Substance misuse and the social work ethos.

The contribution which social work can make to the resolution or minimization of problems stemming from the use of alcohol and drugs is best understood in the context of the profession's ethos. This ethos is one which, unlike that of most other caring professions, retains and encourages a sense of scepticism concerning the prospect of technical or scientific solutions to these problems, preferring to work explicitly within the sphere of policy and of value issues. Three major themes (the person-in-environment, the strengths perspective and the emphasis on service provision) are looked at in the context of Irish social work

Prognostic Algorithms for Condition Monitoring and Remaining Useful Life Estimation

To enable the benets of a truly condition-based maintenance philosophy to be realised, robust, accurate and reliable algorithms, which provide maintenance personnel with the necessary information to make informed maintenance decisions, will be key. This thesis focuses on the development of such algorithms, with a focus on semiconductor manufacturing and wind turbines. An introduction to condition-based maintenance is presented which reviews dierent types of maintenance philosophies and describes the potential benets which a condition- based maintenance philosophy will deliver to operators of critical plant and machinery. The issues and challenges involved in developing condition-based maintenance solutions are discussed and a review of previous approaches and techniques in fault diagnostics and prognostics is presented. The development of a condition monitoring system for dry vacuum pumps used in semi- conductor manufacturing is presented. A notable feature is that upstream process mea- surements from the wafer processing chamber were incorporated in the development of a solution. In general, semiconductor manufacturers do not make such information avail- able and this study identies the benets of information sharing in the development of condition monitoring solutions, within the semiconductor manufacturing domain. The developed solution provides maintenance personnel with the ability to identify, quantify, track and predict the remaining useful life of pumps suering from degradation caused by pumping large volumes of corrosive uorine gas. A comprehensive condition monitoring solution for thermal abatement systems is also presented. As part of this work, a multiple model particle ltering algorithm for prog- nostics is developed and tested. The capabilities of the proposed prognostic solution for addressing the uncertainty challenges in predicting the remaining useful life of abatement systems, subject to uncertain future operating loads and conditions, is demonstrated. Finally, a condition monitoring algorithm for the main bearing on large utility scale wind turbines is developed. The developed solution exploits data collected by onboard supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems in wind turbines. As a result, the developed solution can be integrated into existing monitoring systems, at no additional cost. The potential for the application of multiple model particle ltering algorithm to wind turbine prognostics is also demonstrated

An Ethnographic Case Study of a Deaf Workforce Collective

This ethnographic study seeks to increase our understanding of the individual and shared experiences of five members of a Deaf United States Postal Service (USPS) collective employment cohort in regards to their early learning experiences, how these experiences led to collective employment, and how the collective employment opportunity led them to establish a new Strong Deaf Community in Houston. The data collected through semi structured interviews will be used to increase our understanding about how Strong Deaf Communities form, and what purpose they serve for grassroots members. This study also seeks to shed light on why it is critical for the field of VR to understand the collective aspect of Deaf culture, given our current high rates of Deaf unemployment. It is hoped that this study leads to a reevaluation of how the grassroots Deaf American population is served. This study may also provide guidance toward developing new theoretical plans of action for current rehabilitation professionals seeking to mediate the high rates of Deaf unemployment seen in the body of rehabilitation research. This ethnographic study utilizes a purposeful sample of Deaf career postal employees from Houston, to develop an in-depth understanding of their experiences with collective employment and how their experiences led them to establish a new collective Strong Deaf Community in Houston. The purpose of this study is to develop understandings of how grassroots Deaf workers successfully navigate the world of work, and how the collective aspect of Deaf culture influences the process

Stochastic Search in Data-Based Modelling of Dynamic Systems

This paper examines the application of stochastic search techniques for the solution of two typical problems in mod- elling nonlinear systems using a multi-modelling approach: interpolation function determination and linear model structure determination. Two candidate stochastic search techniques are employed, genetic algorithms and swarm intelligence, which show dierent advantages for each of the problems considered

Particle Filters for Remaining Useful Life Estimation of Abatement Equipment used in Semiconductor Manufacturing

Prognostics is the ability to predict the remaining useful life of a specific system, or component, and represents a key enabler of any effective condition-based-maintenance strategy. Among methods for performing prognostics such as regression and artificial neural networks, particle filters are emerging as a technique with considerable potential. Particle filters employ both a state dynamic model and a measurement model, which are used together to predict the evolution of the state probability distribution function. The approach has similarities to Kalman filtering, however, particle filters make no assumptions that the state dynamic model be linear or that Gaussian noise assumptions must hold true. The technique is applied in predicting the degradation of thermal processing units used in the treatment of waste gases from semiconductor processing chambers. The performance of the technique demonstrates the potential of particle filters as a robust method for accurately predicting system failure. In addition to the use of particle filters, Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) are employed to extract signals associated with the different operating modes from a multi-modal signal generated by the operating characteristics of the thermal processing unit

Use of Weather Inputs in Traffic Volume Forecasting

In this paper, an examination of the effect of including rainfall inputs in the forecasting of daily vehicular traffic volumes is undertaken. A case study is carried out at a busy intersection in Dublin city to examine if any reduction in forecasting error can be obtained by the incorporation of rainfall inputs. This paper also demonstrates the value of incorporating lessons learned from linear time series modelling to the non-linear analysis undertaken

The Icarus Project: report on Luxemburg seminar of March 1999

Describes the Icarus Project which is an international comparative study of how health and social services recognise and respond to the psychosocial needs of children of mentally ill parents

The Icarus Project: report on Luxemburg seminar of March 1999

Describes the Icarus Project which is an international comparative study of how health and social services recognise and respond to the psychosocial needs of children of mentally ill parents

Pre-emergence growth and development in the arctic midge Trichotanypus alaskensis Brundin

Developing at low mean temperatures, arctic chironomids often have prolonged larval growth yet adult emergence is typically a brief and highly synchronous event. How does a midge population achieve synchronous emergence? Under the Absolute Spring Species Hypothesis (AbSS), adult eclosion by early-emerging species may be synchronized by overwintering as fully mature larvae. Such prepupal larvae would neither feed nor grow after spring thaw, only pupate and emerge. The podonomine Trichotanypus alaskensis Brundin is an abundant midge in tundra ponds on Alaska’s Arctic Coastal Plain, and one of the earliest-emerging species in this chironomid-dominated insect community. T. alaskensis is univoltine in these arctic ponds, with most emergence from any one pond occurring within less than a one-week span during late June, typically about three weeks after pond thaw. We evaluated T. alaskensis for conformity to the AbSS model by documenting the overwintering state of this species in a tundra pond near Barrow, Alaska, then monitoring larval growth and development of the population from spring thaw to pupation. Most T. alaskensis were immature instar IV larvae when collected in late September of both 2010 and 2011, with 10-30% still in late instar III. Immediately after pond thaw in 2011, all collected larvae had imaginal disc primordia showing early stages of instar IV development. Within the first two weeks following pond thaw, most larvae had doubled their dry mass and developed into mature (prepupal) final-instar larvae. Highly synchronized emergence by T.  alaskensis is not a consequence of a population overwintering as fully-mature larvae, as per the Absolute Spring Species Hypothesis. Rather, larvae in a given tundra pond appear to develop synchronously throughout the life cycle, including a period of substantial growth and rapid prepupal development between spring thaw and early-summer emergence