Civil Engineering: Plot ground sections

Civil Engineering: Plot ground sections: Plot ground sections from contours. Sections: Cross sections, Longitudinal sections Introduction: The sections you will develop f...

Plot ground sections

Plot ground sections from contours. Sections: Cross sections,

Longitudinal sections

Introduction:

The sections you will develop for this subject serve a similar purpose, they will allow you to graphically view the land at any point you require. From this information you can design your proposed structure and give a graphical representation of the proposed works. 

These sections will also assist you to derive volumes for earthworks. 

There are two sections that we develop to give us “sections of the land”. 

Longitudinal Sections:

Also known as Long Sections, these are a section through the longest length of the subject land. 

Cross Sections:

These are section across the narrowest length of the subject land or works.

How to draw a cross section:

Figure 1 is a contour plot of a simple symmetrical hill.  The numbers represent the elevation (in meters) of that particular point in the landscape.  Let’s say the points are separated by 100 m in the horizontal.  The dark lines are contours, lines of constant elevation.  In this case the contour interval is 10 m.  

The cross section along AB shows us the elevation change encountered by these gung-ho hikers.  The cross section is plotted below the contour plot.  Walking along the top of the cross section, they will start at an elevation of 15m, climb steadily to an elevation of 30 m and then descend back to 15m.  They will do this as they travel 400 m in the horizontal.  The plot is constructed simply by plotting the five elevation numbers (15, 25, 30, 25, 15) encountered along the AB line, spacing them by 100 meters along the horizontal axis.

Figure 2 is based on a more complicated landscape that I contoured using a dark pen at a 10 m contour interval and using a lighter pen at a 5 m contour interval.  Figure 2 is the cross section along line AB.  Each dot represents an elevation number, spaced evenly at 100 m in the horizontal.  To walk from A to B, first you climb from an elevation of 28m to a peak of 52 m and then descend to a gradual plain, ending at 12 m elevation 1700 m from your starting point.

You actually don’t need the elevation numbers to draw a cross section.  Figure 3 shows a contour map of a double-peaked mountain, without the underlying elevation numbers.   The cross section along line AB is shown in the second panel for contour interval of 5 m.  Every time line AB intersects a contour curve, a dot is made immediately beneath the contour map on the cross section plot beneath.  I use lightly drawn arrows to show how the point at 10 m on the left side of the mountain, and the point at 15 m on the right side of the mountain are transferred to the cross section plot.  Without the underlying elevation numbers, the points on the cross section plot are not necessarily evenly spaced along the horizontal axis.  Therefore, the cross section plot must be lined up exactly beneath the contour plot.  I recommend using graph paper.

The third panel of Figure 3 shows what happens when you reduce resolution.  Here I use a contour interval of 10 m (every second contour curve.)  In the reduced resolution, we cannot resolve the twin peaks and are left with a broad flat mountain top.

The purpose behind drawing cross sections directly from the contour maps, without using the elevation numbers is to reinforce visualization concepts.  Most contoured maps (USGS topo maps, or weather maps) do not include the elevation numbers.  Students should be encouraged to visualize the cross sections from the contours alone.

Longitudinal Sections:

The method to draw Longitudinal Sections is exactly the same as you draw a section on an Architectural section. 

You draw construction lines vertically to give a profile of the important features of the house. You then draw in the vertical heights by measurement. 

After this drawing is drawn up you can start the design work. Let us say that the site is going to be levelled to a Reduced Level of 100.500. This is referred as design level.  We would add this to the drawing as follows. 

Health & Fashion: How to live a healthy life

Health & Fashion: How to live a healthy life: Ever wondered about changing your life for the better? Maybe you're interested in losing weight, being more active or just feeling heal...

How to live a healthy life

Ever wondered about changing your life for the better? Maybe you're interested in losing weight, being more active or just feeling healthier. To live a healthier life you'll most likely need to make some adjustments in a wide variety of areas. Being "healthy" is based on many things including: your genetics, diet, exercise routine and lifestyle choices. Since you cannot control your genes, making changes to items you have control over can help lead to a healthier lifestyle. Focus on making small changes to your diet, exercise and other lifestyle factors to help make you healthier.

1.Preparing for Healthier Life:

i. Make an appointment with your doctors. One key to improving your health and maintaining it is regular doctor visits. These health professionals will help support your desire for a healthier life. They'll also be able to tell you if you need to start or stop anything in order to have a healthier life.

Visit your primary care physician. Talk to them about your current health condition and if there is anything they'd recommend to help you life a healthier life.

Also visit your dentist. It's typically recommended to go twice a year just for a check up.[1] This is another important doctors visit you shouldn't overlook.

