PERCEPTION OF BUILDING CONSTRUCTION WORKERS TOWARDS SAFETY, HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT

The construction industry is known as one of the most hazardous activities. Therefore, safety on the job site is an important aspect with respect to the overall safety in construction. This paper assesses the safety level perception of the construction building workers towards safety, health and environment on a construction job site in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The above study was carried out by choosing 5 selected large building construction projects and 5 small building construction projects respectively in and around Kuala Lumpur area. In the present study, an exhaustive survey was carried out in these 10 project site areas using a standard checklist and a detailed developed questionnaire. The checklist comprised 17 divisions of safety measurements which are considered and perceived to be important from the safety point of view and was assessed based on the score obtained. The questionnaire comprised the general information with 36 safety attitude statements on a 1-5 Likert scale which was distributed to 100 construction workers. The results of the checklist show the difference of safety levels between the large and small projects. The study revealed that the large projects shown a high and consistent level in safety while the small projects shown a low and varied safety levels. The relationship between the factors can be obtained from the questionnaire. They are organizational commitment, factor influencing communication among workmates, worker related factors, personal role and supervisors’ role factors, obstacles to safety and safe behavior factors and management commitment at all levels in line with the management structure and risk taking behavioral factors. The findings of the present study revealed invaluable indications to the construction managers especially in improving the construction workers’ attitude towards safety, health and environment and hence good safety culture in the building construction industries

Biochar-mediated control of metabolites and other physiological responses in water-stressed Leptocohloa fusca

We investigated biochar-induced drought tolerance in Leptocohloa fusca (Kallar grass) by exploring the plant defense system at physiological level. L. fusca plants were exposed to drought stress (100%, 70%, and 30% field capacity), and biochar (BC), as an organic soil amendment was applied in two concentrations (15 and 30 mg kg−1 soil) to induce drought tolerance. Our results demonstrated that drought restricted the growth of L. fusca by inhibiting shoot and root (fresh and dry) weight, total chlorophyll content and photosynthetic rate. Under drought stress, the uptake of essential nutrients was also limited due to lower water supply, which ultimately affected metabolites including amino and organic acids, and soluble sugars. In addition, drought stress induced oxidative stress, which is evidenced by the higher production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) including hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), superoxide ion (O2−), hydroxyl ion (OH−), and malondialdehyde (MDA). The current study revealed that stress-induced oxidative injury is not a linear path, since the excessive production of lipid peroxidation led to the accumulation of methylglyoxal (MG), a member of reactive carbonyl species (RCS), which ultimately caused cell injury. As a consequence of oxidative-stress induction, the ascorbate–glutathione (AsA–GSH) pathway, followed by a series of reactions, was activated by the plants to reduce ROS-induced oxidative damage. Furthermore, biochar considerably improved plant growth and development by mediating metabolites and soil physio-chemical status

Coverage and Capacity Planning of LTE Network for-Taizz City

This paper is based on the newly advanced cellular technology called Long Term Evolution (LTE). It is intended to give a good understanding of Radio Network planning of LTE and perform a case study onTaizz City, one of the highest populated cities in Yemen with a selected area of about 118.09km2. The LTE Radio network planning involves coverage estimation, capacity evaluation. In this paper the coverage estimation is done with regards to the real environment dataat its nominal stage to obtain better estimations. Propagation modeling is done using COST HATA W/I model with inclusion of additional parameters obtained from the real environment/terrain what improves the coverage estimation.This in turn, results in a wide coverage, introducing high quality services and excellent mobility support. The simulation is performed using Atoll program to evaluate the traffic demand for all services and to calculate the average throughput of each service

Spontaneous Creation of Inflationary Universes and the Cosmic Landscape

We study some gravitational instanton solutions that offer a natural realization of the spontaneous creation of inflationary universes in the brane world context in string theory. Decoherence due to couplings of higher (perturbative) modes of the metric as well as matter fields modifies the Hartle-Hawking wavefunction for de Sitter space. Generalizing this new wavefunction to be used in string theory, we propose a principle in string theory that hopefully will lead us to the particular vacuum we live in, thus avoiding the anthropic principle. As an illustration of this idea, we give a phenomenological analysis of the probability of quantum tunneling to various stringy vacua. We find that the preferred tunneling is to an inflationary universe (like our early universe), not to a universe with a very small cosmological constant (i.e., like today's universe) and not to a 10-dimensional uncompactified de Sitter universe. Such preferred solutions are interesting as they offer a cosmological mechanism for the stabilization of extra dimensions during the inflationary epoch.Comment: 52 pages, 7 figures, 1 table. Added discussion on supercritical string vacua, added reference

Reheating from Tachyon Condensation

We argue that it may be possible to reheat the universe after inflation driven by D-brane annihilation, due to the coupling of massless fields to the time-dependent tachyon condensate which describes the annihilation process. This mechanism can work if the original branes annihilate to a stable brane containing the standard model. Given reasonable assumptions about the shape of the tachyon background configuration and the size of the relevant extra dimension, the reheating can be efficient enough to overcome the problem of the universe being perpetually dominated by cold dark tachyon matter. In particular, reheating is most efficient when the final brane codimension is large, and when the derivatives of the tachyon background are large.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figures; corrected discussion of kink-antikink formatio

Measurements of differential production cross sections for a Z boson in association with jets in pp collisions at root s=8 TeV

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Search for leptophobic Z ' bosons decaying into four-lepton final states in proton-proton collisions at root s=8 TeV

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Search for black holes and other new phenomena in high-multiplicity final states in proton-proton collisions at root s=13 TeV

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Search for high-mass diphoton resonances in proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV and combination with 8 TeV search

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Search for heavy resonances decaying into a vector boson and a Higgs boson in final states with charged leptons, neutrinos, and b quarks

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