What elements are required to achieve sustainable business change using health and safety as a lens?

Business change continues to be an ongoing challenge. New consultancy models are required to suit the changing financial landscape, which requires businesses to outperform their competitors in order to survive; minimising overheads and removing waste in processes. Whilst business change is a broad topic area, the use of health and safety as a lens through which change can be made is less widely-discussed. This model for change has been utilised successfully in this business with great success. This D Prof project analyses that change programme to establish which elements of it can be applicable to other businesses undertaking change in a first-generation family business, but is applicable to any business. The starting point for the business was to facilitate a cultural shift by approaching the change through a behavioural programme that made safety personal to each employee. It focused on behavioural safety as the lens for change within the business over two iterations/interventions. This D Prof Project is the third iteration. The co-researchers have been immersed in the transformation programme, as insider researchers with the defined objectives of lowering the Accident Frequency Rate (AFR), preventing a fatality, increasing turnover and profitability as well as getting the business fit for rail and nuclear projects. The business has a proven ‘balanced’ safety culture, with much work having been done on Systems, People, and Culture to therefore establishing balance in all areas. The researchers had undertaken Iteration One and Iteration Two of the transformation change programme over a period of five years using health and safety as the focal lens for change, the work represented here in the D Prof project is Iteration Three, providing a new and fresh perspective.We found that to make improvement to safety culture it is essential to already have a ‘balanced safety culture’. Our project work uncovered key issues relating to the cultural differences between different nationalities when working together in close proximity and in a polymorphic society such as London, where our company is based. National identities possess varied power distance and uncertainty avoidance types and when people from diverse cultural mixes are concentrated in small areas such as construction projects there is an impact upon how they work together, how they are able to assimilate information, how they best receive instruction and how they communicate with their peers and managers. We found that the works of Hofstede and Choudray are particularly relevant to improving the way in which construction projects and construction businesses further improve their safety culture and performance once a balanced safety culture has been achieved. Sampling 900 individuals across our business identified 47% as foreign nationals whereas suddenly when you review the London region there is a larger percentage which is around 60% migrant workers or foreign nationals. This indicates that the project findings are relevant to a number of businesses who operate not only in London but in polymorphic environments. We are now reviewing the nationalities and culture of our projects to access the underlying key cultural differences within a polymorphic London environment and concentrating of the Power Distance (PDI) and Uncertainty Avoidance (UAI) of the various work crews and the supervisor nationality to gain a shared understanding of risk and further improve communication and safety performance. Given the complexity of the issues Hofstede’s work on nationality is not a panacea but it is an area of consideration when undertaking high risk construction based projects this has been overlooked particularly in the UK and the South East with a polymorphic London workforce inside the M25. We had to consider ‘Power Distance’ PDI and its relationship to safety performance. The indicators in relation to nationality have led the business to start looking at how we change our methodology and risk assessment into visual method statements and visual risk assessments. Work commenced in the business outside of the Doctorate and we are starting to get varied nationalities to create these visual method statements so it is not only being created from an Irish/English paradigm. The project provides the opportunity for other stakeholders, clients and the wider construction industry to use the model for delivering change within their businesses where they may not have access to the significant resources required to make business change on a large scale. Understanding the elements which are critical to such change upfront will enable efficient and effective targeting of their valuable and scarce resources. The project was carried out in its entirety and completed while both parties were employed within the business. Since completing the project both parties have moved on to other carrier opportunities and the change has been sustained in their absence

A Study and Application of the Process of Supergene Enrichment of Silver Ores.

In many deposits of silver ores the grade of the ore de­creases considerably a few hundred feet below the surface. It is believed that in many cases the better ores owe their richness in part to the process of sulphide enrichment. It is recognized, however, that many rich silver ores are hypogene deposits that have been affected very little, if any, by processes of enrichment

Exploring the Professional Identity of Counselling Psychologists: A mixed methods study

Abstract Aims and Rationale: The present study aims to enrich understanding of the professional identity of counselling psychology in the UK by exploring both the individual professional identities of counselling psychologists and the broader identity of the profession as a whole. This will elaborate on the existing literature base and allow the researcher to gather a breadth of perspectives of counselling psychology identity whilst also exploring the issues surrounding the identity development of practitioners in greater depth. Method: The study adopts a triangulation mixed methods design to explore the professional identity of counselling psychologists (Cresswell, Plano Clark, Guttman & Hanson, 2003). An exploratory online survey was designed to explore 1) the training, employment and practice characteristics of counselling psychologists and 2) their perception of the role, contribution and future identity of the profession. Concurrent with this data collection, qualitative interviews were conducted which aimed to explore the participants’ experience of training and working as a counselling psychologist, and develop an understanding of factors that have impacted upon their individual professional identity. Results: Both data sources contribute to the conception of counselling psychology as a diverse and multi-faceted profession. ‘Unity within diversity’ has been proposed as an overarching theme that marries the data sources and highlights the different ways in which counselling psychologists experience and articulate their individual professional identity, and the collective identity of the profession. Conclusions: The findings reveal there is no single professional identity inherent within counselling psychology. Multiple professional identities exist and are shaped by a range of factors. Uniting these diverse identities is a central commitment to a humanistic philosophy and value base. This provides a foundation on which therapeutic decision making is made and clients’ difficulties conceptualised. Whilst counselling psychology’s interest in identity and critical self-reflection has been questioned, this process may allow the profession to remain alert to the changing professional climate and adapt their practice to ensure that they remain valuable and are not overlooked within the field of therapeutic provision

Eco-Defense against Invasions

Characterizing patterns of invasion across space, time, and taxonomic group will help reveal how invasive species affect ecosystem function and individual native specie

Voliro: An Omnidirectional Hexacopter With Tiltable Rotors

Extending the maneuverability of unmanned areal vehicles promises to yield a considerable increase in the areas in which these systems can be used. Some such applications are the performance of more complicated inspection tasks and the generation of complex uninterrupted movements of an attached camera. In this paper we address this challenge by presenting Voliro, a novel aerial platform that combines the advantages of existing multi-rotor systems with the agility of omnidirectionally controllable platforms. We propose the use of a hexacopter with tiltable rotors allowing the system to decouple the control of position and orientation. The contributions of this work involve the mechanical design as well as a controller with the corresponding allocation scheme. This work also discusses the design challenges involved when turning the concept of a hexacopter with tiltable rotors into an actual prototype. The agility of the system is demonstrated and evaluated in real- world experiments.Comment: Submitted to Robotics and Automation Magazin

Vereinsarbeit als Prävention: Wie für schwierig erreichbare Zielgruppen der Einstieg in Vereine vereinfacht werden kann

Keine Beschreibung

Finger somatotopy is preserved after tetraplegia but deteriorates over time

Previous studies showed reorganised and/or altered activity in the primary sensorimotor cortex after a spinal cord injury (SCI), suggested to reflect abnormal processing. However, little is known about whether somatotopically specific representations can be activated despite reduced or absent afferent hand inputs. In this observational study, we used functional MRI and a (attempted) finger movement task in tetraplegic patients to characterise the somatotopic hand layout in primary somatosensory cortex. We further used structural MRI to assess spared spinal tissue bridges. We found that somatotopic hand representations can be activated through attempted finger movements in the absence of sensory and motor hand functioning, and no spared spinal tissue bridges. Such preserved hand somatotopy could be exploited by rehabilitation approaches that aim to establish new hand-brain functional connections after SCI (e.g. neuroprosthetics). However, over years since SCI the hand representation somatotopy deteriorated, suggesting that somatotopic hand representations are more easily targeted within the first years after SCI

A cobertura e o uso da terra: episódios de inundações no município de Cardoso Moreira

O presente trabalho teve como objetivo principal, o mapeamento da cobertura e o uso da terra no município de Cardoso Moreira no ano de 2016 e sua relação com áreas susceptíveis a inundação. De forma secundária caracteriza-se o histórico de inundação do município de Cardoso Moreira, identificando os locais atingidos e descrevendo os danos sociais e econômicos sofridos pelo Município de Cardoso Moreira. Para atender os objetivos, adotou-se os seguintes procedimentos: realização do inventário do histórico de inundação do município de Cardoso Moreira, por meio de documentos oficiais da Defesa Civil e a utilização da ferramenta de processamento digital Spring com a utilização das imagens do satélite Landsat 8, relativas ao ano de 2016. Os resultados encontrados, mostram que o município de Cardoso Moreira é atingido por inundações periódicas desde o ano de 2002 e que estes eventos de inundações acabam gerando danos sociais e econômicos de grande magnitude para o município.

Animal displacement from marine energy development : Mechanisms and consequences

This work would not be possible without funding support from the U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Water Power Technologies Office to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) under contract DE-AC05- 76RL01830 . We are grateful to all the international marine energy researchers and regulatory advisors who attended the online Expert Forum hosted by OES-Environmental on December 7th, 2022, and provided feedback and input on an earlier version of this work. We also thank Stephanie King (PNNL) for creating the original illustrations, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.For marine wave and tidal energy to successfully contribute to global renewable energy goals and climate change mitigation, marine energy projects need to expand beyond small deployments to large-scale arrays. However, with large-scale projects come potential environmental effects not observed at the scales of single devices and small arrays. One of these effects is the risk of displacing marine animals from their preferred habitats or their migration routes, which may increase with the size of arrays and location. Many marine animals may be susceptible to some level of displacement once large marine energy arrays are increasingly integrated into the seascape, including large migratory animals, non-migratory pelagic animals with large home ranges, and benthic and demersal mobile organisms with more limited ranges, among many others. Yet, research around the mechanisms and effects of displacement have been hindered by the lack of clarity within the international marine energy community regarding the definition of displacement, how it occurs, its consequences, species of concern, and methods to investigate the outcomes. This review paper leveraged lessons learned from other industries, such as offshore development, to establish a definition of displacement in the marine energy context, explore which functional groups of marine animals may be affected and in what way, and identify pathways for investigating displacement through modeling and monitoring. In the marine energy context, we defined displacement as the outcome of one of three mechanisms (i.e., attraction, avoidance, and exclusion) triggered by an animal's response to one or more stressors acting as a disturbance, with various consequences at the individual through population levels. The knowledge gaps highlighted in this study will help the regulatory and scientific communities prepare for mitigating, observing, measuring, and characterizing displacement of various animals around marine energy arrays in order to prevent irreversible consequences.Peer reviewe