (VIV) have been observed on several steel box-girder suspension bridges where different vertical modes are selectively excited in turn with wind velocity in accordance with the Strouhal law. Understanding the relationship of VIV amplitudes for different modes of vibration is very important for wind-resistant design of long-span box-girder suspension bridges. In this study, the basic rectangular cross-section with side ratio of B/D=6 is used to investigate the effect of different modes on VIV amplitudes by section model tests. The section model is flexibly mounted in wind tunnel with a variety of spring constants for simulating different modes of vibration and the non-dimensional vertical amplitudes are determined as a function of reduced velocity U/fD. Two 'lock-in' ranges are observed at the same onset reduced velocities of approximately 4.8 and 9.4 for all cases. The second 'lock-in' range, which is induced by the conventional vortex shedding, consistently gives larger responses than the first one and the Sc-normalized maximum non-dimensional responses are almost the same for different spring constants. The first 'lock-in' range where the vibration frequency is approximately two times the vortex shedding frequency is probably a result of super-harmonic resonance or the "frequency demultiplication". The main conclusion drawn from the section model study, central to the higher-mode VIV of suspension bridges, is that the VIV amplitude for different modes is the same provided that the Sc number for these modes is identical.

• BMB Reports
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• v.46 no.6
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• pp.316-321
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• 2013

Gastric cancer remains the main cause of cancer death all around the world, and upregulated activation of the nonreceptor tyrosine kinase c-SRC (SRC) is a key player in the development. In this study, we found that expression of Src is also increased in clinical gastric cancer samples, with the protein level increased more significantly than that at the RNA level. Further study revealed that miR34a and miR203, two tumor suppressive miRNAs, inversely correlate with the expression of Src. Restoration of miR34a and miR203 decreased Src expression in gastric cancer cell lines, which in turn inhibited cell growth and cell migration. In summary, our study here revealed that posttranscriptional regulation of Src contributes to the deregulated cell growth and metastasis in gastric cancer, and targeting Src by miR34a or miR203 mimics would be a promising strategy in therapy.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.146-159
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• 2015

Since the power capacity needed for the propulsion of large ships is very large, a multiphase AC induction propulsion mode is generally adopted to meet the higher requirements of reliability, redundancy and maintainability. This paper gives a detailed description of the development of a 20MW fifteen-phase PWM driver for advanced fifteen-phase propulsion induction motors with a special third-harmonic injection in terms of the main circuit hardware, control system design, experiments, etc. The adoption of the modular design method for the main circuit hardware design can make the enclosed mechanical structure simple and maintainable. It can also avoid the larger switch stresses caused by the multiple turn on of the IGBTs in conventional large-capacity converter systems. The use of the distributed controller design method based on a high-speed fiber-optic ring net for the control system can overcome such disadvantages as the poor reliability and long maintenance times arising from the conventional centralized controller which is designed according to point-to-point communication. Finally, the performance of the 20MW PWM driver is verified by experimentation on a new fifteen-phase induction propulsion motor.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.17 no.7
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• pp.1823-1840
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• 2023

In order to improve spectral efficiency and reduce power consumption for reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted wireless communication systems, a joint design considering irregular RIS topology, RIS on-off switch, power allocation and phase adjustment is investigated in this paper. Firstly, a multi-dimensional variable joint optimization problem is established under multiple constraints, such as the minimum data requirement and power constraints, with the goal of maximizing the system energy efficiency. However, the proposed optimization problem is hard to be resolved due to its property of nonlinear nonconvex integer programming. Then, to tackle this issue, the problem is decomposed into four sub-problems: topology design, phase shift adjustment, power allocation and switch selection. In terms of topology design, Tabu search algorithm is introduced to select the components that play the main role. For RIS switch selection, greedy algorithm is used to turn off the RISs that play the secondary role. Finally, an iterative optimization algorithm with high data-rate and low power consumption is proposed. The simulation results show that the performance of the irregular RIS aided system with topology design and RIS selection is better than that of the fixed topology and the fix number of RISs. In addition, the proposed joint optimization algorithm can effectively improve the data rate and energy efficiency by changing the propagation environment.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.938-958
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• 2024

Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation (UVOS) is a highly challenging problem in computer vision as the annotation of the target object in the testing video is unknown at all. The main difficulty is to effectively handle the complicated and changeable motion state of the target object and the confusion of similar background objects in video sequence. In this paper, we propose a novel deep Dual-stream Co-enhanced Network (DC-Net) for UVOS via bidirectional motion cues refinement and multi-level feature aggregation, which can fully take advantage of motion cues and effectively integrate different level features to produce high-quality segmentation mask. DC-Net is a dual-stream architecture where the two streams are co-enhanced by each other. One is a motion stream with a Motion-cues Refine Module (MRM), which learns from bidirectional optical flow images and produces fine-grained and complete distinctive motion saliency map, and the other is an appearance stream with a Multi-level Feature Aggregation Module (MFAM) and a Context Attention Module (CAM) which are designed to integrate the different level features effectively. Specifically, the motion saliency map obtained by the motion stream is fused with each stage of the decoder in the appearance stream to improve the segmentation, and in turn the segmentation loss in the appearance stream feeds back into the motion stream to enhance the motion refinement. Experimental results on three datasets (Davis2016, VideoSD, SegTrack-v2) demonstrate that DC-Net has achieved comparable results with some state-of-the-art methods.