Engineering Study Iowa Highway Resarch Board Project HR-223 Maintaining Granular Surfaced Roads, February 1981

Approximately 65% of Iowa's roads are surfaced with aggregates composed of crushed limestone and/or gravel. Rural Iowan's regard these roads as a very important part of their lives. Therefore, the slide-tape presentation, "Maintaining Granular Surfaced Roads" was developed to aid the motor grader operator to better understand the procedures required t o maintain aggregate surfaced roads. A typical cross-section is presented with the proper nomenclature assigned to the roadway features to facilitate the operator's understanding of the basic terms used the program. The following areas are expanded: safety , dragging, cutting, intersections , superelevations, and reporting any discrepancies. The operator's attention to detail can enhance the economy of the state and contribute to the savings of lives on rural highways.

An Engineering Study to Update the Iowa Transportation Laws Annotated: HR 324a January 1995

Research project HR-234A was sponsored by the Iowa Highway Research Board and the Iowa Department of Transportation. In the preparation of this compilation of highway and street laws of Iowa, an attempt has been made to include those sections of the Iowa Code Annotated and Iowa Digest to which reference is frequently required by the Department of Transportation, counties, cities and towns in their conduct of highway and street administration, construction and maintenance. This publication is offered with the hope and belief that it will prove to be of value and assistance to those concerned with the problems of establishing, maintaining and administering a highway and street program. Because of the broad scope of highway and street work and the many interrelated provisions of Iowa law, and usable size, some Code provision which are insignificant to the principal subject were omitted out of necessity; others were omitted to avoid repetition. A general index is provided at the end of the text of this volume. Each major topic is divided into subtopics and is accompanied by appropriate Code sections. Specific section numbers as they appear in the Code are in.

Engineering Study for Reducing Sign Vandalism Final Report Highway Research Advisory Board Projec HR 246, June 1992

Sign vandalism has traditionally been a vexing problem for Iowa counties. The extent of the cost and incidence of these acts have never been fully ascertained, but a 1990 survey indicated that they cost Iowa counties more than 1.5 million dollars annually. In 1990, the Iowa Legislature recognized the seriousness of the problem and strengthened the existing sign vandalism law by increasing the penalty for illegal possession of a traffic control device from a simple to a serious misdemeanor. However, the courts must be willing to prosecute vandals to the magnitude provided in the Iowa Code. An educational campaign begun in 1987 involving over 200 Iowa school districts to educate students on the seriousness of the problem evidently did not have the effect of dramatically reducing the overall cost of sign vandalism in Iowa. This study sought to define the scope of the problem and possibly offer some effective countermeasures to combat sign vandalism and theft in Iowa.

Iowa Traffic Control Devices and Pavement Markings: A Manual for Cities and Counties April 2001

Iowa Traffic Control Devices and Pavement Markings: A Manual for Cities and Counties has been developed to provide state and local transportation agencies with suggestions and examples related to traffic control devices and pavement markings. Both rural and urban applications are included. The primary source of information for this document is the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), but many additional references have also been used. A complete listing of these is included in the appendix to this manual, and the reader is invited to consult these references for more in-depth information. The contents of this manual are not intended to represent standard practice or to imply legal requirements for installation in any particular manner. This document should be used as a supplement to the MUTCD, not as a substitute for any requirements contained therein. Engineering judgement should be applied to all decisions regarding traffic control devices and pavement markings. All references to the MUTCD in this manual apply to the millennium edition. The reader should be aware that many millennium revisions are allowed phase-in periods by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), ranging from two to ten years. These extended compliance periods should be considered when making decisions regarding traffic control devices and pavement markings. A new addition to the MUTCD, Part 5, “Traffic Control Devices for Low-Volume Roads,” also contains valuable recommendations for signing and marking low volume roads. This manual is presented in an easy to use threering format. Topics included in the complete guide manual may not apply to all jurisdictions and can easily be removed or modified as desired. Desired millennium MUTCD sections may be added for quick reference using the divider at the end of this document. Contents may also be available on CD-ROM in the future.

Sequential decisions in allocation problems

[eng] In the context of cooperative TU-games, and given an order of players, we consider the problem of distributing the worth of the grand coalition as a sequentia decision problem. In each step of process, upper and lower bounds for the payoff of the players are required related to successive reduced games. Sequentially compatible payoffs are defined as those allocation vectors that meet these recursive bounds. The core of the game is reinterpreted as a set of sequentally compatible payoffs when the Davis-Maschler reduced game is considered (Th.1). Independently of the reduction, the core turns out to be the intersections of the family of the sets of sequentially compatible payoffs corresponding to the different possible orderings (Th.2), so it is in some sense order-independent. Finally, we analyze advantagenous properties for the first player

New Violence Risk Assessment Aids Parole and Offender Programming Decisions, Data Download, Department of Corrections

In recent years, the Department of Corrections has made major strides in assessing offenders’ risk to reoffend, particularly in measuring changes in that risk over time. Earlier this year, the DOC worked with the Board of Parole to develop a risk assessment that focuses on assessing offenders’ risk to commit violent crimes.

Engineering tolerance into transplanted beta cell lines.

In this paper we explore the possibility of improving, by genetic engineering, the resistance of insulin-secreting cells to the metabolic and inflammatory stresses that are anticipated to limit their function and survival when encapsulated and transplanted in a type 1 diabetic environment. We show that transfer of the Bcl-2 antiapoptotic gene, and of genes specifically interfering with cytokine intracellular signaling pathways, greatly improves resistance of the cells to metabolic limitations and inflammatory stresses.

IL-17F co-expression improves cell growth characteristics and enhances recombinant protein production during CHO cell line engineering.

The generation of a high productivity cell line is a critical step in the production of a therapeutic protein. Many innovative engineering strategies have been devised in order to maximize the expression rate of production cells for increased process efficiency. Less effort has focused on improvements to the cell line generation process, which is typically long and laborious when using mammalian cells. Based on unexpected findings when generating stable CHO cell lines expressing human IL-17F, we studied the benefit of expressing this protein during the establishment of production cell lines. We demonstrate that IL-17F expression enhances the rate of selection and overall number of selected cell lines as well as their transgene expression levels. We also show that this benefit is observed with different parental CHO cell lines and selection systems. Furthermore, IL-17F expression improves the efficiency of cell line subcloning processes. IL-17F can therefore be exploited in a standard manufacturing process to obtain higher productivity clones in a reduced time frame.

Educational attainment and timing of fertility decisions

This paper focuses on timing of fertility decisions, conditional on the level of educational attainment of parents. Timing of fertility and educational attainment of parents rationalize the negative relationship observed in the data between hourly wages and childbearing. It is shown how the recent evolution in total fertility rates observed in developed countries could be in part the result of a transition from an early childbearing regime to a late childbearing regime. I develop a general equilibrium overlapping generations model in order to understand the joint determination of timing of childbearing decisions together with other household economic decisions in a life cycle framework. I show how idiosyncratic uncertainty might have asymmetric efects on completed fertility depending on timing of childbearing, generating the diferences in completed fertility observed between households that difer in their level of educational attainment.

Decisions al voltant de la construcció d'un informe etnografic

Les decisions que comentaré entorn de la construcció d'un informe etnografic estan basades en l'experiencia d'un procés de recerca en la realització d'un estudi de cas. La finalitat d'aquest estudi de cas únic era pretendre comprendre una vida professional docent per tal de descriure, analitzar i interpretar la complexitat del que és i envolta la vida d'una mestra, considerant tant els aspectes biografics -personals i professionals- com els aspectes de la seva practica i, alhora, relacionar ambdós en un context cultural més ampli (escola, sistema educatiu, valors socials, etc.).

MM-GBSA binding free energy decomposition and T cell receptor engineering.

Recognition by the T-cell receptor (TCR) of immunogenic peptides (p) presented by class I major histocompatibility complexes (MHC) is the key event in the immune response against virus infected cells or tumor cells. The major determinant of T cell activation is the affinity of the TCR for the peptide-MHC complex, though kinetic parameters are also important. A study of the 2C TCR/SIYR/H-2Kb system using a binding free energy decomposition (BFED) based on the MM-GBSA approach had been performed to assess the performance of the approach on this system. The results showed that the TCR-p-MHC BFED including entropic terms provides a detailed and reliable description of the energetics of the interaction (Zoete and Michielin, 2007). Based on these results, we have developed a new approach to design sequence modifications for a TCR recognizing the human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-A2 restricted tumor epitope NY-ESO-1. NY-ESO-1 is a cancer testis antigen expressed not only in melanoma, but also on several other types of cancers. It has been observed at high frequencies in melanoma patients with unusually positive clinical outcome and, therefore, represents an interesting target for adoptive transfer with modified TCR. Sequence modifications of TCR potentially increasing the affinity for this epitope have been proposed and tested in vitro. T cells expressing some of the proposed TCR mutants showed better T cell functionality, with improved killing of peptide-loaded T2 cells and better proliferative capacity compared to the wild type TCR expressing cells. These results open the door of rational TCR design for adoptive transfer cancer therapy.

2013 Iowa DOT Engineering Intern Development and Management Program, 13-464, 2013

The Institute for Transportation (InTrans) at Iowa State University (ISU) developed an internship mentoring program in collaboration with the Iowa Department of Transportation (DOT) to provide additional mentorship to both student interns and Iowa DOT intern managers. For the summer 2013 Iowa DOT Engineering Intern Development and Management Program, this report summarizes the following: * Mentoring activities conducted by ISU; * Results of the different intern program success assessments that were conducted; * Experiences, lessons learned, and recommendations; * Program benefits that were realized.