Safety culture assessment and implementation framework to enhance maritime safety

Accident investigation reports attribute the majority of marine accidents to human and organizational factors. Significant efforts are made to eliminate these errors in the maritime industry, but after each catastrophic accident, the maritime industry adopts a reactive approach which results in new regulations and an excessive amount of paperwork. None of these efforts provide the desired safety level for the maritime industry. Currently, the maritime industry is starting to implement proactive approaches and has tried to avoid re-occurrences by implementing an appropriate safety culture. Safety culture is defined as “how an organization behaves when no one is watching”. The safety culture approach describes humans as a means for improving safety rather than someone to blame for failure. A positive safety culture with commitment from all levels in the company can achieve the envisaged and required safety levels in the maritime industry. This paper presents a novel safety culture assessment and improvement framework to enhance the maritime safety and introduces preliminary results of the safety climate assessment within a company. The proposed framework will collect seafarer's attitudes, leading/lagging indicators and key performance indicators to analyze a company's current safety culture level and address the weakest areas to enhance the level of safety accordingly. New strategies and action plans will be proposed to improve these vulnerable areas. The selection of safety indicators will be adjustable according to a company's specific needs and the available data types. Safety indicators have a crucial importance in gaining an insight into a company's safety performance. The safety culture improvement framework will provide a guided way for companies to perform gap identification on their safety level. A management tool will also be developed for shipping companies to analyze and observe their current safety culture level continuously. Implementation of the safety culture assessment framework is a long term process and it requires up to five years of continual effort to get the final results. The results section doesn’t go beyond the assessment of safety climate and identification of the main differences between shore staff and crew members. In the next stages of the study, interviews and observations will be performed to validate the results of the questionnaire. More structured means of statistical analysis will be conducted to identify correlations between safety performance data and safety metrics

The Collection and Organization of Field Materials : A Research Report

Author Institution: Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, Columbus 1

Leadership in Loma : A Preliminary Research Report

Author Institution: Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, Columbus 10, Ohi

Evaluation of the New Version of the Laser-Optical Disdrometer, Parsivel

Disdrometer based hydrometeor size distribution measurements have a wide range of application in radar meteorology among other disciplines. The low-cost laser optical disdrometer which became commercially available in 2005 opened a new era to study the variability of the hydrometeor size distribution. The pixel and footprint scale variability of the ground and spaceborne radar remote sensing of precipitation, respectively, has been investigated through a network of Parsivel disdrometers. At the same timE, the cross comparison of impact-type, two-dimensional video and laser-optical disdrometers highlighted the relative strengths and weaknesses of each type of disdrometer. The Parsivel instrument tended to underestimate the number of small drops less than 0.8 mm in diameter quite severely, while the size of drops larger than 2.0 mm in diameter were overestimated at heavy rain quite frequently. Through a close collaboration with the manufacturer, these shortcomings were attributed to the inexpensive laser device. The manufacturer has just released a beta version of Parsivel2. The preliminary comparisons with old and new versions of Parsivel, impact type disdrometer and rain gauges showed a noticeable improvement of the Parsivel at both small and large drop end. This presentation will demonstrate the evaluation of the new unit and its potential impact on radar rainfall relations, including polarimetric and high frequency radar rainfall

Importance of substrates for the visibility of "dark" plasmonic modes

Dark plasmonic modes have interesting properties, including longer lifetimes and narrower linewidths than their radiative counterpart, and little to no radiative losses. However, they have not been extensively studied yet due to their optical inaccessibility. In this work, we systematically investigated the dark radial breathing modes (RBMs) in monocrystalline gold nanodisks, specifically their outcoupling behavior into the far-field by cathodoluminescence spectroscopy. Increasing the substrate thickness resulted in an up to 4-fold enhanced visibility. This is attributed to breaking the mirror symmetry by the high-index substrate, creating an effective dipole moment. Furthermore, the resonance energy of the dark RMBs can be easily tuned by varying the nanodisk diameter, making them promising candidates for nanophotonic applications. © 2020 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreemen

Electron beams traversing spherical nanoparticles: analytic and numerical treatment

We present an analytic, Mie-theory based solution for the energy-loss and the photon-emission probabilities in the interaction of spherical nanoparticles with electrons passing nearby and through them, in both cathodoluminescence (CL) and electron energy-loss spectroscopies (EELS). In particular, we focus on the case of penetrating electron trajectories, for which the complete fully electrodynamic and relativistic formalism has not been reported as yet. We exhibit the efficiency of this method in describing collective excitations in matter through calculations for a dispersive and lossy system, namely a sphere described by a Drude permittivity, and discuss possible complications when computing contributions from higher-order modes. Subsequently, we use the analytic solution to corroborate the implementation of electron-beam sources in a state-of-the-art numerical method methods. We show that the two approaches produce spectra in good mutual agreement, and demonstrate the versatility of DGTD via simulations of spherical nanoparticles characterized by surface roughness. The possibility of simultaneously employing both kinds of calculations (analytic and numerical) facilitates a better understanding of the rich optical response of nanophotonic architectures excited by fast electron beams.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure