Railroad Quiet Zones

Speaker(s): Mary Cripe, P.E., City of Goshen Engineering Department Glen Campbell, P.E., Patrick Engineering Track: Multi-Modal Transportation Submission ID #: 119 Presentation Duration: 50 Minutes Presentation Title: Railroad Quiet Zones Abstract: In 2005, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) provided communities with the opportunity to reduce locomotive horn noise without compromising public safety. The proposed Marion Branch Quiet Zone, located in Goshen, Indiana, will not only improve public safety, it will also enhance the quality of life and raise home values for adjacent residents. This intricate process involves creative problem-solving and knowledge of the multiple parties involved. It will take a coordinated effort by the FRA, Norfolk Southern, and City for the quiet zone to be approved. Lessons that other communities can learn from this effort are 1) for a quiet zone to be considered feasible, political will supporting the project must exist and 2) involve FRA and the affected railroads as early in the process as possible

Thermal noise in microfabricated AlGaAs structures

Multilayer crystalline AlGaAs stacks have the potential to reduce coating thermal noise in future gravitational-wave interferometers. The results of direct measurements of thermal noise in microfabricated AlGaAs structures will be presented

Development of an ESL curriculum to educate Chinese immigrants about physical activity.

Regular physical activity reduces the risk of many chronic conditions. Multiple studies have shown that Asians in North America engage in less physical activity than the general population. One area for strategic development in the area of health education is the design and evaluation of English as a second language (ESL) curricula. The PRECEDE model and findings from focus groups were used to develop a physical activity ESL curriculum for Chinese immigrants. In general, focus group participants recognized that physical activity contributes to physical and mental wellbeing. However, the benefits of physical activity were most commonly described in terms of improved blood circulation, immune responses, digestion, and reflexes. The importance of peer pressure and the encouragement of friends in adhering to regular physical activity regimens were mentioned frequently. Reported barriers to regular physical activity included lack of time, weather conditions, and financial costs. The ESL curriculum aims to both promote physical activity and improve knowledge, and includes seven different ESL exercises. Our curriculum development methods could be replicated for other health education topics and in other limited English-speaking populations

The Academics Athletics Trade-off: Universities and Intercollegiate Athletics

This analysis focuses on several key issues in the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS). The intrinsic benefits of athletic programs are discussed in the first section. Trends in graduation rates and academic performance among athletes and how they correlate with the general student body are discussed in the second section. Finally, an overview of the revenues and expenses of athletic department budgets are discussed in an effort to gain a better understanding of the allocation of funds to athletics. In spite of recent growth in revenues and expenses, the athletic department budget comprises on average only 5 percent of the entire university budget at an FBS school, though spending and revenues have increased dramatically in recent years. In the grand scheme of things, American higher education faces several other, arguably more pressing, areas of reform. However, athletics is a significant and growing dimension of higher education that warrants in-depth examination

FIRE Arctic Clouds Experiment

An overview is given of the First ISCCP Regional Experiment (FIRE) Arctic Clouds Experiment that was conducted in the Arctic during April through July, 1998. The principal goal of the field experiment was to gather the data needed to examine the impact of arctic clouds on the radiation exchange between the surface, atmosphere, and space, and to study how the surface influences the evolution of boundary layer clouds. The observations will be used to evaluate and improve climate model parameterizations of cloud and radiation processes, satellite remote sensing of cloud and surface characteristics, and understanding of cloud-radiation feedbacks in the Arctic. The experiment utilized four research aircraft that flew over surface-based observational sites in the Arctic Ocean and Barrow, Alaska. In this paper we describe the programmatic and science objectives of the project, the experimental design (including research platforms and instrumentation), conditions that were encountered during the field experiment, and some highlights of preliminary observations, modelling, and satellite remote sensing studies

Increased risk of venous thrombosis by AB alleles of the ABO blood group and Factor V Leiden in a Brazilian population

Most cases of a predisposition to venous thrombosis are caused by resistance to activated protein C, associated in 95% of cases with the Factor V Leiden allele (FVL or R506Q). Several recent studies report a further increased risk of thrombosis by an association between the AB alleles of the ABO blood group and Factor V Leiden. The present study investigated this association with deep vein thrombosis (DVT) in individuals treated at the Hemocentro de Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil. A case-control comparison showed a significant risk of thrombosis in the presence of Factor V Leiden (OR = 10.1), which was approximately doubled when the AB alleles of the ABO blood group were present as well (OR = 22.3). These results confirm that the increased risk of deep vein thrombosis in the combined presence of AB alleles and Factor V Leiden is also applicable to the Brazilian population suggesting that ABO blood group typing should be routinely added to FVL in studies involving thrombosis

Mechanical quantum sensing in the search for dark matter

Numerous astrophysical and cosmological observations are best explained by the existence of dark matter, a mass density which interacts only very weakly with visible, baryonic matter. Searching for the extremely weak signals produced by this dark matter strongly motivate the development of new, ultra-sensitive detector technologies. Paradigmatic advances in the control and readout of massive mechanical systems, in both the classical and quantum regimes, have enabled unprecedented levels of sensitivity. In this white paper, we outline recent ideas in the potential use of a range of solid-state mechanical sensing technologies to aid in the search for dark matter in a number of energy scales and with a variety of coupling mechanisms

First narrow-band search for continuous gravitational waves from known pulsars in advanced detector data

Spinning neutron stars asymmetric with respect to their rotation axis are potential sources of continuous gravitational waves for ground-based interferometric detectors. In the case of known pulsars a fully coherent search, based on matched filtering, which uses the position and rotational parameters obtained from electromagnetic observations, can be carried out. Matched filtering maximizes the signalto- noise (SNR) ratio, but a large sensitivity loss is expected in case of even a very small mismatch between the assumed and the true signal parameters. For this reason, narrow-band analysis methods have been developed, allowing a fully coherent search for gravitational waves from known pulsars over a fraction of a hertz and several spin-down values. In this paper we describe a narrow-band search of 11 pulsars using data from Advanced LIGO’s first observing run. Although we have found several initial outliers, further studies show no significant evidence for the presence of a gravitational wave signal. Finally, we have placed upper limits on the signal strain amplitude lower than the spin-down limit for 5 of the 11 targets over the bands searched; in the case of J1813-1749 the spin-down limit has been beaten for the first time. For an additional 3 targets, the median upper limit across the search bands is below the spin-down limit. This is the most sensitive narrow-band search for continuous gravitational waves carried out so far