Managing the Change of Cultural Resistance

The review of numerous Australian and International Transport and Health Safety cases has highlighted the detrimental effect of cultural resistance when engineers and regulators seek to improve transport safety. This paper will define culture and cultural resistance. It will review a number of cases and provide an overview of the effect of cultural resistance, demonstrating some common characteristics of these cases. A limited number of risk management disciplines will be reviewed as they apply to the problem, and demonstrate how expertise in these fields can be advantageous to the engineer and regulator. The paper will provide the reader with a number of resolution strategies to manage cultural change by reducing resistance using practical methods. This paper has specific relevance to transport safety initiatives in Australia. This paper is an extract of a full research paper "Making the Kingfisher Archipelago a Safer Place", Smith, D.B., 2005, available from the author upon request

Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter: Experiment summary after the first year of global mapping of Mars

The Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA), an instrument on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, has measured the topography, surface roughness, and 1.064-μm reflectivity of Mars and the heights of volatile and dust clouds. This paper discusses the function of the MOLA instrument and the acquisition, processing, and correction of observations to produce global data sets. The altimeter measurements have been converted to both gridded and spherical harmonic models for the topography and shape of Mars that have vertical and radial accuracies of ~1 m with respect to the planet's center of mass. The current global topographic grid has a resolution of 1/64° in latitude × 1/32° in longitude (1 × 2 km^2 at the equator). Reconstruction of the locations of incident laser pulses on the Martian surface appears to be at the 100-m spatial accuracy level and results in 2 orders of magnitude improvement in the global geodetic grid of Mars. Global maps of optical pulse width indicative of 100-m-scale surface roughness and 1.064-μm reflectivity with an accuracy of 5% have also been obtained

Thermal axion constraints in non-standard thermal histories

There is no direct evidence for radiation domination prior to big-bang nucleosynthesis, and so it is useful to consider how constraints to thermally-produced axions change in non-standard thermal histories. In the low-temperature-reheating scenario, radiation domination begins at temperatures as low as 1 MeV, and is preceded by significant entropy generation. Axion abundances are then suppressed, and cosmological limits to axions are significantly loosened. In a kination scenario, a more modest change to axion constraints occurs. Future possible constraints to axions and low-temperature reheating are discussed.Comment: Submitted conference proceedings, based on a talk presented at Dark Matter '08 in Marina del Rey. Based on work discussed in Phys.Rev.D77:085020,2008, as well as arXiv:0711.1352. Updated to correct titl