RISK MANAGEMENT ISSUES ON THE CASE STUDY OF QANTAS CRASH IN BANGKOK, SEPTEMBER 1999

The cycle of risk management is an essential procedure for every company in order to be able to manage its risks. The purpose of this discussion is to explore the risk management issue of Qantas crash in Bangkok, September 1999. Analyzing the potential factors of the safety of flying that closely related to Qantas reputation would give some understanding how to improve company performance. Outlining the six steps proposed by Augustine as a guidance to manage the crisis highlights the importance of identifying the potential crisis, preventing it to happen or even finding the potential success from it. In addition, exploring the case can generate some knowledge that can help one recognizing the effective ways to deal with crisis. Finally, by looking, at the analysis as a whole, it can be concluded that there are always risks associated with flying. Therefore every effort should be made by an airplane company toward the safety of passengers. Improving knowledge of pilot is also essential to reduce human error. Moreover, regularly updating strategy and procedure will give awareness toward the best action that should be taken when facing the crisis

Data Provenance and Management in Radio Astronomy: A Stream Computing Approach

New approaches for data provenance and data management (DPDM) are required for mega science projects like the Square Kilometer Array, characterized by extremely large data volume and intense data rates, therefore demanding innovative and highly efficient computational paradigms. In this context, we explore a stream-computing approach with the emphasis on the use of accelerators. In particular, we make use of a new generation of high performance stream-based parallelization middleware known as InfoSphere Streams. Its viability for managing and ensuring interoperability and integrity of signal processing data pipelines is demonstrated in radio astronomy. IBM InfoSphere Streams embraces the stream-computing paradigm. It is a shift from conventional data mining techniques (involving analysis of existing data from databases) towards real-time analytic processing. We discuss using InfoSphere Streams for effective DPDM in radio astronomy and propose a way in which InfoSphere Streams can be utilized for large antennae arrays. We present a case-study: the InfoSphere Streams implementation of an autocorrelating spectrometer, and using this example we discuss the advantages of the stream-computing approach and the utilization of hardware accelerators

Enhancing security incident response follow-up efforts with lightweight agile retrospectives

Security incidents detected by organizations are escalating in both scale and complexity. As a result, security incident response has become a critical mechanism for organizations in an effort to minimize the damage from security incidents. The final phase within many security incident response approaches is the feedback/follow-up phase. It is within this phase that an organization is expected to use information collected during an investigation in order to learn from an incident, improve its security incident response process and positively impact the wider security environment. However, recent research and security incident reports argue that organizations find it difficult to learn from incidents. A contributing factor to this learning deficiency is that industry focused security incident response approaches, typically, provide very little practical information about tools or techniques that can be used to extract lessons learned from an investigation. As a result, organizations focus on improving technical security controls and not examining or reassessing the effectiveness or efficiency of internal policies and procedures. An additional hindrance, to encouraging improvement assessments, is the absence of tools and/or techniques that organizations can implement to evaluate the impact of implemented enhancements in the wider organization. Hence, this research investigates the integration of lightweight agile retrospectives and meta-retrospectives, in a security incident response process, to enhance feedback and/or follow-up efforts. The research contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it presents an approach based on lightweight retrospectives as a means of enhancing security incident response follow-up efforts. Second, it presents an empirical evaluation of this lightweight approach in a Fortune 500 Financial organization's security incident response team

A study of ASRS reports involving general aviation and weather encounters

Consideration is given to the nature and characteristics of problems involving dissemination of weather information, use of this information by pilots, its adequacy for the purpose intended, the ability of the air traffic control system to cope with weather related incidents, and the various aspects of pilot behavior, aircraft equipment, and NAVAIDS affecting flights in which weather figures. It is concluded from the study that skill and training deficiencies of general aviation pilots are not major factors in weather related occurrences, nor is lack of aircraft equipment. Major problem causes are identified with timely and easily interpreted weather information, judgement and attitude factors of pilots, and the functioning of the air traffic control system

The NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System

This is the fourteenth in a series of reports based on safety-related incidents submitted to the NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System by pilots, controllers, and, occasionally, other participants in the National Aviation System (refs. 1-13). ASRS operates under a memorandum of agreement between the National Aviation and Space Administration and the Federal Aviation Administration. The report contains, first, a special study prepared by the ASRS Office Staff, of pilot- and controller-submitted reports related to the perceived operation of the ATC system since the 1981 walkout of the controllers' labor organization. Next is a research paper analyzing incidents occurring while single-pilot crews were conducting IFR flights. A third section presents a selection of Alert Bulletins issued by ASRS, with the responses they have elicited from FAA and others concerned. Finally, the report contains a list of publications produced by ASRS with instructions for obtaining them

Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Workshop on Meteorological and Environmental Inputs to Aviation Systems

The proceedings of a workshop held at the University of Tennessee Space Institute, Tullahoma, Tennessee, March 28-30, 1978, are reported. The workshop was jointly sponsored by NASA, NOAA, FAA, and brought together many disciplines of the aviation communities in round table discussions. The major objectives of the workshop are to satisfy such needs of the sponsoring agencies as the expansion of our understanding and knowledge of the interactions of the atmosphere with aviation systems, as the better definition and implementation of services to operators, and as the collection and interpretation of data for establishing operational criteria, relating the total meteorological inputs from the atmospheric sciences to the needs of aviation communities

NASA aviation safety reporting system

Knowledge of limitations of the Air Traffic Control system in conflict avoidance capabilities is discussed. Assumptions and expectations held by by airmen regarding the capabilities of the system are presented. Limitations related to communication are described and problems associated with visual approaches, airspace configurations, and airport layouts are discussed. A number of pilot and controller reports illustrative of three typical problem types: occurrences involving pilots who have limited experience; reports describing inflight calls for assistance; and flights in which pilots have declined to use available radar services are presented. Examples of Alert Bulletins and the FAA responses to them are included

SurfelMeshing: Online Surfel-Based Mesh Reconstruction

We address the problem of mesh reconstruction from live RGB-D video, assuming a calibrated camera and poses provided externally (e.g., by a SLAM system). In contrast to most existing approaches, we do not fuse depth measurements in a volume but in a dense surfel cloud. We asynchronously (re)triangulate the smoothed surfels to reconstruct a surface mesh. This novel approach enables to maintain a dense surface representation of the scene during SLAM which can quickly adapt to loop closures. This is possible by deforming the surfel cloud and asynchronously remeshing the surface where necessary. The surfel-based representation also naturally supports strongly varying scan resolution. In particular, it reconstructs colors at the input camera's resolution. Moreover, in contrast to many volumetric approaches, ours can reconstruct thin objects since objects do not need to enclose a volume. We demonstrate our approach in a number of experiments, showing that it produces reconstructions that are competitive with the state-of-the-art, and we discuss its advantages and limitations. The algorithm (excluding loop closure functionality) is available as open source at https://github.com/puzzlepaint/surfelmeshing .Comment: Version accepted to IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligenc