Safety Culture Development in Dredging and Marine Contractor Companies – Three-Case Study on Safety Programs

After Chernobyl accident in 1986 it was concluded that a bad safety culture contributed to it. Development of a good safety culture became a regulation requirement in many countries, and a necessity in many industries including dredging and marine operations. The thesis is carried out as a multiple case study applying qualitative methods. Three cases are represented by the leading dredging and marine contractor companies, being three out of four biggest in the world. Data was collected by means of nine semi-structured interviews and from documents related to safety culture and safety programs. The aim of the thesis is to better understand companies’ view on safety culture and its development; the influence of safety programs on safety culture and its measurement; related problems and challenges. The theoretical framework grounds in intertwined concepts of safety culture and safety, model of organizational culture of Schein, and means to measure quality and maturity of safety culture. Safety culture is being developed in the companies during the last 7-12 years within the framework of safety programs, which revealed great similarity. The results of the thesis demonstrate that the companies consider that safety culture can be engineered, changed, measured, and maintained. Safety culture is a part of companies’ organizational culture and helps to take care of safety, provides market advantages to the companies. Safety culture improvement leads to organizational culture improvement, namely communication, increase of trust, democratic management style, and highlights the aspect of care for all employees. Safety culture is being developed within three core elements: mindset and understanding, structures and functions, and practices. According to the model of Schein (2017) safety culture is created within three cultural levels: artifacts (observable behaviour, structures, and processes), espoused beliefs and values (ideals, goals, rationalizations), and basic underlaying assumptions (taken for granted beliefs, values, which determine thought, perception, and behaviour). The mindset of the companies is based on the espoused values of Vision Zero and that proper safety behaviour improves safety; the underlaying assumptions that all incidents and accidents are preventable, and that safety behaviour will provide long-lasting safe performance. Management sincere commitment and involvement, employees’ empowerment, incentive structures, and reporting play important roles in a strong culture development. The study results show much focus on engineering risk assessment approach and less on sociotechnical perspective. The development is driven by industrial experience, market developments, and influence of ISO standards for risk. The influence of safety programs on safety culture is measured by safety statistics, interviews, group dialogs, feedback, behaviour during trainings, and safety climate surveys. The quality of safety communication, employees’ care for safety, involvement, and management commitment are assessed. Safety culture maturity is evaluated and certified by external Safety Culture Ladder audits mostly upon tender necessity. Some companies’ units possess certificates of third (calculating) and fourth (proactive) maturity steps. Development of safety culture is a gradual, continuous, and complex process demanding constant effort, monitoring, and financing. The cases demonstrate a reasonable progress. Safety culture evolutionized from compliance to rules and procedures to more proactive behaviour of all employees, nevertheless espoused values need to be extended by the ones reflecting dynamic and complex sociotechnical nature of safety. Combination of several safety perspectives, including sociotechnical perspective, Safety II and resilience can further improve existing safety cultures. Risk science can contribute to better understanding, assessment, and prevention of risks. Certain problems and challenges were detected. Disrupted investments into the safety programs, insincere management commitment led occasionally to formal attitudes of employees. Companies’ growth, temporary employment, subcontractors’ involvement, and external influences create challenges for the safety programs and safety culture development. Learning, communication, and cooperation suffered during Covid-19 pandemic. Personal physical participation in learning was substituted by online participation and e-learning and undermined its quality.

Ways of seeing ringed birds - An Eco-Critical Discourse Analysis

This thesis examines how birds being ringed as a conservation effort, are represented in five selected articles from the Norwegian bird magazine Our Bird Fauna [Vår Fuglefauna]. The representations found in the magazine have been evaluated by conducting an Eco-Critical Discourse Analysis, with a phenomenologically inspired eco-philosophy as the normative framework. Rather than being represented as serving a conservational purpose, the ringed birds were represented as inferior, objectified artefacts - captured for the sake of being consumed as entertainment. The conservation effort of ringing birds and the hobby of bird watching were metaphorically constructed as one and the same. The bodies of the ringed birds were represented as satiations of children's and adult’s curiosity, as spectacles for public displays, as tools for constructing one’s bird watcher-identity and as objects of demystification. The thesis draws the conclusion that the representations of ringed birds in the articles analysed facilitate a destructive discourse. This discourse is not considerate of the birds as subjective beings, nor is it sensitive to the power relation embedded in human-animal interactio

Analyses of catch rates of important bycatch species in the Norwegian Coastal Survey north of Stad (62°N) 2003-2017: Do catch statistics and scientific surveys tell the same story?

