Investigation into the development of a human reliability analysis framework for the safety management of construction projects

Despite the fact that the construction industry is well-known for its enormous economic contribution to the country, the high fatality rate remains a major source of concern for construction professionals. The hazardous, fragmented, cost-driven, and dynamic nature of the industry has been identified as the primary contributor to the construction industry's compromised safety. Despite several initiatives from the government, safety regulatory bodies, and safety professionals to improve safety management, statistics show that occupational safety performance is still unacceptable. In fact, the construction industry is still grappling with identifying the critical factors influencing safety performance. Consequently, contemporary practices are incapable of dealing with the current H&S challenges. To overcome safety issues, it is critical to integrate underlying safety factors affecting safety performance into safety management systems. As a result of the aforementioned issues, the goal of this study was to investigate the underlying factors influencing safety performance in the UK construction industry and propose a framework to address the shortcomings by incorporating advanced immersive technologies for H&S management. This study took a systematic approach, first identifying the critical factors that have a significant impact on the safety performance of construction projects through a detailed literature review, which served as the foundation for developing an initial framework. These factors were classified into several clusters, which included organisational, managerial, legislative, social, environmental, and personnel considerations. Human/personnel factors were discovered to have a significant impact on occupational health and safety on construction projects, accounting for approximately 80% of construction site accidents; thus, the underlying factors were investigated further in this study. In order to supplement the findings of the literature review, a mixed-method approach was used to scope the working framework for overcoming the H&S challenges influencing safety performance. This involved conducting a total of 34 questionnaire research which helped to refine the research findings and shaped the proposed framework to assess human error in construction projects. Afterwards, a qualitative approach involving semi-structured interviews was used to validate the proposed framework. In total, 20 experts took part in the interviews, and the results were compared to the initial findings to validate the research findings, as well as the proposed framework, was shown to the participants to validate its working. The research findings suggested that the leading causes of human error are human personnel traits such as human behaviour, attitude, risk assessment, experience, and hazard assessment. Furthermore, to investigate the occurrence of human error, accident causation models have been studied to analyse the relationship between the latent and proximal human factors. The human reliability analysis (HRA) technique was used to manage human error in construction projects. Several HRA techniques have been examined to determine the best fit framework and the proposed framework was created using the HRA technique, which has been proven to be an effective method in safety-critical industries. Furthermore, immersive technology has been proposed and integrated into the novel framework to develop a viable safety management framework. The proposed immersive safety management framework was validated by respondents

COMPARATIVE EFFICACY OF DETOMIDINE AND DETOMIDINE - KETAMINE COCKTAIL IN QUAILS

Twenty adult healthy quails (Coturnix coturnix) were divided into two equal groups. One group was administered detomidine (2.4 mg/kg, I/M) and other group was administered detomidine-ketamine cocktail (1.2 mg/kg + 30 mg/kg, I/M). Detomidine slowly and smoothly induced a light sedation accompanied by superficial analgesia, hypoventilation, hypothermia and bradycardia in all birds. Detomidine-ketamine cocktail rapidly and smoothly induced a deep anaesthesia accompanied by deep analgesia, hypoventilation, hypothermia and bradycardia and complete loss of all reflexes in all birds. In both groups, recovery from sedation and anaesthesia was smooth and of short duration. From this study it was concluded that for minor and least painful procedures in quails detomidine can be used alone, while for major and painful surgical procedures detomidine-ketamine combination should be preferred

Criminal Law--Kidnaping--Detention Incidental to Crime of Robbery Held Not Kidnaping (People v. Levy, 15 N.Y.2d 159 (1965))

Data compression at its base is concerned with how information is organized in data. Understanding this organization can lead to efficient ways of representing the information and hence data compression. In this paper we review the ways in which ideas and approaches fundamental to the theory and practice of data compression have been used in the area of bioinformatics. We look at how basic theoretical ideas from data compression, such as the notions of entropy, mutual information, and complexity have been used for analyzing biological sequences in order to discover hidden patterns, infer phylogenetic relationships between organisms and study viral populations. Finally, we look at how inferred grammars for biological sequences have been used to uncover structure in biological sequences

Data Compression Concepts and Algorithms and Their Applications to Bioinformatics

Data compression at its base is concerned with how information is organized in data. Understanding this organization can lead to efficient ways of representing the information and hence data compression. In this paper we review the ways in which ideas and approaches fundamental to the theory and practice of data compression have been used in the area of bioinformatics. We look at how basic theoretical ideas from data compression, such as the notions of entropy, mutual information, and complexity have been used for analyzing biological sequences in order to discover hidden patterns, infer phylogenetic relationships between organisms and study viral populations. Finally, we look at how inferred grammars for biological sequences have been used to uncover structure in biological sequences

Iterative Residual Fitting for Spherical Harmonic Transform of Band-Limited Signals on the Sphere: Generalization and Analysis

