Early warning sign attributes for the safety of drinking water treatment works

A proactive risk management strategy seeks to prevent accidents from taking place and maintain the safety of a system. In this context, the task of identifying and disseminating early warning signs and signals is among the most important. The problem is that warning signs that are present before an accident takes place are often being overlooked and not picked up or identified as warning signs. If these warning signs were responded to, then an accident may be averted. Accidents occuring in the critical domain of a drinking water treatments works can have serious implications for the public health of consumers of the water supplied. Realising and comprehending early warning signs is a major challenge for the domain of systems safety and especially in the domain of a water treatment works. The approaches that are typically used to enhance the realisation, comprehension and dissemination of early warning signs in the water treatment domain in Ireland mainly involves the creation of accident scenarios, the use of monitoring data and procedures for the dissemination of warnings. While all of these approaches are all useful to inform the mental or process models of possible accident scenarios, nevertheless, accidents are still occurring in this domain. Therefore, a new approach to enhance the comprehension of and effective dissemination of early warning signs is required in order to improve safety and proactive risk management strategies. The contributions of this thesis is the provision of a set of attributes associated with the early warning sign concept that provides meaningful data on the early warning signs and allows recipients to better comprehend them. The values of these attributes were customised for application in the water treatment domain. This research proves that early warning signs at a water treatment works received with information on their attributes are comprehended and communicated more effectively and efficiently than the usual pragmatic approach and thereby improves the safety and proactive risk management strategies.

THE USE OF THE EARLY WARNING INDICATOR REPORT TO IMPACT NINTH GRADE PROMOTION RATES IN A LARGE URBAN SCHOOL DISTRICT

Abstract The purpose of this study was to examine how four high schools used an Early Warning Indicator Report (EWIR) to improve ninth grade promotion rates. Ninth grade on-time promotion is an early predictor of a student’s likelihood to graduate (Bornsheuer, Polonyi, Andrews, Fore, & Onwuegbuzie, 2011; Leckrone & Griffith, 2006; Roderick, Kelley-Kemple, Johnson, & Beechum, 2014; Zvoch, 2006). The analysis revealed both similarities and differences in the ways that the four schools used the EWIR. The research took place in a large urban school district in the Mid-Atlantic. Sixteen participants from four high schools and the district’s central office voluntarily participated in face-to-face interviews. The researcher utilized a qualitative case study method to examine the implementation of the EWIR system in Wyatt School District. The interview data was transcribed and analyzed, along with district documents, to identify categories in this cross case analysis. Three primary themes emerged from the data: (1) targeted school structures for EWIR implementation, (2) the EWIR identified necessary supports for students, and (3) the central office support for school staff. The findings revealed the various ways that the target schools implemented the EWIR in their buildings and the level of support that they received from the central office that aided them in using the EWIR to improve ninth grade promotion rates. Based on the findings of this study, the researcher provided a number of key recommendations: (1) Districts should provide professional development to schools to ensure that schools have the support they need to implement the EWIR successfully; (2) There should be increased accountability from the central office for schools using the EWIR to identify impactful interventions for ninth graders; and (3) The district needs to assign dedicated central office staff to support the implementation of the EWIR in high schools across the district. As schools continue to face the challenge of improving ninth grade promotion rates, effective use of an Early Warning Indicator Report is recommended to provide school and district staff with data needed to impact overall student performance.

Multi-vehicles interaction graph model for cooperative collision warning system

Cooperative collision warning system for road vehicles, enabled by recent advances in positioning systems and wireless communication technologies, can potentially reduce traffic accident significantly. To improve the system, we propose a graph model to represent interactions between multiple road vehicles in a specific region and at a specific time. Given a list of vehicles in vicinity, we can generate the interaction graph using several rules that consider vehicle's properties such as position, speed, heading, etc. Safety applications can use the model to improve emergency warning accuracy and optimize wireless channel usage. The model allows us to develop some congestion control strategies for an efficient multi-hop broadcast protocol.

