Accelerator

This paper presents an experimental study conducted on 240 specimens, 120 cubes and 120 beams to see the effect of accelerators on compressive and flexural strength of concrete Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) was used to produce concrete mixtures M20 and M30. Concrete mixtures were designed as per the new guidelines of IS 10262:2009. Three accelerators Potassium Carbonate, Sodium Thiosulfate and Triethanolamine were used. Both compressive strength and flexural strength of standard specimens with accelerators have been recorded at one, three, seven, fourteen and twenty-eight days of curing with water and compared with strengths of controlled specimens at their corresponding ages. The test results revealed that the maximum percentage gain was observed for Triethanolamine accelerator out of three accelerators at 1, 3, 7, 14 and 28 days compressive and flexural strength for both M20 and M30 grade of concrete. Also there is a very little change in 28 days compressive strength with all accelerators for both M20 and M30 grade of concrete.

To develop proposals for making decisions on venture capital investments, the authors studied the theoretical and methodological basis of the subject of the research: they considered the definition of "venture capital", its types, sources, disadvantages and advantages of venture capital; analyzed the trends in venture financing in the world and Ukraine. Based on the theoretical and methodological analysis, the authors proposed a decision-making algorithm for venture investments as a prerequisite for making decisions for venture investments, and also examined in detail its final stage-exiting a funded project is the most significant part for an investor. For this stage, the authors considered three options for investors to exit the company sale of a venture investor's share to existing shareholders and/or company management; sale of company shares to a strategic partner; sale of company shares through public offering.

This study sought to evaluate the setting time and strength property of concrete when pulverized water hyacinth serves as an admixture by weight. The materials used in this study included water hyacinth plants, cement, coarse and fine aggregates. Dried water hyacinth was pulverized and added to the concrete with two different percentages in each mixture. A standard mixture without water hyacinth was also created for comparison with the concrete cylinders with mixture that has pulverized water hyacinth. The first concrete cylinder contains 0.5% of pulverized water hyacinth by weight and the second concrete cylinder contains 1% of pulverized water hyacinth by weight. The curing was done for 28 days, and the properties of the concrete cylinders, namely setting time and strength, were recorded. It was revealed in the setting time test that the concrete with 0.5% pulverized water hyacinth may serve as accelerator for concrete while the concrete cylinder with 1% pulverized water hyacinth ...

In radiation therapy, preventing treatment plan errors is of paramount importance. In this paper, an alert system is proposed and developed for checking if the pending cancer treatment plan is consistent with the intended use. A key step in the development of the paper is characterization of various treatment plan fingerprints by three-dimension vectors taken from possibly thousands of variables in each treatment plan. Then three machine learning based algorithms are developed and tested in the paper. The first algorithm is a knowledge-based support vector machine method. If an incorrect treatment plan were offered, the algorithm would tell that the pending treatment plan is inconsistent with the intended use and provide a red flag. The algorithm is tested on the actual patient data sets with 100% successful rate and 0% failure rate. In addition, two algorithms based on the well-known k-nearest neighbour and Bayesian approach respectively are developed. Similar to the support vector machine algorithm, these two algorithms are also tested with 100% success rate and 0% failure rate. The key seems to pick up the right features.

Fintech accelerators are a new infrastructural institution within the burgeoning
fintech ecosystem, which currently is going through exceptional growth. A specialized
type of accelerator, fintech accelerators are quickly conquering the venture capital
market, steadily building up their positions, which is associated with a boom in fintech
innovation. In this regard, it may be of interest to gain an insight into some of the key
functions fintech accelerators perform in the market and examine some of the key
areas of startup support provided by fintech accelerators. The authors have singled
out six major functions of fintech accelerators: organizational, financial-economic,
consulting, educative, commercial, and evolutionary. In addition, the authors have
developed a stage-by-stage procedure for the selection of startups by fintech
accelerators for including them in an acceleration program. An analysis of existing
terms and conditions regarding accelerator application submission and consideration
has helped identify a total of five major stages in the process, as well as put forward a
number of ways to enhance the way accelerator applications are processed and
considered at the moment.

Abstract. General Purpose Graphics Computing Units can be effec-tively used for enhancing the performance of many contemporary scien-ti c applications. However, programming GPUs using machine-specic notations like CUDA or OpenCL can be complex and time consuming. In addition, the resulting programs are typically ne-tuned for a partic-ular target device. A promising alternative is to program in a conven-tional and machine-independent notation extended with directives and use compilers to generate GPU code automatically. These compilers en-able portability and increase programmer productivity and, if effective, would not impose much penalty on performance. This paper evaluates two such compilers, PGI and Cray. We rst iden-tify a collection of standard transformations that these compilers can apply. Then, we propose a sequence of manual transformations that pro-grammers can apply to enable the generation of efficient GPU kernels. Lastly, using the Rodinia Benchmark suite, we compare th...

Keeping in view problems of cold weather concreting resulting in prohibition of concrete construction activities in author's native land Kashmir, an attempt to overcome the problem of delayed setting and hardening of concrete leading to frost action and subsequent damage to concrete is made by studying the effect of chemical admixture (sodium nitrite) on early strength development for different grades of concrete. Three Grades of concrete selected for experimental study were M-15; M-20 & M-25.Five samples were prepared in each concrete grade having Sodium Nitrite dosage of 1%, 1.5%, 2%, 2.5% and 3% by weight of cement. The concrete specimens were tested for 3 day, 7 day and 28 day compressive strength and the results obtained were compared with those of normal concrete. The optimum percentage of accelerator that could be used without harming the properties of concrete was also assessed. The results concluded permissibility of using accelerating admixture (Sodium Nitrite) up to 2.5% by weight of cement and also the optimum percentage of accelerating admixture was found to be 2.5% with value of compressive strength being maximum at the age of 3 days and 7days for each grade, thereby validating the optimum dosage arrived experimentally.

For most of the applications that make use of a dedicated vector coprocessor, its resources are not highly utilized due to the lack of sustained data parallelism which often occurs due to vector-length variations in dynamic environments. The motivation of our work stems from: (a) the mandate for multicore designs to make efficient use of on-chip resources for low power and high performance; (b) the omnipresence of vector operations in high-performance scientific and emerging embedded applications; (c) the need to often handle a variety of vector sizes; and (d) vector kernels in application suites may have diverse computation needs. We present a robust design framework for vector coprocessor sharing in multicore environments that maximizes vector unit utilization and performance at substantially reduced energy costs. For our adaptive vector unit, which is attached to multiple cores, we propose three basic shared working policies that enforce coarse-grain, fine-grain, and vector-lane ...