Development of a Mechanistic Method to Obtain Load Position Strain in Instrumented Pavement

To study the in-situ response and performance of asphalt pavement, instrumenting pavement with a variety of sensors has become one of the most important tools in the field or accelerated load facilities. In the dynamic response collection process, engineers are more concerned with the load position strain of the pavement structure due to wheel wander. This paper proposes a method to obtain the load position and the strain at the load position when there is no lateral-axis positioning system based on multilayer elastic theory. The test section was paved in the field with installed strain sensors to verify and apply the proposed method. The verification results showed that both the calculated load position and load position strain matched the measured values with an absolute difference range of 5–60 mm, 0.5–2.5 με, respectively. The application results showed that the strain at the load position calculated by the proposed method had a good correlation with the temperature, as expected.

PsyBuilder: An open-source cross-platform graphical experiment builder with built-in performance optimization for behavioral and neural sciences

Central in an experimental psychologist’s toolkit is software for stimulus presentation and response collection. An ideal package should combine flexibility and power in the choice of stimuli and responses, precision in control and timing, and ease of use. Psychtoolbox has remained the most popular open-source package, but it suffers from two major long-standing limitations: being script-based only, Psychtoolbox is challenging to learn and time-consuming to program and debug; scripting can also lead to timing inaccuracies unwittingly. We dissolve these limitations by developing the first general-purpose graphical experiment builder for Psychtoolbox, called PsyBuilder, which allows users to graphically implement sophisticated experimental tasks through intuitive drag-and-drop without the need of coding and with built-in optimized timing precision. PsyBuilder is poised to facilitate wider adoption of Psychtoolbox in teaching and research in lieu of proprietary software, fueling the open science movement. Furthermore, its built-in performance optimization and drag-and-drop design can improve data-collection efficiency and accuracy to accelerate scientific progress.

Collecting COVID at the California State University: Shared Approaches, Divergent Implementations

COVID-19 is a paradigm-shattering development which will have far-ranging effects, many still unforeseen and unanticipated. Community collecting initiatives provide insight and local-level perspectives to momentous events. Examined with other institutions’ holdings, these collecting initiatives illustrate larger trends and allow for a comparative look at reflections and reactions toward historic happenings like the ongoing pandemic. When the virus first spread, rapid-response collection was at the foremost thoughts of many California State University (CSU) archivists. Thankfully, the CSU’s 23 campuses have a robust community of archival practice, called the CSU Archives and Archivists Roundtable (CSUAAR). CSU archivists engaged each other promptly by conversing, collaborating, supporting, and sharing. We will discuss the community of practice at the CSU, highlight how the CSUAAR facilitated projects and developed some shared approaches to collecting efforts, and illustrate three different rapid-response collecting projects developed at the university level (CSU Bakersfield, CSU Northridge, and CSU San Marcos).

An introduction to the Objective Psychophysics Toolbox (o_ptb)

The Psychophysics Toolbox (PTB) is one of the most popular toolboxes for the development of experimental paradigms. It is a very powerful library, providing low-level, platform independent access to the devices used in an experiment such as the graphics and the sound card. While this low-level design results in a high degree of flexibility and power, writing paradigms that interface the PTB directly might lead to code that is hard to read, maintain, reuse and debug. Running an experiment in different facilities or organizations further requires it to work with various setups that differ in the availability of specialized hardware for response collection, triggering and presentation of auditory stimuli. The Objective Psychophysics Toolbox (o_ptb) provides an intuitive, unified and clear interface, built on top of the PTB that enables researchers to write readable, clean and concise code. In addition to presenting the architecture of the o_ptb, the results of a timing accuracy test are presented. Exactly the same Matlab code was run on two different systems, one of those using the VPixx system. Both systems showed sub-millisecond accuracy.

Computers: Applications to the Quantification of Human Behavior

This paper discusses the use of computing machines in the biological and social sciences, namely the ultilization of computerized behavior analysis systems in the quantification of human behavior. Only systems of which living human organisms are a part are considered. Some specific functional uses of computers for stimulus preparation and presentation, response collection, and apparatus scheduling and control are presented. All of these functions may be performed by automated systems characterized by the amount of experimental integration and control performed by the computer. Systems types include on-line open-loop, on-line closed loop single or multiple purpose, and off-line. The multiple-man, multiple-purpose system which permits numerous automated investigations upon different source subjects to occur simultaneously is highlighted as the culmination of current automated behavioral analysis systems. But the possibility of behavioral scientists “tapping” into operating systems is presented as possibly having revolutionary consequences with respect to the data gathering of human behaviour. Finally, a general automated behavioral analysis system schematic assists in discussing current advantages, potential advances, and impending limitations of contributions of computers to the quantification of human behavior.