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Excessive weight and a growing number of permit vehicles can cause an accelerated bridge damage. Therefore, there is a need to better control operation of heavy permit vehicles. This paper presents an approach to assess bridge life consumption by permit loads. An economic lifetime of a bridge is considered in terms of the number of load cycles to failure so that the structure has to be replaced. Each passage of a truck causes one or more load cycles and thus reduces or consumes a part of the total remaining fatigue life. An incremental consumption equation is derived, and it allows to convert fatigue damage to dollar damage by considering the bridge construction cost, traffic volume, and bridge parameters. The incremental consumption covers only weight exceeding the legal limits. This consumption approach is presented for representative average values and the individual consumption approach with the GIS system using Florida as an example. A developed approach can help state agencies to establish a rational and fair permit fee structure. The methodology is transparent and can be used by any state utilizing the available databases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Pediatric teams of emergency departments work under extreme stress, which affects high-level cognitive functions, specifically attention and memory. Therefore, the methods of stress management are being sought. Mindfulness as a process of intentionally paying attention to each moment with acceptance of each experience without judgment can potentially contribute to improving the performance of medical teams. Medical simulation is a technique that creates a situation to allow persons to experience a representation of a real event for the purpose of education. It has been shown that emergency medicine simulation may create a high physiological fidelity environment similarly to what is observed in a real emergency room. The aim of our study was to determine whether the technical and non-technical skills of medical students in the course of pediatric high fidelity simulations are related to their mindfulness and stress. Participants and methods: A total of 166 standardized simulations were conducted amongstudents of medicine in three simulation centers of medical universities, assessing: stress sensation (subjectively and heart rate/blood pressure), technical (checklists) and non-technical skills (Ottawa scale) and mindfulness (five facet mindfulness questionnaire): ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT03761355. Results: The perception of stress amongstudents was lower and more motivating if they were more mindful. Mindfulness of students correlated positively with avoiding fixation error. In the consecutive simulations the leaders' non-technical skills improved, although no change was noted in their technical skills. Conclusion: The results of our research indicate that mindfulness influence the non-technical skills and the perception of stress of medical students during pediatric emergency simulations. Further research is needed to show whether mindfulness training leads to improvement in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Proposing a new performance-based design concerning the fatigue failure of pavements. • Presenting a new limit state function for accumulative fatigue failure. • The target reliability indices were recommended for the given performance level. Fatigue is one of the most common types of distress in asphalt pavement due to traffic loading. Pavements are steadily deteriorating from a long-term issue of cracking resulting in reduced durability and increased maintenance cost. While limit states design methods have been adopted to enhance the service life of pavements, literature demands development in performance-based design models for these infrastructures. Hence, this study proposed a new performance-based design procedure for fatigue characterization of asphalt pavements at various performance levels. To do so, a performance-based limit state function was utilized to measure the reliability level of the pavements concerning accumulative fatigue failure. Then, the severity levels of the loading scenarios were defined based on the statistical analysis of the random variable WIM (weigh-in-motion) data and the pavement resistance formulated using the rational performance levels. Accordingly, the structural reliability analysis was conducted to determine the reliability level of the existing pavement condition. Eventually, the observed reliability indices were recommended to assure the reliability concern under the given performance level subjected to considered loading scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]