ILR Impact Brief – Supervisor Support, Employee Control Help NYC Firefighters Cope with 9/11

Although individuals often work in groups and groups function within a larger environment, researchers have rarely examined the effect of context on employees’ emotions, attitudes, or behaviors. This study uses the World Trade Center attack to generate and test a context theory concerning the impact on first responders of their involvement in a catastrophic event. The model details the way in which the climate (support from supervisors and employee control over the work environment) within discrete engine and ladder companies (work units) moderates the relationship between emergency response to the attack (the stressor) and the resulting emotional strain on the firefighters. Prior studies have shown that people’s exposure to critical incidents is associated with depression, anxiety, and stress that may begin immediately or surface months later. The severity of individual reactions varies and researchers have proposed several explanatory theories, including biological and psychological factors, the way people mentally process their experiences, and the array of physical and social/emotional resources at their disposal. The authors here draw on the latter two theoretical frameworks to formulate and test several hypotheses that help explain why New York City firefighters involved in 9/11 felt more or less emotionally wrought 18 months after the attack

Improved fracture toughness corrosion-resistant bearing material

A development program was performed to establish whether a corrosion-resistant bearing material, such as a 14Cr steel, could be modified to allow carburization, thereby providing the excellent fracture toughness characteristics feasible with this process. The alloy selected for investigation was AMS 5749. Several modifications were made including the addition of a small amount of nickel for austenite stabilization. While some promising results were achieved, the primary objective of an acceptable combination of case hardness and microstructure was not attained. Because the high chromium content presents a serious problem in achieving a viable carburizing cycle, a number of experimental steels having lower chromium contents (8 to 12%) were produced in laboratory quantities and evaluated. The results were basically the same as those initially obtained with the modified AMS 5749. Corrosion tests were performed on AMS 5749, AISI M50, and 52100 bearing steels as well as some of the lower chromium steels. These tests showed that a reduced chromium level (10 to 12%) provided essentially the same corrosion protection as the 14Cr steels

Regulation as Delegation: Private Firms, Decisionmaking, and Accountability in the Administrative State

Administrative agencies increasingly enlist the judgment of private firms they regulate to achieve public ends. Regulation concerning the identification and reduction of risk-from financial, data and homeland security risk to the risk of conflicts of interest-increasingly mandates broad policy outcomes and accords regulated parties wide discretion in deciding how to interpret and achieve them. Yet the dominant paradigm of administrative enforcement, monitoring and threats of punishment, is ill suited to oversee the sound exercise of judgment and discretion

Bearing fatigue investigation 3

The operating characteristics of large diameter rolling-element bearings in the ultra high speed regimes expected in advanced turbine engines for high performance aircraft were investigated. A high temperature lubricant, DuPont Krytox 143 AC, was evaluated at bearing speeds to 3 million DN. Compared to the results of earlier, similar tests using a MIL-L-23699 (Type II) lubricant, bearings lubricated with the high density Krytox fluid showed significantly higher power requirements. Additionally, short bearing lives were observed when this fluid was used with AISI M50 bearings in an air atmosphere. The primary mode of failure was corrosion initiated surface distress (fatigue) on the raceways. The potential of a case-carburized bearing to sustain a combination of high-tangential and hertzian stresses without experiencing race fracture was also investigated. Limited full scale bearing tests of a 120 mm bore ball bearing at a speed of 25,000 rpm (3 million DN) indicated that a carburized material could sustain spalling fatigue without subsequent propagation to fracture. Planned life tests of the carburized material had to be aborted, however, because of apparent processing-induced material defects

Corrosion of simulated bearing components of three bearing steels in the presence of chloride-contaminated lubricant

Corrosion tests were run with AISI 52100, AISI M-50 and AMS 5794 under conditions that simulate the crevice corrosion found in aircraft ball and roller bearings rejected at overhaul for corrosion. Test specimens were fabricated that simulated the contacts of balls or rollers and the raceways. Corrosion cells were assembled in the presence of a lubricant contaminated with water and chloride ions. The cell was then thermally cycled between 339 K (150 F) and 276 K (37 F). The corrosion observed after 14 cycles was that of crevice and pitting corrosion typically found in aircraft bearings. AMS 5749 showed a very slight amount of corrosion. No appreciable differences were noted between AISI 52100 and AISI M-50, but both showed much greater corrosion than AMS 5749. The corrosion pits observed in AISI M-50 appeared to be fewer in number but generally deeper and larger than in AISI 52100

\u3ci\u3eChevron\u3c/i\u3e\u27s Two Steps

The framework for judicial review of administrative interpretations of regulatory statutes set forth in the landmark Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council decision prescribes two analytic inquiries, and for good reason. The familiar two-step analysis is best understood as a framework for allocating interpretive authority in the administrative state; it separates questions of statutory implementation assigned to independent judicial judgment (Step One) from questions regarding which the courts role is limited to oversight of agency decisionmaking (Step Two). The boundary between a reviewing court\u27s decision and oversight roles rests squarely on the question of statutory ambiguity. For while courts, using traditional tools of statutory interpretation, should decide directly whether statutory language permits or clearly excludes the possibility of a given agency interpretation, judges must withdraw to a supervisory role when agency choices fall within a zone of ambiguity left by congressional instructions. In that oversight role, courts may ask whether an agency employed appropriate processes or reasoning in making an interpretive choice. But if the choice was reached in a reasonable manner, judges must let the administrative interpretation stand. Thus defining the areas of ambiguity within which agencies possess primary interpretive authority constitutes a – if not the – central component of judges\u27 independent Step One task

Gap-filling strategies for annual VOC flux data sets

Up to now the limited knowledge about the exchange of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) between the biosphere and the atmosphere is one of the factors which hinders more accurate climate predictions. Complete long-term flux data sets of several VOCs to quantify the annual exchange and validate recent VOC models are basically not available. In combination with long-term VOC flux measurements the application of gap-filling routines is inevitable in order to replace missing data and make an important step towards a better understanding of the VOC ecosystem–atmosphere exchange on longer timescales. <br><br> We performed VOC flux measurements above a mountain meadow in Austria during two complete growing seasons (from snowmelt in spring to snow reestablishment in late autumn) and used this data set to test the performance of four different gap-filling routines, mean diurnal variation (MDV), mean gliding window (MGW), look-up tables (LUT) and linear interpolation (LIP), in terms of their ability to replace missing flux data in order to obtain reliable VOC sums. According to our findings the MDV routine was outstanding with regard to the minimization of the gap-filling error for both years and all quantified VOCs. The other gap-filling routines, which performed gap-filling on 24 h average values, introduced considerably larger uncertainties. The error which was introduced by the application of the different filling routines increased linearly with the number of data gaps. Although average VOC fluxes measured during the winter period (complete snow coverage) were close to zero, these were highly variable and the filling of the winter period resulted in considerably higher uncertainties compared to the application of gap-filling during the measurement period. <br><br> The annual patterns of the overall cumulative fluxes for the quantified VOCs showed a completely different behaviour in 2009, which was an exceptional year due to the occurrence of a severe hailstorm, compared to 2011. Methanol was the compound which, at 381.5 mg C m^&minus;2 and 449.9 mg C m^&minus;2, contributed most to the cumulative VOC carbon emissions in 2009 and 2011, respectively. In contrast to methanol emissions, however, considerable amounts of monoterpenes (−327.3 mg C m^&minus;2) were deposited onto the mountain meadow during 2009 caused by a hailstorm. Other quantified VOCs had considerably lower influences on the annual patterns