Social media in manufacturing workplaces

This research study and dissertation was designed to evaluate any connection between the use of social media for learning, communication and collaboration in a manufacturing environment and improved performance in quality and delivery metrics in those organizations. As the competition throughout the world becomes more challenging, organizations, small and large, are changing the way they conduct business to remain competitive in the growing and changing marketplace. Many of these organizations are experiencing a continually growing sector of their employees working remotely or in, in some cases, other areas of the world. Many of these organizations are finding that the ways to perform and improve processes that had been relied upon for many years simply do not work in the current workplace. One way that has been discovered to improve performance with consideration to these challenges is through the use of social media. Social media is becoming increasingly more commonplace in the workplace in recent years. For several years, social media has been used by organizations to collect feedback from customers, employees and others to help refine their processes and products to improve their product or service to help make more satisfied customers. Coupled with increasing demands of Just In Time (JIT) manufacturing and increasingly rigorous quality requirements, social media is now being examined to be a means to help better equip and empower these workforces. Effective and consistent training can be a considerable challenge in many manufacturing organizations and many of those businesses are beginning to more fully understand the true impact of training. While the ROI may not always be easily quantifiable in many instances, training and development is becoming a cornerstone of many organizations. Although most employee development / training departments desire to make training better, barriers such as off shifts, departmental budgets and remote working employees can challenge even the best plans or intentions. Because of the inconsistent training that occurs as a result of these factors, organizations can experience varied outcomes that can dramatically impact customer satisfaction, employee engagement and organizational profitability. Training through the use of social media can help reduce the burden placed upon these organizations and lead to a more positive financial performance. It can also allow organizations to use a web based venue that is accessible nearly anywhere in the world and be accessed nearly instantaneously. In addition, many of these social media sites can be used from little to no cost, helping to better control costs that are associated with employee development. Although the use of social media for employee development is new, the results of this research study shows promising results. This research study shows a correlation between the use of social media for learning, communication and collaboration and the organization’s improved performance in quality and delivery metrics. While the Pilot Study produced positive results, the scope of this earlier study was broad, using a number of social media venues, and there was no way to completely understand where the positive effects came from. In an attempt to better control the variables in the empirical research study, the number of forms of social media used in that study was reduced to only the use of Twitter. The results of the research study were also positive yet did not show as large of an impact as the Pilot Study. This could be due to the many factors and allows for significant opportunity for future research using other forms of social media alone or in combination with one another. In addition, the results from the anonymous online survey showed that the majority of the participants found value through the use of Twitter for communication and collaboration within their workplace. Although these results are promising, there is a great deal of opportunity to explore this relationship in much closer detail opening up a venue for future research

Quantifying methane and nitrous oxide emissions from the UK and Ireland using a national-scale monitoring network

The UK is one of several countries around the world that has enacted legislation to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. In this study, we present top-down emissions of methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) for the UK and Ireland over the period August 2012 to August 2014. These emissions were inferred using measurements from a network of four sites around the two countries. We used a hierarchical Bayesian inverse framework to infer fluxes as well as a set of covariance parameters that describe uncertainties in the system. We inferred average UK total emissions of 2.09 (1.65–2.67) Tg yr−1 CH4 and 0.101 (0.068–0.150) Tg yr−1 N2O and found our derived UK estimates to be generally lower than the a priori emissions, which consisted primarily of anthropogenic sources and with a smaller contribution from natural sources. We used sectoral distributions from the UK National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory (NAEI) to determine whether these discrepancies can be attributed to specific source sectors. Because of the distinct distributions of the two dominant CH4 emissions sectors in the UK, agriculture and waste, we found that the inventory may be overestimated in agricultural CH4 emissions. We found that annual mean N2O emissions were consistent with both the prior and the anthropogenic inventory but we derived a significant seasonal cycle in emissions. This seasonality is likely due to seasonality in fertilizer application and in environmental drivers such as temperature and rainfall, which are not reflected in the annual resolution inventory. Through the hierarchical Bayesian inverse framework, we quantified uncertainty covariance parameters and emphasized their importance for high-resolution emissions estimation. We inferred average model errors of approximately 20 and 0.4 ppb and correlation timescales of 1.0 (0.72–1.43) and 2.6 (1.9–20 3.9) days for CH4 and N2O, respectively. These errors are a combination of transport model errors as well as errors due to unresolved emissions processes in the inventory. We found the largest CH4 errors at the Tacolneston station in eastern England, which may be due to sporadic emissions from landfills and offshore gas in the North Sea

A cross-sectional study of Mycoplasma genitalium infection and correlates in women undergoing population-based screening or clinic-based testing for Chlamydia infection in London

To determine Mycoplasma genitalium infection and correlates among young women undergoing population-based screening or clinic-based testing for Chlamydia infection

A comparison of proteomic, genomic, and osteological methods of archaeological sex estimation

Sex estimation of skeletons is fundamental to many archaeological studies. Currently, three approaches are available to estimate sex–osteology, genomics, or proteomics, but little is known about the relative reliability of these methods in applied settings. We present matching osteological, shotgun-genomic, and proteomic data to estimate the sex of 55 individuals, each with an independent radiocarbon date between 2,440 and 100 cal BP, from two ancestral Ohlone sites in Central California. Sex estimation was possible in 100% of this burial sample using proteomics, in 91% using genomics, and in 51% using osteology. Agreement between the methods was high, however conflicts did occur. Genomic sex estimates were 100% consistent with proteomic and osteological estimates when DNA reads were above 100,000 total sequences. However, more than half the samples had DNA read numbers below this threshold, producing high rates of conflict with osteological and proteomic data where nine out of twenty conditional DNA sex estimates conflicted with proteomics. While the DNA signal decreased by an order of magnitude in the older burial samples, there was no decrease in proteomic signal. We conclude that proteomics provides an important complement to osteological and shotgun-genomic sex estimation

Neutrinos below 100 TeV from the southern sky employing refined veto techniques to IceCube data

Many Galactic sources of gamma rays, such as supernova remnants, are expected to produce neutrinos with a typical energy cutoff well below 100 TeV. For the IceCube Neutrino Observatory located at the South Pole, the southern sky, containing the inner part of the Galactic plane and the Galactic Center, is a particularly challenging region at these energies, because of the large background of atmospheric muons. In this paper, we present recent advancements in data selection strategies for track-like muon neutrino events with energies below 100 TeV from the southern sky. The strategies utilize the outer detector regions as veto and features of the signal pattern to reduce the background of atmospheric muons to a level which, for the first time, allows IceCube searching for point-like sources of neutrinos in the southern sky at energies between 100 GeV and several TeV in the muon neutrino charged current channel. No significant clustering of neutrinos above background expectation was observed in four years of data recorded with the completed IceCube detector. Upper limits on the neutrino flux for a number of spectral hypotheses are reported for a list of astrophysical objects in the southern hemisphere

Search for transient optical counterparts to high-energy IceCube neutrinos with Pan-STARRS1

In order to identify the sources of the observed diffuse high-energy neutrino flux, it is crucial to discover their electromagnetic counterparts. IceCube began releasing alerts for single high-energy ($E > 60$ TeV) neutrino detections with sky localisation regions of order 1 deg radius in 2016. We used Pan-STARRS1 to follow-up five of these alerts during 2016-2017 to search for any optical transients that may be related to the neutrinos. Typically 10-20 faint ($m < 22.5$ mag) extragalactic transients are found within the Pan-STARRS1 footprints and are generally consistent with being unrelated field supernovae (SNe) and AGN. We looked for unusual properties of the detected transients, such as temporal coincidence of explosion epoch with the IceCube timestamp. We found only one transient that had properties worthy of a specific follow-up. In the Pan-STARRS1 imaging for IceCube-160427A (probability to be of astrophysical origin of $\sim$50 %), we found a SN PS16cgx, located at 10.0' from the nominal IceCube direction. Spectroscopic observations of PS16cgx showed that it was an H-poor SN at z = 0.2895. The spectra and light curve resemble some high-energy Type Ic SNe, raising the possibility of a jet driven SN with an explosion epoch temporally coincident with the neutrino detection. However, distinguishing Type Ia and Type Ic SNe at this redshift is notoriously difficult. Based on all available data we conclude that the transient is more likely to be a Type Ia with relatively weak SiII absorption and a fairly normal rest-frame r-band light curve. If, as predicted, there is no high-energy neutrino emission from Type Ia SNe, then PS16cgx must be a random coincidence, and unrelated to the IceCube-160427A. We find no other plausible optical transient for any of the five IceCube events observed down to a 5$\sigma$ limiting magnitude of $m \sim 22$ mag, between 1 day and 25 days after detection.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures, accepted to A&

Book Reviews

With the observation of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, interest has risen in models of PeV-mass decaying dark matter particles to explain the observed flux. We present two dedicated experimental analyses to test this hypothesis. One analysis uses 6 years of IceCube data focusing on muon neutrino ‘track’ events from the Northern Hemisphere, while the second analysis uses 2 years of ‘cascade’ events from the full sky. Known background components and the hypothetical flux from unstable dark matter are fitted to the experimental data. Since no significant excess is observed in either analysis, lower limits on the lifetime of dark matter particles are derived: we obtain the strongest constraint to date, excluding lifetimes shorter than $10^{28}$ s at 90% CL for dark matter masses above 10 TeV

Differential limit on the extremely-high-energy cosmic neutrino flux in the presence of astrophysical background from nine years of IceCube data

We report a quasi-differential upper limit on the extremely-high-energy (EHE) neutrino flux above $5\times 10^{6}$ GeV based on an analysis of nine years of IceCube data. The astrophysical neutrino flux measured by IceCube extends to PeV energies, and it is a background flux when searching for an independent signal flux at higher energies, such as the cosmogenic neutrino signal. We have developed a new method to place robust limits on the EHE neutrino flux in the presence of an astrophysical background, whose spectrum has yet to be understood with high precision at PeV energies. A distinct event with a deposited energy above $10^{6}$ GeV was found in the new two-year sample, in addition to the one event previously found in the seven-year EHE neutrino search. These two events represent a neutrino flux that is incompatible with predictions for a cosmogenic neutrino flux and are considered to be an astrophysical background in the current study. The obtained limit is the most stringent to date in the energy range between $5 \times 10^{6}$ and $5 \times 10^{10}$ GeV. This result constrains neutrino models predicting a three-flavor neutrino flux of $E_\nu^2\phi_{\nu_e+\nu_\mu+\nu_\tau}\simeq2\times 10^{-8}\ {\rm GeV}/{\rm cm}^2\ \sec\ {\rm sr}$at$10^9\ {\rm GeV}$. A significant part of the parameter-space for EHE neutrino production scenarios assuming a proton-dominated composition of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays is excluded.Comment: The version accepted for publication in Physical Review