Developing a Holistic Fire Risk Assessment Framework for Building Construction Sites in Hong Kong

Amongst all types of construction accidents, industrial practitioners tend to pay less attention to the prevention of fires at construction sites.  Although fires may not occur frequently on construction sites, statistics show that when they do, the consequences are very serious; involving fatalities, injuries, serious project delays and financial loss.  There are many reasons why fires occur on sites, but a simple lack of awareness of the risks of fire is a major contributor.  Fire risk assessment is not commonly performed on sites.  Hence, it is believed that an appropriate assessment method for evaluating potential fire risk is required in order to improve the awareness of fire risk on construction sites.  This paper reports on the key findings of a research project which aims to develop a comprehensive, objective, reliable, and practical fire risk assessment framework for building construction sites based in Hong Kong.  A comprehensive list of those factors (or conditions) which may constitute a fire risk was compiled using desktop research and structured face-to-face interviews with experienced site personnel.  This list of factors was then used to develop a questionnaire survey form and the Reliability Interval Method (RIM) was used to analyse the survey results and determine the relative importance and rankings of the various fire risk factors at a broad level and risk sub-factors at a detailed level.  It was found that the fire risk factor of “Fire Services Equipment and Installations” has the greatest impact on construction site fire safety, with “Means of Escape in Case of Fire” being the second, and “Attitude of Main Contractor towards Fire Safety” being the third.  In fact, it is the main contractor who plays the pivotal role in maintaining construction site fire safety, which is in line with the high ranking given to the fire risk factor of “Attitude of Main Contractor towards Fire Safety”.  The proposed fire risk assessment framework can be used to develop a useful checklist for assessing the overall level of fire risk for a construction site, and to identify any areas needing improvement.  Although the fire risk assessment framework was developed locally in Hong Kong, the research methodology could be replicated in other countries to produce similar frameworks for international comparison.  Such an extension would aid the understanding of the management of fire risk on construction sites and help discover differences between countries

Lamellae Stability in Confined Systems with Gravity

The microphase separation of a diblock copolymer melt confined by hard walls and in the presence of a gravitational field is simulated by means of a cell dynamical system model. It is found that the presence of hard walls normal to the gravitational field are key ingredients to the formation of well ordered lamellae in BCP melts. To this effect the currents in the directions normal and parallel to the field are calculated along the interface of a lamellar domain, showing that the formation of lamellae parallel to the hard boundaries and normal to the field correspond to the stable configuration. Also, it is found thet the field increases the interface width.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, submitted to Physical Review

UTJECAJ RELIGIOZNOSTI I DUHOVNOSTI NA SVAKODNEVNU PRAKSU SOCIJALNIH RADNIKA

Although social work can trace the roots of its establishment as a profession to religion/spirituality, the relationship between social work and religion/spirituality has deteriorated due to the former’s professionalisation and secularisation. Nevertheless, religious/spiritual values are important for many social work services and for the practice of the profession. It is, hence, worth demarcating the role of religion/spirituality for frontline social workers. In the current qualitative study, repeated interviews were conducted with 11 Chinese social workers from diverse social work settings. It was noted that Eastern and Western religion/spirituality can instil meaning and value in the profession’s nature.Iako se uspostavljanje socijalnog rada kao profesije temelji na religIoznosti/duhovnosti, odnos između socijalnog rada i religioznosti/duhovnosti narušen je zbog profesionalizacije i sekularizacije socijalnog rada. Usprkos tome, religiozne/duhovne vrijednosti važne su za mnoge usluge socijalnog rada i za praksu socijalnog rada kao profesije. Stoga je važno utvrditi ulogu religioznosti/duhovnosti za najizloženije socijalne radnike. U ovom kvalitativnom istraživanju provedeni su ponovljeni razgovori s 11 kineskih socijalnih radnika iz različitih područja socijalnog rada. Uočeno je da istočnjačka i zapadnjačka religioznost/duhovnost mogu unijeti značenje i vrijednost u prirodu profesije

Temporal Effects of Agent Aggregation in the Dynamics of Multiagent Systems

We propose a model of multiagent systems whose agents have a tendency to balance their decisions in time. We find phase transitions to oscillatory behavior, explainable by the aggregation of agents into two groups. On a longer time scale, we find that the aggregation of smart agents is able to explain the lifetime distribution of epochs to 8 decades of probability.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure

A monte-carlo floating-point unit for self-validating arithmetic

Monte-Carlo arithmetic is a form of self-validating arith-metic that accounts for the effect of rounding errors. We have implemented a floating point unit that can perform ei-ther IEEE 754 or Monte-Carlo floating point computation, allowing hardware accelerated validation of results during execution. Experiments show that our approach has a mod-est hardware overhead and allows the propagation of round-ing error to be accurately estimated

Are Preoperative Kattan and Stephenson Nomograms Predicting Biochemical Recurrence after Radical Prostatectomy Applicable in the Chinese Population?

Purpose. Kattan and Stephenson nomograms are based on the outcomes of patients with prostate cancer recruited in the USA, but their applicability to Chinese patients is yet to be validated. We aim at studying the predictive accuracy of these nomograms in the Chinese population. Patients and Methods. A total of 408 patients who underwent laparoscopic or open radical resection of prostate from 1995 to 2009 were recruited. The preoperative clinical parameters of these patients were collected, and they were followed up regularly with PSA monitored. Biochemical recurrence was defined as two or more consecutive PSA levels >0.4 ng/mL after radical resection of prostate or secondary cancer treatment. Results. The overall observed 5-year and 10-year biochemical recurrence-free survival rates were 68.3% and 59.8%, which was similar to the predicted values by the Kattan and Stephenson nomograms, respectively. The results of our study achieved a good concordance with both nomograms (Kattan: 5-years, 0.64; Stephenson: 5-years, 0.62, 10-years, 0.71). Conclusions. The incidence of prostate cancer in Hong Kong is increasing together with the patients’ awareness of this disease. Despite the fact that Kattan nomograms were derived from the western population, it has been validated in our study to be useful in Chinese patients as well

Optimal Location of Sources in Transportation Networks

We consider the problem of optimizing the locations of source nodes in transportation networks. A reduction of the fraction of surplus nodes induces a glassy transition. In contrast to most constraint satisfaction problems involving discrete variables, our problem involves continuous variables which lead to cavity fields in the form of functions. The one-step replica symmetry breaking (1RSB) solution involves solving a stable distribution of functionals, which is in general infeasible. In this paper, we obtain small closed sets of functional cavity fields and demonstrate how functional recursions are converted to simple recursions of probabilities, which make the 1RSB solution feasible. The physical results in the replica symmetric (RS) and the 1RSB frameworks are thus derived and the stability of the RS and 1RSB solutions are examined.Comment: 38 pages, 18 figure

ANALGESIC, ANTI-INFLAMMATORY AND ANTIPYRETIC ACTIVITIES OF THE AQUEOUS EXTRACT OF GERANIUM CAROLINIANUM L

Background: Geranium carolinianum L. (Geraniaceae) is widely used for a variety of diseases including herpetic keratitis, eczema, rheumatalgia etc. However, there is lack of relevant scientific research. Materials and Methods: GCE (125, 250, 500mg/kg body weight) was evaluated for its pharmacological properties by using the acetic acid-induced writhing test, the hot plate test and the fresh egg white-induced paw edema in rats. The dimethylbenzene-induced mouse inflammation model and the lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced rat fever model were employed and the acute toxicity of GCE was also assessed. Results: The Geranium carolinianum aqueous extract (GCE) significantly inhibited the writhing responses in mice, increased reaction time of mice in the hot plate test, and suppressed the fresh egg white-induced paw edema in rats and the dimethylbenzene-induced ear edema in mice whilst attenuating LPS-induced fever in rats in a dose dependent manner. Furthermore, no deaths were observed when mice were orally administered GCE up to 14 g/kg body weight (approximately 553times of clinical dose). Conclusions: GCE possesses analgesic, anti-inflammatory and antipyretic activities and is non-toxic at the doses used. The results of this study support the clinical use and effectiveness of Geranium carolinianum as an analgesic, anti-inflammatory and antipyretic agent in folk medicine. Key words: Plant drug; Pain; Inflammation; Pyrexia; Toxicity; Anima

Ethical dilemmas are not simply black and white

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Ethics and Social Practice on 1 July 2008, available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17496530801948838.This article aims to highlight some of the ethical issues that arise when social work educators plan to involve service users and carers from black and minority ethnic (BME) communities in the teaching of social work students. Between 2005 and 2007, the authors carried out a two-part project that involved working with service users and carers from BME communities in the area around Liverpool in Britain. The article first discusses the background for this two-part project, highlighting two themes relating to the ethical dilemmas we experienced. The first of these themes concerned conducting a project in a political context based on short and intermittent funding and intransigent bureaucracy. Our second theme concerned how to reconcile bringing together a group of people because they were recognized as having a shared experience while at the same time there were a myriad differences within the group. We then discuss these issues in light of the ethical approach we adopted, based on being open and honest, flexible in a respectful and meaningful way, and on anti-oppressive ethics and shared responsibility.Peer reviewe

Enhancing Transport Efficiency by Hybrid Routing Strategy

Traffic is essential for many dynamic processes on real networks, such as internet and urban traffic systems. The transport efficiency of the traffic system can be improved by taking full advantage of the resources in the system. In this paper, we propose a dual-strategy routing model for network traffic system, to realize the plenary utility of the whole network. The packets are delivered according to different "efficient routing strategies" [Yan, et al, Phys. Rev. E 73, 046108 (2006)]. We introduce the accumulate rate of packets, {\eta} to measure the performance of traffic system in the congested phase, and propose the so-called equivalent generation rate of packet to analyze the jamming processes. From analytical and numerical results, we find that, for suitable selection of strategies, the dual- strategy system performs better than the single-strategy system in a broad region of strategy mixing ratio. The analytical solution to the jamming processes is verified by estimating the number of jammed nodes, which coincides well with the result from simulation.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure