Explains how and why ramps and other inclined planes are used in everyday life.

With talent shortages looming over the next decade, what can companies do to attract and retain the large number of professional women who are forced off the career highway? By documenting the successful efforts of a group of cutting-edge global companies to retain talented women and reintegrate them if they’ve already left, Off-Ramps and On-Ramps answers this critical question. Working closely with companies such as Ernst & Young, Goldman Sachs, Time Warner, General Electric and others, author Sylvia Ann Hewlett identifies what works and why. Based on firsthand experience with these companies, along with extensive data that provides the most comprehensive and nuanced portrait of women's career paths, this book documents the actions forward-thinking companies must take to reverse the female brain drain and ensure their access to talent over the long term.

This synthesis will be of interest to highway design engineers, maintenance personnel, safety and enforcement officials, traffic engineers, and others responsible for the safe operation of large trucks on highways. Information is provided on the critical aspects of site location, design criteria, and maintenance procedures, and their relationship to truck escape ramp performance. The safety of truck drivers, other road users, and occupants of roadside properties is often imperiled by the combination of heavy trucks and steep downgrades on highways. Frequently, gearing down, applying the brakes, and using the retarding power of the engine are not sufficient to control the truck, and serious crashes can result. Many states have constructed truck escape ramps to safely remove runaway trucks from the traffic stream. This report of the Transportation Research Board provides information on the location, design, construction materials, geometrics, and construction costs of truck escape ramps. Operational considerations, such as descriptions of advance warning signs, traffic control devices at the ramp, and vehicle removal procedures are described. Information on frequency and type of usage, maintenance of the ramps, and driver-related issues is also included.

Nearly twenty percent of Americans live today with some sort of disability, and this number will grow in coming decades as the population ages. Despite this, the U.S. health care system is not set up to provide care comfortably, safely, and efficiently to persons with disabilities. Individuals with disabilities can therefore face significant barriers to obtaining high quality health care. Some barriers result from obvious impediments, such as doors without automatic openers and examining tables that are too high. Other barriers arise from faulty communication between patients and health care professionals, including misconceptions among clinicians about the daily lives, preferences, values, and abilities of persons with disabilities. Yet additional barriers relate to health insurance limits on items and services essential to maximizing health and independence. This book examines the health care experiences of persons who are blind, deaf, hard of hearing, or who have difficulties using their legs, arms, or hands. The book then outlines strategies for overcoming or circumventing barriers to care, starting by just asking persons with disabilities about workable solutions. Creating safe and accessible health care for persons with disabilities will likely benefit everyone at some point. This book has three parts. The first part looks at the historical roots of healthcare access for persons with disabilities in the United States. The second part discusses the current situation and the special challenges for those with disabilities. The third part looks forward to discuss the ways in which healthcare quality and access can improve.

The Social Contract -- Rousseau's famous term concerning the bond between a government and it's people -- has been sold to the highest bidder. Freedom is reserved only for markets in a society increasingly strangled by corporate of power.Empowerment is the new definition of destitution.By looking at the struggles of the disabled faced with the end of social services, Ending the Social Contract as We Know It provides a powerful warning: the disabled are as canaries in a coal mine, and their maltreatment is a harbinger of things to come for the rest of us.In a tightly woven argument, Marta Russell shows how the onslaught of corporate power facing the disabled -- from issues like genetic screening, to restricted access to health care, to welfare reform -- will shortly be faced by a much broader segment of society.

Finally, the defendant was called to testify. The air went from lighthearted post-lunch chatting to dour and intense. Judging from the sudden solemnity, one might have imagined that this trial was for drug trafficking or a violent crime. But it was about something that had much more profound implications: picking plants—specifically, wild onions." This article appears in the Summer 2012 issue of Southern Cultures. The full issue is also available as an ebook. Southern Cultures is published quarterly (spring, summer, fall, winter) by the University of North Carolina Press. The journal is sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for the Study of the American South.

Among the many GPCRs discovered, the calcitonin family of receptors comprise of members that regulate a number of physiological processes and are involved in many pathological conditions. Therefore, understanding how these receptors function is a critical question in the field. When Foord and his colleagues discovered that a single transmembrane protein called Receptor Activity Modifying Proteins (RAMPs) could modulate the surface expression of GPCRs of the calcitonin family, it widely opened the field of receptor life cycle. Hundreds of studies have confirmed the importance of RAMPs in the life cycle of this receptor family. Receptor biology is a rapidly expanding field and with the advances in cell and molecular biology and in vivo techniques, it is very likely that the field of RAMPs will explode further and many unanswered questions will be answered with in the next few years.

Ramp tricks—skate moves made on, over, or around wood ramps, cement bowls, and half-pipes—are a key, albeit challenging, component of skateboarding. Hundreds of captioned, sequential photographs demonstrate precisely how these exacting moves are safely made in this indispensable guide to 40 ramp tricks. Beginning with basic moves, including stalls, grinds, and slides, skaters gradually learn the particular positioning and balance needed to perform more advanced tricks such as flips and airs. A brief history of ramp skateboarding examines the birth of the genre as well as champions of the sport, including the pioneering Dogtown Crew and current stars Bob Burnquist and Tony Hawk.

How the United States underdeveloped Appalachia Appalachia—among the most storied and yet least understood regions in America—has long been associated with poverty and backwardness. But how did this image arise and what exactly does it mean? In Ramp Hollow, Steven Stoll launches an original investigation into the history of Appalachia and its place in U.S. history, with a special emphasis on how generations of its inhabitants lived, worked, survived, and depended on natural resources held in common. Ramp Hollow traces the rise of the Appalachian homestead and how its self-sufficiency resisted dependence on money and the industrial society arising elsewhere in the United States—until, beginning in the nineteenth century, extractive industries kicked off a “scramble for Appalachia” that left struggling homesteaders dispossessed of their land. As the men disappeared into coal mines and timber camps, and their families moved into shantytowns or deeper into the mountains, the commons of Appalachia were, in effect, enclosed, and the fate of the region was sealed. Ramp Hollow takes a provocative look at Appalachia, and the workings of dispossession around the world, by upending our notions about progress and development. Stoll ranges widely from literature to history to economics in order to expose a devastating process whose repercussions we still feel today.