Ergonomic interventions for the soft drink beverage delivery industry

"The goal of this study was to apply ergonomic controls in the soft drink beverage delivery industry, and measure the effectiveness in reducing musculoskeletal injuries through psychophysical, physiological, and biomechanical methods. Nine driver/sales workers with an average of 20 years experience participated in the study. Risk factors inherent in the job included exposure to whole body vibration from driving the trucks, pushing and pulling loads exceeding 350 pounds, repetitive lifting and moving of crates, slip and fall injuries, surface conditions, exposure to sharp glass from broken glass bottles, robberies, and moving products from bays into the trucks. All nine participants reported suffering a work related musculoskeletal injury, with eight reporting back injuries, five reporting arm injuries, and four reporting leg injuries. All had taken time off as a result of the injuries, with the average time off being 2.8 months. The author recommends the use of several engineering controls, including drop down shelves; low boy tractor trailers; redesigned grab handles; antislip grit on bay rails, platforms, foot wells, and steps; additional foot wells; pullout steps; a dual hand truck holder with high back; adjustable height air cushioned seats; bay door straps; and relocation of the computerized beverage billing and printing system within the truck." - NIOSHTIC-2Shipping list no.: 98-0026-P.Cover title: Ergonomic interventions for the soft drink beverage delivery industry."July 1996."Also available via the World Wide Web.Includes bibliographical references

STATUS OF THE SOUTH CAROLINA COASTAL PROPERTY INSURANCE MARKET : STATUS REPORT FOR 2016

This report provides an outline of operations of the South Carolina Wind and Hail Underwriting Association as well as its book of business. It also presents the results of an annual South Carolina Department of Insurance data call and South Carolina Department of Insurance efforts to promote a healthy coastal property insurance market. Overviews of the South Carolina Department of Insurance’s responses to recent catastrophic events and the insurance impacts of these events are given as well. Additionally, there are brief discussions of catastrophe modeling, the National Flood Insurance Program, and earthquake insurance. Recommendations which the South Carolina Department of Insurance feels will continue to improve the market are included at the end of this report

Robust and secure monitoring and attribution of malicious behaviors

Worldwide computer systems continue to execute malicious software that degrades the systemsâ performance and consumes network capacity by generating high volumes of unwanted traffic. Network-based detectors can effectively identify machines participating in the ongoing attacks by monitoring the traffic to and from the systems. But, network detection alone is not enough; it does not improve the operation of the Internet or the health of other machines connected to the network. We must identify malicious code running on infected systems, participating in global attack networks. This dissertation describes a robust and secure approach that identifies malware present on infected systems based on its undesirable use of network. Our approach, using virtualization, attributes malicious traffic to host-level processes responsible for the traffic. The attribution identifies on-host processes, but malware instances often exhibit parasitic behaviors to subvert the execution of benign processes. We then augment the attribution software with a host-level monitor that detects parasitic behaviors occurring at the user- and kernel-level. User-level parasitic attack detection happens via the system-call interface because it is a non-bypassable interface for user-level processes. Due to the unavailability of one such interface inside the kernel for drivers, we create a new driver monitoring interface inside the kernel to detect parasitic attacks occurring through this interface. Our attribution software relies on a guest kernelâ s data to identify on-host processes. To allow secure attribution, we prevent illegal modifications of critical kernel data from kernel-level malware. Together, our contributions produce a unified research outcome --an improved malicious code identification system for user- and kernel-level malware.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Giffin, Jonathon; Committee Member: Ahamad, Mustaque; Committee Member: Blough, Douglas; Committee Member: Lee, Wenke; Committee Member: Traynor, Patric

PrivacyGuard: A VPN-Based Approach to Detect Privacy Leakages on Android Devices

The Internet is now the most important and efficient way to gain information, and mobile devices are the easiest way to access the Internet. Furthermore, wearable devices, which can be considered to be the next generation of mobile devices, are becoming popular. The more people rely on mobile devices, the more private information about these people can be gathered from their devices. If a device is lost or compromised, much private information is revealed. Although today’s smartphone operating systems are trying to provide a secure environment, they still fail to provide users with adequate control over and visibility into how third-party applications use their private data. The privacy leakage problem on mobile devices is still severe. For example, according a field study [1] done by CMU recently, Android applications track users’ location every three minutes in average. After the PRISM program, a surveillance program done by NSA, is exposed, people are becoming increasingly aware of the mobile privacy leakages. However, there are few tools available to average users for privacy preserving. Most tools developed by recent work have some problems (details can be found in chapter 2). To address these problems, we present PrivacyGuard, an efficient way to simultaneously detect leakage of multiple types of sensitive data, such as a phone’s IMEI number or location data. PrivacyGuard provides real-time protection. It is possible to modify the leaked information and replace it with crafted data to achieve protection. PrivacyGuard is configurable, extensible and useful for other research. We implement PrivacyGuard on the Android platform by taking advantage of the VPNService class provided by the Android SDK. PrivacyGuard does not require root per- missions to run on a device and does not require any knowledge about VPN technology from users either. The VPN server runs on the device locally. No external servers are required. According to our experiments, PrivacyGuard can effectively detect privacy leak- ages of most applications and advertisement libraries with almost no overhead on power consumption and reasonable overhead on network speed

