Complete Street Design Standards and Contemporary Best Practices for Rust Belt or Postindustrial Legacy Cities

Complete streets is a recent term advocating for the accessibility and safety of all users of a roadway, encompassing values of universal design, sustainability, health, accessibility, and safety. It is also a partnership between engineers, transportation departments, urban planners, and designers. Over 600 complete street policies have been adopted as of this year, and dedicated street design guidelines are beginning to be published by the Department of Transportation of many larger cities; streets are becoming retrofitted to fit values such as traffic calming, road diets, multi-modal considerations and safety enhancements, along with improvements to the streetscape and pedestrian realm (sidewalk). Designing roads to meet all residents needs should “not require extra funds or extra time to achieve” if planned for in all phases (Laplante, McCann 2007). Despite this wave of roadway improvements encompassed by the complete streets movement, many streets in postindustrial, shrinking, or so-called “Rust Belt” cities throughout the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic states have not implemented complete street projects. No official “complete streets” projects exist in cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, or Akron, Ohio despite legislative policies adopted by local and metropolitan governments. Even elements within complete streets, such as on-street bicycle lanes, are found in far fewer number than other cities. My proposal seeks to find the gap between implementation in postindustrial locations and how design guidelines recently adopted by other cities may hasten development of these streets, accounting for political obstacles and physical contexts such as wide right-of-ways on arterials no longer carrying peak traffic

Session D6: Fishway Offsets: Significant Opportunities Challenged by Management Realities

Abstract: Water NSW is the primary bulk water supplier in New South Wales, Australia, managing water resources through the operation of over 300 dams, weirs and regulators. In the early 2000’s, dam safety upgrade works were identified at five (5) large dams owned by Water NSW’s to bring them in line with contemporary best practice. The dam safety upgrade works triggered the requirement for Water NSW to construct fishways at the dams under the NSW Fisheries Management Act 1994. Following the development of concept designs and costings for Keepit Dam, Water NSW estimated in 2009 that high level fishways at the five dams would approximate $285 M, a figure viewed as cost prohibitive to the State government and irrigators who had a 50:50 cost share arrangement. Fisheries NSW subsequently worked collaboratively with Water NSW to develop the Dam Safety Upgrade Fishway Offsets Program, whereby fishways would be installed at thirteen (13) high priority weirs located downstream of the original dam compliance sites in order to achieve a greater ecological benefit at a significantly reduced cost of$45 M. Despite the collaborative nature of the agreement, by 2015 only one fishway has been constructed and another weir removed, with the remaining Fishway Offsets Program being placed on indefinite hold due primarily to the doubling of fishway construction costs and a change in political sentiment. This presentation (1) details lessons learned regarding management and political considerations that ultimately resulted in program deferment, (2) highlights the ecological and economic opportunities offered by fishway offsets, (3) summarizes guiding principles for the assessment and selection of potential fishway offset sites, and (4) proposes a decision-making framework for future fishway offset proposals

Issues and design considerations when negotiating fish passage at everyday road causeways

Most older Australian road causeways were constructed prior to the implementation of fish passage policy and legislation and act as low-head weirs. These structures reduce fish passage, particularly upstream migrations, and negatively impact upon the distribution of native fish populations, particularly within catchments where multiple causeway structures exist. These structures can also contribute negative impacts on river morphology placing further stress on native fish populations. Age, engineering standards and increased traffic demand mean that many of these structures now require major maintenance work or complete replacement. Prior to undertaking causeway maintenance or replacement works, legislation within some jurisdictions requires asset owners to obtain approval from fisheries regulators. The approval process provides an opportunity to implement best practice fish passage techniques to ensure that the upgraded or replacement structure will provide an effective, long-lasting level of fish passage. Achieving an effective, long-lasting level of fish passage can be a difficult task for regulators because fish passage requirements are just one of many competing objectives that asset owners must meet. Within New South Wales (NSW), the ability to achieve effective, long-lasting fish passage outcomes at causeways has proved to be a challenge, particularly where budgets are constrained, or where causeways are now acting as bed control structures that are stabilising upstream habitat. To highlight the challenges associated with achieving positive outcomes for fish passage and to show what has and has not worked regarding causeway fish passage options, including rock ramp fishways, we will detail the recent design consultation process that occurred for the Sawyers Gully causeway upgrade project in northern NSW, and detail a cross-section of previously attempted causeway remediation designs. We will conclude by detailing the final agreed design of the Sawyers Gully causeway upgrade project that meets fish passage criteria, and also the economic, social, and environmental objectives

DATA-BASE RULE-SYSTEM FOR THE MULTIVOX TEXT-TO-SPEECH CONVERTER APPLICATION FOR ARABIC LANGUAGE

The MULTIVOX-Multilingual text-to-speech converter system is adapted to Modern Standard Arabic. In this system, Arabic speech is generated from the concatenation of a set of acoustic building units (ABUs). A 3-dimensional data-base rule-system for the synthesis of unlimited vocabulary Arabic text is organized to concatenate the appropri- ate ABUs for all possible phone-code pairs that may exist in the input text. The main functions of the MULTIVOX are explained. Illustrative examples are given to show the conversion of Arabic graphemes into phone-codes and the use of the data-base rule-system in the concatenation of the ABUs. Hearing tests have been carried out to test the quality of the synthesized speech

Thermal Plasticity of Diving Behavior, Aquatic Respiration, and Locomotor Performance in the Mary River Turtle Elusor macrurus

Locomotion is a common measure of performance used in studies of thermal acclimation because of its correlation with predator escape and prey capture. However, for sedentary animals such as freshwater turtles, we propose that diving behavior may be a more ecologically relevant measure of performance. Increasing dive duration in hatchling turtles reduces predator exposure and therefore functions as an ecological benefit. Diving behavior is thermally dependent, and in some species of freshwater turtles, it is also reliant on aquatic respiration. This study examined the influence of thermal acclimation on diving behavior, aquatic respiration, and locomotor performance in the endangered, bimodally respiring Mary River turtle Elusor macrurus. Diving behavior was found to partially acclimate at 17 degrees C, with turtles acclimated to a cold temperature (17 degrees C) having a significantly longer dive duration than hatchlings acclimated to a warm temperature (28 degrees C). This increase in dive duration at 17 degrees C was not a result of physiological alterations in metabolic rate but was due instead to an increase in aquatic oxygen consumption. Increasing aquatic oxygen consumption permitted cold-acclimated hatchlings to remain submerged for significantly longer periods, with one turtle undertaking a dive of over 2.5 d. When burst-swimming speed was used as the measure of performance, thermal acclimation was not detected. Overall, E. macrurus demonstrated a partial ability to acclimate to changes in environmental temperature

Magyar nyelvű kötött, közép szótáras, folyamatos beszédfelismerő rendszer megvalósítási megoldásainak kutatása = Research on the construction of continuous speech recognizer for a Hungarian middle sized vocabulary

A 3 év alatt a tervnek megfelelően az alábbi feladatokat végeztük el: 1. Létrehoztunk egy általános, olvasott szövegű, magyar nyelvű beszédadatbázist, amely irodai környezetben használható beszédfelismerők akusztikai-fonetikai modelljeinek személyfüggetlen betanítására alkalmas. 2. Kifejlesztettünk egy középszótáras, statisztikai alapokra épülő folyamatos beszédfelismerő fejlesztői rendszert, amely lehetőséget ad különböző, kötött témájú, folyamatos beszédfelismerési feladat végrehajtására. 3. Kísérleteket végeztünk a beszédfelismerő fejlesztői rendszerrel az akusztikai-fonetikai modellek optimalizálására, továbbá a nyelvi modellépítés valamint az akusztikai, nyelvi adaptáció területén. Új megoldásokat vezettünk be az akusztikai-fonetikai modellépítésben, és bevezettük a bigram morphéma modelleket amelyeket összehasonlítottunk a hagyományos szóalak bigram modellekkel. 4. Létrehoztunk egy kórházi leletezésre alkalmas folyamatos, személyfüggetlen, 1000-20000 szavas beszédfelismerő rendszert, konkrétan a gasztroszkópia és a hasi ultrahang vizsgálat területén. 5. A létrehozott renszert valós körülmények között teszteltük, a SOTE 2. számú Belklinikáján. Az orvosok tapasztalatait mind a két tématerületen a részletes leírásban adjuk meg. | 1. A Hungarian read speech database was constructed in office circumstances. This database gives possibility for training and testing acoustic-phonetic models of speaker independent continuous speech recognizers. 2. A development tool for constructing continuous speech recognizers has been created under Windows XP. The tool is able to construct middle-sized continuous speech recognizer with a vocabulary of 1000-20000 words. New solutions have been developed for the acoustical preprocessing, for the statistical model building of phonemes and in syntactic level. 3. Research was done with the speech recognition development tool, for the optimalization of the acoustic phonetic models and for the linguistic models too. Hungarian is a strongly agglutinative language, in which the number of the word forms is very high. This is the reason, why two forms of bigram language model were constructed: One is the traditional word-form based, and the other is the morpheme-based model in which the vocabulary is much smaller. 4. We have developed a continuous speech recognizer for preparing medical reports, actually gastroscopy and abdominal ultrasonography records. 5. The speech recognizer was tested at the Medical Semmelweis University of Budapest. Opinion of doctors at the Endoscopy and Radiology Laboratories are attached to the detailed description of the project