Time Series Analysis of Pavement Roughness Condition Data for use in Asset Management

Roughness is a direct measure of the unevenness of a longitudinal section of road pavement. Increased roughness corresponds to decreased ride comfort and increased road user costs. Roughness is relatively inexpensive to measure. Measuring roughness progression over time enables pavement deterioration, which is the result of a complex and chaotic system of environmental and road management influences, to be monitored. This in turn enables the long term functional behaviour of a pavement network to be understood and managed. A range of approaches has been used to model roughness progression for assistance in pavement asset management. The type of modelling able to be undertaken by road agencies depends upon the frequency and extent of data collection, which are consequences of funding available. The aims of this study are to increase the understanding of unbound granular pavement performance by investigating roughness progression, and to model roughness progression to improve roughness prediction methods. The pavement management system in place within the project partner road agency and the data available to this study lend themselves to a methodology allowing roughness progression to be investigated using financial maintenance and physical condition information available for each 1km pavement segment in a 16,000km road network

Observations of the Vertical Structure of Tidal Currents in Two Inlets

Observations of the vertical structure of broad band tidal currents were obtained at two energetic inlets. Each experiment took place over a 4 week period, the first at Hampton Inlet in southeastern New Hampshire, USA, in the Fall of 2011, and the second at New River Inlet in southern North Carolina, USA, in the spring of 2012. The temporal variation and vertical structure of the currents were observed at each site with 600 kHz and 1200 kHz RDI Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (ADCP) deployed on low-profile bottom tripods in 7.5 and 12.5 m water depths near the entrance to Hampton Inlet, and in 8 and 9 m water depth within and outside New River Inlet, respectively. In addition, a Nortek Aquapro ADCP was mounted on a jetted pipe in about 2.5 m water depth on the flank of the each inlet channel. Flows within the Hampton/Seabrook Inlet were dominated by semi-diurnal tides ranging 2.5 - 4 m in elevation, with velocities exceeding 2.5 m/s. Flows within New River inlet were also semi-diurnal with tides ranging about 1 – 1.5 m in elevation and with velocities exceeding 1.5 m/s. Vertical variation in the flow structure at the dominant tidal frequency are examined as a function of location within and near the inlet. Outside the inlet, velocities vary strongly over the vertical, with a nearly linear decay from the surface to near the bottom. The coherence between the upper most velocity bin and the successively vertically separated bins drops off quickly with depth, with as much as 50% coherence decay over the water column. The phase relative to the uppermost velocity bin shifts over depth, with as much as 40 deg phase lag over the vertical, with bottom velocities leading the surface. Offshore, rotary coefficients indicate a stable ellipse orientation with rotational directions consistent over the vertical. At Hampton, the shallower ADCP, but still outside the inlet, shows a rotational structure that changes sign in the vertical indicating a sense of rotation at the bottom that is opposite to that at the surface. Within the inlet, the flow is more aligned with the channel, the decay in amplitude over the vertical is diminished, the coherence and phase structure is nearly uniform, and the rotary coefficients indicate no sense of rotation in the flow. The observations are qualitatively consistent with behavior described by Prandle (1982) for shallow water tidal flows

Textbook Costs and Open Educational Resources in Core A

Adoption of no-cost text options by the Department of Rhetoric and Language for Core A courses could save University of San Francisco students up to $250,000 per year. The cost of new, bookstore-purchased textbooks for a USF student taking the most common or “normative” path through Core A (RHET 103, RHET 110/N, RHET 120) averages$316.14. Textbooks costs vary widely and are highly unpredictable: the most expensive sections can have more than 300% higher costs for books than the least expensive. A student landing in the most costly sections would spend up to $492.50 on texts required for the “normative” path ($176.36 more than the average). Costs are unevenly distributed, partly due to high variation between sections, and partly due to an unfair impact of placement practices. Students with the highest SAT scores have the lowest textbook costs. USF uses SAT scores to place students into RHET 130/131, a two-course sequence that fulfills Core A1 and A2. Students in this track would spend an average of $199.15 to buy new textbooks necessary to fulfill Core A. SATs are highly correlated with family income and family level of education; effectively, the most privileged students at USF have the lowest Core A textbook costs (see Appendix 2). Vulnerable students placed in pre-RHET 110 courses have higher textbook costs. In Spring 2018, the mean cost of new required textbooks in RHET 106/N was$80.44 (max $105.50; min$71.50). For a student placed in RHET 106 and unlucky enough to land in expensive sections, new Core A textbook costs would be almost three times higher than the cost for the average RHET 130/131 student

The Stumped of Us: Why Teach Rhetoric in the Face of Racism?

Heather McGhee’s book presents a deeply ambivalent portrait of Rhetoric as a field of study. Her own optimistic faith in research, evidence, and truth-telling is countered by endless examples of the failure of rational, ethical persuasion in the face of racism and greed. This ambivalence raises existential questions for rhetorical curricula in higher education

Communists and the Classroom: Radicals in U.S. Education, 1930-1960

Concern about Communists in education was a central preoccupation in the U.S. through the middle decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on post-secondary and adult education and on fields related to composition and rhetoric, this essay offers an overview of the surprisingly diverse contexts in which Communist educators worked. Some who taught in Communist- sponsored separatist institutions pioneered the kinds of radical pedagogical theories now most often attributed to Paulo Freire. Communist educators who taught in mainstream institutions, however, less often saw their pedagogy as a mode of political action; their activism was deployed mainly in civic life rather than the classroom. Awareness of this complex history may help current educators appreciate a wider range of possibilities for thinking about the relationships between politics, pedagogy, and professionalism

Sarin Over Aleppo

Histor

The Strangest Dream – Reykjavik 1986

Histor

Iran’s Nuclear Program and the History of the IAEA

Histor