Applying Experimental Results to the Shear Assessment Method for Solid Slab Bridges

I recently presented a overview of the recommendations for shear assessment from my PhD research at Concrete 2013 in Gold Coast, Australia. In this paper and presentation, we looked at the our experiments, and how these led to the recommendations for shear assessment.

The abstract of the paper is the following:

"The combination of increased live loads and a more conservative shear capacity in the recently implemented Eurocodes, resulted in a large number of existing solid slab bridges in the Netherlands being shear-critical upon assessment. However, an enhancement of the shear capacity can occur in slabs under concentrated wheel loads due to transverse load redistribution. To quantify this effect, a comprehensive series of experiments on slabs and slabs strips under a concentrated load near to the support and under a combination of a concentrated and a line load was carried out. The experiments show the difference in behaviour for slabs, carrying the load in a two-dimensional way, as compared to beams in shear. The results from the laboratory research are used to develop recommendations, that are easily used in combination with the codes. These recommendations are implemented in a spreadsheet-based first-level assessment tool, the Quick Scan method. The assessment with this tool of selected cases of existing solid slab bridges shows that applying the experimental results into the assessment practice leads to an improved selection ability of the Quick Scan method."

You can find the slides here:

Applying Experimental Results to the Shear Assessment Method for Solid Slab Bridges from Eva Lantsoght

Writers' Lab: 7 Most Common Resume Writing Mistakes to Avoid

Today in the Writers' Lab we are hosting a professional ghost writer, Jeffrey Peters. Jeffrey works as a chief editor for SolidEssay.com, which is a college paper writing service based in the US. In this post, he gives us his best advice for writing a resume.

Writing an excellent curriculum vitae or a resume may take some effort and skill, but it is significant at the end since it is a manuscript that vouches for your requirements and strives against other resumes that have been presented for the identical place or position. It might be simpler than you believe to conceive a resume that will put you into the top, but there are decisively some things you should not do when composing it. Some notable examples of resume acquiescence include a bright colored paper that is decorated with animals. Actually, a resume portrays your professional ability and should display this in its presentation. You should not have to worry about disappointing your job opportunity by revolving around your resume, which is poorly written, but can be taken care of through consulting experts in writing resumes; there is decisively some general resume composing errors that you should always try to avoid.

1. Out in Extremity
Being straight is the most excellent choice. According to resume writing experts at SolidEssay.com, human resource managers want to only focus on your skills and qualifications, not the composition established in your document. Do not use strange images or fonts in your resume. Colored paper should be completely avoided, and stick to cream or white papers. A quality paper has a light-colored watermark that confirms the manufacturer's logo. When using a paper with a watermark, your resume should be printed with a watermark on the front-side of the document.

2. Using Paragraphs and Sentences
While sentences and paragraphs are great for reports and essays, points are best when writing a resume. Human resource managers most likely have many resumes to evaluate and may be interested in reading your information at a look.

3. Including Dull Job Descriptions
Highlighting all the tasks in your previous job is not as significant as including your success. Successes are evidence of your capabilities and enlighten what you are able of achieving.

4. Too Short or Too Long
A good choice of the length of your resume is to present the number of pages based on your work experience. If you have 6 years of skills or less, you should have 2 pages for your resume. 11 years to 16 years may call for a 3-page resume; whereas 16 years or more has almost certainly earned 4 pages. You must also consider the type of job skill or experience you have had. A more superior career is more possible to be presentable on 3 or 4 pages than a job with less essential education, skills and training. For the most part, if you are not sure, stick with one page to avoid boring the person(s) hiring you.

5. Font Too Small
It is not a good idea trying to shrink the font in order to get more things on one page. It makes it difficult to read and may be in the thrown into a discard pile before your credentials are ever discovered or even read by the recruiter.

6. Getting too personal
As much as you like telling others how you enjoy taking part in sports such as having a relaxing walk on the beach, this is probably inappropriate to the employment you are in search of, and takes up precious space on your resume.

7. Poor Grammar and Misspelled Words
Grammar and spelling mistakes can dishearten an interview in spite of your competency. Check your resume for any spelling problems again and again and look for a peer editor to help you proofread your resume before submitting it.
Paying concentration to detail and quality can help you construct a well-written resume that will highlight your best abilities and skills. It is worth taking your precious time to come up with your resume so that you can be above others and put yourself closer to secure the job you desire.

Silver Linings: Little Book of Contentment

If you have an extra hour this Sunday, read the Little Book of Contentment by Leo Babauta. It's a free e-book, and it will leave you with a smile and some good thoughts to put into practice.

