Understanding safety and production risks in rail engineering planning and protection

Much of the published human factors work on risk is to do with safety and within this is concerned with prediction and analysis of human error and with human reliability assessment. Less has been published on human factors contributions to understanding and managing project, business, engineering and other forms of risk and still less jointly assessing risk to do with broad issues of ‘safety’ and broad issues of ‘production’ or ‘performance’. This paper contains a general commentary on human factors and assessment of risk of various kinds, in the context of the aims of ergonomics and concerns about being too risk averse. The paper then describes a specific project, in rail engineering, where the notion of a human factors case has been employed to analyse engineering functions and related human factors issues. A human factors issues register for potential system disturbances has been developed, prior to a human factors risk assessment, which jointly covers safety and production (engineering delivery) concerns. The paper concludes with a commentary on the potential relevance of a resilience engineering perspective to understanding rail engineering systems risk. Design, planning and management of complex systems will increasingly have to address the issue of making trade-offs between safety and production, and ergonomics should be central to this. The paper addresses the relevant issues and does so in an under-published domain – rail systems engineering work.

Optimal dose of Kanamycin for protection from noise induced hearing loss

Young CBA/J mice were injected with kanamycin under varying schedules then exposed to noise in order to determine the boundary conditions for cochlear protection against noise.

Genetic and temporal aspects of protection by kanamycin against cochlear noise injury

Experiments explored the minimal kanamycin dosing regimen that renders protection against noise induced hearing loss in young CBA/J mice. We also tested the age-dependence of protection in CBA/J as well as the dependence of protection on a particular genetic background in experiments using young C57BL/6J and CBA/CaJ mice.

Genetic influences on early cochlear vulnerability to noise and protection from noise by low-dose kanamycin in hybrid mice

Experiments evaluated both noise vulnerability and the extent of protection from noise by sub-chronic low-dose kanamycin in young F1 hybrids resulting from a cross between C57BL/6J and CBA/J inbred mice.

La protection des données à caractère personnel dans le cadre des activités d’une mission civile de gestion de crise ou la recherche de « l’inaccessible étoile » ? Data Protection within the context of one ESDP Mission - The search for the unreachable star

La question de la protection des données à caractère personnel posée dans le cadre des activités d’assistance et de soutien des missions civiles de gestion de crise ne semble guère avoir suscité l’intérêt des instances en charge de leur gestion et ce en dépit de son importance majeure au regard des tâches exécutées quotidiennement par les agents de ces missions dans le domaine de la coopération policière et judiciaire en matière pénale. S’appuyant sur une expérience de terrain, l’auteur s’efforcera, dans ces lignes, de démontrer la nécessité d’entamer une réflexion de fond sur ce sujet afin, le cas échéant, de prendre les initiatives utiles destinées à porter remède aux difficultés qui, en ce domaine, pourraient apparaître.