Machinery Transportation Management: Case Study of 'Plant-trailer' H&S Incidents

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate causal agents of health and safety (H&S)incidents among “plant-trailers” (as used by construction and utility contractors to transport mechanical machinery); including the relationship(s) of such incidents to routine safety inspections and, plant maintenance functions. Design/methodology/approach – H&S plant-trailer incident data, from a collaborating UK-based case study utility company are analysed using inductive, interpretative and descriptive statistical methods. Findings – Principal incident occurrences relate to trailer wheels, wheel bearings, tyres and braking systems. All forms of incidents observed harbour significant risk and especially, if they occur during travel on public highways. Derived recommendations for incident mitigation and Control, suggest a requirement for improved human behaviour, machinery inspection regimes and maintenance systems. Research limitations/implications – The findings will be valuable to academia as a basis for advancing this new research subject, both empirically and internationally. Direction is offered in this respect. Practical implications – Recommendations will be of practical relevance to machinery management practitioners generally and to plant-trailer stakeholders more Specifically. For the latter, the study encourages introspective consideration of plant-trailer H&S systems. Originality/value – No previous research has targeted these issues relating to plant-trailers. Keywords Risk, Inspection, Maintenance, Machinery, H&S, Trailers Paper type Case stud

Sources of Measurement Error in an ECG Examination: Implications for Performance-Based Assessments

Objective: To assess the sources of measurement error in an electrocardiogram (ECG) interpretation examination given in a third-year internal medicine clerkship. Design: Three successive generalizability studies were conducted. 1) Multiple faculty rated student responses to a previously administered exam. 2) The rating criteria were revised and study 1 was repeated. 3) The examination was converted into an extended matching format including multiple cases with the same underlying cardiac problem. Results: The discrepancies among raters (main effects and interactions) were dwarfed by the error associated with case specificity. The largest source of the differences among raters was in rating student errors of commission rather than student errors of omission. Revisions in the rating criteria may have helped increase inter-rater reliability slightly however, due to case specificity, it had little impact on the overall reliability of the exam. The third study indicated the majority of the variability in student performance across cases was in performance across cases within the same type of cardiac problem rather than between different types of cardiac problems. Conclusions: Case specificity was the overwhelming source of measurement error. The variation among cases came mainly from discrepancies in performance between examples of the same cardiac problem rather than from differences in performance across different types of cardiac problems. This suggests it is necessary to include a large number of cases even if the goal is to assess performance on only a few types of cardiac problems

Demystifying the educational benefits of different gaming genres

As research continues into the use of computer games for educational purposes, educators still appear reluctant to incorporate them into their teaching. One contributing factor to this reluctance is the lack of information regarding the benefits offered by the different games available today. These differences appear to have been largely overlooked by the academic community, resulting in a lack of information being made available to both the academic and education communities alike. Without this information, educators will find it difficult to determine whether a game will suit their teaching needs, and will continue to avoid using them. This paper studies a selection of games from several different genres, assessing each one in its ability to fulfil a set of previously identified requirements for a good educational resource. The results of the investigation showed that there were indeed strong differences between the genres, allowing for some suggestions to be made regarding their use in education, as well as leaving room for some interesting future work

The Costs of Teenage Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing: Analysis with a Within-School Propensity Score Matching Estimator

Teen out-of-wedlock mothers have lower education and earnings than peers who have children later. This study uses the National Educational Longitudinal Survey of 1988 (NELS) to examine the extent to which the apparent effects of out-of-wedlock teen fertility are not causal, but are due to pre-existing disadvantages of the young women and their families. We use a novel fixed-effect matching method to study this problem. We find that mothers-to-be were substantially disadvantaged before their teen out-of-wedlock fertility. At the same time, we cannot rule out that out-of-wedlock fertility reduces education substantially, although far less than the cross-sectional comparisons of means suggest.

Sources of Measurement Error in an ECG Examination: Implications for Performance-Based Assessments

Objective: To assess the sources of measurement error in an electrocardiogram (ECG) interpretation examination given in a third-year internal medicine clerkship. Design: Three successive generalizability studies were conducted. 1) Multiple faculty rated student responses to a previously administered exam. 2) The rating criteria were revised and study 1 was repeated. 3) The examination was converted into an extended matching format including multiple cases with the same underlying cardiac problem. Results: The discrepancies among raters (main effects and interactions) were dwarfed by the error associated with case specificity. The largest source of the differences among raters was in rating student errors of commission rather than student errors of omission. Revisions in the rating criteria may have helped increase inter-rater reliability slightly however, due to case specificity, it had little impact on the overall reliability of the exam. The third study indicated the majority of the variability in student performance across cases was in performance across cases within the same type of cardiac problem rather than between different types of cardiac problems. Conclusions: Case specificity was the overwhelming source of measurement error. The variation among cases came mainly from discrepancies in performance between examples of the same cardiac problem rather than from differences in performance across different types of cardiac problems. This suggests it is necessary to include a large number of cases even if the goal is to assess performance on only a few types of cardiac problems