The central idea of the book is about finding contentment, right now, right where you are in life. 
Yes, it's perfectly fine to strive for improvement, but it's so much more rewarding if you start from a place of contentment, and then enjoy the process of improvement. Babauta puts it as follows:

"Contentment actually is a much better place from which to start making changes (self-improvement) than an unhappiness with who you are"

"If you start from a place of wanting to improve yourself and feeling stuck, even if you're constantly successful and improving, you're always looking for happiness from external sources. You don't find the happiness from within so you look to other things."

"... And in that way, you can offer yourself to the world and do great works in the world, but not necessarily need that to be happy"

One of the key ideas comes in the very beginning:

"Worst of all, with the attitude of "you can be content because you're successful", is that people who say this are dismissing the path of contentment... when it's something they can do right now. Not later, when they reach certain gals or a certain level of financial success. Now."

The lack of contentment has it's cause in two problems, according to Babauta:
1. You don't trust yourself.
2. You judge yourself badly.

Many of us can't find contentment because we are holding onto anger and disappointed from the past. Or we get upset easily, which ruins our day, and we feel as if some terrible wrong has been done to us. The book expands on anger and frustration:

"... But when we get frustrated, disappointed, irritated, or angry with other people or ourselves, that's a sure sign we had a fantasy that didn't come true"

Along the same lines, he writes:

"If someone behaves rudely and you get angry with him, the problem isn't the other person's actions... it's your reaction. Or more accurately, it's not even your reaction, but your action based on that reaction"

One way of turning a negative reaction around something I learned in a meditation course some time ago. If someone behaves rudely, you can simply tell yourself: "There I go, behaving badly again". The key idea here is that we all have our bad moments an our flaws, no need to get upset about that (an certainly not about someone else having one of these moments).

One of the key steps to find contentment, is to rebuild our trust. We should realize that failure is not a reason to judge ourselves.

"Failure is simply an indicator that something in our method needs to be changed"

I'm wishing for all of us perfectionists to read and re-read this piece of wisdom over and over again. We stumble, and fall, and that's how we learn - nothing to be embarrassed about.

Next, Babauta explores the concept of happiness. He analyzes what happens when we find happiness from external sources, and what a difference turning inwards, and starting from happiness within makes to our perception of the world.

Another interesting concept in the book is about our relationships (with friends as well as with partners). When we get upset, there's a lot to learn about ourselves, and our perception of the other person; more than about the relationship itself. We don't need to depend on the other person to find our worth and value. As Babauta puts is:

"Realize you already have everything you need to be whole - you just need to let go of the insecurities, and realize how amazing you already are."

The book ends with a list of suggestions to practice self-acceptance, as well as Babauta's answers to questions from his readers.

The Little Book of Contentment is a beautiful read that reminds us to smile, slow down and accept our position in this place, at this time. Highly recommended.

What to do when your planning fails

Planning your progress and learning how to manage your time are two essential skills for a successful PhD. As we've discussed a number of times here about systems to track time and manage time, I'd like to focus on a different topic for today:

What should you do when your planning fails?

First and foremost: Don't give up on planning! Don't fall in the trap of saying that planning is just simply not for you.
We all need a planning - the degree of detail of planning might differ from person to person, but the question of what we should be doing and when to get stuff done, is essential to all of us.

Until you have found a planning method that works, I encourage you to do the following: test out different methods, try out different tools, and reflect on what works for you and what doesn't.
 This method might sound like throwing spaghetti to the wall and seeing what sticks, but if you evaluate how you do with planning honestly, and try to figure out why a certain method is not working, then you'll reach convergence and a working system much more quickly.

Here's a quick recap of a Twitter discussion I had on this topic:

For your convenience, here is the link to the Monthly Progress Monitor, and the programmer method of scheduling time.

Writer's Lab: Why writing is (not) like sculpting

Today, I have the pleasure of hosting Koen Van den Eeckhout for a guest post in the Writers' Lab. Koen has recently obtained his PhD in physics at Ghent University, on the subject of glow-in-the-dark materials. In the following years he will be focusing on how to improve the currently available LED lighting.

Besides science, he's curious about everything related to scientific communication, personal development, graphic design and photography. 

He only recently entered the world of social media, you can find out more on his blog or follow him on twitter: @Koen_VdE.

I was not born a writer. When I was younger, I had to struggle a lot to get my ideas onto paper. Not that I did not know what I wanted to say, but after a few sentences, or even a few words, I would get stuck and start doubting my word choice, or the structure of the sentence I just wrote down. Obviously, this frightened me at the start of my PhD, since I knew I would have to write reports, papers, and ultimately my thesis. Indeed, writing is the most important skill of a PhD student. How would I ever manage to finish all that writing?

Things changed in November 2011, when I decided to step out of my comfort zone and subscribed for the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) challenge. Despite its name, NaNoWriMo is an international project open to anyone. The goal? Writing a novel of at least 50,000 words in a period of 30 days, from November 1 until November 30. This means that I would have to write on average 1,667 words a day, the equivalent of 3 A4 pages.

During the process, and thanks to the motivation of the large community behind the NaNoWriMo project, I quickly learned an important lesson. I used to think of writing as an art comparable to sculpting, where every word, every sentence is a small touch of the hammer, chipping away small pieces of stone until a masterpiece emerges. I learned that I was wrong, and I realized why - up to then - I never managed to transform my ideas into a piece of text. The first phase of sculpting is not grabbing your hammer, it's collecting your raw material, choosing the right stone with the size and shape you need. Similarly, the first phase of writing is not the crafting of beautiful words and amazing sentences. It's about writing down your ideas the way they are popping up in your head, without worrying about your words. Don't worry if the grammar of the sentence you just wrote is not entirely right. Don't worry if you know there is a better word for what you want to describe, but can't find it just yet. Just continue writing. All your doubts will be dealt with during the editing process.

I successfully finished the NaNoWriMo challenge, and at the end of the month I had a manuscript of 50,051 words (which to me felt as a massive amount of text). But I didn't have the start of a good novel. What I wrote down lacked a story, and did not have structure. Not even all the editing in the world could ever transform my text into a best-seller. Which immediately made me realize a second important lesson. I was wrong - yet again - about the first phase of writing. It's not about getting words on paper, it's about sitting down and sketching the sequence of ideas you want to explain, developing the structure of the text you are about to write. What will you discuss first, what is your final conclusion, and which path will you take to get from one to the other? Personally, I start writing by choosing which figures I want to discuss and in which order, and describing them by an accurate caption. This gives me a list of ideas, like a pathway leading from conception to conclusion. That is the real first phase of writing.

Only when the structure of your text is clear, you can start writing it down and gathering your raw material. And finally, you can start editing to turn your raw material into a piece of art. Since my NaNoWriMo experience, I no longer have problems to write proposals or papers. I have learned that it is okay to ignore my nagging sense of unhappiness with my sentence structure or word choice, and deal with it later during the editing phase. It has even given me the self-confidence to finish the 200 pages of my PhD thesis in only a few weeks' time. That's something my young self, struggling with even the smallest writing assignment, could never have imagined...

What can the success of Malcolm Gladwell teach us about gaps in science outreach and communication?

I recently joined in a discussion on Twitter about how and why the books of Malcolm Gladwell fill a gap in science outreach. The questions remain open, and popularizing our research results might be a requirement on grant proposals that is left to the occasions in which we are invited to try and explain our findings to a broader public.

Nonetheless, these are valuable questions we should ask ourselves. For that reason, I'm glad to share this Storify here.

Why do you think is there a gap between science outreach and popular writing as by Gladwell?

Lecture at Vrije Universiteit Brussel

On September 10th 2013, I gave a lecture about my PhD research at my alma mater, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Brussels, Belgium.

Even though I graduated from Brussels in 2008, I have kept in touch every now and then with my former adviser and one of my former professors. When they invited me to give a lecture to their research group about my doctoral dissertation, I was more than delighted.

The abstract of the lecture was the following:

The capacity of existing reinforced concrete slab bridges in the Netherlands is subject to discussion for two reasons: 1) the increase in traffic loads and volumes and 2) the fact that the majority of the bridges was built before 1976, and these structures are reaching the end of their service life. Upon assessment according to the governing codes, a large number of slab bridges are found to be shear-critical. The shear capacity from the codes, however, is the result of experiments on beam in shear. Slabs subjected to concentrated loads (such as wheel loads of a truck) are expected to have a larger bearing capacity as a result of the transverse distribution capacity.

In this research, the capacity of slabs subjected to concentrated loads close to supports is studied. A literature review, resulting in a database of 215 experiments from the literature, is used to study the mechanisms that occur in one-way shear (beam shear) and two-way shear (punching shear). For this research, 156 experiments on 38 scale models (scale 1:2) of slab bridges are executed. The experimental results are analyzed in a parameter study.

Two methods are proposed to determine the shear capacity of slabs subjected to concentrated loads close to supports: 1) the Modified Bond Model, a new theory; and 2) an extension of the Eurocode provisions based on a probabilistic analysis according to the safety philosophy of the Eurocodes.

Finally, the connection to the assessment practice is made by means of recommendations, by improving the Quick Scan tool of the Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment, and then applying this method to existing slab bridges.

You can find the slides of this lecture here: