Space station crew safety alternatives study, volume 1

The first 15 years of accumulated space station concepts for initial operational capability (IOC) during the early 1990's were considered. Twenty-five threats to the space station are identified and selected threats addressed as impacting safety criteria, escape and rescue, and human factors safety concerns. Of the 25 threats identified, eight are discussed including strategy options for threat control: fire, biological or toxic contamination, injury/illness, explosion, loss of pressurization, radiation, meteoroid penetration and debris

Space station crew safety alternatives study. Volume 3: Safety impact of human factors

The first 15 years of accumulated space station concepts for Initial Operational Capability (IOC) during the early 1990's was considered. Twenty-five threats to the space station are identified and selected threats addressed as impacting safety criteria, escape and rescue, and human factors safety concerns. Of the 25 threats identified, eight are discussed including strategy options for threat control: fire, biological or toxic contamination, injury/illness, explosion, loss of pressurization, radiation, meteoroid penetration and debris. Of particular interest here is volume three (of five volumes) pertaining to the safety impact of human factors

Space Station crew safety alternatives study. Volume 4: Appendices

The scope of this study considered the first 15 years of accumulated space station concepts for Initial Operational Capability (10C) during the early 1990's. Twenty-five threats to the space station are identified and selected threats addressed as impacting safety criteria, escape and rescue, and human factors safety concerns. Of the 25 threats identified, eight are discussed including strategy options for threat control: fire, biological or toxic contamination, injury/illness, explosion, loss of pressurization, radiation, meteoroid penetration and debris

Does Menstruation Explain Gender Gaps in Work Absenteeism?

Ichino and Moretti (2009) find that menstruation may contribute to gender gaps in absenteeism and earnings, based on evidence that absences of young female Italian bank employees follow a 28-day cycle. We analyze absenteeism of teachers and find no evidence of increased female absenteeism on a 28-day cycle. We also show that the evidence of 28-day cycles in the Italian data is not robust to the correction of coding errors or small changes in specification. We show that five day workweeks can cause misleading group differences in absence hazards at multiples of 7, including 28 days.

Worker Absence and Productivity: Evidence from Teaching

A significant amount of work time is lost each year due to worker absence, but evidence on the productivity losses from absenteeism remains scant due to difficulties with identification. In this paper, we use uniquely detailed data on the timing, duration, and cause of absences among teachers to address many of the potential biases from the endogeneity of worker absence. Our analysis indicates that worker absences have large negative impacts: the expected loss in daily productivity from employing a temporary substitute is on par with replacing a regular worker of average productivity with one at the 10th–20th percentile of productivity. We also find daily productivity losses decline with the length of an absence spell, consistent with managers engaging in costly search for more productive substitutes and temporary workers learning on the job. While illness is a major cause of absenteeism among teachers, we find no evidence that poor health also causes lower on-the-job productivity.

Can You Recognize an Effective Teacher When You Recruit One?

Research on the relationship between teachers' characteristics and teacher effectiveness has been underway for over a century, yet little progress has been made in linking teacher quality with factors observable at the time of hire. However, most research has examined a relatively small set of characteristics that are collected by school administrators in order to satisfy legal requirements and set salaries. To extend this literature, we administered an in-depth survey to new math teachers in New York City and collected information on a number of non-traditional predictors of effectiveness including teaching specific content knowledge, cognitive ability, personality traits, feelings of self-efficacy, and scores on a commercially available teacher selection instrument. Individually, we find that only a few of these predictors have statistically significant relationships with student and teacher outcomes. However, when all of these variables are combined into two primary factors summarizing cognitive and non-cognitive teacher skills, we find that both factors have a modest and statistically significant relationship with student and teacher outcomes, particularly with student test scores. These results suggest that, while there may be no single factor that can predict success in teaching, using a broad set of measures can help schools improve the quality of their teachers.

An Analysis by Synthesis Approach for Automatic Vertebral Shape Identification in Clinical QCT

Quantitative computed tomography (QCT) is a widely used tool for osteoporosis diagnosis and monitoring. The assessment of cortical markers like cortical bone mineral density (BMD) and thickness is a demanding task, mainly because of the limited spatial resolution of QCT. We propose a direct model based method to automatically identify the surface through the center of the cortex of human vertebra. We develop a statistical bone model and analyze its probability distribution after the imaging process. Using an as-rigid-as-possible deformation we find the cortical surface that maximizes the likelihood of our model given the input volume. Using the European Spine Phantom (ESP) and a high resolution \mu CT scan of a cadaveric vertebra, we show that the proposed method is able to accurately identify the real center of cortex ex-vivo. To demonstrate the in-vivo applicability of our method we use manually obtained surfaces for comparison.Comment: Presented on German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR) 2018 in Stuttgar

Teacher quality in the twenty first century: new lives, old truths

This chapter is based upon a keynote address to the first global teacher education summit, organised by Beijing Normal University in 2011, in which research across the world about influences which affect teachers' sense of professional identity, capacity for compassion, commitment, resilience and effectiveness long after they have graduated from their pre-service education and training programmes in universities and colleges were shared. The findings suggest that teaching pre-service students about how the conditions in which they work may enhance or diminish their capacity to teach to their best and how they might act to mediate these is a key part of the work of all teacher educators and an important focus for the work of educational researchers