Government Information Quarterly. Volume 7, no. 2: National Aeronautics and Space Administration Scientific and Technical Information Programs. Special issue

NASA scientific and technical information (STI) programs are discussed. Topics include management of information in a research and development agency, the new space and Earth science information systems at NASA's archive, scientific and technical information management, and technology transfer of NASA aerospace technology to other industries

Ready for Tomorrow: Demand-Side Emerging Skills for the 21st Century

As part of the Ready for the Job demand-side skill assessment, the Heldrich Center explored emerging work skills that will affect New Jersey's workforce in the next three to five years. The Heldrich Center identified five specific areas likely to generate new skill demands: biotechnology, security, e-learning, e-commerce, and food/agribusiness. This report explores the study's findings and offers recommendations for improving education and training in New Jersey

The New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation: Transforming a Public Safety Net Delivery System to Achieve Higher Performance

Describes the results of the public benefit corporation's improvement initiatives -- a common clinical information system for continuity, coordination on chronic disease management, teamwork and continuous innovation, and access to appropriate care

An Innovative, Multidisciplinary Educational Program in Interactive Information Storage and Retrieval

There exists a large number of large-scale bibliographic Information Storage and Retrieval Systems containing large amounts of valuable data of interest in a wide variety of research applications. These systems are not used to capacity because the end users, i.e., the researchers, have not been trained in the techniques of accessing such systems. This thesis describes the development of a transportable, university-level course in methods of querying on-line interactive Information Storage and Retrieval systems as a solution to this problem. This course was designed to instruct upper division science and engineering students to enable these end users to directly access such systems. The course is designed to be taught by instructors who are not specialists in either computer science or research skills. It is independent of any particular IS and R system or computer hardware. The project is sponsored by NASA and conducted by the University of Southwestern Louisiana and Southern University

Developing a system for health and safety enhancement and automation in construction sites

The construction industry forms an important element within the economic activities and is known to be challenging and dangerous. Erroneously construction site accidents were accepted as unavoidable. The existing work health and safety protocols goals were not to cut risk but to provide risk assessment by understanding the types of risks associated with various activities and setting out rules and procedures to manage them and cut their impact. This study attempts a proactive approach to construction site health and safety by anticipating the hazards associated with a planned daily work activity and providing on site the relevant training and safety instructions. This was achieved by integrating the project’s digital design with site images processing and analysis. Digital image processing applies signal processing algorithms to images and videos resulting in extracting useful information from them. An essential and critical issue in the field of computer vision is the object’s recognition methods which should be capable of finding the partial occlusion of objects. Knowledge management systems archive and locate the required information and make it available to the relevant destination quickly and efficiently. It can also provide access to information in other construction sites and to the design team. This management system helps to save the gained experience and make it available to the project or other similar projects. The Building Information System was introduced as a system in which the objectives of this study can be incorporated leaving the door open to incorporate other project management activities. The possible solutions for the identified health and safety business problem were analysed in order to arrive at the best solution suitable to the objectives of the study. The end users ‘needs obtained from the distributed questionnaire and the project’s functional requirements were considered in order to create a model that will achieve their goals in an efficient manner. An activity diagram and a user case diagram based on the UML language were generated. Based on them a computerized model (CONSTRUCTION AUTOMATA) was developed to identify risks associated with specific work activities and provide the relevant safety instructions and training to mitigate them. The model automatically produces safety reports to record and serve as a knowledge management base for future reference thus eliminating possible human errors. The computer program was tested with available site images from an existing project and it proved to deliver its outputs according to its design. The developed model was then demonstrated to a selected group of relevant professionals and was seen to score well with ease of use mark of (6.17) and effectiveness as a health and safety tool mark of (6.37) out of a total mark of (10)

Teaching Modeling to Engineers in an Undergraduate Simulation Course

A significant challenge in teaching simulation to undergraduate students is to find a way to allow them to model a real world referent system within time and student skill constraints. Several research sources highlight not only the important challenge of model development (Garcia and Ceneno, 2009, Tako, 2011) but also the increased need for model development instruction among engineers (Grasas et. al., 2013, Saltzman and Roeder, 2013). One approach to this challenge is to use a general purpose discrete event simulation software package within the course, but this presents two challenges. Teaching the package to the students takes significant time, and the package introduces limitations which may restrict their ability to model certain real-world referents, particularly in the engineering domain. A conceptual approach to solving this problem is to use a model development paradigm that abstracts away the interface to the simulation infrastructure while still allowing the students to use the full expressive nature of a programming language. Two undergraduate courses at the United States Military Academy employed this strategy via the Discrete Events Specification System – Distributed Modeling Framework (DEVS-DMF) (Kewley et. al, 2016). The DEVS abstraction allowed students to think about their model as a simple state change function with defined inputs and outputs, and DMF allowed them to program in a cloud-based Jupyter Notebook using the Python language. Students in a combat modeling course employed a variety of models to understand drone jamming, and students in an engineering capstone project employed models to account for human factors in rifle marksmanship. The effectiveness of this approach was assessed through student grades, exit-interviews, and course-end surveys. These assessments showed an increased understanding of the model development process, and students also reported greater ownership of their models. However, this experiment also highlighted some weaknesses in their understanding of underlying methodologies and programming skills

Construction safety and digital design: a review

As digital technologies become widely used in designing buildings and infrastructure, questions arise about their impacts on construction safety. This review explores relationships between construction safety and digital design practices with the aim of fostering and directing further research. It surveys state-of-the-art research on databases, virtual reality, geographic information systems, 4D CAD, building information modeling and sensing technologies, finding various digital tools for addressing safety issues in the construction phase, but few tools to support design for construction safety. It also considers a literature on safety critical, digital and design practices that raises a general concern about ‘mindlessness’ in the use of technologies, and has implications for the emerging research agenda around construction safety and digital design. Bringing these strands of literature together suggests new kinds of interventions, such as the development of tools and processes for using digital models to promote mindfulness through multi-party collaboration on safet