Organizational learning at nuclear power plants

The Nuclear Power Plant Advisory Panel on Organizational Learning provides channels of communications between the management and organization research projects of the MIT International Program for Enhanced Nuclear Power Plant Safety and plant personnel actively concerned with important operational issues, inside and outside the control room, relevant to safety. The Panel is conceived as an opportunity for plants to share their knowledge and concerns about aspects of management and organization, with a particular emphasis on self-assessment, learning, and the management of change. Further, the Panel seeks to identify opportunities for collaborative research with practical benefits. At the first Panel meeting, 20 representatives from U.S. nuclear power plants and utilities and 14 MIT faculty, research staff, and students explored mutual interests and priorities in order to guide future research efforts. Professor John Carroll introduced the overall MIT research project.Three MIT researchers discussed their proposed research: Professor Alfred Marcus discussed quantitative analyses of improvements in U.S. nuclear power plant safety during the 1980s, and the need to conduct detailed studies of plant improvements and of utility strategies; Dr. Constance Perin discussed how work requires bridging across functions, levels, technical groups, and shifts within a social and cultural system, and proposed to study various plant programs in terms of their vertical relationships and institutional context; Professor John Carroll focused on the analysis of safety-relevant incidents through the application of knowledge distributed among various professional groups in the plant, and the need for research to characterize this knowledge and its relationship to performance enhancement.In addition, Professor Michael Golay discussed the organization and management implications of new reactor technology, and Professor Thomas Kochan summarized research on contractor training and safety in the petrochemical industry. Roundtable groups discussed three topics of their own choosing: configuration control, proactivity and communication with management, and event trending (including root cause analysis and corrective action tracking). A wide-ranging discussion explored topics of mutual interest, their connections to safe operations and their potential for research. A variety of research opportunities were raised and discussed, along with next steps for continued communication between the Panel and MIT

Consensus guidelines for the use and interpretation of angiogenesis assays

The formation of new blood vessels, or angiogenesis, is a complex process that plays important roles in growth and development, tissue and organ regeneration, as well as numerous pathological conditions. Angiogenesis undergoes multiple discrete steps that can be individually evaluated and quantified by a large number of bioassays. These independent assessments hold advantages but also have limitations. This article describes in vivo, ex vivo, and in vitro bioassays that are available for the evaluation of angiogenesis and highlights critical aspects that are relevant for their execution and proper interpretation. As such, this collaborative work is the first edition of consensus guidelines on angiogenesis bioassays to serve for current and future reference

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Transition, Integration and Convergence. The Case of Romania

This volume comprises several studies and papers published in the last decades. They have been selected and ranged so that to provide a minimum of coherence concerning the phases which Romania has crossed in her way to the advanced socio-economic system of European type: transition to the market economy, accession to the EU, the economic convergence in the three fundamental domains: institutions, real economy, and nominal economy. The readers may find in this volume a description of debates, difficulties and solutions adopted for building-up the market economy by a state being in a profound transformation from weak transition institutions towards hard democratic institutions. Because the transition to the market economy and the association of Romania with the EU and then the integration presenting strategic political decisions, I have included in this work two studies devoted to the political forces state and political parties that elaborated and applied these strategic decisions underlining their structure, role and function and their transformation. Integration into the EU of a country like Romania, which emerged from a different system comparing with the West-European one, has proved to be difficult and lasting many years because of the structural transformations. In five chapters I am referring to the essential characteristics of the integration process, such as: market liberalization, competitiveness of the local (national) firms on the national and EU markets, institutional reforms so that the institutions of candidate countries have to become compatible with those of the EU and finally the perspective assessment to find out the real and nominal convergence. Putting into practice the EU competitivity and cohesion principles, Romania has good prospects to close, in a reasonable time, the economic gap and to be admitted into the Euro Zone. Although the real convergence of Romania with the EU requires higher growth rates for the former, a new approach is compulsory to take into consideration the environment quality, the natural resources and the equity between the present and the future generations as natural resource consumers. Just these problems have determined me to include in this volume the last two chapters which, on the one hand, try to prove the necessity of the economy growth harmonization with the environment evolution as well as the saving of the energy resources, and, on the other hand, to point out the main ways to be followed and instruments to be used

ISO 9000's Effects on Accident Reduction in the U.S. Motor Carrier Industry

This report aims at establishing a correlation between the voluntary ISO 9000 certification by motor carriers and traffic safety. The report shows that improvement of operating and quality performance improved safety performance. As part of the analysis, several ISO 9000 certified and non-certified motor carrier companies were compared based on their social and financial performance prior to, during and after the certification process. The authors have shown that there is a positive increase in performance during and after the certification process. The number of motor carrier companies certified by ISO 9000 is limited and unique. The uniqueness arises from the fact that the certified organizations haul specialized products such as automobiles and hazardous materials. That shows that most organizations are certified due to mandatory reasons. In conclusion, the observations and results have thrown light in a new direction that indicates that there exists a significant relationship between the quality assurance and safety performance of a motor carrier organization. The authors feel that further research is necessary to investigate of the circumstances under which ISO 9000 and other programs for upgrading motor carrier performance help lead to increase in safety.Center for Transportation StudiesMinnesota Department of Transportatio

The MIT International Program for Enhanced Nuclear Power Plant Safety : organization and management in the nuclear power industry

by John S. Carroll, Constance Perin, Alfred A. Marcus.HD28 .M414 no.3435-, 92,

Management research on outages and maintenance

HD28 .M414 no.3580-93,