Some aspects of signals in the I.A.F.

Article shall try to tell you something about the Signals Branch of the Indian Air Force, what it aims to do, some of its difficulties and some of the instances where we feel it is not as efficient as we should like it to be. The purpose of an Air Force Signal Organization is to provide communication and radar facilities which will assist the Air Commander to exercise efficient control of his forces and to develop and apply their maximum fighting strength. These various facilities comprise-(a) Wireless communication system, (b) Radio Navigational and runway approach aids, (c) Aircraft control, early warning and identification systems, (d) Airborne search system, (e) Radio warfare system. (d) Airborne search system, (e) Radio warfare syste

The relationship between stereotyped movements and self-injurious behavior in children with developmental or sensory disabilities

Stereotyped movements (SM), including stereotyped self-injurious behaviour (SIB), are common among children with developmental and sensory disorders, but it is not known if SIB is a more severe form of SM or whether SIB and SM differ in kind. We developed the Stereotyped and Self-Injurious Movement Interview (SSIMI) to assess injurious and non-injurious SM. The SSIMI was administered to children with autism (n=56), intellectual disability (n=29), vision impairment (n=50), hearing impairment (n=51), and typical children (n=30). Results indicate that the reliability of measurement increases when SIB and other SM items are included in a single scale, that SIB is rarely evident in the absence of other SM (but not vice versa), that between group differences in the prevalence of SIB are paralleled by differences in the prevalence of other SM, and that correlations between SIB and other SM are moderately strong in autism, vision impaired, and intellectual disability groups but not in typical and hearing impaired groups. We conclude that the SSIMI is a useful measure of SIB and other SM. Among children with autism, vision impairment, or intellectual disability, SIB appear to represent a more severe form of SM. Both SIB and other SM may result from impairments in intellectual and sensory processing

Taking ownership of safety. What are the active ingredients of safety coaching and how do they impact safety outcomes in critical offshore working environments?

Safety coaching interventions have become a common feature in the safety critical offshore working environments of the North Sea. Whilst the beneficial impact of coaching as an organizational tool has been evidenced, there remains a question specifically over the use of safety coaching and its impact on behavioural change and producing safe working practices. A series of 24 semi-structured interviews were conducted with three groups of experts in the offshore industry: safety coaches, offshore managers and HSE directors. Using a thematic analysis approach, several significant themes were identified across the three expert groups including connecting with and creating safety ownership in the individual, personal significance and humanisation, ingraining safety and assessing and measuring a safety coach's competence. Results suggest clear utility of safety coaching when applied by safety coaches with appropriate coach training and understanding of safety issues in an offshore environment. The current work has found that the use of safety coaching in the safety critical offshore oil and gas industry is a powerful tool in managing and promoting a culture of safety and care

Setting and motivation in the decision to participate: An approach to the engagement of diverse samples in mobile research.

Internet and mobile based research are powerful tools in the creation of large, cohort studies (eCohort). However, recent analysis indicates that an underrepresentation of minority and low income groups in these studies might exceed that found in traditional research [1-5]. In this report, we present findings from an experiment in research engagement using the Eureka Research Platform developed to enroll diverse populations in support of biomedical clinical research. This experiment involved the recruitment of African American and Latino participants in a smartphone based survey at a temporary, charitable, dental event sponsored, in part, by the research team, in order to explore the impact of setting and approach on recruitment outcomes. 211 participants enrolled including a significant representation of African Americans (51%) and Latinos (31%) and those with education levels at high school or less (37%). Interviews conducted after the study confirmed that our recruitment efforts within the context of a service event affected the decision to participate. While further research is necessary, this experiment holds promise for the engagement of underrepresented groups in research

The Exceptions and the Rules in Global Musical Diversity

Global music diversity is a popular topic for both scientific and humanities researchers, but often for different reasons. Scientific research typically focuses on the generalities through measurement and statistics, while humanists typically emphasize exceptions using qualitative approaches. But these two approaches need not be mutually exclusive. Using a quantitative approach to identify musical outliers and a qualitative discussion of the most unusual songs, we can combine scientific and humanities approaches to unite knowledge on musical diversity. Objectively defining unusual music is a delicate task, having historically been subject to Eurocentric approaches. Using the Global Jukebox, a dataset containing almost 6,000 songs from over 1,000 societies coded on 37 “Cantometric” variables of musical style, we designate the unusualness of a song as the frequency of its coded variables relative to their regional frequency. Using quantitative metrics to identify outliers in musical diversity, we present a qualitative discussion of some of the most unusual individual songs (from a Panpipe ensemble from Kursk, Russia), and a comparison of unusual repertoires from Malay, Kel Aïr, and Moroccan Berber musical cultures. We also ask whether unusual music is the result of unusual social organisation or isolation from other groups. There is weak evidence that the unusualness of music is predicted by kinship organisation and cultural isolation, but these predictors are heavily outweighed by the finding that unusual songs are best predicted by knowing the society they come from – evidence that quantitatively supports the existence of musical style

Groundcover community assembly in high-diversity pine savannas: seed arrival and fire-generated environmental filtering

Environmental filtering—abiotic and biotic constraints on the demographic performance of individual organisms—is a widespread mechanism of selection in communities. A given individual is “filtered out” (i.e., selectively removed) when environmental conditions or disturbances like fires preclude its survival and reproduction. Although interactions between these filters and dispersal from the regional species pool are thought to determine much about species composition locally, there have been relatively few studies of dispersal × filtering interactions in species-rich communities and fewer still where fire is also a primary selective agent. We experimentally manipulated dispersal and filtering by fire (pre-fire fuel loads and post-fire ash) in species-rich groundcover communities of the longleaf pine ecosystem. We tested four predictions: (1) That species richness would increase with biologically realistic dispersal (seed addition); (2) that the immediate effect of increased fuels in burned communities would be to decrease species richness, whereas the longer-term effects of increased fuels would be to open recruitment opportunities in the groundcover, increase species richness, and increase individual performance (growth) of immigrating species; (3) that adding ash would increase species richness; and (4) that increased dispersal would generate larger increases in species richness in plots with increased fuels compared to plots with decreased fuels. We found that dispersal interacted with complex fire-generated filtering during and after fires. Dispersal increased species richness more in burned communities with increased and decreased fuels compared to burned controls. Moreover, individuals of immigrating species generally grew to larger sizes in burned communities with increased fuels compared to burned controls. In contrast to dispersal and fuels, ash had no effect on species richness directly or in combination with other treatments. We conclude that filtering occurs both during fires and in the post-fire environment and that these influences interact with dispersal such that the consequences are only fully revealed when all are considered in combination. Our experiment highlights the importance of considering the dynamic interplay of dispersal and selection in the assembly of species-rich communities