Alternative strategies in the delivery of injury prevention health education

"The primary purpose of this study was to identify health education strategies which are effective in increasing the use of protective devices which can prevent injury. The specific protective device studied was the helmet worn by off-road vehicle [including All-Terrain Vehicles [ATVs] and snowmachines] riders in rural Alaska"--Leaf 3.Thesis (Ed. D.)--Boston University, 1996

Driver attitude and attribution : implications for accident prevention

This study involved self-completion questionnaire-based surveys in which a total of almost 1800 respondents took part. Attributional bias identified by previous research in relation to drivers' causal attributions for road accidents (Preston & Harris, 1965; Clay, 1987) was more fully explored with the aid of both objectively and subjectively culpable driver samples. Banks et al (1977) demonstrated the utility of distinguishing drivers according to culpability in relation to accident fatalaties. The current study examined the utility of distinguishing subjectively culpable, non-culpable, and non-accident driver groups in relation to road accidents with a variety of consequences, in relation to factors which may predispose drivers to accident involvement. This study involved a large sample of drivers who were representative of the general population of licenced drivers in Britain, and specifically focussed samples which allowed the influence of objective and subjective culpability to be ascertained, while a relatively small cross-cultural survey allowed a focus on young drivers (up to 25 years), involving Victorian (Australian) licenced drivers and a sub-sample of young British drivers drawn from the main British sample. The main objectives of the current study were to evaluate drivers' awareness of their potential for active accident avoidance, exploring attribution issues raised by previous research and examining factors which may contribute to road accidents in relation to self-reported accident involvement and culpability and their implications for accident prevention. The main findings were that drivers seemed to have a tendency to attribute more responsibility to "other drivers" than to themselves for accidents in which they had been involved, and to consider that such other drivers had more scope for accident avoidance than they did themselves. Such tendencies, although very considerably reduced, were not eradicated within the driver group deemed culpable by traffic police investigative teams. These findings were broadly consistent with those of Clay (1987) and Preston & Harris (1965), suggesting a lack of awareness of personal influence on accident occurrence, at least to some degree, with implications for accident prevention, the quality of social interaction in the driving environment (Knapper & Cropley, 1980), and the driver's potential to learn from experience. Perhaps more importantly, the other major finding was that clear distinctions could nonetheless be made between drivers in accordance with self-reported accident involvement and culpability in relation to driver affect/state, self-perception, attributions for accident causation, and attitudinal/behavioural tendencies, in a manner which seemed to be meaningful in terms of driver susceptibility to accident risk. Ile pattern of response for accident involvement and culpability effects was then examined in relation to the norms which emerged for age and sex, while the effects of driving experience duration and intensity were examined separately. The second point of focus on any distinctive features of younger driver risk, also allowed assessment of generalizability of findings across cultures, to some degree. The findings appear to have considerable implications for the development of effective accident prevention strategies, while suggesting that further exploration of drivers' causal attribution bias in relation to road accidents and distinctions between drivers according to subjective culpability may offer considerable safety benefits

Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency (NATO COE-DAT Handbook 1)

In 2014 NATO’s Center of Excellence-Defence Against Terrorism (COE-DAT) launched the inaugural course on “Critical Infrastructure Protection Against Terrorist Attacks.” As this course garnered increased attendance and interest, the core lecturer team felt the need to update the course in critical infrastructure (CI) taking into account the shift from an emphasis on “protection” of CI assets to “security and resiliency.” What was lacking in the fields of academe, emergency management, and the industry practitioner community was a handbook that leveraged the collective subject matter expertise of the core lecturer team, a handbook that could serve to educate government leaders, state and private-sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure, academicians, and policymakers in NATO and partner countries. Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency is the culmination of such an effort, the first major collaborative research project under a Memorandum of Understanding between the US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute (SSI), and NATO COE-DAT. The research project began in October 2020 with a series of four workshops hosted by SSI. The draft chapters for the book were completed in late January 2022. Little did the research team envision the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February this year. The Russian occupation of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, successive missile attacks against Ukraine’s electric generation and distribution facilities, rail transport, and cyberattacks against almost every sector of the country’s critical infrastructure have been on world display. Russian use of its gas supplies as a means of economic warfare against Europe—designed to undermine NATO unity and support for Ukraine—is another timely example of why adversaries, nation-states, and terrorists alike target critical infrastructure. Hence, the need for public-private sector partnerships to secure that infrastructure and build the resiliency to sustain it when attacked. Ukraine also highlights the need for NATO allies to understand where vulnerabilities exist in host nation infrastructure that will undermine collective defense and give more urgency to redressing and mitigating those fissures.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1951/thumbnail.jp

