Safety committees: Their role in preventing employee accidents in hotels and resorts

Employee accidents have a powerful and negative affect on the bottom line and profitability of a hotel or resort. In this professional paper, a literature review will be used to analyze the frequency and severity of injuries in hotels and resorts. Then, a guideline for a hotel safety committee will be established in an effort to help hotels and resorts decrease the amount, severity, and ultimately the cost associated with employee accidents. This professional paper aims to establish and implement guidelines for hotel and/or resort safety committees in order to increase the percentage of safe work practices on and off the job

Comment on ``Large Slip of Aqueous Liquid Flow over a Nanoengineered Superhydrophobic Surface'' by C-H Choi and C Kim

In a recent Letter (Phys. Rev. Lett. vol 96, 066001 (2006), ref [1]), Choi and Kim reported slip lengths of a few tens of microns for water on nanoengineered superhydrophobic surfaces, on the basis of rheometry (cone-and-plate) measurements. We show that the experimental uncertainty in the experiment of Ref. [1], expressed in term of slip lengths, lies in the range 20 - 100 micrometers, which is precisely the order of magnitude of the reported slip lengths. Moreover we point out a systematic bias expected on the superhydrophobic surfaces. We thus infer that it is not possible to draw out any conclusion concerning the existence of huge slip lengths in the system studied by Choi and Kim.Comment: to appear in Physical Review Letter

Passive scalar intermittency in low temperature helium flows

We report new measurements of turbulent mixing of temperature fluctuations in a low temperature helium gas experiment, spanning a range of microscale Reynolds number, $R_{\lambda}$, from 100 to 650. The exponents $\xi_{n}$ of the temperature structure functions $\sim r^{\xi_{n}}$ are shown to saturate to $\xi_{\infty} \simeq 1.45 \pm 0.1$ for the highest orders, $n \sim 10$. This saturation is a signature of statistics dominated by front-like structures, the cliffs. Statistics of the cliff characteristics are performed, particularly their width are shown to scale as the Kolmogorov length scale.Comment: 4 pages, with 4 figure

Contact angle determination in multicomponent lattice Boltzmann simulations

Droplets on hydrophobic surfaces are ubiquitous in microfluidic applications and there exists a number of commonly used multicomponent and multiphase lattice Boltzmann schemes to study such systems. In this paper we focus on a popular implementation of a multicomponent model as introduced by Shan and Chen. Here, interactions between different components are implemented as repulsive forces whose strength is determined by model parameters. In this paper we present simulations of a droplet on a hydrophobic surface. We investigate the dependence of the contact angle on the simulation parameters and quantitatively compare different approaches to determine it. Results show that the method is capable of modelling the whole range of contact angles. We find that the a priori determination of the contact angle is depending on the simulation parameters with an uncertainty of 10 to 20%.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure

Knudsen Diffusion in Silicon Nanochannels

Measurements on helium and argon gas flow through an array of parallel, linear channels of 12 nm diameter and 200 micrometer length in a single crystalline silicon membrane reveal a Knudsen diffusion type transport from 10^2 to 10^7 in Knudsen number Kn. The classic scaling prediction for the transport diffusion coefficient on temperature and mass of diffusing species,D_He ~ sqrt(T), is confirmed over a T range from 40 K to 300 K for He and for the ratio of D_He/D_Ar ~ sqrt(m_Ar/m_He). Deviations of the channels from a cylindrical form, resolved with transmission electron microscopy down to subnanometer scales, quantitatively account for a reduced diffusivity as compared to Knudsen diffusion in ideal tubular channels. The membrane permeation experiments are described over 10 orders of magnitude in Kn, encompassing the transition flow regime, by the unified flow model of Beskok and Karniadakis.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Spillover Effects of the Robinson Scholars Program in the Service Area

High rates of poverty and low levels of educational attainment have plagued the Appalachian region throughout history. The Robinson Scholars Program was created in 1996 as part of the University of Kentucky Board of Trustees’ plan to support economic and community development in Appalachian Kentucky. The Robinson Scholars Program is a scholarship and student support program that serves first-generation college and college-bound students from twenty-nine Eastern Kentucky counties with historically low rates of college attendance. The Program’s mission is to empower students to complete baccalaureate degrees and thereby add to the educational capital of their communities. The first class of Robinson Scholars was selected as eighth-graders in 1997. Since its inception, the Program has named approximately 540 students as Robinson Scholars. The Robinson Scholars Program likely affects not only the Scholars themselves, but also their families and communities. The visibility of Robinson Scholars in their communities, including those who have graduated from the University of Kentucky and returned to the area to pursue their careers, may inspire others in the community to pursue higher education as well. The purpose of this study is to investigate this phenomenon by collecting and analyzing empirical data to determine if such a “peer effect” or “role model effect” does, in fact, exist. The existence of an effect will highlight indirect and unintended benefits of the Program in addition to the benefits enjoyed by the Scholars themselves. The following research questions were explored: Did implementation of the Robinson Scholars Program have the effect of increasing high school graduation rates in the 29-county service area? Did implementation of the Robinson Scholars Program have the effect of increasing college matriculation rates in the 29-county service area? To answer these questions, a panel data set for 171 of Kentucky’s 176 school districts was used first to estimate two simple linear regression models and then to estimate two fixed effects models. The dependent variables in the models were district high school graduation rate and college matriculation rate in school year t, for t from 1994-1995 to 2004-2005. The fixed effects models were determined to be preferred to the simple linear regression models. The results of the fixed effects models show no statistically significant effect of the Robinson Scholars Program on high school graduation and college matriculation rates in the service area. Though there is no evidence that the Program is having an effect, the results suggest that the model estimation could be improved by using individual level data. Such a data set could potentially control for omitted variables, which may be biasing the coefficients of the models presented here