Protect your body, protect your temple : a toolkit for building healthier places of worship

This toolkit is designed to provide faith-based organizations with ideas and resources to help them plan, develop, and implement health related programs and activities. The activities and programs contained within the toolkit are easy to use and implement. This toolkit is divided into four sections. The first section describes how to create a strong health committee in your place of worship. The remaining sections focus on three risk factors that have the largest contribution to chronic diseases and mortality: physical activity, nutrition, tobacco

Equitable Complete Streets: Data and Methods for Optimal Design Implementation

69A43551747123The Complete Streets concept references roads designed to accommodate: (1) diverse modes, including walking, cycling, public transit, and automobile; (2) different users, e.g. affluent and low-income individuals, people with disabilities, and senior citizens; (3) and a mix of land uses such as office, retail, businesses, and residential to ensure streets are safe, balanced and inclusively support diverse economic, cultural and environmental uses. Today most of our streets are poorly designed and do not offer safe places to walk, bike, or take public transportation. Such streets are particularly dangerous for disadvantaged segments of the population, including people of color, older adults, children, and those living in low-income communities. Successful Complete Streets projects prioritize multi-modal transport systems and have been demonstrated to be effective in fostering more livable communities, increasing equity and improving public health. This project analyzes different components of Complete Streets design and use with the goal of creating fast, low-cost, and high impact (transportation) changes in our communities. In recent years, \u201ccomplete streets\u201d has been an emerging concept in North American transportation planning and design. To be considered a \u201ccomplete street\u201d, a road should be designed to be safe for users of all traffic modes. This report presents three studies: safety evaluation on the complete streets by simulating different modes, quantify the benefits of complete streets in terms of equity and improved access across different segments of the population (especially low income) and road space allocation on the complete streets

Drone-Based Computer Vision-Enabled Vehicle Dynamic Mobility and Safety Performance Monitoring

This report documents the research activities to develop a drone-based computer vision-enabled vehicle dynamic safety performance monitoring in Rural, Isolated, Tribal, or Indigenous (RITI) communities. The acquisition of traffic system information, especially the vehicle speed and trajectory information, is of great significance to the study of the characteristics and management of the traffic system in RITI communities. The traditional method of relying on video analysis to obtain vehicle number and trajectory information has its application scenarios, but the common video source is often a camera fixed on a roadside device. In the videos obtained in this way, vehicles are likely to occlude each other, which seriously affects the accuracy of vehicle detection and the estimation of speed. Although there are methods to obtain high-view road video by means of aircraft and satellites, the corresponding cost will be high. Therefore, considering that drones can obtain high-definition video at a higher viewing angle, and the cost is relatively low, we decided to use drones to obtain road videos to complete vehicle detection. In order to overcome the shortcomings of traditional object detection methods when facing a large number of targets and complex scenes of RITI communities, our proposed method uses convolutional neural network (CNN) technology. We modified the YOLO v3 network structure and used a vehicle data set captured by drones for transfer learning, and finally trained a network that can detect and classify vehicles in videos captured by drones. A self-calibrated road boundary extraction method based on image sequences was used to extract road boundaries and filter vehicles to improve the detection accuracy of cars on the road. Using the results of neural network detection as input, we use video-based object tracking to complete the extraction of vehicle trajectory information for traffic safety improvements. Finally, the number of vehicles, speed and trajectory information of vehicles were calculated, and the average speed and density of the traffic flow were estimated on this basis. By analyzing the acquiesced data, we can estimate the traffic condition of the monitored area to predict possible crashes on the highways

Fast Reference-free Crack Measurement (RACM) System in Transportation Infrastructures using Non-Contact Ultrasound

According to a 2017 report by the American Society of Civil Engineers, the infrastructure of the United States requires a $2.0 trillion investment to return it to good condition by 2025. Distributed microcracks and delaminated damages in our transportation system\u2019s concrete infrastructure have caused more deterioration by cracks and more delamination by corrosion, adversely affecting the system components\u2019 mechanical strength, stiffness, and permeability. Freeze and Thaw (F&T) and Alkali Silica Reaction (ASR) are the most common cause of the microcrack formation in the concrete infrastructures. The early detection of these propagating damages through a pragmatic non-destructive testing (NDT) technique can lead to a better decision making which prevents further degradation and saves money, time, and lives. As of today, there is no NDT method that has proven to be sensitive to the early stage damages such as F&T in an inhomogeneous infrastructure. The methods are either insensitive to early stages (low crack volumes) of damage, not repeatable, or inconsistent. Prior methods have had an inadequate contact system that cannot measure the damage quickly enough as they require a contact to the surface, and a more sophisticated reference data system that can more readily respond to the nature of the heterogeneous aspects of the problem sites. This research presents the solution in the form of a reference-free acoustic crack measurement (RACM) system. The developed RACM system provides absolute damage index values. The RACM utilizes non-contact ultrasonic system to implement backscattering waves to characterize the damage level. Three F&T damaged specimens were prepared and tested with the RACM and other techniques such as resonant frequency tests and expansion tests in a laboratory. The research presents the results of the field tests using the ultrasonic sensor array device (MIRA) and RACM system. In addition, website-based and App-based monitoring platforms are developed to allow fast access to the test results using map-based location displayer