Changes in worker perceptions of health and safety during the BG Tanzania drilling campaign (2011-2016)

Research studies on the implementation of global health and safety standards mostly concentrate on the safety perceptions of workers (Gao et al., 2016) and safety culture (Lu and Yang, 2009). Most of the studies are medium to large scale in nature and are heavily reliant on quantitative data. Very few studies have attempted to capture personal perspectives using qualitative techniques from individuals who are working within new venture environments regarding the implementation of global health and safety standards. In addition, no studies of this nature which had been completed by insider researchers were identified within the literature reviews for this research project. This project was completed by an insider researcher who worked for BG Group/Shell during an extended gas exploration drilling campaign in Tanzania between 2011 and 2016. The research focuses on a cross section of local and expatriate workers from the Mtwara Supply Base facility in Tanzania. Participants included frontline and supervisory roles from within the operational team at the supply base. The intent of the research was to complete a qualitative review of the impacts of implementing global health and safety standards at the Mtwara Supply Base over the five-year period between 2011 and 2016. The mixed method data collection for the research involved the completion of 16 semi-structured interviews with expatriate and local staff and the completion of 55 multiple-choice questionnaire surveys by local staff, plus an analysis of the health and safety incident data for the Mtwara operational sites during that time. The research findings confirmed that 15 out of 16 of the interview participants acknowledged changes in their perception of health and safety during their time working at the Mtwara Supply Base. These changes mainly involved positive personal impacts in terms of learning and personal development as a result of working on the project and in some cases changes to safe working outside of the working environment. Participants also commented on the transfer of best practice from the project into the local community and to third party contractor organisations who supplied services to the drilling project. The survey data indicated that the majority of survey participants perceived an improvement in their own health and safety awareness which increased with their length of service at the Mtwara Supply Base. Survey participants also confirmed that in their opinion there were tangible indicators of improvements in relation to the Mtwara Supply Base HSSE performance during the lifecycle of the project. Examples included: a reduction in the number of injuries to personnel and increased numbers of health and safety interventions taking place (to stop unsafe behaviours/improve unsafe conditions which had been observed). A review of the incident data for the Mtwara operational sites also revealed performance improvements at the supply base, with a reduced severity of incident rates as the drilling campaign continued. Six emergent themes which were developed from the coding analysis of the qualitative data from the survey questionnaires and interviews: 1. Impacts of the implementation of HSSE standards on individuals 2. Impacts of the implementation of HSSE standards on the wider community 3. What worked well and why – organisational factors and HSSE improvements 4. BG/Shell Lessons Learned from the drilling campaign 5. Ideas for Shell to consider in future drilling campaigns 6. Ideas for improving occupational health and safety within Tanzania From the emerging themes and survey data it was evident that the implementation of HSSE standards within the Mtwara Supply Base had a positive influence on the broader health and safety culture relating to other entities, both inside and outside the supply base. The research also identified wider factors which contributed to HSSE performance improvements, such as the local content policies which BG/Shell (and other operators) applied to their respective operations, the importance of effective community engagement, BG/Shell organisational factors, contractor management and the selection of expatriate supervisory personnel. The research concluded that impacts of these wider factors should also be carefully considered when planning future campaigns within Tanzania or other similar new start-up projects

Shock absorbing mount for electrical components

A shock mount for installing electrical components on circuit boards is described. The shock absorber is made of viscoelastic material which interconnects the electrical components. With this system, shocks imposed on one component of the circuit are not transmitted to other components. A diagram of a typical circuit is provided

The dynamics of the semicircular canals

Transfer functions derived for theoretical dynamic responses of semicircular canals defined by differential equatio

Zadie Smith’s Intimations: The Idea of the Ambient Essay

Following the devastating global crisis of the First World War, Virginia Woolf noted in ‘The Modern Essay’ (1919), that ‘the essay is alive; there is no reason to despair’. Just over one hundred years later, in the middle of another global crisis, Zadie Smith’s collection of essays, Intimations (2020), reassures us once again of the ongoing social significance of the essay and the continued existence of readerships happy to receive it in newspapers, magazines and books. While the short essays in Smith’s collection lack the size of the late-Victorian essays Woolf would have feasted on, they, much like Smith’s earlier collections: Feel Free: Essays (2018) and Changing my Mind: Occasional Essays (2009), do not lack sonority. Operating as a collection of ambient essays, that is essays immersed in the ‘here and now’ and taking place in the shared world of the everyday, Smith’s collection finds its counterpart in the Woolfian essay. These ambient texts produced by Woolf and Smith are not simply situated in a world of voices outside the self, but also encompassed /enveloped by porous boundaries, and enter into dialogue with uncontrollable external circumstances, thereby facilitating reflections on the socio-political environs of the wider world

When the path is never shortest: a reality check on shortest path biocomputation

Shortest path problems are a touchstone for evaluating the computing performance and functional range of novel computing substrates. Much has been published in recent years regarding the use of biocomputers to solve minimal path problems such as route optimisation and labyrinth navigation, but their outputs are typically difficult to reproduce and somewhat abstract in nature, suggesting that both experimental design and analysis in the field require standardising. This chapter details laboratory experimental data which probe the path finding process in two single-celled protistic model organisms, Physarum polycephalum and Paramecium caudatum, comprising a shortest path problem and labyrinth navigation, respectively. The results presented illustrate several of the key difficulties that are encountered in categorising biological behaviours in the language of computing, including biological variability, non-halting operations and adverse reactions to experimental stimuli. It is concluded that neither organism examined are able to efficiently or reproducibly solve shortest path problems in the specific experimental conditions that were tested. Data presented are contextualised with biological theory and design principles for maximising the usefulness of experimental biocomputer prototypes.Comment: To appear in: Adamatzky, A (Ed.) Shortest path solvers. From software to wetware. Springer, 201

Shock and vibration isolation mount for small electronic components

Mount includes metallic cup and support ring placed in mold fixture. Viscoelastic material is injected between these parts by means of large hypodermic needle. Circular projections on cup and ring extend into material and are kept in place without dependence on quality of adhesion between material and metal

No evidence for intense, cold accretion onto YSOs from measurements of Li in T-Tauri stars

We have used medium resolution spectra to search for evidence that proto-stellar objects accrete at high rates during their early 'assembly phase'. Models predict that depleted lithium and reduced luminosity in T-Tauri stars are key signatures of 'cold' high-rate accretion occurring early in a star's evolution. We found no evidence in 168 stars in NGC 2264 and the Orion Nebula Cluster for strong lithium depletion through analysis of veiling corrected 6708 angstrom lithium spectral line strengths. This suggests that 'cold' accretion at high rates (M_dot > 5 x 10-4 M_sol yr-1) occurs in the assembly phase of fewer than 0.5 per cent of 0.3 < M < 1.9 M_sol stars. We also find that the dispersion in the strength of the 6708 angstrom lithium line might imply an age spread that is similar in magnitude to the apparent age spread implied by the luminosity dispersion seen in colour magnitude diagrams. Evidence for weak lithium depletion (< 10 per cent in equivalent width) that is correlated with luminosity is also apparent, but we are unable to determine whether age spreads or accretion at rates less than 5 x 10-4 M_sol yr-1 are responsible.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures; Accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2013 June 0

Pre-main-sequence isochrones -- II. Revising star and planet formation timescales

We have derived ages for 13 young (<30 Myr) star-forming regions and find they are up to a factor two older than the ages typically adopted in the literature. This result has wide-ranging implications, including that circumstellar discs survive longer (~10-12 Myr) and that the average Class I lifetime is greater (~1 Myr) than currently believed. For each star-forming region we derived two ages from colour-magnitude diagrams. First we fitted models of the evolution between the zero-age main-sequence and terminal-age main-sequence to derive a homogeneous set of main-sequence ages, distances and reddenings with statistically meaningful uncertainties. Our second age for each star-forming region was derived by fitting pre-main-sequence stars to new semi-empirical model isochrones. For the first time (for a set of clusters younger than 50 Myr) we find broad agreement between these two ages, and since these are derived from two distinct mass regimes that rely on different aspects of stellar physics, it gives us confidence in the new age scale. This agreement is largely due to our adoption of empirical colour-Teff relations and bolometric corrections for pre-main-sequence stars cooler than 4000 K. The revised ages for the star-forming regions in our sample are: ~2 Myr for NGC 6611 (Eagle Nebula; M 16), IC 5146 (Cocoon Nebula), NGC 6530 (Lagoon Nebula; M 8), and NGC 2244 (Rosette Nebula); ~6 Myr for {\sigma} Ori, Cep OB3b, and IC 348; ~10 Myr for {\lambda} Ori (Collinder 69); ~11 Myr for NGC 2169; ~12 Myr for NGC 2362; ~13 Myr for NGC 7160; ~14 Myr for {\chi} Per (NGC 884); and ~20 Myr for NGC 1960 (M 36).Comment: 28 pages, 18 figures, 34 tables, accepted for publication in MNRAS. All photometric catalogues presented in this paper are available online at the Cluster Collaboration homepage http://www.astro.ex.ac.uk/people/timn/Catalogues

A lithium depletion boundary age of 22 Myr for NGC 1960

We present a deep Cousins RI photometric survey of the open cluster NGC 1960, complete to R_C \simeq 22, I_C \simeq 21, that is used to select a sample of very low-mass cluster candidates. Gemini spectroscopy of a subset of these is used to confirm membership and locate the age-dependent "lithium depletion boundary" (LDB) --the luminosity at which lithium remains unburned in its low-mass stars. The LDB implies a cluster age of 22 +/-4 Myr and is quite insensitive to choice of evolutionary model. NGC 1960 is the youngest cluster for which a LDB age has been estimated and possesses a well populated upper main sequence and a rich low-mass pre-main sequence. The LDB age determined here agrees well with precise age estimates made for the same cluster based on isochrone fits to its high- and low-mass populations. The concordance between these three age estimation techniques, that rely on different facets of stellar astrophysics at very different masses, is an important step towards calibrating the absolute ages of young open clusters and lends confidence to ages determined using any one of them.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRA