Toward best practices for construction and maintenance of through-grade culverts to mitigate pavement roughness

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonnie Kavanagh ◽  
Haithem Soliman ◽  
Ahmed Shalaby

Culverts are used to preserve pavement embankments by draining water from the structures. However pavement roughness caused by excessive bumps, sags, and depressions at a culvert location are signs of failure or improper construction. The surface roughness at a culvert location can be caused by inadequate compaction of granular base material, erosion of the backfill or supporting materials, and (or) differential frost heaving. Pavement roughness can adversely affect ride quality and create potentially unsafe driving conditions. The objective of this study is to recommend construction and maintenance solutions to mitigate bumps, sags, and depressions at through-grade culverts on highways in Manitoba. The study consists of a review of the state of the art practices in culvert construction and maintenance; a survey questionnaire to obtain construction and performance history of through-grade culverts in Manitoba; and a forensic investigation and case study analysis of failed culverts with excessive bump, dip or sags. Culverts with minor or no pavement roughness were also investigated to identify design and construction elements that favor good performance. The results of the forensic investigation and recommended best practices construction and maintenance solutions to mitigate excessive pavement roughness at culverts are presented.

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211
Author(s):  
Patricia E. Chu

The Paris avant-garde milieu from which both Cirque Calder/Calder's Circus and Painlevé’s early films emerged was a cultural intersection of art and the twentieth-century life sciences. In turning to the style of current scientific journals, the Paris surrealists can be understood as engaging the (life) sciences not simply as a provider of normative categories of materiality to be dismissed, but as a companion in apprehending the “reality” of a world beneath the surface just as real as the one visible to the naked eye. I will focus in this essay on two modernist practices in new media in the context of the history of the life sciences: Jean Painlevé’s (1902–1989) science films and Alexander Calder's (1898–1976) work in three-dimensional moving art and performance—the Circus. In analyzing Painlevé’s work, I discuss it as exemplary of a moment when life sciences and avant-garde technical methods and philosophies created each other rather than being classified as separate categories of epistemological work. In moving from Painlevé’s films to Alexander Calder's Circus, Painlevé’s cinematography remains at the forefront; I use his film of one of Calder's performances of the Circus, a collaboration the men had taken two decades to complete. Painlevé’s depiction allows us to see the elements of Calder's work that mark it as akin to Painlevé’s own interest in a modern experimental organicism as central to the so-called machine-age. Calder's work can be understood as similarly developing an avant-garde practice along the line between the bestiary of the natural historian and the bestiary of the modern life scientist.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (6) ◽  
pp. 1035-1055 ◽  
Author(s):  
S.V. Pankova ◽  
V.V. Popov

Subject. The article considers the development of a set of methods and indicators of economic analysis, which can be used for performance audit of customs authorities, using the Volga Customs Administration case. Objectives. The aim is to justify the use of analytical procedures to rank the effectiveness of customs payments for the purpose of performance audit of customs authorities. Methods. We employ general scientific methods of research, i.e. dialectical and monographic methods, logical analysis, comparison, as well as the Euclidean distance method. Results. We reviewed works by Russian and foreign scholars on the history of customs audit development and internal financial control of customs authorities, gave scientific credence to attributing the system of customs payment and performance to the indicators of economic activity of customs authorities. Due to the lack of methods for assessing the performance of customs authorities, the use of analytical procedures during the performance audit seems to be a promising area. Conclusions. When verifying the scientific hypothesis put forward in the study, we established that the introduction and development of the ranking system for the performance of customs authorities related to the collection of customs duties can contribute to effective financial audit of customs authorities in general.


Author(s):  
A. Drutsé

The modern world popularity of the nai — a traditional Romanian instrument — has identified interest in writing this article. This problematic constitutes the circle of our research interest as a doctoral candidate, but also as a concert performer, a graduate of the Academy of Music, Theater and Fine Arts. One of the most interesting aspects of the study of nai is its technical improvement since 60s of the 20th century, which led to the acquisition of a number of new, innovative skills and performance skills. In this article we have identified some pages of the modern history of the manufacture of this ancient instrument associated with these processes.


2020 ◽  
Vol 384 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-232
Author(s):  
P. V. Menshikov ◽  
G. K. Kassymova ◽  
R. R. Gasanova ◽  
Y. V. Zaichikov ◽  
V. A. Berezovskaya ◽  
...  

A special role in the development of a pianist as a musician, composer and performer, as shown by the examples of the well-known, included in the history of art, and the most ordinary pianists, their listeners and admirers, lovers of piano music and music in general, are played by moments associated with psychotherapeutic abilities and music features. The purpose of the study is to comprehend the psychotherapeutic aspects of performing activities (using pianists as an example). The research method is a theoretical analysis of the psychotherapeutic aspects of performing activities: the study of the possibilities and functions of musical psychotherapy in the life of a musician as a “(self) psychotherapist” and “patient”. For almost any person, music acts as a way of self-understanding and understanding of the world, a way of self-realization, rethinking and overcoming life's difficulties - internal and external "blockages" of development, a way of saturating life with universal meanings, including a person in the richness of his native culture and universal culture as a whole. Art and, above all, its metaphorical nature help to bring out and realize internal experiences, provide an opportunity to look at one’s own experiences, problems and injuries from another perspective, to see a different meaning in them. In essence, we are talking about art therapy, including the art of writing and performing music - musical psychotherapy. However, for a musician, music has a special meaning, special significance. Musician - produces music, and, therefore, is not only an “object”, but also the subject of musical psychotherapy. The musician’s training includes preparing him as an individual and as a professional to perform functions that can be called psychotherapeutic: in the works of the most famous performers, as well as in the work of ordinary teachers, psychotherapeutic moments sometimes become key. Piano music and performance practice sets a certain “viewing angle” of life, and, in the case of traumatic experiences, a new way of understanding a difficult, traumatic and continuing to excite a person event, changing his attitude towards him. It helps to see something that was hidden in the hustle and bustle of everyday life or in the patterns of relationships familiar to a given culture. At the same time, while playing music or learning to play music, a person teaches to see the hidden and understand the many secrets of the human soul, the relationships of people.


Public Voices ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mordecai Lee

One of the building blocks of the professionalization of American public administration was the recognition of the need for expert knowledge and the wide dissemination of that information to practitioners. Municipal civil servants could adopt and adapt these best practices in their localities. Such was the purpose of the Municipal Administration Service (1926-1933), initially founded by the National Municipal League and funded by the Rockefeller philanthropies. This article is an organizational history of the Service. It presents the life cycle of the agency, including its operations, funding, problems, and the behind-the-scenes public administration politics which led to its demise. In all, the Municipal Administration Service captures the early history of American public administration, its attempt to demonstrate that it was a full-fledged profession with recognized experts and managerial advice that ultimately proved unable to perpetuate itself.


Author(s):  
Wakoh Shannon Hickey

Mindfulness is widely claimed to improve health and performance, and historians typically say that efforts to promote meditation and yoga therapeutically began in the 1970s. In fact, they began much earlier, and that early history offers important lessons for the present and future. This book traces the history of mind-body medicine from eighteenth-century Mesmerism to the current Mindfulness boom and reveals how religion, race, and gender have shaped events. Many of the first Americans to advocate meditation for healing were women leaders of the Mind Cure movement, which emerged in the late nineteenth century. They believed that by transforming their consciousness, they could also transform oppressive circumstances in which they lived, and some were activists for social reform. Trained by Buddhist and Hindu missionaries, these women promoted meditation through personal networks, religious communities, and publications. Some influenced important African American religious movements, as well. For women and black men, Mind Cure meant not just happiness but liberation in concrete political, economic, and legal terms. The Mind Cure movement exerted enormous pressure on mainstream American religion and medicine, and in response, white, male doctors and clergy with elite academic credentials appropriated some of its methods and channeled them into scientific psychology and medicine. As mental therapeutics became medicalized, individualized, and then commodified, the religious roots of meditation, like the social justice agendas of early Mind Curers, fell away. After tracing how we got from Mind Cure to Mindfulness, this book reveals what got lost in the process.


Author(s):  
Michael J. Bazyler ◽  
Kathryn Lee Boyd ◽  
Kristen L. Nelson ◽  
Rajika L. Shah

The Nazis and their cohorts stole mercilessly from the Jews of Europe. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, returning survivors had to navigate unclear and hostile legal paths to recover their stolen property from governments and neighbors who often had been complicit in their persecution and theft. While the return of Nazi-looted art and recent legal settlements involving dormant Swiss bank accounts, unpaid insurance policies and use of slave labor by German companies have been well-publicized, efforts by Holocaust survivors and heirs over the last 70 years to recover stolen land and buildings were forgotten. In 2009, 47 countries convened in Prague to deal with the lingering problem of restitution of prewar private, communal, and heirless property stolen during the Holocaust. The outcome was the Terezin Declaration on Holocaust Era Assets and Related Issues, aiming to “rectify the consequences” of the wrongful Nazi-era immovable property seizures. This book sets forth the legal history of Holocaust immovable property restitution in each of the Terezin Declaration signatory states. It also analyzes how each of the 47 countries has fulfilled the standards of the Guidelines and Best Practices of the Terezin Declaration. These standards were issued in 2010 in conjunction with the establishment of the European Shoah Legacy Institute (ESLI), a state-sponsored NGO created to monitor compliance. The book is based on the Holocaust (Shoah) Immovable Property Restitution Study commissioned by ESLI, written by the authors and issued in Brussels in 2017 before the European Parliament.


Author(s):  
Nurit Yaari

This chapter surveys the history of classical Greek drama productions at the Department of Theatre Arts of Tel Aviv University as the basis for an exploration of the issue of theatre and art education. By analysing the students’ approach to classical Greek drama, we can see how they deal with the interpretative reading, translation, and performance of such texts on stage. We also see how the ancient works invite the students to delve more deeply into their distinctive content and forms; to draw links between theory and practice, and between text and context; to gain a deeper understanding of the issues of style and styling; and to engage in a richer experimentation with various aspects of stage performance—such as pronunciation, diction, voice, movement, music, and mise-en-scène.


Author(s):  
James Moody ◽  
Ryan Light

This chapter provides an overview of social network visualization. Network analysis encourages the visual display of complex information, but effective network diagrams, like other data visualizations, result from several best practices. After a brief history of network visualization, the chapter outlines several of those practices. It highlights the role that network visualizations play as heuristics for making sense of networked data and translating complicated social relationships, such as those that are dynamic, into more comprehensible structures. The goal in this chapter is to help identify the methods underlying network visualization with an eye toward helping users produce more effective figures.


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