Crash

Artists, writers, and filmmakers from Andy Warhol and J. G. Ballard to Alejandro González Iñárritu and Ousmane Sembène have repeatedly used representations of immobilized and crashed cars to wrestle with the conundrums of modernity. In Crash, Karen Beckman argues that representations of the crash parallel the encounter of film with other media, and that these collisions between media offer useful ways to think about alterity, politics, and desire. Examining the significance of automobile collisions in film genres including the “cinema of attractions,” slapstick comedies, and industrial-safety movies, Beckman reveals how the car crash gives visual form to fantasies and anxieties regarding speed and stasis, risk and safety, immunity and contamination, and impermeability and penetration

THE CONSTRUCTION OF LOCAL ROAD SAFETY ISSUES: WHEN LAY AND PROFESSIONAL DISCOURSES COLLIDE

Highway Authorities in the United Kingdom have jurisdiction to control, maintain and improve the local highway network, and the Road Traffic Act 1988 places a duty on such authorities to take preventative measures to reduce road casualties. As such, engineers working for the Highway Authority are on the ‘front-line,’ and are required to deal directly with lay concerns relating to road safety. This study investigates the nature and characteristics of how local road safety issues are raised and how engineers respond to such issues in a local authority setting. A grounded theory methodology was applied in the collection and analysis of this data, and in the generation of subsequent emergent themes. Datasets were established containing textual data from correspondence between the lay public and the authority, and from local press reporting. This was augmented by 47 semi-structured interviews with engineers. The analysis demonstrates that road safety issues and their construction, form a distinct genre. There are certain characteristic structural elements and argumentative approaches, which are oft repeated, in lay formulations of road safety. Road safety issues are played out in a contested field, although engineers may have, in theory, the ‘expertise’ that grants them authority to assess, diagnose and implement mitigation measures; in practice they have little autonomy or control. Regulatory restrictions, political interference, resource impoverishment and a volatile public, severely limit engineers’ independence and discretion. In dealing with the exigencies and pressures of day-to-day front-line public service, engineers deploy certain strategies for ‘managing’ the public. These pragmatic strategies are examined in order to establish how engineers can best effect practical action, in the face of competing and often conflicting demands. In examining the rhetorical organisation of lay argumentative strategies, a ‘popular epidemiology’ of road safety is recreated. This term, borrowed from Brown (1992), encapsulates a folk philosophy with respect to accident causation and the measures that are considered necessary or appropriate to ameliorate/eliminate identified issues. It is suggested that in vivo formulations of road safety issues, such as the ‘accident waiting to happen’ are founded on vague premises, and constitute a category mistake. Projections from phenomenally troubling, yet largely unsubstantiable events, to those with profound material consequences, are neither necessary nor certain. In making decisions on substantial capital investments, engineers, by necessity, are required to assess competing sites on a more epistemically secure metric, namely the police road casualty record

On Counterinsurgency: Firepower, Biopower, and the Collateralization of Milliatry Violence

This dissertation investigates the most recent cycle of North Atlantic expeditionary warfare by addressing the resuscitation of counterinsurgency warfare with a specific focus on the war in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2014. The project interrogates the lasting aesthetic, epistemological, philosophical, and territorial implications of counterinsurgency, which should be understood as part of wider transformations in military affairs in relation to discourses of adaptation, complexity, and systemic design, and to the repertoire of global contingency and stability operations. Afghanistan served as a counterinsurgency laboratory, and the experiments will shape the conduct of future wars, domestic security practices, and the increasingly indistinct boundary between them. Using work from Michel Foucault and liberal war studies, the project undertakes a genealogy of contemporary population-centred counterinsurgency and interrogates how its conduct is constituted by and as a mixture firepower and biopower. Insofar as this mix employs force with different speeds, doses, and intensities, the dissertation argues that counterinsurgency unrestricts and collateralizes violence, which is emblematic of liberal war that kills selectively to secure and make life live in ways amenable to local and global imperatives of liberal rule. Contemporary military counterinsurgents, in conducting operations on the edges of liberal rule's jurisdiction and in recursively influencing the domestic spaces of North Atlantic states, fashion biopoweras custodial power to conduct the conduct of lifeto shape different interventions into the everyday lives of target populations. The 'lesser evil' logic of counterinsurgency is used to frame counterinsurgency as a type of warfare that is comparatively low-intensity and less harmful, and this justification actually lowers the threshold for violence by making increasingly indiscriminate the ways in which its employment damages and envelops populations and communities, thereby allowing counterinsurgents to speculate on the practice of expeditionary warfare and efforts to sustain occupations. Thus, the dissertation argues that counterinsurgency is a communicative process, better understood as mobile military media with an atmospheric-environmental register blending acute and ambient measures that are always-already kinetic. The counterinsurgent gaze enframes a world picture where everything can be a force amplifier and everywhere is a possible theatre of operations