Bridging the gap: Early warning, gender and the responsibility to protect

Women, Peace and Security (WPS) scholars and practitioners have expressed reservations about the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle because of its popular use as a synonym for armed humanitarian intervention. On the other hand, R2P’s early failure to engage with and advance WPS efforts such as United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution 1325 (2000) has seen the perpetuation of limited roles ascribed to women in implementing the R2P principle. As a result, there has been a knowledge and practice gap between the R2P and WPS agendas, despite the fact that their advocates share common goals in relation to the prevention of atrocities and protection of populations. In this article we propose to examine just one of the potential avenues for aligning the WPS agenda and R2P principle in a way that is beneficial to both and strengthens the pursuit of a shared goal – prevention. We argue that the development and inclusion of gender-specific indicators – particularly economic, social and political discriminatory practices against women – has the potential to improve the capacity of early warning frameworks to forecast future mass atrocities.

Hand, foot and mouth disease in China: Evaluating an automated system for the detection of outbreaks

Objective To evaluate the performance of China’s infectious disease automated alert and response system in the detection of outbreaks of hand, foot and mouth (HFM) disease. Methods We estimated size, duration and delay in reporting HFM disease outbreaks from cases notified between 1 May 2008 and 30 April 2010 and between 1 May 2010 and 30 April 2012, before and after automatic alert and response included HFM disease. Sensitivity, specificity and timeliness of detection of aberrations in the incidence of HFM disease outbreaks were estimated by comparing automated detections to observations of public health staff. Findings The alert and response system recorded 106 005 aberrations in the incidence of HFM disease between 1 May 2010 and 30 April 2012 – a mean of 5.6 aberrations per 100 days in each county that reported HFM disease. The response system had a sensitivity of 92.7% and a specificity of 95.0%. The mean delay between the reporting of the first case of an outbreak and detection of that outbreak by the response system was 2.1 days. Between the first and second study periods, the mean size of an HFM disease outbreak decreased from 19.4 to 15.8 cases and the mean interval between the onset and initial reporting of such an outbreak to the public health emergency reporting system decreased from 10.0 to 9.1 days. Conclusion The automated alert and response system shows good sensitivity in the detection of HFM disease outbreaks and appears to be relatively rapid. Continued use of this system should allow more effective prevention and limitation of such outbreaks in China.

An Intelligent Driver Warning System

This chapter is focussed on the research and development of an intelligent driver warning system (IDWS) as a means to improve road safety and driving comfort. Two independent IDWS case studies are presented. The first study examines the methodology and implementation for attentive visual tracking and trajectory estimation for dynamic scene segmentation problems. In the second case study, the concept of driver modelling is evaluated which can be used to provide useful feedback to drivers. In both case studies, the quality of IDWS is largely determined by the modelling capability for estimating multiple vehicle trajectories and modelling driving behaviour. A class of modelling techniques based on neural-fuzzy systems, which exhibits provable learning and modelling capability, is proposed. For complex modelling problems where the curse of dimensionality becomes an issue, a network construction algorithm based on Adaptive Spline Modelling of Observation Data (ASMOD) is also proposed.

Evaluation of a Drunk Driving Warning System

The Drunk Driving Warning System is an alcohol interlock based on performance of the Critical Tracking Task (CTT). An evaluation was undertaken to determine CTT sensitivity to blood alcohol concentration (BAC), particularly at .05 g/100 ml. Subjects were 36 males in 3 age groups (18, 21 to 25, 35 years and above) divided into 2 alcohol consumption categories ("light" and "heavy"), and scored on 4 training and 2 test days (one alcohol and one placebo). The CTT performance declined as BAC increased and was significantly impaired at .05 BAC. However, performance was too variable for in-vehicle use. Age and alcohol consumption pattern were without effect.