Visit any other doctors you may need. For example: OB/GYN, allergist or endocrinologist.

ii.Take some measurements. There are a few ways to check on your health status without a doctor. Measuring your weight and overall size can give you some insight into whether or not your body is healthy as well.

Weigh yourself. Note your weight and compare it with national standards for ideal body weight. This will tell you if you're close to a healthy weight or should consider weight loss.

Measure your waist circumference. Another way to interpret your weight and health is by measuring your waist circumference. A large waist may mean you have a high amount of visceral fat which could be dangerous to your health.[2] Men should have a waist circumference less than 40" and women should be less than 35".[3]

Also figure out your BMI with an online calculator. Again, this is just an additional method of letting you know whether or not you're at a healthy weight.

If many of these measurements are too high and you feel you might be overweight or carrying too much weight, this can be a part of your life you work on so you can be healthier.

iii.Start a journal. Keeping a journal is a great way to start your healthier life. You can take notes, write goals, track your goals and even keep a food journal. These items will help you figure out what you need to do and motivate you to meet those goals.

You might first want to start taking some notes on any information you get from your doctors or track your weight, BMI or waist circumference.

Also jot down notes about what goals you have and how you think you're going to live a healthier life. It'll take some brainstorming and thinking about all the different aspects of your life you want to change to be healthier.[4]

Take notes on your food choices in your journal as well. Studies show that those who journal their food regularly stay on track with new diet patterns for longer time

iv.Build a support group. A support group is a great part of a healthier lifestyle. They not only can provide support for your goals but also are a support to your mental and emotional well being.[5]

A big part of a healthier life that often gets overlooked is your mental and emotional health. A support group doesn't have to just be there to cheer you on, but be a good friend.

Ask friends, family members or co-workers to join you on certain goals. Maybe others want to lose weight, eat healthier or exercise more.

Studies show that those people who have a support group are morel likely to meet their long-term goals.

2. Making Healthier Diet Choices:

i. Write up a meal plan. When you're trying to live a healthier life, your diet may be one thing you want to change. Writing up a new meal plan for yourself can help give you the guidelines you need to eat healthy all week long.[6]

A meal plan is your blueprint for each meal, snack and beverage throughout the week.

This plan can also allow you to see and plan each of your choices. You can feel confident that what you're eating each day meets your new healthier life.

To start your meal plan, get a pen and paper and write out each day of the week. Write down all your meals, snacks and drinks.

Writing a meal plan can also help you have a more organized grocery list.

ii. Eat mindfully. Mindful eating is a way of eating that helps you bring more attention and focus to how you eat. Mindful eating is important to a healthier life as it helps you enjoy eating.[8]

People who eat mindfully typically eat less, have an easier time losing weight and get more satisfaction out of their meals.[9]

Eating mindfully involves a variety of things. To start, turn off all electronics (like your phone or TV) and remove any other distractions. You need to be able to fully focus on your meal.

When you're eating pay attention to how your food looks, how it tastes, the textures and temperatures. Really concentrate on each bite.

Also take at least 20-30 minutes to eat your meal. When you take your time with your meal, you may end up eating less and enjoy your meal more.

iii. Maintain a balanced diet. A well-balanced diet is the cornerstone of a healthy diet. Eating well is important to help you live a healthier life.[10]

When you eat a well-balanced diet you're able to consume all the recommended nutrients your body needs. Your less at risk for nutrient deficiencies and other side effects of a poor quality diet.[11] You will feel and be healthier.

A well-balanced diet is one that includes all 5 food groups each day. In addition, its a diet that features a wide variety of food. Don't eat the same few foods each day. This limits your ability to eat a wide variety of nutrients.

Also make sure you're eating the appropriate portion sizes of foods. For example, stick to: 3-4 oz of protein[12], 1/2 cup of grains[13], 1/2 cup of fruit or 1 small piece[14] and 1 cup of vegetables/2 cups of leafy greens[15]. These are serving sizes per meal.

iv. Drink more water. Make a conscious effort to drink more water. Being adequately hydrated is essential to living a healthier life.

When you're dehydrated you may experience a variety of side effects that may not only affect your health, but how you're feeling as well.

When you're dehydrated you may have chronic headaches, fatigue and afternoon fogginess.[16]

Aim for about 8-13 glasses of clear, hydrating fluids each day. This amount will vary based upon your age, gender and activity level.[17]

Drinks that can count towards water include: water, flavored waters, decaf coffee and decaf tea.

v. Limit alcohol. Excessive consumption of alcohol can lead to weight gain or a weight stall and also have negative effects of your overall health.

Health professionals typically recommend that women consume no more than 1 alcoholic beverage daily and men consume no more than 2 alcoholic beverages daily.[18]

Limit these even further than the recommendations to help support your desire to lose weight and be more slim. Alcohol provides only calories, no nutrition.

Typically one serving of alcohol is 4 oz of wine, 2 oz of liquor or 1 beer.

vi. Take a supplement. Many times your diet is not always the healthiest or you might be a picky eater or have allergies. When your diet is limited, you may need to rely on a supplement to help you get enough vital nutrients for your body.

Taking a daily multivitamin is a good idea for most healthy people. This can be a "back up plan" when your diet doesn't meet your daily needs.[20]

You may also want to consider taking calcium (especially for women), iron (for women who are menstruating), or B12 (for those who are vegan or vegetarian).[21]

Remember, vitamins are there as a back up. They shouldn't be used to in place of foods. You should always aim to get as much of your nutrition from foods as possible.

Health & Fashion: How To Change XP Start Button

Health & Fashion: How To Change XP Start Button: Since defragging the disk won't do much to improve Windows XP performance, here are 23 suggestions that will. Each can enhance the pe...

How To Change XP Start Button

Since defragging the disk won't do much to improve Windows XP performance, here are 23 suggestions that will. Each can enhance the performance and reliability of your customers' PCs. Best of all, most of them will cost you nothing.

1.) To decrease a system's boot time and increase system performance, use the money you save by not buying defragmentation software -- the built-in Windows defragmenter works just fine -- and instead equip the computer with an Ultra-133 or Serial ATA hard drive with 8-MB cache buffer.

2.) If a PC has less than 512 MB of RAM, add more memory. This is a relatively inexpensive and easy upgrade that can dramatically improve system performance.

3.) Ensure that Windows XP is utilizing the NTFS file system. If you're not sure, here's how to check: First, double-click the My Computer icon, right-click on the C: Drive, then select Properties. Next, examine the File System type; if it says FAT32, then back-up any important data. Next, click Start, click Run, type CMD, and then click OK. At the prompt, type CONVERT C: /FS:NTFS and press the Enter key. This process may take a while; it's important that the computer be uninterrupted and virus-free. The file system used by the bootable drive will be either FAT32 or NTFS. I highly recommend NTFS for its superior security, reliability, and efficiency with larger disk drives.

4.) Disable file indexing. The indexing service extracts information from documents and other files on the hard drive and creates a "searchable keyword index." As you can imagine, this process can be quite taxing on any system.

The idea is that the user can search for a word, phrase, or property inside a document, should they have hundreds or thousands of documents and not know the file name of the document they want. Windows XP's built-in search functionality can still perform these kinds of searches without the Indexing service. It just takes longer. The OS has to open each file at the time of the request to help find what the user is looking for.

Most people never need this feature of search. Those who do are typically in a large corporate environment where thousands of documents are located on at least one server. But if you're a typical system builder, most of your clients are small and medium businesses. And if your clients have no need for this search feature, I recommend disabling it.

Here's how: First, double-click the My Computer icon. Next, right-click on the C: Drive, then select Properties. Uncheck "Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching." Next, apply changes to "C: subfolders and files," and click OK. If a warning or error message appears (such as "Access is denied"), click the Ignore All button.

5.) Update the PC's video and motherboard chipset drivers. Also, update and configure the BIOS. For more information on how to configure your BIOS properly, see this article on my site.

6.) Empty the Windows Prefetch folder every three months or so. Windows XP can "prefetch" portions of data and applications that are used frequently. This makes processes appear to load faster when called upon by the user. That's fine. But over time, the prefetch folder may become overloaded with references to files and applications no longer in use. When that happens, Windows XP is wasting time, and slowing system performance, by pre-loading them. Nothing critical is in this folder, and the entire contents are safe to delete.

7.) Once a month, run a disk cleanup. Here's how: Double-click the My Computer icon. Then right-click on the C: drive and select Properties. Click the Disk Cleanup button -- it's just to the right of the Capacity pie graph -- and delete all temporary files.

8.) In your Device Manager, double-click on the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers device, and ensure that DMA is enabled for each drive you have connected to the Primary and Secondary controller. Do this by double-clicking on Primary IDE Channel. Then click the Advanced Settings tab. Ensure the Transfer Mode is set to "DMA if available" for both Device 0 and Device 1. Then repeat this process with the Secondary IDE Channel.

