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Experimental study on Steel Fiber concrete for M20 grade having mix proportion 1: 2.23: 3.99 and water cement ratio of 0.47 to study the compressive, flexural and split tensile strength of Steel Fibred Reinforced Concrete (SFRC) containing fibers of 0%, 0.5%, 1%, 1.5%, 2% volume fraction. The result obtained is analyzed and compared with a control specimen (0% steel fiber).The Two Pont loading carried out on a test specimen. The Results are compared with each other in compressive strength, flexural strength and split tensile strength for 28days for 1% steel of 100mm and 150mm stirrups spacing.

Nielsen and Stewart (2024) introduced a novel intra-group criterion of algorithmic fairness called ‘spanning’. Here, I propose an alternative intra-group criterion and argue that is has some salient advantages over spanning.

The multi-row stabilizing piles have been applied in the stabilization of large-scale reservoir landslides in recent years. However, the mechanical behavior and deformation characteristics of the multi-row stabilizing piles reinforced reservoir landslides have rarely been investigated. This study takes the Taping landslide, a large-scale reservoir landslide in China, as a prototype. Two centrifuge tests were conducted to study the deformation and failure characteristics of the multi-row stabilizing piles reinforced reservoir landslide with two different row spacings. The result shows that the reservoir water level (RWL) drawdown operation induced the soil movement and high downslope driving force, further causing a significant increase in bending moments at the lower section of the piles, with peaking near the sliding zone; eventually, bending deformation and failure occurred more easily near the sliding zone. The downslope part of the piles can change the mechanical transmission behavior of the multi-row stabilizing piles in reservoir landslides. Small row spacing can enhance the mechanical connection between the rows of piles and raise the overall reinforcement capacity of the piles. The large row spacing weakens the mechanical connection between the rows of piles, and the mechanical states of the pile in different rows are relatively independent. As a result, the piles are easily damaged one by one from the first row to the last row, and the overall reinforcement capacity of the multi-row stabilizing piles is poor.

Mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) are complexes of thunderstorms that become organized and cover hundreds of kilometres over several hours. MCSs are prolific rain producers in the tropics and mid-latitudes and are the major cause of warm-season flooding. Traditionally, climate models have difficulties in simulating MCSs partly due to the misrepresentation of complex process interactions that operate across a large range of scales. Significant improvements in simulating MCSs have been found in kilometre-scale models that explicitly simulate deep convection. However, these models operate in the grey zone of turbulent motion and have known deficiencies in simulating small-scale processes (e.g. entrainment, vertical mass transport). Here, we perform mid-latitude idealized ensemble MCS simulations under current and future climate conditions in three atmospheric regimes: hydrostatic (12 km horizontal grid spacing; Δ x ), non-hydrostatic (Δ x = 4, 2 and 1 km) and large eddy scale (Δ x = 500 m and 250 m). Our results show a dramatic improvement in simulating MCS precipitation, movement, cold pools, and cloud properties when transitioning from 12 km to 4 km Δ x . Decreasing Δ x beyond 4 km results in modest improvements except for up- and downdraft sizes, average vertical mass fluxes, and cloud top height and temperature, which continue to change. Most important for climate modelling is that Δ x = 4 km simulations reliably capture most MCS climate change signals compared to those of the Δ x = 250 m runs. Significantly different climate change signals are found in Δ x = 12 km runs that overestimate extreme precipitation changes by up to 100%. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Intensification of short-duration rainfall extremes and implications for flash flood risks’.

A U-shape cavity including the microring resonator with a radius of 3 µm has been modeled and studied for the throughput and drop output power enhancement of the microring resonator. We have obtained the maximum output power of the silicon microring resonator by varying the bandgap between the microring and the coupled bus waveguides. The outputs can be further affected by using the different semiconductor materials such as GaAs and InAs as core waveguides, which show significant power enhancement at the throughput and drop, respectively. A time delay of 347 fs is realized for the generated results, which is occurred due to the different light propagation patch.

A large body of research has found an association between short birth intervals and the risk of infant mortality in developing countries, but recent work on other perinatal outcomes from highly developed countries has called these claims into question, arguing that previous studies have failed to adequately control for unobserved heterogeneity. Our study addresses this issue by estimating within-family models on a sample of 4.5 million births from 77 countries at various levels of development. We show that after unobserved maternal heterogeneity is controlled for, intervals shorter than 36 months substantially increase the probability of infant death. However, the importance of birth intervals as a determinant of infant mortality varies inversely with maternal education and the strength of the relationship varies regionally. Finally, we demonstrate that the mortality-reducing effects of longer birth intervals are strong at low levels of development but decline steadily toward zero at higher levels of development. These findings offer a clear way to reconcile previous research showing that birth intervals are important for perinatal outcomes in lowincome countries but are much less consequential in high-income settings.

With declining vision ability, character spacing and size on smartphones designed for the general population are not accessible for older adults. This study aimed to explore how larger Chinese character spacing and size affect older adults’ user experience (UX). An orthogonal experiment was conducted. The optimal range of font size (FS), word spacing (WS) and line spacing (LS) were proposed utilising subjective evaluations to investigate the correlation of eye movement data with participants perceived UX. The results showed that improvement in different aspects of UX varied when FS, WS and LS increased. Overall, participants preferred larger FS, WS and LS, however, the larger FS, WS and LS values are more likely to cause errors and slower reading speed. These results suggest that the distinct combination of size and spacing depends on the motivation, needs and situation of older people when reading on a smartphone. These findings will help designers to provide better design for the older people.

Spaced repetition seems to play a significant role in the learning and retention of words in foreign language settings. This experimental study investigated the impact of expanding and equal spacing conditions on receptive and productive English vocabulary retrieval. The participants consisted of 63 pre-intermediate EFL learners in three intact classes randomly assigned to one control and two experimental groups. A Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS) was used to select 20 unknown word pairs (each word and its synonym) for teaching purposes and check the effects of the treatments at the end of the study. The word pairs were later divided into two 10-item A and B sets because of the counterbalanced design of the study. The first experimental group studied set A under an equally spaced condition (2-2-2) and set B under an expanding spaced condition (0-1-5) with the same absolute spacing value. The second experimental group studied them in the reverse order, thus counterbalancing the effect of encounter order. The control group studied the target items under the no-spacing or massed condition (0-0-0). The statistical analyses of the three groups’ posttest scores indicated that all the three groups had improved their receptive and productive vocabulary retrieval. However, an equally spaced schedule had led to a significantly higher mean score only on the receptive items of the posttest and, therefore, better vocabulary retrieval. Therefore, it is suggested that EFL teachers consider spacing in general and the equal spacing condition in particular as important elements in facilitating both receptive and productive vocabulary learning.

The acquisition and retention of knowledge is affected by a multitude of factors including amount of practice, elapsed time since practice occurred, and the temporal distribution of practice. The third factor, temporal distribution of practice, is at the heart of research on the spacing effect. This research has consistently shown that separating practice repetitions by a delay slows acquisition but enhances retention. The current study addresses an empirical gap in the spacing effects literature. Namely, how does the allocation of a fixed number of practice repetitions among multiple sessions impact learning and retention? To address this question, we examined participants’ acquisition and retention of declarative knowledge given different study schedules in which the number of practice repetitions increased, decreased, or remained constant across multiple acquisition sessions. The primary result was that retention depended strongly on the total number of sessions in which an item appeared, but not on how practice repetitions were distributed among those sessions. This outcome was consistent with predictions from a computational cognitive model of skill acquisition and retention called the Predictive Performance Equation (PPE). The success of the model in accounting for the patterns of performance across a large set of study schedules suggests that it can be used to tame the complexity of the design space and to identify schedules to enhance knowledge acquisition and retention.

Word is important in Chinese reading. However, when inter-word spaces are inserted into Chinese text, there is no facilitation or disruption to adults’ reading. Researchers argued that there was a trade-off between word segmentation facilitation and disruption due to format unfamiliarity. To assess the trade-off hypothesis, in Experiment 1, we tested Grade 1, 2 and 3 children who have less reading experience than adults and manipulated four spacing conditions: normal unspaced, word spaced, character spaced, and nonword spaced text. In Experiment 2, we collected data from Grade 1 and 3 with the word spaced condition and normal unspaced condition. Overall, global analyses from both Experiments consistently showed that word spacing facilitated Grade 1 reading, with much reduced facilitation for higher grade readers; local measures (total reading time and second-pass reading time) replicated the same pattern in which word spacing effects were more pronounced among younger readers. In summary, we obtained greater facilitatory effects of word spacing for younger compared with elder readers, which provides strong evidence for the trade-off hypothesis.