Applications of a sugar-based surveillance system to track arboviruses in wild mosquito populations

Effective arbovirus surveillance is essential to ensure the implementation of control strategies, such as mosquito suppression, vaccination, or dissemination of public warnings. Traditional strategies employed for arbovirus surveillance, such as detection of virus or virus-specific antibodies in sentinel animals, or detection of virus in hematophagous arthropods, have limitations as an early-warning system. A system was recently developed that involves collecting mosquitoes in CO2-baited traps, where the insects expectorate virus on sugar-baited nucleic acid preservation cards. The cards are then submitted for virus detection using molecular assays. We report the application of this system for detecting flaviviruses and alphaviruses in wild mosquito populations in northern Australia. This study was the first to employ nonpowered passive box traps (PBTs) that were designed to house cards baited with honey as the sugar source. Overall, 20/144 (13.9%) of PBTs from different weeks contained at least one virus-positive card. West Nile virus Kunjin subtype (WNVKUN), Ross River virus (RRV), and Barmah Forest virus (BFV) were detected, being identified in 13/20, 5/20, and 2/20 of positive PBTs, respectively. Importantly, sentinel chickens deployed to detect flavivirus activity did not seroconvert at two Northern Territory sites where four PBTs yielded WNVKUN. Sufficient WNVKUN and RRV RNA was expectorated onto some of the honey-soaked cards to provide a template for gene sequencing, enhancing the utility of the sugar-bait surveillance system for investigating the ecology, emergence, and movement of arboviruses. © 2014, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.

A generalized geo-hazard warning system

An automated geo-hazard warning system is the need of the hour. It is integration of automation in hazard evaluation and warning communication. The primary objective of this paper is to explain a geo-hazard warning system based on Internet-resident concept and available cellular mobile infrastructure that makes use of geo-spatial data. The functionality of the system is modular in architecture having input, understanding, expert, output and warning modules. Thus, the system provides flexibility in integration between different types of hazard evaluation and communication systems leading to a generalized hazard warning system. The developed system has been validated for landslide hazard in Indian conditions. It has been realized through utilization of landslide causative factors, rainfall forecast from NASA's TRMM (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission) and knowledge base of landslide hazard intensity map and invokes the warning as warranted. The system evaluated hazard commensurate with expert evaluation within 5-6 % variability, and the warning message permeability has been found to be virtually instantaneous, with a maximum time lag recorded as 50 s, minimum of 10 s. So it could be concluded that a novel and stand-alone system for dynamic hazard warning has been developed and implemented. Such a handy system could be very useful in a densely populated country where people are unaware of the impending hazard.

A LOWER INITIAL ABUNDANCE OF SHORT-LIVED Ca-41 IN THE EARLY SOLAR SYSTEM AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR SOLAR SYSTEM FORMATION

The short-lived radionuclide Ca-41 plays an important role in constraining the immediate astrophysical environment and the formation timescale of the nascent solar system due to its extremely short half-life (0.1 Myr). Nearly 20 years ago, the initial ratio of Ca-41/Ca-40 in the solar system was determined to be (1.41 +/- 0.14) x 10(-8), primarily based on two Ca-Al-rich Inclusions (CAIs) from the CV chondrite Efremovka. With an advanced analytical technique for isotopic measurements, we reanalyzed the potassium isotopic compositions of the two Efremovka CAIs and inferred the initial ratios of Ca-41/Ca-40 to be (2.6 +/- 0.9) x 10(-9) and (1.4 +/- 0.6) x 10(-9) (2 sigma), a factor of 7-10 lower than the previously inferred value. Considering possible thermal processing that led to lower Al-26/Al-27 ratios in the two CAIs, we propose that the true solar system initial value of Ca-41/Ca-40 should have been similar to 4.2 x 10(-9). Synchronicity could have existed between Al-26 and Ca-41, indicating a uniform distribution of the two radionuclides at the time of CAI formation. The new initial Ca-41 abundance is 4-16 times lower than the calculated value for steady-state galactic nucleosynthesis. Therefore, Ca-41 could have originated as part of molecular cloud materials with a free decay time of 0.2-0.4 Myr. Alternative possibilities, such as a last-minute input from a stellar source and early solar system irradiation, could not be definitively ruled out. This underscores the need for more data from diverse CAIs to determine the true astrophysical origin of Ca-41.