Evaluation of Current Repair Criteria for Longitudinal Barrier with Crash Damage

To protect motorists and avoid tort liability, highway agencies expend considerable resources to repair damaged longitudinal barriers, such as w-beam guardrails. With limited funding available, though, highway agencies are unable to maintain all field-installed systems in the ideal as-built condition. Instead, these agencies focus on repairing only damage that has a detrimental effect on the safety performance of the barrier. The distinction between minor damage and more severe performance-altering damage, however, is not always clear. This paper presents a critical review of current United States (US) and Canadian criteria on whether to repair damaged longitudinal barrier. Barrier repair policies were obtained via comprehensive literature review and a survey of US and Canadian transportation agencies. In an analysis of the maintenance procedures of 40 US States and 8 Canadian transportation agencies, fewer than one-third of highway agencies were found to have quantitative measures to determine when barrier repair is warranted. In addition, no engineering basis for the current US barrier repair guidelines could be found. These findings underscore the importance of the development of quantitative barrier repair guidelines based on a strong technical foundation.

So Very Far Away

I began my thesis planning to craft pieces of both fiction and nonfiction. I had very much enjoyed working on a travel essay during the fall semester, but I have always had an inherent interest in writing short stories, so I had hoped to explore both genres, using my previous work from a seminar in fiction and a travel writing class as a springboard. However, in writing “So Very Far Away,” my second nonfiction piece, which I developed from material that I was unableto keep in the essay “Lunch with the Americans,” I discovered that nonfiction was an incredibly freeing genre because the essential ingredients were already present. My personal experiences provided the basic elements of plot, character, and setting, yet I discovered new challenges as I attempted to present these experiences in a way that moved beyond mere memories and reflections and towards a larger meaning that would matter to others as well. I became sointrigued by this process of creating cohesive narratives through the editing and shaping of memories that I decided to focus completely on nonfiction for my thesis work and write a collection of essays about my time abroad.

Writing the Unspeakable: an Ethical Approach to a Traumatized Narrative

This project uses the works of contemporary author Tim O’Brien, whose fiction often performs the trauma of the Vietnam War, to explore new ways of encountering the traumatized text. Informed by Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the face, and Sigmund Freud’s and Dominick LaCapra’s work on the narratology of the melancholic and the mourner, I consider the different ways we respond to the suffering Other and explore the paradox that through reading a traumatized narrative empathically we may come face-toface, as it were, with the suffering Other. If this is indeed the case, I reason, then the obligations that are due to the Other are also due to the text itself.