A model of the role of management in construction fire safety failure scenarios

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Environmental enforcement technology adoption: Marine environment in the Kingdom of Bahrain

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonResearch Background: Entities responsible for environmental enforcement around the world are facing increasing pressure to deal with the alarming rate of environmental degradation and crime, despite the limited resources available to them. They are continuously searching for technological advancements to enhance their effectiveness and efficiency. This research aims to explore and develop effective technology adoption insights for environmental compliance and enforcement in the Kingdom of Bahrain. Research Gap: Existing technology adoption studies in law enforcement were mainly conducted on criminal law enforcement. Studies conducted on technology adoption of users involved in environmental enforcement were very scarce, especially from the perspective of environmental enforcers. Environmental enforcement was found to be a unique field of law enforcement with unique challenges and characteristics. This gap in the literature gives interest to acquire further knowledge and understanding of the technology use and adoption of users involved in environmental enforcement. Methodology: This study has adapted a qualitative approach with multiple case studies triangulated with onsite observations, documents, and interviews with relevant stakeholders to explore the use and adoption of technology in environmental compliance and enforcement in the Kingdom of Bahrain. Findings: Numerous significant findings were made during the research. The research found that technology use in the field of environmental enforcement in the marine environment in Bahrain has a significant impact on the effectiveness and efficiency of these systems, mainly through providing increased accuracy, speed, cost reduction and transparency. The technologies vary from basic technologies such as GPS to complex integrated systems, the type of technology utilized is mainly driven by the role and task of the organization or individual. The research also finds many aspects of theories from previous studies on technology adoption in the field of law enforcement to be applicable to this research’s field, mainly the M-TAM which is based on the TAM model. The research found that technology adoption in environmental enforcement in the Kingdom is mandatory in nature, in which intent to use the technology has no influence since the user does not have the choice not to use the technology provided. Rather the extent to which the technology is used is influenced mainly by attitude, perceived usefulness, degree of necessity of the use of the technology, and various external factors (management style, cognitive acceptance, and stakeholder environment). Furthermore, the research identified additional unique factors affecting technology adoption in environmental enforcement, mainly the stakeholder’s environment. The study's findings led to the development of a modified model of technology adoption for environmental enforcement. The model illustrates the complex interaction between many factors influencing users' adoption and usage of technology in the field of environmental enforcement in the Kingdom of Bahrain. Implications: The model illustrates the factors that influence technology adoption by users involved in environmental enforcement in the Kingdom of Bahrain. The main contribution of the research and the model is the ability to predict and explain technology adoption of users in the unique field of environmental enforcement. This knowledge is critical for the Kingdom, which has made significant investments in technological solutions across a variety of sectors, including environmental enforcement. Understanding and taking into account the factors influencing technology adoption will increase the likelihood of effective technology being adopted successfully in the Kingdom of Bahrain, resulting in more efficient usage, increased productivity, and ultimately improved performance toward the achievement of goals and targets.Ministry of Interior of the Kingdom of Bahrai

Objectification of the Subject through the Exercise of Power: An Ethnographical Inquiry of Power in an American Policing Organization

abstract: A void exists in public administration, criminology, and criminal justice research as it relates to the study of power in American policing agencies. This has significant ramifications for academia and practitioners in terms of how they view, address, study, and interpret behaviors/actions in American policing agencies and organizations in general. In brief, mainstream research on power in organizations does not take into account relationships of power that do not act directly, and immediately, on others. By placing its emphasis on an agency centric perspective of power, the mainstream approach to the study of power fails to recognize indirect power relationships that influence discourse, pedagogy, mechanisms of communication, knowledge, and individual behavior/actions. In support of a more holistic inquiry, this study incorporates a Foucauldian perspective of power along with an ethnographical methodology and methods to build a greater understanding of power in policing organizations. This ethnography of an American policing organization illuminates the relationship between the exercise of power and the objectification of the subject through the interplay of relationships of communication, goal oriented activities, and relationships of power. Specifically, the findings demonstrate that sworn officers and civilian employees are objectified distinctly and dissimilarly. In summary, this study argues that the exercise of power in this American policing organization objectifies the civilian employee as a second class citizen.Dissertation/ThesisPh.D. Public Administration 201

Human-human multi-threaded spoken dialogs in the presence of driving

The problem addressed in this research is that engineers looking for interface designs do not have enough data about the interaction between multi-threaded dialogs and manual-visual tasks. Our goal was to investigate this interaction. We proposed to analyze how humans handle multi-threaded dialogs while engaged in a manual-visual task. More specifically, we looked at the interaction between performance on two spoken tasks and driving. The novelty of this dissertation is in its focus on the intersection between a manual-visual task and a multi-threaded speech communication between two humans. We proposed an experiment setup that is suitable for investigating multi-threaded spoken dialogs while subjects are involved in a manual-visual task. In our experiments one participant drove a simulated vehicle while talking with another participant located in a different room. The participants communicated using headphones and microphones. Both participants performed an ongoing task, which was interrupted by an interrupting task. Both tasks, the ongoing task and the interrupting task, were done using speech. We collected corpora of annotated data from our experiments and analyzed the data to verify the suitability of the proposed experiment setup. We found that, as expected, driving and our spoken tasks influenced each other. We also found that the timing of interruption influenced the spoken tasks. Unexpectedly, the data indicate that the ongoing task was more influenced by driving than the interrupting task. On the other hand, the interrupting task influenced driving more than the ongoing task. This suggests that the multiple resource model [1] does not capture the complexity of the interactions between the manual-visual and spoken tasks. We proposed that the perceived urgency or the perceived task difficulty plays a role in how the tasks influence each other

