Making Effective Audits Truly Effective

The Queensland Coal Mining Safety and Health Act 1999 and the Mining and Quarrying Safety and Health Act 1999 require a mine to have a Safety and Health Management System (SHMS) in place to manage the risk to safety and health of persons at the mine. The legislation assigns the obligation to the site senior executive to develop and implement the mine’s SHMS. It assigns a further obligation to the mine operator to audit the effectiveness of the system put in place by the site senior executive. What is exactly meant in the legislation by the term effectiveness, and how to go about assessing effectiveness has been the topic of much debate since the legislation was enacted. In 2008, the Queensland Mines Inspectorate provided some clarification on the issue, when it published Queensland Guidance Note QGN09 Reviewing the Effectiveness of Safety and Health Management Systems. However, QGN09 is not an exhaustive treatment of reviewing the effectiveness of an SHMS. In this paper, former Queensland Commissioner for Mine Safety and Health, Paul Harrison, and former Queensland Chief Inspector of Mines, Phil Goode, discuss effectiveness audits from the perspective of the authors’ experience and propose a tool for quantitative measurement of SHMS effectiveness

CONDOR: a database resource of developmentally associated conserved non-coding elements

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Comparative genomics is currently one of the most popular approaches to study the regulatory architecture of vertebrate genomes. Fish-mammal genomic comparisons have proved powerful in identifying conserved non-coding elements likely to be distal <it>cis-</it>regulatory modules such as enhancers, silencers or insulators that control the expression of genes involved in the regulation of early development. The scientific community is showing increasing interest in characterizing the function, evolution and language of these sequences. Despite this, there remains little in the way of user-friendly access to a large dataset of such elements in conjunction with the analysis and the visualization tools needed to study them.</p> <p>Description</p> <p>Here we present CONDOR (COnserved Non-coDing Orthologous Regions) available at: <url>http://condor.fugu.biology.qmul.ac.uk</url>. In an interactive and intuitive way the website displays data on > 6800 non-coding elements associated with over 120 early developmental genes and conserved across vertebrates. The database regularly incorporates results of ongoing <it>in vivo </it>zebrafish enhancer assays of the CNEs carried out in-house, which currently number ~100. Included and highlighted within this set are elements derived from duplication events both at the origin of vertebrates and more recently in the teleost lineage, thus providing valuable data for studying the divergence of regulatory roles between paralogs. CONDOR therefore provides a number of tools and facilities to allow scientists to progress in their own studies on the function and evolution of developmental <it>cis</it>-regulation.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>By providing access to data with an approachable graphics interface, the CONDOR database presents a rich resource for further studies into the regulation and evolution of genes involved in early development.</p

Television news and the symbolic criminalisation of young people

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Journalism Studies, 9(1), 75 - 90, 2008, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14616700701768105.This essay combines quantitative and qualitative analysis of six UK television news programmes. It seeks to analyse the representation of young people within broadcast news provision at a time when media representations, political discourse and policy making generally appear to be invoking young people as something of a folk devil or a locus for moral panics. The quantitative analysis examines the frequency with which young people appear as main actors across a range of different subjects and analyses the role of young people as news sources. It finds a strong correlation between young people and violent crime. A qualitative analysis of four “special reports” or backgrounders on channel Five's Five News explores the representation of young people in more detail, paying attention to contradictions and tensions in the reports, the role of statistics in crime reporting, the role of victims of crime and the tensions between conflicting news frames.Arts and Humanities Research Counci

Earthshine Project

This site, created by Phil Goode of New Jersey's Science and Technology University, investigates new ways to measure the earth's albedo (reflected sunlight). The incoming sunlight and the albedo have a significant impact on the earth's climate. The page features different images of observatories around the globe along with statistical data and charts to illustrate their findings. An extensive bibliography is provided for those interested in further study on these findings

Multi-conjugate Adaptive Optics at Big Bear Solar Observatory

A multi-conjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) system for solar observations has been set up at the 1.6-meter clearaperture New Solar Telescope (NST) in Big Bear Lake, California. Being a pathnder to address fundamentaldesign questions in solar MCAO experimentally, the system is purposely exible. We deploy three deformablemirrors (DMs). One of which is conjugate to the telescope pupil, and the other two to distinct higher altitudes.The pupil DM can be either placed into a pupil image up- or downstream of the high-altitude DMs. Thehigh-altitude DMs can be separately and quickly conjugated to various altitudes between 2 and 8 km. ThreeShack-Hartmann wavefront sensor units are available, one for low-order, multi-directional sensing and two highorderon-axis sensing of which one is used at a time. The exibility of the setup allows us to experimentallystudy the various sequencings of DMs and WFSs, which are hard to simulate conclusively. We report on thepreliminary results and summarize the design and the conguration options of the MCAO system at Big BearSolar Observatory (BBSO)

Ecological Sensing in a Southern California Forest: Integrating Environmental Abiotic and Biotic Measurements to Understand Ecosystem Function.

