A Comparison of Mobile Scanning to a Total Station Survey at the I-35 and IA 92 Interchange in Warren County, Iowa, August 15, 2012

The purpose of this project was to investigate the potential for collecting and using data from mobile terrestrial laser scanning (MTLS) technology that would reduce the need for traditional survey methods for the development of highway improvement projects at the Iowa Department of Transportation (Iowa DOT). The primary interest in investigating mobile scanning technology is to minimize the exposure of field surveyors to dangerous high volume traffic situations. Issues investigated were cost, timeframe, accuracy, contracting specifications, data capture extents, data extraction capabilities and data storage issues associated with mobile scanning. The project area selected for evaluation was the I-35/IA 92 interchange in Warren County, Iowa. This project covers approximately one mile of I-35, one mile of IA 92, 4 interchange ramps, and bridges within these limits. Delivered LAS and image files for this project totaled almost 31GB. There is nearly a 6-fold increase in the size of the scan data after post-processing. Camera data, when enabled, produced approximately 900MB of imagery data per mile using a 2- camera, 5 megapixel system. A comparison was done between 1823 points on the pavement that were surveyed by Iowa DOT staff using a total station and the same points generated through the MTLS process. The data acquired through the MTLS and data processing met the Iowa DOT specifications for engineering survey. A list of benefits and challenges is included in the detailed report. With the success of this project, it is anticipate[d] that additional projects will be scanned for the Iowa DOT for use in the development of highway improvement projects

New-Age Branding and the Public Sector

{Excerpt} Branding is a means to identify a company’s products or services, differentiate them from those of others, and create and maintain an image that encourages confidence among clients, audiences, and partners. Until the mid-1990s, brand management—based on the 4Ps ofproduct (or service), place, price, and promotion—aimed to engineer additional value from single brands. The idea of organizational branding has since developed, with implications for behavior and behavioral change, and is making inroads into the public sector too. The core concept in marketing has always been that of transaction, whereby an exchange of values takes place. However, in parallel with changes in cultures, lifestyles, and technologies, the emphasis in marketing has shifted from individual transactions: the new focus is on establishing long-term relationships. Marketing and branding are inextricably linked. To meet demand and facilitate transaction, the objectives that a good brand achieves are to deliver the message clearly, confirm credibility, connect emotionally to the targeted prospects, motivate the end users, and concretize user loyalty. Having a strong brand is invaluable as competition intensifies. Brand management—that is, the art of creating and maintaining a brand—now requires that the whole organization support its brand with integrated marketing. The stronger the brand, the greater the loyalty of end users is. The stronger the brand, the more flexible an organization is. Higher staff morale leads to higher productivity and better results

The Competitive Performance of Life Insurance Firms in the Retirement Asset Market

This paper summarizes the findings of the joint Wharton Financial Institutions Center and KPMG study of the retirement assets market and the role of life insurance companies within it. The study began with the following goals: Investigate how people save for retirement and whether this is adequate. Determine the primary products and institutions of the retirement asset market and observe how these have changed through time. Key findings: For most, asset accumulation is less than adequate for a comfortable retirement. The average worker exhibits little of the needed financial understanding to adequately plan for retirement. Upon retirement, households do not spend down their assets optimally. The retirement asset market is rapidly expanding. Products in retirement portfolios have shifted with time. The market share of mutual funds has exploded, mostly at the expense of depository institutions. Life insurance companies maintain a large, but slipping share.

Bridging the Gap Between Schools and Non-Formal Science Institutions: Using New York City\u27s Non-Formal Resources to Teach Science

Effective science teaching and learning needs to take place in an environment in which the formal and non-formal worlds of science combine their expertise and resources. Science learning and ultimately, scientific literacy for all depends on the teaching that occurs both in schools and in non-formal settings. As we move towards the attainment of scientific literacy for all, it is becoming more imperative that we recognize and utilize the media, industry education programs, non-formal science centers, museums, and other science learning outlets as valuable segments of our nation’s science education infrastructure. This paper describes the context, rationale, and outline of the non-formal science education course developed at New York University under the auspices of New York Collaborative for Excellence in Teacher Preparation (NYCETP) and the subsequently developed non-formal science education specialization

How useful is anthropometric history?

