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Managing designing for safety: a framework for whole-team decision making and risk control
Full text linkDesigning for Safety (DfS) aims to make designs inherently safer to build, operate and maintain, but any residual risk must be controlled, something essential to realising the benefits of inherently safer designs. Here, a conceptual decision-making framework to support DfS, developed in conjunction with industry, is introduced. It aims to assist designers in communicating risk, residual risk and actions needed to support DfS, in a way easily understood by non-specialists such as clients and business leaders. The framework proposes a qualitative categorisation for DfS linked to a clear numerical scale, which embraces the complexity of engineering assessment across the full asset lifecycle, while using a form of language (numbers) that can be readily understood by all. The framework was empirically explored through an operational design workshop with the four engineers leading design and planning teams on the framework. It was found to bring a range of benefits for DfS at the design stage: it provided structure for the discussion of DfS, made the consideration of DfS objective, gave a new vernacular which improved the collective thought process, and made the debate and the resultant design decisions more accessible to non-specialists. The framework provides a tool to support the implementation of DfS across the entire lifecycle of an asset, enhancing DfS communication within the decision making process from the initial strategic definition stage onwards
The current state of concussion knowledge and attitudes in British American Football
Full text linkObjectives
To examine concussion knowledge and concussion attitudes of players, coaches, and support staff in British American Football (BAF).
Methods
Data from players, coaches and support staff (n = 236) were collected from across all leagues in BAF. An online survey tool was used which included the Rosenbaum Concussion Knowledge and Attitudes Survey (RoCKAS), and questions examining concussion education and perceived risk of participating in football.
Results
The mean score on the RoCKAS concussion knowledge was 21.0 ± 2.1 of a possible score of 25 reflecting good knowledge. Of a possible score of 65, the mean concussion attitude score was 55.6 ± 6.1 showing safe attitude. Whilst an overall safe attitude was seen, almost half of participants (45.3%) noted they would continue to play with a concussion. No relationship was found between CAI and prior concussion history. Fifty seven percent of participants agreed the benefits of playing football outweighed the risks. Forty eight percent reported that they had received no concussion-related education in the past 12 months.
Conclusion
BAF participants have good concussion knowledge and safe attitudes. However, risky behavior is demonstrated through unsafe likelihood to report and attitude to long-term health risks. Access to the British American Football Association (BAFA) concussion policy and education was poor raising questions over what sources of information stakeholders are drawing their knowledge from. These findings can help form the foundation of educational interventions (e.g. coaching workshops) to challenge current misconceptions and improve likelihood to report concussion in BAF
Is the 'Appropriate Adult' appropriate?
No full textIt is recognised that children are particularly vulnerable within the criminal justice system and therefore should be afforded ‘appropriate assistance’ pursuant to Article 37 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Within England and Wales, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 states that all individuals under the age of 18 must be provided with an appropriate adult to provide advice and assistance, facilitate communication and ensure the child is being treated fairly. This chapter considers whether the appropriate adult, who can be a family member, social worker or volunteer, is appropriate to safeguard the child’s rights, entitlements and welfare whilst they are in police custody. The chapter will examine whether lawyers, as a consequence of their legal knowledge and skills, are better placed to protect the interests of a child in police custody, and if so, whether the role of the appropriate adult should be redefined to support the child’s emotional welfare and facilitate their relationship with the lawyer
Image Editing based Data Augmentation for Illumination-insensitive Background Subtraction
Full text linkA core challenge in background subtraction (BGS) is handling videos with sudden illumination changes in consecutive frames. While the use of data augmentation has been shown to increase robustness, the modelling of realistic illumination changes remains less explored and is usually limited to global, static brightness adjustments. In this paper, we focus on tackling the problem of background subtraction using augmented training data, and propose an augmentation method which vastly improves the model's performance under challenging illumination conditions. In particular, our framework consists of a local component that considers direct light/shadow and lighting angles, and a global component that considers the overall contrast, sharpness and color saturation of the image. It generates realistic, structured training data with different illumination conditions, enabling our deep learning system to be trained effectively for background subtraction even when significant illumination changes take place. We further propose a post-processing method that removes noise from the output binary map of segmentation, resulting in a cleaner, more accurate segmentation map that can generalise to multiple scenes of different conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system outperforms existing work, with the highest F-measure score of 81.27% obtained by the full system. To facilitate the research in the field, we open the source code of this project at: https://github.com/dksakkos/illumination_augmentatio
Moral regulation and a good moral panic: UK Polish migrant workers and the 2016 EU Referendum
Full text linkThe UK 2016 EU Referendum has introduced a period of uncertainty for both the indigenous population and for non-British citizens. This uncertainty is considered within a framework of the recent revisions in the sociology of moral panics through an analysis of interviews with Polish migrant workers. This analysis reveals two main discursive framing logics. The first logic refers to a self-reported anti-Polish migrant moral panic discourse that – according to respondents – was exploited by British anti-migrant campaigners. The second type of articulation illustrates the good moral panic logic, namely, a panicking discourse appearing among respondents about the vulnerability of their community in post-Referendum Britain. This article, however, problematises the good moral panic logic by eliciting competing narratives found in the interview data. The latter did not aim merely at stimulating caring attitudes but referred also to moral regulation techniques to manage Brexit-oriented risks and avoid the trap of becoming a vulnerable migrant
