A Tool for Assessing Sign Language Skills of Rehabilitation Counselors

Non

KYTC Maintenance Overview and Budget Analysis

The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC) manages over 27,500 miles of the state’s roadways and is responsible for preserving many assets in a good state of repair, including bridges, traffic signals, lighting features, traffic signs, and guardrails. The Cabinet’s Maintenance function, which encompasses maintenance (e.g., patching potholes, repainting roadway lines and markings, cleaning bridges, mowing) and operations (e.g., plowing and salting roadways; keeping signs, traffic signals, and roadway signals functional), had a budget in FY 2018 of roughly $350 million. This report describes core maintenance functions and reviews their importance for preserving Kentucky’s roadway network and analyzes trends in KYTC’s maintenance budget. Among the maintenance issues explored are potholes; guardrails, signs, and striping; roadside vegetation; and winter operations (i.e., snow and ice removal). Without adequate maintenance funding, pressing maintenance issues are sometimes left unattended, which has negative consequences for the entire transportation network. Time trend analysis of KYTC’s maintenance budget indicates that inflation has reduced the purchasing power of funding allocated for maintenance activities. Forecasts suggest that its purchasing power will continue to decline through FY 2022. Winter maintenance operations, which vary significantly in scope and expense from year to year, can apply significant pressure to the Cabinet’s maintenance budget. In years with particularly severe winters, some maintenance activities are deferred because of the high cost of snow and ice removal. Accordingly, a starting point to improve maintenance outcomes is keeping maintenance funding on pace with inflation. Improving maintenance outcomes has many benefits, including extending the service lives of assets, eliminating potential safety hazards, and increasing traffic flow efficiency

A community-engaged infection prevention and control approach to Ebola.

The real missing link in Ebola control efforts to date may lie in the failure to apply core principles of health promotion: the early, active and sustained engagement of affected communities, their trusted leaders, networks and lay knowledge, to help inform what local control teams do, and how they may better do it, in partnership with communities. The predominant focus on viral transmission has inadvertently stigmatized and created fear-driven responses among affected individuals, families and communities. While rigorous adherence to standard infection prevention and control (IPC) precautions and safety standards for Ebola is critical, we may be more successful if we validate and combine local community knowledge and experiences with that of IPC medical teams. In an environment of trust, community partners can help us learn of modest adjustments that would not compromise safety but could improve community understanding of, and responses to, disease control protocol, so that it better reflects their 'community protocol' (local customs, beliefs, knowledge and practices) and concerns. Drawing on the experience of local experts in several African nations and of community-engaged health promotion leaders in the USA, Canada and WHO, we present an eight step model, from entering communities with cultural humility, though reciprocal learning and trust, multi-method communication, development of the joint protocol, to assessing progress and outcomes and building for sustainability. Using examples of changes that are culturally relevant yet maintain safety, we illustrate how often minor adjustments can help prevent and treat the most serious emerging infectious disease since HIV/AIDS

Architecture in a Northern Flood Plain

The thesis is an exploration of strategies that could be utilised in creating sustainable urbanism, one in which the inhabitants retain a relationship with the environmental and geographic conditions of their place. Promoting awareness of the natural context of urban activities is necessary in an increasingly complex world that is more able to disregard the natural systems that we depend on. Sustainability is seen as crucial in terms of the economic viability of cities as well as the sustainability of the environment in which dense urban centres are situated. In the case of a city located on a flood plain, the viability of the physical and social condition of the urban centre as well as its impact on that of the surrounding region comes to the forefront each time there is a flood. The city of Winnipeg on the Red River flood plain in the central lowlands of the eastern prairie of Canada is chosen as the site for this exploration where the difficulties of freezing temperatures make the problem of building on a flood plain a greater challenge. Several methods are explored in this urban design, demonstrating that urban sustainability and environmental sustainability are not exclusive of one another. The technique of densifying and unifying elements of the urban fabric, including parks and landscaping, residential inhabitation, as well as industrial and commercial activities, can be effective for both environmental and urban sustainability. Techniques explore the incorporation of vertically integrated multi-use buildings, the movement of public areas above street level, and construction on engineered hills, stilts or with the use of floatation devices, resulting in a site specific response to urban inhabitation. The trend toward a generic non-location specific urban lifestyle is superceded in this proposal for a mode of urban dwelling reconnected with surrounding context, marked by experience of seasonal and cyclical conditions of environment inscribed by an awareness of place

Training Curricula for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet Department of Highways

Most state departments of transportation (DOTs) offer their employees professional development opportunities (e.g., training courses) so they can build their expertise and in doing so facilitate agency efforts to fulfill their business mandates. The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC) is no different in this regard. While professional development opportunities are invaluable, and while the Cabinet offers a number of trainings to its staff, currently there exists no comprehensive training curricula to help professionals and paraprofessionals systematically grow their knowledge and skills and ensure KYTC maintains a robust portfolio of technical competencies across the organization. The inconsistent and ad hoc manner in which trainings are made available in turn produces unevenness in the distribution of knowledge and skills across the Cabinet. To address the challenge, researchers at the Kentucky Transportation Center (KTC) were asked to develop training curricula for different subject-matter areas. Before devising these curricula, researchers examined practices and programs in place at other state DOTs which are designed to improve professional development as well as the trainings currently available from at or through the Cabinet. Additionally, previous course offerings and attendance figures were analyzed to understand which trainings have proven the most valuable. Based on these analyses, researchers prepared training curricula for five categories: construction, maintenance, roadway design, project management, and section engineers. Within each category, curricula identify training opportunities for personnel classified as entry, mid-level, and advanced. Undoubtedly, the curricula outlined in this report serve only as a starting point; they will need to undergo refinement as the needs of both KYTC and its employees continue to evolve

Correction of Dropped Frames in High-resolution Push-broom Hyperspectral Images for Cultural Heritage

Dropped frames can occur in line-scan cameras, which result in non-uniform spatial sampling of the scene. A dropped frame occurs when data from an image sensor is not successfully recorded. When mosaicking multiple line-scan images, such as in high-resolution imaging, this can cause misalignment. Much previous work to identify dropped frames in video prioritises fast computation over high accuracy, whereas in heritage imaging, high accuracy is often preferred over short computation time. Two approaches to identify the position of dropped frames are presented, both using the A* search algorithm to correct dropped frames. One method aligns overlapping sections of push-broom images and the other aligns the push-broom image to a lower resolution reference image. The two methods are compared across a range of test images, and the method aligning overlapping sections is shown to perform better than the method using a reference image under most circumstances. The overlap method was applied to hyperspectral images acquired of La Ghirlandata, an 1873 oil on canvas painting by D. G. Rossetti, enabling a high-resolution hyperspectral image mosaic to be produced. The resulting composite image is 10,875 $\times$ 14,697 pixels each with 500 spectral bands from 400–2,500 nm. This corresponds to a spatial resolution of 80 \,\mathrm{\upmu }\mathrm{m} and a spectral resolution of 3–6 nm