This is to certify that I have examined this copy of a master's thesis by WEI CHEN and have found that it is complete and satisfactory in all respects, and that any and all revisions required by the final examining committee have been made. Principal Investigator of this project, for his inspiration and direction on this research. Throughout my study in University of Minnesota, he provided pati...

IN T R O D U C T IO N More than 76,000 miles of roads are under county control in Indiana—a responsibility for county road authorities which almost defies measurement. The magnitude of the task is indicated, however, by two factors: annual expenditures, which in 1958 totaled over $40 million, and employment, which totaled several thousand persons. This responsibility places great problems on th...

We exploit historical data on planned highways, railroads, and exploration routes as sources of exogenous variation, in order to estimate the effect of interstate highways on regional innovation: a 10% increase in a region?s stock of highways causes a 1.7% increase in regional patenting over a five-year period. In terms of the mechanism, we report evidence that roads facilitate local knowledge ...

The objective of this paper is to present review on the axle used in railways to have better performance with minimum losses to railways . There are various material which is used for manufacturing axle. This paper gives the summary and range of various material used in the railway axle and our aim is to find stresses on axle and is to reduce the maintainence cost stresses as well as increase t...

Two new studies reveal the role of microtubule polarity in the asymmetric localization of mRNAs. In this issue of Cell, Zimyanin et al. (2008) show that the asymmetric localization of oskar mRNA in fruit fly oocytes results from a slight bias in the direction of its transport. Meanwhile, Messitt et al. (2008) reporting in Developmental Cell find a subpopulation of microtubules that is critical ...

Horizontal alignment is a major roadway characteristic used in safety and operational evaluations of many facility types. The Highway Safety Manual (HSM) uses this characteristic in crash prediction models for rural two-lane highways, freeway segments, and freeway ramps/C-D roads. Traffic simulation models use this characteristic in their processes on almost all types of facilities. However, a ...