Intelligent compaction (IC) is a new technique in the U.S. construction market that uses an instrumented compactor to control soil or asphalt compaction in real time. This technology provides one of the first opportunities to apply process control to civil construction. IC is based on the measurement of the mechanical characteristics of the compacted soil, commonly soil stiffness, but other properties are used also. Initiatives in both the United States and Europe started more than 10 years ago and have demonstrated the technical viability of measuring in situ soil stiffness. The measured soil stiffness is used to estimate or compute in situ soil modulus on the basis of assumptions about soil behavior and the interaction between the compaction machine and the soils. IC offers immense potential benefits in embankment, buried structure, and dam and pavement construction. These benefits–-including improved quality, reduced compaction cost, reduced life-cycle cost, and integration of design with construction and pavement performance–-arise from surface-covering documentation and process control of the compaction operation.
The phrase "family values" currently reverberates in political, religious, and even academic circles. The conversations are complicated and the tone is often heated. Various organizations spend vast sums of money to promulgate their views on issues such as pro-natalism and gay marriage. People argue vigorously about the very nature of the family. Those debates involve important and foundational questions: What is a family? Is there a normative family structure? What does marriage mean? One might think that these questions belong primarily to the purview of sociologists, anthropologists, and ethicists, among others. However, as many of us know, the aforementioned conversations regularly involve appeals to biblical literature. When examining the issue of the Bible and family values, Jay Newman recently wrote, "In modern Western democracies, the religious texts that have had by far the greatest cultural impact have been Biblical texts, so it is not surprising that in recent debates in the West about religion and the family, religious cultural critics and reformers have concentrated much of their attention on the values ostensibly imparted by Biblical texts. Questions thus arise concerning, for example, what family values the Bible actually imparts.. . ," 1 If Newman s assessments are accurate, we biblical scholars have a role to play in the current debates, since who better than one of us is in a position to talk about family values as they are depicted either in the Hebrew Bible or in the New Testament. Within the context of this discourse about family values, one prominent organization, Focus on the Family, has identified five principles or "pillars" that undergird its work of "helping to preserve traditional values and the institution
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