Leveraging virtualization technologies for resource partitioning in mixed criticality systems

Multi- and many-core processors are becoming increasingly popular in embedded systems. Many of these processors now feature hardware virtualization capabilities, such as the ARM Cortex A15, and x86 processors with Intel VT-x or AMD-V support. Hardware virtualization offers opportunities to partition physical resources, including processor cores, memory and I/O devices amongst guest virtual machines. Mixed criticality systems and services can then co-exist on the same platform in separate virtual machines. However, traditional virtual machine systems are too expensive because of the costs of trapping into hypervisors to multiplex and manage machine physical resources on behalf of separate guests. For example, hypervisors are needed to schedule separate VMs on physical processor cores. Additionally, traditional hypervisors have memory footprints that are often too large for many embedded computing systems. This dissertation presents the design of the Quest-V separation kernel, which partitions services of different criticality levels across separate virtual machines, or sandboxes. Each sandbox encapsulates a subset of machine physical resources that it manages without requiring intervention of a hypervisor. In Quest-V, a hypervisor is not needed for normal operation, except to bootstrap the system and establish communication channels between sandboxes. This approach not only reduces the memory footprint of the most privileged protection domain, it removes it from the control path during normal system operation, thereby heightening security

Alternate Load Paths and Retrofits for Long-span Truss Bridges under Sudden Member Loss and Blast Loads

In current bridge design practices, due to the existence of alternate load paths (ALPs), continued stability and progressive collapse-resistance of long-span bridges following the initialed loss of a critical member can be attributed to “redundancy”. However, “redundancy”, also indicated as the post member failure behavior of long-span bridges is not well understood and is not explicitly considered, especially for long-span truss bridges. As one of the most famous collapse events that took place recently, collapse of the I-35W truss bridge has demonstrated the vulnerabilities of long-span truss bridges, and their societal and economic consequences under the abnormal events, such as sudden loss of a critical member or members and the explosive attacks. These long-span truss bridges that are designed under the provisions of past and current specifications, particularly those in the urban environments, may be incapable of maintaining their structural capacity and integrity under the influence of extreme loadings generated by sudden member loss and the blast loads. Current existing design specifications have none or limited provisions that are related to structural design against the extreme loadings, therefore, their automatic extension to the protective design of long-span truss bridges to the abnormal events may not be guaranteed. This dissertation proposes an integrated framework and performance-based criteria to quantify the load-path redundancy in the form of ALPs and proposes further three-dimensional (3-D) retrofit schemes to enhance the ALPs of long-span truss bridges subjected to sudden loss of a critical member. By taking the I-35W truss bridge as the case study, this dissertation investigates the redundancy or existing ALP capacity of long-span truss bridges before and after the abnormal events such as sudden member loss by two different indicators: demand to capacity ratio (DCR) for linear elastic analysis and strain ratio (SR) for nonlinear dynamic analysis. Based on the possible failure modes and failure scenarios after sudden critical member loss, performance-based retrofit criteria and recommendations for 3-D ALP retrofits are proposed in terms of both DCR and SR metrics. To investigate the complicated behavior of truss members under the coupled actions of axial forces and bending moments, this dissertation proposes a simplified modeling approach to simulate the structural behaviors of truss bridge systems by multiple Hughes-Liu (H-L) beam elements with material model *MAT_Simplified_Johnson_Cook (*MAT_98) in LS-DYNA for each truss member. The effectiveness and accuracy of this simplified modeling approach are validated by several numerical examples that are related to both elastic and nonlinear large-deformation problems. Then, based on a small truss bridge (Aby truss bridge) that is previously designed as fracture critical, an integrated framework to identify critical members by using nonlinear dynamic analysis in LS-DYNA is proposed and validated with the simulation results available in previous literature. Meanwhile, both the implicit model in SAP2000 and the explicit model in LS-DYNA of the I-35W truss bridge are developed and validated by the available shop drawings and FHWA reports. Subsequently, the ALP of long-span truss bridges is numerically studied through the numerical simulations of the I-35W truss bridge before and after sudden member removal (MR) analyses. Moreover, similar to the performance-based seismic retrofit philosophy that is widely utilized in earthquake engineering, a performance-based design (PBD) approach is considered to enhance the redundancy and ALPs of long-span truss bridges. Various ALP retrofit strategies, such as member strengthening and addition of extra members as diagonal or floor trusses are numerically investigated and evaluated. Analysis results indicate that the member strengthening approach only has limited effectiveness in enhancing the ALPs of the long-span truss bridges, whereas retrofitting strategies that help to improve the three-dimensionality of the truss bridge, such as adding diagonal members and floor truss members are more cost-effective in improving the ALP and redundancy of the truss bridge while minimizing the increase in the weight of steel (because of retrofit). Performing the nonlinear dynamic analysis using LS-DYNA in the development of ALP retrofit strategies for enhancing ALP and redundancy of long-span truss bridges is more cost-effective than the linear static analysis using SAP2000. Performance levels in terms of DCR and SR metrics are proposed for the practicing engineering community to use for the retrofits of long-span truss bridges to help them survive from the progressive collapse. Furthermore, to investigate the blast load effects on long-span truss bridges, the above-deck close-in explosions are numerically simulated for the I-35W truss bridge using the *Load_Blast_Enhanced (LBE) formulation in LS-DYNA. Based on several blast loadings simulation examples, the identification of finite element (FE) model-related parameters, i.e., mesh size, material models and properties (i.e., strain rate effect) both for concrete and steel are presented and validated. Then the effectiveness and capability of the modeling using the H-L beam formulation with the shell elements are numerically investigated and validated through several numerical examples. Afterward, by using the validated multiscale modeling method, high-fidelity FE models of the I-35W truss bridge are developed and several comprehensive studies regarding the blast load effects (i.e., the above-deck close-in denotations) on this truss bridge are investigated. Finally, by inputting the calibrated and validated material parameters for the material model *MAT_Concrete_Damage_REL3 (*MAT_72R3) for the UHPC that is available in previous studies, and the effectiveness and capability of UHPC strengthening in improving the blast resistance of the I-35W truss bridge under the blast loads are numerically investigated and validated, and UHPC can be utilized as the retrofit material to strengthen the RC deck system and helps in reducing the damage of truss members for long-span truss bridges

