One theory argues that state ownership of infrastructure is greater in poor countries because the social returns from investment exceed the private returns by a wider margin. Another theory argues that state ownership is greater when legal and political institutions provide weak enforcement of private property rights or weak limits on government excess. I test these theories using cross-country...

The Commander, Eighth Coast Guard District, issued a temporary deviation from the regulation governing the operation of the CSX Railroad Swing Span Bridge across Chickasaw Creek, mile 0.0, in Mobile, Alabama. The deviation is necessary to replace railroad ties on the bridge. This deviation allows the bridge to remain closed for eight hours on March 8, 2011. DATES: This deviation is effective fr...

Ballast degradation can cause poor drainage, settlement and reduced lateral stability, which adversely affect railroad track safety and performance. Two indices are commonly used in the North American railroad industry to quantify the level of ballast degradation. These are (i) Fouling Index (FI) and (ii) Percentage Fouling (PF). Identifying these two traditional indices involve ballast samplin...

The rolling surface for railroad wheels can be a heat source that may have an impact on the performance of the wheel bearing. In this study, experimental data from an electrically-heated railroad wheel set is analyzed by constructing thermal models of the wheel set. A steady finite-element model, a steady-analytical model, and a transient lumped-parameter model are discussed. Model parameters a...

Background and objective The Modified Look-Locker Inversion-Recovery (MOLLI) sequence (Messroghli, et al, JMRI, 2007) was optimized for myocardial T1 mapping on 1.5T. However, little data exists on T1 mapping at 3T. The standard MOLLI sequence uses three inversion-recovery blocks to acquire 11 images over 17 heartbeats (HB). The long breath hold could limit its clinical application in patients ...

Background Regular physical activity over a long time period leads to a cardiac adaptation described as “athlete’s heart”. The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of intensive daily training in a specific type of sportsprofessional soccer, in regard to morphological and functional left ventricular parameters assessed by cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMRI) and to compare the...

This study develops an integrated data-driven and model-driven approach (template matching) that clusters the urban railroad point clouds into three classes of rail track, contact cable, and catenary cable. The employed dataset covers 630 m of the Dutch urban railroad corridors in which there are four rail tracks, two contact cables, and two catenary cables. The dataset includes only geometrica...

For generations of scholars and observers, the "transportation revolution," especially the railroad, has loomed large as a dominant factor in the settlement and development of the United States in the nineteenth century. There has, however, been considerable debate as to whether transportation improvements led economic development or simply followed. Using a newly developed GIS transportation d...