USING ENGEL CURVES TO ESTIMATE BIAS IN THE CANADIAN CPI AS A COST OF LIVING INDEX

Consumer/Household Economics,

Enhancing Safety: the Challenge of Foresight - ESReDA Project Group Foresight in Safety

This Deliverable is the result of a joint effort by experts, working in the fields of risks management, accident analysis, learning from experience and safety management. They come from 10 countries mainly from Europe and also from USA and Australia. Their expertise covers several industrial sectors. They attempted to provide useful information, both from a theoretical and a practical point of views, about "Foresight in Safety". Safety is still an ongoing issue for which a number of subjects remain under debate (e.g. is goal of safety to ensure that 'as few things as possible go wrong' or to ensure that ‘as many things as possible go right’?). Anyway, we can assume that safety is to act in a way for both the process continues to be run right and that errors and failures to not lead to a major accident. Even if "foresight in safety" is the implicit underlying goal of every practitioner in safety, the outlines of its domain remain blurred and the relevant topics associated with it have never been clearly defined. A humble ambition of this Deliverable is to display some aspects of "foresight in safety" according to the current state of practices and scientific knowledge.JRC.G.10-Knowledge for Nuclear Security and Safet

Organizing risk: organization and management theory for the risk society

Risk has become a crucial part of organizing, affecting a wide range of organizations in all sectors. We identify, review and integrate diverse literatures relevant to organizing risk, building on an existing framework that describes how risk is organized in three ‘modes’ – prospectively, in real-time, and retrospectively. We then identify three critical issues in the existing literature: its fragmented nature; its neglect of the tensions associated with each of the modes; and its tendency to assume that the meaning of an object in relation to risk is singular and stable. We provide a series of new insights with regard to each of these issues. First, we develop the concept of a risk cycle that shows how organizations engage with all three modes and transition between them over time. Second, we explain why the tensions have been largely ignored and show how studies using a risk work perspective can provide further insights into them. Third, we develop the concept of risk translation to highlight the ways in the meanings of risks can be transformed and to identify the political consequences of such translations. We conclude the paper with a research agenda to elaborate these insights and ideas further

Alignment of the ALICE Inner Tracking System with cosmic-ray tracks

37 pages, 15 figures, revised version, accepted by JINSTALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) experiment devoted to investigating the strongly interacting matter created in nucleus-nucleus collisions at the LHC energies. The ALICE ITS, Inner Tracking System, consists of six cylindrical layers of silicon detectors with three different technologies; in the outward direction: two layers of pixel detectors, two layers each of drift, and strip detectors. The number of parameters to be determined in the spatial alignment of the 2198 sensor modules of the ITS is about 13,000. The target alignment precision is well below 10 micron in some cases (pixels). The sources of alignment information include survey measurements, and the reconstructed tracks from cosmic rays and from proton-proton collisions. The main track-based alignment method uses the Millepede global approach. An iterative local method was developed and used as well. We present the results obtained for the ITS alignment using about 10^5 charged tracks from cosmic rays that have been collected during summer 2008, with the ALICE solenoidal magnet switched off.Peer reviewe

Modern accident investigation - Four major challenges

Nowadays, 'investigation' is a very commonly advocated approach and consequently is becoming an umbrella concept. 'Investigation' includes many types of approaches on different system levels. Originating from transport accidents and crime scenes, 'investigation' ranges from genocide, natural disasters, via discrimination, health care to crime fighting, economic fraud and ethical questions in engineering and management. In such a changing operating environment and widespread applications, accident investigation must reassess its distinctive role, purposes and operating conditions. It must clarify and communicate its specific aims and functions and performance to such an extent that it maintains its credibility, capability and quality in the eye of professionals, politicians as well as the public. Based on an assessment of the past performance of leading investigation agencies, practical experiences during major ad hoc accident investigations and changes in the operating environment, a SWOT analysis identified several issues as internal and external challenges in the future conduct of major investigations. Finally, the article proposes several priorities, challenging each stakeholder and expert in the investigation community to contribute from its own perspective to improve accident investigation theory and practices. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Public safety investigations-A new evolutionary step in safety enhancement?

A historical overview highlights the evolutionary nature of developments in accident investigations in the transport industry. Based on a series of major events outside transportation, the concept of accident investigations has broadened to other domains and to a widening of the scope of the investigation. Consequently, existing investigation boards are forced to adapt their mandates, missions and methods. With the introduction of social risk perception and application of the concept of safety investigation in the public sector, a change of focus towards the aftermath and non-technical issues of a more generic nature emerges. This expansion has also gained the interest of social sciences and public governance, generating new underlying models and theories on risk and responsibility. The evolutionary development of safety investigations is demonstrated by the various organisational forms which shaped accident investigations in different countries. Underneath these organisational differences, a need for a common methodology and a reflection oil fundamental notions is discussed. In particular differences among human operator models, the allocation of responsibilities in design concepts and methodological issue are elaborated. The needs and opportunities for a transition from accident prevention towards systems change are indicated. At present, the situation is ambiguous. Ail encompassing inventory can only provide a general oversight over emerging trends and lacks analytic rigor on specific topics. The societal dimensions, institutional changes at the level of governance and control and the powers that advocate or challenge investigations are not yet fully described. Therefore, in the conclusions a small number of critical challenges and threats are identified that should be open to scrutiny in order to facilitate a new, evolutionary step in safety enhancement. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Public safety investigations - a new evolutionary step in safety enhancement?

Over the past years, natural catastrophes have disrupted society: the tsunami in December 2004, hurricane Katrina in the Gulf of Mexico, the earthquakes in Pakistan in 2005, causing massive material destruction and human suffering. In addition, technological accidents in transport, energy and process industry undermine the public faith in risk management, while the uncontrolled spreading of diseases and viruses put high demands on medical and emergency responses and public governance decision making. The use of experiences and lessons learned from such major events is considered a valuable tool in understanding causal mechanisms and in taking appropriate measures to prevent recurrence, reduction of the consequences and restoring public faith in governance and decision making. Started in the transportation industry in the early sixties of the previous century, the phenomenon of independent public safety investigations has now been recognized as a valuable tool for safety enhancement in other industrial sectors and areas of public governance. At an international level, the EU has issued several Guidelines for their mandatory application in high-tech sectors, putting demands on the Member States to install independent governmental agencies, to harmonize concepts and investigation procedures and to feed back their findings and recommendations in EU policy making. Apart from their substantive contribution to improving knowledge about causal phenomena and accident prevention, safety investigations have been advocated as high potential tools in restoring public faith after a major event and in arbitration in societal dissensus about risk acceptability and risk perception. Safety investigations focus on enhancing the systems safety performance in contrast to accident investigations, which have their focus on preventing recurrence of accidents and incidents. Conducting safety investigations have been characterized as a Citizens' Right and Society's Duty. Such a recognition however, also sets a series of challenges for a wider application of this investigation tool outside its original technical domain, expanding the concept to all phases of the accident sequence, before, during and after the event, and to higher levels of the socio-technical systems in which the events are embedded and risk debates require expertise in supporting risk ion making. This contribution is primarily based on observations of trends and patterns as they emerge in society, and by the lack of scientific literature, assessed by expert judgment. It describes and analyses several trends and types of investigations that have developed over the past decade, focusing on their strengths and weaknesses, dilemmas, potential for prevention and ability to change systems safety characteristics. It identifies critical areas of attention for further development focusing on substantive issues as well as specific sectorial and national constraints in their implementation