Understanding the interactions between belowground and aboveground process and how they respond to annual climatic variability remains a challenging task. In this study, we combined molecular techniques with high frequency images from automated minirhizotrons to determine the identity and temporal variability of fine roots and mycorrhizal fungi in a mixed-conifer forest in Southern California. We also examined how changes in fine roots and mycorrhizal fungi are related to leaf phenology and water dynamics over the course of the growing season. Throughout the study, there was considerable variation in ectomycorrhizal roots, with greater ectomycorrhizal roots during the dry summer months compared to early spring. Although the total number of ectomycorrhizal fungi did not change, there was a significant change in the ectomycorrhizal fungal community over the course of the growing season. Arbuscular mycorrhizal roots, on the other hand, showed little variation during the growing season. Sap flow peaked in mid-June, and corresponded well to the formation of new leaves and a period of relatively high soil moisture. Soil respiration varied between 1 µmol CO2 m-2 s-1 and 3.5 µmol CO2 m-2 s-1 during the year, with greater rates corresponding to periods of relatively high soil moisture and high soil temperature. By integrating data from a wide range of sensors, we can better understand the biophysical factors influencing the flux of carbon and water through an ecosystem

Ecological Sensing in a Southern California Forest: Integrating Environmental Abiotic and Biotic Measurements to Understand Ecosystem Function.

Understanding the interactions between belowground and aboveground process and how they respond to annual climatic variability remains a challenging task. In this study, we combined molecular techniques with high frequency images from automated minirhizotrons to determine the identity and temporal variability of fine roots and mycorrhizal fungi in a mixed-conifer forest in Southern California. We also examined how changes in fine roots and mycorrhizal fungi are related to leaf phenology and water dynamics over the course of the growing season. Throughout the study, there was considerable variation in ectomycorrhizal roots, with greater ectomycorrhizal roots during the dry summer months compared to early spring. Although the total number of ectomycorrhizal fungi did not change, there was a significant change in the ectomycorrhizal fungal community over the course of the growing season. Arbuscular mycorrhizal roots, on the other hand, showed little variation during the growing season. Sap flow peaked in mid-June, and corresponded well to the formation of new leaves and a period of relatively high soil moisture. Soil respiration varied between 1 µmol CO2 m-2 s-1 and 3.5 µmol CO2 m-2 s-1 during the year, with greater rates corresponding to periods of relatively high soil moisture and high soil temperature. By integrating data from a wide range of sensors, we can better understand the biophysical factors influencing the flux of carbon and water through an ecosystem

CONDOR: a database resource of developmentally associated conserved non-coding elements-3

<p><b>Copyright information:</b></p><p>Taken from "CONDOR: a database resource of developmentally associated conserved non-coding elements"</p><p>http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-213X/7/100</p><p>BMC Developmental Biology 2007;7():100-100.</p><p>Published online 30 Aug 2007</p><p>PMCID:PMC2020477.</p><p></p>ing a stringent whole genome comparison of the non-coding portions of the human and genomes [4]. The genomic regions to be aligned are then expanded past the map boundaries up to the next nearest known genes. genes in the region are determined using appropriate GO ontologies and/or InterPro domains. Orthologous sequence corresponding to this expanded region in human is then extracted from mouse, rat and/or dog genomes. Sequences are masked for repeats and are aligned using MLAGAN (identifying sequences conserved in the same order along the sequence) and SLAGAN (to identify conserved elements that have undergone rearrangement in one or more lineages). CNEs are identified using VISTA and filtered to exclude any that overlap known coding exons or ncRNAs. As an added stringency filter, only those CNEs that are conserved in at last four divergent vertebrate genomes (including ) are retained to avoid spurious matches