2,568 research outputs found
Report of the inquiry into the loss of Autosub2 under the Fimbulisen
No full textThe Board of inquiry into the loss of Autosub2 under the Fimbulisen found that the loss was caused by a technical systems failure on the AUV. A comprehensive analysis was made of the technical reasons for the loss. However, because it was not possible to recover the AUV from under the ice shelf for direct examination, it was not possible to identify the actual cause of loss. Consequently an assessment was made of the likelihood of different failure modes causing the loss. The results of this analysis suggest that the loss was equally likely to have come about from an Abort Command (AC) as a Loss of Power (LP). A root cause analysis was performed which indicated that the source of the failure was most likely to have been a fault introduced during the manufacturing/assembly phase (52%), followed by Maintenance (25%). Design error was considered less likely (14%) while Operations (7%) and External factors (1%) were considered least likely.This analysis indicates that the greatest benefits to reliability improvements are most likely to come from attention to faults originating in the manufacturing and assembly stage, followed by attention to faults arising from maintenance activities. Due to the large numbers of connections and leakage paths, it is necessary to pay particular attention to the reliability of electrical connectors and harnesses. A high level of quality assurance in manufacture and assembly is required to achieve an acceptable level of system reliability.While it was accepted that the development team at NOC had adopted sound engineering practices in the development of the AUV and that reliability considerations had informed design decisions, the design team had no formally implemented reliability or technical risk assessment procedures to support design decision making. This was considered to be a major management weakness
Benchmarking risk management practice within the water utility sector
No full textExplicit approaches to risk analysis within the water utility sector, traditionally
applied to occupational health and safety and public health protection, are now seeing
broader application in contexts including corporate level decision making, asset
management, watershed protection and network reliability. Our research suggested that
neither the development of novel risk analysis techniques nor the refinement of existing
ones was of paramount importance in improving the capabilities of water utilities to
manage risk. It was thought that a more fruitful approach would be to focus on the
implementation of risk management rather than the techniques employed per se.
Thus, we developed a prescriptive capability maturity model for benchmarking
the maturity of implementation of water utility risk management practice, and applied it
to the sector via case study and benchmarking survey. We observed risk management
practices ranging from the application of hazard and operability studies, to the use of
scenario planning in guiding organisational restructuring programmes. We observed
methods for their institutionalisation, including the use of initiation criteria for applying
risk analysis techniques; the adoption of formalised procedures to guide their
application; and auditing and peer reviews to ensure procedural compliance and provide
quality assurance.
We then built upon this research to develop a descriptive1 capability maturity
model of utility risk analysis and risk based decision making practice, and described its
case study application. The contribution to knowledge of this stage of the research was
three-fold, we: synthesized empirical observations with behavioral and normative theories to codify the processes of risk analysis and risk based decision making; placed
these processes within a maturity framework which distinguishes their relative maturity
of implementation from ad hoc to adaptive; and provided a comparative analysis of risk
analysis and risk based decision making practices, and their maturity of
implementation, across a range of utility functions.
The research provides utility managers, technical staff, project managers and
chief finance officers with a practical and systematic understanding of how to
implement and improve risk management, and offers preliminary guidance to regulators
concerning how improved water utility governance can be made real
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Preliminary Geologic Map of the North Half of the Union Pass Quadrangle, Mohave County, Arizona
No full textPreliminary Geologic Map of the North Half of the Union Pass Quadrangle, Mohave County, Arizona. Includes one map sheet with cross section at 1:24,000 map scale.On 1/17/2014, F.L. Hillemeyer's name was removed from the author list per his request. (The request was forwarded to AZGS by J.E. Faulds.)Documents in the AZGS Document Repository collection are made available by the Arizona Geological Survey (AZGS) and the University Libraries at the University of Arizona. For more information about items in this collection, please contact [email protected]
Building and Defining Behavioral Economics
No full textContains fulltext :
95156.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access)George Loewenstein, a prominent behavioral economist, recalls thatIn 1994, when Thaler, Camerer, Rabin, Prelec and I spent the year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, we had a meeting to make a kind of final decision about what to call what we were doing. Remarkably, at that time, the name behavioral economics was not yet well established. I actually advocated “psychological economics,” and Thaler was strong on behavioral economics. I'm kind of glad that he prevailed; I think it's a better, catchier, label, although it creates confusion due to association with Behaviorism. (G. Loewenstein, personal email to author, June 16, 2008
The IPHAS catalogue of H alpha emission-line sources in the northern Galactic plane
No full textWe present a catalogue of point-source H alpha emission-line objects selected from the INT/WFC Photometric Ha Survey (IPHAS) of the northern Galactic plane. The catalogue covers the magnitude range 13 <= r' <= 19.5 and includes Northern hemisphere sources in the Galactic latitude range -5 degrees < b < 5 degrees. It is derived from similar to 1500 deg(2) worth of imaging data, which represents 80 per cent of the final IPHAS survey area. The electronic version of the catalogue will be updated once the full survey data become available. In total, the present catalogue contains 4853 point sources that exhibit strong photometric evidence for Ha emission. We have so far analysed spectra for similar to 300 of these sources, confirming more than 95 per cent of them as genuine emission-line stars. A wide range of stellar populations are represented in the catalogue, including early-type emission-line stars, active late-type stars, interacting binaries, young stellar objects and compact nebulae.
The spatial distribution of catalogue objects shows overdensities near sites of recent or current star formation, as well as possible evidence for the warp of the Galactic plane. Photometrically, the incidence of Ha emission is bimodally distributed in (r' - i'). The blue peak is made up mostly of early-type emission-line stars, whereas the red peak may signal an increasing contribution from other objects, such as young/active low-mass stars. We have cross-matched our H alpha-excess catalogue against the emission-line star catalogue of Kohoutek & Wehmeyer, as well as against sources in SIMBAD. We find that fewer than 10 per cent of our sources can be matched to known objects of any type. Thus IPHAS is uncovering an order of magnitude more faint (r' > 13) emission-line objects than were previously known in the Milky Way
Risk management capabilities - towards 'mindfulness' for the international water utility sector
No full textPublic health protection must be the primary goal of a drinking water utility;
delivered through supplying safe drinking water. For complex multi-utilities,
this goal may come under pressure from the need to manage a plethora of business
risks. We describe a risk management maturity model for assessing the capacity
of utilities to manage business risks and comment on the importance of
‘mindfulness' as a prerequisite for effective risk manageme
Tools and techniques - what we need or what people think we want?
No full textINTRODUCTION: Traditionally, water utilities have carried out risk assessments in a relatively small number of fields, addressing specific safety, health and environmental (SHE) risk concerns. In the last few years, however, the use of risk techniques has been extended as these companies increasingly seek to establish sound risk governance throughout all levels of their business to safeguard the interests of their customers and investors. Many new techniques have been imported from other process industries (offshore, energy supply, nuclear) and other businesses and financial institutions. In many respects, risk management is a practitioner led discipline and as such, its development and implementation within water utilities can vary significantly according to their size, operations, ownership and leadership, as well as the political, economic, legislative and regulatory frameworks in which they operate. As part of the ongoing AwwaRF Project 2939 ‘Risk analysis strategies for more credible and defensible decisions, studies have been undertaken in order to better understand the current level of application of risk analysis within the sector and to identify sector-specific views on key implementation issues. This research has realised the development of a maturity model for assessing capabilities in risk management and has also included a series of structured interviews with utility risk managers and industry spokespeople. Between 13th May, 2004 and 25th January, a total of sixteen interviews were conducted with specialists from five different countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States). Fifteen work primarily within the water sector; the sixteenth works for an energy company. A full summary of this research and its findings will be published in the AwwaRF Project Report. With regard to the topic of risk analysis tools and techniques in the sector, the following key issues emerged: Does anyone use the risk management frameworks in practice? Are they useful and practical? What are the practical limits of, and people views of quantitative risk analysis techniques? Should we and how do we make consistent the various tools and techniques for risk management across utility companies
Testing protoplanetary disc dispersal with radio emission
No full textWe consider continuum free–free radio emission from the upper atmosphere of protoplanetary discs as a probe of the ionized luminosity impinging upon the disc. Making use of previously computed hydrodynamic models of disc photoevaporation within the framework of extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) and X-ray irradiation, we use radiative transfer post-processing techniques to predict the expected free–free emission from protoplanetary discs. In general, the free–free luminosity scales roughly linearly with ionizing luminosity in both EUV- and X-ray-driven scenarios, where the emission dominates over the dust tail of the disc and is partial optically thin at cm wavelengths. We perform a test observation of GM Aur at 14–18?GHz and detect an excess of radio emission above the dust tail to a very high level of confidence. The observed flux density and spectral index are consistent with free–free emission from the ionized disc in either the EUV- or the X-ray-driven scenario. Finally, we suggest a possible route to testing the EUV- and X-ray-driven dispersal model of protoplanetary discs, by combining observed free–free flux densities with measurements of mass-accretion rates. On the point of disc dispersal one would expect to find an M?2? scaling with free–free flux in the case of EUV-driven disc dispersal or an ?* scaling in the case of X-ray-driven disc dispersa
The Benefits of Being Economics Professor A (and not Z)
No full textAlphabetic name ordering on multi-authored academic papers, which is the convention in the economics discipline and various other disciplines, is to the advantage of people whose last name initials are placed early in the alphabet. As it turns out, Professor A, who has been a first author more often than Professor Z, will have published more articles and experienced afaster growth rate over the course of her career as a result of reputation and visibility. Moreover, authors know that name ordering matters and indeed take ordering seriously: Several characteristics of an author group composition determine the decision to deviate from the default alphabetic name order to a significant extent.performance measurement, incentives, economists, name ordering
Pinchi Lake Mercury Belt, British Columbia:
No full textby J.E. Armstrong.Paper (Geological Survey of Canada) ; 42-11
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