An evaluation of health and safety management in small construction enterprises in the United Kingdom

The United Kingdom (UK) construction industry has one of the best safety records within the European Union, with fatalities and serious injuries being about one third of the European average. However, despite a number of recent initiatives, accidents still regularly occur on UK construction sites. A disproportionate number of fatalities occur in small construction enterprises employing fifteen operatives or less. In 2007, a survey of small construction enterprises in Southern England was carried out to identify factors which contribute to this relatively poor safety record. The survey was based on prior research which had identified three interrelated factors that influence health and safety (H&S) management: the individual’s competence and attitude; the job tasks and environment; and the organisational culture and leadership. It was found that project managers on small construction sites had limited knowledge of H&S requirements which often resulted in a poor or potentially dangerous work environment and a poor safety attitude within the workforce. It was concluded that increased awareness and training of project managers in small construction enterprises should be a priority for all who seek to improve H&S on construction sites

Entanglement gives rise to Pareto optimality in the generalised quantum Hawk-Dove Game

We quantise the generalised Hawk-Dove Game. By restricting the strategy space available to the players, we show that every game of this type can be extended into the quantum realm to produce a Pareto optimal evolutionarily stable strategy. This equilibrium replaces the inefficient classical one when the entanglement prepared in the game exceeds a critical threshold value, which we derive analytically.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, submitted for review, comments welcom

The impact of civil war on forest wildlife in West Africa: Mammals in Gola Forest, Sierra Leone

Human conflicts may sometimes benefit wildlife by depopulating wilderness areas but there is evidence from Africa that the impacts tend to be negative. The forested states of West Africa have experienced much recent human conflict but there have been no assessments of impacts on the wildlife. We conducted surveys of mammals in the 710-km2 Gola Forest reserves to assess the impact of the 1991-2001 civil war in Sierra Leone. Gola is the most important remaining tract of lowland forest in the country and a key site for the conservation of the highly threatened forests of the Upper Guinea region. We found that Gola has survived well despite being in the heart of the area occupied by the rebels. We recorded 44 species of larger mammal, including 18 threatened, near-threatened and endemic species, accounting for all species recorded in pre-war surveys and adding several more (African buffalo Syncerus caffer nanus and water chevrotain Hyemoschus aquaticus). Populations of primates were healthy with little evidence of decline. Duiker detection rates were low and further work is required to confirm their numbers as they include five species endemic (or near endemic) to the Upper Guinea region, three of which are threatened. However, the population of African forest elephants Loxodonta cyclotis has collapsed, with only a few individuals remaining from c. 110 in the mid 1980s. We conclude that peacetime pressures from the bushmeat trade, clearance for agriculture, logging and mining are likely to be far greater for Gola than the pressures from the civil war

Book reviews

Birds of the Horn of Africa: Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia and Socotra. Nigel Redman, Terry Stevenson and John Fanshawe with contributions from Nik Borrow and Brian Finch. Illustrated by John Gale and Brian Small. 2009.Birds of Ethiopia and Eritrea: an atlas of distribution. John Ash and John Atkins. With contributions from Caroline Ash, Sue Edward, Chris Hillman, Geoffrey Last and John Miskell. Photographs by Hadoram Shirihai. 2009. Christopher Helm

Airborne LiDAR detects selectively logged tropical forest even in an advanced stage of recovery

Identifying historical forest disturbances is difficult, especially in selectively logged areas. LiDAR is able to measure fine-scale variations in forest structure over multiple kilometers. We use LiDAR data from ca. 16 km2 of forest in Sierra Leone, West Africa, to discriminate areas of old-growth from areas recovering from selective logging for 23 years. We examined canopy height variation and gap size distributions. We found that though recovering blocks of forest differed little in height from old-growth forest (up to 3 m) they had a greater area of canopy gaps (average 10.2% gap fraction in logged areas, compared to 5.6% in unlogged area); and greater numbers of gaps penetrating to the forest floor (162 gaps at 2 m height in logged blocks, and 101 in an unlogged block). Comparison of LiDAR measurements with field data demonstrated that LiDAR delivered accurate results. We found that gap size distributions deviated from power-laws reported previously, with substantially fewer large gaps than predicted by power-law functions. Our analyses demonstrate that LiDAR is a useful tool for distinguishing structural differences between old-growth and old-secondary forests. That makes LiDAR a powerful tool for REDD+ (Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) programs implementation and conservation planning.This research was funded by the European Union under the EuropeAid Programme, as a part of the Across the River Transboundary Peace Park Project DCI/ENV/2008/151-577; by a Cambridge Conservation Initiative Collaborative Fund grant “Applications of airborne remote sensing to the conservation management of a West African National Park”; and by the ERC grant Africa GHG #247349. We would also like to thank the British Technion Society for the generous funding of the post-doctoral Coleman-Cohen fellowship of R. Kent.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from MDPI via http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rs7070834

Family medicine residents' risk of adverse motor vehicle events: comparison between rural and urban placements.

Background: Sleep deprivation and fatigue are associated with long and irregular work hours. These work patterns are common to medical residents. Motor vehicle crashes (MVCs) are a leading cause of injury related deaths in Canada, with MVC fatality rates in rural areas up to three times higher than in urban areas. Objectives: To: 1) examine the number of adverse motor vehicle events (AMVEs) in family medicine residents in Canada; 2) assess whether residents with rural placements are at greater risk of experiencing AMVEs than urban residents; and 3) determine if family medicine residency programs across Canada have travel policies in place. Methodology: A prospective, cross-sectional study, using a national survey of second-year family medicine residents. Results: A higher percentage of rural residents reported AMVEs than urban residents. The trend was for rural residents to be involved in more MVCs during residency, while urban residents were more likely to be involved in close calls. The majority of Canadian medical schools do not have resident travel policies in place. Conclusion: AMVEs are common in family medicine residents, with a trend for the number of MVCs to be greater for rural residents. These data support the need for development and incorporation of travel policies by medical schools

Changes in postgraduate medical education and training in clinical radiology

Postgraduate medical education and training in many specialties, including Clinical Radiology, is undergoing major changes. In part this is to ensure that shorter training periods maximise the learning opportunities but it is also to bring medical education in line with broader educational theory. Learning outcomes need to be defined so that there is no doubt what knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours are expected of those in training. Curricula should be developed into competency or outcome based models and should state the aims, objectives, content, outcomes and processes of a training programme. They should include a description of the methods of learning, teaching, feedback and supervision. Assessment systems must be matched to the curriculum and must be fair, reliable and valid. Workplace based assessments including the use of multisource feedback need to be developed and validated for use during radiology training. These should be used in a formative and developmental way, although the overall results from a series of such assessments can be used in a more summative way to determine progress to the next phase of training. Formal standard setting processes need to be established for ‘high stakes’ summative assessments such as examinations. In addition the unique skills required of a radiologist in terms of image interpretation, pattern recognition, deduction and diagnosis need to be evaluated in robust, reliable and valid ways. Through a combination of these methods we can be assured that decisions about trainees’ progression through training is fair and standardised and that we are protecting patients by establishing national standards for training, curricula and assessment methods

Brain Imaging and Brain Privacy: A Realistic Concern?

Functional neuroimaging has been used to study a wide array of psychological traits, including aspects of personality and intelligence. Progress in identifying the neural correlates of individual differences in such traits, for the sake of basic science, has moved us closer to the applied science goal of measuring them and thereby raised ethical concerns about privacy. How realistic are such concerns given the current state of the art? In this article, we describe the statistical basis of the measurement of psychological traits using functional neuroimaging and examine the degree to which current functional neuroimaging protocols could be used for this purpose. By analyzing the published data from 16 studies, we demonstrate that the use of imaging to gather information about an individual’s psychological traits is already possible, but to an extremely limited extent