A wireless sensor network system for border security and crossing detection

The protection of long stretches of countries’ borders has posed a number of challenges. Effective and continuous monitoring of a border requires the implementation of multi-surveillance technologies, such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), that work as an integrated unit to meet the desired goals. The research presented in this thesis investigates the application of topologically Linear WSN (LWSNs) to international border monitoring and surveillance. The main research questions studied here are: What is the best form of node deployment and hierarchy? What is the minimum number of sensor nodes to achieve k− barrier coverage in a given belt region? iven an appropriate network density, how do we determine if a region is indeed k−barrier covered? What are the factors that affect barrier coverage? How to organise nodes into logical segments to perform in-network processing of data? How to transfer information from the networks to the end users while maintaining critical QoS measures such as timeliness and accuracy. To address these questions, we propose an architecture that specifies a mechanism to assign nodes to various network levels depending on their location. These levels are used by a cross-layer communication protocol to achieve data delivery at the lowest possible cost and minimal delivery delay. Building on this levelled architecture, we study the formation of weak and strong barriers and how they determine border crossing detection probability. We propose new method to calculate the required node density to provide higher intruder detection rate. Then, we study the effect of people movement models on the border crossing detection probability. At the data link layer, new energy balancing along with shifted MAC protocol are introduced to further increase the network lifetime and delivery speed. In addition, at network layer, a routing protocol called Level Division raph (LD ) is developed. LD utilises a complex link cost measurement to insure best QoS data delivery to the sink node at the lowest possible cost. The proposed system has the ability to work independently or cooperatively with other monitoring technologies, such as drowns and mobile monitoring stations. The performance of the proposed work is extensively evaluated analytically and in simulation using real-life conditions and parameters. The simulation results show significant performance gains when comparing LD to its best rivals in the literature Dynamic Source Routing. Compared to DSR, LD achieves higher performance in terms of average end-to-end delays by up to 95%, packet delivery ratio by up to 20%, and throughput by up to 60%, while maintaining similar performance in terms of normalised routing load and energy consumption

Programming Persistent Memory

Beginning and experienced programmers will use this comprehensive guide to persistent memory programming. You will understand how persistent memory brings together several new software/hardware requirements, and offers great promise for better performance and faster application startup times—a huge leap forward in byte-addressable capacity compared with current DRAM offerings. This revolutionary new technology gives applications significant performance and capacity improvements over existing technologies. It requires a new way of thinking and developing, which makes this highly disruptive to the IT/computing industry. The full spectrum of industry sectors that will benefit from this technology include, but are not limited to, in-memory and traditional databases, AI, analytics, HPC, virtualization, and big data. Programming Persistent Memory describes the technology and why it is exciting the industry. It covers the operating system and hardware requirements as well as how to create development environments using emulated or real persistent memory hardware. The book explains fundamental concepts; provides an introduction to persistent memory programming APIs for C, C++, JavaScript, and other languages; discusses RMDA with persistent memory; reviews security features; and presents many examples. Source code and examples that you can run on your own systems are included. What You’ll Learn Understand what persistent memory is, what it does, and the value it brings to the industry Become familiar with the operating system and hardware requirements to use persistent memory Know the fundamentals of persistent memory programming: why it is different from current programming methods, and what developers need to keep in mind when programming for persistence Look at persistent memory application development by example using the Persistent Memory Development Kit (PMDK) Design and optimize data structures for persistent memory Study how real-world applications are modified to leverage persistent memory Utilize the tools available for persistent memory programming, application performance profiling, and debugging Who This Book Is For C, C++, Java, and Python developers, but will also be useful to software, cloud, and hardware architects across a broad spectrum of sectors, including cloud service providers, independent software vendors, high performance compute, artificial intelligence, data analytics, big data, etc

A study on the adaptive capacity of ecological system and the Sundarbans community in response to climate change in Bangladesh

The paper is regarding a community in Bangladesh, live by the Sundarbans Mangrove forest. The forest is facing challenges because of climate change. People’s lifestyle, socio ecological system is influenced by the forest elements, as it is also a source of their livelihood. At the same time, their life is also influenced by the social actors, change the adaptability in response to climate change. Here, I tried to find out, to what extent the socio ecology is responding to achieve adaptability subject to climate change and influence of social factor.M-D