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This paper presents a manufacturing process to make an imitative RPC material. The blend was regularly composed of cement, silica fume, and certain content of rubber powder. The granular size distribution of dry blend was optimized to reduce the porosity of set material and the imitative RPC material was characterized by high silica fume content and with very low water to binder ratio. Furthermore, fine crushed aggregate and local natural medium crude sand were used to form mineral skeleton. Properties of various reference concrete series were investigated by conducting multiple tests, including permeability and mechanical strength test, the salt solution absorption test, the accelerated sulphate attack test, etc. The results show that the imitative RPC is an environmental-friendly civil engineering material which owns favorable mechanical strength, high impermeability and qualified excellent durability in sulphate contained environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cumulative sum charting procedure is traditionally used in the manufacturing industry for monitoring the quality of products. Recently, it has been extended to monitoring surgical outcomes. Unlike a manufacturing process where the raw material is usually reasonably homogeneous, patients’ risks of surgical failure are usually different. It has been proposed in the literature that the binary outcomes from a surgical procedure be adjusted using the preoperative risk based on a likelihood-ratio scoring method. Such a crude classification of surgical outcome is naive. It is unreasonable to regard a patient who has a full recovery, the same quality outcome as another patient who survived but remained bed-ridden for life. For a patient who survives an operation, there can be many different grades of recovery. Thus, it makes sense to consider a risk-adjusted cumulative sum charting procedure based on more than two outcomes to better monitor surgical performance. In this article, we develop such a chart and study its performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research attempts to find out how the location of the CBD(central business district), the distance to the main roads, the distribution of the public facilities, and the urban land-use pattern influence the urban residential land value variations. The study begins by identifying the influences into two categories: general circumstance and micro/neighboring circumstances. Benchmark price and market land value are tested to be the results influenced by general circumstance and both the influential range and the influential force of individual land-use are investigated and compared. At last explicit case comparisons are also taken for testing the result. The finding of the research is not only useful for understanding the spatial patterns of land values, but also beneficial for the policy-makers concerning land administration and urban planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]