9.) Upgrade the cabling. As hard-drive technology improves, the cabling requirements to achieve these performance boosts have become more stringent. Be sure to use 80-wire Ultra-133 cables on all of your IDE devices with the connectors properly assigned to the matching Master/Slave/Motherboard sockets. A single device must be at the end of the cable; connecting a single drive to the middle connector on a ribbon cable will cause signaling problems. With Ultra DMA hard drives, these signaling problems will prevent the drive from performing at its maximum potential. Also, because these cables inherently support "cable select," the location of each drive on the cable is important. For these reasons, the cable is designed so drive positioning is explicitly clear.

10.) Remove all spyware from the computer. Use free programs such as AdAware by Lavasoft or SpyBot Search & Destroy. Once these programs are installed, be sure to check for and download any updates before starting your search. Anything either program finds can be safely removed. Any free software that requires spyware to run will no longer function once the spyware portion has been removed; if your customer really wants the program even though it contains spyware, simply reinstall it. For more information on removing Spyware visit this Web Pro News page.

11.) Remove any unnecessary programs and/or items from Windows Startup routine using the MSCONFIG utility. Here's how: First, click Start, click Run, type MSCONFIG, and click OK. Click the StartUp tab, then uncheck any items you don't want to start when Windows starts. Unsure what some items are? Visit the WinTasks Process Library. It contains known system processes, applications, as well as spyware references and explanations. Or quickly identify them by searching for the filenames using Google or another Web search engine.

12.) Remove any unnecessary or unused programs from the Add/Remove Programs section of the Control Panel.

13.) Turn off any and all unnecessary animations, and disable active desktop. In fact, for optimal performance, turn off all animations. Windows XP offers many different settings in this area. Here's how to do it: First click on the System icon in the Control Panel. Next, click on the Advanced tab. Select the Settings button located under Performance. Feel free to play around with the options offered here, as nothing you can change will alter the reliability of the computer -- only its responsiveness.

14.) If your customer is an advanced user who is comfortable editing their registry, try some of the performance registry tweaks offered at Tweak XP.

15.) Visit Microsoft's Windows update site regularly, and download all updates labeled Critical. Download any optional updates at your discretion.

16.) Update the customer's anti-virus software on a weekly, even daily, basis. Make sure they have only one anti-virus software package installed. Mixing anti-virus software is a sure way to spell disaster for performance and reliability.

17.) Make sure the customer has fewer than 500 type fonts installed on their computer. The more fonts they have, the slower the system will become. While Windows XP handles fonts much more efficiently than did the previous versions of Windows, too many fonts -- that is, anything over 500 -- will noticeably tax the system.

18.) Do not partition the hard drive. Windows XP's NTFS file system runs more efficiently on one large partition. The data is no safer on a separate partition, and a reformat is never necessary to reinstall an operating system. The same excuses people offer for using partitions apply to using a folder instead. For example, instead of putting all your data on the D: drive, put it in a folder called "D drive." You'll achieve the same organizational benefits that a separate partition offers, but without the degradation in system performance. Also, your free space won't be limited by the size of the partition; instead, it will be limited by the size of the entire hard drive. This means you won't need to resize any partitions, ever. That task can be time-consuming and also can result in lost data.

19.) Check the system's RAM to ensure it is operating properly. I recommend using a free program called MemTest86. The download will make a bootable CD or diskette (your choice), which will run 10 extensive tests on the PC's memory automatically after you boot to the disk you created. Allow all tests to run until at least three passes of the 10 tests are completed. If the program encounters any errors, turn off and unplug the computer, remove a stick of memory (assuming you have more than one), and run the test again. Remember, bad memory cannot be repaired, but only replaced.

20.) If the PC has a CD or DVD recorder, check the drive manufacturer's Web site for updated firmware. In some cases you'll be able to upgrade the recorder to a faster speed. Best of all, it's free.

21.) Disable unnecessary services. Windows XP loads a lot of services that your customer most likely does not need. To determine which services you can disable for your client, visit the Black Viper site for Windows XP configurations.

22.) If you're sick of a single Windows Explorer window crashing and then taking the rest of your OS down with it, then follow this tip: open My Computer, click on Tools, then Folder Options. Now click on the View tab. Scroll down to "Launch folder windows in a separate process," and enable this option. You'll have to reboot your machine for this option to take effect.

23.) At least once a year, open the computer's cases and blow out all the dust and debris. While you're in there, check that all the fans are turning properly. Also inspect the motherboard capacitors for bulging or leaks. For more information on this leaking-capacitor phenomena, you can read numerous articles on my site.

Following any of these suggestions should result in noticeable improvements to the performance and reliability of your customers' computers. If you still want to defrag a disk, remember that the main benefit will be to make your data more retrievable in the event of a crashed drive.

Health & Fashion: How to use internet

Health & Fashion: How to use internet: Introduction Man with laptop and mobile phone As the Internet has grown, it has developed into a multi-faceted tool with a vast range...