Constructing pedestrian-centric street mobility: Observation and simulation for design

There are three principal components to the research presented in this thesis: a video-observation study of pedestrian behaviours and interactions with traffic, leading to the development of an agent-based digital simulation, and demonstrating the potential of this simulation for designing pedestrian-centric interventions in the streetscape. The long-term objective is to devise streetscapes that responsively adapt to the needs of pedestrians. Since the advent of car culture in the late 1930s, the approaches to street design have prioritised efficient motorised traffic flow, restricting walking and neglecting the pedestrian point of view. In recent years, however, a growing interest in making urban spaces more pedestrian-friendly has emerged, popularising concepts such as walkability, shared space, and traffic calming. These approaches aim to promote active travel and reduce car dependency in order to mitigate congestion, pollution, accidents and other harms. Urban studies have concentrated primarily on pedestrian-only zones and utilised spatial features as a way to reach pedestrian-friendly streets. Meanwhile, transport studies have tended to approach the street from a throughput and vehicle-oriented stance. Despite these endeavours, pedestrian-oriented approaches appear to lack systematic consideration of pedestrian behaviours as they interact with motor vehicles and street infrastructure. My PhD research differs from prior studies by focusing on these behaviours and interactions to support a pedestrian-oriented street mobility system. The current design of streets communicates to pedestrians via its structures and signs, such as barriers, crossings, and lights, while its capacity to respond and adapt is minimal. In contrast, this thesis argues that, since the street environment is inherently dynamic, we should analyse its dynamics and design the street to be responsive. Through responsiveness, my aim is to increase the convenience of pedestrian movement whilst creating a safe experience. This PhD asks the question 'how to design a pedestrian-centric street system that dynamically manages street mobility?'. The research takes a practice-based and reflective approach, designing agent-based simulations based on a qualitative observational study. Designing a simulation accomplishes two things: 1) it creates a space for implementing and evaluating possible design interventions, and 2) it prompts new insights into the behavioural processes of pedestrians. My research has followed an iterative cycle in line with second-order cybernetics: in two feedback loops, the first study informed the second study while the second informed the first. The video observation of street behaviours particularly explored pedestrian decision and interaction processes, identifying pedestrians’ own observational strategies and their varying levels of risk-taking. These aspects are reflected in the simulation. The first chapter introduces the pedestrian issues on the street and sets out the key concepts in pedestrian-centric street design. The second chapter examines the literature and existing practice that addresses pedestrian and vehicle interactions on the street. Chapter three sets out the theoretical framework and the following chapter describes the methodology. The three subsequent chapters present the following studies: (1) understanding the context by conducting qualitative video observation in a real street environment to observe and document the relations between streets, pedestrians and vehicles; (2) creating an artificial pedestrian society for simulation purposes, using agent-based modelling, both to refine the understanding developed through video analysis and to create a platform for experimentation; (3) design and implementation of prototype responsive interventions within the simulation, focusing on localised changes in the environment to empower pedestrians. The last chapter reflects on these projects by discussing the research contributions in terms of methods, techniques, and practices. The methodological innovation includes combining qualitative and computational tools as well as the use of simulation and video analysis in an iterative and reflexive cycle. Theoretical contributions include evaluating streets through pedestrian dynamics, creating a taxonomy of existing pedestrian interventions according to their spatial and temporal impacts, and rethinking the street as a responsive environment. The practical component advances the technical state of the art by expanding the capabilities of pedestrian agents when negotiating with vehicles and making crossing decisions and demonstrates the potential for designing novel interventions in the streetscape, including those that respond to pedestrian behaviour. The last chapter, also, emphasises the role of reflective design practice and the place of simulation within it