The Effect of Education on Homeownership: Evidence from 20th Century School Attendance Laws in the United States
Full text linkThis article examines the causal impact of schooling on the probability of homeownership using decennial US Census data between 1960 and 2000. This is done by employing an instrumental variable approach that exploits historical changes in state mandatory schooling and child labour laws which affected the educational attainment of individuals with relatively low levels of schooling. Aggregate results suggest that policy-induced increases in schooling at the bottom of the educational distribution have a positive impact on homeownership rates of 1.9 percentage points. Disaggregated results reveal that the impact of education is highest among individuals who are located in the middle and top terciles of the income distribution with no effect of additional education in the lowest tercile. These results add to the growing body of literature which suggests that education may lead to positive outcomes beyond labour market earnings
Only a paper moon: The Artemis Accords and future human settlements
No full textProject Artemis was announced in 2017 planning to send women and men back to the Moon. Through this project, the United States is seeking to create an enduring and sustainable presence on the Moon in partnership between NASA, the private sector, and international collaborators. The announcement of the Artemis Accords at the virtual 71st International Astronautical Congress was the result of a concerted diplomatic effort and the Accords are seeking to codify the way in which a sustained presence on the Moon would comport within established international agreements. Foundational principles for regulating the activities of states in outer space were laid down in the Outer Space Treaty 1967. But the Treaty contains no real detail of how humans might establish a society in space beyond a prohibition on State appropriation of outer space and celestial bodies (Article II), forbidding military bases (Article IV), and making states internationally responsible for their national space activities, including non-governmental entities (Article VI). The Moon Agreement of 1979 attempted to codify provisions relating to exploration and the management of resources, but this was largely repudiated by the international community, including China, Russia, and the United States.There has been considerable academic discussion of the way in which the Accords interact with the existing international law. This discussion will touch upon that, whilst seeking to address the broader question about the evolution of space law. The question of the significance of the Accords will be addressed giving consideration as to the role that the Accords could have in shaping the way in which future human settlements might be governed beyond the terms of existing space treaties. It has been identified that a key problem, when considering any form of off-world governance, is the lack of an underpinning shared value system upon which to base any subsequent regulatory or governance structure. As much as the Accords may represent a new epoch in space law, it is timely to ask whether they are another step towards identifying areas of commonality around which new space settlements can coalesce
Designing graded fuel cell electrodes for proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells with recurrent neural network (RNN) approaches
Full text linkThe graded distribution of Pt loading in the catalyst layer (CL) and the porosity of the gas diffusion layer (GDL) significantly affect the spatial distributions of electrochemical reaction and mass transport rates, thus influencing the cell performance and durability. A sophisticated physics-based model is established to study the influence of graded Pt loading and GDL porosity at the cathode, with their distribution function obeying the elliptic equation along the in-plane and through-plane directions, on the current density and its uniformity at a given cell voltage. To reduce the computational time and resources, an RNN algorithm-based data-driven surrogate model is developed to assist in the identification of the relationship between the design parameters and the objective functions. Latin hypercube sampling (LHS) method is implemented for sampling and then the initial data acquisition is conducted for training and testing the surrogate model. Results show that the machine learning (ML) algorithm could effectively assist the optimal design of the functionally graded electrode, and the surrogate model achieves > 97.9 prediction accuracy for current density and < 0.13 root mean square error (RMSE) for current homogeneity. Both the individual variation of Pt loading and GDL porosity and their interaction are respectively analysed. Results also indicate that the inhomogeneous Pt distribution improves the current density. On the contrary, GDL porosity has a greater impact on the cell performance since current density monotonically increases with the homogeneous GDL porosity. When both the inhomogeneous distributions of Pt loading and GDL porosity are simultaneously considered, the homogeneity of current density is improved. However, the improvement of the homogeneity of current density (increases by 54) sacrifices the maximum current density (reduces by 22)
Pressure Driven Adsorption Cycle Integrated with Thermal Desalination
Full text linkThe canned food market is growing at an annually average rate of 3.6% due to easy access and awareness of dietary requirements, leading to a surge in water withdrawal and an estimated supply-demand gap of 40% by 2030. The conventional desalination processes are not sustainable due to high energy requirements and chemicals injection. The adsorption cycle is an emerging technology for desalination due to its temperature operation. It has many advantages over conventional desalination processes including integration synergy to improve overall performance. The conventional AD cycle processes, however, have lower performance due to inefficient packing of adsorbent in the beds and heat transfer losses to their massive heat exchangers. In this article, we propose an innovative pressure driven adsorption (PDAD) cycle to overcome conventional AD cycle limitations. In PDAD, firstly, low pressure steam is used to regenerate the adsorbent which eliminates the huge infrastructure requirement of water circulation and secondly, steam selectively extracts water vapours from pores, reducing energy consumption. We have tested the PDAD pilot and showed successful regeneration of silica gel at motive steam pressure of 2–5 bar. We also demonstrate that discharge steam from the PDAD at 65 °C can be used as a heat source for a multi effect desalination system when operating in hybrid mode to overcome its operational limitations. Our experiments show that the MED + PDAD cycle increases water production by up to 22% as compared to an earlier hybrid MEDAD cycle. The proposed system has excellent thermodynamic synergy with the combined CCGT power and desalination plant, where low-pressure bleed steam can be utilized more efficiently