FHWA's Covered Bridge Manual — Focused on Engineering and Construction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21) as amended by the TEA-21 Restoration Act established the National Historic Covered Bridge Preservation Program (NHCBPP). This program includes preservation of covered bridges that are listed, or are eligible for listing, on the National Register of Historic Places. Beyond its primary funding focus on actual construction work on historic covered bridges, the program also includes funding of research for better means of restoring and protecting covered bridges. Technology transfer is encouraged to disseminate information on covered bridges as a means of preserving our cultural heritage. The development of the Covered Bridge Manual (hereinafter referred to as the manual) is one of the research projects funded through NHCBPP — Contract No. DTFH61-00-C-001161 that culminated in Report No. FHWA-HRT-04-098. The author of this paper was the Principal Investigator and primary author of the manual. The broad objectives of the NHCBPP research program are to find means and methods to restore and rehabilitate historic covered bridges to preserve our heritage using advanced technologies, and to assist in rehabilitating and restoring these bridges. The specific objectives of this research project are to provide comprehensive support to those readers involved with maintaining, assessing, strengthening, or rehabilitating any covered bridge. The manual is intended primarily for engineers and historic bridge preservationists to provide technical and historical information on preservation of covered bridges. It will also be of interest to others involved with these bridges—including lay people, owners, and contractors. The manual is separated into several sections with a number of chapters devoted to the specifics of each. The sections include background, description of bridge components, technical engineering issues, existing bridges, and references. The appendices include multiple case studies of existing bridge rehabilitation and construction of new authentic covered bridges. This paper and the corresponding presentation to be made at the 2008 ASCE Structures Congress in Vancouver, BC, will provide: 1 a summary of the manual, 2 discussion of the special challenges confronting engineers when working on covered bridges, 3 an update on research related to covered bridges, and 4 highlights of rehabilitation of a number of covered bridges.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.089 | 0.036 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".