Masteroppgåve i biologiBIO399MAMN-BI

Aspects of Invariant Manifold Theory and Applications

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in "data-driven" approaches to determine the equations governing complex systems. Yet in spite of modern computing advances, the high dimensionality of many systems --- such as those occurring in biology and robotics --- renders direct machine learning approaches infeasible. This dissertation develops tools for the experimental study of complex systems, based on mathematical concepts from dynamical systems theory. Our approach uses the fact that parsimonious assumptions often lead to strong insights from dynamical systems theory; such insights can be leveraged in learning algorithms to mitigate the “curse of dimensionality” and make these algorithms practical. Our first contribution concerns nonlinear oscillators. Oscillators are ubiquitous in nature, and usually associated with the existence of an "asymptotic phase" which governs the long-term dynamics of the oscillator. We show that asymptotic phase can be expressed as a line integral with respect to a uniquely defined closed differential 1-form, and provide an algorithm for estimating this "ToF" from observational data. Unlike all previously available data-driven phase estimation methods, our algorithm can: (i) use observations that are much shorter than a cycle; (ii) recover phase within the entire region for which data convergent to the limit cycle is available; (iii) recover the phase response curves (PRC-s) that govern weak oscillator coupling; (iv) show isochron curvature, and recover nonlinear features of isochron geometry. Our method may find application wherever models of oscillator dynamics need to be constructed from measured or simulated time-series. Our next contribution concerns locomotion systems which are dominated by viscous friction in the sense that without power expenditure they quickly come to a standstill. From geometric mechanics, it is known that in the ``Stokesian'' (viscous; zero Reynolds number) limit, the motion is governed by a reduced order "connection'' model that describes how body shape change produces motion for the body frame with respect to the world. In the "perturbed Stokes regime'' where inertial forces are still dominated by viscosity, but are not negligible (low Reynolds number), we show that motion is still governed by a functional relationship between shape velocity and body velocity, but this function is no longer connection-like. We derive this model using results from noncompact NHIM theory in a singular perturbation framework. Using a normal form derived from theoretical properties of this reduced-order model, we develop an algorithm that estimates an approximation to the dynamics near a cyclic body shape change (a "gait") directly from observational data of shape and body motion. Our algorithm has applications to the study of optimality of animal gaits, and to hardware-in-the-loop optimization to produce gaits for robots. Finally, we make fundamental contributions to NHIM theory: we prove that the global stable foliation of a NHIM is a $C^0$ disk bundle, and we prove that the dynamics restricted to the stable manifold of a compact inflowing NHIM are globally topologically conjugate to the linearized transverse dynamics at the NHIM restricted to the stable vector bundle. We also give conditions ensuring $C^k$ versions of our results, and we illustrate the theory by giving applications to geometric singular perturbation theory in the case of an attracting critical manifold: we show that the domain of the Fenichel Normal Form can be extended to the entire global stable manifold, and under additional nonresonance assumptions we derive a smooth global linear normal form.PHDElectrical and Computer EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147642/1/kvalheim_1.pd

Linearizability of flows by embeddings

We consider the problem of determining the class of continuous-time dynamical systems that can be globally linearized in the sense of admitting an embedding into a linear flow on a finite-dimensional Euclidean space. We obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of linearizing embeddings of compact invariant sets and basins of attraction. Our results reveal relationships between linearizability, symmetry, topology, and invariant manifold theory that impose fundamental limitations on algorithms from the ``applied Koopman operator theory'' literature.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figure, comments welcom

Koopman Embedding and Super-Linearization Counterexamples with Isolated Equilibria

A frequently repeated claim in the "applied Koopman operator theory'' literature is that a dynamical system with multiple isolated equilibria cannot be linearized in the sense of admitting a smooth embedding as an invariant submanifold of a linear dynamical system. This claim is sometimes made only for the class of super-linearizations, which additionally require that the embedding "contain the state''. We show that both versions of this claim are false by constructing (super-)linearizable smooth dynamical systems on $\mathbb{R}^k$ having any countable (finite) number of isolated equilibria for each $k>1$.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure