Attracting and Retaining Women in the Transportation Industry

This study synthesized previously conducted research and identified additional research needed to attract, promote, and retain women in the transportation industry. This study will detail major findings and subsequent recommendations, based on the annotated bibliography, of the current atmosphere and the most successful ways to attract and retain young women in the transportation industry in the future. Oftentimes, it is perception that drives women away from the transportation industry, as communal goals are not emphasized in transportation. Men are attracted to agentic goals, whereas women tend to be more attracted to communal goals (Diekman et al., 2011). While this misalignment of goals has been found to be one reason that women tend to avoid the transportation industry, there are ways to highlight the goal congruity processes that contribute to transportation engineering, planning, operations, maintenance, and decisions—thus attracting the most talented individuals, regardless of gender. Other literature has pointed to the lack of female role models and mentors as one reason that it is difficult to attract women to transportation (Dennehy & Dasgupta, 2017). It is encouraging to know that attention is being placed on the attraction and retention of women in all fields, as it will increase the probability that the best individual is attracted to the career that best fits their abilities, regardless of gender

A Method for Psychosocial Stress-Induced Reinstatement of Cocaine Seeking in Rats

We describe a novel preclinical model of stress-induced relapse to cocaine use in rats using social defeat stress, an ethologically valid psychosocial stressor in rodents that closely resembles stressors that promote craving and relapse in humans. Rats self-administered cocaine for 20 days. On days 11, 14, 17, and 20, animals were subjected to social defeat stress or a nonstressful control condition following the session, with discrete environmental stimuli signaling the impending event. After extinction training, reinstatement was assessed following re-exposure to these discrete cues. Animals re-exposed to psychosocial stress-predictive cues exhibited increased serum corticosterone and significantly greater reinstatement of cocaine seeking than the control group, and active coping behaviors during social defeat episodes were associated with subsequent reinstatement magnitude. These studies are the first to describe an operant model of psychosocial stress-induced relapse in rodents and lay the foundation for future work investigating its neurobiological underpinnings

UNC-Emory Infant Atlases for Macaque Brain Image Analysis: Postnatal Brain Development through 12 Months

Computational anatomical atlases have shown to be of immense value in neuroimaging as they provide age appropriate reference spaces alongside ancillary anatomical information for automated analysis such as subcortical structural definitions, cortical parcellations or white fiber tract regions. Standard workflows in neuroimaging necessitate such atlases to be appropriately selected for the subject population of interest. This is especially of importance in early postnatal brain development, where rapid changes in brain shape and appearance render neuroimaging workflows sensitive to the appropriate atlas choice. We present here a set of novel computation atlases for structural MRI and Diffusion Tensor Imaging as crucial resource for the analysis of MRI data from non-human primate rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta) data in early postnatal brain development. Forty socially-housed infant macaques were scanned longitudinally at ages 2 weeks, 3, 6, and 12 months in order to create cross-sectional structural and DTI atlases via unbiased atlas building at each of these ages. Probabilistic spatial prior definitions for the major tissue classes were trained on each atlas with expert manual segmentations. In this article we present the development and use of these atlases with publicly available tools, as well as the atlases themselves, which are publicly disseminated to the scientific community

Guidebook for Deploying Battery Electric Buses

A s part of FTA\u2019s effort to promote continuous safety and operational improvements in the public transit industry, Guidebook for Deploying Battery Electric Buses was developed to provide bus transit agencies with leading transit industry practices for performing these activities. The supporting research report, Procuring and Maintaining Battery Electric Buses and Charging Systems \u2013 Best Practices, is a resource for the industry that offers a summary of industry reports highlighting the challenges and opportunities with battery electric bus (BEB) deployments and the outcomes of federally sponsored deployments, existing standards from the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) and the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), as examples, and lessons learned through case studies. It also includes a series of findings associated with BEB and charging station procurements, system efficiency and interoperability considerations, and maintenance standards and guidelines. Additionally, the Safety and Security Certification of Electric Bus Fleets \u2013 Industry Best Practices supporting research was conducted to give bus transit agencies helpful information on the requirements of a Safety and Security Certification (SSC) program to verify the unique identified risks that will be introduced to a transit agency as a result of initiating a BEB fleet transition. The findings are useful to transit agencies as tools to identify likely challenges that should be considered before embarking on the transition to bus fleet electrification, such as specific language to include in procurements to reduce challenges associated with part availability, and battery warranty ambiguity

Demonstration of surface electron rejection with interleaved germanium detectors for dark matter searches

The following article appeared in Applied Physics Letters 103.16 (2013): 164105 and may be found at http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/apl/100/26/10.1063/1.4729825The SuperCDMS experiment in the Soudan Underground Laboratory searches for dark matter with a 9-kg array of cryogenic germanium detectors. Symmetric sensors on opposite sides measure both charge and phonons from each particle interaction, providing excellent discrimination between electron and nuclear recoils, and between surface and interior events. Surface event rejection capabilities were tested with two 210 Pb sources producing ∼130 beta decays/hr. In ∼800 live hours, no events leaked into the 8–115 keV signal region, giving upper limit leakage fraction 1.7 × 10−5 at 90% C.L., corresponding to < 0.6 surface event background in the future 200-kg SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment.This work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation (Grant Nos. AST-9978911, NSF-0847342, PHY-1102795,NSF-1151869, PHY-0542066, PHY-0503729, PHY-0503629, PHY-0503641, PHY-0504224, PHY-0705052,PHY-0801708, PHY-0801712, PHY-0802575, PHY-0847342, PHY-0855299, PHY-0855525, and PHY-1205898), by the Department of Energy (Contract Nos. DE-AC03-76SF00098, DE-FG02-92ER40701, DE-FG02-94ER40823,DE-FG03-90ER40569, DE-FG03-91ER40618, and DESC0004022),by NSERC Canada (Grant Nos. SAPIN 341314 and SAPPJ 386399), and by MULTIDARK CSD2009-00064 and FPA2012-34694. Fermilab is operated by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC under Contract No. De-AC02-07CH11359, while SLAC is operated under Contract No. DE-AC02-76SF00515 with the United States Department of Energy

Risk-Taking Characteristics as Explanatory Variables in Variations of Fatality Rates in the Southeastern United States

Traffic fatalities accounted for 1.24 million lives lost in 2013 worldwide, and almost 33 thousand of those fatalities were in the U.S. in 2013. The southeastern region of the nation stands out for continuously having higher fatality rates per mile driven than the national average. If one can establish compelling relationships between various factors and fatality rates, then policies and investments can be targeted to increase the safety on the network by focusing on policies that mitigate those factors. In this research effort risk-taking characteristics are explored. These factors have not been as comprehensively reviewed as conventional factors such as vehicle and facility conditions associated with safety. The hypothesis assumes if a person exhibits risk-taking behavior, that risk-taking behavior is not limited to only one aspect of risk, but is likely to occur in multiple facets of the person\u27s life. Some of the risk-taking characteristics explored include credit score, safety belt use, smoking and tobacco use, drug use, mental health, educational attainment, obesity, and overall general health characteristics. All risk-taking characteristics with the exception of mental health were found to have statistically significant correlations with fatality rates alone. However, when a regression model was formed to estimate fatality rates by risk-taking characteristics, only four risk-taking characteristics - credit score, educational attainment, overall poor health, and seat belt use were found to be statistically significant at an integrated level with other demographic characteristics such as unemployment levels and population born is state of residency. By identifying at-risk population segments, education, counseling, enforcement, or other strategies may be deployed to help improve travel safety