In his recent presidential address to the American Economic History Association, Paul Hohenberg argued that anthropometric history does not meet his criteria for useful research in the field of economic history. He considers research useful if (a) it "helps shape one of our underlying disciplines"; b) it contributes "to clear—even fresh—thinking about current, policy-related issues or on-going scholarly debates about the historical past"; and c) it "penetrates the fuzzy realm of identity-shaping popular discourse". I argue briefly that only a superficial reading of the literature would lead to the conclusion that anthropometric history has not been useful

Revealing Compressed Stops Using High-Momentum Recoils

Searches for supersymmetric top quarks at the LHC have been making great progress in pushing sensitivity out to higher mass, but are famously plagued by gaps in coverage around lower-mass regions where the decay phase space is closing off. Within the common stop-NLSP / neutralino-LSP simplified model, the line in the mass plane where there is just enough phase space to produce an on-shell top quark remains almost completely unconstrained. Here, we show that is possible to define searches capable of probing a large patch of this difficult region, with S/B ~ 1 and significances often well beyond 5 sigma. The basic strategy is to leverage the large energy gain of LHC Run 2, leading to a sizable population of stop pair events recoiling against a hard jet. The recoil not only re-establishes a MET signature, but also leads to a distinctive anti-correlation between the MET and the recoil jet transverse vectors when the stops decay all-hadronically. Accounting for jet combinatorics, backgrounds, and imperfections in MET measurements, we estimate that Run 2 will already start to close the gap in exclusion sensitivity with the first few 10s of inverse-fb. By 300/fb, exclusion sensitivity may extend from stop masses of 550 GeV on the high side down to below 200 GeV on the low side, approaching the "stealth" point at m(stop) = m(top) and potentially overlapping with limits from top pair cross section and spin correlation measurements.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figure

Gender and the Sharing Economy

While the sharing economy has been celebrated as a flexible alternative to traditional employment for those with family responsibilities, especially women, it presents challenges for gender equality. Many of the services that are “shared” take place in the context of intimacy, which can have substantial consequences for transacting, particularly by enhancing the importance of identity of both the worker and the customer. Expanding on previous research on intimate work — a critical area that exists largely in limbo between the law of the market and the law of the family — this Article, written for the Cooper-Walsh Colloquium, explores the significance of intimacy in the sharing economy and the implications for its regulation of the sharing economy and for sex equality. It argues that the intimacy of many sharing economy transactions heightens the salience of sex to these transactions, in tension with sex discrimination law’s goal of reducing the salience of sex in the labor market. But even if existing sex discrimination law extends to these transactions, the intimacy of the transactions again limits the law’s ability to promote gender equality in the same transformative way that it has in the traditional economy. The sharing economy thus raises serious concerns for proponents of sex equality

Urban Fathers Asset Building – Final Report

The Urban Fathers Asset Building (UFAB) project demonstrated the potential benefits, as well as limitations, of an innovative nexus between the child support system, fatherhood programs, and the Assets for Independence (AFI) grant-funded services. UFAB was a collaborative initiative of the Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG), Baylor College of Medicine’s Teen Health Clinic, Covenant Community Capital Corporation (the local AFI grantee), and RAISE Texas, the statewide association of AFI grantees. This Final Report summarizes UFAB’s operational features and outcomes; depicts the demonstration’s challenges and innovative responses; reviews the accomplishments of the ancillary projects supported by BAFF funds; and assesses the prospects for sustaining demonstration practices in the Houston area, as well as extending promising practices to other areas of the state.Texas Office of the Attorney GeneralRay Marshall Center for the Study of Human Resource