What to do if PSM/HSE performance flattens out? Resuming your drive to ZERO

PresentationMost companies have a continuous improvement expectation in their PSM/HSE mission and values. Many companies measure PSM/HSE performance with lagging and leading metrics. Some companies are pursuing Operational Excellence. And some companies have adopted some form of “drive to zero”. But, what happens when their performance flattens out? People will wonder why, and there will be pressure from many directions - internal and externa

Re-Energizing Industry Risk Management and Coordination and Communication

PresentationEPA promulgated its risk management program (RMP) rule in the mid-90s when many companies invested a lot of effort in compliance with the rule, coordinating with local emergency planners and responders, and communicating RMP information to the public. After 9/11, national priorities refocused onto security matters; community outreach activity and investment (nationwide) took a backset and appeared to decline over the next decade. Since then, various regulatory enforcement initiatives and CSB accident investigations have highlighted industry PSM compliance and emergency planning and response effectiveness issues Plus, there has been a “generational change” in people - most stakeholder groups, communities and industry – “memories” have lapsed regarding all the chemical accident prevention and emergency response preparations that industry has done. There have been significant improvements in process safety activities and metrics, largely driven/re-started by the BP Texas City refinery accident in March 2005 and various subsequent investigations (e.g., Baker Panel). However, no commensurate progress has occurred in emergency and public risk communication. Various chemical accidents led to EO 13650, subsequent OSHA PSM and EPA RMP rulemakings, and increasing inquisitive non-industry entities seek information about industry risks and performance (e.g., Houston Chronicle “Chemical Breakdown” series). Industry and its stakeholders are not in as good a position to address these issues due to factors including: Uncertain knowledge of the status of the effectiveness of our LEPCs and emergency response organizations with respect to planning and public communication The “relational bank account” of industry with its communities has declined due to many “withdrawals”, lack of sufficient re-investment”, and “generational” change This presentation will provide suggestions on how industry can revitalize its efforts to coordinate process safety risk management with its stakeholders: Helping companies, industry groups and stakeholders prepare for RMP changes and associated public risk communication needs Renew partnership efforts with LEPCs and local emergency response organizations Invest in outreach-area focused public risk communication efforts based on a revised communications strategy taking into account the expansion of social media Re-energize company participation in coordinated local stakeholder outreach efforts to rebuild member relational bank accounts to prepare for certain, future demand

‘A plentiful crop of cripples made by all this progress’: Disability, Artificial Limbs and Working-Class Mutualism in the South Wales Coalfield, 1890-1948’

Historians of orthopaedics, artificial limbs and disability have devoted a great deal of attention to children and soldiers but have neglected to give sufficient space in their studies to industrial workers, the other patient group that has been identified as crucial to the development of these areas. Furthermore, this attention has led to an imbalanced focus on charitable and philanthropic activities as the main means of assistance and the neglect of a significant part of the voluntary sphere, the labour movement. This article, focusing on industrial south Wales, examines the efforts of workingclass organisations to provide artificial limbs and a range of other surgical appliances to workers and their family members in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It finds that a distinctive, labourist conception of disability existed which envisaged disabled workers as an important priority and one to which significant time, effort and resources were devoted.Wellcome Trus

DeepWheat: Estimating Phenotypic Traits from Crop Images with Deep Learning

In this paper, we investigate estimating emergence and biomass traits from color images and elevation maps of wheat field plots. We employ a state-of-the-art deconvolutional network for segmentation and convolutional architectures, with residual and Inception-like layers, to estimate traits via high dimensional nonlinear regression. Evaluation was performed on two different species of wheat, grown in field plots for an experimental plant breeding study. Our framework achieves satisfactory performance with mean and standard deviation of absolute difference of 1.05 and 1.40 counts for emergence and 1.45 and 2.05 for biomass estimation. Our results for counting wheat plants from field images are better than the accuracy reported for the similar, but arguably less difficult, task of counting leaves from indoor images of rosette plants. Our results for biomass estimation, even with a very small dataset, improve upon all previously proposed approaches in the literature.Comment: WACV 2018 (Code repository: https://github.com/p2irc/deepwheat_WACV-2018

Offering Expert Knowledge Within a Not-Knowing Solution-Focused Paradigm: A Contradiction in Terms or a Helpful Response to (Some) Real Life Conundrums?

Abstract One of the fundamental tenets of solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) is that its strengths-based starting point and the not-knowing stance of the therapist are sufficient to ensure that most clients progress without the need for reliance on expert knowledg

Characterization of Ethyl Chloroformate Derivative of β-Methylamino-l-alanine

β-Methylamino-l-alanine (BMAA) is a neurotoxic amino acid that can be produced by cyanobacteria in aqueous environments. To analyze this compound by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS), BMAA must be derivatized to a nonpolar, volatile compound. This can be accomplished by reacting BMAA with ethyl chloroformate. While carrying out electron ionization (EI) mass spectrometric analysis on the 13C-labeled derivative, it was discovered that the formation of an ion with a peak at m/z 245.12 is the result of [CH3CH2O·] loss from the amino groups resulting from α-cleavage. This differs from previous reports that attributed this peak to α-cleavage of the carboxylic ester portion of the BMAA derivative. This finding is important for understanding BMAA derivative mass spectrometric fragmentation patterns and ultimately to properly identifying and quantifying BMAA. Fragmentation pathways for the formation of other major peaks observed in the EI mass spectra are also proposed

Ariel - Volume 5 Number 6

Editors J.D. Kanofsky Mark Dembert Entertainment Robert Breckenridge Joe Conti Gary Kaskey Photographer Scot Kastner Overseas Editor Mike Sinason Circulation Jay Amsterdam Humorist Jim McCann Staff Ken Jaffe Bob Sklaroff Janet Welsh Dave Jacoby Phil Nimoityn Frank Chervane