We present the generalized iterative residual fitting (IRF) for the computation of the spherical harmonic transform (SHT) of band-limited signals on the sphere. The proposed method is based on the partitioning of the subspace of band-limited signals into orthogonal subspaces. There exist sampling schemes on the sphere which support accurate computation of SHT. However, there are applications where samples~(or measurements) are not taken over the predefined grid due to nature of the signal and/or acquisition set-up. To support such applications, the proposed IRF method enables accurate computation of SHTs of signals with randomly distributed sufficient number of samples. In order to improve the accuracy of the computation of the SHT, we also present the so-called multi-pass IRF which adds multiple iterative passes to the IRF. We analyse the multi-pass IRF for different sampling schemes and for different size partitions. Furthermore, we conduct numerical experiments to illustrate that the multi-pass IRF allows sufficiently accurate computation of SHTs

Data Compression Concepts and Algorithms and Their Applications to Bioinformatics

Data compression at its base is concerned with how information is organized in data. Understanding this organization can lead to efficient ways of representing the information and hence data compression. In this paper we review the ways in which ideas and approaches fundamental to the theory and practice of data compression have been used in the area of bioinformatics. We look at how basic theoretical ideas from data compression, such as the notions of entropy, mutual information, and complexity have been used for analyzing biological sequences in order to discover hidden patterns, infer phylogenetic relationships between organisms and study viral populations. Finally, we look at how inferred grammars for biological sequences have been used to uncover structure in biological sequences

Immune-Mediated Inflammation May Contribute to the Pathogenesis of Cardiovascular Disease in Mucopolysaccharidosis Type I.

BackgroundCardiovascular disease, a progressive manifestation of α-L-iduronidase deficiency or mucopolysaccharidosis type I, continues in patients both untreated and treated with hematopoietic stem cell transplantation or intravenous enzyme replacement. Few studies have examined the effects of α-L-iduronidase deficiency and subsequent glycosaminoglycan storage upon arterial gene expression to understand the pathogenesis of cardiovascular disease.MethodsGene expression in carotid artery, ascending, and descending aortas from four non-tolerized, non-enzyme treated 19 month-old mucopolysaccharidosis type I dogs was compared with expression in corresponding vascular segments from three normal, age-matched dogs. Data were analyzed using R and whole genome network correlation analysis, a bias-free method of categorizing expression level and significance into discrete modules. Genes were further categorized based on module-trait relationships. Expression of clusterin, a protein implicated in other etiologies of cardiovascular disease, was assessed in canine and murine mucopolysaccharidosis type I aortas via Western blot and in situ immunohistochemistry.ResultsGene families with more than two-fold, significant increased expression involved lysosomal function, proteasome function, and immune regulation. Significantly downregulated genes were related to cellular adhesion, cytoskeletal elements, and calcium regulation. Clusterin gene overexpression (9-fold) and protein overexpression (1.3 to 1.62-fold) was confirmed and located specifically in arterial plaques of mucopolysaccharidosis-affected dogs and mice.ConclusionsOverexpression of lysosomal and proteasomal-related genes are expected responses to cellular stress induced by lysosomal storage in mucopolysaccharidosis type I. Upregulation of immunity-related genes implicates the potential involvement of glycosaminoglycan-induced inflammation in the pathogenesis of mucopolysaccharidosis-related arterial disease, for which clusterin represents a potential biomarker

Derivatives trading in emerging economies with special reference to India

In this study The National Stock Exchange of India (NSE) has been taken as the sample exchange since this is the only exchange which provided the derivatives facility throughout the reference period of the study. The reference period of the study has been taken from 2001-02 to 2011-12.MAGR has been employed to determine the growth of derivatives in NSE and this study concludes  that the derivatives products such as Stock Futures, Stock Options , Index Options and Index Futures have shown significant growth during the earlier years during which the national and international sentiment was quite optimistic, however, since the year 2009-2010 the derivatives market have registered sluggish growth even negative growth in some cases because of the slowdown in The U.S.A. and debt crises in the Euro zone which engulfed the emerging capital markets all over the globe including India. It was this reason that impacted the volumes of derivative products in India. Despite, all these economic disturbances the overall growth of derivatives continued in India though at decreasing pace

Reddit Users' Questions and Concerns about Anesthesia

Background. Patients utilize social media in search of support networks. Reddit is one of the most popular social media sites and allows users to anonymously connect. Anesthesia patients are actively using Reddit to discuss their treatment options and experiences within the medical system. Methods. Posts published on an active Reddit forum on Anesthesia (i.e., /r/Anesthesia) were used. Big Query was used to collect posts from /r/Anesthesia. We collected 3,288 posts published between December 2015 and August 2019. We collected a control group of 3,288 posts from a Reddit forum not related to Anesthesia. Using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) we extracted 20 topics from our data set. The LDA topic themes most associated with posts in /r/Anesthesia compared to the control group were determined. Results. LDA analysis of posts in /r/Anesthesia relative to a control group produced 6 distinct categories of posts (Table 1). The posts most associated with /r/Anesthesia when compared to a control group were posts belonging to the “Physician-Patient Experience” category (Cohen’s d= 0.389) while the posts least associated with /r/Anesthesia were from the “Uncertainties” category of posts (Cohen’s d= 0.147). Example experiences from members of the /r/Anesthesia forum highlight subjective experiences of patients undergoing anesthesiology. Conclusions. The language used on social media can provide insights into an individual's experience with anesthesia and inform physicians about patient concerns. Anesthesiologists are poised to address these concerns and prevent anonymous misinformation by providing verified physician insights on the forum /r/Anesthesia