Security challenges with virtualization

Tese de mestrado, Segurança Informática, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2009Virtualização é uma palavra em voga no mundo das tecnologias de informação. Com a promessa de reduzir o constante crescimento das infra-estruturas informáticas dentro de um centro de processamento de dados, aliado a outros aspectos importantes como disponibilidade e escalabilidade, as tecnologias de virtualização têm vindo a ganhar popularidade, não só entre os profissionais de tecnologias de informação mas também administradores e directores. No entanto, o aumento da adopção do uso desta tecnologia expõe o sistema a novas preocupações de segurança que normalmente são negligenciadas. Esta tese apresenta o estado da arte das soluções actualmente mais usadas de virtualização de servidores e também um estudo literário dos vários problemas de segurança das tecnologias de virtualização. Estes problemas não são específicos em termos de produto, e são abordados no âmbito de tecnologias de virtualização. No entanto, nesta tese é feita uma análise de vulnerabilidades de duas das mais conhecidas soluções de virtualização: Vmware EXS e Xen. No final, são descritas algumas soluções para melhorar a segurança de acesso a banco online e de comercio electrónico, usando virtualização.Virtualization is a hype word in the IT world. With the promise to reduce the ever-growing infrastructure inside data centers allied to other important concerns such as availability and scalability, virtualization technology has been gaining popularity not only with IT professionals but also among administrators and directors as well. The increasingly rising rate of the adoption of this technology has exposed these systems to new security concerns which in recent history have been ignored or simply overlooked. This thesis presents an in depth state of art look at the currently most used server virtualization solutions, as well as a literature study on various security issues found within this virtualization technology. These issues can be applied to all the current virtualization technologies available without focusing on a specific solution. However, we do a vulnerability analysis of two of the most known virtualization solutions: VMware ESX and Xen. Finally, we describe some solutions on how to improve the security of online banking and e-commerce, using virtualization

Photovoltaic stand-alone modular systems, phase 2

The final hardware and system qualification phase of a two part stand-alone photovoltaic (PV) system development is covered. The final design incorporated modular, power blocks capable of expanding incrementally from 320 watts to twenty kilowatts (PK). The basic power unit (PU) was nominally rated 1.28 kWp. The controls units, power collection buses and main lugs, electrical protection subsystems, power switching, and load management circuits are housed in a common control enclosure. Photo-voltaic modules are electrically connected in a horizontal daisy-chain method via Amp Solarlok plugs mating with compatible connectors installed on the back side of each photovoltaic module. A pair of channel rails accommodate the mounting of the modules into a frameless panel support structure. Foundations are of a unique planter (tub-like) configuration to allow for world-wide deployment without restriction as to types of soil. One battery string capable of supplying approximately 240 ampere hours nominal of carryover power is specified for each basic power unit. Load prioritization and shedding circuits are included to protect critical loads and selectively shed and defer lower priority or noncritical power demands. The baseline system, operating at approximately 2 1/2 PUs (3.2 kW pk.) was installed and deployed. Qualification was successfully complete in March 1983; since that time, the demonstration system has logged approximately 3000 hours of continuous operation under load without major incident