Concepts of accident causation and their role in safe design among engineering students
- Authors: Hall, Stephen , Culvenor, John , Cowley, Stephen , Else, Dennis
- Date: 2007
- Type: Text , Conference paper
- Relation: Paper presented at 18th conference of the Australasian Association for Engineering Education, Melbourne, Victoria : 9th-13th December 2007
- Full Text:
- Description: Safe design is a strong theme at present in Australia. To ‘eliminate hazards at the design stage’ is one of the five national priorities set out by the National OHS Strategy. The Australian Safety and Compensation Council have recently released both a guideline for safe design and an engineering education package. Safe design is not only about engineering decisions. Engineers are however an important group. This paper reports on a survey to evaluate perceptions of student engineers on topics relevant to the advancement of safe design including perceptions of: control versus fatalism; accident causation; and perceptions of the role played by engineers.
- Description: 2003004787
Fe and S K-edge XAS determination of iron-sulfur species present in a range of acid sulfate soils : Effects of particle size and concentration on quantitative XANES determinations
- Authors: Morgan, Kate , Burton, Edward , Cook, Perran , Raven, Mark , Fitzpatrick, Rob W. , Bush, Richard , Sullivan, Leigh , Hocking, Rosalie
- Date: 2009
- Type: Text , Conference paper
- Relation: 14th International Conference on X-ray Absorption Fine Structure (XAFS14); Camerino, Italy; 26th-31st July 2009. Vol. 190, p. 1-5
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Acid sulfate soils (ASS) are soils and soft sediments in which sulfuric acid may be produced from iron sulfides or have been produced leaving iron oxyhydroxysulfates in amounts that have a long lasting effect on soil characteristics. If soil material is exposed to rotting vegetation or other reducing material, the Fe-oxyhydroxysulfates can be bacterially reduced to sulfides including disulfides (pyrite and marcasite), and Monosulfidic Black Ooze (MBO) a poorly characterised material known to be a mixture of iron sulfides (especially mackinawite) and organic matter. The chemistry of these environments is strongly affected by Fe and S cycling processes and herein we have sought to identify key differences in environments that occur as a function of Fe and S concentration. In addition to our chemical results, we have found that the effects of particle size on self absorption in natural sediments play an important role in the spectroscopic identification of the relative proportions of different species present. © 2009 IOP Publishing Ltd.
Adaptive regulatory genes cardinality for reconstructing genetic networks
- Authors: Chowdhury, Ahsan , Chetty, Madhu , Vinh, Nguyen
- Date: 2012
- Type: Text , Conference paper
- Relation: WCCI 2012 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: With the advent of microarray technology, researchers are able to determine cellular dynamics for thousands of genes simultaneously, thereby enabling reverse engineering of the gene regulatory network (GRN) from high-throughput time-series gene expression data. Amongst the various currently available models for inferring GRN, the S-System formalism is often considered as an excellent compromise between accuracy and mathematical tractability. In this paper, a novel approach for inferring GRN based on the decoupled S-System model, incorporating the new concept of adaptive regulatory genes cardinality, is proposed. Parameter learning for the S-System is carried out in an evolving manner using a versatile and robust Trigonometric Evolutionary Algorithm. The applicability and efficiency of the proposed method is studied using a well-known and widely studied synthetic network with various levels of noise, and excellent performance observed. Further, investigations of a 5 gene in-vivo synthetic biological network of Saccharomyces cerevisiae called IRMA, has succeeded in detecting higher number of correct regulations compared to other approaches reported earlier.
Performance monitoring with application of reliability growth analysis
- Authors: Tam, Allen
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Conference paper
- Relation: 8th World Congress on Engineering Asset Management (WCEAM 2013) & the 3rd International Conference on Utility Management & Safety (ICUMAS) p. 1281-1289
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Reliability growth analysis is a popular tool in monitoring reliability changes over time. The methods used include Duane plots and the Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity (AMSAA) model. The reliability growth analysis is traditionally applied to the time domain of failure. The amplitude of failure is not considered. For equipment or processes with same MTBF should not be treated with the same priority without looking into loss of opportunity in wealth creation. This research proposes the application of reliability growth method to failure losses in unit of production loss for monitoring changes in magnitude of production loss due to failure events. In conjunction with reliability growth in time domain, a new analytical visualisation of reliability assessment, named Reliability Quadrant Graph, is proposed. This research provides a new way for high level reliability performance monitoring.