Crew Resource Management and Its Possible Role in Nursing Risk Management

Crew Resource Management (CRM) was introduced within the aviation industry in the late 1970s after an aircraft ran out of fuel whilst the pilots were trying to solve an undercarriage problem. To reduce such errors and ultimately lower the probability of failure and the severity of risks that occur, training in CRM was rolled out across the whole industry. It has been successful over the last few years in major reductions in the number of crashes and fatalities in the commercial aviation sector. Nursing has similar concerns in that errors can ultimately result in fatalities. There are parallels in the needs and expectations of pilots and nurses to assess risk, reduce risk and deliver reliable and dependable professional services. In this paper the parallels of pilots and nurses demands are compared to assess if the lessons learned in aviation can assist nurses deliver procedures with lower risks. The analysis will draw on the demands and expectations and how they both deal with risk, challenging errors and ensuring that identified risks are not overlooked or ignored. Finally, suggestions of adopting, sharing and benchmarking between these two industries can adopt best practices so that both industries can learn from each other

Shape control and whole-life energy assessment of an 'infinitely stiff' prototype adaptive structure

A previously developed design methodology produces optimum adaptive structures that minimise the whole-life energy which is made of an embodied part in the material and an operational part for structural adaptation. Planar and complex spatial reticular structures designed with this method and simulations showed that the adaptive solution achieves savings as high as 70% in the whole-life energy compared to optimised passive solutions. This paper describes a large-scale prototype adaptive structure built to validate the numerical findings and investigate the practicality of the design method. Experimental results show that (1) shape control can be used to achieve 'infinite stiffness' (i.e. to reduce displacements completely) in real-time without predetermined knowledge regarding position, direction and magnitude (within limits) of the external load; (2) the whole-life energy of the structure is in good agreement with that predicted by numerical simulations. This result confirms the proposed design method is reliable and that adaptive structures can achieve substantive total energy savings compared to passive structures

Infinite stiffness structures via active control

Active control has been used in civil engineering structures for a variety of purposes. Although the potential for using deflection-control adaptation to save material has been investigated by a few other authors, little attention has been given to assessing whether these material savings outweigh the energy consumed through control and actuation. Our paper seeks to address this gap, presenting experimental work on a truss with effective infinite stiffness which builds on earlier theoretical studies. Senatore previously developed a design method that produces an optimum adaptive structure that minimises the total energy spent throughout the whole life of the structure (embodied in the materials + operational for the control) (Senatore, et al., 2013). The method was used to design a range of structures from trusses to space frames, both determinate and indeterminate, and it was shown that it allows energy saving up to 70% compared to state of the art optimisation methods. A large scale prototype structure has now been built to validate the numerical findings and investigate the practicality of the method. This paper discusses recent experimental findings and the making of the prototype. Using the insight acquired after the making and testing of the prototype the authors will discuss potential applications of adaptive structures in selection of different scenarios, ranging from cantilever seating tiers in sports stands to lightweight roofs to slender beams with 80:1 span/depth ratio

Designing adaptive structures for whole life energy savings

Designing structures with minimal environmental impact is emerging as a seriou concern in the construction sector. Conventional structural design practice involves designing first for strength, followed by secondary checks on deflections and other serviceability limits states. If these limits are exceeded, the con-ventional solution has been to add material to increase stiffness. When the design is governed by unpredicta-ble events such as fluctuating loads, strong wind storms or earthquakes, the structure is effectively overde-signed for most of its working life. This paper presents a methodology to design adaptive structures that minimize the whole life energy consumption. The methodology is illustrated on plane pin-jointed trusses, both determinate and indeterminate. Strategically placing actuators allow the internal flow of forces to be ho-mogenized and displacements to be controlled. The actuators only start working when the loads reach a cer-tain threshold. Below this threshold, the structure resists loads mainly passively thereby limiting significantly the operational energy used. It was found that both indeterminate and determinate topologies bring substantial energy savings up to 70% of the total energy

Role of Light Vector Mesons in the Heavy Particle Chiral Lagrangian

We give the general framework for adding "light" vector particles to the heavy hadron effective chiral Lagrangian. This has strong motivations both from the phenomenological and aesthetic standpoints. An application to the already observed D \rightarrow \overbar{K^*} weak transition amplitude is discussed.Comment: 19 pages, LaTeX documen

Compensation of B-L charge of matter with relic sneutrinos

We consider massless gauge boson connected to B-L charge with and without compensation to complete the investigation of the gauging of B and L charges. Relic sneutrinos predicted by SUSY and composite models may compensate B-L charge of matter. As a consequence of the possible compensation mechanism we have shown that the available experimental data admit the range of the B-L interaction constant, 10^{-29} < {\alpha}_{B-L} < 10^{-12}, in addition to {\alpha}_{B-L} < 10^{-49} obtained without compensation.Comment: 6 page