Mathematical Thinking and Creativity through Mathematical Problem Posing and Solving

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

María F. Ayllón

2016-04-01

Full Text Available This work shows the relationship between the development of mathematical thinking and creativity with mathematical problem posing and solving. Creativity and mathematics are disciplines that do not usually appear together. Both concepts constitute complex processes sharing elements, such as fluency (number of ideas, flexibility (range of ideas, novelty (unique idea and elaboration (idea development. These factors contribute, among others, to the fact that schoolchildren are competent in mathematics. The problem solving and posing are a very powerful evaluation tool that shows the mathematical reasoning and creative level of a person. Creativity is part of the mathematics education and is a necessary ingredient to perform mathematical assignments. This contribution presents some important research works about problem posing and solving related to the development of mathematical knowledge and creativity. To that end, it is based on various beliefs reflected in the literature with respect to notions of creativity, problem solving and posing.

Investigating Mathematics Teachers Candidates' Knowledge about Problem Solving Strategies through Problem Posing

Science.gov (United States)

Ünlü, Melihan

2017-01-01

The aim of the study was to determine mathematics teacher candidates' knowledge about problem solving strategies through problem posing. This qualitative research was conducted with 95 mathematics teacher candidates studying at education faculty of a public university during the first term of the 2015-2016 academic year in Turkey. Problem Posing…

Effects of the Problem-Posing Approach on Students' Problem Solving Skills and Metacognitive Awareness in Science Education

Science.gov (United States)

Akben, Nimet

2018-05-01

The interrelationship between mathematics and science education has frequently been emphasized, and common goals and approaches have often been adopted between disciplines. Improving students' problem-solving skills in mathematics and science education has always been given special attention; however, the problem-posing approach which plays a key role in mathematics education has not been commonly utilized in science education. As a result, the purpose of this study was to better determine the effects of the problem-posing approach on students' problem-solving skills and metacognitive awareness in science education. This was a quasi-experimental based study conducted with 61 chemistry and 40 physics students; a problem-solving inventory and a metacognitive awareness inventory were administered to participants both as a pre-test and a post-test. During the 2017-2018 academic year, problem-solving activities based on the problem-posing approach were performed with the participating students during their senior year in various university chemistry and physics departments throughout the Republic of Turkey. The study results suggested that structured, semi-structured, and free problem-posing activities improve students' problem-solving skills and metacognitive awareness. These findings indicated not only the usefulness of integrating problem-posing activities into science education programs but also the need for further research into this question.

Analyzing Pre-Service Primary Teachers' Fraction Knowledge Structures through Problem Posing

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Kilic, Cigdem

2015-01-01

In this study it was aimed to determine pre-service primary teachers' knowledge structures of fraction through problem posing activities. A total of 90 pre-service primary teachers participated in this study. A problem posing test consisting of two questions was used and the participants were asked to generate as many as problems based on the…

Enhancing students’ mathematical problem posing skill through writing in performance tasks strategy

Science.gov (United States)

Kadir; Adelina, R.; Fatma, M.

2018-01-01

Many researchers have studied the Writing in Performance Task (WiPT) strategy in learning, but only a few paid attention on its relation to the problem-posing skill in mathematics. The problem-posing skill in mathematics covers problem reformulation, reconstruction, and imitation. The purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of WiPT strategy on students’ mathematical problem-posing skill. The research was conducted at a Public Junior Secondary School in Tangerang Selatan. It used a quasi-experimental method with randomized control group post-test. The samples were 64 students consists of 32 students of the experiment group and 32 students of the control. A cluster random sampling technique was used for sampling. The research data were obtained by testing. The research shows that the problem-posing skill of students taught by WiPT strategy is higher than students taught by a conventional strategy. The research concludes that the WiPT strategy is more effective in enhancing the students’ mathematical problem-posing skill compared to the conventional strategy.

Teachers Implementing Mathematical Problem Posing in the Classroom: Challenges and Strategies

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Leung, Shuk-kwan S.

2013-01-01

This paper reports a study about how a teacher educator shared knowledge with teachers when they worked together to implement mathematical problem posing (MPP) in the classroom. It includes feasible methods for getting practitioners to use research-based tasks aligned to the curriculum in order to encourage children to pose mathematical problems.…

An Investigation of Eighth Grade Students' Problem Posing Skills (Turkey Sample)

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Arikan, Elif Esra; Ünal, Hasan

2015-01-01

To pose a problem refers to the creative activity for mathematics education. The purpose of the study was to explore the eighth grade students' problem posing ability. Three learning domains such as requiring four operations, fractions and geometry were chosen for this reason. There were two classes which were coded as class A and class B. Class A…

Improving attitudes toward mathematics learning with problem posing in class VIII

Science.gov (United States)

Vionita, Alfha; Purboningsih, Dyah

2017-08-01

This research is classroom action research which is collaborated to improve student's behavior toward math and mathematics learning at class VIII by using problem posing approach. The subject of research is all of students grade VIIIA which consist of 32 students. This research has been held on two period, first period is about 3 times meeting, and second period is about 4 times meeting. The instrument of this research is implementation of learning observation's guidance by using problem posing approach. Cycle test has been used to measure cognitive competence, and questionnaire to measure the students' behavior in mathematics learning process. The result of research shows the students' behavior has been improving after using problem posing approach. It is showed by the behavior's criteria of students that has increasing result from the average in first period to high in second period. Furthermore, the percentage of test result is also improve from 68,75% in first period to 78,13% in second period. On the other hand, the implementation of learning observation by using problem posing approach has also improving and it is showed by the average percentage of teacher's achievement in first period is 89,2% and student's achievement 85,8%. These results get increase in second period for both teacher and students' achievement which are 94,4% and 91,11%. As a result, students' behavior toward math learning process in class VIII has been improving by using problem posing approach.

Morozov-type discrepancy principle for nonlinear ill-posed problems ...

Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

[3] Engl H W, Kunisch K and Neubauer A, Convergence rates for Tikhonov regularization of nonliner problems, Inverse Problems 5 (1989) 523–540. [4] Hanke M, Neubauer A and Scherzer O, A convergence analysis of Landweber iteration for nonlinear ill-posed problems, Numer. Math. 72 (1995) 21–37. [5] Hofmann B and ...

Integrating Worked Examples into Problem Posing in a Web-Based Learning Environment

Science.gov (United States)

Hsiao, Ju-Yuan; Hung, Chun-Ling; Lan, Yu-Feng; Jeng, Yoau-Chau

2013-01-01

Most students always lack of experience and perceive difficult regarding problem posing. The study hypothesized that worked examples may have benefits for supporting students' problem posing activities. A quasi-experiment was conducted in the context of a business mathematics course for examining the effects of integrating worked examples into…

LEVELING STUDENTS’ CREATIVE THINKING IN SOLVING AND POSING MATHEMATICAL PROBLEM

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Tatag Yuli Eko Siswono

2010-07-01

Full Text Available Many researchers assume that people are creative, but their degree ofcreativity is different. The notion of creative thinking level has beendiscussed .by experts. The perspective of mathematics creative thinkingrefers to a combination of logical and divergent thinking which is basedon intuition but has a conscious aim. The divergent thinking is focusedon flexibility, fluency, and novelty in mathematical problem solving andproblem posing. As students have various backgrounds and differentabilities, they possess different potential in thinking patterns,imagination, fantasy and performance; therefore, students have differentlevels of creative thinking. A research study was conducted in order todevelop a framework for students’ levels of creative thinking inmathematics. This research used a qualitative approach to describe thecharacteristics of the levels of creative thinking. Task-based interviewswere conducted to collect data with ten 8thgrade junior secondary schoolstudents. The results distinguished five levels of creative thinking,namely level 0 to level 4 with different characteristics in each level.These differences are based on fluency, flexibility, and novelty inmathematical problem solving and problem posing.Keywords: student’s creative thinking, problem posing, flexibility,fluency, novelty DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22342/jme.1.1.794.17-40

Investigasi Kemampuan Problem Solving dan Problem Posing Matematis Mahasiswa Via Pendekatan Realistic

OpenAIRE

Afriansyah, Ekasatya Aldila

2016-01-01

Mathematical problem solving and problem posing skill are the mathematical skills that need to be owned by students. By having this skill, students can be more creative in expressing ideas by connecting the knowledge that they held previously. But in reality, there are some students who are lack of problem solving skill; therefore it is really important to improve learning through appropriate approach. Realistic approach had been chosen as the learning theory to be applied in the class. This ...

Problem-Posing in Education: Transformation of the Practice of the Health Professional.

Science.gov (United States)

Casagrande, L. D. R.; Caron-Ruffino, M.; Rodrigues, R. A. P.; Vendrusculo, D. M. S.; Takayanagui, A. M. M.; Zago, M. M. F.; Mendes, M. D.

1998-01-01

Studied the use of a problem-posing model in health education. The model based on the ideas of Paulo Freire is presented. Four innovative experiences of teaching-learning in environmental and occupational health and patient education are reported. Notes that the problem-posing model has the capability to transform health-education practice.…

Process-based Assignment-Setting Change for Support of Overcoming Bottlenecks in Learning by Problem-Posing in Arithmetic Word Problems

Science.gov (United States)

Supianto, A. A.; Hayashi, Y.; Hirashima, T.

2017-02-01

Problem-posing is well known as an effective activity to learn problem-solving methods. Monsakun is an interactive problem-posing learning environment to facilitate arithmetic word problems learning for one operation of addition and subtraction. The characteristic of Monsakun is problem-posing as sentence-integration that lets learners make a problem of three sentences. Monsakun provides learners with five or six sentences including dummies, which are designed through careful considerations by an expert teacher as a meaningful distraction to the learners in order to learn the structure of arithmetic word problems. The results of the practical use of Monsakun in elementary schools show that many learners have difficulties in arranging the proper answer at the high level of assignments. The analysis of the problem-posing process of such learners found that their misconception of arithmetic word problems causes impasses in their thinking and mislead them to use dummies. This study proposes a method of changing assignments as a support for overcoming bottlenecks of thinking. In Monsakun, the bottlenecks are often detected as a frequently repeated use of a specific dummy. If such dummy can be detected, it is the key factor to support learners to overcome their difficulty. This paper discusses how to detect the bottlenecks and to realize such support in learning by problem-posing.

The Effects of Problem Posing on Student Mathematical Learning: A Meta-Analysis

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Rosli, Roslinda; Capraro, Mary Margaret; Capraro, Robert M.

2014-01-01

The purpose of the study was to meta-synthesize research findings on the effectiveness of problem posing and to investigate the factors that might affect the incorporation of problem posing in the teaching and learning of mathematics. The eligibility criteria for inclusion of literature in the meta-analysis was: published between 1989 and 2011,…

Perturbation-Based Regularization for Signal Estimation in Linear Discrete Ill-posed Problems

KAUST Repository

Suliman, Mohamed Abdalla Elhag; Ballal, Tarig; Al-Naffouri, Tareq Y.

2016-01-01

Estimating the values of unknown parameters from corrupted measured data faces a lot of challenges in ill-posed problems. In such problems, many fundamental estimation methods fail to provide a meaningful stabilized solution. In this work, we propose a new regularization approach and a new regularization parameter selection approach for linear least-squares discrete ill-posed problems. The proposed approach is based on enhancing the singular-value structure of the ill-posed model matrix to acquire a better solution. Unlike many other regularization algorithms that seek to minimize the estimated data error, the proposed approach is developed to minimize the mean-squared error of the estimator which is the objective in many typical estimation scenarios. The performance of the proposed approach is demonstrated by applying it to a large set of real-world discrete ill-posed problems. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms a set of benchmark regularization methods in most cases. In addition, the approach also enjoys the lowest runtime and offers the highest level of robustness amongst all the tested benchmark regularization methods.

Perturbation-Based Regularization for Signal Estimation in Linear Discrete Ill-posed Problems

KAUST Repository

Suliman, Mohamed Abdalla Elhag

2016-11-29

Estimating the values of unknown parameters from corrupted measured data faces a lot of challenges in ill-posed problems. In such problems, many fundamental estimation methods fail to provide a meaningful stabilized solution. In this work, we propose a new regularization approach and a new regularization parameter selection approach for linear least-squares discrete ill-posed problems. The proposed approach is based on enhancing the singular-value structure of the ill-posed model matrix to acquire a better solution. Unlike many other regularization algorithms that seek to minimize the estimated data error, the proposed approach is developed to minimize the mean-squared error of the estimator which is the objective in many typical estimation scenarios. The performance of the proposed approach is demonstrated by applying it to a large set of real-world discrete ill-posed problems. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms a set of benchmark regularization methods in most cases. In addition, the approach also enjoys the lowest runtime and offers the highest level of robustness amongst all the tested benchmark regularization methods.

Developing teachers' subject didactic competence through problem posing

Czech Academy of Sciences Publication Activity Database

Tichá, Marie; Hošpesová, A.

2013-01-01

Roč. 83, č. 1 (2013), s. 133-143 ISSN 0013-1954 Institutional support: RVO:67985840 Keywords : professional development * primary school teachers * problem posing Subject RIV: AM - Education Impact factor: 0.639, year: 2013 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10649-012-9455-1

Meanings Given to Algebraic Symbolism in Problem-Posing

Science.gov (United States)

Cañadas, María C.; Molina, Marta; del Río, Aurora

2018-01-01

Some errors in the learning of algebra suggest that students might have difficulties giving meaning to algebraic symbolism. In this paper, we use problem posing to analyze the students' capacity to assign meaning to algebraic symbolism and the difficulties that students encounter in this process, depending on the characteristics of the algebraic…

Fraction Multiplication and Division Word Problems Posed by Different Years of Pre-Service Elementary Mathematics Teachers

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Tuba Aydogdu Iskenderoglu

2018-04-01

Full Text Available It is important for pre-service teachers to know the conceptual difficulties they have experienced regarding the concepts of multiplication and division in fractions and problem posing is a way to learn these conceptual difficulties. Problem posing is a synthetic activity that fundamentally has multiple answers. The purpose of this study is to analyze the multiplication and division of fractions problems posed by pre-service elementary mathematics teachers and to investigate how the problems posed change according to the year of study the pre-service teachers are in. The study employed developmental research methods. A total of 213 pre-service teachers enrolled in different years of the Elementary Mathematics Teaching program at a state university in Turkey took part in the study. The “Problem Posing Test” was used as the data collecting tool. In this test, there are 3 multiplication and 3 division operations. The data were analyzed using qualitative descriptive analysis. The findings suggest that, regardless of the year, pre-service teachers had more conceptual difficulties in problem posing about the division of fractions than in problem posing about the multiplication of fractions.

Solution of linear ill-posed problems using overcomplete dictionaries

OpenAIRE

Pensky, Marianna

2016-01-01

In the present paper we consider application of overcomplete dictionaries to solution of general ill-posed linear inverse problems. Construction of an adaptive optimal solution for such problems usually relies either on a singular value decomposition or representation of the solution via an orthonormal basis. The shortcoming of both approaches lies in the fact that, in many situations, neither the eigenbasis of the linear operator nor a standard orthonormal basis constitutes an appropriate co...

Morozov-type discrepancy principle for nonlinear ill-posed problems ...

Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

For proving the existence of a regularization parameter under a Morozov-type discrepancy principle for Tikhonov regularization of nonlinear ill-posed problems, it is required to impose additional nonlinearity assumptions on the forward operator. Lipschitz continuity of the Freéchet derivative and requirement of the Lipschitz ...

Morozov-type discrepancy principle for nonlinear ill-posed problems ...

Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

2016-08-26

Aug 26, 2016 ... For proving the existence of a regularization parameter under a Morozov-type discrepancy principle for Tikhonov regularization of nonlinear ill-posed problems, it is required to impose additional nonlinearity assumptions on the forward operator. Lipschitz continuity of the Freéchet derivative and requirement ...

Enhancing Students' Communication Skills through Problem Posing and Presentation

Science.gov (United States)

Sugito; E. S., Sri Mulyani; Hartono; Supartono

2017-01-01

This study was to explore how enhance communication skill through problem posing and presentation method. The subjects of this research were the seven grade students Junior High School, including 20 male and 14 female. This research was conducted in two cycles and each cycle consisted of four steps, they were: planning, action, observation, and…

Control and System Theory, Optimization, Inverse and Ill-Posed Problems

Science.gov (United States)

1988-09-14

Justlfleatlen Distribut ion/ Availability Codes # AFOSR-87-0350 Avat’ and/or1987-1988 Dist Special *CONTROL AND SYSTEM THEORY , ~ * OPTIMIZATION, * INVERSE...considerable va- riety of research investigations within the grant areas (Control and system theory , Optimization, and Ill-posed problems]. The

Regularization theory for ill-posed problems selected topics

CERN Document Server

Lu, Shuai

2013-01-01

Thismonograph is a valuable contribution to thehighly topical and extremly productive field ofregularisationmethods for inverse and ill-posed problems. The author is an internationally outstanding and acceptedmathematicianin this field. In his book he offers a well-balanced mixtureof basic and innovative aspects.He demonstrates new,differentiatedviewpoints, and important examples for applications. The bookdemontrates thecurrent developments inthe field of regularization theory,such as multiparameter regularization and regularization in learning theory. The book is written for graduate and PhDs

A problem-posing approach to teaching the topic of radioactivity

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Klaassen, C.W.J.M.

1995-01-01

This thesis highlights a problem-posing approach to science education. By this is meant an approach that explicitly aims at providing students with content-related motives for extending their existing conceptual resources, experiential base and belief system in a certain direction, such that a

Mathematical Thinking and Creativity through Mathematical Problem Posing and Solving

Science.gov (United States)

Ayllón, María F.; Gómez, Isabel A.; Ballesta-Claver, Julio

2016-01-01

This work shows the relationship between the development of mathematical thinking and creativity with mathematical problem posing and solving. Creativity and mathematics are disciplines that do not usually appear together. Both concepts constitute complex processes sharing elements, such as fluency (number of ideas), flexibility (range of ideas),…

MODEL PEMBELAJARAN PROBLEM POSING DENGAN PENDEKATAN SAINTIFIK UNTUK MENINGKATKAN KEMAMPUAN PEMECAHAN MASALAH

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Adi Purnomo

2015-08-01

Full Text Available Tujuan penelitian ini untuk menghasilkan perangkat pembelajaran model problem posing pendekatan saintifik yang valid, praktis dan efektif. Penelitian ini merupakan penelitian pengembangan dengan model Thiagarajan. Pengolahan data penelitian untuk uji kevalidan dan kepraktisan dilakukan dengan menghitung rata-rata skor, sedangkan uji keefektifan dilakukan dengan uji t, uji proporsi, uji regresi, uji t berpasangan, dan uji normalitas gain. Hasil pengembangan diperoleh perangkat pembelajaran dinyatakan valid dengan rata-rata skor validasi silabus 4,3, RPP 4,31, buku peserta didik 4,24, LKPD 4,16, TKPM 4,19, dari skor maksimal 5,00. Perangkat pembelajaran praktis berdasarkan hasil pengamatan kemampuan guru 4,5 (sangat baik dan respon peserta didik 3,8 (baik. Implementasi perangkat pembelajaran efektif yang ditunjukkan dengan: (1 ketuntasan klasikal TKKM melampaui 75%, rata-rata kelas melampaui KKM; (2 kemampuan pemecahan masalah peserta didik yang pembelajarannya menggunakan model problrm posing pendekatan saintifik lebih baik dari pada peserta didik dengan pembelajaran konvensional; (3 keterampilan proses saintifik dan karakter kemandirian berpengaruh positif terhadap kemampuan pemecahan masalah; dan (4 adanya peningkatan pemecahan masalah dan mendiskripsikan peningkatan kemampuan pemecahan masalah berdasarkan Taksonomi SOLO.The purpose of this research to development lesson plan through problem posing model with scientific approach which are valid, practical, and effective. The development research using Thiagarajan model. Processing data for validation and practice can be done calculating the score average, while effectivity by use of t-test, proportion test, regression test, paired t-test, n-gain. The lesson plan is valid based on the average of validation scores syllabus 4,3, RPP 4,31, student book 4,24, LKPD 4,16, TKPM 4,19.  The lesson plan is practical based on the result of observation teacher ability 4,53 and student response 4,23. The

[Evaluation of Educational Effect of Problem-Posing System in Nursing Processing Study].

Science.gov (United States)

Tsuji, Keiko; Takano, Yasuomi; Yamakawa, Hiroto; Kaneko, Daisuke; Takai, Kiyako; Kodama, Hiromi; Hagiwara, Tomoko; Komatsugawa, Hiroshi

2015-09-01

The nursing processing study is generally difficult, because it is important for nursing college students to understand knowledge and utilize it. We have developed an integrated system to understand, utilize, and share knowledge. We added a problem-posing function to this system, and expected that students would deeply understand the nursing processing study through the new system. This system consisted of four steps: create a problem, create an answer input section, create a hint, and verification. Nursing students created problems related to nursing processing by this system. When we gave a lecture on the nursing processing for second year students of A university, we tried to use the creating problem function of this system. We evaluated the effect by the number of problems and the contents of the created problem, that is, whether the contents consisted of a lecture stage or not. We also evaluated the correlation between those and regular examination and report scores. We derived the following: 1. weak correlation between the number of created problems and report score (r=0.27), 2. significant differences between regular examination and report scores of students who created problems corresponding to the learning stage, and those of students who created problems not corresponding to it (P<0.05). From these results, problem-posing is suggested to be effective to fix and utilize knowledge in the lecture of nursing processing theory.

Iterative Runge–Kutta-type methods for nonlinear ill-posed problems

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Böckmann, C; Pornsawad, P

2008-01-01

We present a regularization method for solving nonlinear ill-posed problems by applying the family of Runge–Kutta methods to an initial value problem, in particular, to the asymptotical regularization method. We prove that the developed iterative regularization method converges to a solution under certain conditions and with a general stopping rule. Some particular iterative regularization methods are numerically implemented. Numerical results of the examples show that the developed Runge–Kutta-type regularization methods yield stable solutions and that particular implicit methods are very efficient in saving iteration steps

Greedy solution of ill-posed problems: error bounds and exact inversion

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Denis, L; Lorenz, D A; Trede, D

2009-01-01

The orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) is a greedy algorithm to solve sparse approximation problems. Sufficient conditions for exact recovery are known with and without noise. In this paper we investigate the applicability of the OMP for the solution of ill-posed inverse problems in general, and in particular for two deconvolution examples from mass spectrometry and digital holography, respectively. In sparse approximation problems one often has to deal with the problem of redundancy of a dictionary, i.e. the atoms are not linearly independent. However, one expects them to be approximatively orthogonal and this is quantified by the so-called incoherence. This idea cannot be transferred to ill-posed inverse problems since here the atoms are typically far from orthogonal. The ill-posedness of the operator probably causes the correlation of two distinct atoms to become huge, i.e. that two atoms look much alike. Therefore, one needs conditions which take the structure of the problem into account and work without the concept of coherence. In this paper we develop results for the exact recovery of the support of noisy signals. In the two examples, mass spectrometry and digital holography, we show that our results lead to practically relevant estimates such that one may check a priori if the experimental setup guarantees exact deconvolution with OMP. Especially in the example from digital holography, our analysis may be regarded as a first step to calculate the resolution power of droplet holography

The effect of problem posing and problem solving with realistic mathematics education approach to the conceptual understanding and adaptive reasoning

Science.gov (United States)

Mahendra, Rengga; Slamet, Isnandar; Budiyono

2017-12-01

One of the difficulties of students in learning mathematics is on the subject of geometry that requires students to understand abstract things. The aim of this research is to determine the effect of learning model Problem Posing and Problem Solving with Realistic Mathematics Education Approach to conceptual understanding and students' adaptive reasoning in learning mathematics. This research uses a kind of quasi experimental research. The population of this research is all seventh grade students of Junior High School 1 Jaten, Indonesia. The sample was taken using stratified cluster random sampling technique. The test of the research hypothesis was analyzed by using t-test. The results of this study indicate that the model of Problem Posing learning with Realistic Mathematics Education Approach can improve students' conceptual understanding significantly in mathematics learning. In addition tu, the results also showed that the model of Problem Solving learning with Realistic Mathematics Education Approach can improve students' adaptive reasoning significantly in learning mathematics. Therefore, the model of Problem Posing and Problem Solving learning with Realistic Mathematics Education Approach is appropriately applied in mathematics learning especially on the subject of geometry so as to improve conceptual understanding and students' adaptive reasoning. Furthermore, the impact can improve student achievement.

Survey of the problems posed by the man-machine interface, as seen from the angle of facility operators

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Heinbuch, R.

1995-01-01

The man-machine interface in nuclear power plants is an area very much influenced by the vigorous progress in computer technology. The paper describes the causes underlying the innovative power in this field and its impacts on the man-machine interface in nuclear power plants. The benefits brought by the advanced computer systems in the design of the man-machine interface as well as the problems posed through application in practice to safety-relevant plant systems are discussed, and examples are given showing the experience accumulated so far, and the significant changes effected in the man-machine interface. (orig.) [de

Analysis of Problems Posed by Sixth-Grade Middle School Students for the Addition of Fractions in Terms of Semantic Structures

Science.gov (United States)

Kar, Tugrul

2015-01-01

This study aimed to investigate how the semantic structures of problems posed by sixth-grade middle school students for the addition of fractions affect their problem-posing performance. The students were presented with symbolic operations involving the addition of fractions and asked to pose two different problems related to daily-life situations…

Problem posing as a didactic resource in formal mathematics courses to train future secondary school mathematics teachers

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Lorena Salazar Solórzano

2015-06-01

Full Text Available Beginning university training programs must focus on different competencies for mathematics teachers, i.e., not only on solving problems, but also on posing them and analyzing the mathematical activity. This paper reports the results of an exploratory study conducted with future secondary school mathematics teachers on the introduction of problem-posing tasks in formal mathematics courses, specifically in abstract algebra and real analysis courses. Evidence was found that training which includes problem-posing tasks has a positive impact on the students’ understanding of definitions, theorems and exercises within formal mathematics, as well as on their competency in reflecting on the mathematical activity. 

EFEKTIVITAS PEMBELAJARAN MATEMATIKA DENGAN METODE PROBLEM POSING BERBASIS PENDIDIKAN KARAKTER

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Eka Lia Susanti

2012-06-01

Full Text Available Abstract Tujuan penelitian ini adalah untuk mengetahui apakah pembelajaran matematika dengan metode Problem Posing berbasis pendidikan karakter di laboratorium TeenZania pada materi garis singgung lingkaran efektif. Populasi dalam penelitian ini adalah peserta didik di SMP N 2 Pati. Sampel dalam penelitian ini diambil dengan teknik cluster random sampling. Variabel dalam penelitian ini yaitu keaktifan sebagai variabel independen dan prestasi belajar sebagai variabel dependen. Cara pengambilan data dengan lembar pengamatan dan tes. Data diolah dengan uji banding t dan uji pengaruh regresi. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa prestasi belajar kelas eksperimen (82,74 secara statistik melebihi KKM (75. Dengan uji regresi linear sederhana diperoleh persamaan regresi ?=-15,847 + 1,194X dan R^2=0,829. Koefisien X merupakan bilangan positif sehingga keaktifan berpengaruh positif pada prestasi belajar sebesar 82,9%. Rata-rata prestasi belajar kelas eksperimen (82,74 dan rata-rata prestasi belajar kelas kontrol (72,91. Secara uji stastistik prestasi belajar kelas eksperimen lebih baik daripada prestasi belajar kelas kontrol. Berdasarkan hasil analisis disimpulkan (1 pembelajaran mencapai tuntas belajar; (2 adanya pengaruh positif pada keaktifan terhadap prestasi belajar; dan (3 prestasi belajar kelas eksperimen lebih baik daripada prestasi belajar kelas kontrol; sehingga pembelajaran matematika dengan metode problem posing berbasis pendidikan karakter di laboratorium TeenZania merupakan pembelajaran yang efektif. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the learning of mathematics by Problem Posing method in a TeenZania laboratory based character education in circle tangent material effectively. The population in this study were students in SMP N 2 Pati. The sample in this study were drawn by cluster random sampling technique. The variables in this study is the activity as an independent variable and learning achievement as the dependent variable

Solving ill-posed control problems by stabilized finite element methods: an alternative to Tikhonov regularization

Science.gov (United States)

Burman, Erik; Hansbo, Peter; Larson, Mats G.

2018-03-01

Tikhonov regularization is one of the most commonly used methods for the regularization of ill-posed problems. In the setting of finite element solutions of elliptic partial differential control problems, Tikhonov regularization amounts to adding suitably weighted least squares terms of the control variable, or derivatives thereof, to the Lagrangian determining the optimality system. In this note we show that the stabilization methods for discretely ill-posed problems developed in the setting of convection-dominated convection-diffusion problems, can be highly suitable for stabilizing optimal control problems, and that Tikhonov regularization will lead to less accurate discrete solutions. We consider some inverse problems for Poisson’s equation as an illustration and derive new error estimates both for the reconstruction of the solution from the measured data and reconstruction of the source term from the measured data. These estimates include both the effect of the discretization error and error in the measurements.

Numerical methods for the design of large-scale nonlinear discrete ill-posed inverse problems

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Haber, E; Horesh, L; Tenorio, L

2010-01-01

Design of experiments for discrete ill-posed problems is a relatively new area of research. While there has been some limited work concerning the linear case, little has been done to study design criteria and numerical methods for ill-posed nonlinear problems. We present an algorithmic framework for nonlinear experimental design with an efficient numerical implementation. The data are modeled as indirect, noisy observations of the model collected via a set of plausible experiments. An inversion estimate based on these data is obtained by a weighted Tikhonov regularization whose weights control the contribution of the different experiments to the data misfit term. These weights are selected by minimization of an empirical estimate of the Bayes risk that is penalized to promote sparsity. This formulation entails a bilevel optimization problem that is solved using a simple descent method. We demonstrate the viability of our design with a problem in electromagnetic imaging based on direct current resistivity and magnetotelluric data

Exploiting residual information in the parameter choice for discrete ill-posed problems

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hansen, Per Christian; Kilmer, Misha E.; Kjeldsen, Rikke Høj

2006-01-01

Most algorithms for choosing the regularization parameter in a discrete ill-posed problem are based on the norm of the residual vector. In this work we propose a different approach, where we seek to use all the information available in the residual vector. We present important relations between...

Penalized linear regression for discrete ill-posed problems: A hybrid least-squares and mean-squared error approach

KAUST Repository

Suliman, Mohamed Abdalla Elhag; Ballal, Tarig; Kammoun, Abla; Al-Naffouri, Tareq Y.

2016-01-01

This paper proposes a new approach to find the regularization parameter for linear least-squares discrete ill-posed problems. In the proposed approach, an artificial perturbation matrix with a bounded norm is forced into the discrete ill-posed model

PENGARUH DARI PROBLEM POSING METHOD TERHADAP KREATIVITAS VERBAL SISWA SMP KELAS VII

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Bagus Priambodo

2013-10-01

Full Text Available Verbal creativity is the ability to think fluent, flexible, and original that manifested through the words. Psychological freedom is one factor that can develop creativity. One alternative teaching methods that provide freedom in an atmosphere of learning is the Problem Posing Method (PPM which is triggered by Paulo Freire. This research aims to determine the presence or absence of the influence of PPM on verbal creativity. Characteristic of the subjects was junior high school students in grade 7th, received conventional learning materials, and have never had learning by using PPM. This study used a non-randomized pretest-posttest control group design. Subjects in the study were divided into two, experimental group (N = 33 and control group (N= 35. The data was collected using the Verbal Creativity Test. The results of hypothesis testing used Independent Sample T Test techniques showed the differences of mean = 3.294, α = 0.014 with (p<0.05. Keywords: Verbal creativity, problem posing method, a test of verbal creativity, junior high school students

Environmental and safety problems of waste management in nuclear engineering

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Schwibach, J.; Jacobi, W.

1976-01-01

The environmental and safety problems which waste management in nuclear technology poses are discussed under the aspects of the disposal of radioactive waste by nuclear facilities and the safety of radioactive waste disposal. The release and global distribution of long-lived radionuclides such as tritium, Kr-85, C-14, I-129, and Pu-239 as well as the radiation exposure of the world population resulting thereof are investigated, the authors starting from a specific production rate of the nuclides released from nuclear facilities. Definitions of the terms 'dose commitment' and 'collective dose commitment' are given. Furthermore, local radiation exposure in reprocessing plants is investigated and compared with regional and global radiation exposure. A recommendation is made to take measures which would reduce the nuclides tritium, Kr-85, and C-14 in order to achieve considerably smaller collective doses. (HR/LN) [de

On piecewise constant level-set (PCLS) methods for the identification of discontinuous parameters in ill-posed problems

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

De Cezaro, A; Leitão, A; Tai, X-C

2013-01-01

We investigate level-set-type methods for solving ill-posed problems with discontinuous (piecewise constant) coefficients. The goal is to identify the level sets as well as the level values of an unknown parameter function on a model described by a nonlinear ill-posed operator equation. The PCLS approach is used here to parametrize the solution of a given operator equation in terms of a L 2 level-set function, i.e. the level-set function itself is assumed to be a piecewise constant function. Two distinct methods are proposed for computing stable solutions of the resulting ill-posed problem: the first is based on Tikhonov regularization, while the second is based on the augmented Lagrangian approach with total variation penalization. Classical regularization results (Engl H W et al 1996 Mathematics and its Applications (Dordrecht: Kluwer)) are derived for the Tikhonov method. On the other hand, for the augmented Lagrangian method, we succeed in proving the existence of (generalized) Lagrangian multipliers in the sense of (Rockafellar R T and Wets R J-B 1998 Grundlehren der Mathematischen Wissenschaften (Berlin: Springer)). Numerical experiments are performed for a 2D inverse potential problem (Hettlich F and Rundell W 1996 Inverse Problems 12 251–66), demonstrating the capabilities of both methods for solving this ill-posed problem in a stable way (complicated inclusions are recovered without any a priori geometrical information on the unknown parameter). (paper)

A problem-posing approach to teaching the topic of radioactivity

Science.gov (United States)

Klaassen, C. W. J. M.

1995-12-01

This thesis highlights a problem-posing approach to science education. By this is meant an approach that explicitly aims at providing students with content-related motives for extending their existing conceptual resources, experiential base and belief system in a certain direction, such that a further development in that direction eventually leads to a proper understanding of science. An elaboration of that approach consists in designing, testing, improving, etc, concrete didactical structures. The eventual aim of the approach is a coherent, and by means of developmental research empirically supported, didactical structure that covers the whole of science education. The thesis also contains a few steps in the direction suggested by this programmatic view. It contains an illustration of the heuristic value of an articulation of a didactical structure in some main substructures, based on the work of van Hiele and ten Voorde. It further contains a discussion of some methodological aspects relating to the design and evaluation of a didactical structure, and of the role that a further developed version of Davidson's theory of interpretation could play in this respect. A detailed didactical structure of the topic of radioactivity is presented, evaluated and, on the basis of the evaluation, judged as `good enough.' Also the role of the teacher in a problem-posing approach is dis-cussed, and in particular the consequences for that role of giving students control over and responsibility for the progress of their learning process with respect to content.

A problem-posing approach to teaching the topic of radioactivity

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Klaassen, J.M.

1995-01-01

This thesis highlights a problem-posing approach to science education. By this is meant an approach that explicitly aims at providing students with content-related motives for extending their existing conceptual resources, experiential base and belief system in a certain direction, such that a further development in that direction eventually leads to a proper understanding of science. An elaboration of that approach consists in designing, testing, improving, etc, concrete didactical structures. The eventual aim of the approach is a coherent, and by means of developmental research empirically supported, didactical structure that covers the whole of science education. The thesis also contains a few steps in the direction suggested by this programmatic view. It contains an illustration of the heuristic value of an articulation of a didactical structure in some main substructures, based on the work of van Hiele and ten Voorde. It further contains a discussion of some methodological aspects relating to the design and evaluation of a didactical structure, and of the role that a further developed version of Davidson's theory of interpretation could play in this respect. A detailed didactical structure of the topic of radioactivity is presented, evaluated and, on the basis of the evaluation, judged as 'good enough'. Also the role of the teacher in a problem-posing approach is discussed, and in particular the consequences for that role of giving students control over and responsibility for the progress of their learning process with respect to content. refs

Estimation of G-renewal process parameters as an ill-posed inverse problem

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Krivtsov, V.; Yevkin, O.

2013-01-01

Statistical estimation of G-renewal process parameters is an important estimation problem, which has been considered by many authors. We view this problem from the standpoint of a mathematically ill-posed, inverse problem (the solution is not unique and/or is sensitive to statistical error) and propose a regularization approach specifically suited to the G-renewal process. Regardless of the estimation method, the respective objective function usually involves parameters of the underlying life-time distribution and simultaneously the restoration parameter. In this paper, we propose to regularize the problem by decoupling the estimation of the aforementioned parameters. Using a simulation study, we show that the resulting estimation/extrapolation accuracy of the proposed method is considerably higher than that of the existing methods

Lavrentiev regularization method for nonlinear ill-posed problems

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kinh, Nguyen Van

2002-10-01

In this paper we shall be concerned with Lavientiev regularization method to reconstruct solutions x 0 of non ill-posed problems F(x)=y o , where instead of y 0 noisy data y δ is an element of X with absolut(y δ -y 0 ) ≤ δ are given and F:X→X is an accretive nonlinear operator from a real reflexive Banach space X into itself. In this regularization method solutions x α δ are obtained by solving the singularly perturbed nonlinear operator equation F(x)+α(x-x*)=y δ with some initial guess x*. Assuming certain conditions concerning the operator F and the smoothness of the element x*-x 0 we derive stability estimates which show that the accuracy of the regularized solutions is order optimal provided that the regularization parameter α has been chosen properly. (author)

Development of a Mobile Learning System Based on a Collaborative Problem-Posing Strategy

Science.gov (United States)

Sung, Han-Yu; Hwang, Gwo-Jen; Chang, Ya-Chi

2016-01-01

In this study, a problem-posing strategy is proposed for supporting collaborative mobile learning activities. Accordingly, a mobile learning environment has been developed, and an experiment on a local culture course has been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Three classes of an elementary school in southern Taiwan…

Problems posed by the development of the Oklo phenomenon: tentative global interpretation

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Naudet, R.

This paper discusses the basic problems posed by the development of the Oklo phenomenon: the conditions in which the reactions are triggered and propagated and how they have been controlled. The reactions were maintained by the destruction of neutron poisons in the ore and were controlled by temperature. Oklo is made up of a large number of contiguous reactors. Geological problems of the origin of the clays, desilification, and uranium concentration are discussed. Oklo is shown to be a very complex phenomenon which developed in space and time. Besides the thermal, neutron, and geochemical coupling, there is also a tectonic coupling

Penalized linear regression for discrete ill-posed problems: A hybrid least-squares and mean-squared error approach

KAUST Repository

Suliman, Mohamed Abdalla Elhag

2016-12-19

This paper proposes a new approach to find the regularization parameter for linear least-squares discrete ill-posed problems. In the proposed approach, an artificial perturbation matrix with a bounded norm is forced into the discrete ill-posed model matrix. This perturbation is introduced to enhance the singular-value (SV) structure of the matrix and hence to provide a better solution. The proposed approach is derived to select the regularization parameter in a way that minimizes the mean-squared error (MSE) of the estimator. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms a set of benchmark methods in most cases when applied to different scenarios of discrete ill-posed problems. Jointly, the proposed approach enjoys the lowest run-time and offers the highest level of robustness amongst all the tested methods.

Multi-task pose-invariant face recognition.

Science.gov (United States)

Ding, Changxing; Xu, Chang; Tao, Dacheng

2015-03-01

Face images captured in unconstrained environments usually contain significant pose variation, which dramatically degrades the performance of algorithms designed to recognize frontal faces. This paper proposes a novel face identification framework capable of handling the full range of pose variations within ±90° of yaw. The proposed framework first transforms the original pose-invariant face recognition problem into a partial frontal face recognition problem. A robust patch-based face representation scheme is then developed to represent the synthesized partial frontal faces. For each patch, a transformation dictionary is learnt under the proposed multi-task learning scheme. The transformation dictionary transforms the features of different poses into a discriminative subspace. Finally, face matching is performed at patch level rather than at the holistic level. Extensive and systematic experimentation on FERET, CMU-PIE, and Multi-PIE databases shows that the proposed method consistently outperforms single-task-based baselines as well as state-of-the-art methods for the pose problem. We further extend the proposed algorithm for the unconstrained face verification problem and achieve top-level performance on the challenging LFW data set.

Anatomy of safety-critical computing problems

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Swu Yih; Fan Chinfeng; Shirazi, Behrooz

1995-01-01

This paper analyzes the obstacles faced by current safety-critical computing applications. The major problem lies in the difficulty to provide complete and convincing safety evidence to prove that the software is safe. We explain this problem from a fundamental perspective by analyzing the essence of safety analysis against that of software developed by current practice. Our basic belief is that in order to perform a successful safety analysis, the state space structure of the analyzed system must have some properties as prerequisites. We propose the concept of safety analyzability, and derive its necessary and sufficient conditions; namely, definability, finiteness, commensurability, and tractability. We then examine software state space structures against these conditions, and affirm that the safety analyzability of safety-critical software developed by current practice is severely restricted by its state space structure and by the problem of exponential growth cost. Thus, except for small and simple systems, the safety evidence may not be complete and convincing. Our concepts and arguments successfully explain the current problematic situation faced by the safety-critical computing domain. The implications are also discussed

Minimization of Linear Functionals Defined on| Solutions of Large-Scale Discrete Ill-Posed Problems

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Elden, Lars; Hansen, Per Christian; Rojas, Marielba

2003-01-01

The minimization of linear functionals de ned on the solutions of discrete ill-posed problems arises, e.g., in the computation of con dence intervals for these solutions. In 1990, Elden proposed an algorithm for this minimization problem based on a parametric-programming reformulation involving...... the solution of a sequence of trust-region problems, and using matrix factorizations. In this paper, we describe MLFIP, a large-scale version of this algorithm where a limited-memory trust-region solver is used on the subproblems. We illustrate the use of our algorithm in connection with an inverse heat...

Right-Hand Side Dependent Bounds for GMRES Applied to Ill-Posed Problems

KAUST Repository

Pestana, Jennifer

2014-01-01

© IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2014. In this paper we apply simple GMRES bounds to the nearly singular systems that arise in ill-posed problems. Our bounds depend on the eigenvalues of the coefficient matrix, the right-hand side vector and the nonnormality of the system. The bounds show that GMRES residuals initially decrease, as residual components associated with large eigenvalues are reduced, after which semi-convergence can be expected because of the effects of small eigenvalues.

Boneless Pose Editing and Animation

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Bærentzen, Jakob Andreas; Hansen, Kristian Evers; Erleben, Kenny

2007-01-01

In this paper, we propose a pose editing and animation method for triangulated surfaces based on a user controlled partitioning of the model into deformable parts and rigid parts which are denoted handles. In our pose editing system, the user can sculpt a set of poses simply by transforming...... the handles for each pose. Using Laplacian editing, the deformable parts are deformed to match the handles. In our animation system the user can constrain one or several handles in order to define a new pose. New poses are interpolated from the examples poses, by solving a small non-linear optimization...... problem in order to obtain the interpolation weights. While the system can be used simply for building poses, it is also an animation system. The user can specify a path for a given constraint and the model is animated correspondingly....

Further Understanding of the Food Safety Problem

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

Xingxing; MEI; Zhongchao; FENG; Pinghua; HE; Yawen; GAO; Yuqin; DAI

2015-01-01

Frequent occurrence of food quality and safety proves that it is not effective to solve the Problem only from mechanism and supervision mechanism. Instead,it may expand solution ideas from external environment inducing changes of social institutions. Edible agricultural products are raw materials of foods,so their quality and safety are decisive for food quality and safety. Combining with concept of quality and safety of edible agricultural products,from social economy,science,technology and culture,environment cognition,this paper made a further understanding of food quality and safety. It found that the quality and safety of domestic edible agricultural products are not completely resulted from human factor,and not completely quality and safety problem in practical sense. Design of problem solutions should consider such external factors as economic level and consumption concept,dual character of science and technology,cultural quality of the masses,and moral trait of the masses,and enhance matching of building of regulation tools with external environment.

Lithium-thionyl chloride battery safety

Science.gov (United States)

Carter, B.; Williams, R.; Tsay, F.; Rodriguez, A.; Frank, H.

1982-01-01

Primary lithium cells which use LiAlCl4/SOCl2 electrolyte exhibit high energy density and long life. Currently these cells pose a safety problem since they have been found to vent or explode. This paper summarizes experiments to resolve the safety problem of Li-SOCl2 cells by thermal modeling and identification of possibly hazardous intermediates formed during discharge of these cells. A thermal model and mechanism for the reduction of SOCl2 are presented, as well as a discussion of their application to Li-SOCl2 cell safety.

Lithium-thionyl chloride battery safety

Science.gov (United States)

Carter, B.; Williams, R.; Tsay, F.; Rodriguez, A.; Frank, H.

Primary lithium cells which use LiAlCl4/SOCl2 electrolyte exhibit high energy density and long life. Currently these cells pose a safety problem since they have been found to vent or explode. This paper summarizes experiments to resolve the safety problem of Li-SOCl2 cells by thermal modeling and identification of possibly hazardous intermediates formed during discharge of these cells. A thermal model and mechanism for the reduction of SOCl2 are presented, as well as a discussion of their application to Li-SOCl2 cell safety.

Aviation safety and operation problems research and technology

Science.gov (United States)

Enders, J. H.; Strickle, J. W.

1977-01-01

Aircraft operating problems are described for aviation safety. It is shown that as aircraft technology improves, the knowledge and understanding of operating problems must also improve for economics, reliability and safety.

Multiscale analysis for ill-posed problems with semi-discrete Tikhonov regularization

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Zhong, Min; Lu, Shuai; Cheng, Jin

2012-01-01

Using compactly supported radial basis functions of varying radii, Wendland has shown how a multiscale analysis can be applied to the approximation of Sobolev functions on a bounded domain, when the available data are discrete and noisy. Here, we examine the application of this analysis to the solution of linear moderately ill-posed problems using semi-discrete Tikhonov–Phillips regularization. As in Wendland’s work, the actual multiscale approximation is constructed by a sequence of residual corrections, where different support radii are employed to accommodate different scales. The convergence of the algorithm for noise-free data is given. Based on the Morozov discrepancy principle, a posteriori parameter choice rule and error estimates for the noisy data are derived. Two numerical examples are presented to illustrate the appropriateness of the proposed method. (paper)

Problems of nuclear reactor safety. Vol. 1

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Shal'nov, A.V.

1995-01-01

Proceedings of the 9. Topical Meeting 'Problems of nuclear reactor safety' are presented. Papers include results of studies and developments associated with methods of calculation and complex computerized simulation for stationary and transient processes in nuclear power plants. Main problems of reactor safety are discussed as well as rector accidents on operating NPP's are analyzed

Problems in determining the optimal use of road safety measures

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Elvik, Rune

2014-01-01

for intervention that ensures maximum safety benefits. The third problem is how to develop policy options to minimise the risk of indivisibilities and irreversible choices. The fourth problem is how to account for interaction effects between road safety measures when determining their optimal use. The fifth......This paper discusses some problems in determining the optimal use of road safety measures. The first of these problems is how best to define the baseline option, i.e. what will happen if no new safety measures are introduced. The second problem concerns choice of a method for selection of targets...... problem is how to obtain the best mix of short-term and long-term measures in a safety programme. The sixth problem is how fixed parameters for analysis, including the monetary valuation of road safety, influence the results of analyses. It is concluded that it is at present not possible to determine...

Lithium-thionyl chloride battery safety

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Carter, B.; Frank, H.; Rodriquez, A.; Tsay, F.; Williams, R.

1982-08-01

Primary lithium cells which use LiAlCl/sub 4// SOCl/sub 2/ electrolyte exhibit high energy density and long life. Currently these cells pose a safety problem since they have been found to vent or explode. This paper summarizes experiments to resolve the safety problem of Li-SOCl/sub 2/ cells by thermal modeling and identification of possibly hazardous intermediates formed during discharge of these cells. A thermal model and mechanism for the reduction of SOCl/sub 2/ are presented, as well as a discussion of their application to Li-SOCl/sub 2/ cell safety.

FLIGHT SAFETY MANAGEMENT PROBLEMS AND EVALUATION OF FLIGHT SAFETY LEVEL OF AN AVIATION ENTERPRISE

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

B. V. Zubkov

2017-01-01

Full Text Available This article is devoted to studying the problem of safety management system (SMS and evaluating safety level of an aviation enterprise.This article discusses the problems of SMS, presented at the 41st meeting of the Russian Aviation Production Commanders Club in June 2014 in St. Petersburg in connection with the verification of the status of the CA of the Russian Federation by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO in the same year, a set of urgent measures to eliminate the deficiencies identified in the current safety management system by participants of this meeting were proposed.In addition, the problems of evaluating flight safety level based on operation data of an aviation enterprise were analyzed. This analysis made it possible to take into account the problems listed in this article as a tool for a comprehensive study of SMS parameters and allows to analyze the quantitative indicators of the flights safety level.The concepts of Acceptable Safety Level (ASL indicators are interpreted differently depending on the available/applicable methods of their evaluation and how to implement them in SMS. However, the indicators for assessing ASL under operational condition at the aviation enterprise should become universal. Currently, defined safety levels and safety indicators are not yet established functionally and often with distorted underrepresented models describing their contextual contents, as well as ways of integrating them into SMS aviation enterprise.The results obtained can be used for better implementation of SMS and solving problems determining the aviation enterprise technical level of flight safety.

Safety: Science and technique in social problems

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Smit, W.A.

1982-01-01

The author describes in a simple and clearly written Dutch text the relationship between scientific and technical knowledge and the social problems concerning the safety of nuclear energy. He begins with the cooling system of reactors and the safety aspects of the associated pumps. He uses this example to illustrate that the quantative determination of failure risks need not necessarily be relevant for judging the acceptance of the risk but is always relevant as a method of judging the effect of technical improvements on safety values. The author then considers the radiological effects of the operation of a nuclear plant by presenting the doses of radioactivity released if a reactor is operating normally, if there are technical problems and in the case of accidents. The corresponding biological effects on man are also presented and in an appendix the radiological consequences of reactor accidents are considered in some detail. He describes a number of models used in such calculations - for metereological distribution, dosimetry for internal radiation, cancer induction - to illustrate the margins of uncertainty in the predictions. According to the author safety aspects should not just be seen as a purely technical problem, starting with the fact that nuclear energy is desirable and then ensuring that all required safety regulations are met. Safety aspects are a social problem and should be considered by first discussing whether nuclear energy is acceptable, taking into consideration such consequences as the effects of possible accidents and the long term effects of reactor operation. (C.F.)

Coupled bias-variance tradeoff for cross-pose face recognition.

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Annan; Shan, Shiguang; Gao, Wen

2012-01-01

Subspace-based face representation can be looked as a regression problem. From this viewpoint, we first revisited the problem of recognizing faces across pose differences, which is a bottleneck in face recognition. Then, we propose a new approach for cross-pose face recognition using a regressor with a coupled bias-variance tradeoff. We found that striking a coupled balance between bias and variance in regression for different poses could improve the regressor-based cross-pose face representation, i.e., the regressor can be more stable against a pose difference. With the basic idea, ridge regression and lasso regression are explored. Experimental results on CMU PIE, the FERET, and the Multi-PIE face databases show that the proposed bias-variance tradeoff can achieve considerable reinforcement in recognition performance.

Problems of nuclear reactor safety. Vol. 2

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Goncharov, L.A.

1995-01-01

Theses of proceedings of the 9 Topical Meeting on problems of nuclear power plant safety are presented. Reports include results of neutron-physical experiments carried out for reactor safety justification. Concepts of advanced reactors with improved safety are considered. Results of researches on fuel cycles are given too

In-the-wild facial expression recognition in extreme poses

Science.gov (United States)

Yang, Fei; Zhang, Qian; Zheng, Chi; Qiu, Guoping

2018-04-01

In the computer research area, facial expression recognition is a hot research problem. Recent years, the research has moved from the lab environment to in-the-wild circumstances. It is challenging, especially under extreme poses. But current expression detection systems are trying to avoid the pose effects and gain the general applicable ability. In this work, we solve the problem in the opposite approach. We consider the head poses and detect the expressions within special head poses. Our work includes two parts: detect the head pose and group it into one pre-defined head pose class; do facial expression recognize within each pose class. Our experiments show that the recognition results with pose class grouping are much better than that of direct recognition without considering poses. We combine the hand-crafted features, SIFT, LBP and geometric feature, with deep learning feature as the representation of the expressions. The handcrafted features are added into the deep learning framework along with the high level deep learning features. As a comparison, we implement SVM and random forest to as the prediction models. To train and test our methodology, we labeled the face dataset with 6 basic expressions.

Convergence rates and finite-dimensional approximations for nonlinear ill-posed problems involving monotone operators in Banach spaces

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Nguyen Buong.

1992-11-01

The purpose of this paper is to investigate convergence rates for an operator version of Tikhonov regularization constructed by dual mapping for nonlinear ill-posed problems involving monotone operators in real reflective Banach spaces. The obtained results are considered in combination with finite-dimensional approximations for the space. An example is considered for illustration. (author). 15 refs

Prospective elementary school teachers’ ways of making sense of mathematical problem posing (Modos en que futuros profesores de primaria dan sentido a la invención de problemas matemáticos

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Olive Chapman

2012-06-01

Full Text Available The study tackled prospective teachers’ sense-making of mathematical problem posing and the impact of posing different contextual problems on their learning. Focus was on the generation of new problems and reformulation of given problems. Participants were 40 prospective elementary teachers. The findings provide insights into possible ways these teachers could make sense of problem posing of contextual mathematical problems and the learning afforded by posing diverse problems. Highlighted are five perspectives and nine categories of problem posing tasks to support development of proficiency in problem-posing knowledge for teaching. El estudio indagó sobre los modos en que futuros profesores de primaria dan sentido a la invención de problemas matemáticos y el impacto de plantear diferentes problemas contextualizados en su aprendizaje. El foco fue la invención de nuevos problemas y la reformulación de otros dados. Los participantes fueron 40 futuros maestros de primaria. Los resultados proporcionan elementos sobre posibles modos en que estos maestros dan sentido a la invención de problemas matemáticos y el aprendizaje que ofrece plantear diversos problemas. Se destacan cinco perspectivas y nueve categorías de tareas en la invención de problemas para apoyar el desarrollo de la competencia de plantear problemas en la enseñanza.

The nucleolus is well-posed

Science.gov (United States)

Fragnelli, Vito; Patrone, Fioravante; Torre, Anna

2006-02-01

The lexicographic order is not representable by a real-valued function, contrary to many other orders or preorders. So, standard tools and results for well-posed minimum problems cannot be used. We prove that under suitable hypotheses it is however possible to guarantee the well-posedness of a lexicographic minimum over a compact or convex set. This result allows us to prove that some game theoretical solution concepts, based on lexicographic order are well-posed: in particular, this is true for the nucleolus.

Language and Communication-Related Problems of Aviation Safety.

Science.gov (United States)

Cushing, Steven

A study of the problems posed by the use of natural language in various aspects of aviation is presented. The study, part of a larger investigation of the feasibility of voice input/output interfaces for communication in aviation, looks at representative real examples of accidents and near misses resulting from language confusions and omissions.…

Problems of safety and protection posed during overpressures in radioactive waste incinerator combustion chambers

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Chevalier, G.; Caramelle, D.

1987-01-01

The incineration of radioactive spent fuel is a method of preserving these wastes offering a substantial reduction in volume (from 20 to 50), and the solid residue (ash, etc.) can be packaged and stored more safely than the initial wastes. However, these advantages should not be acquired to the detriment of safety and protection of personnel and of the environment during and after operation. Our recommendations are aimed to define the conditions to be satisfied so that the equipment to be constructed, as well as their method of use: - ensure the correct operation of the installation under the stipulated conditions - limit the consequences of an incident with respect to the installations, the personnel and the environment

How to manage the cumulative flood safety of catchment dams ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Dam safety is a significant issue being taken seriously worldwide. However, in Australia, although much attention is being devoted to the medium- to large-scale dams, minimal attention is being paid to the serious potential problems associated with smaller dams, particularly the potential cumulative safety threats they pose ...

Man as a safety problem in technical systems

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Compes, P.C.; Wolff, H.A.

1980-01-01

Safety engineering derives its justification from the success achieved in maintaining and enlarging safety, more precisely, from activities aimed at avoiding or preventing damage caused by accidents. Man is not only affected by accidents but is also the cause of accidents, either directly or indirectly, and thus is to be regarded as the actual cause or preventer of accidents. The Second International Summer Symposium of the Society for Safety Engineering (GfS) which was held at Duesseldorf in 1980 brought into focus this aspect and the importance to be attached to the individual man and the whole mankind in the field of accident prevention. 'Man as a safety problem in technical systems' - a great and weighty field of problems, the large extent of which and the complex content of which was to be discussed by the programme with its many different contributions, on the one hand by presenting an outline as completely as possible, and on the other hand by finding further-reaching solutions for at least some problems. This was the purpose of the dialogues held between theory and practice on the one hand, and between safety engineering and, in this case, the human sciences on the other hand. (orig./RW) [de

Human action recognition based on estimated weak poses

Science.gov (United States)

Gong, Wenjuan; Gonzàlez, Jordi; Roca, Francesc Xavier

2012-12-01

We present a novel method for human action recognition (HAR) based on estimated poses from image sequences. We use 3D human pose data as additional information and propose a compact human pose representation, called a weak pose, in a low-dimensional space while still keeping the most discriminative information for a given pose. With predicted poses from image features, we map the problem from image feature space to pose space, where a Bag of Poses (BOP) model is learned for the final goal of HAR. The BOP model is a modified version of the classical bag of words pipeline by building the vocabulary based on the most representative weak poses for a given action. Compared with the standard k-means clustering, our vocabulary selection criteria is proven to be more efficient and robust against the inherent challenges of action recognition. Moreover, since for action recognition the ordering of the poses is discriminative, the BOP model incorporates temporal information: in essence, groups of consecutive poses are considered together when computing the vocabulary and assignment. We tested our method on two well-known datasets: HumanEva and IXMAS, to demonstrate that weak poses aid to improve action recognition accuracies. The proposed method is scene-independent and is comparable with the state-of-art method.

Pose-Invariant Face Recognition via RGB-D Images.

Science.gov (United States)

Sang, Gaoli; Li, Jing; Zhao, Qijun

2016-01-01

Three-dimensional (3D) face models can intrinsically handle large pose face recognition problem. In this paper, we propose a novel pose-invariant face recognition method via RGB-D images. By employing depth, our method is able to handle self-occlusion and deformation, both of which are challenging problems in two-dimensional (2D) face recognition. Texture images in the gallery can be rendered to the same view as the probe via depth. Meanwhile, depth is also used for similarity measure via frontalization and symmetric filling. Finally, both texture and depth contribute to the final identity estimation. Experiments on Bosphorus, CurtinFaces, Eurecom, and Kiwi databases demonstrate that the additional depth information has improved the performance of face recognition with large pose variations and under even more challenging conditions.

Face pose tracking using the four-point algorithm

Science.gov (United States)

Fung, Ho Yin; Wong, Kin Hong; Yu, Ying Kin; Tsui, Kwan Pang; Kam, Ho Chuen

2017-06-01

In this paper, we have developed an algorithm to track the pose of a human face robustly and efficiently. Face pose estimation is very useful in many applications such as building virtual reality systems and creating an alternative input method for the disabled. Firstly, we have modified a face detection toolbox called DLib for the detection of a face in front of a camera. The detected face features are passed to a pose estimation method, known as the four-point algorithm, for pose computation. The theory applied and the technical problems encountered during system development are discussed in the paper. It is demonstrated that the system is able to track the pose of a face in real time using a consumer grade laptop computer.

Modified truncated randomized singular value decomposition (MTRSVD) algorithms for large scale discrete ill-posed problems with general-form regularization

Science.gov (United States)

Jia, Zhongxiao; Yang, Yanfei

2018-05-01

In this paper, we propose new randomization based algorithms for large scale linear discrete ill-posed problems with general-form regularization: subject to , where L is a regularization matrix. Our algorithms are inspired by the modified truncated singular value decomposition (MTSVD) method, which suits only for small to medium scale problems, and randomized SVD (RSVD) algorithms that generate good low rank approximations to A. We use rank-k truncated randomized SVD (TRSVD) approximations to A by truncating the rank- RSVD approximations to A, where q is an oversampling parameter. The resulting algorithms are called modified TRSVD (MTRSVD) methods. At every step, we use the LSQR algorithm to solve the resulting inner least squares problem, which is proved to become better conditioned as k increases so that LSQR converges faster. We present sharp bounds for the approximation accuracy of the RSVDs and TRSVDs for severely, moderately and mildly ill-posed problems, and substantially improve a known basic bound for TRSVD approximations. We prove how to choose the stopping tolerance for LSQR in order to guarantee that the computed and exact best regularized solutions have the same accuracy. Numerical experiments illustrate that the best regularized solutions by MTRSVD are as accurate as the ones by the truncated generalized singular value decomposition (TGSVD) algorithm, and at least as accurate as those by some existing truncated randomized generalized singular value decomposition (TRGSVD) algorithms. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation of China (Nos. 11771249 and 11371219).

Binary classification posed as a quadratically constrained quadratic ...

Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

Binary classification is posed as a quadratically constrained quadratic problem and solved using the proposed method. Each class in the binary classification problem is modeled as a multidimensional ellipsoid to forma quadratic constraint in the problem. Particle swarms help in determining the optimal hyperplane or ...

The way to solve the safety problems of nuclear power

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Qian Jihui; Zhang Senru

1991-01-01

Based on the safety problems that the current water cooled reactor nuclear power plants have the potential danger of core melt, the paper comments upon the safety behaviors of the advanced reactors (AP-600, SIR) and passive safety reactors (PIUS, MHTGR). According to design and user's requirements for next generation water cooled reactor, the paper put forward a new concept about self safety U-ZrH reactor (SUR) which is able to solve the safety problems for water cooled reactor nuclear power plant and become a development direction for world water cooled reactor nuclear power plants. This type of reactor has been studied in NPIC (Nuclear Power Institute of China)

Medical social consequences of the safety problems of oncological radiology

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Pilipenko, M.Yi.; Stadnik, L.L.; Shal'opa, O.Yu.; Rigan, M.M.; Skalets'kij, Yu.M.

2015-01-01

Actuality of the problem of patient safety in oncoradiology in Ukraine is grounded. The results of international audit TLD (IAEA/WHO) quality during dosimetry procedures cobalt-telegamma vehicles in Ukraine are investigated, as well as legal and regulatory framework providing for the safety of radiotherapy care, scientific publications on patient safety. Methods: statistical, analytical, bibliographical, systematic approach. On the example of radiation therapy using the results of the international program of the IAEA/WHO TLD audit quality dosimetry calibration devices for remote gamma therapy in Ukraine from 1998 to 2014 the attempt to assess the extent of medical and social consequences of underestimating of medical errors in oncoradiology is made. The problems of regulatory nature of medical errors in oncoradiology are preliminary identified. The problem of medical errors in the treatment of cancer radiation methods in Ukraine is extremely important. Usually the problems of errors in oncoradiology are considered in organizational, technical, personnel and technical aspects, while medical and social consequences of problem are not covered. About 10 thousand of cancer patients in year may suffer from errors related only to dose calculation according to the optimistic variant, while the number of patients for the same period on the pessimistic case can reach 15 thousand. There are a number of legal character problems in oncoradiology related to patient safety that require clarification. The first priority for improving the safety of patients in oncoradiology is the recording and analysis of radiation therapy defects and their consequences

System analysis of vehicle active safety problem

Science.gov (United States)

Buznikov, S. E.

2018-02-01

The problem of the road transport safety affects the vital interests of the most of the population and is characterized by a global level of significance. The system analysis of problem of creation of competitive active vehicle safety systems is presented as an interrelated complex of tasks of multi-criterion optimization and dynamic stabilization of the state variables of a controlled object. Solving them requires generation of all possible variants of technical solutions within the software and hardware domains and synthesis of the control, which is close to optimum. For implementing the task of the system analysis the Zwicky “morphological box” method is used. Creation of comprehensive active safety systems involves solution of the problem of preventing typical collisions. For solving it, a structured set of collisions is introduced with its elements being generated also using the Zwicky “morphological box” method. The obstacle speed, the longitudinal acceleration of the controlled object and the unpredictable changes in its movement direction due to certain faults, the road surface condition and the control errors are taken as structure variables that characterize the conditions of collisions. The conditions for preventing typical collisions are presented as inequalities for physical variables that define the state vector of the object and its dynamic limits.

Making 2D face recognition more robust using AAMs for pose compensation

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Huisman, Peter; Munster, Ruud; Moro-Ellenberger, Stephanie; Veldhuis, Raymond N.J.; Bazen, A.M.

2006-01-01

The problem of pose in 2D face recognition is widely acknowledged. Commercial systems are limited to near frontal face images and cannot deal with pose deviations larger than 15 degrees from the frontal view. This is a problem, when using face recognition for surveillance applications in which

Perceived school safety is strongly associated with adolescent mental health problems.

Science.gov (United States)

Nijs, Miesje M; Bun, Clothilde J E; Tempelaar, Wanda M; de Wit, Niek J; Burger, Huibert; Plevier, Carolien M; Boks, Marco P M

2014-02-01

School environment is an important determinant of psychosocial function and may also be related to mental health. We therefore investigated whether perceived school safety, a simple measure of this environment, is related to mental health problems. In a population-based sample of 11,130 secondary school students, we analysed the relationship of perceived school safety with mental health problems using multiple logistic regression analyses to adjust for potential confounders. Mental health problems were defined using the clinical cut-off of the self-reported Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. School safety showed an exposure-response relationship with mental health problems after adjustment for confounders. Odds ratios increased from 2.48 ("sometimes unsafe") to 8.05 ("very often unsafe"). The association was strongest in girls and young and middle-aged adolescents. Irrespective of the causal background of this association, school safety deserves attention either as a risk factor or as an indicator of mental health problems.

FLIGHT SAFETY MANAGEMENT PROBLEMS AND EVALUATION OF FLIGHT SAFETY LEVEL OF AN AVIATION ENTERPRISE

OpenAIRE

B. V. Zubkov; H. E. Fourar

2017-01-01

This article is devoted to studying the problem of safety management system (SMS) and evaluating safety level of an aviation enterprise.This article discusses the problems of SMS, presented at the 41st meeting of the Russian Aviation Production Commanders Club in June 2014 in St. Petersburg in connection with the verification of the status of the CA of the Russian Federation by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) in the same year, a set of urgent measures to eliminate the def...

Problems in Food Safety of Hunan Province and Countermeasures

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

Fanfan; OUYANG; Fangming; DENG

2014-01-01

In recent years,serious food safety accidents are of frequent occurrence. Although government has taken many practical and feasible measures to contain food safety accidents,new food safety accidents still emerge in large numbers. In this situation,food safety control is a long-term and arduous task to be performed jointly by many government departments. Finally,it presents corresponding countermeasures and recommendations on the basis of current situations of food safety in Hunan Province,problem causes,in combination with control measures related to food safety both at home and abroad.

Xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus does not pose a risk to blood recipient safety.

Science.gov (United States)

Dodd, Roger Y; Hackett, John; Linnen, Jeffrey M; Dorsey, Kerri; Wu, Yanyun; Zou, Shimian; Qiu, Xiaoxing; Swanson, Priscilla; Schochetman, Gerald; Gao, Kui; Carrick, James M; Krysztof, David E; Stramer, Susan L

2012-02-01

When xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) was first reported in association with chronic fatigue syndrome, it was suggested that it might offer a risk to blood safety. Thus, the prevalence of the virus among blood donors and, if present, its transmissibility by transfusion need to be defined. Two populations of routine blood donor samples (1435 and 13,399) were obtained for prevalence evaluations; samples from a linked donor-recipient repository were also evaluated. Samples were tested for the presence of antibodies to XMRV-related recombinant antigens and/or for XMRV RNA, using validated, high-throughput systems. The presence of antibodies to XMRV could not be confirmed among a total of 17,249 blood donors or recipients (0%; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0%-0.017%); 1763 tested samples were nonreactive for XMRV RNA (0%; 95% CI, 0%-0.17%). Evidence of infection was absent from 109 recipients and 830 evaluable blood samples tested after transfusion of a total of 3741 blood components. XMRV and related murine leukemia virus (MLV) markers are not present among a large population of blood donors and evidence of transfusion transmission could not be detected. Thus, these viruses do not currently pose a threat to blood recipient safety and further actions relating to XMRV and MLV are not justified. © 2012 American Association of Blood Banks.

Common problems in the elicitation and analysis of expert opinion affecting probabilistic safety assessments

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Meyer, M.A.; Booker, J.M.

1990-01-01

Expert opinion is frequently used in probabilistic safety assessment (PSA), particularly in estimating low probability events. In this paper, we discuss some of the common problems encountered in eliciting and analyzing expert opinion data and offer solutions or recommendations. The problems are: that experts are not naturally Bayesian. People fail to update their existing information to account for new information as it becomes available, as would be predicted by the Bayesian philosophy; that experts cannot be fully calibrated. To calibrate experts, the feedback from the known quantities must be immediate, frequent, and specific to the task; that experts are limited in the number of things that they can mentally juggle at a time to 7 {plus minus} 2; that data gatherers and analysts can introduce bias by unintentionally causing an altering of the expert's thinking or answers; that the level of detail the data, or granularity, can affect the analyses; and the conditioning effect poses difficulties in gathering and analyzing of the expert data. The data that the expert gives can be conditioned on a variety of factors that can affect the analysis and the interpretation of the results. 31 refs.

Well-posed optimization problems

CERN Document Server

Dontchev, Asen L

1993-01-01

This book presents in a unified way the mathematical theory of well-posedness in optimization. The basic concepts of well-posedness and the links among them are studied, in particular Hadamard and Tykhonov well-posedness. Abstract optimization problems as well as applications to optimal control, calculus of variations and mathematical programming are considered. Both the pure and applied side of these topics are presented. The main subject is often introduced by heuristics, particular cases and examples. Complete proofs are provided. The expected knowledge of the reader does not extend beyond textbook (real and functional) analysis, some topology and differential equations and basic optimization. References are provided for more advanced topics. The book is addressed to mathematicians interested in optimization and related topics, and also to engineers, control theorists, economists and applied scientists who can find here a mathematical justification of practical procedures they encounter.

On application of CFD codes to problems of nuclear reactor safety

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Muehlbauer, Petr

2005-01-01

The 'Exploratory Meeting of Experts to Define an Action Plan on the Application of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Codes to Nuclear Reactor Safety Problems' held in May 2002 at Aix-en-Province, France, recommended formation of writing groups to report the need of guidelines for use and assessment of CFD in single-phase nuclear reactor safety problems, and on recommended extensions to CFD codes to meet the needs of two-phase problems in nuclear reactor safety. This recommendations was supported also by Working Group on the Analysis and Management of Accidents and led to formation oaf three Writing Groups. The first writing Group prepared a summary of existing best practice guidelines for single phase CFD analysis and made a recommendation on the need for nuclear reactor safety specific guidelines. The second Writing Group selected those nuclear reactor safety applications for which understanding requires or is significantly enhanced by single-phase CFD analysis, and proposed a methodology for establishing assesment matrices relevant to nuclear reactor safety applications. The third writing group performed a classification of nuclear reactor safety problems where extension of CFD to two-phase flow may bring real benefit, a classification of different modeling approaches, and specification and analysis of needs in terms of physical and numerical assessments. This presentation provides a review of these activities with the most important conclusions and recommendations (Authors)

Intermodal safety research needs report of the sixth workshop on national transportation problems

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Warshawer, A.J. (ed.)

1976-04-01

This conference brought together DOT policymakers, university principal investigators and other professionals to consider the intermodal safety research requirements of the Department of Transportation. The objectives of the conference were: (1) to highlight safety problems and needed transportation safety research identified by DOT modal safety managers and to stimulate university or university/industry teams to respond with research proposals which emphasize multi-modal applicability and a system view; and (2) to provide a forum for university research groups to inform DOT safety managers of promising new directions in transportation safety research and new tools with which to address safety related problems. The conference addressed the research requirements for safety as identified by the Statement of National Transportation Policy and by the modal safety managers in three principal contexts, each a workshop panel: I, Inter-Institutional Problems of Transportation Safety. Problems were described as: Federal-State, local; Federal-Industry; Federal-Public, Consumer groups. II, Goal Setting and Planning for Transportation Safety Programs. Issues were: modifying risk behavior, safety as a social value, and involving citizens in development of standards as a way of increasing probability of achieving program objectives. III, DOT Information, Management, and Evaluation Systems Requirements. Needs were: data requirements and analytic tools for management of safety programs.

Nuclear safety targets and problems of social acceptability

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Macgill, S.M.

1989-01-01

The following are among the factors which make the problem of setting acceptable safety targets for societal protection from possible nuclear accidents one of such formidable proportion: The varied and often conflicting positions among and between the many constituencies with a claim to interest in the problem: local, national and international populations; lay, workplace and professional communities; private and public interests; active environmental lobbies and intentionally passive publics; powerful influences and politically unprivileged classes; press and mass media. To seek 'acceptability' of safety targets through common consensus is problematised by the difficulty in overcoming the immense social and historical forces that give rise to the prevailing contrariety among different people's positions. To seek resolution of differences by some appropriate weighting of the different views of different constituencies is problematised by the lack of unique identification of what the constituencies are, by the difficulty in faithfully representing their views, and by the absence of 'laws of social entitlement' vis-a-vis the weight that should be given to each. In sum, the problem of setting socially acceptable safety targets is itself bound up with inherently open ended questions of democracy and representation. (author)

Pose estimation for mobile robots working on turbine blade

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Ma, X.D.; Chen, Q.; Liu, J.J.; Sun, Z.G.; Zhang, W.Z. [Tsinghua Univ., Beijing (China). Key Laboratory for Advanced Materials Processing Technology, Ministry of Education, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering

2009-03-11

This paper discussed a features point detection and matching task technique for mobile robots used in wind turbine blade applications. The vision-based scheme used visual information from the robot's surrounding environment to match successive image frames. An improved pose estimation algorithm based on a scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) was developed to consider the characteristics of local images of turbine blades, pose estimation problems, and conditions. The method included a pre-subsampling technique for reducing computation and bidirectional matching for improving precision. A random sample consensus (RANSAC) method was used to estimate the robot's pose. Pose estimation conditions included a wide pose range; the distance between neighbouring blades; and mechanical, electromagnetic, and optical disturbances. An experimental platform was used to demonstrate the validity of the proposed algorithm. 20 refs., 6 figs.

Posing the problem of time in S. N. Bulgakov: in the context of nature and freedom antinomy

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Tatiana Rezvykh

2015-06-01

Full Text Available The author discusses a S. N. Bulgakov’s unique approach to the problem of time, consisting of an effort to resolve the problem basing on corollaries from Kant’s antinomy of nature and freedom, as well as on ideas of Schelling. Bulgakov views the time antinomically. It was his reflection on the meaning of Kant’s antinomism which led him to posing the problem of time. For the first time we find him treating this problem in his article Apocalypticism and Socialism, which dealt with antinomy of eschatology and chiliasm. Here also he starts to consider relation of time and eternity through antinomy of nature and freedom. In his Philosophy of Economy the same problem is solved by means of the concept of Sophia as the ontological basis of personality, which unites freedom and nature, the eternal and the temporal. But in his Unfading Light the antinomy of nature and freedom is discussed through differentiation between negative and positive theology. Bulgakov uses as a synthesizing concept Schelling’s idea of «eternal time» as unity of eternity and time. Thus, despite Bulgakov’s repeated statements about their clear distinction, time and eternity are drawn together. Such an attempt to solve the problem of time raises doubts about the very possibility of freedom.

Safety of pressurized water reactors: problems and corresponding studies

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Cogne, F.

1976-01-01

The author recalls the safety problems subject to researches in the CEA, either because of their importance or because studies made abroad were not sufficiently developed or were classified or in order to acquire an independent judgement when safety is concerned. Those problems and studies are submitted referring to the 3 existing shields between man and dangerous materials: fuel element can, thermal shield, (pressure vessel and pipes), biological shield of which the behaviour is studied in connection with outside aggressions such as earthquakes, plane crashes, chemical explosions.. [fr

Robust head pose estimation via supervised manifold learning.

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, Chao; Song, Xubo

2014-05-01

Head poses can be automatically estimated using manifold learning algorithms, with the assumption that with the pose being the only variable, the face images should lie in a smooth and low-dimensional manifold. However, this estimation approach is challenging due to other appearance variations related to identity, head location in image, background clutter, facial expression, and illumination. To address the problem, we propose to incorporate supervised information (pose angles of training samples) into the process of manifold learning. The process has three stages: neighborhood construction, graph weight computation and projection learning. For the first two stages, we redefine inter-point distance for neighborhood construction as well as graph weight by constraining them with the pose angle information. For Stage 3, we present a supervised neighborhood-based linear feature transformation algorithm to keep the data points with similar pose angles close together but the data points with dissimilar pose angles far apart. The experimental results show that our method has higher estimation accuracy than the other state-of-art algorithms and is robust to identity and illumination variations. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Zebra Mussels Pose a Threat to Virginia's Waters

OpenAIRE

Helfrich, Louis A. (Louis Anthony), 1942-; Weigmann, Diana L.; Speenburgh, Renee M.; Neves, Richard J.; Kitchel, Lisie; Bruenderman, Sue A., 1962-

2005-01-01

Provides an brief introduction to the invasion of the zebra mussel into American waters, explains the economic consequences they pose, and discusses if Virginia will inherit the problem, what the public can do to help, the general lifecycle of the zebra mussel and if they can be controlled, and who is working on the zebra mussel problem.

Shoe concerns and foot problems of wearers of safety footwear.

Science.gov (United States)

Marr, S J; Quine, S

1993-05-01

In Australia workers in many industries are required to wear safety footwear (footwear incorporating a steel toe cap). An investigation of the problems reported by 321 workers (70 per cent male) employed in a broad range of work activities and required to wear safety footwear was conducted in 1990 and 1991. Respondents were interviewed by a professionally trained podiatrist using a structured questionnaire followed by a foot examination. An extremely high percentage (91 per cent) of subjects reported one or more foot problems (which were verified by the podiatrist), and most considered that the safety footwear either caused the problem or adversely affected an existing foot condition. The main shoe concerns reported were excessive heat (65 per cent of all respondents), inflexible soles (52 per cent), weight (48 per cent) and pressure from steel toe cap (47 per cent). Certain gender differences were identified. General recommendations are made.

Pose estimation of industrial objects towards robot operation

Science.gov (United States)

Niu, Jie; Zhou, Fuqiang; Tan, Haishu; Cao, Yu

2017-10-01

With the advantages of wide range, non-contact and high flexibility, the visual estimation technology of target pose has been widely applied in modern industry, robot guidance and other engineering practices. However, due to the influence of complicated industrial environment, outside interference factors, lack of object characteristics, restrictions of camera and other limitations, the visual estimation technology of target pose is still faced with many challenges. Focusing on the above problems, a pose estimation method of the industrial objects is developed based on 3D models of targets. By matching the extracted shape characteristics of objects with the priori 3D model database of targets, the method realizes the recognition of target. Thus a pose estimation of objects can be determined based on the monocular vision measuring model. The experimental results show that this method can be implemented to estimate the position of rigid objects based on poor images information, and provides guiding basis for the operation of the industrial robot.

Safety problems with abandoned explosive facilities

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Courtright, W.C.

1969-01-01

Procedures were developed for the safe removal of explosive and radioactive contaminated materials structures and drains from abandoned sites, including explosives processing and service buildings with a goal to return the entire area to its natural state and to permit public access. The safety problems encountered in the cleanup and their solutions are applicable to modification and maintenance work in operating explosive facilities. (U.S.)

Sparse deconvolution for the large-scale ill-posed inverse problem of impact force reconstruction

Science.gov (United States)

Qiao, Baijie; Zhang, Xingwu; Gao, Jiawei; Liu, Ruonan; Chen, Xuefeng

2017-01-01

Most previous regularization methods for solving the inverse problem of force reconstruction are to minimize the l2-norm of the desired force. However, these traditional regularization methods such as Tikhonov regularization and truncated singular value decomposition, commonly fail to solve the large-scale ill-posed inverse problem in moderate computational cost. In this paper, taking into account the sparse characteristic of impact force, the idea of sparse deconvolution is first introduced to the field of impact force reconstruction and a general sparse deconvolution model of impact force is constructed. Second, a novel impact force reconstruction method based on the primal-dual interior point method (PDIPM) is proposed to solve such a large-scale sparse deconvolution model, where minimizing the l2-norm is replaced by minimizing the l1-norm. Meanwhile, the preconditioned conjugate gradient algorithm is used to compute the search direction of PDIPM with high computational efficiency. Finally, two experiments including the small-scale or medium-scale single impact force reconstruction and the relatively large-scale consecutive impact force reconstruction are conducted on a composite wind turbine blade and a shell structure to illustrate the advantage of PDIPM. Compared with Tikhonov regularization, PDIPM is more efficient, accurate and robust whether in the single impact force reconstruction or in the consecutive impact force reconstruction.

Pose-invariant face recognition using Markov random fields.

Science.gov (United States)

Ho, Huy Tho; Chellappa, Rama

2013-04-01

One of the key challenges for current face recognition techniques is how to handle pose variations between the probe and gallery face images. In this paper, we present a method for reconstructing the virtual frontal view from a given nonfrontal face image using Markov random fields (MRFs) and an efficient variant of the belief propagation algorithm. In the proposed approach, the input face image is divided into a grid of overlapping patches, and a globally optimal set of local warps is estimated to synthesize the patches at the frontal view. A set of possible warps for each patch is obtained by aligning it with images from a training database of frontal faces. The alignments are performed efficiently in the Fourier domain using an extension of the Lucas-Kanade algorithm that can handle illumination variations. The problem of finding the optimal warps is then formulated as a discrete labeling problem using an MRF. The reconstructed frontal face image can then be used with any face recognition technique. The two main advantages of our method are that it does not require manually selected facial landmarks or head pose estimation. In order to improve the performance of our pose normalization method in face recognition, we also present an algorithm for classifying whether a given face image is at a frontal or nonfrontal pose. Experimental results on different datasets are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Determination of the Geometric Form of a Plane of a Tectonic Gap as the Inverse III-posed Problem of Mathematical Physics

Science.gov (United States)

Sirota, Dmitry; Ivanov, Vadim

2017-11-01

Any mining operations influence stability of natural and technogenic massifs are the reason of emergence of the sources of differences of mechanical tension. These sources generate a quasistationary electric field with a Newtonian potential. The paper reviews the method of determining the shape and size of a flat source field with this kind of potential. This common problem meets in many fields of mining: geological exploration mineral resources, ore deposits, control of mining by underground method, determining coal self-heating source, localization of the rock crack's sources and other applied problems of practical physics. This problems are ill-posed and inverse and solved by converting to Fredholm-Uryson integral equation of the first kind. This equation will be solved by A.N. Tikhonov regularization method.

Fast human pose estimation using 3D Zernike descriptors

Science.gov (United States)

Berjón, Daniel; Morán, Francisco

2012-03-01

Markerless video-based human pose estimation algorithms face a high-dimensional problem that is frequently broken down into several lower-dimensional ones by estimating the pose of each limb separately. However, in order to do so they need to reliably locate the torso, for which they typically rely on time coherence and tracking algorithms. Their losing track usually results in catastrophic failure of the process, requiring human intervention and thus precluding their usage in real-time applications. We propose a very fast rough pose estimation scheme based on global shape descriptors built on 3D Zernike moments. Using an articulated model that we configure in many poses, a large database of descriptor/pose pairs can be computed off-line. Thus, the only steps that must be done on-line are the extraction of the descriptors for each input volume and a search against the database to get the most likely poses. While the result of such process is not a fine pose estimation, it can be useful to help more sophisticated algorithms to regain track or make more educated guesses when creating new particles in particle-filter-based tracking schemes. We have achieved a performance of about ten fps on a single computer using a database of about one million entries.

Effectiveness of road safety education in Nigeria using a quasi ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Road traffic injuries pose a serious public health problem worldwide, especially in low-income countries. The aim of this study was to determine the effectiveness of a post-license road safety education intervention programme in terms of increased knowledge and self-reported behaviour among commercial minibus drivers ...

Person-Independent Head Pose Estimation Using Biased Manifold Embedding

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sethuraman Panchanathan

2008-02-01

Full Text Available Head pose estimation has been an integral problem in the study of face recognition systems and human-computer interfaces, as part of biometric applications. A fine estimate of the head pose angle is necessary and useful for several face analysis applications. To determine the head pose, face images with varying pose angles can be considered to be lying on a smooth low-dimensional manifold in high-dimensional image feature space. However, when there are face images of multiple individuals with varying pose angles, manifold learning techniques often do not give accurate results. In this work, we propose a framework for a supervised form of manifold learning called Biased Manifold Embedding to obtain improved performance in head pose angle estimation. This framework goes beyond pose estimation, and can be applied to all regression applications. This framework, although formulated for a regression scenario, unifies other supervised approaches to manifold learning that have been proposed so far. Detailed studies of the proposed method are carried out on the FacePix database, which contains 181 face images each of 30 individuals with pose angle variations at a granularity of 1∘. Since biometric applications in the real world may not contain this level of granularity in training data, an analysis of the methodology is performed on sparsely sampled data to validate its effectiveness. We obtained up to 2∘ average pose angle estimation error in the results from our experiments, which matched the best results obtained for head pose estimation using related approaches.

The sociotechnical configuration of the problem of Patient Safety

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Danholt, Peter

2010-01-01

Abstract. This paper presents and discusses two approaches to “the sociotechnical”, one coming from the Tavistock tradition and the other from actor network theory. These two differ in important ways and from the latter it follows that what patient safety means must be scrutinized and unpacked....... The paper thus rudimentarily discusses central contributions to the problematization of patient safety. Last it is argued that research that provide data on the processes of medical interventions where events, decisions and entities become transformed through their interactions is needed in order to further...... nuance the problem of patient safety. Keywords. Sociotechnical, patient safety, actor network theory, adverse events....

Problems of Rural Food Safety and Strategies of Constructing Supervision System

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

2011-01-01

This paper expounds the practical necessity of constructing diversified rural food safety supervision system as follows: it is the necessary requirements of guaranteeing people’s health and life safety; it is an important component of governmental function of social management and the logical extension of administrative responsibilities; it is the basis of maintaining order of rural society and constructing harmonious society. The main problems existing in the supervision of rural food safety are analyzed as follows: first, the legislative work of rural food safety lags behind to some extent; second, the supervision of governmental departments on rural food safety is insufficient; third, the industrial supervision mechanism of rural food security is not perfect; fourth, the role of rural social organizations in supervising food safety is limited; fifth, the farmers’ awareness of food safety supervision is not strong. Based on these problems, the targeted strategies of constructing diversified rural food safety supervision system are put forward as follows: accelerate the legislation of rural food safety, and ensure that there are laws to go by; give play to the dominant role of government, and strengthen administrative supervision on rural food safety; perfect industrial convention of rural food safety, and improve industrial supervision mechanism; actively support the fostering of social organizations, and give play to the role of supervision of organizations; cultivate correct concept of rights and obligations of farmers, and form awareness of food safety supervision.

Pose estimation for augmented reality applications using genetic algorithm.

Science.gov (United States)

Yu, Ying Kin; Wong, Kin Hong; Chang, Michael Ming Yuen

2005-12-01

This paper describes a genetic algorithm that tackles the pose-estimation problem in computer vision. Our genetic algorithm can find the rotation and translation of an object accurately when the three-dimensional structure of the object is given. In our implementation, each chromosome encodes both the pose and the indexes to the selected point features of the object. Instead of only searching for the pose as in the existing work, our algorithm, at the same time, searches for a set containing the most reliable feature points in the process. This mismatch filtering strategy successfully makes the algorithm more robust under the presence of point mismatches and outliers in the images. Our algorithm has been tested with both synthetic and real data with good results. The accuracy of the recovered pose is compared to the existing algorithms. Our approach outperformed the Lowe's method and the other two genetic algorithms under the presence of point mismatches and outliers. In addition, it has been used to estimate the pose of a real object. It is shown that the proposed method is applicable to augmented reality applications.

Problem of evaluating the safety of an explosive

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Smith, L.C.

1977-01-01

Some general considerations on the problem of evaluating the safety of an explosive lead to the reasons why the much-criticized drop-weight impact machine remains an important tool in most explosive research and development laboratories. Problems related to the design, calibration, and use of such machines, and certain misconceptions concerning the interpretation of the test data, are discussed. The results of an unsuccessful attempt to construct a more comprehensive hazards scale also are described

Problems with quantification of safety culture

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kozuh, M.; Mavko, B.

1995-01-01

For the qualitative part of the method for the Safety Culture assessment we quantitative part was developed based on expert judgement and statistical methods. The quantitative assessment should go in parallel with the qualitative part already presented. The essential part is based on expert opinion which organizational factors are the most important for certain risk significant components and how well are they implemented. The problems with getting the ratings are described in the paper. (author)

Hydrogen problems in reactor safety research

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Casper, H.

1984-01-01

The BMFT and BMI have initiated a workshop 'Hydrogen Problems in Reactor Safety Research' that took place October 3./4., 1983. The objective of this workshop was to present the state of the art in the main areas - Hydrogen-Production - Hydrogen-Distribution - Hydrogen-Ignition - Hydrogen-Burning and Containment Behaviour - Mitigation Measures. The lectures on the different areas are compiled. The most important results of the final discussion are summarized as well. (orig.) [de

Comparison of Safety Margin Generation Concepts in Image Guided Radiotherapy to Account for Daily Head and Neck Pose Variations.

Science.gov (United States)

Stoll, Markus; Stoiber, Eva Maria; Grimm, Sarah; Debus, Jürgen; Bendl, Rolf; Giske, Kristina

2016-01-01

Intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) of head and neck tumors allows a precise conformation of the high-dose region to clinical target volumes (CTVs) while respecting dose limits to organs a risk (OARs). Accurate patient setup reduces translational and rotational deviations between therapy planning and therapy delivery days. However, uncertainties in the shape of the CTV and OARs due to e.g. small pose variations in the highly deformable anatomy of the head and neck region can still compromise the dose conformation. Routinely applied safety margins around the CTV cause higher dose deposition in adjacent healthy tissue and should be kept as small as possible. In this work we evaluate and compare three approaches for margin generation 1) a clinically used approach with a constant isotropic 3 mm margin, 2) a previously proposed approach adopting a spatial model of the patient and 3) a newly developed approach adopting a biomechanical model of the patient. All approaches are retrospectively evaluated using a large patient cohort of over 500 fraction control CT images with heterogeneous pose changes. Automatic methods for finding landmark positions in the control CT images are combined with a patient specific biomechanical finite element model to evaluate the CTV deformation. The applied methods for deformation modeling show that the pose changes cause deformations in the target region with a mean motion magnitude of 1.80 mm. We found that the CTV size can be reduced by both variable margin approaches by 15.6% and 13.3% respectively, while maintaining the CTV coverage. With approach 3 an increase of target coverage was obtained. Variable margins increase target coverage, reduce risk to OARs and improve healthy tissue sparing at the same time.

Problems of nuclear energetics safety in the Soviet Union

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kovalevitsh, O.M.

1991-01-01

Authors describe present state of Soviet nuclear energy. They don't cover problems relative to its development and that reasons made so bleak picture of this economic branch. They pay particular attention to low level of nuclear safety in nuclear power plants. The improvement of this situation they see in enacting of atomic low, as quickly as possible, which will make a basis of safety development in nuclear industry

Ecological Congress and the safety problems of the Rostov region

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Madoyan, A.A.

2001-01-01

A brief description of activities of the 3 research and technical conference Ecological Congress (April 16-17, 2001), dealing with problems of reliability and safety of the Rostov NPP operation, is provided. More than 25 reports on problems pertaining to radiation safety and ecology, development and introduction for new research and technical approaches, reliability of building structures, account of human factor during operation of industrial facilities, etc. were submitted. By and large, participants to the conference supported construction for facilities necessary for regional economy upsurge like the Rostov NPP, on condition of high-quality construction and safe operation [ru

Evaluation by the Department de Surete Nucleaire of unsolved PWR safety problems

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Dupuis, M.C.; Cayol, A.; Fourest, B.

1980-04-01

The deterministic or probabilistic methods of safety analysis and the analysis of accidents used at the design and construction stage have enabled certain safety problems connected with the PWR programme in France to be identified. Some of these problems have already been stressed by the NRC whereas others are specific to the safety approach practised in France. These problems have led to the adoption of special measurements on the reactors already in operation and should be accounted for in the design of future installations. Analysis of running experience and of incidents should be used to check the validity of the steps taken at the design stage and to identify the weak points of the facilities, especially in their piloting and at the man-machine interface [fr

Environmental problems related to winter traffic safety conditions

OpenAIRE

Hääl, Maire-Liis; Sürje, Peep

2006-01-01

The changeable Nordic climate has added problems to road maintenance and the environment to ensure traffic safety under winter conditions. The widespread use of salt (NaCl) for snow and ice removal from roads has resulted in environmental impacts in many areas. Some of the problems associated with the use of NaCl are the corrosion of bridges, road surfaces and vehicles and damage to roadside vegetation and aquatic system that are affected by water from de-iced roads. Accumulation of hard meta...

Contribution of maintainability and maintenance to problems of safety evaluation

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Adnot, Serge; Meriaux, Pierre.

1977-10-01

A method has been developed for defining the contribution of Maintainability and the Maintenance Studies to Safety evaluation problems. The efficiency of this method is shown and results obtained are given for two theoretical examples approximating reality. For repairable systems, the risk defined according to such given safety criterion, becomes a characteristic of the systems in operation [fr

Problems of making decisions with account of risk and safety factors

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Larichev, O I

1987-01-01

New trends in making decisions on accidents when using large-scale technologies-NPPs, chemical plants etc., are considered. Three main directions in the investigations in this field are distinguished. One of them consists in risk measuring (its perception by people, ways of its quantitative determination). The second direction consists in increasing the safety of large-scale production systems. Here the following questions are considered: risk assessment (the safety standard statement), site selection for new systems, man-machine interaction problems, development of safer technologies, cost benefit safety analysis. The third direction is connected with the problem of accidents and their analysis. This direction includes considering the reasons and process of the accident development, preparing for the possible accidents, monitoring under extreme conditions, accident effect analysis.

Problems of making decisions with account of risk and safety factors

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Larichev, O.I.

1987-01-01

New trends in making decisions on accidents when using large-scale technologies-NPPs, chemical plants etc., are considered. Three main directions in the investigations in this field are distinguished. One of them consists in risk measuring (its perception by people, ways of its quantitative determination). The second direction consists in increasing the safety of large-scale production systems. Here the following questions are considered: risk assessment (the safety standard statement), site selection for new systems, man-machine interaction problems, development of safer technologies, cost benefit safety analysis. The third direction is connected with the problem of accidents and their analysis. This direction includes considering the reasons and process of the accident development, preparing for the possible accidents, monitoring under extreme conditions, accident effect analysis

Safety of superconducting fusion magnets: twelve problem areas

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Turner, L.R.

1979-05-01

Twelve problem areas of superconducting magnets for fusion reaction are described. These are: Quench Detection and Energy Dump, Stationary Normal Region of Conductor, Current Leads, Electrical Arcing, Electrical Shorts, Conductor Joints, Forces from Unequal Currents, Eddy Current Effects, Cryostat Rupture, Vacuum Failure, Fringing Field and Instrumentation for Safety. Each is described under the five categories: Identification and Definition, Possible Safety Effects, Current Practice, Adequacy of Current Practice for Fusion Magnets and Areas Requiring Further Analytical and Experimental Study. Priorities among these areas are suggested; application is made to the Large Coil Project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Safety and environmental aspects of heavy water production (Paper No. 4.1)

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Singh, Mohinder

1992-01-01

Different processes are utilised for heavy water production in the heavy water plants in India. H 2 S is used in large quantities as carrier gas to extract deuterium content from water. The safe handling of such large quantities of H 2 S gas poses a major problem because of its toxicity, high corrosive nature and high flammability. Handling of large quantities of synthesis gas in ammonia based plants at high pressure and temperature poses a major problem because it is a mixture of hydrogen and nitrogen. H 2 is highly inflammable and explosive when mixed with air or oxygen. All the safety aspects considered while designing, fabricating, constructing and operating the plants are described. (author). 5 tabs

Probability and uncertainty in nuclear safety decisions

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Pate-Cornell, M.E.

1986-01-01

In this paper, we examine some problems posed by the use of probabilities in Nuclear Safety decisions. We discuss some of the theoretical difficulties due to the collective nature of regulatory decisions, and, in particular, the calibration and the aggregation of risk information (e.g., experts opinions). We argue that, if one chooses numerical safety goals as a regulatory basis, one can reduce the constraints to an individual safety goal and a cost-benefit criterion. We show the relevance of risk uncertainties in this kind of regulatory framework. We conclude that, whereas expected values of future failure frequencies are adequate to show compliance with economic constraints, the use of a fractile (e.g., 95%) to be specified by the regulatory agency is justified to treat hazard uncertainties for the individual safety goal. (orig.)

Media-safety of children as important social-pedagogical problem of modern times

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yuliia Semeniako

2017-02-01

Full Text Available In the article the relevance of media-safety as a socio-pedagogical problems. The introduction of media education in the practice of work of preschool educational institutions, the author identified as one of the strategies for overcoming negative influences of media on the younger generation. The concept of “information security”, “pre-school media education”, “media informational security” and identified the main tasks of media education  at the present stage in Ukraine. Determined main problems, the overcoming of which may provide media-safety of preschoolers.Key words: media education, media-safety media, information and communication technology, information security.

Plant Operations. OSHA on Campus: Campus Safety Officers Discuss Problems and Potentials

Science.gov (United States)

Kuchta, Joseph F.; And Others

1973-01-01

The Occupation Safety and Health Act (OSHA) has presented campus safety officers with new problems, but it is also offering them new potentials, which were explored at the recent national conference on Campus Security. (Editor)

Point Cloud Based Relative Pose Estimation of a Satellite in Close Range

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Lujiang Liu

2016-06-01

Full Text Available Determination of the relative pose of satellites is essential in space rendezvous operations and on-orbit servicing missions. The key problems are the adoption of suitable sensor on board of a chaser and efficient techniques for pose estimation. This paper aims to estimate the pose of a target satellite in close range on the basis of its known model by using point cloud data generated by a flash LIDAR sensor. A novel model based pose estimation method is proposed; it includes a fast and reliable pose initial acquisition method based on global optimal searching by processing the dense point cloud data directly, and a pose tracking method based on Iterative Closest Point algorithm. Also, a simulation system is presented in this paper in order to evaluate the performance of the sensor and generate simulated sensor point cloud data. It also provides truth pose of the test target so that the pose estimation error can be quantified. To investigate the effectiveness of the proposed approach and achievable pose accuracy, numerical simulation experiments are performed; results demonstrate algorithm capability of operating with point cloud directly and large pose variations. Also, a field testing experiment is conducted and results show that the proposed method is effective.

Yoga Poses Increase Subjective Energy and State Self-Esteem in Comparison to 'Power Poses'.

Science.gov (United States)

Golec de Zavala, Agnieszka; Lantos, Dorottya; Bowden, Deborah

2017-01-01

Research on beneficial consequences of yoga focuses on the effects of yogic breathing and meditation. Less is known about the psychological effects of performing yoga postures. The present study investigated the effects of yoga poses on subjective sense of energy and self-esteem. The effects of yoga postures were compared to the effects of 'power poses,' which arguably increase the sense of power and self-confidence due to their association with interpersonal dominance (Carney et al., 2010). The study tested the novel prediction that yoga poses, which are not associated with interpersonal dominance but increase bodily energy, would increase the subjective feeling of energy and therefore increase self-esteem compared to 'high power' and 'low power' poses. A two factorial, between participants design was employed. Participants performed either two standing yoga poses with open front of the body ( n = 19), two standing yoga poses with covered front of the body ( n = 22), two expansive, high power poses ( n = 21), or two constrictive, low power poses ( n = 20) for 1-min each. The results showed that yoga poses in comparison to 'power poses' increased self-esteem. This effect was mediated by an increased subjective sense of energy and was observed when baseline trait self-esteem was controlled for. These results suggest that the effects of performing open, expansive body postures may be driven by processes other than the poses' association with interpersonal power and dominance. This study demonstrates that positive effects of yoga practice can occur after performing yoga poses for only 2 min.

Safety of superconducting fusion magnets: twelve problem areas

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Turner, L.R.

1979-01-01

Twelve problem areas of superconducting magnets for fusion reaction are described. These are: quench detection and energy dump, stationary normal region of conductor, current leads, electrical arcing, electrical shorts, conductor joints, forces from unequal currents, eddy current effects, cryostat rupture, vacuum failure, fringing field and instrumentation for safety. Priorities among these areas are suggested

Safety of superconducting fusion magnets: twelve problem areas

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Turner, L.R.

1979-01-01

Twelve problem areas of superconducting magnets for fusion reaction are described. These are: Quench Detection and Energy Dump, Stationary Normal Region of Conductor, Current Leads, Electrical Arcing, Electrical Shorts, Conductor Joints, Forces from Unequal Currents, Eddy Current Effects, Cryostat Rupture, Vacuum Failure, Fringing Field and Instrumentation for Safety. Priorities among these areas are suggested

Perspective projection for variance pose face recognition from camera calibration

Science.gov (United States)

Fakhir, M. M.; Woo, W. L.; Chambers, J. A.; Dlay, S. S.

2016-04-01

Variance pose is an important research topic in face recognition. The alteration of distance parameters across variance pose face features is a challenging. We provide a solution for this problem using perspective projection for variance pose face recognition. Our method infers intrinsic camera parameters of the image which enable the projection of the image plane into 3D. After this, face box tracking and centre of eyes detection can be identified using our novel technique to verify the virtual face feature measurements. The coordinate system of the perspective projection for face tracking allows the holistic dimensions for the face to be fixed in different orientations. The training of frontal images and the rest of the poses on FERET database determine the distance from the centre of eyes to the corner of box face. The recognition system compares the gallery of images against different poses. The system initially utilises information on position of both eyes then focuses principally on closest eye in order to gather data with greater reliability. Differentiation between the distances and position of the right and left eyes is a unique feature of our work with our algorithm outperforming other state of the art algorithms thus enabling stable measurement in variance pose for each individual.

Multi-Task Convolutional Neural Network for Pose-Invariant Face Recognition

Science.gov (United States)

Yin, Xi; Liu, Xiaoming

2018-02-01

This paper explores multi-task learning (MTL) for face recognition. We answer the questions of how and why MTL can improve the face recognition performance. First, we propose a multi-task Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for face recognition where identity classification is the main task and pose, illumination, and expression estimations are the side tasks. Second, we develop a dynamic-weighting scheme to automatically assign the loss weight to each side task, which is a crucial problem in MTL. Third, we propose a pose-directed multi-task CNN by grouping different poses to learn pose-specific identity features, simultaneously across all poses. Last but not least, we propose an energy-based weight analysis method to explore how CNN-based MTL works. We observe that the side tasks serve as regularizations to disentangle the variations from the learnt identity features. Extensive experiments on the entire Multi-PIE dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work using all data in Multi-PIE for face recognition. Our approach is also applicable to in-the-wild datasets for pose-invariant face recognition and achieves comparable or better performance than state of the art on LFW, CFP, and IJB-A datasets.

Retrieval of LAI and leaf chlorophyll content from remote sensing data by agronomy mechanism knowledge to solve the ill-posed inverse problem

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Zhenhai; Nie, Chenwei; Yang, Guijun; Xu, Xingang; Jin, Xiuliang; Gu, Xiaohe

2014-10-01

Leaf area index (LAI) and LCC, as the two most important crop growth variables, are major considerations in management decisions, agricultural planning and policy making. Estimation of canopy biophysical variables from remote sensing data was investigated using a radiative transfer model. However, the ill-posed problem is unavoidable for the unique solution of the inverse problem and the uncertainty of measurements and model assumptions. This study focused on the use of agronomy mechanism knowledge to restrict and remove the ill-posed inversion results. For this purpose, the inversion results obtained using the PROSAIL model alone (NAMK) and linked with agronomic mechanism knowledge (AMK) were compared. The results showed that AMK did not significantly improve the accuracy of LAI inversion. LAI was estimated with high accuracy, and there was no significant improvement after considering AMK. The validation results of the determination coefficient (R2) and the corresponding root mean square error (RMSE) between measured LAI and estimated LAI were 0.635 and 1.022 for NAMK, and 0.637 and 0.999 for AMK, respectively. LCC estimation was significantly improved with agronomy mechanism knowledge; the R2 and RMSE values were 0.377 and 14.495 μg cm-2 for NAMK, and 0.503 and 10.661 μg cm-2 for AMK, respectively. Results of the comparison demonstrated the need for agronomy mechanism knowledge in radiative transfer model inversion.

Flightdeck Automation Problems (FLAP) Model for Safety Technology Portfolio Assessment

Science.gov (United States)

Ancel, Ersin; Shih, Ann T.

2014-01-01

NASA's Aviation Safety Program (AvSP) develops and advances methodologies and technologies to improve air transportation safety. The Safety Analysis and Integration Team (SAIT) conducts a safety technology portfolio assessment (PA) to analyze the program content, to examine the benefits and risks of products with respect to program goals, and to support programmatic decision making. The PA process includes systematic identification of current and future safety risks as well as tracking several quantitative and qualitative metrics to ensure the program goals are addressing prominent safety risks accurately and effectively. One of the metrics within the PA process involves using quantitative aviation safety models to gauge the impact of the safety products. This paper demonstrates the role of aviation safety modeling by providing model outputs and evaluating a sample of portfolio elements using the Flightdeck Automation Problems (FLAP) model. The model enables not only ranking of the quantitative relative risk reduction impact of all portfolio elements, but also highlighting the areas with high potential impact via sensitivity and gap analyses in support of the program office. Although the model outputs are preliminary and products are notional, the process shown in this paper is essential to a comprehensive PA of NASA's safety products in the current program and future programs/projects.

Safety problems, symptomatic oriented accident regulations, influence of nuclear energetic on ecology of the Slovak Republic

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Palenikova, M.

2002-01-01

IAEA initiated in 1990 the program on help of the countries of Eastern Europe and of the former Soviet Union at evaluating of the safety of their first generation nuclear power reactors of the type WWER 440/223. The main aim of this program was to identify the main design and operational safety problems, to determine international consensus on priorities of safety improvements, to provide the help in the assessment of completeness and adequacy of programs of safety improvements: What are the safety problems; What is the safety importance of problems; What is done for prevention from damage of nuclear power plant; and of three barriers: the tasks MOD V-2 NPP; What is done for reducing of damage consequences; PHP, PASS (post-accidental directives and post-accidental monitoring). (author)

The main chemical safety problems in main process of nuclear fuel reprocessing plant

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Song Fengli; Zhao Shangui; Liu Xinhua; Zhang Chunlong; Lu Dan; Liu Yuntao; Yang Xiaowei; Wang Shijun

2014-01-01

There are many chemical reactions in the aqueous process of nuclear fuel reprocessing. The reaction conditions and the products are different so that the chemical safety problems are different. In the paper the chemical reactions in the aqueous process of nuclear fuel reprocessing are described and the main chemical safety problems are analyzed. The reference is offered to the design and accident analysis of the nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. (authors)

Heavy metals contamination: implications for health and food safety

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yulieth C. Reyes

2016-07-01

Full Text Available Contamination by heavy metals in water resources, soil and air poses one of the most severe problems that compromise food safety and public health at global and local level. In this review, the specific problem of contamination by mercury (Hg, arsenic (As, cadmium (Cd and lead (Pb in the environment and food is presented. A description of the sources of contamination, exposure in living beings, accumulation and retention in food and consumer products is carried out. Study cases and results in some countries included Colombia are discussed.

Criticality Safety Problems Related to Storage of Highly Active Liquid Waste

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Amin, E.

1999-01-01

The geometries of liquid waste storage tanks are not generally safe against criticality. Normally, this does not cause problems as fissile materials exist in nitric acid solution only as depleted uranium or in insignificant concentration of the originally reprocessed inventory of plutonium. However, if sedimentation of solid particles would occur, the deposited material would cause criticality safety problems. Particularly, non-horizontal installation of the storage tanks would increase the Eigen value. The effect of the storage tank inclination and the presence of transplutonium elements on the criticality safety are investigated using the NCNSRC code packages. The results are compared well with a similar German published results

Safety and problems in using radioactive drugs in hospitals

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Arimizu, Noboru

1975-01-01

The safety and the control problem of non-closed RI (radiopharmaceuticals) of which use has rapidly been increased, were studied. At present, the hospitals with an independent clinic for the nuclear medicine are very limited and many doctors, nurses and safety controllers who are working in the clinic belong to other clinics. As for the diagnosis using RI examination, the dangers of the persons who are working with radioimmunoassay, especially using Au-antigen kit were studied. Furthermore, the problems concerning the reduction of exposure dose by the use of a short half-life RI, such as sup(99m)Tc and the dangers of external exposure on the persons who use the isotope were studied. In addition, the control of RI ward for RI therapy was discussed. The author considered the specialization and fixation of doctors, nurses and technicians are becoming of necessity with the advancement of RI therapy. In addition, the necessity of training nurses for the nuclear medicine was insisted on. (Tsukamoto, Y.)

Safety and problems in using radioactive drugs in hospitals

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Arimizu, N [National Inst. of Radiological Sciences, Chiba (Japan)

1975-01-01

The safety and the control problem of non-closed RI (radiopharmaceuticals) of which use has rapidly been increased, were studied. At present, the hospitals with an independent clinic for the nuclear medicine are very limited and many doctors, nurses and safety controllers who are working in the clinic belong to other clinics. As for the diagnosis using RI examination, the dangers of the persons who are working with radioimmunoassay, especially using Au-antigen kit were studied. Furthermore, the problems concerning the reduction of exposure dose by the use of a short half-life RI, such as sup(99m)Tc and the dangers of external exposure on the persons who use the isotope were studied. In addition, the control of RI ward for RI therapy was discussed. The author considered the specialization and fixation of doctors, nurses and technicians are becoming of necessity with the advancement of RI therapy. In addition, the necessity of training nurses for the nuclear medicine was insisted on.

Problems of nuclear reactor safety. Vol. 1; Problemy bezopasnosti yaderno-ehnergeticheskikh ustanovok. Tom 1

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Shal` nov, A V [Moskovskij Inzhenerno-Fizicheskij Inst., Moscow (Russian Federation)

1996-12-31

Proceedings of the 9. Topical Meeting `Problems of nuclear reactor safety` are presented. Papers include results of studies and developments associated with methods of calculation and complex computerized simulation for stationary and transient processes in nuclear power plants. Main problems of reactor safety are discussed as well as rector accidents on operating NPP`s are analyzed.

Full Body Pose Estimation During Occlusion using Multiple Cameras

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Fihl, Preben; Cosar, Serhan

people is a very challenging problem for methods based on pictorials structure as for any other monocular pose estimation method. In this report we present work on a multi-view approach based on pictorial structures that integrate low level information from multiple calibrated cameras to improve the 2D...

PROBLEMS OF APPLYING FIXED FORMULAE TO SAFETY CRITERIA AND SITE SELECTION

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Davis, W. K.

1963-10-15

The problem of developing a formula or calculation procedure for that could more-or-less automatically indicate whether or not a nuclear plant would be considered safe at a particular location is discussed. The difficulties and impossibilities of any sach formula for making decisions on siting and safety involving large amounts of money and public safety are considered. (P.C.H.)

Key Problems of Fire Safety Enforcement in Traffic and Communication Centers (TCC)

Science.gov (United States)

Medyanik, M.; Zosimova, O.

2017-10-01

A Traffic and Communication Center (TCC) means facilities designed and used to distribute and redirect flows of humans and motor vehicles while they get serviced and operate. This paper sets forth the basic problems of fire safety enforcement on the TCC, and the causes that slow down human and vehicle traffic speeds. It proposes ways to solve the problems of fire safety enforcement on the TCC, in the Russian Federation and elsewhere. Engineering solutions are proposed for TCC design, with key outlooks of TCC future development as an alternative way to organize access in transportation.

3D Facial Landmarking under Expression, Pose, and Occlusion Variations

NARCIS (Netherlands)

H. Dibeklioğ lu; A.A. Salah (Albert Ali); L. Akarun

2008-01-01

htmlabstractAutomatic localization of 3D facial features is important for face recognition, tracking, modeling and expression analysis. Methods developed for 2D images were shown to have problems working across databases acquired with different illumination conditions. Expression variations, pose

Mixed gradient-Tikhonov methods for solving nonlinear ill-posed problems in Banach spaces

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Margotti, Fábio

2016-01-01

Tikhonov regularization is a very useful and widely used method for finding stable solutions of ill-posed problems. A good choice of the penalization functional as well as a careful selection of the topologies of the involved spaces is fundamental to the quality of the reconstructions. These choices can be combined with some a priori information about the solution in order to preserve desired characteristics like sparsity constraints for example. To prove convergence and stability properties of this method, one usually has to assume that a minimizer of the Tikhonov functional is known. In practical situations however, the exact computation of a minimizer is very difficult and even finding an approximation can be a very challenging and expensive task if the involved spaces have poor convexity or smoothness properties. In this paper we propose a method to attenuate this gap between theory and practice, applying a gradient-like method to a Tikhonov functional in order to approximate a minimizer. Using only available information, we explicitly calculate a maximal step-size which ensures a monotonically decreasing error. The resulting algorithm performs only finitely many steps and terminates using the discrepancy principle. In particular the knowledge of a minimizer or even its existence does not need to be assumed. Under standard assumptions, we prove convergence and stability results in relatively general Banach spaces, and subsequently, test its performance numerically, reconstructing conductivities with sparsely located inclusions and different kinds of noise in the 2D electrical impedance tomography. (paper)

Risks posed by large seismic events in the gold mining districts of South Africa

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Durrheim, RJ

2011-01-01

Full Text Available buildings are considered vulnerable to damage by large seismic events, posing safety and financial risks. It is recommended that an earthquake engineer inspect the building stock and review the content and enforcement of building codes. Appropriate training...

Safety problems of nuclear power plants with channel-type graphite boiling water reactors

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Emel'yanov, I.Ya.; Vasilevskij, V.P.; Volkov, V.P.; Gavrilov, P.A.; Kramerov, A.Ya.; Kuznetsov, S.P.; Kunegin, E.P.; Rybakov, N.Z.

1977-01-01

Construction of nuclear power plants in a highly populated region near large industrial centres necessitates to pay a special attention to their nuclear and radiation safety. Safety problems of nuclear reactor operation are discussed, in particular, they are: reliable stoppage of fission chain reaction at any emergency cases; reliable core cooling with failure of various equipment; emergency core cooling with breached pipes of a circulating circuit; and prevention of radioactive coolant release outside the nuclear power plant in amount exceeding the values adopted. Channel-type water boiling reactors incorporate specific features requiring a new approach to safety operation of a reactor and a nuclear power plant. These include primarily a rather large steam volume in the coolant circuit, large amount of accumulated heat, void reactivity coefficient. Channel-type reactors characterized by fair neutron balance and flexible fuel cycle, have a series of advantages alleviating the problem of ensuring their safety. The possibility of reliable control over the state of each channel allows to replace failed fuel elements by the new ones, when operating on-load, to increase the number of circulating loops and reduce the diameter of main pipelines, simplifies significantly the problem of channel emergency cooling and localization of a radioactive coolant release from a breached circuit. The concept of channel-type reactors is based on the solution of three main problems. First, plant safety should be assured in emergency switch off of separate units and, if possible, energy conditions should be maintained, this is of particular importance considering the increase in unit power. Second, the system of safety and emergency cooling should eliminate a great many failures of fuel elements in case of potential breaches of any tube in the circulating circuit. Finally, rugged boxes and localizing devices should be provided to exclude damage of structural elements of the nuclear power

Impact of Y2K problem on physical protection system

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kumar, R.; Swadia, N.S.; Zanwar, P.S.; Mishra, G.P.; Salunke, A.S.; Nigam, R.K.

1999-01-01

Year 2000 related system failures/problems in Physical Protection System pose no threat to general safety and functioning of any nuclear facility. But there can be potential security threats having radiation safety and non-proliferation concern and hence should be given due importance. Reviewing and testing Physical Protection System for Y2K compliance are easier than other systems as it does not directly affect operation of the plant. The existing emergency response capability at the nuclear facilities should be utilizes effectively to mitigate any Y2K induced events on Physical Protection System with dedicated manpower and channeled efforts

Nurses' perceptions and problems in the usability of a medication safety app.

Science.gov (United States)

Ankem, Kalyani; Cho, Sookyung; Simpson, Diana

2017-10-16

The majority of medication apps support medication adherence. Equally, if not more important, is medication safety. Few apps report on medication safety, and fewer studies have been conducted with these apps. The usability of a medication safety app was tested with nurses to reveal their perceptions of the graphical user interface and to discover problems they encountered in using the app. Usability testing of the app was conducted with RN-BSN students and informatics students (n = 18). Perceptions of the graphical components were gathered in pretest and posttest questionnaires, and video recordings of the usability testing were transcribed. The significance of the difference in mean performance time for 8 tasks was tested, and qualitative analysis was deployed to identify problems encountered and to rate the severity of each problem. While all participants perceived the graphical user interface as easy to understand, nurses took significantly more time to complete certain tasks. More nurses found the medication app to be lacking in intuitiveness of user interface design, in capability to match real-world data, and in providing optimal information architecture. To successfully integrate mobile devices in healthcare, developers must address the problems that nurses encountered in use of the app.

Public opinion confronted by the safety problems associated with different energy source

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Otway, H J; Thomas, K

1978-09-01

Model study of public opinion 'for' and 'against' the various energy sources - oil, coal, solar and nuclear power. Attitudes are examined from four aspects: psychology - economic advantages, sociopolitical problems, environmental problems and safety. The investigation focuses on nuclear energy. (13 refs.) (In French)

Problems posed by the model of bipolar transistor used and the measurement of the parameters associated in the IMAG.1 program

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Imbrechts, Claude; Le Ber, Jacques

1969-02-01

The IMAG-1 program uses, for diodes and transistors, bipolar models of the Ebers and Moll modified type. This model is already used in the US NET.1 program. The object of this paper is essentially to pose the problem of the measurement of the parameters associated with the Ebers and Moll model. However, the authors' ambition is not to solve it but to attract attention to the need to speak the same language to define the model, the methods of measuring the associated parameters and their dispersions in order to better appreciate inaccuracies due to the model's approximations

An Improved Method of Pose Estimation for Lighthouse Base Station Extension.

Science.gov (United States)

Yang, Yi; Weng, Dongdong; Li, Dong; Xun, Hang

2017-10-22

In 2015, HTC and Valve launched a virtual reality headset empowered with Lighthouse, the cutting-edge space positioning technology. Although Lighthouse is superior in terms of accuracy, latency and refresh rate, its algorithms do not support base station expansion, and is flawed concerning occlusion in moving targets, that is, it is unable to calculate their poses with a small set of sensors, resulting in the loss of optical tracking data. In view of these problems, this paper proposes an improved pose estimation algorithm for cases where occlusion is involved. Our algorithm calculates the pose of a given object with a unified dataset comprising of inputs from sensors recognized by all base stations, as long as three or more sensors detect a signal in total, no matter from which base station. To verify our algorithm, HTC official base stations and autonomous developed receivers are used for prototyping. The experiment result shows that our pose calculation algorithm can achieve precise positioning when a few sensors detect the signal.

Potential problems will drillstring safety valves

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

NONE

1996-06-01

In the paper titled ``New generation drill string safety valves,`` presented at the IADC Well Control Conference for Europe, Aberdeen, May 22--24, 1996, documented limitations of presently available drillstring safety valves commonly used as kelly valves and stabbing valves were presented, and industry efforts to develop solutions to these problems were described. Authors of the paper are B.A. Tarr and R.A. Sukup (Mobil E and P Technology Center, Dallas), Dr. R. Luy (ITE, Clausthal, Germany), G. Rabby (Hi-Kalibre, Edmonton, Alberta) and J. Mertsch (ITAG, Celle, Germany). In 1995, the Task Group developed a draft of a new spec, and a DSSV testing program was initiated as a joint industry project, with the Gas Research Institute (GRI) as the major sponsor. Two manufacturers, Hi-Kalibre and ITAG, agreed to build new valves for the testing program. Hi-Kalibre, Edmonton, Alberta, supplied an already-commercial twin floating ball valve for November 1995 testing. This product is being used by Tesco in its portable top drive system. ITAG of Germany supplied a radically improved DSSV design, which was tested in December, and was to be retested in May following modifications.

Pose Self-Calibration of Stereo Vision Systems for Autonomous Vehicle Applications.

Science.gov (United States)

Musleh, Basam; Martín, David; Armingol, José María; de la Escalera, Arturo

2016-09-14

Nowadays, intelligent systems applied to vehicles have grown very rapidly; their goal is not only the improvement of safety, but also making autonomous driving possible. Many of these intelligent systems are based on making use of computer vision in order to know the environment and act accordingly. It is of great importance to be able to estimate the pose of the vision system because the measurement matching between the perception system (pixels) and the vehicle environment (meters) depends on the relative position between the perception system and the environment. A new method of camera pose estimation for stereo systems is presented in this paper, whose main contribution regarding the state of the art on the subject is the estimation of the pitch angle without being affected by the roll angle. The validation of the self-calibration method is accomplished by comparing it with relevant methods of camera pose estimation, where a synthetic sequence is used in order to measure the continuous error with a ground truth. This validation is enriched by the experimental results of the method in real traffic environments.

Pose Self-Calibration of Stereo Vision Systems for Autonomous Vehicle Applications

Science.gov (United States)

Musleh, Basam; Martín, David; Armingol, José María; de la Escalera, Arturo

2016-01-01

Nowadays, intelligent systems applied to vehicles have grown very rapidly; their goal is not only the improvement of safety, but also making autonomous driving possible. Many of these intelligent systems are based on making use of computer vision in order to know the environment and act accordingly. It is of great importance to be able to estimate the pose of the vision system because the measurement matching between the perception system (pixels) and the vehicle environment (meters) depends on the relative position between the perception system and the environment. A new method of camera pose estimation for stereo systems is presented in this paper, whose main contribution regarding the state of the art on the subject is the estimation of the pitch angle without being affected by the roll angle. The validation of the self-calibration method is accomplished by comparing it with relevant methods of camera pose estimation, where a synthetic sequence is used in order to measure the continuous error with a ground truth. This validation is enriched by the experimental results of the method in real traffic environments. PMID:27649178

Abstract Cauchy problems three approaches

CERN Document Server

Melnikova, Irina V

2001-01-01

Although the theory of well-posed Cauchy problems is reasonably understood, ill-posed problems-involved in a numerous mathematical models in physics, engineering, and finance- can be approached in a variety of ways. Historically, there have been three major strategies for dealing with such problems: semigroup, abstract distribution, and regularization methods. Semigroup and distribution methods restore well-posedness, in a modern weak sense. Regularization methods provide approximate solutions to ill-posed problems. Although these approaches were extensively developed over the last decades by many researchers, nowhere could one find a comprehensive treatment of all three approaches.Abstract Cauchy Problems: Three Approaches provides an innovative, self-contained account of these methods and, furthermore, demonstrates and studies some of the profound connections between them. The authors discuss the application of different methods not only to the Cauchy problem that is not well-posed in the classical sense, b...

Health IT for Patient Safety and Improving the Safety of Health IT.

Science.gov (United States)

Magrabi, Farah; Ong, Mei-Sing; Coiera, Enrico

2016-01-01

Alongside their benefits health IT applications can pose new risks to patient safety. Problems with IT have been linked to many different types of clinical errors including prescribing and administration of medications; as well as wrong-patient, wrong-site errors, and delays in procedures. There is also growing concern about the risks of data breach and cyber-security. IT-related clinical errors have their origins in processes undertaken to design, build, implement and use software systems in a broader sociotechnical context. Safety can be improved with greater standardization of clinical software and by improving the quality of processes at different points in the technology life cycle, spanning design, build, implementation and use in clinical settings. Oversight processes can be set up at a regional or national level to ensure that clinical software systems meet specific standards. Certification and regulation are two mechanisms to improve oversight. In the absence of clear standards, guidelines are useful to promote safe design and implementation practices. Processes to identify and mitigate hazards can be formalised via a safety management system. Minimizing new patient safety risks is critical to realizing the benefits of IT.

Observation problems posed for the Klein-Gordon equation

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

András Szijártó

2012-01-01

Sufficient conditions are obtained that guarantee the solvability of each of four observation problems with given state functions $f, \\ g$ at two distinct time instants $-\\inftyproblem, and the representability of $t_2-t_1$ as a rational multiple of $\\frac{2l}{a}$. The reconstruction of the unknown initial data $(u(x,0, u_t(x,0$ as the elements of $D^{s+1}(0,l \\times D^s(0,l$ are given by means of the method of Fourier expansions.

Safety report on WWR-S reactor

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Horyna, J.; Kaisler, L.; Listik, E.

1981-04-01

The present Safety Report of the WWR-S reactor summarizes findings obtained during the trial and partially also permanent operation of the reactor after two stages of its reconstruction implemented between 1974 and 1976. Most data are presented necessary for assessing probable risks of possible accident conditions whose consequences pose health hazards to individuals of the population, radiation personnel and the facilities themselves. Attention is devoted to the description of the locality, to components and systems, heat removal from the core, design aspects, the quality of new and old parts of the technological circuits, the systems of protection and control, the emergency core cooling system, the problems of radiation safety, and to the safety analyses of the abnormal states envisaged. The Report was compiled with regard to IAEA and CMEA recommendations concerning safe operation of research reactors and to the recommendations and binding decisions of the Czechoslovak Atomic Energy Commission. (author)

Safety problems relating to plutonium recycling in light water reactors

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Devillers, C.; Frison, J.M.; Mercier, J.P.; Revais, J.P.

1991-01-01

This paper describes the specific nature, as regards safety, of the mixed oxide (MOX) fuel cycle, with the exception of safety problems relating to the operation of nuclear power plants. These specific characteristics are due mainly to the presence of plutonium in fresh fuel and to the higher plutonium and transuranic element content in spent fuel assemblies. The fuel cycle steps analysed here are the transport of plutonium oxide, the manufacture of MOX fuel assemblies, the transport of fresh and spent fuel assemblies and the processing of spent fuel assemblies

Safety problems relating to plutonium recycling in light water reactors

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Devillers, C.; Frison, J.M.; Mercier, J.P.; Revais, J.P

1991-01-01

This paper describes the specific nature, as regards safety, of the mixed oxide (MOX) fuel cycle, with the exception of safety problems relating to the operation of nuclear power plants. These specific characteristics are due mainly to the presence of plutonium in fresh fuel and to the higher plutonium and transuranic element content in spent fuel assemblies. The fuel cycle steps analysed here are the transport of plutonium oxide, the manufacture of MOX fuel assemblies, the transport of fresh and spent fuel assemblies and the processing of spent fuel assemblies. (author) [fr

30-th anniversary of nuclear power engineering in the USSR. Safety problems of nuclear engineering

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kulov, E.V.; Sidorenko, V.A.; Kovalevich, O.M.

1984-01-01

The problems of safety and protection of personnel, population and environments from the NPP radiation effect in the Soviet Union in cases of possible accidents and in the course of normal operation are discussed. The problem of safety assurance includes scientific technological and organizational aspects. The necessity of accounting the ''national factor'' in the form of a possible NPP location, existing legislation experience gained, etc. is noted. The main trends in ensuring safety are a high quality of equipment manufacturing and assembly, quality control of equipment at all stages of operation, development and realization of efficient protective measures and devices, assurance of safety precautions at all stages of designing equipment production, NPP operation and maintenance, functioning of the system of state control of NPP safety assurance. The skill and training of personnel are necessary prerequisite for ensuring safety of nuclear power plants

Patient safety problem identification and solution sharing among rural community pharmacists.

Science.gov (United States)

Galt, Kimberly A; Fuji, Kevin T; Faber, Jennifer

2013-01-01

To implement a communication network for safety problem identification and solution sharing among rural community pharmacists and to report participating pharmacists' perceived value and impact of the network on patient safety after 1 year of implementation. Action research study. Rural community pharmacies in Nebraska from January 2010 to April 2011. Rural community pharmacists who voluntarily agreed to join the Pharmacists for Patient Safety Network in Nebraska. Pharmacists reported errors, near misses, and safety concerns through Web-based event reporting. A rapid feedback process was used to provide patient safety solutions to consider implementing across the network. Qualitative interviews were conducted 1 year after program implementation with participating pharmacists to assess use of the reporting system, value of the disseminated safety solutions, and perceived impact on patient safety in pharmacies. 30 of 38 pharmacists participating in the project completed the interviews. The communication network improved pharmacist awareness, promoted open discussion and knowledge sharing, contributed to practice vigilance, and led to incorporation of proactive safety prevention practices. Despite low participation in error and near-miss reporting, a dynamic communication network designed to rapidly disseminate evidence-based patient safety strategies to reduce risk was valued and effective at improving patient safety practices in rural community pharmacies.

Safety management in multiemployer worksites in the manufacturing industry: opinions on co-operation and problems encountered.

Science.gov (United States)

Nenonen, Sanna; Vasara, Juha

2013-01-01

Co-operation between different parties and effective safety management play an important role in ensuring safety in multiemployer worksites. This article reviews safety co-operation and factors complicating safety management in Finnish multiemployer manufacturing worksites. The paper focuses on the service providers' opinions; however, a comparison of the customers' views is also presented. The results show that safety-related co-operation between providers and customers is generally considered as successful but strongly dependent on the partner. Safety co-operation is provided through, e.g., training, orientation and risk analysis. Problems encountered include ensuring adequate communication, identifying hazards, co-ordinating work tasks and determining responsibilities. The providers and the customers encounter similar safety management problems. The results presented in this article can help companies to focus their efforts on the most problematic points of safety management and to avoid common pitfalls.

THE QUALITY OF MATHEMATICAL PROBLEMS - EVALUATION AND SELF-EVALUATION

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Patáková, Eva

2013-09-01

Full Text Available The research presented in the article consists of two parts. Firstly, opinions on mathematical problem quality are explored within four groups of participants (novices, specialists and experts in problem posing; high school students who never posed their own problems. Secondly, self-reflections written by the participants who have some experience in problem posing (novices, specialists and experts are explored and compared with the general view of problem quality received in the first part of the research. The more experienced problem posers have more requirements on problem quality (both as general requirements and within their own work on posing problems. There is a slight decrease in ability to notice important features of mathematical problem quality after the first experience in problem posing. Experts lay stress on mathematical features of the problem whilst novices and specialists more on problem – student interaction.

Pose Space Surface Manipulation

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yusuke Yoshiyasu

2012-01-01

Full Text Available Example-based mesh deformation techniques produce natural and realistic shapes by learning the space of deformations from examples. However, skeleton-based methods cannot manipulate a global mesh structure naturally, whereas the mesh-based approaches based on a translational control do not allow the user to edit a local mesh structure intuitively. This paper presents an example-driven mesh editing framework that achieves both global and local pose manipulations. The proposed system is built with a surface deformation method based on a two-step linear optimization technique and achieves direct manipulations of a model surface using translational and rotational controls. With the translational control, the user can create a model in natural poses easily. The rotational control can adjust the local pose intuitively by bending and twisting. We encode example deformations with a rotation-invariant mesh representation which handles large rotations in examples. To incorporate example deformations, we infer a pose from the handle translations/rotations and perform pose space interpolation, thereby avoiding involved nonlinear optimization. With the two-step linear approach combined with the proposed multiresolution deformation method, we can edit models at interactive rates without losing important deformation effects such as muscle bulging.

When a Problem Is More than a Teacher's Question

Science.gov (United States)

Olson, Jo Clay; Knott, Libby

2013-01-01

Not only are the problems teachers pose throughout their teaching of great importance but also the ways in which they use those problems make this a critical component of teaching. A problem-posing episode includes the problem setup, the statement of the problem, and the follow-up questions. Analysis of problem-posing episodes of precalculus…

Most household waters below the safety limits

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Salonen, L.; Annanmaeki, M.

1994-01-01

According to guidelines published by the Finnish Centre for Radiation and Nuclear Safety, the radiation dose caused by radioactivity in household water shall not exceed 0.5 millisieverts a year. Most of the water distributed by Finnish waterworks meets this safety goal. According to measurements performed to date, only 20-30 small waterworks or water intake plants have exceeded the limit. Radioactivity in excess of the safety goal is almost invariably caused by a high radon concentration. When ingested, radon causes a radiation dose to the organism; the lungs are also affected when radon is released into the air and then inhalated. Privately owned bored wells, however pose a problem, because the radioactivity of water in some Finnish wells is among the highest in the world. If the same 0.5 millisievert limit was also applied to wells bored for private use, the safety goal would be exceeded by more than half of the wells. (orig.)

Statistical Model-Based Face Pose Estimation

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

GE Xinliang; YANG Jie; LI Feng; WANG Huahua

2007-01-01

A robust face pose estimation approach is proposed by using face shape statistical model approach and pose parameters are represented by trigonometric functions. The face shape statistical model is firstly built by analyzing the face shapes from different people under varying poses. The shape alignment is vital in the process of building the statistical model. Then, six trigonometric functions are employed to represent the face pose parameters. Lastly, the mapping function is constructed between face image and face pose by linearly relating different parameters. The proposed approach is able to estimate different face poses using a few face training samples. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate its efficiency and accuracy.

Analysis of general aviation single-pilot IFR incident data obtained from the NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System

Science.gov (United States)

Bergeron, H. P.

1983-01-01

An analysis of incident data obtained from the NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) has been made to determine the problem areas in general aviation single-pilot IFR (SPIFR) operations. The Aviation Safety Reporting System data base is a compilation of voluntary reports of incidents from any person who has observed or been involved in an occurrence which was believed to have posed a threat to flight safety. This paper examines only those reported incidents specifically related to general aviation single-pilot IFR operations. The frequency of occurrence of factors related to the incidents was the criterion used to define significant problem areas and, hence, to suggest where research is needed. The data was cataloged into one of five major problem areas: (1) controller judgment and response problems, (2) pilot judgment and response problems, (3) air traffic control (ATC) intrafacility and interfacility conflicts, (4) ATC and pilot communication problems, and (5) IFR-VFR conflicts. In addition, several points common to all or most of the problems were observed and reported. These included human error, communications, procedures and rules, and work load.

A Few Examples of ISPs Addressing Specific Reactor Safety Problems

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Reocreux, M.

2008-01-01

Four International Standard Problems which were related to safety reactor problems are briefly discussed. ISP-20 (Steam Generator Tube Rupture in DOEL 2) is a unique ISP as it is based on a real incident which occurred in a commercial Power Plant. This ISP clearly illustrated the special problems of an ISP based on a real plant, namely limited access to precise plant data, some lack in the detailed knowledge of sensor behaviour, etc. ISP-26 (ROSA IV-LSTF small break test) was an open ISP. A qualitatively good prediction of the measured events was obtained even if some modelling deficiencies were identified. ISP-27 (BETHSY Exp. 9.1 B) was a blind ISP. All important trends observed during the test were qualitatively calculated by most computer codes. However, some deficiencies in calculating some variables were evident. ISP-33 (PACTEL Natural Circulation) was an exercise with a test facility modelled on the basis of a Russian VVER 440 and with participations from Eastern and Western organisations. ISP-33 was a double-blind exercise. The simulation of some variables caused some problems although they were in principle not too complicated. Post-test calculations demonstrated significant improvements. For all the four ISPs, the influence of the code user was evident and caused some scatter in the results. A specific study was performed in ISP-26 to clarify from where those user effects were coming. The reactor safety problems related to those ISPs are detailed and the specific contribution of the ISPs to bring solutions is discussed.

Gaussian particle filter based pose and motion estimation

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

无

2007-01-01

Determination of relative three-dimensional (3D) position, orientation, and relative motion between two reference frames is an important problem in robotic guidance, manipulation, and assembly as well as in other fields such as photogrammetry.A solution to pose and motion estimation problem that uses two-dimensional (2D) intensity images from a single camera is desirable for real-time applications. The difficulty in performing this measurement is that the process of projecting 3D object features to 2D images is a nonlinear transformation. In this paper, the 3D transformation is modeled as a nonlinear stochastic system with the state estimation providing six degrees-of-freedom motion and position values, using line features in image plane as measuring inputs and dual quaternion to represent both rotation and translation in a unified notation. A filtering method called the Gaussian particle filter (GPF) based on the particle filtering concept is presented for 3D pose and motion estimation of a moving target from monocular image sequences. The method has been implemented with simulated data, and simulation results are provided along with comparisons to the extended Kalman filter (EKF) and the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) to show the relative advantages of the GPF. Simulation results showed that GPF is a superior alternative to EKF and UKF.

Problems of probabilistic safety assessment after Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Sugiyama, Naoki

2011-01-01

Probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) methodology to assure nuclear safety is had great expectations of lessons learned from Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (NPP) accident and on the other hand this accident made actualized technical problems of PSA. Effectiveness of current PSA methodology for risk assessment was confirmed by comparing the accident development with accident scenario of PSA and equipment failure rate. From a viewpoint of nuclear safety objective and defense in depth approach of IAEA, technical problems of PSA were (1) extension of PSA for spent fuel pool and waste disposal system as well as level 3PSA for broader environmental contamination and (2) overlapping of accident scenario of plural unit site, balance of high quality plant management and preceding negation, treatment of uncertainty of external events, severe accident measure and human reliability analysis and reflection of disaster prevention capability to level 3PSA. In order to upgrade PSA technology, six proposals were described for nuclear safety and defense in depth, comprehensive evaluation scope and catch-up of latest technology, necessity of strategic preparation of PSA standard, human resources fostering and risk communication. (T. Tanaka)

Adaptive relative pose control of spacecraft with model couplings and uncertainties

Science.gov (United States)

Sun, Liang; Zheng, Zewei

2018-02-01

The spacecraft pose tracking control problem for an uncertain pursuer approaching to a space target is researched in this paper. After modeling the nonlinearly coupled dynamics for relative translational and rotational motions between two spacecraft, position tracking and attitude synchronization controllers are developed independently by using a robust adaptive control approach. The unknown kinematic couplings, parametric uncertainties, and bounded external disturbances are handled with adaptive updating laws. It is proved via Lyapunov method that the pose tracking errors converge to zero asymptotically. Spacecraft close-range rendezvous and proximity operations are introduced as an example to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control approach.

Generalized railway tank car safety design optimization for hazardous materials transport: Addressing the trade-off between transportation efficiency and safety

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Saat, Mohd Rapik; Barkan, Christopher P.L.

2011-01-01

North America railways offer safe and generally the most economical means of long distance transport of hazardous materials. Nevertheless, in the event of a train accident releases of these materials can pose substantial risk to human health, property or the environment. The majority of railway shipments of hazardous materials are in tank cars. Improving the safety design of these cars to make them more robust in accidents generally increases their weight thereby reducing their capacity and consequent transportation efficiency. This paper presents a generalized tank car safety design optimization model that addresses this tradeoff. The optimization model enables evaluation of each element of tank car safety design, independently and in combination with one another. We present the optimization model by identifying a set of Pareto-optimal solutions for a baseline tank car design in a bicriteria decision problem. This model provides a quantitative framework for a rational decision-making process involving tank car safety design enhancements to reduce the risk of transporting hazardous materials.

Pose Self-Calibration of Stereo Vision Systems for Autonomous Vehicle Applications

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Basam Musleh

2016-09-01

Full Text Available Nowadays, intelligent systems applied to vehicles have grown very rapidly; their goal is not only the improvement of safety, but also making autonomous driving possible. Many of these intelligent systems are based on making use of computer vision in order to know the environment and act accordingly. It is of great importance to be able to estimate the pose of the vision system because the measurement matching between the perception system (pixels and the vehicle environment (meters depends on the relative position between the perception system and the environment. A new method of camera pose estimation for stereo systems is presented in this paper, whose main contribution regarding the state of the art on the subject is the estimation of the pitch angle without being affected by the roll angle. The validation of the self-calibration method is accomplished by comparing it with relevant methods of camera pose estimation, where a synthetic sequence is used in order to measure the continuous error with a ground truth. This validation is enriched by the experimental results of the method in real traffic environments.

Recovering the 3d Pose and Shape of Vehicles from Stereo Images

Science.gov (United States)

Coenen, M.; Rottensteiner, F.; Heipke, C.

2018-05-01

The precise reconstruction and pose estimation of vehicles plays an important role, e.g. for autonomous driving. We tackle this problem on the basis of street level stereo images obtained from a moving vehicle. Starting from initial vehicle detections, we use a deformable vehicle shape prior learned from CAD vehicle data to fully reconstruct the vehicles in 3D and to recover their 3D pose and shape. To fit a deformable vehicle model to each detection by inferring the optimal parameters for pose and shape, we define an energy function leveraging reconstructed 3D data, image information, the vehicle model and derived scene knowledge. To minimise the energy function, we apply a robust model fitting procedure based on iterative Monte Carlo model particle sampling. We evaluate our approach using the object detection and orientation estimation benchmark of the KITTI dataset (Geiger et al., 2012). Our approach can deal with very coarse pose initialisations and we achieve encouraging results with up to 82 % correct pose estimations. Moreover, we are able to deliver very precise orientation estimation results with an average absolute error smaller than 4°.

Using driving simulators to assess driving safety.

Science.gov (United States)

Boyle, Linda Ng; Lee, John D

2010-05-01

Changes in drivers, vehicles, and roadways pose substantial challenges to the transportation safety community. Crash records and naturalistic driving data are useful for examining the influence of past or existing technology on drivers, and the associations between risk factors and crashes. However, they are limited because causation cannot be established and technology not yet installed in production vehicles cannot be assessed. Driving simulators have become an increasingly widespread tool to understand evolving and novel technologies. The ability to manipulate independent variables in a randomized, controlled setting also provides the added benefit of identifying causal links. This paper introduces a special issue on simulator-based safety studies. The special issue comprises 25 papers that demonstrate the use of driving simulators to address pressing transportation safety problems and includes topics as diverse as neurological dysfunction, work zone design, and driver distraction. Copyright (c) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Probabilist methods applied to electric source problems in nuclear safety

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Carnino, A.; Llory, M.

1979-01-01

Nuclear Safety has frequently been asked to quantify safety margins and evaluate the hazard. In order to do so, the probabilist methods have proved to be the most promising. Without completely replacing determinist safety, they are now commonly used at the reliability or availability stages of systems as well as for determining the likely accidental sequences. In this paper an application linked to the problem of electric sources is described, whilst at the same time indicating the methods used. This is the calculation of the probable loss of all the electric sources of a pressurized water nuclear power station, the evaluation of the reliability of diesels by event trees of failures and the determination of accidental sequences which could be brought about by the 'total electric source loss' initiator and affect the installation or the environment [fr

Nuclear power plants: Results of recent safety analyses

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Steinmetz, E.

1987-01-01

The contributions deal with the problems posed by low radiation doses, with the information currently available from analyses of the Chernobyl reactor accident, and with risk assessments in connection with nuclear power plant accidents. Other points of interest include latest results on fission product release from reactor core or reactor building, advanced atmospheric dispersion models for incident and accident analyses, reliability studies on safety systems, and assessment of fire hazard in nuclear installations. The various contributions are found as separate entries in the database. (DG) [de

Roy's safety-first portfolio principle in financial risk management of disastrous events.

Science.gov (United States)

Chiu, Mei Choi; Wong, Hoi Ying; Li, Duan

2012-11-01

Roy pioneers the concept and practice of risk management of disastrous events via his safety-first principle for portfolio selection. More specifically, his safety-first principle advocates an optimal portfolio strategy generated from minimizing the disaster probability, while subject to the budget constraint and the mean constraint that the expected final wealth is not less than a preselected disaster level. This article studies the dynamic safety-first principle in continuous time and its application in asset and liability management. We reveal that the distortion resulting from dropping the mean constraint, as a common practice to approximate the original Roy's setting, either leads to a trivial case or changes the problem nature completely to a target-reaching problem, which produces a highly leveraged trading strategy. Recognizing the ill-posed nature of the corresponding Lagrangian method when retaining the mean constraint, we invoke a wisdom observed from a limited funding-level regulation of pension funds and modify the original safety-first formulation accordingly by imposing an upper bound on the funding level. This model revision enables us to solve completely the safety-first asset-liability problem by a martingale approach and to derive an optimal policy that follows faithfully the spirit of the safety-first principle and demonstrates a prominent nature of fighting for the best and preventing disaster from happening. © 2012 Society for Risk Analysis.

Safety problems in decommissioning of nuclear power plants

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

1975-12-01

The safety problems in decommissioning are presented by the example of light water reactors with an electric power of 1300 MW and 40 years of preceding specified operation. In such a plant the radioactivity in the form of activation and contamination is of the order of 10 7 Ci one year after final shut-down. The fuel elements are not taken into account. During the work at the reactor vessel dose rates of some 10 4 rem/h may occur at the flange level. According to a rough estimation the dose accumulated by the decommissioning personnel during dismantling of the radioactive components amounts to 1200 rem. During the decommissioning work the problems are caused predominantly by the direct radiation from the radioactive components and systems as well as from the release of radioactive particles, aerosols and liquids on cutting them up. In designing new plants the extent of later decommissioning problems can be reduced above all by selection of suitable materials and by decommissioning-minded design and arrangement of the components and parts of the plant. (orig./RW) [de

Inverse logarithmic potential problem

CERN Document Server

Cherednichenko, V G

1996-01-01

The Inverse and Ill-Posed Problems Series is a series of monographs publishing postgraduate level information on inverse and ill-posed problems for an international readership of professional scientists and researchers. The series aims to publish works which involve both theory and applications in, e.g., physics, medicine, geophysics, acoustics, electrodynamics, tomography, and ecology.

Pengenalan Pose Tangan Menggunakan HuMoment

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dina Budhi Utami

2017-02-01

Full Text Available Computer vision yang didasarkan pada pengenalan bentuk memiliki banyak potensi dalam interaksi manusia dan komputer. Pose tangan dapat dijadikan simbol interaksi manusia dengan komputer seperti halnya pada penggunaan berbagai pose tangan pada bahasa isyarat. Berbagai pose tangan dapat digunakan untuk menggantikan fungsi mouse, untuk mengendalikan robot, dan sebagainya. Penelitian ini difokuskan pada pembangunan sistem pengenalan pose tangan menggunakan HuMoment. Proses pengenalan pose tangan dimulai dengan melakukan segmentasi citra masukan untuk menghasilkan citra ROI (Region of Interest yaitu area telapak tangan. Selanjutnya dilakukan proses deteksi tepi. Kemudian dilakukan ekstraksi nilai HuMoment. Nilai HuMoment dikuantisasikan ke dalam bukukode yang dihasilkan dari proses pelatihan menggunakan K-Means. Proses kuantisasi dilakukan dengan menghitung nilai Euclidean Distance terkecil antara nilai HuMomment citra masukan dan bukukode. Berdasarkan hasil penelitian, nilai akurasi sistem dalam mengenali pose tangan adalah 88.57%.

Pose tracking for augmented reality applications in outdoor archaeological sites

Science.gov (United States)

Younes, Georges; Asmar, Daniel; Elhajj, Imad; Al-Harithy, Howayda

2017-01-01

In recent years, agencies around the world have invested huge amounts of effort toward digitizing many aspects of the world's cultural heritage. Of particular importance is the digitization of outdoor archaeological sites. In the spirit of valorization of this digital information, many groups have developed virtual or augmented reality (AR) computer applications themed around a particular archaeological object. The problem of pose tracking in outdoor AR applications is addressed. Different positional systems are analyzed, resulting in the selection of a monocular camera-based user tracker. The limitations that challenge this technique from map generation, scale, anchoring, to lighting conditions are analyzed and systematically addressed. Finally, as a case study, our pose tracking system is implemented within an AR experience in the Byblos Roman theater in Lebanon.

Problems of making the laminar construction of the nuclear reactor safety hausing

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Ablewicz, Z.

1980-01-01

General specifications and operating conditions of a safety housing are followed by a characteristics of constructional materials and a description of basic problems connected with making the laminar structure of this housing. (author)

Perceived School Safety is Strongly Associated with Adolescent Mental Health Problems

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Nijs, Miesje M.; Bun, Clothilde J. E.; Tempelaar, Wanda M.; de Wit, Niek J.; Burger, Huibert; Plevier, Carolien M.; Boks, Marco P. M.

School environment is an important determinant of psychosocial function and may also be related to mental health. We therefore investigated whether perceived school safety, a simple measure of this environment, is related to mental health problems. In a population-based sample of 11,130 secondary

The assessment of structural dynamics problems in nuclear reactor safety

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Liebe, R.

1978-10-01

The paper discusses important physical features of structural dynamics problems in reactor safety. First a general characterization is given of the following problems: Containment deformation due to pool-dynamics during BWR-blowdown; behavior of the core internals due to PWR-blowdown loads; dynamic response of a nuclear power plant during an earthquake; fuel element deformation due to local pressure pulses in an LMFBR core. Several criterias are formulated to classify typical problems so that a better choise can be made both of appropriate mathematical/numerical as well as experimental techniques. The degree of physical coupling between structural dynamics and fluid dynamics is discussed in more detail since it requires particular attention when selecting problem-oriented methods of solution. Some examples are given to illustrate the application and to compare advantages and disadvantages of several numerical methods. Then description is given of experimental techniques in structural dynamics and typical problem areas are identified. Finally some results are presented concerning the fuel element deformation problem in LMFBRs and from the general considerations some important conclusions are summarized. (orig.) 891 RW 892 AP [de

Patient safety is not enough: targeting quality improvements to optimize the health of the population.

Science.gov (United States)

Woolf, Steven H

2004-01-06

Ensuring patient safety is essential for better health care, but preoccupation with niches of medicine, such as patient safety, can inadvertently compromise outcomes if it distracts from other problems that pose a greater threat to health. The greatest benefit for the population comes from a comprehensive view of population needs and making improvements in proportion with their potential effect on public health; anything less subjects an excess of people to morbidity and death. Patient safety, in context, is a subset of health problems affecting Americans. Safety is a subcategory of medical errors, which also includes mistakes in health promotion and chronic disease management that cost lives but do not affect "safety." These errors are a subset of lapses in quality, which result not only from errors but also from systemic problems, such as lack of access, inequity, and flawed system designs. Lapses in quality are a subset of deficient caring, which encompasses gaps in therapeutics, respect, and compassion that are undetected by normative quality indicators. These larger problems arguably cost hundreds of thousands more lives than do lapses in safety, and the system redesigns to correct them should receive proportionately greater emphasis. Ensuring such rational prioritization requires policy and medical leaders to eschew parochialism and take a global perspective in gauging health problems. The public's well-being requires policymakers to view the system as a whole and consider the potential effect on overall population health when prioritizing care improvements and system redesigns.

Distracted walking: Examining the extent to pedestrian safety problems

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Judith Mwakalonge

2015-10-01

Full Text Available Pedestrians, much like drivers, have always been engaged in multi-tasking like using hand-held devices, listening to music, snacking, or reading while walking. The effects are similar to those experienced by distracted drivers. However, distracted walking has not received similar policies and effective interventions as distracted driving to improve pedestrian safety. This study reviewed the state-of-practice on policies, campaigns, available data, identified research needs, and opportunities pertaining to distracted walking. A comprehensive review of literature revealed that some of the agencies/organizations disseminate useful information about certain distracting activities that pedestrians should avoid while walking to improve their safety. Various walking safety rules/tips have been given, such as not wearing headphones or talking on a cell phone while crossing a street, keeping the volume down, hanging up the phone while walking, being aware of traffic, and avoiding distractions like walking with texting. The majority of the past observational-based and experimental-based studies reviewed in this study on distracted walking is in agreement that there is a positive correlation between distraction and unsafe walking behavior. However, limitations of the existing crash data suggest that distracted walking may not be a severe threat to the public health. Current pedestrian crash data provide insufficient information for researchers to examine the extent to which distracted walking causes and/or contributes to actual pedestrian safety problems.

[Problems of safety regulation under radioactive waste management in Russia].

Science.gov (United States)

Monastyrskaia, S G; Kochetkov, O A; Barchukov, V G; Kuznetsova, L I

2012-01-01

Analysis of the requirements of Federal Law N 190 "About radioactive waste management and incorporation of changes into some legislative acts of the Russian Federation", as well as normative-legislative documents actual and planned to be published related to provision of radiation protection of the workers and the public have been done. Problems of safety regulation raised due to different approaches of Rospotrebnadzor, FMBA of Russia, Rostekhnadzor and Minprirody with respect to classification and categorization of the radioactive wastes, disposal, exemption from regulatory control, etc. have been discussed in the paper. Proposals regarding improvement of the system of safety regulation under radioactive waste management and of cooperation of various regulatory bodies have been formulated.

Combining Front Vehicle Detection with 3D Pose Estimation for a Better Driver Assistance

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yu Peng

2012-09-01

Full Text Available Driver assistant systems enhance traffic safety and efficiency. The accurate 3D pose of a front vehicle can help a driver to make the right decision on the road. We propose a novel real-time system to estimate the 3D pose of the front vehicle. This system consists of two parallel threads: vehicle rear tracking and mapping. The vehicle rear is first identified in the video captured by an onboard camera, after license plate localization and foreground extraction. The 3D pose estimation technique is then employed with respect to the extracted vehicle rear. Most current 3D pose estimation techniques need prior models or a stereo initialization with user cooperation. It is extremely difficult to obtain prior models due to the varying appearance of vehicles' rears. Moreover, it is unsafe to ask for drivers' cooperation when a vehicle is running. In our system, two initial keyframes for stereo algorithms are automatically extracted by vehicle rear detection and tracking. Map points are defined as a collection of point features extracted from the vehicle's rear with their 3D information. These map points are inferences that relate the 2D features detected in following vehicles' rears with the 3D world. The relative 3D pose of the onboard camera to the front vehicle rear is then estimated through matching the map points with point features detected on the front vehicle rear. We demonstrate the capabilities of our system by testing on real-time and synthesized videos. In order to make the experimental analysis visible, we demonstrated an estimated 3D pose through augmented reality, which needs accurate and real-time 3D pose estimation.

Enrichment and assessment of the health risks posed by heavy metals in PM1 in Changji, Xinjiang, China.

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Yu Y; Shen, Ya X; Liu, Cheng; Liu, Hao F

2017-04-16

The present study aims to investigate the influence of human activity on heavy metals in a typical arid urban area of China and assess human health risks posed by heavy metals in PM 1 (particles <1.0 μm in diameter) for different people. In this paper, Changji (Xinjiang, China) was selected as the study area, and samples were collected from March 2014 to March 2015. A total 14 elements in PM 1 were quantified using ICP-MS. An enrichment factor (EF) was used to assess the influence of human activity on the contamination of these metals. The results indicated that Mn was not enriched; Co, Cu, Cr, Ni, Tl, and V were slightly enriched; Mo, Pb, and Sb were moderately enriched; and Ag, As, and Cd were strongly enriched. To assess the health risks associated with inhaling PM 1 , the risk assessment code and loss in life expectancy based on the individual metals were calculated. The results showed that the elements Ag, Cu, Mo, Pb, Sb, Tl, and V in PM 1 posed low levels of non-carcinogenic risks, but these metals may still pose risks to certain susceptible populations. In addition, the results also showed that As, Co, and Cr posed an appreciable carcinogenic risk, while Cd and Ni posed low levels of carcinogenic risk. The total predicted loss of life expectancy caused by the three metals As, Co, and Ni was 63.67 d for the elderly, 30.95 d for adult males, 26.62 d for adult females, and 48.22 d for children. Therefore, the safety of the elderly and children exposed to PM 1 should be given more attention than the safety of adults. The results from this study demonstrate that the health risks posed by heavy metals in PM 1 in Changji, Xinjiang, China should be examined.

Nuclear power performance and safety. V.3. Safety and international co-operation

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

1988-01-01

The International Conference on Nuclear Power Performance and Safety, organized by the International Atomic Energy Agency, was held at the Austria Centre Vienna (ACV) in Vienna, Austria, from 28 September to 2 October 1987. The objective of the Conference was to promote an exchange of worldwide information on the current trends in the performance and safety of nuclear power and its fuel cycle, and to take a forward look at the expectations and objectives for the 1990s. This objective was accomplished through presentation and discussion of about 200 papers at the Conference. Almost 500 participants and observers from 40 countries and 12 organizations discussed three major questions which were posed as the focus of this Conference: (1) What are the current trends and major issues with regard to performance and safety of nuclear power, the nuclear fuel cycle and radioactive waste management? (2) What steps are being taken or need to be taken to resolve outstanding issues in order to improve the performance of nuclear power with assured safety? (3) What performance objectives and achievements can be anticipated for the 1990s? All presentations of this Conference were divided into six volumes. This is Volume 3 which is devoted to the problems of safety and international cooperation. All presentations of Volume 3 were divided into four sessions as follows: the need for safety in nuclear power programmes (4 papers); international cooperation in nuclear safety (6 papers); technical aspects in plant safety (7 papers); approaches to safety (3 papers). A separate abstract was prepared for each of these 20 papers. Refs, figs and tabs

Aviation Risk and Safety Management : Methods and Applications in Aviation Organizations

OpenAIRE

2014-01-01

The International Civil Aviation Organization's (ICAO) decision to require aviation organizations to adopt Safety Management Systems poses a major problem especially for small and medium sized aviation companies. The complexity of regulations overstrains the aviation stakeholders who seek to fully advantage from them but have no clear guidance. The aim of the book is to show the implementation of such a new system with pragmatic effort in order to gain a gradation for smaller operators. This ...

Preconditioner and convergence study for the Quantum Computer Aided Design (QCAD) nonlinear poisson problem posed on the Ottawa Flat 270 design geometry.

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Kalashnikova, Irina

2012-05-01

A numerical study aimed to evaluate different preconditioners within the Trilinos Ifpack and ML packages for the Quantum Computer Aided Design (QCAD) non-linear Poisson problem implemented within the Albany code base and posed on the Ottawa Flat 270 design geometry is performed. This study led to some new development of Albany that allows the user to select an ML preconditioner with Zoltan repartitioning based on nodal coordinates, which is summarized. Convergence of the numerical solutions computed within the QCAD computational suite with successive mesh refinement is examined in two metrics, the mean value of the solution (an L{sup 1} norm) and the field integral of the solution (L{sup 2} norm).

Hierarchical graphical-based human pose estimation via local multi-resolution convolutional neural network

Science.gov (United States)

Zhu, Aichun; Wang, Tian; Snoussi, Hichem

2018-03-01

This paper addresses the problems of the graphical-based human pose estimation in still images, including the diversity of appearances and confounding background clutter. We present a new architecture for estimating human pose using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Firstly, a Relative Mixture Deformable Model (RMDM) is defined by each pair of connected parts to compute the relative spatial information in the graphical model. Secondly, a Local Multi-Resolution Convolutional Neural Network (LMR-CNN) is proposed to train and learn the multi-scale representation of each body parts by combining different levels of part context. Thirdly, a LMR-CNN based hierarchical model is defined to explore the context information of limb parts. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed deep learning approach for human pose estimation.

Hierarchical graphical-based human pose estimation via local multi-resolution convolutional neural network

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Aichun Zhu

2018-03-01

Full Text Available This paper addresses the problems of the graphical-based human pose estimation in still images, including the diversity of appearances and confounding background clutter. We present a new architecture for estimating human pose using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN. Firstly, a Relative Mixture Deformable Model (RMDM is defined by each pair of connected parts to compute the relative spatial information in the graphical model. Secondly, a Local Multi-Resolution Convolutional Neural Network (LMR-CNN is proposed to train and learn the multi-scale representation of each body parts by combining different levels of part context. Thirdly, a LMR-CNN based hierarchical model is defined to explore the context information of limb parts. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed deep learning approach for human pose estimation.

Collaborative Random Faces-Guided Encoders for Pose-Invariant Face Representation Learning.

Science.gov (United States)

Shao, Ming; Zhang, Yizhe; Fu, Yun

2018-04-01

Learning discriminant face representation for pose-invariant face recognition has been identified as a critical issue in visual learning systems. The challenge lies in the drastic changes of facial appearances between the test face and the registered face. To that end, we propose a high-level feature learning framework called "collaborative random faces (RFs)-guided encoders" toward this problem. The contributions of this paper are three fold. First, we propose a novel supervised autoencoder that is able to capture the high-level identity feature despite of pose variations. Second, we enrich the identity features by replacing the target values of conventional autoencoders with random signals (RFs in this paper), which are unique for each subject under different poses. Third, we further improve the performance of the framework by incorporating deep convolutional neural network facial descriptors and linking discriminative identity features from different RFs for the augmented identity features. Finally, we conduct face identification experiments on Multi-PIE database, and face verification experiments on labeled faces in the wild and YouTube Face databases, where face recognition rate and verification accuracy with Receiver Operating Characteristic curves are rendered. In addition, discussions of model parameters and connections with the existing methods are provided. These experiments demonstrate that our learning system works fairly well on handling pose variations.

Safety studies concerning nuclear power reactors

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bailly, Jean; Pelce, Jacques

1980-01-01

The safety of nuclear installations poses different technical problems, whether concerning pressurized water reactors or fast reactors. But investigating methods are closely related and concern, on the one hand, the behavior of shields placed between fuel and outside and, on the other, analysis of accidents. The article is therefore in two parts based on the same plan. Concerning light water reactors, the programme of studies undertaken in France accounts for the research carried out in countries where collaboration agreements exist. Concerning fast reactors, France has the initiative of their studies owing to her technical advance, which explains the great importance of the programmes under way [fr

The safety problems of the nuclear power. The lessons of Chernobyl

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Prister, B.S.; Klyuchnikov, A.A.; Shestopalov, V.M.; Kukhar', V.P.

2013-01-01

The problems of nuclear safety as a complex system are considered. It is shown that the reliability and safety of a nuclear power plant determined does not only reliable structures of the main equipment and qualification of the staff, but especially strict compliance with the priorities of the Security over the economic, political and other factors. Failure to observe this principle has become a real cause of several accidents in the global nuclear power industry, accompanied by the release of radionuclides into the environment. The lessons of Chernobyl remain unlearned, what confirmed the accident at the Fukushima-1 in Japan. The most important of these is the readiness to respond and protect the public, not only from radiation, but also from a psychological stress. For specialists in the field of nuclear and radiation safety, radiobiology, ecology, environment, agriculture, graduates and university students

Inverse problems for Maxwell's equations

CERN Document Server

Romanov, V G

1994-01-01

The Inverse and Ill-Posed Problems Series is a series of monographs publishing postgraduate level information on inverse and ill-posed problems for an international readership of professional scientists and researchers. The series aims to publish works which involve both theory and applications in, e.g., physics, medicine, geophysics, acoustics, electrodynamics, tomography, and ecology.

A deep learning approach for pose estimation from volumetric OCT data.

Science.gov (United States)

Gessert, Nils; Schlüter, Matthias; Schlaefer, Alexander

2018-05-01

Tracking the pose of instruments is a central problem in image-guided surgery. For microscopic scenarios, optical coherence tomography (OCT) is increasingly used as an imaging modality. OCT is suitable for accurate pose estimation due to its micrometer range resolution and volumetric field of view. However, OCT image processing is challenging due to speckle noise and reflection artifacts in addition to the images' 3D nature. We address pose estimation from OCT volume data with a new deep learning-based tracking framework. For this purpose, we design a new 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture to directly predict the 6D pose of a small marker geometry from OCT volumes. We use a hexapod robot to automatically acquire labeled data points which we use to train 3D CNN architectures for multi-output regression. We use this setup to provide an in-depth analysis on deep learning-based pose estimation from volumes. Specifically, we demonstrate that exploiting volume information for pose estimation yields higher accuracy than relying on 2D representations with depth information. Supporting this observation, we provide quantitative and qualitative results that 3D CNNs effectively exploit the depth structure of marker objects. Regarding the deep learning aspect, we present efficient design principles for 3D CNNs, making use of insights from the 2D deep learning community. In particular, we present Inception3D as a new architecture which performs best for our application. We show that our deep learning approach reaches errors at our ground-truth label's resolution. We achieve a mean average error of 14.89 ± 9.3 µm and 0.096 ± 0.072° for position and orientation learning, respectively. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Safety from physical viewpoint: ''two-risk model in multiple risk problem''

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kuz'Min, I.I.; Akimov, V.A.

1998-01-01

Full text of publication follows: the problem of safety provision for people and environment within the framework of a certain socio-economic system (SES) as a problem of managing a great number of interacting risks characterizing numerous hazards (natural, manmade, social, economic once, etc.) inherent in the certain SES has been discussed. From the physical point of view, it can be considered a problem of interaction of many bodies which has no accurate mathematical solution even if the laws of interaction of this bodies are known. In physics, to solve this problem, an approach based on the reduction of the above-mentioned problem of the problem of two-body interaction which can be solved accurately in mathematics has been used. The report presents a similar approach to the problem of risk management in the SES. This approach includes the subdivision of numerous hazards inherent within the framework of the SES into two classes of hazards, so that each of the classes could be considered an integrated whole one, each of them being characterized by the appropriate risk. Consequently, problem of 'multiple-risk' management (i.e. the problem of many bodies, as represented in physics) can be reduced to the 'two-risk' management problem (that is, to the problem two-bodies). Within the framework of the two-risk model the optimization of costs to reduce the two kinds of risk, that is, the risk inherent in the SES as a whole, as well as the risk potentially provoked by lots of activities to be introduced in the SES economy has been described. The model has made it possible to formulate and prove the theorem of equilibrium in risk management. Using the theorem, a relatively simple and practically applicable procedure of optimizing the threshold costs to reduce diverse kinds of risk has been elaborated. The procedure provides to assess the minimum value of the cost that can be achieved regarding the socio-economic factors typical of the SES under discussion. The aimed

Issues affecting advanced passive light-water reactor safety analysis

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Beelman, R.J.; Fletcher, C.D.; Modro, S.M.

1992-01-01

Next generation commercial reactor designs emphasize enhanced safety through improved safety system reliability and performance by means of system simplification and reliance on immutable natural forces for system operation. Simulating the performance of these safety systems will be central to analytical safety evaluation of advanced passive reactor designs. Yet the characteristically small driving forces of these safety systems pose challenging computational problems to current thermal-hydraulic systems analysis codes. Additionally, the safety systems generally interact closely with one another, requiring accurate, integrated simulation of the nuclear steam supply system, engineered safeguards and containment. Furthermore, numerical safety analysis of these advanced passive reactor designs wig necessitate simulation of long-duration, slowly-developing transients compared with current reactor designs. The composite effects of small computational inaccuracies on induced system interactions and perturbations over long periods may well lead to predicted results which are significantly different than would otherwise be expected or might actually occur. Comparisons between the engineered safety features of competing US advanced light water reactor designs and analogous present day reactor designs are examined relative to the adequacy of existing thermal-hydraulic safety codes in predicting the mechanisms of passive safety. Areas where existing codes might require modification, extension or assessment relative to passive safety designs are identified. Conclusions concerning the applicability of these codes to advanced passive light water reactor safety analysis are presented

40 CFR 257.3-8 - Safety.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 40 Protection of Environment 24 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Safety. 257.3-8 Section 257.3-8... and Practices § 257.3-8 Safety. (a) Explosive gases. The concentration of explosive gases generated by... shall not pose a hazard to the safety of persons or property from fires. This may be accomplished...

Engineering solutions of traffic safety problems of road transport

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

M. Bogdevičius

2004-02-01

Full Text Available The authors of this paper focus on the simulation of the motor vehicle movement (taking into consideration motor vehicle dynamics, motor vehicle hydraulic brake system influence on motor vehicle movement, interaction between its wheels with road pavements, road guardrail characteristics, interaction between motor vehicle and road guardrail on a certain road section and propose their specific solution of this problem. The presented results, illustrating the motor vehicle movement trajectories (motor vehicle braking and interaction between motor vehicle and road guardrail at various initial conditions and at various certain pavement surface of the road section under investigation and work of a motor vehicle hydraulic brake system. Taking into consideration the presented general mathematical model and computer aided test results it is possible to investigate various road transport traffic situations as well as to investigate various transport traffic safety problems.

Safety problems in decommissioning nuclear power plants

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Auler, I.; Bardtenschlager, R.; Gasch, A.; Majohr, N.

1975-12-01

The safety problems at decommissioning are illustrated by the example of a LWR with 1300 MW electric power after 40 years of specified normal operation. For such a facility the radioactivity in the form of activation and contamination one year after being finally taken out of service is in the order of magnitude of 10 7 Ci, not counting the fuel assemblies. The dose rates occurring during work on the reactor vessel at nozzle level may amount to some 10 4 rem/h. After a rough estimation the accumulated dose for the decommissioning personnel during total dismantling will be about 1200 rem. During performance of the decommissioning activities the problems are mainly caused by direct radiation of the active components and systems and by the release of radioactive particles, aerosols and liquids if these components are crushed. The extent of later dismantling problems may be reduced by selecting appropriate materials as well as considering the requirements for dismantling in design and arrangement of the components already in the design stage of new facilities. Apart from plant design also the concept for the disposal of the radioactive waste from decommissioning will provide important boundary conditions. E.g. the maximum size of the pieces to be stored in the ultimate storage place will very much influence the dose expenditure for handling these parts. For complete dismantling of nuclear power plants an ultimate store must be available where large amounts of bulky decommissioning waste, containing relatively low activity, can be stored. The problems and also the cost for decommissioning may be considerably reduced by delaying complete disposal of the radioactive material >= 40 years and during this period, keeping the radioactivity enclosed within the plant in the form of a safe containment. (orig./HP) [de

Penerapan Pendekatan Contextual Teaching and Learning (Ctl) Dengan Model Problem Posing Untuk Meningkatkan Kualitas Pembelajaran Biologi Siswa Kelas X.2 SMA Negeri 2 Karanganyar Tahun Pelajaran 2011/2012

OpenAIRE

Suparmi, Suparmi; Suciati, Suciati; Harlita, Harlita

2013-01-01

– This research aims to improve low quality of biology in class X.2 SMA Negeri 2 Karanganyar in academic year 2011/2012. Learning considered by teacher's performance, utility of facilities in the classroom, classroom climate, student's scientific attitude, and student motivation of achievement applying for approach Contextual Teaching and Learning with Problem Posing model. This research was a classroom action research which and performed in three cycles. Each cycle consisted of 4 ...

Safety issues of nuclear production of hydrogen

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Piera, Mireia; Martinez-Val, Jose M.; Jose Montes, Ma

2006-01-01

Hydrogen is not an uncommon issue in Nuclear Safety analysis, particularly in relation to severe accidents. On the other hand, hydrogen is a household name in the chemical industry, particularly in oil refineries, and is also a well known chemical element currently produced by steam reforming of natural gas, and other methods (such as coal gasification). In the not-too-distant future, hydrogen will have to be produced (by chemical reduction of water) using renewable and nuclear energy sources. In particular, nuclear fission seems to offer the cheapest way to provide the primary energy in the medium-term. Safety principles are fundamental guidelines in the design, construction and operation both of hydrogen facilities and nuclear power plants. When these two technologies are integrated, a complete safety analysis must consider not only the safety practices of each industry, but any interaction that could be established between them. In particular, any accident involving a sudden energy release from one of the facilities can affect the other. Release of dangerous substances (chemicals, radiotoxic effluents) can also pose safety problems. Although nuclear-produced hydrogen facilities will need specific approaches and detailed analysis on their safety features, a preliminary approach is presented in this paper. No significant roadblocks are identified that could hamper the deployment of this new industry, but some of the hydrogen production methods will involve very demanding safety standards

Exemplar-based human action pose correction.

Science.gov (United States)

Shen, Wei; Deng, Ke; Bai, Xiang; Leyvand, Tommer; Guo, Baining; Tu, Zhuowen

2014-07-01

The launch of Xbox Kinect has built a very successful computer vision product and made a big impact on the gaming industry. This sheds lights onto a wide variety of potential applications related to action recognition. The accurate estimation of human poses from the depth image is universally a critical step. However, existing pose estimation systems exhibit failures when facing severe occlusion. In this paper, we propose an exemplar-based method to learn to correct the initially estimated poses. We learn an inhomogeneous systematic bias by leveraging the exemplar information within a specific human action domain. Furthermore, as an extension, we learn a conditional model by incorporation of pose tags to further increase the accuracy of pose correction. In the experiments, significant improvements on both joint-based skeleton correction and tag prediction are observed over the contemporary approaches, including what is delivered by the current Kinect system. Our experiments for the facial landmark correction also illustrate that our algorithm can improve the accuracy of other detection/estimation systems.

The fuel element of the first charge for EL 4; presentation, main problems arising in the research, production problems; L'element combustible du 1. jeu de EL 4; presentation, problemes essentiels poses par l'etude, problemes de fabrication

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Ringot, C; Bailly, H; Bujas, R [Commissariat a l' Energie Atomique, Saclay (France). Centre d' Etudes Nucleaires

1964-07-01

The fuel element making up the first charge for EL-4 is made of slightly enriched uranium oxide canned in stainless steel. This fuel element makes it possible to operate the reactor in the safest conditions awaiting the development of the fuel which will be finally adopted; this will have a low absorption can: beryllium, or a zirconium copper alloy. The 500 mm assembly is made up of 19 small rods placed on 3 rings, inside a graphite jacket. The solution adopted was a solution using completely independent small rods. This report deals with possible problems resulting from their study and production. (authors) [French] L'element combustible du 1er jeu EL-4 est un element combustible a oxyde d'uranium legerement enrichi gaine d'acier inoxydable. C'est un element combustible permettant de faire fonctionner le reacteur EL 4 dans des conditions aussi sures que possible avant de mettre au point le combustible definitif qui sera a gaine peu absorbante: beryllium, ou alliage zirconium-cuivre. L'assemblage de longueur 500 mm est constitue de 19 crayons places sur 3 couronnes, a l'interieur d'une chemise de graphite. La solution adoptee a ete une solution a crayons independants les uns des autres. Ce rapport traite des problemes eventuels poses par leur etude et leur fabrication. (auteurs)

A New 3D Object Pose Detection Method Using LIDAR Shape Set.

Science.gov (United States)

Kim, Jung-Un; Kang, Hang-Bong

2018-03-16

In object detection systems for autonomous driving, LIDAR sensors provide very useful information. However, problems occur because the object representation is greatly distorted by changes in distance. To solve this problem, we propose a LIDAR shape set that reconstructs the shape surrounding the object more clearly by using the LIDAR point information projected on the object. The LIDAR shape set restores object shape edges from a bird's eye view by filtering LIDAR points projected on a 2D pixel-based front view. In this study, we use this shape set for two purposes. The first is to supplement the shape set with a LIDAR Feature map, and the second is to divide the entire shape set according to the gradient of the depth and density to create a 2D and 3D bounding box proposal for each object. We present a multimodal fusion framework that classifies objects and restores the 3D pose of each object using enhanced feature maps and shape-based proposals. The network structure consists of a VGG -based object classifier that receives multiple inputs and a LIDAR-based Region Proposal Networks (RPN) that identifies object poses. It works in a very intuitive and efficient manner and can be extended to other classes other than vehicles. Our research has outperformed object classification accuracy (Average Precision, AP) and 3D pose restoration accuracy (3D bounding box recall rate) based on the latest studies conducted with KITTI data sets.

75 FR 35366 - Pipeline Safety: Applying Safety Regulation to All Rural Onshore Hazardous Liquid Low-Stress Lines

Science.gov (United States)

2010-06-22

... DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration 49 CFR Part... Onshore Hazardous Liquid Low-Stress Lines AGENCY: Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration... to the risks that hazardous liquid and natural gas pipelines pose to the environment. In the Pipeline...

Nuclear safety

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

1991-02-01

This book reviews the accomplishments, operations, and problems faced by the defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. Specifically, it discusses the recommendations that the Safety Board made to improve safety and health conditions at the Department of Energy's defense nuclear facilities, problems the Safety Board has encountered in hiring technical staff, and management problems that could affect the Safety Board's independence and credibility

Survey of the results of a two- and three-dimensional kinetics benchmark problem typical for a thermal reactor

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Werner, W.

1975-01-01

In 1973, NEACRP and CSNI posed a number of kinetic benchmark problems intended to be solved by different groups. Comparison of the submitted results should lead to estimates on the accuracy and efficiency of the employed codes. This was felt to be of great value since the codes involved become more and more important in the field of reactor safety. In this paper the results of the 2d and 3d benchmark problem for a BWR are presented. The specification of the problem is included in the appendix of this survey. For the 2d benchmark problem, 5 contributions have been obtained, while for the 3d benchmark problem 2 contributions have been submitted. (orig./RW) [de

Robustness of Input features from Noisy Silhouettes in Human Pose Estimation

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Gong, Wenjuan; Fihl, Preben; Gonzàlez, Jordi

2014-01-01

. In this paper, we explore this problem. First, We compare performances of several image features widely used for human pose estimation and explore their performances against each other and select one with best performance. Second, iterative closest point algorithm is introduced for a new quantitative...... of silhouette samples of different noise levels and compare with the selected feature on a public dataset: Human Eva dataset....

Safety aspects of advanced fuels irradiations in EBR-II

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Lehto, W.K.

1975-09-01

Basic safety questions such as MFCI, loss-of-Na bond, pin behavior during design basis transients, and failure propagation were evaluated as they pertain to advanced fuels in EBR-II. With the exception of pin response to the unlikely loss-of-flow transient, the study indicates that irradiation of significant numbers of advanced fueled subassemblies in EBR-II should pose no safety problems. The analysis predicts, however, that Na boiling may occur during the postulated design basis unlikely loss-of-flow transient in subassemblies containing He-bonded fuel pins with the larger fuel-clad gaps. The calculations indicate that coolant temperatures at top of core in the limiting S/A's, containing the He bonded pins, would reach approximately 1480 0 F during the transient without application of uncertainty factors. Inclusion of uncertainties could result in temperature predictions which approach coolant boiling temperatures (1640 0 F). Further analysis of He-bonded pins is being done in this potential problem area, e.g., to apply best estimates of uncertainty factors and to determine the sensitivity of the preliminary results to gap conductance

Research mathematicians’ practices in selecting mathematical problems

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Misfeldt, Morten; Johansen, Mikkel Willum

2015-01-01

mathematicians select and pose problems and discuss to what extent our results can be used to inform, criticize, and develop educational practice at various levels. Selecting and posing problems is far from simple. In fact, it is considered hard, complex, and of crucial importance. A number of criteria...

49 CFR 190.239 - Safety orders.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

... pipeline integrity risk to public safety, property, or the environment, the Associate Administrator may issue an order requiring the operator of the facility to take necessary corrective action. Such action... existence of a condition that poses a pipeline integrity risk to public safety, property, or the environment...

Generalized Hough transform based time invariant action recognition with 3D pose information

Science.gov (United States)

Muench, David; Huebner, Wolfgang; Arens, Michael

2014-10-01

Human action recognition has emerged as an important field in the computer vision community due to its large number of applications such as automatic video surveillance, content based video-search and human robot interaction. In order to cope with the challenges that this large variety of applications present, recent research has focused more on developing classifiers able to detect several actions in more natural and unconstrained video sequences. The invariance discrimination tradeoff in action recognition has been addressed by utilizing a Generalized Hough Transform. As a basis for action representation we transform 3D poses into a robust feature space, referred to as pose descriptors. For each action class a one-dimensional temporal voting space is constructed. Votes are generated from associating pose descriptors with their position in time relative to the end of an action sequence. Training data consists of manually segmented action sequences. In the detection phase valid human 3D poses are assumed as input, e.g. originating from 3D sensors or monocular pose reconstruction methods. The human 3D poses are normalized to gain view-independence and transformed into (i) relative limb-angle space to ensure independence of non-adjacent joints or (ii) geometric features. In (i) an action descriptor consists of the relative angles between limbs and their temporal derivatives. In (ii) the action descriptor consists of different geometric features. In order to circumvent the problem of time-warping we propose to use a codebook of prototypical 3D poses which is generated from sample sequences of 3D motion capture data. This idea is in accordance with the concept of equivalence classes in action space. Results of the codebook method are presented using the Kinect sensor and the CMU Motion Capture Database.

CONCEPTUALIZATION OF IDEAS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY IN SPORTS: PROBLEMS OF EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yulia Vladimirovna Vardanyan

2013-09-01

Full Text Available This article is devoted to the research of the concept “psychological safety in sports”. On the basis of analysis of ideas about psychological safety in sports and their representation in printed or verbal form the necessity of overcoming the fragmentation and lack of system is substantiated. The authors state that one and the same sports situation can constructively or destructively affect the psychological safety of direct or indirect participants of sports events. In this context, it is important to create the psycholinguistic basis of experimental research of psychological safety in sports. Great attention is paid to systematization of the content of the concept “psychological safety in sports”. The created models of words and expressions that convey ideas about this phenomenon are of particular value. In the structure of the concept the dominant meanings, expressed in the nucleus, and additional meanings, related to the periphery of the concept are distinguished.Purpose: to explore the ideas of psychological safety in sports and their representation in printed or verbal form; to determine ways of overcoming the conceptual psycholinguistic problems in the process of experimental research of psychological safety in sports; to create the model of words and expressions which are used to verbalize the concept “psychological safety in sports”.Methodology: theoretical analysis of psychological and linguistic literature, creation of the psycholinguistic basis of experimental research, modeling of the conceptual ideas of psychological safety in sports.Results: psycholinguistic basis of experimental research of psychological safety in sports, the model of content and structure of the corresponding concept.Practical implications: Pedagogical Psychology, Sports Psychology, Philology, Psycholinguistics.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12731/2218-7405-2013-8-11

Graphical symbols -- Safety colours and safety signs -- Part 1: Design principles for safety signs in workplaces and public areas

CERN Document Server

International Organization for Standardization. Geneva

2002-01-01

This International Standard establishes the safety identification colours and design principles for safety signs to be used in workplaces and in public areas for the purpose of accident prevention, fire protection, health hazard information and emergency evacuation. It also establishes the basic principles to be applied when developing standards containing safety signs. This part of ISO 3864 is applicable to workplaces and all locations and all sectors where safety-related questions may be posed. However, it is not applicable to the signalling used for guiding rail, road, river, maritime and air traffic and, generally speaking, to those sectors subject to a regulation which may differ.

Learning methods for ill-posed problems. Applications to γ-spectrometry

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Vigneron, V.

1997-05-01

Up to recent days, feature extraction bas been mostly considered a supervised process of (linear filters) mapping the original measurements into more effective features so as to minimize a criterion, assuming that the variables are already selected and given. Furthermore, data are rare and/or expensive, even sometimes not representative of the exact distribution. From an experimental device, the physicist gets some measurements, spoiled by noise and some determinist distortions. The 'problem' is then to seek 'good' values of a 'number' of 'interesting' parameters. But, neither 'good', nor the 'number', nor 'interesting' are clearly defined notions. Frequently, the physicist is unable to write the mathematical equations of the observed phenomenon. He hopes that usual recipes called Fourier transform, deconvolution, least squares... Will produce shining revelations. Of course, these recipes are well-known and their honorability well established, sometimes with a name of a mathematician as a quality-label. In Pattern Recognition the input items have to be identified under various transformations of their representations. Contemporary neural-network research concentrates mostly on decision making systems, whereas the fundamental functions associated with the preprocessing of observations have often been ignored. This paper is a step toward theories that are expected to help the emergence of invariant-features. In this context, the Learning Theory approach (through advances tools like ACP, CCA or factorial cumulants) offers a great potential for archiving optimal solutions of complex real world problems, because it deals with undefined knowledge which is in mind of the physicist before he carries out the experiment: non-linear correlations, hidden dependencies... These questions are complex and very problem-dependant, but we focus on a specific one: ill-conditioned problems, i.e. when the physicist has not a sufficient amount of experimental data. In order to illustrate

Extension of CFD Codes Application to Two-Phase Flow Safety Problems - Phase 3

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bestion, D.; Anglart, H.; Mahaffy, J.; Lucas, D.; Song, C.H.; Scheuerer, M.; Zigh, G.; Andreani, M.; Kasahara, F.; Heitsch, M.; Komen, E.; Moretti, F.; Morii, T.; Muehlbauer, P.; Smith, B.L.; Watanabe, T.

2014-11-01

The Writing Group 3 on the extension of CFD to two-phase flow safety problems was formed following recommendations made at the 'Exploratory Meeting of Experts to Define an Action Plan on the Application of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Codes to Nuclear Reactor Safety Problems' held in Aix-en-Provence, in May 2002. Extension of CFD codes to two-phase flow is significant potentiality for the improvement of safety investigations, by giving some access to smaller scale flow processes which were not explicitly described by present tools. Using such tools as part of a safety demonstration may bring a better understanding of physical situations, more confidence in the results, and an estimation of safety margins. The increasing computer performance allows a more extensive use of 3D modelling of two-phase Thermal hydraulics with finer nodalization. However, models are not as mature as in single phase flow and a lot of work has still to be done on the physical modelling and numerical schemes in such two-phase CFD tools. The Writing Group listed and classified the NRS problems where extension of CFD to two-phase flow may bring real benefit, and classified different modelling approaches in a first report (Bestion et al., 2006). First ideas were reported about the specification and analysis of needs in terms of validation and verification. It was then suggested to focus further activity on a limited number of NRS issues with a high priority and a reasonable chance to be successful in a reasonable period of time. The WG3-step 2 was decided with the following objectives: - selection of a limited number of NRS issues having a high priority and for which two-phase CFD has a reasonable chance to be successful in a reasonable period of time; - identification of the remaining gaps in the existing approaches using two-phase CFD for each selected NRS issue; - review of the existing data base for validation of two-phase CFD application to the selected NRS problems

The risks to miners, mines, and the public posed by large seismic events in the gold mining districts of South Africa

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Durrheim, RJ

2006-10-01

Full Text Available are incorporating the risks of seismicity in their disaster management plans, and Johannesburg is urged to do likewise. Some buildings are considered vulnerable to damage by large seismic events, posing safety and financial risks....

Pose Planning for the Feed Support System of FAST

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rui Yao

2014-01-01

Full Text Available A six-cable driven parallel manipulator and an A-B rotator in the feed support system of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST are adopted for realizing the position and pose of nine feeds. The six-cable driven parallel manipulator is a flexible mechanism, which may not be stably controlled due to a small cable tension. The A-B rotator is a rigid mechanism, and its stability and accuracy can be improved by small pose angle. Based on the different characteristics, a pose planning function is presented. The optimization target of the pose planning function is to get the smallest pose angle of the A-B rotator, and the constraint condition can reflect the controllability of the six-cable driven parallel manipulator. Then, the pose planning realization process of the feed support system is proposed. Based on the pose planning method, optimized pose angles of the feed support system for the nine feeds are obtained, which suggests that the pose angle of the six-cable driven parallel manipulator changes from 0° to 14° and the pose angle of the A-B rotator changes from 0° to 26.4°.

Cross-comparison of three surrogate safety methods to diagnose cyclist safety problems at intersections in Norway.

Science.gov (United States)

Laureshyn, Aliaksei; Goede, Maartje de; Saunier, Nicolas; Fyhri, Aslak

2017-08-01

Relying on accident records as the main data source for studying cyclists' safety has many drawbacks, such as high degree of under-reporting, the lack of accident details and particularly of information about the interaction processes that led to the accident. It is also an ethical problem as one has to wait for accidents to happen in order to make a statement about cyclists' (un-)safety. In this perspective, the use of surrogate safety measures based on actual observations in traffic is very promising. In this study we used video data from three intersections in Norway that were all independently analysed using three methods: the Swedish traffic conflict technique (Swedish TCT), the Dutch conflict technique (DOCTOR) and the probabilistic surrogate measures of safety (PSMS) technique developed in Canada. The first two methods are based on manual detection and counting of critical events in traffic (traffic conflicts), while the third considers probabilities of multiple trajectories for each interaction and delivers a density map of potential collision points per site. Due to extensive use of microscopic data, PSMS technique relies heavily on automated tracking of the road users in video. Across the three sites, the methods show similarities or are at least "compatible" with the accident records. The two conflict techniques agree quite well for the number, type and location of conflicts, but some differences with no obvious explanation are also found. PSMS reports many more safety-relevant interactions including less severe events. The location of the potential collision points is compatible with what the conflict techniques suggest, but the possibly significant share of false alarms due to inaccurate trajectories extracted from video complicates the comparison. The tested techniques still require enhancement, with respect to better adjustment to analysis of the situations involving cyclists (and vulnerable road users in general) and further validation. However, we

Fundamental challenging problems for developing new nuclear safety standard computer codes

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Wong, P.K.; Wong, A.E.; Wong, A.

2005-01-01

Based on the claims of the US Basic patents number 5,084,232; 5,848,377 and 6,430,516 that can be obtained from typing the Patent Numbers into the Box of the Web site http://164.195.100.11/netahtml/srchnum.htm and their associated published technical papers having been presented and published at International Conferences in the last three years and that all these had been sent into US-NRC by E-mail on March 26, 2003 at 2:46 PM., three fundamental challenging problems for developing new nuclear safety standard computer codes had been presented at the US-NRC RIC2003 Session W4. 2:15-3:15 PM. at the Washington D.C. Capital Hilton Hotel, Presidential Ballroom on April 16, 2003 in front of more than 800 nuclear professionals from many countries worldwide. The objective and scope of this paper is to invite all nuclear professionals to examine and evaluate all the current computer codes being used in their own countries by means of comparison of numerical data from these three specific openly challenging fundamental problems in order to set up a global safety standard for all nuclear power plants in the world. (authors)

2D Methods for pose invariant face recognition

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Mokoena, Ntabiseng

2016-12-01

Full Text Available The ability to recognise face images under random pose is a task that is done effortlessly by human beings. However, for a computer system, recognising face images under varying poses still remains an open research area. Face recognition across pose...

Dealing with the problem countries

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Jones, R.W.

1985-01-01

The test of America's policies to prevent nuclear proliferation is the so-called problem countries, those states that pose the greatest risk of ''going nuclear.'' Most visible - and the source of greatest concern - are those countries which have developed or appear to be in the process of developing nuclear weapons capabilities. In addition to Pakistan, near-nuclear countries of note include India, Israel, South Africa, Argentina, South Korea, and Taiwan. Several other countries, including Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Brazil, seem to pose proliferation risks in the longer term. More problematic are countries, such as Mexico, that, although they seem to represent little or no proliferation risk themselves, pose difficult problems by challenging restrictions in nuclear export policy. The author examines US policy toward some of the problem countries, paying particular attention to Pakistan. The constants in US policy and the few changes wrought by the Reagan administration are noted throughout

Real-Time Head Pose Estimation on Mobile Platforms

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jianfeng Ren

2010-06-01

Full Text Available Many computer vision applications such as augmented reality require head pose estimation. As far as the real-time implementation of head pose estimation on relatively resource limited mobile platforms is concerned, it is required to satisfy real-time constraints while maintaining reasonable head pose estimation accuracy. The introduced head pose estimation approach in this paper is an attempt to meet this objective. The approach consists of the following components: Viola-Jones face detection, color-based face tracking using an online calibration procedure, and head pose estimation using Hu moment features and Fisher linear discriminant. Experimental results running on an actual mobile device are reported exhibiting both the real- time and accuracy aspects of the developed approach.

Problems which are well posed in a generalized sense with applications to the Einstein equations

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kreiss, H-O; Winicour, J

2006-01-01

In the harmonic description of general relativity, the principal part of the Einstein equations reduces to a constrained system of ten curved space wave equations for the components of the spacetime metric. We use the pseudo- differential theory of systems which are strongly well posed in the generalized sense to establish the well posedness of constraint-preserving boundary conditions for this system when treated in a second-order differential form. The boundary conditions are of a generalized Sommerfeld type that is benevolent for numerical calculation

On the complex analysis of the reliability, safety, and economic efficiency of atomic electric power stations

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Emel'yanov, I.Ya.; Klemin, A.I.; Polyakov, E.F.

1977-01-01

The problem is posed of effectively increasing the engineering performance of nuclear electric power stations (APS). The principal components of the engineering performance of modern large APS are considered: economic efficiency, radiation safety, reliability, and their interrelationship. A nomenclature is proposed for the quantitative indices which most completely characterize the enumerated properties and are convenient for the analysis of the engineering performance. The urgent problem of developing a methodology for the complex analysis and optimization of the principal performance components is considered; this methodology is designed to increase the efficiency of the work on high-performance competitive APS. The principle of complex optimization of the reliability, safety, and economic-efficiency indices is formulated; specific recommendations are made for the practical realization of this principle. The structure of the complex quantiative analysis of the enumerated performance components is given. The urgency and promise of the complex approach to solving the problem of APS optimization is demonstrated, i.e., the solution of the problem of creating optimally reliable, fairly safe, and maximally economically efficient stations

Participatory/problem-based methods and techniques for training in health and safety.

Science.gov (United States)

Rosskam, E

2001-01-01

More knowledgeable and trained people are needed in the area of occupational health, safety, and environment (OSHE) if work-related fatalities, accidents, and diseases are to be reduced. Established systems have been largely ineffective, with few employers taking voluntary measures to protect workers and the environment and too few labor inspectors available. Training techniques using participatory methods and a worker empowerment philosophy have proven value. There is demonstrated need for the use of education for action, promoting the involvement of workers in all levels of decision-making and problem-solving in the workplace. OSH risks particular to women s jobs are virtually unstudied and not addressed at policy levels in most countries. Trade unions and health and safety professionals need to demystify technical areas, empower workers, and encourage unions to dedicate special activities around women s jobs. Trained women are excellent motivators and transmitters of safety culture. Particular emphasis is given to train-the-trainer approaches.

General problems arising from the analogical resolution of the kinetic equations of nuclear reactors (1961); Problemes generaux poses par la resolution analogique des equations cinetiques des reacteurs nucleaires (1961)

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Caillet, C [Commissariat a l' Energie Atomique, Saclay (France). Centre d' Etudes Nucleaires

1961-07-01

The author reviews precisely the analogical techniques used for the resolution of the kinetic equations of nuclear reactors. Prior to this, he recalls the reasons which oblige physicians and engineers, even today, to use electronic machines in this domain. The author then considers the technological problems posed by the range of values which the various nuclear parameters adopt. In each case, he shows that a compromise is possible allowing an optimum precision. He compares the results to those obtained by arithmetic calculation and uses the examples chosen in a critical analysis of the present possibilities of the two methods of calculation. (author) [French] L'auteur cherche a faire un point aussi exact que possible des techniques analogiques utilisees pour resoudre les equations cinetiques des reacteurs nucleaires. Il rappelle auparavant les raisons pour lesquelles physiciens et ingenieurs sont obliges, encore aujourd'hui, de faire appel aux machines electroniques dans ce domaine. Puis il etudie les problemes technologiques que souleve le champ des valeurs prises par les differents parametres nucleaires. Dans chacun des cas, il montre l'existence d'un compromis qui permet d'atteindre une precision optimum. Il compare les resultats obtenus a ceux provenant de calculateurs arithmetiques et profite des exemples choisis pour faire une analyse critique des possibilites actuelles offertes par les deux modes de calcul. (auteur)

Simulation-Based Optimization of Camera Placement in the Context of Industrial Pose Estimation

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Jørgensen, Troels Bo; Iversen, Thorbjørn Mosekjær; Lindvig, Anders Prier

2018-01-01

In this paper, we optimize the placement of a camera in simulation in order to achieve a high success rate for a pose estimation problem. This is achieved by simulating 2D images from a stereo camera in a virtual scene. The stereo images are then used to generate 3D point clouds based on two diff...

Utilization of mathematics amongst healthcare students towards problem solving during their occupational safety health internship

Science.gov (United States)

Umasenan a/l Thanikasalam

2017-05-01

Occupational safety health is a multidisciplinary discipline concentrating on the safety, health and welfare of workers in the working place. Healthcare Students undergoing Occupational Safety Health internships are required to apply mathematical in areas such as safety legislation, safety behavior, ergonomics, chemical safety, OSH practices, industrial hygiene, risk management and safety health practices as problem solving. The aim of this paper is to investigate the level of mathematics and logic utilization from these students during their internship looking at areas of Hazard identification, Determining the population exposed to the hazard, Assessing the risk of the exposure to the hazards and Taking preventive and control. A total of 142 returning healthcare students from their Occupational Safety Health, internship were given a questionnaire to measure their perceptions towards mathematical and logic utilization. The overall results indicated a strong positive skewed result towards the use of Mathematics during their internship. The findings showed that mathematics were well delivered by the students during their internship. Mathematics could not be separated from OSH practice as a needed precision in quantifying safety, health an d welfare of workers in addition to empiricism.

Underground localization using dual magnetic field sequence measurement and pose graph SLAM for directional drilling

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Park, Byeolteo; Myung, Hyun

2014-01-01

With the development of unconventional gas, the technology of directional drilling has become more advanced. Underground localization is the key technique of directional drilling for real-time path following and system control. However, there are problems such as vibration, disconnection with external infrastructure, and magnetic field distortion. Conventional methods cannot solve these problems in real time or in various environments. In this paper, a novel underground localization algorithm using a re-measurement of the sequence of the magnetic field and pose graph SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) is introduced. The proposed algorithm exploits the property of the drilling system that the body passes through the previous pass. By comparing the recorded measurement from one magnetic sensor and the current re-measurement from another magnetic sensor, the proposed algorithm predicts the pose of the drilling system. The performance of the algorithm is validated through simulations and experiments. (paper)

Underground localization using dual magnetic field sequence measurement and pose graph SLAM for directional drilling

Science.gov (United States)

Park, Byeolteo; Myung, Hyun

2014-12-01

With the development of unconventional gas, the technology of directional drilling has become more advanced. Underground localization is the key technique of directional drilling for real-time path following and system control. However, there are problems such as vibration, disconnection with external infrastructure, and magnetic field distortion. Conventional methods cannot solve these problems in real time or in various environments. In this paper, a novel underground localization algorithm using a re-measurement of the sequence of the magnetic field and pose graph SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) is introduced. The proposed algorithm exploits the property of the drilling system that the body passes through the previous pass. By comparing the recorded measurement from one magnetic sensor and the current re-measurement from another magnetic sensor, the proposed algorithm predicts the pose of the drilling system. The performance of the algorithm is validated through simulations and experiments.

Head pose estimation algorithm based on deep learning

Science.gov (United States)

Cao, Yuanming; Liu, Yijun

2017-05-01

Head pose estimation has been widely used in the field of artificial intelligence, pattern recognition and intelligent human-computer interaction and so on. Good head pose estimation algorithm should deal with light, noise, identity, shelter and other factors robustly, but so far how to improve the accuracy and robustness of attitude estimation remains a major challenge in the field of computer vision. A method based on deep learning for pose estimation is presented. Deep learning with a strong learning ability, it can extract high-level image features of the input image by through a series of non-linear operation, then classifying the input image using the extracted feature. Such characteristics have greater differences in pose, while they are robust of light, identity, occlusion and other factors. The proposed head pose estimation is evaluated on the CAS-PEAL data set. Experimental results show that this method is effective to improve the accuracy of pose estimation.

ONKALO POSE experiment. Phase 3: execution and monitoring

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Valli, J.; Hakala, M.; Wanne, T.; Kantia, P.; Siren, T.

2014-01-01

In-depth knowledge of the in situ stress state at the Olkiluoto site is critical for stability assessment both prior to and after deposition of spent nuclear fuel in order to understand and avoid potential damage to the rock at the site. Posiva's Olkiluoto Spalling Experiment (POSE) was designed specifically for this purpose with three primary goals: establish the in situ spalling/damage strength of Olkiluoto migmatitic gneiss, establish the state of in situ stress at the -345 m depth level and act as a Prediction-Outcome (P-O) exercise. Phases 1 and 2 of POSE are outlined in WR 2012-60. The objectives of the third phase of the POSE experiment are the same as the original objectives outlined above. This report outlines the execution and results of the third phase of the POSE experiment. The third phase of the experiment involved internally heating the third experimental hole (ONK-EH3) of the POSE niche in order to cause a symmetrical thermal stress increase around the hole due to the thermal expansion of rock. This thermomechanically induced stress increase, coupled with the estimated existing in situ stress state, should cause the maximum principal stress around the hole to exceed the predicted spalling strength of the rock around the hole. ONK-EH3 is located almost completely in pegmatitic granite. Four fractures near the top of the hole were mapped after boring ONK-EH3, and a tensile failure located at the contact between mica-rich gneiss and pegmatitic granite was observed 18 months after boring, prior to the experiment. Based on predictive calculations and the estimated in situ state of stress, the maximum principal stress magnitude should reach ca. 100 MPa when the temperature was just below 100 deg C after 12 weeks of heating. There were problems with the heater control unit at the beginning of the experiment, after which heating proceeded according to plan. The crack damage threshold of pegmatitic granite has been determined to be 85 ±17 MPa at Olkiluoto

Report to NASA Committee on Aircraft Operating Problems Relative to Aviation Safety Engineering and Research Activities

Science.gov (United States)

1963-01-01

The following report highlights some of the work accomplished by the Aviation Safety Engineering and Research Division of the Flight Safety Foundations since the last report to the NASA Committee on Aircraft Operating Problems on 22 May 1963. The information presented is in summary form. Additional details may be provided upon request of the reports themselves may be obtained from AvSER.

Satellite markers: a simple method for ground truth car pose on stereo video

Science.gov (United States)

Gil, Gustavo; Savino, Giovanni; Piantini, Simone; Pierini, Marco

2018-04-01

Artificial prediction of future location of other cars in the context of advanced safety systems is a must. The remote estimation of car pose and particularly its heading angle is key to predict its future location. Stereo vision systems allow to get the 3D information of a scene. Ground truth in this specific context is associated with referential information about the depth, shape and orientation of the objects present in the traffic scene. Creating 3D ground truth is a measurement and data fusion task associated with the combination of different kinds of sensors. The novelty of this paper is the method to generate ground truth car pose only from video data. When the method is applied to stereo video, it also provides the extrinsic camera parameters for each camera at frame level which are key to quantify the performance of a stereo vision system when it is moving because the system is subjected to undesired vibrations and/or leaning. We developed a video post-processing technique which employs a common camera calibration tool for the 3D ground truth generation. In our case study, we focus in accurate car heading angle estimation of a moving car under realistic imagery. As outcomes, our satellite marker method provides accurate car pose at frame level, and the instantaneous spatial orientation for each camera at frame level.

Application of an engineering problem-solving methodology to address persistent problems in patient safety: a case study on retained surgical sponges after surgery.

Science.gov (United States)

Anderson, Devon E; Watts, Bradley V

2013-09-01

Despite innumerable attempts to eliminate the postoperative retention of surgical sponges, the medical error persists in operating rooms worldwide and places significant burden on patient safety, quality of care, financial resources, and hospital/physician reputation. The failure of countless solutions, from new sponge counting methods to radio labeled sponges, to truly eliminate the event in the operating room requires that the emerging field of health-care delivery science find innovative ways to approach the problem. Accordingly, the VA National Center for Patient Safety formed a unique collaboration with a team at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College to evaluate the retention of surgical sponges after surgery and find a solution. The team used an engineering problem solving methodology to develop the best solution. To make the operating room a safe environment for patients, the team identified a need to make the sponge itself safe for use as opposed to resolving the relatively innocuous counting methods. In evaluation of this case study, the need for systematic engineering evaluation to resolve problems in health-care delivery becomes clear.

Local Feature Learning for Face Recognition under Varying Poses

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Duan, Xiaodong; Tan, Zheng-Hua

2015-01-01

In this paper, we present a local feature learning method for face recognition to deal with varying poses. As opposed to the commonly used approaches of recovering frontal face images from profile views, the proposed method extracts the subject related part from a local feature by removing the pose...... related part in it on the basis of a pose feature. The method has a closed-form solution, hence being time efficient. For performance evaluation, cross pose face recognition experiments are conducted on two public face recognition databases FERET and FEI. The proposed method shows a significant...... recognition improvement under varying poses over general local feature approaches and outperforms or is comparable with related state-of-the-art pose invariant face recognition approaches. Copyright ©2015 by IEEE....

To Strike a Pose: No Stereotype Backlash for Power Posing Women

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Miriam Rennung

2016-09-01

Full Text Available Power posing, the adoption of open and powerful postures, has effects that parallel those of actual social power. This study explored the social evaluation of adopting powerful versus powerless body postures in men and women regarding perceived warmth, competence, and the likelihood of eliciting admiration, envy, pity, and contempt. Previous findings suggest that the display of power by women may have side effects due to gender stereotyping, namely reduced warmth ratings and negative emotional reactions. An experiment (N = 2,473 asked participants to rate pictures of men and women who adopted high-power or low-power body postures. High-power posers were rated higher on competence, admiration, envy, and contempt compared to low-power posers, whereas the opposite was true for pity. There was no impact of power posing on perceived warmth. Contrary to expectations, the poser’s gender did not moderate any of the effects. These findings suggest that nonverbal displays of power do influence fundamental dimensions of social perception and their accompanying emotional reactions but result in comparably positive and negative evaluations for both genders.

An ill-posed problem for the Black-Scholes equation for a profitable forecast of prices of stock options on real market data

Science.gov (United States)

Klibanov, Michael V.; Kuzhuget, Andrey V.; Golubnichiy, Kirill V.

2016-01-01

A new empirical mathematical model for the Black-Scholes equation is proposed to forecast option prices. This model includes new interval for the price of the underlying stock, new initial and new boundary conditions. Conventional notions of maturity time and strike prices are not used. The Black-Scholes equation is solved as a parabolic equation with the reversed time, which is an ill-posed problem. Thus, a regularization method is used to solve it. To verify the validity of our model, real market data for 368 randomly selected liquid options are used. A new trading strategy is proposed. Our results indicates that our method is profitable on those options. Furthermore, it is shown that the performance of two simple extrapolation-based techniques is much worse. We conjecture that our method might lead to significant profits of those financial insitutions which trade large amounts of options. We caution, however, that further studies are necessary to verify this conjecture.

[Karachi Nuclear Power Plant (KANUPP), Safety Management

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Hasan, S M [Karachi Nuclear Power Plant (KANUPP), Karachi (Pakistan)

1997-12-01

The present regime for CANDU safety management in Pakistan has evolved in line with contemporary international practice, and is essential adequate to ensure the continued safety of KANUPP and other future CANDU reactors, as confirmed by international reviews as well. But the small size of Pakistan nuclear power program poses limitations in developing - expert judgment in analysis of in-service inspection data; and own methodology for CANDU safety analysis.

[Karachi Nuclear Power Plant (KANUPP), Safety Management

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Hasan, S.M.

1997-01-01

The present regime for CANDU safety management in Pakistan has evolved in line with contemporary international practice, and is essential adequate to ensure the continued safety of KANUPP and other future CANDU reactors, as confirmed by international reviews as well. But the small size of Pakistan nuclear power program poses limitations in developing - expert judgment in analysis of in-service inspection data; and own methodology for CANDU safety analysis

Inverse problems in linear transport theory

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Dressler, K.

1988-01-01

Inverse problems for a class of linear kinetic equations are investigated. The aim is to identify the scattering kernel of a transport equation (corresponding to the structure of a background medium) by observing the 'albedo' part of the solution operator for the corresponding direct initial boundary value problem. This means to get information on some integral operator in an integrodifferential equation through on overdetermined boundary value problem. We first derive a constructive method for solving direct halfspace problems and prove a new factorization theorem for the solutions. Using this result we investigate stationary inverse problems with respect to well posedness (e.g. reduce them to classical ill-posed problems, such as integral equations of first kind). In the time-dependent case we show that a quite general inverse problem is well posed and solve it constructively. (orig.)

Multifactor Analysis of Roadheader’s Body Pose Responses during the Horizontal Cutting Process

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Kai Zong

2018-01-01

Full Text Available Based on the Lagrange equation in system dynamics, aiming at the horizontal cutting process, the dynamical coupling model of boom-type roadheader’s body pose was established. According to input problem of solving the model, a calculation method of the cutting head load was proposed, and the relationship between the cutting head load and pressure of the driving cylinders and swing angle of the cutting arm was obtained through simulating analysis. The simulation model was established to solve the dynamical coupling model. The cutting head load, horizontal swing angle of the cutting arm, and dip angle of coal seam were regarded as independent variables to perform changing parameter analysis in variations of the body pose. The field experiment was carried out, and the measured data is basically consistent with the simulation values. The results show that lateral displacement of the body can reach up to 6.5 cm, backward displacement can reach up to 5.2 cm, floor-based quantity can reach up to 11 cm, pitch angle of the body can reach up to 7.8°, and roll angle can reach up to 2.1°. Variations of the body pose parameters are influenced greatly by the cutting head load, while the influence from horizontal swing angle of the cutting arm and dip angle of coal seam is slighter. Among the pose parameters, floor-based quantity and pitch angle of the body vary relatively greatly, which tend to seriously influence forming quality of the roadway and should be mainly considered in deviation rectification of the roadheader’s body pose.

Binocular Vision-Based Position and Pose of Hand Detection and Tracking in Space

Science.gov (United States)

Jun, Chen; Wenjun, Hou; Qing, Sheng

After the study of image segmentation, CamShift target tracking algorithm and stereo vision model of space, an improved algorithm based of Frames Difference and a new space point positioning model were proposed, a binocular visual motion tracking system was constructed to verify the improved algorithm and the new model. The problem of the spatial location and pose of the hand detection and tracking have been solved.

Assessing exposure risks for freshwater tilapia species posed by mercury and methylmercury.

Science.gov (United States)

Cheng, Yi-Hsien; Lin, Yi-Jun; You, Shu-Han; Yang, Ying-Fei; How, Chun Ming; Tseng, Yi-Ting; Chen, Wei-Yu; Liao, Chung-Min

2016-08-01

Waterborne and dietborne exposures of freshwater fish to mercury (Hg) in the forms of inorganic (Hg(II)) and organic (methylmercury or MeHg) affect their growth, development, and reproduction. However, an integrated mechanistic risk model framework to predict the impact of Hg(II)/MeHg on freshwater fish is lacking. Here, we integrated biokinetic, physiological and biogeographic data to calibrate and then establish key risk indices-hazardous quotient and exceedance risk-for freshwater tilapia species across geographic ranges of several major rivers in Taiwan. We found that Hg(II) burden was highest in kidney followed by gill, intestine, liver, blood, and muscle. Our results showed that Hg was less likely to pose mortality risk (mortality rate less than 5 %) for freshwater tilapia species. However, Hg is likely to pose the potential hazard to aquatic environments constrained by safety levels for aquatic organisms. Sensitivity analysis showed that amount of Hg accumulated in tilapia was most influenced by sediment uptake rate. Our approach opens up new possibilities for predicting future fish population health with the impacts of continued Hg exposure to provide information on which fish are deemed safe for human consumption.

Hardware in the Loop Performance Assessment of LIDAR-Based Spacecraft Pose Determination.

Science.gov (United States)

Opromolla, Roberto; Fasano, Giancarmine; Rufino, Giancarlo; Grassi, Michele

2017-09-24

In this paper an original, easy to reproduce, semi-analytic calibration approach is developed for hardware-in-the-loop performance assessment of pose determination algorithms processing point cloud data, collected by imaging a non-cooperative target with LIDARs. The laboratory setup includes a scanning LIDAR, a monocular camera, a scaled-replica of a satellite-like target, and a set of calibration tools. The point clouds are processed by uncooperative model-based algorithms to estimate the target relative position and attitude with respect to the LIDAR. Target images, acquired by a monocular camera operated simultaneously with the LIDAR, are processed applying standard solutions to the Perspective- n -Points problem to get high-accuracy pose estimates which can be used as a benchmark to evaluate the accuracy attained by the LIDAR-based techniques. To this aim, a precise knowledge of the extrinsic relative calibration between the camera and the LIDAR is essential, and it is obtained by implementing an original calibration approach which does not need ad-hoc homologous targets (e.g., retro-reflectors) easily recognizable by the two sensors. The pose determination techniques investigated by this work are of interest to space applications involving close-proximity maneuvers between non-cooperative platforms, e.g., on-orbit servicing and active debris removal.

School safety in rural schools: Are schools as safe as we think they ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

annaline

school physical facilities, including school buildings and grounds, also pose safety ..... Figure 8 Existence and application of classroom safety rules policies, there is a ... All schools should expressly pay attention to safety issues and compile.

Sensitivity computation of the l1 minimization problem and its application to dictionary design of ill-posed problems

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Horesh, L; Haber, E

2009-01-01

The l 1 minimization problem has been studied extensively in the past few years. Recently, there has been a growing interest in its application for inverse problems. Most studies have concentrated in devising ways for sparse representation of a solution using a given prototype dictionary. Very few studies have addressed the more challenging problem of optimal dictionary construction, and even these were primarily devoted to the simplistic sparse coding application. In this paper, sensitivity analysis of the inverse solution with respect to the dictionary is presented. This analysis reveals some of the salient features and intrinsic difficulties which are associated with the dictionary design problem. Equipped with these insights, we propose an optimization strategy that alleviates these hurdles while utilizing the derived sensitivity relations for the design of a locally optimal dictionary. Our optimality criterion is based on local minimization of the Bayesian risk, given a set of training models. We present a mathematical formulation and an algorithmic framework to achieve this goal. The proposed framework offers the design of dictionaries for inverse problems that incorporate non-trivial, non-injective observation operators, where the data and the recovered parameters may reside in different spaces. We test our algorithm and show that it yields improved dictionaries for a diverse set of inverse problems in geophysics and medical imaging

Sensitivity computation of the ell1 minimization problem and its application to dictionary design of ill-posed problems

Science.gov (United States)

Horesh, L.; Haber, E.

2009-09-01

The ell1 minimization problem has been studied extensively in the past few years. Recently, there has been a growing interest in its application for inverse problems. Most studies have concentrated in devising ways for sparse representation of a solution using a given prototype dictionary. Very few studies have addressed the more challenging problem of optimal dictionary construction, and even these were primarily devoted to the simplistic sparse coding application. In this paper, sensitivity analysis of the inverse solution with respect to the dictionary is presented. This analysis reveals some of the salient features and intrinsic difficulties which are associated with the dictionary design problem. Equipped with these insights, we propose an optimization strategy that alleviates these hurdles while utilizing the derived sensitivity relations for the design of a locally optimal dictionary. Our optimality criterion is based on local minimization of the Bayesian risk, given a set of training models. We present a mathematical formulation and an algorithmic framework to achieve this goal. The proposed framework offers the design of dictionaries for inverse problems that incorporate non-trivial, non-injective observation operators, where the data and the recovered parameters may reside in different spaces. We test our algorithm and show that it yields improved dictionaries for a diverse set of inverse problems in geophysics and medical imaging.

Safety assessment of the liquid-fed ceramic melter process

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Buelt, J.L.; Partain, W.L.

1980-08-01

As part of its development program for the solidification of high-level nuclear waste, Pacific Northwest Laboratory assessed the safety issues for a complete liquid-fed ceramic melter (LFCM) process. The LFCM process, an adaption of commercial glass-making technology, is being developed to convert high-level liquid waste from the nuclear fuel cycle into glass. This safety assessment uncovered no unresolved or significant safety problems with the LFCM process. Although in this assessment the LFCM process was not directly compared with other solidification processes, the safety hazards of the LFCM process are comparable to those of other processes. The high processing temperatures of the glass in the LFCM pose no additional significant safety concerns, and the dispersible inventory of dried waste (calcine) is small. This safety assessment was based on the nuclear power waste flowsheet, since power waste is more radioactive than defense waste at the time of solidification, and all accident conditions for the power waste would have greater radiological consequences than those for defense waste. An exhaustive list of possible off-standard conditions and equipment failures was compiled. These accidents were then classified according to severity of consequence and type of accident. Radionuclide releases to the stack were calculated for each group of accidents using conservative assumptions regarding the retention and decontamination features of the process and facility. Two recommendations that should be considered by process designers are given in the safety assessment

The nuclear safety at Cattenom: when an anomaly becomes a fundamental problem

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Legrand, V.; Marignac, Y.

2003-02-01

The Cattenom nuclear power plant established in Moselle, near Luxembourg is the center of incidents that placed in the context of the actual management of its park by EDF are significant of a safety erosion, linked to the research of economic performance. More, the analysis of the management by the operator and its supervision authority of these incidents raises questions on their ability to evaluate, control and exchange information on these problems. (N.C.)

Manifolds for pose tracking from monocular video

Science.gov (United States)

Basu, Saurav; Poulin, Joshua; Acton, Scott T.

2015-03-01

We formulate a simple human-pose tracking theory from monocular video based on the fundamental relationship between changes in pose and image motion vectors. We investigate the natural embedding of the low-dimensional body pose space into a high-dimensional space of body configurations that behaves locally in a linear manner. The embedded manifold facilitates the decomposition of the image motion vectors into basis motion vector fields of the tangent space to the manifold. This approach benefits from the style invariance of image motion flow vectors, and experiments to validate the fundamental theory show reasonable accuracy (within 4.9 deg of the ground truth).

75 FR 59963 - Safety Zone: Monte Foundation Firework Display, Monterey, CA

Science.gov (United States)

2010-09-29

...-AA00 Safety Zone: Monte Foundation Firework Display, Monterey, CA AGENCY: Coast Guard, DHS. ACTION... Monte Foundation Firework Display. This safety zone is established to ensure the safety of participants... be completed. Because of the dangers posed by the pyrotechnics used in this fireworks display, the...

The lighter side of advertising: investigating posing and lighting biases.

Science.gov (United States)

Thomas, Nicole A; Burkitt, Jennifer A; Patrick, Regan E; Elias, Lorin J

2008-11-01

People tend to display the left cheek when posing for a portrait; however, this effect does not appear to generalise to advertising. The amount of body visible in the image and the sex of the poser might also contribute to the posing bias. Portraits also exhibit lateral lighting biases, with most images being lit from the left. This effect might also be present in advertisements. A total of 2801 full-page advertisements were sampled and coded for posing direction, lighting direction, sex of model, and amount of body showing. Images of females showed an overall leftward posing bias, but the biases in males depended on the amount of body visible. Males demonstrated rightward posing biases for head-only images. Overall, images tended to be lit from the top left corner. The two factors of posing and lighting biases appear to influence one another. Leftward-lit images had more leftward poses than rightward, while the opposite occurred for rightward-lit images. Collectively, these results demonstrate that the posing biases in advertisements are dependent on the amount of body showing in the image, and that biases in lighting direction interact with these posing biases.

Malting and Brewing Industries Encounter Fusarium spp. Related Problems

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Kristina Mastanjević

2018-01-01

Full Text Available Versatile microbiota are inevitably naturally present on cereals. Fungi, yeasts and bacteria and their metabolites all contribute to the quality and safety of the final products derived from most common beer cereals—barley and wheat. The microorganisms that are most often associated with the safety and quality of cereals for beer production belong to the Fusarium spp. They greatly influence yields from the field, and can modify and diminish economic success for farmers. However, the real problem is their harmful metabolites—mycotoxins—that affect the health of humans and animals. In the era of emerging analytical methodologies, the spectrum of known toxins originating from microorganisms that can pose a threat to humans has grown tremendously. Therefore, it is necessary to monitor microflora throughout the productive “barley to beer” chain and to act suppressive on the proliferation of unwanted microorganisms, before and during malting, preventing the occurrence of mycotoxins in final products and by-products. Multi-mycotoxin analyses are very advanced and useful tools for the assessment of product safety, and legislation should follow up and make some important changes to regulate as yet unregulated, but highly occurring, microbial toxins in malt and beer.

Animated pose templates for modeling and detecting human actions.

Science.gov (United States)

Yao, Benjamin Z; Nie, Bruce X; Liu, Zicheng; Zhu, Song-Chun

2014-03-01

This paper presents animated pose templates (APTs) for detecting short-term, long-term, and contextual actions from cluttered scenes in videos. Each pose template consists of two components: 1) a shape template with deformable parts represented in an And-node whose appearances are represented by the Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) features, and 2) a motion template specifying the motion of the parts by the Histogram of Optical-Flows (HOF) features. A shape template may have more than one motion template represented by an Or-node. Therefore, each action is defined as a mixture (Or-node) of pose templates in an And-Or tree structure. While this pose template is suitable for detecting short-term action snippets in two to five frames, we extend it in two ways: 1) For long-term actions, we animate the pose templates by adding temporal constraints in a Hidden Markov Model (HMM), and 2) for contextual actions, we treat contextual objects as additional parts of the pose templates and add constraints that encode spatial correlations between parts. To train the model, we manually annotate part locations on several keyframes of each video and cluster them into pose templates using EM. This leaves the unknown parameters for our learning algorithm in two groups: 1) latent variables for the unannotated frames including pose-IDs and part locations, 2) model parameters shared by all training samples such as weights for HOG and HOF features, canonical part locations of each pose, coefficients penalizing pose-transition and part-deformation. To learn these parameters, we introduce a semi-supervised structural SVM algorithm that iterates between two steps: 1) learning (updating) model parameters using labeled data by solving a structural SVM optimization, and 2) imputing missing variables (i.e., detecting actions on unlabeled frames) with parameters learned from the previous step and progressively accepting high-score frames as newly labeled examples. This algorithm belongs to a

TJC: HCOs need to be on alert for HIT problems related to sociotechnical factors, take steps to improve safety culture, process, and leadership.

Science.gov (United States)

2015-06-01

Noting that too many errors related to health information technology (HIT) are resulting in adverse consequences, The Joint Commission (TJC) has issued a Sentinel Event Alert, urging health care providers to take steps to improve their safety culture, approach to process improvement, and leadership in this area. In this latest alert, the accrediting agency is taking particular aim at risks posed by sociotechnical factors--or the ways in which HIT is implemented and used. Experts say that many of these risks are, in fact, exemplified at a higher level in the emergency setting, where providers are under constant pressure to see more patients and move them though the system faster. In an analysis of 3,375 sentinel events that resulted in permanent patient harm or death between January 1, 2010, and June 20, 2013, The Joint Commission (TJC) found that 120 events included HIT-related contributing factors. Many of the problems cited by TJC relate to orders or medicines being prescribed for the wrong patients. These can result from toggling errors or pop-up screens where providers are asked to click on the appropriate patient or medicine, and they mistakenly click on the wrong selection. In the ED, experts recommend the creation of a multidisciplinary performance improvement group to continuously monitor the ED information system (EDIS), recognize problems, and work with the vendor to resolve them. Also important is a quick and easy way for providers to report HIT-related problems. Experts add that emergency providers need to be fully engaged in the process of selecting HIT that they will be using, and that health care organizations should arrange for usability assessments before purchasing HIT.

Safety Case Development as an Information Modelling Problem

Science.gov (United States)

Lewis, Robert

This paper considers the benefits from applying information modelling as the basis for creating an electronically-based safety case. It highlights the current difficulties of developing and managing large document-based safety cases for complex systems such as those found in Air Traffic Control systems. After a review of current tools and related literature on this subject, the paper proceeds to examine the many relationships between entities that can exist within a large safety case. The paper considers the benefits to both safety case writers and readers from the future development of an ideal safety case tool that is able to exploit these information models. The paper also introduces the idea that the safety case has formal relationships between entities that directly support the safety case argument using a methodology such as GSN, and informal relationships that provide links to direct and backing evidence and to supporting information.

Reflections on current nuclear safety problems

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Teillac, J.

1981-01-01

After operations totalling more than 2000 reactor-years, the safety balance is undeniably positive: no nuclear power plant in the world has so far caused significant damage to populations or to the environment. The paper reviews the darker and brighter aspects of recent analyses, in particular since the Harrisburg accident, and suggests three general lines of action: maintenance of a high level of technical competence in safety, systematic analysis of operational incidents and, finally, increased attention to the ''human factor'' as regards both the man/machine relationship and the training of personnel. With regard to the last-mentioned point, it is suggested that the greatest possible profit should be drawn from the tests carried out at the time of plant commissioning. International collaboration is particularly necessary both to ensure progress in the technical aspects of safety and to place the credibility of specialists on a firmer foundation. Finally, it is essential to assist countries which are embarking on nuclear power programmes. Nuclear safety is not always correctly perceived by public opinion, which will not definitively accept this new source of energy without having complete confidence in those who are promoting it. A clear and firm position on the part of those in positions of political responsibility is an important element in gaining public confidence. (author)

Radiation safety of soil moisture neutron probes

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Oresegun, M.O.

2000-01-01

The neutron probe measures sub-surface moisture in soil and other materials by means of high energy neutrons and a slow (thermal) neutron detector. Exposure to radiation, including neutrons, especially at high doses, can cause detrimental health effects. In order to achieve operational radiation safety, there must be compliance with protection and safety standards. The design and manufacture of commercially available neutron moisture gauges are such that risks to the health of the user have been greatly reduced. The major concern is radiation escape from the soil during measurement, especially under dry conditions and when the radius of influence is large. With appropriate work practices as well as good design and manufacture of gauges, recorded occupational doses have been well below recommended annual limits. It can be concluded that the use of neutron gauges poses not only acceptable health and safety risks but, in fact, the risks are negligible. Neutron gauges should not be classified as posing high potential health hazards. (author)

A cross docking pipeline for improving pose prediction and virtual screening performance

Science.gov (United States)

Kumar, Ashutosh; Zhang, Kam Y. J.

2018-01-01

Pose prediction and virtual screening performance of a molecular docking method depend on the choice of protein structures used for docking. Multiple structures for a target protein are often used to take into account the receptor flexibility and problems associated with a single receptor structure. However, the use of multiple receptor structures is computationally expensive when docking a large library of small molecules. Here, we propose a new cross-docking pipeline suitable to dock a large library of molecules while taking advantage of multiple target protein structures. Our method involves the selection of a suitable receptor for each ligand in a screening library utilizing ligand 3D shape similarity with crystallographic ligands. We have prospectively evaluated our method in D3R Grand Challenge 2 and demonstrated that our cross-docking pipeline can achieve similar or better performance than using either single or multiple-receptor structures. Moreover, our method displayed not only decent pose prediction performance but also better virtual screening performance over several other methods.

Assessing the risk posed by high-turbidity water to water supplies.

Science.gov (United States)

Chang, Chia-Ling; Liao, Chung-Sheng

2012-05-01

The objective of this study is to assess the risk of insufficient water supply posed by high-turbidity water. Several phenomena can pose risks to the sufficiency of a water supply; this study concerns risks to water treatment plants from particular properties of rainfall and raw water turbidity. High-turbidity water can impede water treatment plant operations; rainfall properties can influence the degree of soil erosion. Thus, water turbidity relates to rainfall characteristics. Exceedance probabilities are presented for different rainfall intensities and turbidities of water. When the turbidity of raw water is higher than 5,000 NTU, it can cause operational problems for a water treatment plant. Calculations show that the turbidity of raw water at the Ban-Sin water treatment plant will be higher than 5,000 NTU if the rainfall intensity is larger than 165 mm/day. The exceedance probability of high turbidity (turbidity >5,000 NTU) in the Ban-Sin water treatment plant is larger than 10%. When any water treatment plant cannot work regularly, its ability to supply water to its customers is at risk.

Pose Estimation with a Kinect for Ergonomic Studies: Evaluation of the Accuracy Using a Virtual Mannequin

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Pierre Plantard

2015-01-01

Full Text Available Analyzing human poses with a Kinect is a promising method to evaluate potentials risks of musculoskeletal disorders at workstations. In ecological situations, complex 3D poses and constraints imposed by the environment make it difficult to obtain reliable kinematic information. Thus, being able to predict the potential accuracy of the measurement for such complex 3D poses and sensor placements is challenging in classical experimental setups. To tackle this problem, we propose a new evaluation method based on a virtual mannequin. In this study, we apply this method to the evaluation of joint positions (shoulder, elbow, and wrist, joint angles (shoulder and elbow, and the corresponding RULA (a popular ergonomics assessment grid upper-limb score for a large set of poses and sensor placements. Thanks to this evaluation method, more than 500,000 configurations have been automatically tested, which would be almost impossible to evaluate with classical protocols. The results show that the kinematic information obtained by the Kinect software is generally accurate enough to fill in ergonomic assessment grids. However inaccuracy strongly increases for some specific poses and sensor positions. Using this evaluation method enabled us to report configurations that could lead to these high inaccuracies. As a supplementary material, we provide a software tool to help designers to evaluate the expected accuracy of this sensor for a set of upper-limb configurations. Results obtained with the virtual mannequin are in accordance with those obtained from a real subject for a limited set of poses and sensor placements.

Transfer between Pose and Illumination Training in Face Recognition

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Chang Hong; Bhuiyan, Md. Al-Amin; Ward, James; Sui, Jie

2009-01-01

The relationship between pose and illumination learning in face recognition was examined in a yes-no recognition paradigm. The authors assessed whether pose training can transfer to a new illumination or vice versa. Results show that an extensive level of pose training through a face-name association task was able to generalize to a new…

Calibrating corneal material model parameters using only inflation data: an ill-posed problem

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Kok, S

2014-08-01

Full Text Available is to perform numerical modelling using the finite element method, for which a calibrated material model is required. These material models are typically calibrated using experimental inflation data by solving an inverse problem. In the inverse problem...

Baseline Face Detection, Head Pose Estimation, and Coarse Direction Detection for Facial Data in the SHRP2 Naturalistic Driving Study

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Paone, Jeffrey R [ORNL; Bolme, David S [ORNL; Ferrell, Regina Kay [ORNL; Aykac, Deniz [ORNL; Karnowski, Thomas Paul [ORNL

2015-01-01

Keeping a driver focused on the road is one of the most critical steps in insuring the safe operation of a vehicle. The Strategic Highway Research Program 2 (SHRP2) has over 3,100 recorded videos of volunteer drivers during a period of 2 years. This extensive naturalistic driving study (NDS) contains over one million hours of video and associated data that could aid safety researchers in understanding where the driver s attention is focused. Manual analysis of this data is infeasible, therefore efforts are underway to develop automated feature extraction algorithms to process and characterize the data. The real-world nature, volume, and acquisition conditions are unmatched in the transportation community, but there are also challenges because the data has relatively low resolution, high compression rates, and differing illumination conditions. A smaller dataset, the head pose validation study, is available which used the same recording equipment as SHRP2 but is more easily accessible with less privacy constraints. In this work we report initial head pose accuracy using commercial and open source face pose estimation algorithms on the head pose validation data set.

The Pose Estimation of Mobile Robot Based on Improved Point Cloud Registration

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yanzi Miao

2016-03-01

Full Text Available Due to GPS restrictions, an inertial sensor is usually used to estimate the location of indoor mobile robots. However, it is difficult to achieve high-accuracy localization and control by inertial sensors alone. In this paper, a new method is proposed to estimate an indoor mobile robot pose with six degrees of freedom based on an improved 3D-Normal Distributions Transform algorithm (3D-NDT. First, point cloud data are captured by a Kinect sensor and segmented according to the distance to the robot. After the segmentation, the input point cloud data are processed by the Approximate Voxel Grid Filter algorithm in different sized voxel grids. Second, the initial registration and precise registration are performed respectively according to the distance to the sensor. The most distant point cloud data use the 3D-Normal Distributions Transform algorithm (3D-NDT with large-sized voxel grids for initial registration, based on the transformation matrix from the odometry method. The closest point cloud data use the 3D-NDT algorithm with small-sized voxel grids for precise registration. After the registrations above, a final transformation matrix is obtained and coordinated. Based on this transformation matrix, the pose estimation problem of the indoor mobile robot is solved. Test results show that this method can obtain accurate robot pose estimation and has better robustness.

Problems of safety and risk in physical education

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Robert Podstawski

2015-10-01

Full Text Available Purpose: One of the methodology issues in Physical Education is providing children with safety. The purpose of this work is to present basic concepts of safety at Physical Education classes. Material & Methods: The issues connected with safety at classes of Physical Education have been discussed in the subsections, each of which focuses on different concepts such as: legal safety regulations, causes of hazards, theoretical models of preventing hazards at P.E. classes, nutrition programs related to exercise’s fulfillment, prevention of heat disorders and dehydration. Results: According to experts’ opinion, the causes of safety hazards at P.E. classes can be divided into three groups: caused by instructor, caused by a student, and finally hazards technical in nature. The number of accidents during P.E. classes is still substantial, and among most common hazards there are the following: fractures of upper and lower limbs, dislocations, contusions, tendonitis, muscle tear and cuts. Curiously, boys experience such injuries more frequently than girls. Conclusions: Even though safety rules at Physical Education classes are defined by specific regulations, children’s absolute safety is never guaranteed. In order to diminish the number of misadventures, instructor is obliged not only to adhere to the norms but also to teach children to safety rules.

An improved silhouette for human pose estimation

Science.gov (United States)

Hawes, Anthony H.; Iftekharuddin, Khan M.

2017-08-01

We propose a novel method for analyzing images that exploits the natural lines of a human poses to find areas where self-occlusion could be present. Errors caused by self-occlusion cause several modern human pose estimation methods to mis-identify body parts, which reduces the performance of most action recognition algorithms. Our method is motivated by the observation that, in several cases, occlusion can be reasoned using only boundary lines of limbs. An intelligent edge detection algorithm based on the above principle could be used to augment the silhouette with information useful for pose estimation algorithms and push forward progress on occlusion handling for human action recognition. The algorithm described is applicable to computer vision scenarios involving 2D images and (appropriated flattened) 3D images.

Temporal subtraction of chest radiographs compensating pose differences

Science.gov (United States)

von Berg, Jens; Dworzak, Jalda; Klinder, Tobias; Manke, Dirk; Kreth, Adrian; Lamecker, Hans; Zachow, Stefan; Lorenz, Cristian

2011-03-01

Temporal subtraction techniques using 2D image registration improve the detectability of interval changes from chest radiographs. Although such methods are well known for some time they are not widely used in radiologic practice. The reason is the occurrence of strong pose differences between two acquisitions with a time interval of months to years in between. Such strong perspective differences occur in a reasonable number of cases. They cannot be compensated by available image registration methods and thus mask interval changes to be undetectable. In this paper a method is proposed to estimate a 3D pose difference by the adaptation of a 3D rib cage model to both projections. The difference between both is then compensated for, thus producing a subtraction image with virtually no change in pose. The method generally assumes that no 3D image data is available from the patient. The accuracy of pose estimation is validated with chest phantom images acquired under controlled geometric conditions. A subtle interval change simulated by a piece of plastic foam attached to the phantom becomes visible in subtraction images generated with this technique even at strong angular pose differences like an anterior-posterior inclination of 13 degrees.

Self-employed individuals performing different types of work have different occupational safety and health problems.

Science.gov (United States)

Park, Jungsun; Han, Boyoung; Kim, Yangho

2018-05-22

We assessed the occupational safety and health (OSH) issues of self-employed individuals in Korea. The working conditions and OSH issues in three groups were analyzed using the Korean Working Conditions Survey of 2014. Among self-employed individuals, "Physical work" was more common among males, whereas "Emotional work" was more common among females. Self-employed individuals performing "Mental work" had more education, higher incomes, and the lowest exposure to physical/chemical and ergonomic hazards in the workplace. In contrast, those performing "Physical work" were older, had less education, lower incomes, greater exposure to physical/chemical and ergonomic hazards in the workplace, and more health problems. Individuals performing "Physical work" were most vulnerable to OSH problems. The self-employed are a heterogeneous group of individuals. We suggest development of specific strategies that focus on workers performing "Physical work" to improve the health and safety of self-employed workers in Korea. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The solar neutrino problem

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Roxburgh, I.W.

1981-01-01

The problems posed by the low flux of neutrinos from the sun detected by Davis and coworkers are reviewed. Several proposals have been advanced to resolve these problems and the more reasonable (in the author's opinion) are presented. Recent claims that the neutrino may have finite mass are also considered. (orig.)

Learning from no-fault treatment injury claims to improve the safety of older patients.

Science.gov (United States)

Wallis, Katharine Ann

2015-09-01

New Zealand's treatment injury compensation claims data set provides an uncommon no-fault perspective of patient safety incidents. Analysis of primary care claims data confirmed medication as the leading threat to the safety of older patients in primary care and drew particular attention to the threat posed by antibiotics. For most injuries there was no suggestion of error. The no-fault perspective reveals the greatest threat to the safety of older patients in primary care to be, not error, but the risk posed by treatment itself. To improve patients' safety, in addition to reducing error, clinicians need to reduce patients' exposure to treatment risk, where appropriate. © 2015 Annals of Family Medicine, Inc.

Vision and commercial motor vehicle driver safety : vol. 1 : evidence report

Science.gov (United States)

2008-06-06

The purpose of this evidence report is to address several key questions posed by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) that pertain to vision and commercial motor vehicle (CMV) driver safety. Each of these key questions was develope...

Methane combustion kinetic rate constants determination: an ill-posed inverse problem analysis

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Bárbara D. L. Ferreira

2013-01-01

Full Text Available Methane combustion was studied by the Westbrook and Dryer model. This well-established simplified mechanism is very useful in combustion science, for computational effort can be notably reduced. In the inversion procedure to be studied, rate constants are obtained from [CO] concentration data. However, when inherent experimental errors in chemical concentrations are considered, an ill-conditioned inverse problem must be solved for which appropriate mathematical algorithms are needed. A recurrent neural network was chosen due to its numerical stability and robustness. The proposed methodology was compared against Simplex and Levenberg-Marquardt, the most used methods for optimization problems.

An inverse problem in a parabolic equation

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Zhilin Li

1998-11-01

Full Text Available In this paper, an inverse problem in a parabolic equation is studied. An unknown function in the equation is related to two integral equations in terms of heat kernel. One of the integral equations is well-posed while another is ill-posed. A regularization approach for constructing an approximate solution to the ill-posed integral equation is proposed. Theoretical analysis and numerical experiment are provided to support the method.

On physics of the hydrogen plasticization and embrittlement of metallic materials, relevance to the safety and standards' problems

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Yury S Nechaev; Georgy A Filippov; T Nejat Veziroglu

2006-01-01

In the present contribution, some related fundamental problems of revealing micro mechanisms of hydrogen plasticization, superplasticity, embrittlement, cracking, blistering and delayed fracture of some technologically important industrial metallic materials are formulated. The ways are considered of these problems' solution and optimizing the technological processes and materials, particularly in the hydrogen and gas-petroleum industries, some aircraft, aerospace and automobile systems. The results are related to the safety and standardization problems of metallic materials, and to the problem of their compatibility with hydrogen. (authors)

Method of orthogonally splitting imaging pose measurement

Science.gov (United States)

Zhao, Na; Sun, Changku; Wang, Peng; Yang, Qian; Liu, Xintong

2018-01-01

In order to meet the aviation's and machinery manufacturing's pose measurement need of high precision, fast speed and wide measurement range, and to resolve the contradiction between measurement range and resolution of vision sensor, this paper proposes an orthogonally splitting imaging pose measurement method. This paper designs and realizes an orthogonally splitting imaging vision sensor and establishes a pose measurement system. The vision sensor consists of one imaging lens, a beam splitter prism, cylindrical lenses and dual linear CCD. Dual linear CCD respectively acquire one dimensional image coordinate data of the target point, and two data can restore the two dimensional image coordinates of the target point. According to the characteristics of imaging system, this paper establishes the nonlinear distortion model to correct distortion. Based on cross ratio invariability, polynomial equation is established and solved by the least square fitting method. After completing distortion correction, this paper establishes the measurement mathematical model of vision sensor, and determines intrinsic parameters to calibrate. An array of feature points for calibration is built by placing a planar target in any different positions for a few times. An terative optimization method is presented to solve the parameters of model. The experimental results show that the field angle is 52 °, the focus distance is 27.40 mm, image resolution is 5185×5117 pixels, displacement measurement error is less than 0.1mm, and rotation angle measurement error is less than 0.15°. The method of orthogonally splitting imaging pose measurement can satisfy the pose measurement requirement of high precision, fast speed and wide measurement range.

Surgical fiducial segmentation and tracking for pose estimation based on ultrasound B-mode images.

Science.gov (United States)

Lei Chen; Kuo, Nathanael; Aalamifar, Fereshteh; Narrow, David; Coon, Devin; Prince, Jerry; Boctor, Emad M

2016-08-01

Doppler ultrasound is a non-invasive diagnostic tool for the quantitative measurement of blood flow. However, given that it provides velocity data that is dependent on the location and angle of measurement, repeat measurements to detect problems over time may require an expert to return to the same location. We therefore developed an image-guidance system based on ultrasound B-mode images that enables an inexperienced user to position the ultrasound probe at the same site repeatedly in order to acquire a comparable time series of Doppler readings. The system utilizes a bioresorbable fiducial and complementing software composed of the fiducial detection, key points tracking, probe pose estimation, and graphical user interface (GUI) modules. The fiducial is an echogenic marker that is implanted at the surgical site and can be detected and tracked during ultrasound B-mode screening. The key points on the marker can next be used to determine the pose of the ultrasound probe with respect to the marker. The 3D representation of the probe with its position and orientation are then displayed in the GUI for the user guidance. The fiducial detection has been tested on the data sets collected from three animal studies. The pose estimation algorithm was validated by five data sets collected by a UR5 robot. We tested the system on a plastisol phantom and showed that it can detect and track the fiducial marker while displaying the probe pose in real-time.

Safety Precautions for Total Release Foggers

Science.gov (United States)

Total release foggers, also known as bug bombs, are pesticide products containing aerosol propellants that release their contents at once to fumigate an area. They can pose a hazard if used incorrectly. Find safety information and videos on this page.

An investigation into multi-dimensional prediction models to estimate the pose error of a quadcopter in a CSP plant setting

Science.gov (United States)

Lock, Jacobus C.; Smit, Willie J.; Treurnicht, Johann

2016-05-01

The Solar Thermal Energy Research Group (STERG) is investigating ways to make heliostats cheaper to reduce the total cost of a concentrating solar power (CSP) plant. One avenue of research is to use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to automate and assist with the heliostat calibration process. To do this, the pose estimation error of each UAV must be determined and integrated into a calibration procedure. A computer vision (CV) system is used to measure the pose of a quadcopter UAV. However, this CV system contains considerable measurement errors. Since this is a high-dimensional problem, a sophisticated prediction model must be used to estimate the measurement error of the CV system for any given pose measurement vector. This paper attempts to train and validate such a model with the aim of using it to determine the pose error of a quadcopter in a CSP plant setting.

Study of different fitness functions with safety restriction for nuclear reactor reload problem using QDPSO

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Oliveira, Paulo C. de, E-mail: paulocaixeta@poli.ufrj.br [Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Rio de Janeiro, RJ (Brazil). Departamento de Engenharia Nuclear; Lima, Alan M.M. de; Schirru, Roberto, E-mail: alan@lmp.ufrj.br, E-mail: schirru@lmp.ufrj.br [Coordenacao dos Programas de Pos-Graduacao em Engenharia (COPPE/UFRJ), Rio de Janeiro, RJ (Brazil)

2015-07-01

Nuclear Reactor Reload Problem (NRRP) is a classical problem in Nuclear Engineering that has been studied for more than 40 years, which focuses on the economics and safety of the Nuclear Power Plant (NPP). This problem consists in searching for the best loading pattern of fuel assemblies (FA) in the core, aiming to determine the permutation of fuel assemblies that optimizes the uranium utilization, with fitness function evaluated according to specific criteria and methods of nuclear reactor physics, such as the maximum mean power peak and the boron concentration. In this article will be presented different methodologies to obtain a representative fitness function for NRRP, where Quantum particle Swarm optimization (QPSO) was used to determine which one gives the best array of fuel assemblies that will make the maximum EFPD (Effective Full Power Days) with the least computational effort. In this approach, as well as others in literature, was not used Burnable Poison in the simulations and the results will be compared in relation of the maximization of the cycle length considering the boron concentration yield by the reactor physics code, to make sure that the configuration is valid from a safety point of view. This paper was based on Angra 1's seventh reload cycle. (author)

PROBLEM OF GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOODS SAFETY: A TOXICOLOGIST’S VIEW

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

E. L. Levitsky

2016-02-01

Full Text Available This study aimed to analyze the published literature regarding the problem of safety of consuming food products containing genetically modified organisms. Genetically modified food products are given a brief definition, purpose and methods of their production are described, and the pro- and contra- arguments for their consumption are presented. The discussion is mostly focused on results of evaluating possible toxicity of such foods and their safety for macroorganism using traditional methods of toxicological analysis. Test results for long-term toxic effects, namely allergenicity, carcinogenicity, reproductive toxicity, and the possibility of mutagenic effects of these food products on the human body and the intestinal microflora are discussed separately. These data are based on the current understanding of the laws of the penetration and functioning of foreign genetic material outside the body, its entry and the possibility of integration into the genome during intake of foods manufactured by genetic engineering. The basic principles of the toxicological and hygienic regulation of these food products are also considered. An analysis of published experimental results allowed to draw a general conclusion about the absence of reliable scientific information indicating the presence of the toxic properties of genetically modified foods, and therefore of credible evidence of the dangers of consuming for humans and pets.

Use of feedback control to address flight safety issues

Science.gov (United States)

Ganguli, Subhabrata

This thesis addresses three control problems related to flight safety. The first problem relates to the scope of improvement in performance of conventional flight control laws. In particular, aircraft longitudinal axis control based on the Total Energy Control System (TECS) is studied. The research draws attention to a potentially sluggish and undesirable aircraft response when the engine dynamics is slow (typically the case). The proposed design method uses a theoretically well-developed modern design method based on Hinfinity optimization to improve the aircraft dynamic behavior in spite of slow engine characteristics. At the same time, the proposed design method achieves other desirable performance goals such as insensitivity to sensor noise and wind gust rejection: all addressed in one unified framework. The second problem is based on a system level analysis of control structure hierarchy for aircraft flight control. The objective of the analysis problem is to translate outer-loop stability and performance specifications into a comprehensive inner-loop metric. The prime motivation is to make the flight control design process more systematic and the system-integration reliable and independent of design methodology. The analysis problem is posed within the robust control analysis framework. Structured singular value techniques and free controller parameterization ideas are used to impose a hierarchical structure for flight control architecture. The third problem involves development and demonstration of a new reconfiguration strategy in the flight control architecture that has the potential of improving flight safety while keeping cost and complexity low. This research proposes a fault tolerant feature based on active robust reconfiguration. The fault tolerant control problem is formulated in the Linear Parameter Varying (LPV) design framework. A prime advantage of this approach is that the synthesis results in a single nonlinear controller (as opposed to a bank

Multi-view 3D Human Pose Estimation in Complex Environment

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Hofmann, K.M.; Gavrila, D.M.

2012-01-01

We introduce a framework for unconstrained 3D human upper body pose estimation from multiple camera views in complex environment. Its main novelty lies in the integration of three components: single-frame pose recovery, temporal integration and model texture adaptation. Single-frame pose recovery

Contactless and pose invariant biometric identification using hand surface.

Science.gov (United States)

Kanhangad, Vivek; Kumar, Ajay; Zhang, David

2011-05-01

This paper presents a novel approach for hand matching that achieves significantly improved performance even in the presence of large hand pose variations. The proposed method utilizes a 3-D digitizer to simultaneously acquire intensity and range images of the user's hand presented to the system in an arbitrary pose. The approach involves determination of the orientation of the hand in 3-D space followed by pose normalization of the acquired 3-D and 2-D hand images. Multimodal (2-D as well as 3-D) palmprint and hand geometry features, which are simultaneously extracted from the user's pose normalized textured 3-D hand, are used for matching. Individual matching scores are then combined using a new dynamic fusion strategy. Our experimental results on the database of 114 subjects with significant pose variations yielded encouraging results. Consistent (across various hand features considered) performance improvement achieved with the pose correction demonstrates the usefulness of the proposed approach for hand based biometric systems with unconstrained and contact-free imaging. The experimental results also suggest that the dynamic fusion approach employed in this work helps to achieve performance improvement of 60% (in terms of EER) over the case when matching scores are combined using the weighted sum rule.

The scope and nature of the problem of high level nuclear waste disposal

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Jennekens, J.

1981-09-01

The disposal of high level nuclear waste poses a challenge to the Canadian technical and scientific communities, but a much greater challenge to government and industry leaders who must convince the public that the so-called 'problem' can be resolved by a pragmatic approach utilizing existing skills and knowledge. This paper outlines the objectives of radioactive waste management, the quantities of high level waste expected to be produced by the Canadian nuclear power program, the regulatory process which will apply and the government initiatives which have been and will be taken to ensure that the health, safety, security, and environmental interests of the public will be protected. (author)

Approximate source conditions for nonlinear ill-posed problems—chances and limitations

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Hein, Torsten; Hofmann, Bernd

2009-01-01

In the recent past the authors, with collaborators, have published convergence rate results for regularized solutions of linear ill-posed operator equations by avoiding the usual assumption that the solutions satisfy prescribed source conditions. Instead the degree of violation of such source conditions is expressed by distance functions d(R) depending on a radius R ≥ 0 which is an upper bound of the norm of source elements under consideration. If d(R) tends to zero as R → ∞ an appropriate balancing of occurring regularization error terms yields convergence rates results. This approach was called the method of approximate source conditions, originally developed in a Hilbert space setting. The goal of this paper is to formulate chances and limitations of an application of this method to nonlinear ill-posed problems in reflexive Banach spaces and to complement the field of low order convergence rates results in nonlinear regularization theory. In particular, we are going to establish convergence rates for a variant of Tikhonov regularization. To keep structural nonlinearity conditions simple, we update the concept of degree of nonlinearity in Hilbert spaces to a Bregman distance setting in Banach spaces

Methods of RVD object pose estimation and experiments

Science.gov (United States)

Shang, Yang; He, Yan; Wang, Weihua; Yu, Qifeng

2007-11-01

Methods of measuring a RVD (rendezvous and docking) cooperative object's pose from monocular and binocular images respectively are presented. The methods solve the initial values first and optimize the object pose parameters by bundle adjustment. In the disturbance-rejecting binocular method, chosen measurement system parameters of one camera's exterior parameters are modified simultaneously. The methods need three or more cooperative target points to measure the object's pose accurately. Experimental data show that the methods converge quickly and stably, provide accurate results and do not need accurate initial values. Even when the chosen measurement system parameters are subjected to some amount of disturbance, the binocular method manages to provide fairly accurate results.

Single-frame 3D human pose recovery from multiple views

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Hofmann, M.; Gavrila, D.M.

2009-01-01

We present a system for the estimation of unconstrained 3D human upper body pose from multi-camera single-frame views. Pose recovery starts with a shape detection stage where candidate poses are generated based on hierarchical exemplar matching in the individual camera views. The hierarchy used in

Standard diffusive systems are well-posed linear systems

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Matignon, Denis; Zwart, Heiko J.

2004-01-01

The class of well-posed linear systems as introduced by Salamon has become a well-understood class of systems, see e.g. the work of Weiss and the book of Staffans. Many partial partial differential equations with boundary control and point observation can be formulated as a well-posed linear system.

Regularization methods for ill-posed problems in multiple Hilbert scales

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Mazzieri, Gisela L; Spies, Ruben D

2012-01-01

Several convergence results in Hilbert scales under different source conditions are proved and orders of convergence and optimal orders of convergence are derived. Also, relations between those source conditions are proved. The concept of a multiple Hilbert scale on a product space is introduced, and regularization methods on these scales are defined, both for the case of a single observation and for the case of multiple observations. In the latter case, it is shown how vector-valued regularization functions in these multiple Hilbert scales can be used. In all cases, convergence is proved and orders and optimal orders of convergence are shown. Finally, some potential applications and open problems are discussed. (paper)

[Specific problems posed by carbohydrate utilization in the rainbow trout].

Science.gov (United States)

Bergot, F

1979-01-01

Carbohydrate incorporation in trout diets arises problems both at digestive and metabolic levels. Digestive utilization of carbohydrate closely depends on their molecular weight. In addition, in the case of complex carbohydrates (starches), different factors such as the level of incorporation, the amount consumed and the physical state of starch influence the digestibility. The measurement of digestibility in itself is confronted with methodological difficulties. The way the feces are collected can affect the digestion coefficient. Dietary carbohydrates actually serve as a source of energy. Nevertheless, above a certain level in the diet, intolerance phenomena may appear. The question that arises now is to establish the optimal part that carbohydrates can take in the metabolizable energy of a given diet.

Human factors in safety assessment. Safety culture assessment

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Zhang Li; Deng Zhiliang; Wang Yiqun; Huang Weigang

1996-01-01

This paper analyses the present conditions and problems in enterprises safety assessment, and introduces the characteristics and effects of safety culture. The authors think that safety culture must be used as a 'soul' to form the pattern of modern safety management. Furthermore, they propose that the human safety and synthetic safety management assessment in a system should be changed into safety culture assessment. Finally, the assessment indicators are discussed

Real-time Pipeline for Object Modeling and Grasping Pose Selection via Superquadric Functions

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Giulia Vezzani

2017-11-01

Full Text Available This work provides a novel real-time pipeline for modeling and grasping of unknown objects with a humanoid robot. Such a problem is of great interest for the robotic community, since conventional approaches fail when the shape, dimension, or pose of the objects are missing. Our approach reconstructs in real-time a model for the object under consideration and represents the robot hand both with proper and mathematically usable models, i.e., superquadric functions. The volume graspable by the hand is represented by an ellipsoid and is defined a priori, because the shape of the hand is known in advance. The superquadric representing the object is obtained in real-time from partial vision information instead, e.g., one stereo view of the object under consideration, and provides an approximated 3D full model. The optimization problem we formulate for the grasping pose computation is solved online by using the Ipopt software package and, thus, does not require off-line computation or learning. Even though our approach is for a generic humanoid robot, we developed a complete software architecture for executing this approach on the iCub humanoid robot. Together with that, we also provide a tutorial on how to use this framework. We believe that our work, together with the available code, is of a strong utility for the iCub community for three main reasons: object modeling and grasping are relevant problems for the robotic community, our code can be easily applied on every iCub, and the modular structure of our framework easily allows extensions and communications with external code.

Assessment of CFD Codes for Nuclear Reactor Safety Problems - Revision 2

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Smith, B.L.; Andreani, M.; Bieder, U.; Ducros, F.; Bestion, D.; Graffard, E.; Heitsch, M.; Scheuerer, M.; Henriksson, M.; Hoehne, T.; Houkema, M.; Komen, E.; Mahaffy, J.; Menter, F.; Moretti, F.; Morii, T.; Muehlbauer, P.; Rohde, U.; Krepper, E.; Song, C.H.; Watanabe, T.; Zigh, G.; Boyd, C.F.; Archambeau, F.; Bellet, S.; Munoz-Cobo, J.M.; Simoneau, J.P.

2015-01-01

Following recommendations made at an 'Exploratory Meeting of Experts to Define an Action Plan on the Application of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Codes to Nuclear Reactor Safety (NRS) Problems', held in Aix-en-Provence, France, 15-16 May, 2002, and a follow-up meeting 'Use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Codes for Safety Analysis of Reactor Systems including Containment', which took place in Pisa on 11-14 Nov., 2002, a CSNI action plan was drawn up which resulted in the creation of three Writing Groups, with mandates to perform the following tasks: (1) Provide a set of guidelines for the application of CFD to NRS problems; (2) Evaluate the existing CFD assessment bases, and identify gaps that need to be filled; (3) Summarise the extensions needed to CFD codes for application to two-phase NRS problems. Work began early in 2003. In the case of Writing Group 2 (WG2), a preliminary report was submitted to Working Group on the Analysis and Management of Accidents (WGAMA) in September 2004 that scoped the work needed to be carried out to fulfil its mandate, and made recommendations on how to achieve the objective. A similar procedure was followed by the other two groups, and in January 2005 all three groups were reformed to carry out their respective tasks. In the case of WG2, this resulted in the issue of a CSNI report (NEA/CSNI/R(2007)13), issued in January 2008, describing the work undertaken. The writing group met on average twice per year during the period March 2005 to May 2007, and coordinated activities strongly with the sister groups WG1 (Best Practice Guidelines) and WG3 (Multiphase Extensions). The resulting document prepared at the end of this time still represents the core of the present revised version, though updates have been made as new material has become available. After some introductory remarks, Chapter 3 lists twenty-three (23) NRS issues for which it is considered that the application of CFD would bring real benefits

Stable methods for ill-posed problems and application to reconstruction of atmospheric temperature profile

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Son, H.H.; Luong, P.T.; Loan, N.T.

1990-04-01

The problems of Remote Sensing (passive or active) are investigated on the base of main principle which consists in interpretation of radiometric electromagnetic measurements in such spectral interval where the radiation is sensitive to interested physical property of medium. Those problems such as an analysis of composition and structure of atmosphere using the records of scattered radiation, cloud identification, investigation of thermodynamic state and composition of system, reconstructing the atmospheric temperature profile on the base of data processing of infrared radiation emitted by system Earth-Atmosphere... belong to class of inverse problems of mathematical physics which are often incorrect. Int his paper a new class of regularized solution corresponding to general formulated RATP-problem is considered. (author). 14 refs, 3 figs, 3 tabs

49 CFR 209.501 - Review of rail transportation safety and security route analysis.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

... 49 Transportation 4 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false Review of rail transportation safety and security....820 § 209.501 Review of rail transportation safety and security route analysis. (a) Review of route... establish that the route chosen by the carrier poses the least overall safety and security risk, the...

Nuclear ships and their safety

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

NONE

1961-04-15

Several aspects of nuclear ship propulsion, with special reference to nuclear safety, were discussed at an international symposium at Taormina, Italy, from 14-18 November 1960. Discussions on specific topics are conducted, grouped under the following headings: Economics and National Activities in Nuclear Ship Propulsion; International Problems and General Aspects of Safety for Nuclear Ships; Nuclear Ship Projects from the Angle of Safety; Ship Reactor Problems; Sea Motion and Hull Problems; Maintenance and Refuelling Problems; and Safety Aspects of Nuclear Ship Operation.

The principal approaches to the problem of nuclear power plant safety in the USSR

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Sidorenko, V.A.; Kovalevich, O.M.; Kramerov, A.Ya.; Bagdasarov, Yu.E.

1977-01-01

The paper sets forth methods of ensuring the safety of nuclear power plants in the USSR on the basis of the scientific and engineering experience gained during the design, construction and operation of such plants, and describes the complex of technical and organizational problems whose solution determines the actual safety of nuclear power plants in the USSR. High-quality nuclear power plant equipment and components and their constant checking during the whole life of the plant are the prerequisites for preventing failures and accidents. The pattern of protective measures is discussed on the basis of possible failures and 'safe limits' for failures. The potentialities of the quantitative probabilistic method are analysed together with the need for a deterministic approach. The relationship of the maximum design accident with the protection and localization systems is considered in the case of nuclear power plants of different generations. The authors deal with the questions of State regulation of power plant safety on the basis of the adopted organizational structure and the system of standards. In conclusion, they briefly consider the application of the safety approach here described to power plants using water-water reactors, high-power boiling-water reactors and fast reactors in accordance with their place and role in the nuclear power development programme of the USSR. (author)

The Coffee-Milk Mixture Problem Revisited

Science.gov (United States)

Marion, Charles F.

2015-01-01

This analysis of a problem that is frequently posed at professional development workshops, in print, and on the Web--the coffee-milk mixture riddle--illustrates the timeless advice of George Pólya's masterpiece on problem solving in mathematics, "How to Solve It." In his book, Pólya recommends that problems previously solved and put…

Nuclear health and safety

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

1990-04-01

This report summarizes the responsiveness of DOE and contractors to findings contained in DOE technical safety appraisals and environmental surveys. These appraisals and surveys have been done at DOE facilities and sites to find out the extent of the environmental, safety, and health problems and to prioritize them for corrective action. As of January 1990, DOE computer data showed over 1,700 safety and health problems and almost 1,300 environmental problems. The majority of these problems, however, have not yet been corrected. GAO also looked at the extent to which DOE has developed a computerized tracking system to monitor the status of its environmental, safety, and health problems. GAO found that the computer system lacks important information, such as various field office and independent appraisals. Inclusion of this information would provide a more complete picture of the problems at the site

Regularization parameter selection methods for ill-posed Poisson maximum likelihood estimation

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bardsley, Johnathan M; Goldes, John

2009-01-01

In image processing applications, image intensity is often measured via the counting of incident photons emitted by the object of interest. In such cases, image data noise is accurately modeled by a Poisson distribution. This motivates the use of Poisson maximum likelihood estimation for image reconstruction. However, when the underlying model equation is ill-posed, regularization is needed. Regularized Poisson likelihood estimation has been studied extensively by the authors, though a problem of high importance remains: the choice of the regularization parameter. We will present three statistically motivated methods for choosing the regularization parameter, and numerical examples will be presented to illustrate their effectiveness

Ethics and choosing appropriate means to an end: Problems with coal mine and nuclear workplace safety

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Shrader-Frechette, K.; Cooke, R. [University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN (USA). Dept. of Biological Science

2004-02-01

A common problem in ethics is that people often desire an end but fail to take the means necessary to achieve it. Employers and employees may desire the safety end mandated by performance standards for pollution control, but they may fail to employ the means, specification standards, necessary to achieve this end. This article argues that current (de jure) performance standards, for lowering employee exposures to ionizing radiation, fail to promote de facto worker welfare, in part because employers and employees do not follow the necessary means (practices known as specification standards) to achieve the end (performance standards) of workplace safety. To support this conclusion, the article argues that (1) safety requires attention to specification, as well as performance, standards; (2) coal-mine specification standards may fail to promote performance standards; (3) nuclear workplace standards may do the same; (4) choosing appropriate means to the end of safety requires attention to the ways uncertainties and variations in exposure may mask violations of standards; and (5) correcting regulatory inattention to differences between de jute and de facto is necessary for achievement of ethical goals for safety.

Research Mathematicians' Practices in Selecting Mathematical Problems

Science.gov (United States)

Misfeldt, Morten; Johansen, Mikkel Willum

2015-01-01

Developing abilities to create, inquire into, qualify, and choose among mathematical problems is an important educational goal. In this paper, we elucidate how mathematicians work with mathematical problems in order to understand this mathematical process. More specifically, we investigate how mathematicians select and pose problems and discuss to…

The problem of maintenance of strength, lifetime and safety of the structural components operational NPP from items of a system approach

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Getman, A.F.

2005-01-01

The strength of the structural components and pipelines NPP determines largely their lifetime, radiation and nuclear safety. As shows world experience of operation NPP, in a series of cases during operation the local damages, breaks and destructions of elements of the equipment and pipelines emerge. These cases force maintaining organizations to execute on NPP large volumes of the control, repair and modernizing of the equipment and pipelines. These activities require large material inputs (net less than 50% of the cost of operation NPP), however not always are effective and in a series of cases do not allow to reach required of level reliability and safety. The reason of such condition of a problem is that the measures executed on NPP, developed on stretch of long time and under influence of the diverse factors. Besides until now there is no unified scientific methodology of a case study of maintenance of strength, lifetime and safety of the operational equipment and pipelines NPP. The application of a system approach to a problem of maintenance of strength, lifetime and safety of the equipment and pipelines operational NPP allows to consider a problem as a whole, from unified items, to define the most fast and effective paths it of the solution and to decide problems in as much as possible short times at minimum material inputs. The experience of practical application of a system approach at the solution of separate problems of operation NPP has allowed to develop a lot of effective new techniques, technologies and means, which application allows essentially to increase reliability and gamma percentage lifetime of elements NPP, to which they were applied. As an example in the report the outcomes of application of a system approach for maintenance of SG tubes integrity of reactors of a type WWER are adduced. The application of a system approach for all elements of the equipment and pipelines NPP will allow to increase it reliability and safety not less, than on 10

Invasive Lionfish (Pterosis volitans) Pose Public Health Threats.

Science.gov (United States)

Diaz, James H

2015-01-01

The lionfish, Pterosis volitans, a native of Indo-Pacific oceans, is a popular saltwater aquarium fish despite venomous spines on its fins. Lionfish were inadvertently introduced into the western Atlantic from Florida in the early 1990s and have overpopulated and dispersed widely into the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. Initiatives to control lionfish populations were launched, including the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)-sponsored "Lionfish as Food Campaign".2 Recently, scientists from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reported that lionfish caught off the US Virgin Islands contained ciguatoxins and could cause ciguatera fish poisoning (CFP); a seafood-borne poisoning without an antidote or any specific treatment, and a potential for prolonged neurotoxicity. Lionfish pose several public health threats. New strategies to control the lionfish population explosion in coastal waters and offshore fisheries are needed now to ensure seafood safety and public health. The lionfish, Pterosis volitans, is native to the reefs of the western Indian and Pacific Oceans (Figure 1). Brightly colored with red, white, and black stripes and adorned with feathery fins, the lionfish is a popular saltwater aquarium fish despite venomous spines on its fins (Figure 2). Lionfish were introduced into the western North Atlantic from Florida in the early 1990s after some specimens were discarded by dissatisfied amateur aquarists and others escaped from hurricane-flooded public aquariums.1 Since lionfish are voracious carnivores, have few natural predators, and reproduce prolifically, they have overpopulated and dispersed widely from Cape Hatteras to Florida, throughout the Caribbean Sea, and into the Gulf of Mexico.1 The population density of lionfish in its new, invaded territory now exceeds that of its native habitat.1 As a result, campaigns to control lionfish populations were launched in Florida and the Caribbean. Lionfish now pose several public

DESIGN SAFETY PROBLEMS OF NUCLEAR REACTORS IN SPACE FOR ELECTRICAL POWER

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Pickler, D A

1963-06-15

A general treatment is presented of some of the problems in the design safety of reactors which are to be operated in space. The basic requirements of these reachigh temperatures. The usual concept of a space reactor is described briefly, and the hazards of an assumed unmanned vehicle with an enriched-U-fueled reactor are examined during its launching, orbit, and reentry. Graphs are given for the dose vs distance downwind for an excursion of 100 Mw-sec, for the activity vs time after shutdown of a reactor which has been operated for 5 yr at 100 kw(t), and for the altitude vs orbital lifetime. Apparent conflicts between the basic requirements are discussed. (D.L.C.)

Problems of nuclear power plant safety evaluation

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Suchomel, J.

1977-01-01

Nuclear power plant safety is discussed with regard to external effects on the containment and to the human factor. As for external effects, attention is focused on shock waves which may be due to explosions or accidents in flammable material transport and storage, to missiles, and to earthquake effects. The criteria for evaluating nuclear power plant safety in different countries are shown. Factors are discussed affecting the reliability of man with regard to his behaviour in a loss-of-coolant accident in the power plant. Different types of PWR containments and their functions are analyzed, mainly in case of accident. Views are discussed on the role of destructive accidents in the overall evaluation of fast reactor safety. Experiences are summed up gained with the operation of WWER reactors with respect to the environmental impact of the nuclear power plants. (Z.M.)

Is supergravity well-posed?

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Isenberg, J.; Bao, D.; Yasskin, P.B.

1983-01-01

One rather fundamental question concerning supergravity remains unresolved: Is supergravity a well-posed field theory? That is, does a set of certain (Cauchy) data specified on some initial spacelike surface determine a unique, causally propagating spacetime solution of the supergravity field equations (at least in some finite neighborhood of the initial surface)? In this paper, the authors give a very brief report on work directed towards answering this question. (Auth.)

Spontaneous and posed facial expression in Parkinson's disease.

Science.gov (United States)

Smith, M C; Smith, M K; Ellgring, H

1996-09-01

Spontaneous and posed emotional facial expressions in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD, n = 12) were compared with those of healthy age-matched controls (n = 12). The intensity and amount of facial expression in PD patients were expected to be reduced for spontaneous but not posed expressions. Emotional stimuli were video clips selected from films, 2-5 min in duration, designed to elicit feelings of happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, or anger. Facial movements were coded using Ekman and Friesen's (1978) Facial Action Coding System (FACS). In addition, participants rated their emotional experience on 9-point Likert scales. The PD group showed significantly less overall facial reactivity than did controls when viewing the films. The predicted Group X Condition (spontaneous vs. posed) interaction effect on smile intensity was found when PD participants with more severe disease were compared with those with milder disease and with controls. In contrast, ratings of emotional experience were similar for both groups. Depression was positively associated with emotion rating but not with measures of facial activity. Spontaneous facial expression appears to be selectively affected in PD, whereas posed expression and emotional experience remain relatively intact.

Analysis and Study of Safety Problems in Chemical Process Design%化工工艺设计中的安全问题分析与研究

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

王玲

2016-01-01

In the chemical industry,because of the special reaction conditions such as high temperature and high pressure, catalyst and so on,there will be a lot of gas and heat,often dangerous chemicals are added to the reaction,often leading to some safety accidents.Such safety accidents on the lives of people and the interests of chemical companies posed a great threat,so the chemical industry should begiven to the chemical process design in the safety of a high degree of attention to improve the quality of chemical process design,chemical technology as much as possible To avoid the emergence of security issues.The contents and characteristics of the chemical process design,the safety problems in the chemical process design and the countermeasures are discussed.%在化工生产中，因为高温高压、催化剂等特殊的反应条件，会产生大量的气体与热量，加上反应时经常使用危险化学品，常常引发一些安全事故。这类安全事故对人们的生命安全以及化工企业的利益造成了很大的威胁，因此化工企业应给予化工工艺设计中的安全问题高度的重视，提高化工工艺设计质量，在化学工艺中尽可能地避免安全问题的出现。就化工工艺设计的内容与特点、化工工艺设计中存在的安全问题以及解决对策进行了论述。

NASA's Aviation Safety and Modeling Project

Science.gov (United States)

Chidester, Thomas R.; Statler, Irving C.

2006-01-01

The Aviation Safety Monitoring and Modeling (ASMM) Project of NASA's Aviation Safety program is cultivating sources of data and developing automated computer hardware and software to facilitate efficient, comprehensive, and accurate analyses of the data collected from large, heterogeneous databases throughout the national aviation system. The ASMM addresses the need to provide means for increasing safety by enabling the identification and correcting of predisposing conditions that could lead to accidents or to incidents that pose aviation risks. A major component of the ASMM Project is the Aviation Performance Measuring System (APMS), which is developing the next generation of software tools for analyzing and interpreting flight data.

A globally well-posed finite element algorithm for aerodynamics applications

Science.gov (United States)

Iannelli, G. S.; Baker, A. J.

1991-01-01

A finite element CFD algorithm is developed for Euler and Navier-Stokes aerodynamic applications. For the linear basis, the resultant approximation is at least second-order-accurate in time and space for synergistic use of three procedures: (1) a Taylor weak statement, which provides for derivation of companion conservation law systems with embedded dispersion-error control mechanisms; (2) a stiffly stable second-order-accurate implicit Rosenbrock-Runge-Kutta temporal algorithm; and (3) a matrix tensor product factorization that permits efficient numerical linear algebra handling of the terminal large-matrix statement. Thorough analyses are presented regarding well-posed boundary conditions for inviscid and viscous flow specifications. Numerical solutions are generated and compared for critical evaluation of quasi-one- and two-dimensional Euler and Navier-Stokes benchmark test problems.

United States import safety, environmental health, and food safety regulation in China.

Science.gov (United States)

Nyambok, Edward O; Kastner, Justin J

2012-01-01

China boasts a rapidly growing economy and is a leading food exporter. Since China has dominated world export markets in food, electronics, and toys, many safety concerns about Chinese exports have emerged. For example, many countries have had problems with Chinese food products and food-processing ingredients. Factors behind food safety and environmental health problems in China include poor industrial waste management, the use of counterfeit agricultural inputs, inadequate training of farmers on good farm management practices, and weak food safety laws and poor enforcement. In the face of rising import safety problems, the U.S. is now requiring certification of products and foreign importers, pursuing providing incentives to importers who uphold good safety practices, and considering publicizing the names of certified importers.

Nuclear safety culture and nuclear safety supervision

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Chai Jianshe

2013-01-01

In this paper, the author reviews systematically and summarizes up the development process and stage characteristics of nuclear safety culture, analysis the connotation and characteristics of nuclear safety culture, sums up the achievements of our country's nuclear safety supervision, dissects the challenges and problems of nuclear safety supervision. This thesis focused on the relationship between nuclear safety culture and nuclear safety supervision, they are essential differences, but there is a close relationship. Nuclear safety supervision needs to introduce some concepts of nuclear safety culture, lays emphasis on humanistic care and improves its level and efficiency. Nuclear safety supervision authorities must strengthen nuclear safety culture training, conduct the development of nuclear safety culture, make sure that nuclear safety culture can play significant roles. (author)

On Euler's problem

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Egorov, Yurii V

2013-01-01

We consider the classical problem on the tallest column which was posed by Euler in 1757. Bernoulli-Euler theory serves today as the basis for the design of high buildings. This problem is reduced to the problem of finding the potential for the Sturm-Liouville equation corresponding to the maximum of the first eigenvalue. The problem has been studied by many mathematicians but we give the first rigorous proof of the existence and uniqueness of the optimal column and we give new formulae which let us find it. Our method is based on a new approach consisting in the study of critical points of a related nonlinear functional. Bibliography: 6 titles.

Adaptive nonlinear robust relative pose control of spacecraft autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations.

Science.gov (United States)

Sun, Liang; Huo, Wei; Jiao, Zongxia

2017-03-01

This paper studies relative pose control for a rigid spacecraft with parametric uncertainties approaching to an unknown tumbling target in disturbed space environment. State feedback controllers for relative translation and relative rotation are designed in an adaptive nonlinear robust control framework. The element-wise and norm-wise adaptive laws are utilized to compensate the parametric uncertainties of chaser and target spacecraft, respectively. External disturbances acting on two spacecraft are treated as a lumped and bounded perturbation input for system. To achieve the prescribed disturbance attenuation performance index, feedback gains of controllers are designed by solving linear matrix inequality problems so that lumped disturbance attenuation with respect to the controlled output is ensured in the L 2 -gain sense. Moreover, in the absence of lumped disturbance input, asymptotical convergence of relative pose are proved by using the Lyapunov method. Numerical simulations are performed to show that position tracking and attitude synchronization are accomplished in spite of the presence of couplings and uncertainties. Copyright © 2016 ISA. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Chemical Hazards and Safety Issues in Fusion Safety Design

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Cadwallader, L.C.

2003-01-01

Radiological inventory releases have dominated accident consequences for fusion; these consequences are important to analyze and are generally the most severe result of a fusion facility accident event. However, the advent of, or plan for, large-scale usage of some toxic materials poses the additional hazard of chemical exposure from an accident event. Examples of toxic chemicals are beryllium for magnetic fusion and fluorine for laser fusion. Therefore, chemical exposure consequences must also be addressed in fusion safety assessment. This paper provides guidance for fusion safety analysis. US Department of Energy (DOE) chemical safety assessment practices for workers and the public are reviewed. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has published some guidance on public exposure to releases of mixtures of chemicals, this guidance has been used to create an initial guideline for treating mixed radiological and toxicological releases in fusion; for example, tritiated hazardous dust from a tokamak vacuum vessel. There is no convenient means to judge the hazard severity of exposure to mixed materials. The chemical fate of mixed material constituents must be reviewed to determine if there is a separate or combined radiological and toxicological carcinogenesis, or if other health threats exist with radiological carcinogenesis. Recommendations are made for fusion facility chemical safety evaluation and safety guidance for protecting the public from chemical releases, since such levels are not specifically identified in the DOE fusion safety standard

Assessment of the Safety of Some On-The-Shelf Canned Food ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

There is also the possibility of these organisms posing food safety issues and pharmaceutical risks in case of possible out break, assayed through plasmid profiling of the culture-dependent isolates. A major concern in this study is the lack of adherence to food safety regulations. The products still been marketed on the ...

The Y2K problem; assessment of the safety of nuclear facilities by IPSN (France)

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Henry, J.Y.

1999-01-01

The millennium bug (or Y2K problem) could lead to a common cause failure of the Nuclear Power Plant computer based systems. This report discusses Y2K related issues with respect to the safety of the nuclear power plants. The consequences of failures must be estimated to assess the impact on the safety of the installation, taking into account that these installations were designed with due allowance for the possibility of failure of equipment or components. The main objective of the work done by operators and licensees is aimed at ensuring the millennium bug could not cause failure or unavailability of equipment or components which are needed for the safety of the installation. The obvious solution is to correct the sensitive systems so that the potential failures could not occur. Moreover, the risk of a loss of grid should be taken into account as the safety of nuclear power plants depends upon plant resources and consequently the delay necessary to recover external electrical sources. Safety authority (DSIN) has issued recommendations asking for reporting periodically the progress and results of the Y2K plan the licensees and operators have to implement for Y2K readiness. The analysis done by IPSN the technical support of the safety authority, is presented as the majority of the Y2K related activities have been done by the licensee (EDF). Up to now, France is on the tracks. If some works are still ahead, the results shown today are rather reflecting the readiness of the nuclear installations in due time. (author)

77 FR 2017 - Safety Zone; Ice Rescue Exercise; Green Bay, Dyckesville, WI

Science.gov (United States)

2012-01-13

... Environmental Health Risks and Safety Risks. This rule is not an economically significant rule and does not concern an environmental risk to health or risk to safety that may disproportionately affect children... the Port Sector Lake has determined that this ice rescue exercise will pose hazards to the public...

Prioritizing medication safety in care of people with cancer: clinicians’ views on main problems and solutions

Science.gov (United States)

Car, Lorainne Tudor; Papachristou, Nikolaos; Urch, Catherine; Majeed, Azeem; Atun, Rifat; Car, Josip; Vincent, Charles

2017-01-01

Background Cancer care is liable to medication errors due to the complex nature of cancer treatment, the common presence of comorbidities and the involvement of a number of clinicians in cancer care. While the frequency of medication errors in cancer care has been reported, little is known about their causal factors and effective prevention strategies. With a unique insight into the main safety issues in cancer treatment, frontline staff can help close this gap. In this study, we aimed to identify medication safety priorities in cancer patient care according to clinicians in North West London using PRIORITIZE, a novel priority–setting approach. Methods The project steering group determined the scope, the context and the criteria for prioritization. We then invited North West London cancer care clinicians to identify and prioritize main causes for, and solutions to, medication errors in cancer care. Forty cancer care providers submitted their suggestions which were thematically synthesized into a composite list of 20 distinct problems and 22 solutions. A group of 26 clinicians from the initial cohort ranked the composite list of suggestions using predetermined criteria. Results The top ranked problems focused on patients’ poor understanding of treatments due to language or education difficulties, clinicians’ insufficient attention to patients’ psychological distress, and inadequate information sharing among health care providers. The top ranked solutions were provision of guidance to patients and their carers on what to do when unwell, pre–chemotherapy work–up for all patients and better staff training. Overall, clinicians considered improved communication between health care providers, quality assurance procedures (during prescription and monitoring stages) and patient education as key strategies for improving cancer medication safety. Prescribing stage was identified as the most vulnerable to medication safety threats. The highest ranked suggestions

Safety, dose optimisation and security: the quadrature of the circle

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Hardeman, Frank; Vermeersch, Fernand [Belgian Nuclear Research Centre (SCK.CEN), Boeretang 200, BE-2400 Mol (Belgium)

2010-07-01

The growing concern for potential terrorist acts has lead to a number of new ideas about storing radiological and nuclear materials that are not always compatible with existing practices or infrastructures. This is valid in routine circumstances, but especially poses problems in case of accidents. As such, the management of nuclear safety, radiological protection and security within an evolving world such as a nuclear research centre sometimes looks like implementing the quadrature of the circle. International guidance exists, but is not always easily converted into an adequate policy comprehensible to all levels in a plant, from management to the work floor. Some examples. 1. infrastructure related problems: from a security point of view, fuels are better stored in the heart of a protected zone, while in case of criticality, fire... a more peripheral location is appropriate. 2. Safety related problems: Protection infrastructure may lead to difficulties of evacuation in case of emergencies; access limitations may be a burden in the management of safety interventions, maintenance... 3. Administrative contradictions: inventories of fuel storages and high active sealed sources are a cornerstone of inspections and verifications; yet, this information is a treasure for terrorists aiming at actions to obtain special materials. 4. Dose management: measures taken to secure sources may lead to a dose increase (e.g. labelling of old sources). However, the main difficulty is related to the 'cultural' aspect. There are synergies between safety culture, 'ALARA' culture and security culture. An individual aspect of desirable behaviour (e.g. questioning attitude), complemented with an organisational dimension (e.g. training, raising awareness) are obviously common. The objective is also in line: to avoid reduction of well-being of people, to protect the environment, to prevent damage to facilities. The main difficulties arise however because of the fundamental

Safety, dose optimisation and security: the quadrature of the circle

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Hardeman, Frank; Vermeersch, Fernand

2010-01-01

The growing concern for potential terrorist acts has lead to a number of new ideas about storing radiological and nuclear materials that are not always compatible with existing practices or infrastructures. This is valid in routine circumstances, but especially poses problems in case of accidents. As such, the management of nuclear safety, radiological protection and security within an evolving world such as a nuclear research centre sometimes looks like implementing the quadrature of the circle. International guidance exists, but is not always easily converted into an adequate policy comprehensible to all levels in a plant, from management to the work floor. Some examples. 1. infrastructure related problems: from a security point of view, fuels are better stored in the heart of a protected zone, while in case of criticality, fire... a more peripheral location is appropriate. 2. Safety related problems: Protection infrastructure may lead to difficulties of evacuation in case of emergencies; access limitations may be a burden in the management of safety interventions, maintenance... 3. Administrative contradictions: inventories of fuel storages and high active sealed sources are a cornerstone of inspections and verifications; yet, this information is a treasure for terrorists aiming at actions to obtain special materials. 4. Dose management: measures taken to secure sources may lead to a dose increase (e.g. labelling of old sources). However, the main difficulty is related to the 'cultural' aspect. There are synergies between safety culture, 'ALARA' culture and security culture. An individual aspect of desirable behaviour (e.g. questioning attitude), complemented with an organisational dimension (e.g. training, raising awareness) are obviously common. The objective is also in line: to avoid reduction of well-being of people, to protect the environment, to prevent damage to facilities. The main difficulties arise however because of the fundamental differences being

Agricultural vehicles and rural road safety: tackling a persistent problem.

Science.gov (United States)

Jaarsma, Catharinus F; De Vries, Jasper R

2014-01-01

Crashes involving agricultural vehicles (AVs) on public roads are an increasing road safety problem. We aim to analyze developments in the appearance and severity of these accidents, identify influencing factors, and draw lessons for possible interventions for accident prevention within the context of modern mechanized agriculture. To analyze developments in the appearance of accidents we use a subset of accidents with AVs involved on public roads in The Netherlands aggregated per year for 1987-2010. To identify and explore preventive measures we use an in-depth study of the Dutch Safety Board. With a study of international literature we put our findings in a wider context. During this time span, Dutch annual averages show 15 registered fatal accidents involving AVs, 93 with hospitalization and 137 with slight injuries. For nonfatal accidents, the numbers are decreasing over time. This decrease is proportionate to the reduction in the total number of traffic victims. For fatalities, however, the number is stable, increasing its proportion in all traffic fatalities from 1 in 1987 to 2 percent in 2010. Related to the number of inhabitants, this number is 2 times the value in the UK and 3 times the value in the United States. Influencing factors can be related to the 3 road system components (AV, driver, and infrastructure). Weak points for AVs are the view from the driver's seat, visibility at night, permitted vehicle width, and crash aggressivity (large kinetic energy of the AV) that is transferred to other road users in case of a collision. Important factors identified for the driver are poor risk perception and high risk acceptance, in combination with speeding, dysfunctional use such as the use of AVs as modes of transport to and from school, and driving on public roads without protecting or removing protruding and sharp components. For infrastructure, the focus is on road design and separation of AVs from other motor vehicles. Lessons to be learned follow from

Nuclear safety research in HGF 2011

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Tromm, Walter

2012-01-01

After the events at the Japanese nuclear power plant of Fukushima Daiichi, the German federal government decided that Germany will give up electricity generation from nuclear power within a decade. The last reactor will be disconnected from the power grid in 2022. Helping to make this opt-out as safe as possible is one of the duties of the Helmholtz Association with its Nuclear Safety Research Program within the Energy Research Area. Also the demolition of nuclear power plants and the repository problem will keep society, and thus also research, busy for a number of decades to come. Giving up electricity production from nuclear power thus must not mean giving up the required nuclear technology competences. In the fields of reactor safety, demolition, final storage, radiation protection, and crisis management, in critical support of international developments, and for competent evaluation of nuclear facilities around Germany, these competences will be in demand far beyond the German opt-out. This is the reason why the final report by the Ethics Committee on 'Safe Energy Supply' emphasizes the importance of nuclear technology research. Close cooperation on national, European and international levels is indispensable in this effort. Also nuclear safety research in the Helmholtz Association is aligned with the challenges posed by the opt-out of the use of nuclear power. It is important that the high competences in the areas of plant safety and demolition, handling of radioactive waste, and safe final storage as well as radiation protection be preserved. The Nuclear Safety Research Program within the Energy Research Area of the Helmholtz Association therefore will continue studying scientific and technical aspects of the safety of nuclear reactors and the safety of nuclear waste management. These research activities are provident research conducted for society and must be preserved for a long period of time. The work is closely harmonized with the activities of the

Some particular problems put by operating experimental reactors; Quelques problemes particuliers poses par le fonctionnement des piles laboratoires

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Candiotti, C; Mabeix, R; Uguen, R [Commissariat a l' Energie Atomique, Saclay (France).Centre d' Etudes Nucleaires

1960-07-01

On basis of a six years experience in operating research reactors, the authors explain, first, the difference in their utilization between these piles and another similar ones and, after, in consequence, they set off corresponding servitudes. These servitudes put very particular problems in operating itself, maintenance, modifications or additions on these apparatus. (author) [French] Les redacteurs se basant sur six annees d'experience dans l'exploitation de reacteurs de recherche, exposent tout d'abord les differences d'utilisation entre ces engins et d'autres appareils fonctionnellement similaires et font ressortir, par voie de consequence, les servitudes correspondantes. Ces servitudes posent des problemes tres particuliers dans les domaines de l'exploitation proprement dite, de l'entretien, des modifications ou adjonctions apportees a l'ensemble. (auteur)

Hyperbolic systems with analytic coefficients well-posedness of the Cauchy problem

CERN Document Server

Nishitani, Tatsuo

2014-01-01

This monograph focuses on the well-posedness of the Cauchy problem for linear hyperbolic systems with matrix coefficients. Mainly two questions are discussed: (A) Under which conditions on lower order terms is the Cauchy problem well posed? (B) When is the Cauchy problem well posed for any lower order term? For first order two by two systems with two independent variables with real analytic coefficients, we present complete answers for both (A) and (B). For first order systems with real analytic coefficients we prove general necessary conditions for question (B) in terms of minors of the principal symbols. With regard to sufficient conditions for (B), we introduce hyperbolic systems with nondegenerate characteristics, which contains strictly hyperbolic systems, and prove that the Cauchy problem for hyperbolic systems with nondegenerate characteristics is well posed for any lower order term. We also prove that any hyperbolic system which is close to a hyperbolic system with a nondegenerate characteristic of mu...

Evaluating fuel cycle safety for CITa

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Longhurst, G.R.; Reilly, H.J.; Piet, S.J.

1987-01-01

A safety concern in the design of the Compact Ignition Tokamak (CIT) currently being designed in the U. S. is the accidental release of tritium. To evaluate the basis for that concern, an assessment of the risk to the public posed by CIT was conducted that made use of probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) techniques. These include both frequency and consequence elements of risk. This analysis concluded that the tritium systems on the CIT could be designed and operated as planned with negligible safety impact, well within the established guidelines. (author)

Maternal physiological dysregulation while parenting poses risk for infant attachment disorganization and behavior problems.

Science.gov (United States)

Leerkes, Esther M; Su, Jinni; Calkins, Susan D; O'Brien, Marion; Supple, Andrew J

2017-02-01

The extent to which indices of maternal physiological arousal (skin conductance augmentation) and regulation (vagal withdrawal) while parenting predict infant attachment disorganization and behavior problems directly or indirectly via maternal sensitivity was examined in a sample of 259 mothers and their infants. Two covariates, maternal self-reported emotional risk and Adult Attachment Interview attachment coherence were assessed prenatally. Mothers' physiological arousal and regulation were measured during parenting tasks when infants were 6 months old. Maternal sensitivity was observed during distress-eliciting tasks when infants were 6 and 14 months old, and an average sensitivity score was calculated. Attachment disorganization was observed during the Strange Situation when infants were 14 months old, and mothers reported on infants' behavior problems when infants were 27 months old. Over and above covariates, mothers' arousal and regulation while parenting interacted to predict infant attachment disorganization and behavior problems such that maternal arousal was associated with higher attachment disorganization and behavior problems when maternal regulation was low but not when maternal regulation was high. This effect was direct and not explained by maternal sensitivity. The results suggest that maternal physiological dysregulation while parenting places infants at risk for psychopathology.

Safety culture

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Keen, L.J.

2003-01-01

Safety culture has become a topic of increasing interest for industry and regulators as issues are raised on safety problems around the world. The keys to safety culture are organizational effectiveness, effective communications, organizational learning, and a culture that encourages the identification and resolution of safety issues. The necessity of a strong safety culture places an onus on all of us to continually question whether the safety measures already in place are sufficient, and are being applied. (author)

75 FR 24402 - Safety Zone; St. Louis River, Tallas Island, Duluth, MN

Science.gov (United States)

2010-05-05

... Captain of the Port Duluth has determined this activity could pose significant risk to public safety and... Executive Order 13045, Protection of Children from Environmental Health Risks and Safety Risks. This rule is not an economically significant rule and does not create an environmental risk to health or risk to...

Challenges Posed by Novel Psychoactive Substances – Middle East Perspective

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Maciej J. Bogusz

2017-04-01

Full Text Available New psychoactive substances (NPS are defined as substances of abuse, either in a pure form or a preparation, that are not controlled by the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs or the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances, but which may pose a public health threat. In this context, the term “new” does not necessarily refer to new inventions but to substances that have recently become available or popular in a given society or country. This definition indicates that the problem of NPS is not new; however, the availability of any information via new communication technologies in the 21st century has enabled the spread of unwanted and socially harmful information, like information on the commercial availability of various NPS, offered in rising amounts and brands.

76 FR 66239 - Safety Zones; Fireworks Displays Within the Fifth Coast Guard District

Science.gov (United States)

2011-10-26

...-AA00 Safety Zones; Fireworks Displays Within the Fifth Coast Guard District AGENCY: Coast Guard, DHS... safety zones established for fireworks displays at various locations within the geographic boundary of... maritime public from the hazards posed by fireworks displays. Entry into or movement within these proposed...

Some particular problems put by operating experimental reactors; Quelques problemes particuliers poses par le fonctionnement des piles laboratoires

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Candiotti, C.; Mabeix, R.; Uguen, R. [Commissariat a l' Energie Atomique, Saclay (France).Centre d' Etudes Nucleaires

1960-07-01

On basis of a six years experience in operating research reactors, the authors explain, first, the difference in their utilization between these piles and another similar ones and, after, in consequence, they set off corresponding servitudes. These servitudes put very particular problems in operating itself, maintenance, modifications or additions on these apparatus. (author) [French] Les redacteurs se basant sur six annees d'experience dans l'exploitation de reacteurs de recherche, exposent tout d'abord les differences d'utilisation entre ces engins et d'autres appareils fonctionnellement similaires et font ressortir, par voie de consequence, les servitudes correspondantes. Ces servitudes posent des problemes tres particuliers dans les domaines de l'exploitation proprement dite, de l'entretien, des modifications ou adjonctions apportees a l'ensemble. (auteur)

The present global financial and economic crisis poses an additional risk factor for mental health problems on the employees.

Science.gov (United States)

Avčin, Bojana Avguštin; Kučina, Andrea Užmah; Sarotar, Brigita Novak; Radovanović, Mirjana; Plesničar, Blanka Kores

2011-09-01

The global financial and economic crisis starting in 2007 led to a deterioration of several socio-economic determinants of mental health. The aim of this cross-sectional study was to examine the impact of the present economic crisis on the depression and anxiety levels of the employed in the private and public sector in Slovenia. Altogether 1592 employees completed an internet based self-reported questionnaire. Data about perceived impact of the economic crisis, several socio-demographic, socioeconomic, and health parameters were collected. Depression symptoms were assessed by the Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression Scale and anxiety symptoms by the Spielberger State-Inventory. Regression models were used 1) to explore the associations of the economic crisis with the level of depression and anxiety symptoms while controlling for some sociodemographic and work characteristic variables, and 2) to understand the relationship between some potentially important socioeconomic variables and the perception of the economic crisis. Depressive and anxiety scores were significantly increased among 590 (46.6%) employees being affected by the economic crisis. The level of depressive symptoms was significantly associated with perceived impact by the crisis, recent sick leave, reported injuries sustained at work, benzodiazepine and analgesic use, the lack of emotional support, and trust in crisis telephone lines. The level of anxiety symptoms yielded the robust association with the level of depression symptoms, reported injuries sustained on the way to work and education. The economic crisis poses an additional risk factor for mental health problems which clinicians should internalize and become more aware of them. Symptoms of depression and anxiety can be masked in high-utilizers of medical care with physical complaints or psychoactive drug use.

77 FR 40541 - Safety Zone; Water Main Crossing; Choctawhatchee Bay; Santa Rosa Beach, FL

Science.gov (United States)

2012-07-10

... required use of turbidity silt curtains pose significant safety hazards to both vessels and mariners... to the marine community will be made through Local Notice to Mariners and Broadcast Notice to... Harbors, Marine safety, Navigation (water), Reporting and recordkeeping requirements, Security measures...

Driver head pose tracking with thermal camera

Science.gov (United States)

Bole, S.; Fournier, C.; Lavergne, C.; Druart, G.; Lépine, T.

2016-09-01

Head pose can be seen as a coarse estimation of gaze direction. In automotive industry, knowledge about gaze direction could optimize Human-Machine Interface (HMI) and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Pose estimation systems are often based on camera when applications have to be contactless. In this paper, we explore uncooled thermal imagery (8-14μm) for its intrinsic night vision capabilities and for its invariance versus lighting variations. Two methods are implemented and compared, both are aided by a 3D model of the head. The 3D model, mapped with thermal texture, allows to synthesize a base of 2D projected models, differently oriented and labeled in yaw and pitch. The first method is based on keypoints. Keypoints of models are matched with those of the query image. These sets of matchings, aided with the 3D shape of the model, allow to estimate 3D pose. The second method is a global appearance approach. Among all 2D models of the base, algorithm searches the one which is the closest to the query image thanks to a weighted least squares difference.

A Support System for the Electric Appliance Control Using Pose Recognition

Science.gov (United States)

Kawano, Takuya; Yamamoto, Kazuhiko; Kato, Kunihito; Hongo, Hitoshi

In this paper, we propose an electric appliance control support system for aged and bedridden people using pose recognition. We proposed a pose recognition system that distinguishes between seven poses of the user on the bed. First, the face and arm regions of the user are detected by using the skin color. Our system focuses a recognition region surrounding the face region. Next, the higher order local autocorrelation features within the region are extracted. The linear discriminant analysis creates the coefficient matrix that can optimally distinguish among training data from the seven poses. Our algorithm can recognize the seven poses even if the subject wears different clothes and slightly shifts or slants on the bed. From the experimental results, our system achieved an accuracy rate of over 99 %. Then, we show that it possibles to construct one of a user-friendly system.

Flexible Polyhedral Surfaces with Two Flat Poses

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hellmuth Stachel

2015-05-01

Full Text Available We present three types of polyhedral surfaces, which are continuously flexible and have not only an initial pose, where all faces are coplanar, but pass during their self-motion through another pose with coplanar faces (“flat pose”. These surfaces are examples of so-called rigid origami, since we only admit exact flexions, i.e., each face remains rigid during the motion; only the dihedral angles vary. We analyze the geometry behind Miura-ori and address Kokotsakis’ example of a flexible tessellation with the particular case of a cyclic quadrangle. Finally, we recall Bricard’s octahedra of Type 3 and their relation to strophoids.

Nuclear safety research in HGF 2012

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Anon.

2013-01-01

After the events at the Japanese nuclear power plant of Fukushima Daiichi, the German Federal government decided that Germany will give up electricity generation from nuclear power within a decade. The last reactor will be disconnected from the power grid in 2022. Helping to make this opt-out safe is one of the duties of the Helmholtz Association with its Nuclear Safety Research Program within the Energy Research Area. Also the demolition of nuclear power plants and the repository problem will keep society, and thus also research, busy for a number of decades to come. Giving up electricity production from nuclear power thus must not mean giving up the required nuclear technology competences. In the fields of reactor safety, demolition, final storage, radiation protection, and crisis management, in critical support of international developments, and for competent evaluation of nuclear facilities around Germany, these competences will be in demand far beyond the German opt-out. This is the reason why the final report by the Ethics Committee on 'Safe Energy Supply' emphasizes the importance of nuclear technology research. Close cooperation on national, European and international levels is indispensable in this effort. Also nuclear safety research in the Helmholtz Association is aligned with the challenges posed by the opt-out of the use of nuclear power. It is important that the high competences in the areas of plant safety and demolition, handling of radioactive waste, and safe final storage as well as radiation protection be preserved. The Nuclear Safety Research Program within the Energy Research Area of the Helmholtz Association therefore will continue studying scientific and technical aspects of the safety of nuclear reactors and the safety of nuclear waste management. These research activities are provident research conducted for society and must be preserved for a long period of time. The work is closely harmonized with the activities of the partners in the

Nuclear health and safety

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

1991-04-01

Numerous environmental, safety, and health problems found at other Department of Energy (DOE) defense nuclear facilities precipitated a review of these conditions at DOE's contractor-operated Pantex Plant, where our nation's nuclear weapons are assembled. This book focuses the review on examining key safety and health problems at Pantex and determining the need for external safety oversight of the plant

Coupled multiview autoencoders with locality sensitivity for three-dimensional human pose estimation

Science.gov (United States)

Yu, Jialin; Sun, Jifeng; Luo, Shasha; Duan, Bichao

2017-09-01

Estimating three-dimensional (3D) human poses from a single camera is usually implemented by searching pose candidates with image descriptors. Existing methods usually suppose that the mapping from feature space to pose space is linear, but in fact, their mapping relationship is highly nonlinear, which heavily degrades the performance of 3D pose estimation. We propose a method to recover 3D pose from a silhouette image. It is based on the multiview feature embedding (MFE) and the locality-sensitive autoencoders (LSAEs). On the one hand, we first depict the manifold regularized sparse low-rank approximation for MFE and then the input image is characterized by a fused feature descriptor. On the other hand, both the fused feature and its corresponding 3D pose are separately encoded by LSAEs. A two-layer back-propagation neural network is trained by parameter fine-tuning and then used to map the encoded 2D features to encoded 3D poses. Our LSAE ensures a good preservation of the local topology of data points. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Perceptions about safety and risks in gender-based violence research: implications for the ethics review process.

Science.gov (United States)

Sikweyiya, Yandisa; Jewkes, Rachel

2011-10-01

Does research on gender-based violence (GBV) pose greater than minimal risk to researchers and participants? This question needs to be understood particularly in light of hesitancy by Institutional Review Boards to approve research on GBV. The safety and risks of doing GBV studies and the implications for the ethical review process have not been a focus of much research. This qualitative study collected data through in-depth interviews with 12 experienced GBV researchers from various countries and a desk review. This paper explores researchers' interpretation of and meanings of the safety recommendations as provided in the WHO guidelines and whether there is empirical evidence on the presence of risks and safety concerns unique to GBV research. Informants raised a number of safety concerns about GBV research, yet in the interviews there were very few examples of problems having occurred, possibly because of the precautions applied. This paper argues that the notion that GBV studies carry greater than minimal risk when ethics precautions are followed is based on speculation, not evidence. It highlights the need for empirical evidence to support assertions of risk in research.

A step towards positive safety culture in DAE units

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Ramprasad, K.

2016-01-01

Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) has considered safety as its priority, since inception in late 1950s, in all its activities. A belief in safety principles like defense-in depth, diversity, multi-tier review, etc. has laid a long path of success in safety management for decades. Multitude of DAE activities in the past few decades, especially in application of nuclear energy in scientific research, industrial, medical, agriculture and food technologies, often, poses new challenges in safety management. A good safety management system is in place in DAE units to cope up with the challenges of the evolving technologies. An opportunity is taken through this workshop to highlight extra efforts to be taken to inch forward in developing a strong safety culture

Are classical process safety concepts relevant to nanotechnology applications?

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Amyotte, Paul R

2011-01-01

The answer to the question posed by the title of this paper is yes - with adaptation to the specific hazards and challenges found in the field of nanotechnology. The validity of this affirmative response is demonstrated by relating key process safety concepts to various aspects of the nanotechnology industry in which these concepts are either already practised or could be further applied. This is accomplished by drawing on the current author's experience in process safety practice and education as well as a review of the relevant literature on the safety of nanomaterials and their production. The process safety concepts selected for analysis include: (i) risk management, (ii) inherently safer design, (iii) human error and human factors, (iv) safety management systems, and (v) safety culture.

EC-sponsored research activities on innovative passive safety systems

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bermejo, J.M.; Goethem, G. van

2000-01-01

On April 26th 1994, the European Union (EU) adopted via a Council Decision a EURATOM Multiannual Programme for community activities in the field of Nuclear Fission Safety (NFS) Research for the period 1994 to 1998. An area of work having, as an objective, to 'explore innovative approaches' to improve the safety of future and existing reactors, was introduced in this programme. Most of the projects selected in this area, which have been grouped under a common cluster known as 'INNO', are currently being carried out on a 'cost-shared' basis, i.e. contribution of the European Commission is up to 50% of the total cost. At present, the 'INNO' cluster is composed of 10 projects in which 25 different organisations, representing research centres, universities, regulators, utilities and vendors from 7 EU member states and Switzerland, are involved. These projects are proving to be an efficient means to gain the necessary phenomenological knowledge and to solve the challenging problems, many times of generic nature, posed among others by the characteristically small driving forces of the systems studied and by the lack of really prototypical test facilities. (author)

Problems encountered in embodying the principles of ICRP-26 and the revised IAEA safety standards into UK national legislation

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Beaver, P.F.

1979-01-01

This paper describes the United Kingdom procedures and format for safety legislation and goes on to show how the necessary legislation for radiological protection will fit into the general framework. The United Kingdom, as a member of the European Community and EURATOM, is bound to implement the Euratom Directive on radiological protection within the next few years. The latest draft of the Directive takes account of the recommendations of ICRP-26 and further, a recent draft of the revised IAEA Basic Safety Standards is a composite of both the Directive and ICRP-26. Thus, the effect of embodying the principles of the Directive is to embody the principles of ICRP-26 and the Basic Safety Standards. Some of the problems which have been met are described and in particular there is discussion of the problems arising from the incorporation of the three ICRP-26 facets of dose control, namely justification, optimization and limitation, into a legislative package. The UK system of evolving safety legislation now requires considerable participation by all the parties affected (or by their representatives). This paper indicates that the involvement of persons affected, coupled with a legislative package which consists of a hierarchy of (a) regulations; (b) codes of practice; and (c) guidance notes, will result in the fundamental principles of ICRP-26 being incorporated into UK legislation in a totally acceptable way. (author)

78 FR 27304 - Safety Zone; Melrose Pyrotechnics Fireworks Display; Chicago Harbor, Chicago, IL

Science.gov (United States)

2013-05-10

... environmental risk to health or risk to safety that may disproportionately affect children. 11. Indian Tribal... Pier in Chicago Harbor, Chicago, IL. The Captain of the Port, Lake Michigan, has determined that these fireworks displays will pose a significant risk to public safety and property. Such hazards include falling...

Trajectory Planning with Pose Feedback for a Dual-Arm Space Robot

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yicheng Liu

2016-01-01

Full Text Available In order to obtain high precision path tracking for a dual-arm space robot, a trajectory planning method with pose feedback is proposed to be introduced into the design process in this paper. Firstly, pose error kinematic models are derived from the related kinematics and desired pose command for the end-effector and the base, respectively. On this basis, trajectory planning with pose feedback is proposed from a control perspective. Theoretical analyses show that the proposed trajectory planning algorithm can guarantee that pose error converges to zero exponentially for both the end-effector and the base when the robot is out of singular configuration. Compared with the existing algorithms, the proposed algorithm can lead to higher precision path tracking for the end-effector. Furthermore, the algorithm renders the system good anti-interference property for the base. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed trajectory planning algorithm.

77 FR 56772 - Safety Zone; Water Main Crossing; Choctawhatchee Bay; Santa Rosa Beach, FL

Science.gov (United States)

2012-09-14

... turbidity silt curtains pose significant safety hazards to both vessels and mariners operating in or near... restrictions; and (3) the impacts on routine navigation are expected to be minimal. Notifications to the marine... Part 165 Harbors, Marine safety, Navigation (water), Reporting and recordkeeping requirements, Security...

Problems and concerns in radiation safety management related with decommissioning of tritium facility

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kawano, Takao

2005-01-01

The tritium facility at the National Institute for Fusion Science has been closed in 2002 after decommissioning procedure. A number of works have been completed including technical measures and administrative documentations to be reported to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sport, Science and Technology. All the operations were carried out in three successive terms; 1) survey and preparations, 2) actual decommissioning works, and 3) report of all procedures to the Minister. A valuable experience we had during this project has been summarized, and some problems have also been pointed out from a viewpoint of radiation safety management. (author)

Rethinking pedagogy for second-order differential equations: a simplified approach to understanding well-posed problems

Science.gov (United States)

Tisdell, Christopher C.

2017-07-01

Knowing an equation has a unique solution is important from both a modelling and theoretical point of view. For over 70 years, the approach to learning and teaching 'well posedness' of initial value problems (IVPs) for second- and higher-order ordinary differential equations has involved transforming the problem and its analysis to a first-order system of equations. We show that this excursion is unnecessary and present a direct approach regarding second- and higher-order problems that does not require an understanding of systems.

The safety of nuclear installations

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

1993-01-01

This Safety Fundamental publication sets out basic objectives, concepts and principles for ensuring safety that can be used both by the IAEA in its international assistance operations and by Member States in their national nuclear programmes. These Safety Fundamentals apply primarily to those nuclear installations in which the stored energy developed in certain situations could potentially results in the release of radioactive material from its designated location with the consequent risk of radiation exposure of people. These principles are applicable to a broad range of nuclear installations, but their detailed application will depend on the particular technology and the risks posed by it. In addition to nuclear power plants, such installations may include: research reactors and facilities, fuel enrichment, manufacturing and reprocessing plants; and certain facilities for radioactive waste treatment and storage

Problems of introducing first nuclear power plant in a developing country with some natural energy resources. The case of Indonesia

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Subki, I.R.

1997-01-01

Indonesia, an archipelagic country, has limited hydro, oil/gas, coal and geothermal resources distributed unevenly over many islands. The use of nuclear energy is very potential not only for optimal energy mix but also to reduce the depletion rates of the fossil fuels. This potential was seriously studied by launching a comprehensive Feasibility Study and Site Investigation from November 1991 to May 1996. The study gives positive results for Nuclear Power Plant's (NPP) introduction, especially from technoeconomic aspects which cover : technology, safety, economy, radioactive waste management and acceptable site at Ujung Lemahabang in Central Java. Financial aspects pose some problem due to the government's policy of accepting no risks both political and financial in big projects undertaking. But, this can be overcome through Build Operate Own (BOO) and barter financing projects. The most difficult problems are non-technical, they are : people's perception on nuclear safety and psycho-political aspects of nuclear energy. We propose a combined solution of continuing more effective public information and developing a wisdom in decision making process. (author)

Urinary tract infections in pregnancy: old and new unresolved diagnostic and therapeutic problems.

Science.gov (United States)

Matuszkiewicz-Rowińska, Joanna; Małyszko, Jolanta; Wieliczko, Monika

2015-03-16

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are common in pregnant women and pose a great therapeutic challenge, since the risk of serious complications in both the mother and her child is high. Pregnancy is a state associated with physiological, structural and functional urinary tract changes which promote ascending infections from the urethra. Unlike the general population, all pregnant women should be screened for bacteriuria with urine culture, and asymptomatic bacteriuria must be treated in every case that is diagnosed, as it is an important risk factor for pyelonephritis in this population. The antibiotic chosen should have a good maternal and fetal safety profile. In this paper, current principles of diagnosis and management of UTI in pregnancy are reviewed, and the main problems and controversies are identified and discussed.

Tooth display and lip position during spontaneous and posed smiling in adults.

Science.gov (United States)

Van Der Geld, Pieter; Oosterveld, Paul; Berge, Stefaan J; Kuijpers-Jagtman, Anne M

2008-08-01

To analyze differences in tooth display, lip-line height, and smile width between the posed smiling record, traditionally produced for orthodontic diagnosis, and the spontaneous (Duchenne) smile of joy. The faces of 122 male participants were each filmed during spontaneous and posed smiling. Spontaneous smiles were elicited through the participants watching a comical movie. Maxillary and mandibular lip-line heights, tooth display, and smile width were measured using a digital videographic method for smile analysis. Paired sample t-tests were used to compare measurements of posed and spontaneous smiling. Maxillary lip-line heights during spontaneous smiling were significantly higher than during posed smiling. Compared to spontaneous smiling, tooth display in the (pre)molar area during posed smiling decreased by up to 30%, along with a significant reduction of smile width. During posed smiling, also mandibular lip-line heights changed and the teeth were more covered by the lower lip than during spontaneous smiling. Reduced lip-line heights, tooth display, and smile width on a posed smiling record can have implications for the diagnostics of lip-line height, smile arc, buccal corridors, and plane of occlusion. Spontaneous smiling records next to posed smiling records are therefore recommended for diagnostic purposes. Because of the dynamic nature of spontaneous smiling, it is proposed to switch to dynamic video recording of the smile.

Resolution for the Loviisa benchmark problem

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Garcia, C.R.; Quintero, R.; Milian, D.

1992-01-01

In the present paper, the Loviisa benchmark problem for cycles 11 and 8, and reactor blocks 1 and 2 from Loviisa NPP, is calculated. This problem user law leakage reload patterns and was posed at the second thematic group of TIC meeting held in Rheinsberg GDR, march 1989. SPPS-1 coarse mesh code has been used for the calculations

3D head pose estimation and tracking using particle filtering and ICP algorithm

KAUST Repository

Ben Ghorbel, Mahdi; Baklouti, Malek; Couvet, Serge

2010-01-01

This paper addresses the issue of 3D head pose estimation and tracking. Existing approaches generally need huge database, training procedure, manual initialization or use face feature extraction manually extracted. We propose a framework for estimating the 3D head pose in its fine level and tracking it continuously across multiple Degrees of Freedom (DOF) based on ICP and particle filtering. We propose to approach the problem, using 3D computational techniques, by aligning a face model to the 3D dense estimation computed by a stereo vision method, and propose a particle filter algorithm to refine and track the posteriori estimate of the position of the face. This work comes with two contributions: the first concerns the alignment part where we propose an extended ICP algorithm using an anisotropic scale transformation. The second contribution concerns the tracking part. We propose the use of the particle filtering algorithm and propose to constrain the search space using ICP algorithm in the propagation step. The results show that the system is able to fit and track the head properly, and keeps accurate the results on new individuals without a manual adaptation or training. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.

Head Pose Estimation Using Multilinear Subspace Analysis for Robot Human Awareness

Science.gov (United States)

Ivanov, Tonislav; Matthies, Larry; Vasilescu, M. Alex O.

2009-01-01

Mobile robots, operating in unconstrained indoor and outdoor environments, would benefit in many ways from perception of the human awareness around them. Knowledge of people's head pose and gaze directions would enable the robot to deduce which people are aware of the its presence, and to predict future motions of the people for better path planning. To make such inferences, requires estimating head pose on facial images that are combination of multiple varying factors, such as identity, appearance, head pose, and illumination. By applying multilinear algebra, the algebra of higher-order tensors, we can separate these factors and estimate head pose regardless of subject's identity or image conditions. Furthermore, we can automatically handle uncertainty in the size of the face and its location. We demonstrate a pipeline of on-the-move detection of pedestrians with a robot stereo vision system, segmentation of the head, and head pose estimation in cluttered urban street scenes.

Compensating Pose Uncertainties through Appropriate Gripper Finger Cutouts

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Wolniakowski Adam

2018-03-01

Full Text Available The gripper finger design is a recurring problem in many robotic grasping platforms used in industry. The task of switching the gripper configuration to accommodate for a new batch of objects typically requires engineering expertise, and is a lengthy and costly iterative trial-and-error process. One of the open challenges is the need for the gripper to compensate for uncertainties inherent to the workcell, e.g. due to errors in calibration, inaccurate pose estimation from the vision system, or object deformation. In this paper, we present an analysis of gripper uncertainty compensating capabilities in a sample industrial object grasping scenario for a finger that was designed using an automated simulation-based geometry optimization method (Wolniakowski et al., 2013, 2015. We test the developed gripper with a set of grasps subjected to structured perturbation in a simulation environment and in the real-world setting. We provide a comparison of the data obtained by using both of these approaches. We argue that the strong correspondence observed in results validates the use of dynamic simulation for the gripper finger design and optimization.

Software reliability for safety-critical applications

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Everett, B.; Musa, J.

1994-01-01

In this talk, the authors address the question open-quotes Can Software Reliability Engineering measurement and modeling techniques be applied to safety-critical applications?close quotes Quantitative techniques have long been applied in engineering hardware components of safety-critical applications. The authors have seen a growing acceptance and use of quantitative techniques in engineering software systems but a continuing reluctance in using such techniques in safety-critical applications. The general case posed against using quantitative techniques for software components runs along the following lines: safety-critical applications should be engineered such that catastrophic failures occur less frequently than one in a billion hours of operation; current software measurement/modeling techniques rely on using failure history data collected during testing; one would have to accumulate over a billion operational hours to verify failure rate objectives of about one per billion hours

Pose Estimation and Adaptive Robot Behaviour for Human-Robot Interaction

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Svenstrup, Mikael; Hansen, Søren Tranberg; Andersen, Hans Jørgen

2009-01-01

Abstract—This paper introduces a new method to determine a person’s pose based on laser range measurements. Such estimates are typically a prerequisite for any human-aware robot navigation, which is the basis for effective and timeextended interaction between a mobile robot and a human. The robot......’s pose. The resulting pose estimates are used to identify humans who wish to be approached and interacted with. The interaction motion of the robot is based on adaptive potential functions centered around the person that respect the persons social spaces. The method is tested in experiments...

Perturbative methods for sensitivity calculation in safety problems of nuclear reactors: state-of-the-art

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Lima, Fernando R.A.; Lira, Carlos A.B.O.; Gandini, Augusto

1995-01-01

During the last two decades perturbative methods became an efficient tool to perform sensitivity analysis in nuclear reactor safety problems. In this paper, a comparative study taking into account perturbation formalisms (Diferential and Matricial Mthods and generalized Perturbation Theory - GPT) is considered. Then a few number of applications are described to analyze the sensitivity of some functions relavant to thermal hydraulics designs or safety analysis of nuclear reactor cores and steam generators. The behaviours of the nuclear reactor cores and steam generators are simulated, respectively, by the COBRA-IV-I and GEVAP codes. Results of sensitivity calculations have shown a good agreement when compared to those obtained directly by using the mentioned codes. So, a significative computational time safe can be obtained with perturbative methods performing sensitivity analysis in nuclear power plants. (author). 25 refs., 5 tabs

An anti-disturbing real time pose estimation method and system

Science.gov (United States)

Zhou, Jian; Zhang, Xiao-hu

2011-08-01

Pose estimation relating two-dimensional (2D) images to three-dimensional (3D) rigid object need some known features to track. In practice, there are many algorithms which perform this task in high accuracy, but all of these algorithms suffer from features lost. This paper investigated the pose estimation when numbers of known features or even all of them were invisible. Firstly, known features were tracked to calculate pose in the current and the next image. Secondly, some unknown but good features to track were automatically detected in the current and the next image. Thirdly, those unknown features which were on the rigid and could match each other in the two images were retained. Because of the motion characteristic of the rigid object, the 3D information of those unknown features on the rigid could be solved by the rigid object's pose at the two moment and their 2D information in the two images except only two case: the first one was that both camera and object have no relative motion and camera parameter such as focus length, principle point, and etc. have no change at the two moment; the second one was that there was no shared scene or no matched feature in the two image. Finally, because those unknown features at the first time were known now, pose estimation could go on in the followed images in spite of the missing of known features in the beginning by repeating the process mentioned above. The robustness of pose estimation by different features detection algorithms such as Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi (KLT) feature, Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) and Speed Up Robust Feature (SURF) were compared and the compact of the different relative motion between camera and the rigid object were discussed in this paper. Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) parallel computing was also used to extract and to match hundreds of features for real time pose estimation which was hard to work on Central Processing Unit (CPU). Compared with other pose estimation methods, this new

Problems of underground gasification of coal. Les Problemes que pose une gazeification souterraine des charbons

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Doumenc, R A.M.

1948-11-01

Underground gasification is examined in collaboration with Socogaz of Brussels. The USSR has been successful and claims to have produced gas of 1,000 cal per cu m at the rate of 30,000 cu m per hr at Gorlovka (Donets). Results of the American, Belgian, and Italian experiments show that the gas produced contains much CO/sub 2/ and only 5 percent CO. The coal has been burned but not gasified. If the main problem to be solved should be production of a rich gas for burning or a sufficiently hot gas for direct heating, many difficulties would need to be overcome, such as remote control of the fire, choice of suitable coal seams, etc. The underground process is attractive because of the great saving in labor. As it is impossible to reproduce conditions on a laboratory scale, the time and expenditure required for these lengthy experiments seem to be amply justified.

A Review and Comparative Analysis of Security Risks and Safety Measures of Mobile Health Apps

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Karen Scott

2015-11-01

Full Text Available In line with a patient-centred model of healthcare, Mobile Health applications (mhealth apps provide convenient and equitable access to health and well-being resources and programs that can enable consumers to monitor their health related problems, understand specific medical conditions and attain personal fitness goals. This increase in access and control comes with an increase in risk and responsibility to identify and manage the associated risks, such as the privacy and security of consumers’ personal and health information. Based on a review of the literature, this paper identifies a set of risk and safety features for evaluating mHealth apps and uses those features to conduct a comparative analysis of the 20 most popular mHealth apps. The comparative analysis reveals that current mHealth apps do pose a risk to consumers. To address the safety and privacy concerns, recommendations to consumers and app developers are offered together with consideration of mHealth app future trends.

Application of probabilistic methods for sizing of safety factors in studies on defect harm fullness

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Ardillon, E.; Pitner, P.

1996-01-01

The design rules that are currently under application in nuclear engineering recommend the use of deterministic analysis methods. Probabilistic methods allow the uncertainties inherent in input variables of the analytical model to be taken into account owing to data provided by operation feedback so as to better evaluate the link between the deterministic margins adopted and the actual risk level. In the Resistance R/Loading L elementary case where the variables are Gaussian, there is an explicit relation between the required safety level and the partial safety coefficients which affect each variable. In the complex case of a flawed pipe subjected to various modes of ruin where many random variables are not Gaussian, one can obtain implicit relations. These relations allow a certain flexibility when choosing the coefficients, which poses the problem of their optimum calibration. The choice of coefficients based upon the coordinates of the ''most probable failure point'' illustrates this approach. (authors). 7 refs., 5 figs., 2 tabs

Locating binding poses in protein-ligand systems using reconnaissance metadynamics

Science.gov (United States)

Söderhjelm, Pär; Tribello, Gareth A.; Parrinello, Michele

2012-01-01

A molecular dynamics-based protocol is proposed for finding and scoring protein-ligand binding poses. This protocol uses the recently developed reconnaissance metadynamics method, which employs a self-learning algorithm to construct a bias that pushes the system away from the kinetic traps where it would otherwise remain. The exploration of phase space with this algorithm is shown to be roughly six to eight times faster than unbiased molecular dynamics and is only limited by the time taken to diffuse about the surface of the protein. We apply this method to the well-studied trypsin–benzamidine system and show that we are able to refind all the poses obtained from a reference EADock blind docking calculation. These poses can be scored based on the length of time the system remains trapped in the pose. Alternatively, one can perform dimensionality reduction on the output trajectory and obtain a map of phase space that can be used in more expensive free-energy calculations. PMID:22440749

A Grasp-Pose Generation Method Based on Gaussian Mixture Models

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Wenjia Wu

2015-11-01

Full Text Available A Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM-based grasp-pose generation method is proposed in this paper. Through offline training, the GMM is set up and used to depict the distribution of the robot's reachable orientations. By dividing the robot's workspace into small 3D voxels and training the GMM for each voxel, a look-up table covering all the workspace is built with the x, y and z positions as the index and the GMM as the entry. Through the definition of Task Space Regions (TSR, an object's feasible grasp poses are expressed as a continuous region. With the GMM, grasp poses can be preferentially sampled from regions with high reachability probabilities in the online grasp-planning stage. The GMM can also be used as a preliminary judgement of a grasp pose's reachability. Experiments on both a simulated and a real robot show the superiority of our method over the existing method.

77 FR 70684 - Safety Zone; Bridge Demolition Project; Indiana Harbor Canal, East Chicago, IN

Science.gov (United States)

2012-11-27

... environmental risk to health or risk to safety that may disproportionately affect children. 10. Indian Tribal... the Cline Avenue bridge in East Chicago, IN. The Captain of the Port, Sector Lake Michigan, has determined that this demolition project will pose a significant risk to public safety and property. Such...

Comprehensive analysis of pipeline transportation systems for CO2 sequestration. Thermodynamics and safety problems

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Witkowski, Andrzej; Rusin, Andrzej; Majkut, Mirosław; Rulik, Sebastian; Stolecka, Katarzyna

2013-01-01

Highlights: • Comprehensive analysis of the efficiency and safety strategies of transport CO 2 . • Selection of safety zones around pipelines transporting CO 2 . • Optimization of CO 2 pipeline transportation conditions. - Abstract: The aim of this paper is to analyze CO 2 compression and transportation processes with safety issues for post-combustion CO 2 capture applications for basic technological concepts of a 900 MW pulverized coal-fired power plant. Four various types of compressors including a conventional multistage centrifugal compressor, an integrally geared centrifugal compressor, a supersonic shock wave compressor, and pump machines were used. This study emphasizes that total compression power is a strong function of the thermodynamic process and is not only determined by the compressor efficiency. The compressor increases the CO 2 pressure from normal pressure to critical pressure and the boosting pump continues to increase the pressure to the required pressure for the pipeline inlet. Another problem analyzed in this study is the transport of CO 2 by pipeline from the compressor outlet site to the disposal site under heat transfer conditions. Simulations were made to determine maximum safe pipeline distance to subsequent booster stations depending on inlet pressure, environmental temperature, the thermal insulation thickness and the ground level heat transfer conditions. From the point of view of environmental protection, the most important problem is to identify the hazards which indirectly affect CO 2 transportation in a strict and reliable manner. This identification is essential for effective hazard management. A failure of pipelines is usually caused by corrosion, material defects, ground movement or third party interference. After the rupture of the pipeline transporting liquid CO 2 , a large pressure drop will occur. The pressure will continue to fall until the liquid becomes a mixture of saturated vapour/liquid. In the vicinity of the

Perspectives on nuclear material safety management methods at DOE sites

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Hyder, M.L.

1997-01-01

The management of nuclear materials, and fissile materials in particular, at the USDOE facilities is undergoing significant changes. These result in large part from decreasing requirements for these materials in the US weapons program. Not only is new production no longer required, but returns must be handled and safely stored. Eventually surplus fissile material will be used for power production, or else put into a form suitable for long term disposition. In the meanwhile concentrates must be stored with protection against releases of radioactive material to the environment, and also against theft or deliberate dispersion. In addition, cleaning up large volumes of materials contaminated with fissile isotopes will be a major activity, and there will also be some quantity of spent fuel containing enriched uranium that cannot readily be processed. All these activities pose safety problems, some of which are addressed here

Rethinking Pedagogy for Second-Order Differential Equations: A Simplified Approach to Understanding Well-Posed Problems

Science.gov (United States)

Tisdell, Christopher C.

2017-01-01

Knowing an equation has a unique solution is important from both a modelling and theoretical point of view. For over 70 years, the approach to learning and teaching "well posedness" of initial value problems (IVPs) for second- and higher-order ordinary differential equations has involved transforming the problem and its analysis to a…

Proceedings of the 2010 Canadian Dam Association's public safety around dams workshop

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

NONE

2010-07-01

Nearly 30 people have drowned in dam-related incidents over the last 10 years in Canada. The Canadian public is now calling for improved safety guidelines. Public interaction with dams is increasing as a result of interest in extreme sports and perceived rights of access. However, many members of the public are not aware of the dangers posed by dams. This workshop provided a forum to discuss proposals for a draft publication of the Canadian Dam Association (CDA) guidelines for public safety and security around dams. Issues related to current legislation and liability were discussed. Methods of increasing public awareness of the hazards posed by dams included increased signage in dam locations, the use of audible and visual alert systems, and the use of booms and buoys. The responsibilities of dam owners in ensuring the safety of dams were also discussed. The conference featured 5 presentations, of which 2 have been catalogued separately for inclusion in this database. tabs., figs.

Preparatory power posing affects nonverbal presence and job interview performance.

Science.gov (United States)

Cuddy, Amy J C; Wilmuth, Caroline A; Yap, Andy J; Carney, Dana R

2015-07-01

The authors tested whether engaging in expansive (vs. contractive) "power poses" before a stressful job interview--preparatory power posing--would enhance performance during the interview. Participants adopted high-power (i.e., expansive, open) poses or low-power (i.e., contractive, closed) poses, and then prepared and delivered a speech to 2 evaluators as part of a mock job interview. All interview speeches were videotaped and coded for overall performance and hireability and for 2 potential mediators: verbal content (e.g., structure, content) and nonverbal presence (e.g., captivating, enthusiastic). As predicted, those who prepared for the job interview with high- (vs. low-) power poses performed better and were more likely to be chosen for hire; this relation was mediated by nonverbal presence, but not by verbal content. Although previous research has focused on how a nonverbal behavior that is enacted during interactions and observed by perceivers affects how those perceivers evaluate and respond to the actor, this experiment focused on how a nonverbal behavior that is enacted before the interaction and unobserved by perceivers affects the actor's performance, which, in turn, affects how perceivers evaluate and respond to the actor. This experiment reveals a theoretically novel and practically informative result that demonstrates the causal relation between preparatory nonverbal behavior and subsequent performance and outcomes. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Consistently Showing Your Best Side? Intra-individual Consistency in #Selfie Pose Orientation

Science.gov (United States)

Lindell, Annukka K.

2017-01-01

Painted and photographic portraits of others show an asymmetric bias: people favor their left cheek. Both experimental and database studies confirm that the left cheek bias extends to selfies. To date all such selfie studies have been cross-sectional; whether individual selfie-takers tend to consistently favor the same pose orientation, or switch between multiple poses, remains to be determined. The present study thus examined intra-individual consistency in selfie pose orientations. Two hundred selfie-taking participants (100 male and 100 female) were identified by searching #selfie on Instagram. The most recent 10 single-subject selfies for the each of the participants were selected and coded for type of selfie (normal; mirror) and pose orientation (left, midline, right), resulting in a sample of 2000 selfies. Results indicated that selfie-takers do tend to consistently adopt a preferred pose orientation (α = 0.72), with more participants showing an overall left cheek bias (41%) than would be expected by chance (overall right cheek bias = 31.5%; overall midline bias = 19.5%; no overall bias = 8%). Logistic regression modellng, controlling for the repeated measure of participant identity, indicated that sex did not affect pose orientation. However, selfie type proved a significant predictor when comparing left and right cheek poses, with a stronger left cheek bias for mirror than normal selfies. Overall, these novel findings indicate that selfie-takers show intra-individual consistency in pose orientation, and in addition, replicate the previously reported left cheek bias for selfies and other types of portrait, confirming that the left cheek bias also presents within individuals’ selfie corpora. PMID:28270790

Code coverage measurement methodology for MMI software of safety-class I and C system

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Lee, Eun Hyung; Jung, Beom Young; Choi, Seok Joo [Suresofttech, Seoul (Korea, Republic of)

2016-10-15

MMI (Man-Machine Interface) software of the safety instrumentation and control system used in nuclear power plants carry out an important functions, such as displaying and transmitting the commend to another system, and change setpoints the safety-related information. Yet, this has been recognized reliability of the MMI software plays an important role in enhancing nuclear power plants are operating, regulatory standards have been strengthened with it. Strengthening of regulatory standards has affected even perform software testing soon, and accordingly, the current regulatory require the measurement of code coverage with legal standard. In this paper, it poses a problem of the conventional method used for measuring the above-mentioned code coverage, presents a new coverage measuring method for solving the exposed problems. In this paper, we checked the problems such as limit and the low efficiency of the existing test coverage measuring method on the MMI software using in nuclear power instrumentation and control systems, and it proposed a new test coverage measuring method as a solution for this. If you apply a new method of Top-Down approach, can mitigate all of the problems of existing test coverage measurement methods and possible coverage achievement of the desired objectives. Of course, it is still necessary to secure more cases, and the methodology should be systematization based on the cases. Thus, if later the efficient and reliable are ensured through the application in many cases, as well as nuclear power instrumentation and control, may be used to ensure code coverage of software of the many areas where the GUI is utilized.

A tutorial on inverse problems for anomalous diffusion processes

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Jin, Bangti; Rundell, William

2015-01-01

of related inverse problems, depending crucially on the specific type of given data and quantity of interest. Further, the study exhibits distinct new features of ‘fractional’ inverse problems, and a partial list of surprising observations is given below. (a) Classical backward diffusion is exponentially ill-posed, whereas time fractional backward diffusion is only mildly ill-posed in the sense of norms on the domain and range spaces. However, this does not imply that the latter always allows a more effective reconstruction. (b) Theoretically, the time fractional sideways problem is severely ill-posed like its classical counterpart, but numerically can be nearly well-posed. (c) The classical Sturm–Liouville problem requires two pieces of spectral data to uniquely determine a general potential, but in the fractional case, one single Dirichlet spectrum may suffice. (d) The space fractional sideways problem can be far more or far less ill-posed than the classical counterpart, depending on the location of the lateral Cauchy data. In many cases, the precise mechanism of these surprising observations is unclear, and awaits further analytical and numerical exploration, which requires new mathematical tools and ingenuities. Further, our findings indicate fractional diffusion inverse problems also provide an excellent case study in the differences between theoretical ill-conditioning involving domain and range norms and the numerical analysis of a finite-dimensional reconstruction procedure. Throughout we will also describe known analytical and numerical results in the literature. (paper)

77 FR 63732 - Safety Zone; Bridge Demolition Project; Indiana Harbor Canal, East Chicago, IN

Science.gov (United States)

2012-10-17

..., Protection of Children from Environmental Health Risks and Safety Risks. This rule is not an economically significant rule and does not create an environmental risk to health or risk to safety that may.... The Captain of the Port, Sector Lake Michigan, has determined that this demolition project will pose a...

77 FR 39638 - Safety Zone; Barbara Harder Wedding Fireworks, Lake Erie, Lake View, NY

Science.gov (United States)

2012-07-05

... environmental risk to health or risk to safety that may disproportionately affect children. 10. Indian Tribal... be held on Lake Erie near Lake View, NY. The Captain of the Port Buffalo has determined that fireworks launched proximate to a gathering of watercraft pose a significant risk to public safety and...

Architecture Level Safety Analyses for Safety-Critical Systems

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

K. S. Kushal

2017-01-01

Full Text Available The dependency of complex embedded Safety-Critical Systems across Avionics and Aerospace domains on their underlying software and hardware components has gradually increased with progression in time. Such application domain systems are developed based on a complex integrated architecture, which is modular in nature. Engineering practices assured with system safety standards to manage the failure, faulty, and unsafe operational conditions are very much necessary. System safety analyses involve the analysis of complex software architecture of the system, a major aspect in leading to fatal consequences in the behaviour of Safety-Critical Systems, and provide high reliability and dependability factors during their development. In this paper, we propose an architecture fault modeling and the safety analyses approach that will aid in identifying and eliminating the design flaws. The formal foundations of SAE Architecture Analysis & Design Language (AADL augmented with the Error Model Annex (EMV are discussed. The fault propagation, failure behaviour, and the composite behaviour of the design flaws/failures are considered for architecture safety analysis. The illustration of the proposed approach is validated by implementing the Speed Control Unit of Power-Boat Autopilot (PBA system. The Error Model Annex (EMV is guided with the pattern of consideration and inclusion of probable failure scenarios and propagation of fault conditions in the Speed Control Unit of Power-Boat Autopilot (PBA. This helps in validating the system architecture with the detection of the error event in the model and its impact in the operational environment. This also provides an insight of the certification impact that these exceptional conditions pose at various criticality levels and design assurance levels and its implications in verifying and validating the designs.

Integral geometry and inverse problems for hyperbolic equations

CERN Document Server

Romanov, V G

1974-01-01

There are currently many practical situations in which one wishes to determine the coefficients in an ordinary or partial differential equation from known functionals of its solution. These are often called "inverse problems of mathematical physics" and may be contrasted with problems in which an equation is given and one looks for its solution under initial and boundary conditions. Although inverse problems are often ill-posed in the classical sense, their practical importance is such that they may be considered among the pressing problems of current mathematical re­ search. A. N. Tihonov showed [82], [83] that there is a broad class of inverse problems for which a particular non-classical definition of well-posed ness is appropriate. This new definition requires that a solution be unique in a class of solutions belonging to a given subset M of a function space. The existence of a solution in this set is assumed a priori for some set of data. The classical requirement of continuous dependence of the solutio...

Hazards of solid waste management: bioethical problems, principles, and priorities

Science.gov (United States)

Maxey, Margaret N.

1978-01-01

The putative hazards of solid waste management cannot be evaluated without placing the problem within a cultural climate of crisis where some persons consider such by-products of “high, hard technology” to have raised unresolved moral and ethical issues. In order to assist scientific and technical efforts to protect public health and safety, a bioethical perspective requires us to examine three controversial aspects of policy-making about public safety. Failure to recognize the qualitative difference between two cognitive activities—risk-measurements (objective, scientific probabilities) and safety-judgments (subjective, shifting value priorities)—has had three unfortunate consequences. Sophisticated methods of risk analysis have been applied in a piecemeal, haphazard, ad hoc fashion within traditional institutions with the false expectation that incremental risk-reducing programs automatically ensure public health and safety. Ethical priorities require, first and foremost, a whole new field of data arranged for comparable risk-analyses. Critics of cost/risk/benefit quantifications attack the absurdity of “putting a price on human life” but have not been confronted with its threefold ethical justification. The widening discrepancy in risk-perceptions and loss of mutual confidence between scientific experts and ordinary citizens has placed a burden of social responsibility on members of the scientific and technical community to engage in more effective public education through the political process, notwithstanding advocates of a nonscientific adversary process. The urgency of effective public education has been demonstrated by the extent to which we have lost our historically balanced judgment about the alleged environmental hazards posed by advanced technology. PMID:738238

Cultural adaptations to the differential threats posed by hot versus cold climates.

Science.gov (United States)

Murray, Damian R

2013-10-01

Hot and cold climates have posed differential threats to human survival throughout history. Cold temperatures can pose direct threats to survival in themselves, whereas hot temperatures may pose threats indirectly through higher prevalence of infectious disease. These differential threats yield convergent predictions for the relationship between more demanding climates and freedom of expression, but divergent predictions for freedom from discrimination.

Assessment of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for nuclear reactor safety problems

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Smith, B. L.; Andreani, M.; Bieder, U.; Bestion, D.; Ducros, F.; Graffard, E.; Heitsch, M.; Scheuerer, M.; Henriksson, M.; Hoehne, T.; Rohde, U.; Lucas, D.; Komen, E.; Houkema, M.; Mahaffy, J.; Moretti, F.; Morii, T.; Muehlbauer, P.; Song, C.H.; Zigh, G.; Menter, F.; Watanabe, T.

2008-01-01

The basic objective of the present work was to provide documented evidence of the need to perform CFD simulations in Nuclear Reactor Safety (NRS), concentrating on single-phase applications, and to assess the competence of the present generation of CFD codes to perform these simulations reliably. The fulfilling of this objective involves multiple tasks, summarized as: to provide a classification of NRS problems requiring CFD analysis, to identify and catalogue existing CFD assessment bases, to identify shortcomings in CFD approaches, to put into place a means for extending the CFD assessment database, with an emphasis on NRS applications. The resulting document is presented here. After some introductory remarks, chapter 3 lists twenty-two NRS issues for which it is considered that the application of CFD would bring real benefits in terms of better predictive capability. This classification is followed by a short description of the safety issue, a state-of-the-art summary of what has been attempted, and what is still needed to be done to improve reliability. Chapter 4 details the assessment bases that have already been established in both the nuclear and non-nuclear domains, and discusses the usefulness and relevance of the work to NRS applications, where appropriate. This information is augmented in Chapter 5 by descriptions of the existing CFD assessment bases that have been established around specific, NRS problems. Typical examples are experiments devoted to the boron dilution issue, pressurised thermal shock, and thermal fatigue in pipes. Chapter 6 is devoted to identifying the technology gaps which need to be closed to make CFD a more trustworthy analytical tool. Some deficiencies identified are lack of a Phenomenon Identification and Ranking Table (PIRT), limitations in the range of application of turbulence models, coupling of CFD with neutronics and system codes, and computer power limitations. Most CFD codes currently being used have their own, custom

The relative pose estimation of aircraft based on contour model

Science.gov (United States)

Fu, Tai; Sun, Xiangyi

2017-02-01

This paper proposes a relative pose estimation approach based on object contour model. The first step is to obtain a two-dimensional (2D) projection of three-dimensional (3D)-model-based target, which will be divided into 40 forms by clustering and LDA analysis. Then we proceed by extracting the target contour in each image and computing their Pseudo-Zernike Moments (PZM), thus a model library is constructed in an offline mode. Next, we spot a projection contour that resembles the target silhouette most in the present image from the model library with reference of PZM; then similarity transformation parameters are generated as the shape context is applied to match the silhouette sampling location, from which the identification parameters of target can be further derived. Identification parameters are converted to relative pose parameters, in the premise that these values are the initial result calculated via iterative refinement algorithm, as the relative pose parameter is in the neighborhood of actual ones. At last, Distance Image Iterative Least Squares (DI-ILS) is employed to acquire the ultimate relative pose parameters.

A Methodological Framework for Software Safety in Safety Critical Computer Systems

OpenAIRE

P. V. Srinivas Acharyulu; P. Seetharamaiah

2012-01-01

Software safety must deal with the principles of safety management, safety engineering and software engineering for developing safety-critical computer systems, with the target of making the system safe, risk-free and fail-safe in addition to provide a clarified differentaition for assessing and evaluating the risk, with the principles of software risk management. Problem statement: Prevailing software quality models, standards were not subsisting in adequately addressing the software safety ...

Hysteresis and Phase Transitions in a Lattice Regularization of an Ill-Posed Forward-Backward Diffusion Equation

Science.gov (United States)

Helmers, Michael; Herrmann, Michael

2018-03-01

We consider a lattice regularization for an ill-posed diffusion equation with a trilinear constitutive law and study the dynamics of phase interfaces in the parabolic scaling limit. Our main result guarantees for a certain class of single-interface initial data that the lattice solutions satisfy asymptotically a free boundary problem with a hysteretic Stefan condition. The key challenge in the proof is to control the microscopic fluctuations that are inevitably produced by the backward diffusion when a particle passes the spinodal region.

Carbon chain length and the stimulus problem in oldfaction

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Boesveldt, S.; Olsson, M.; Lundstrom, J.N.

2010-01-01

Understanding how odour quality perception is encoded in its molecular properties arguably poses one of the most significant problems in olfaction. Determining the odour structure–quality relationships of structurally similar odorants could provide a key tool to this problem. We tentatively explored

The Liner Shipping Fleet Repositioning Problem with Cargo Flows

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Tierney, Kevin; Jensen, Rune Møller

2012-01-01

We solve an important problem for the liner shipping industry called the Liner Shipping Fleet Repositioning Problem (LSFRP). The LSFRP poses a large financial burden on liner shipping firms. During repositioning, vessels are moved between services in a liner shipping network. Shippers wish...

Micro-Encapsulated Phase Change Materials: A Review of Encapsulation, Safety and Thermal Characteristics

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ahmed Hassan

2016-10-01

Full Text Available Phase change materials (PCMs have been identified as potential candidates for building energy optimization by increasing the thermal mass of buildings. The increased thermal mass results in a drop in the cooling/heating loads, thus decreasing the energy demand in buildings. However, direct incorporation of PCMs into building elements undermines their structural performance, thereby posing a challenge for building integrity. In order to retain/improve building structural performance, as well as improving energy performance, micro-encapsulated PCMs are integrated into building materials. The integration of microencapsulation PCMs into building materials solves the PCM leakage problem and assures a good bond with building materials to achieve better structural performance. The aim of this article is to identify the optimum micro-encapsulation methods and materials for improving the energy, structural and safety performance of buildings. The article reviews the characteristics of micro-encapsulated PCMs relevant to building integration, focusing on safety rating, structural implications, and energy performance. The article uncovers the optimum combinations of the shell (encapsulant and core (PCM materials along with encapsulation methods by evaluating their merits and demerits.

Solution of safety problems for nuclear power plants with WWER-440 reactors

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Krett, V.; Pernitsa, R.; Pfann, Ya.; Zbeglik, J.

1982-01-01

Institute of nuclear research (INR) of Czechoslovakian Atomic Energy Commission isto fulfil the supervision functions within the field of nuclear power research and development. The problems of safe operation ensurance for the nuclear power plants (NPP) with WWER-440 reactors are studied within the frame of sever major issues: code standardization and devolopment of guiding materials for the state supervision; neutronic and thermohydrolic data processing for the accident analysis; operation reliability studies of the safety systems and estimates of separate component failure importance; assessment of the accidents resulting from the equipment misfunctioning and component failures; development of a controlled reliability program; evaluation of the atomic installationsimpact on the environment; ensurence of the reactor vessel reliability and durability under irradiation. The NPP safety analysis incorporates the calculations of transient and accidental regimes for the core, the primary loop and the entire plant. A number of codes has been produced which allow to determine the state of fuel elements during operation just before the accidents assessed, thermohydrolic conditions in the coolant and the temperature distribution within the fuel both for the stationary reactor conditions and for transient regimes. A mathematical model has been deveoloped, including the description of all the primary loop major components. The Soviet code DYNAMIKA has been adopted and adjusted for EC-1040 computer, there by the accident analysis for the entire NPP has been made possible. On the basis of american SAFTE code a faster SAFEDO-2 code has been developed employing the Monte Carlo method for the accident analysis of a complex system described by means of a failure tree. The discussed codes are used at the data assessment for the accident analysis part of the safety reports as well as for the reliability evaluation of the emergency core cooling system [ru

Work safety and sustainable development in enterprise

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

TANG Min-kang; ZHOU Yue; XU Jian-hong

2005-01-01

The nature of work safety and the way insisting on sustainable development in enterprise were analyzed. It indicates that problem of work safety in enterprise is closely related to the public's consciousness, to the development of science and technology, and to the weakening of safety management during the economic transition period. However, it is the people's questions concerned in the final analysis for the forming and development of the problem of work safety. Therefore, in order to solve the problem of work safety radically, the most basic way of insisting on the sustainable development in safety administration is to do a good job of every aspect about people. We should improve all people quality in science and culture and strengthen their safety and legal consciousness to form correct safety value concept. We should fortify safety legislation and bring close attention to approach and apply new safety technology.

Advanced reactor concepts and safety

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Lipsett, J.J.

1988-06-01

The need for some consistency in the terms used to describe the evolution of methods for ensuring the safety of nuclear reactors has been identified by the IAEA. This is timely since there appears to be a danger that the precision of many valuable words is being diluted and that a new jargon may appear that will confuse rather than aid the communication of important but possibly diverse philosophies and concepts. Among the difficulties faced by the nuclear industry is promoting and gaining a widespread understanding of the risks actually posed by nuclear reactors. In view of the importance of communication to both the public and to the technical community generally, the starting point for the definition of terms must be with dictionary meanings and common technical usage. The nuclear engineering community should use such words in conformance with the whole technical world. This paper addresses many of the issues suggested in the invitation to meet and also poses some additional issues for consideration. Some examples are the role of the operator in either enhancing or degrading safety and how the meaning or interpretation of the word 'safety' can be expected to change during the next few decades. It is advantageous to use criteria against which technologies and ongoing operating performance can be judged provided that the criteria are generic and not specific to particular reactor concepts. Some thoughts are offered on the need to frame the criteria carefully so that innovative solutions and concepts are fostered, not stifled

Head Pose Estimation on Eyeglasses Using Line Detection and Classification Approach

Science.gov (United States)

Setthawong, Pisal; Vannija, Vajirasak

This paper proposes a unique approach for head pose estimation of subjects with eyeglasses by using a combination of line detection and classification approaches. Head pose estimation is considered as an important non-verbal form of communication and could also be used in the area of Human-Computer Interface. A major improvement of the proposed approach is that it allows estimation of head poses at a high yaw/pitch angle when compared with existing geometric approaches, does not require expensive data preparation and training, and is generally fast when compared with other approaches.

Approximation of Bayesian Inverse Problems for PDEs

OpenAIRE

Cotter, S. L.; Dashti, M.; Stuart, A. M.

2010-01-01

Inverse problems are often ill posed, with solutions that depend sensitively on data.n any numerical approach to the solution of such problems, regularization of some form is needed to counteract the resulting instability. This paper is based on an approach to regularization, employing a Bayesian formulation of the problem, which leads to a notion of well posedness for inverse problems, at the level of probability measures. The stability which results from this well posedness may be used as t...

Application of digital control systems in nuclear power plants

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Keiper, J.T.

1993-01-01

This paper describes a sampling of recent digital applications, both safety related and non-safety related, in four nuclear power plants and discusses a few of the unique application experiences. Each application accrues unique benefits, but also poses unique problems. A few of the benefits and problems are discussed

Probabilistic Elastic Part Model: A Pose-Invariant Representation for Real-World Face Verification.

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Haoxiang; Hua, Gang

2018-04-01

Pose variation remains to be a major challenge for real-world face recognition. We approach this problem through a probabilistic elastic part model. We extract local descriptors (e.g., LBP or SIFT) from densely sampled multi-scale image patches. By augmenting each descriptor with its location, a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is trained to capture the spatial-appearance distribution of the face parts of all face images in the training corpus, namely the probabilistic elastic part (PEP) model. Each mixture component of the GMM is confined to be a spherical Gaussian to balance the influence of the appearance and the location terms, which naturally defines a part. Given one or multiple face images of the same subject, the PEP-model builds its PEP representation by sequentially concatenating descriptors identified by each Gaussian component in a maximum likelihood sense. We further propose a joint Bayesian adaptation algorithm to adapt the universally trained GMM to better model the pose variations between the target pair of faces/face tracks, which consistently improves face verification accuracy. Our experiments show that we achieve state-of-the-art face verification accuracy with the proposed representations on the Labeled Face in the Wild (LFW) dataset, the YouTube video face database, and the CMU MultiPIE dataset.

Software Safety Risk in Legacy Safety-Critical Computer Systems

Science.gov (United States)

Hill, Janice L.; Baggs, Rhoda

2007-01-01

Safety Standards contain technical and process-oriented safety requirements. Technical requirements are those such as "must work" and "must not work" functions in the system. Process-Oriented requirements are software engineering and safety management process requirements. Address the system perspective and some cover just software in the system > NASA-STD-8719.13B Software Safety Standard is the current standard of interest. NASA programs/projects will have their own set of safety requirements derived from the standard. Safety Cases: a) Documented demonstration that a system complies with the specified safety requirements. b) Evidence is gathered on the integrity of the system and put forward as an argued case. [Gardener (ed.)] c) Problems occur when trying to meet safety standards, and thus make retrospective safety cases, in legacy safety-critical computer systems.

Urinary tract infections in pregnancy: old and new unresolved diagnostic and therapeutic problems

Science.gov (United States)

Małyszko, Jolanta; Wieliczko, Monika

2015-01-01

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are common in pregnant women and pose a great therapeutic challenge, since the risk of serious complications in both the mother and her child is high. Pregnancy is a state associated with physiological, structural and functional urinary tract changes which promote ascending infections from the urethra. Unlike the general population, all pregnant women should be screened for bacteriuria with urine culture, and asymptomatic bacteriuria must be treated in every case that is diagnosed, as it is an important risk factor for pyelonephritis in this population. The antibiotic chosen should have a good maternal and fetal safety profile. In this paper, current principles of diagnosis and management of UTI in pregnancy are reviewed, and the main problems and controversies are identified and discussed. PMID:25861291

ITER safety

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Raeder, J.; Piet, S.; Buende, R.

1991-01-01

As part of the series of publications by the IAEA that summarize the results of the Conceptual Design Activities for the ITER project, this document describes the ITER safety analyses. It contains an assessment of normal operation effluents, accident scenarios, plasma chamber safety, tritium system safety, magnet system safety, external loss of coolant and coolant flow problems, and a waste management assessment, while it describes the implementation of the safety approach for ITER. The document ends with a list of major conclusions, a set of topical remarks on technical safety issues, and recommendations for the Engineering Design Activities, safety considerations for siting ITER, and recommendations with regard to the safety issues for the R and D for ITER. Refs, figs and tabs

Attribute And-Or Grammar for Joint Parsing of Human Pose, Parts and Attributes.

Science.gov (United States)

Park, Seyoung; Nie, Xiaohan; Zhu, Song-Chun

2017-07-25

This paper presents an attribute and-or grammar (A-AOG) model for jointly inferring human body pose and human attributes in a parse graph with attributes augmented to nodes in the hierarchical representation. In contrast to other popular methods in the current literature that train separate classifiers for poses and individual attributes, our method explicitly represents the decomposition and articulation of body parts, and account for the correlations between poses and attributes. The A-AOG model is an amalgamation of three traditional grammar formulations: (i)Phrase structure grammar representing the hierarchical decomposition of the human body from whole to parts; (ii)Dependency grammar modeling the geometric articulation by a kinematic graph of the body pose; and (iii)Attribute grammar accounting for the compatibility relations between different parts in the hierarchy so that their appearances follow a consistent style. The parse graph outputs human detection, pose estimation, and attribute prediction simultaneously, which are intuitive and interpretable. We conduct experiments on two tasks on two datasets, and experimental results demonstrate the advantage of joint modeling in comparison with computing poses and attributes independently. Furthermore, our model obtains better performance over existing methods for both pose estimation and attribute prediction tasks.

Experience of NS disposal at the Enterprise ''Zvezdochka'', in Severodvinsk. Problems of ecological safety

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kozlov, Yuri

1999-01-01

According to this presentation, decommissioning and disposal of nuclear submarines is a problem of great concern in Russia. So far more than 150 nuclear submarines have been removed from the Fleet and will be disposed of. Future disposals were not taken into consideration when the shipyards were constructed. Nuclear vessels with loaded cores stay afloat waiting for their turn to be disposed of, often with damaged safety assurance systems and a potential for causing major ecological catastrophes. The presentation deals briefly with some international programmes in progress at Nerpa in Murmansk, Zvezda in Primorye and Zvezdochka in Arkhangelsk and then discusses in more detail the experience of disposal at the Zvezdochka, which under the Start-2 agreement is defined as one of the enterprises dealing with the disposal of strategic nuclear submarines. There they have the qualified staff and the equipment needed. Spent nuclear fuel unloading and removal is the most acute problem

Seismic Safety Guide

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Eagling, D.G.

1985-01-01

The Seismic Safety Guide provides facilities managers with practical guidelines for administering a comprehensive earthquake safety program. Most facilities managers, unfamiliar with earthquake engineering, tend to look for answers in techniques more sophisticated than required to solve the actual problems in earthquake safety. Often the approach to solutions to these problems is so academic, legalistic, and financially overwhelming that mitigation of actual seismic hazards simply does not get done in a timely, cost-effective way. The objective of the Guide is to provide practical advice about earthquake safety so that managers and engineers can get the job done without falling into common pitfalls, prolonged diagnosis, and unnecessary costs. It is comprehensive with respect to earthquakes in that it covers the most important aspects of natural hazards, site planning, rehabilitation of existing buildings, design of new facilities, operational safety, emergency planning, non-structural elements, life lines, and risk management. 5 references

Role of systems safety in maintaining affordable safety in the 1980's

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Hollister, H.; Trauth, C.A. Jr.

1979-01-01

Historically, the Department of Energy and its predecessors have used and supported the development of systems safety programs, practices, and principles, finding them by and large adequate, effective, and managerially efficient. Today, attempts are bing made to resolve increasingly complex environmental, safety, and health problems by turning to increasingly complex and detailed regulation as the primary governmental answer. It is increasingly doubtful that such an approach will provide management of these issues and problems that is either effective or efficient. Challenge is issued to those in systems safety to develop and apply systems safety principles and practices more broadly to total operational systems and not just to hardware and to environmental and health protection and not just to safety, so that the total universe of environmental, safety, and health can be managed effectively and efficiently with encouragement of innovation and creativity, using a relatively brief and concise, but adequate, regulatory base

On Euler's problem

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Egorov, Yurii V [Institute de Mathematique de Toulouse, Toulouse (France)

2013-04-30

We consider the classical problem on the tallest column which was posed by Euler in 1757. Bernoulli-Euler theory serves today as the basis for the design of high buildings. This problem is reduced to the problem of finding the potential for the Sturm-Liouville equation corresponding to the maximum of the first eigenvalue. The problem has been studied by many mathematicians but we give the first rigorous proof of the existence and uniqueness of the optimal column and we give new formulae which let us find it. Our method is based on a new approach consisting in the study of critical points of a related nonlinear functional. Bibliography: 6 titles.

Categorization of questions posed before and after inquiry-based learning

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sandra Milena García González

2014-07-01

Full Text Available Posing research questions is the central ability of the scientific thought. This article examines the ability of sixth grade children to pose researchable questions before and after a three months’ work on a didactic sequence based on the inquiry school model. According to their purpose, the questions asked by children, after reading a text, were classified into researchable questions -susceptible to be empirically explored-, questions about a cause, and questions on a piece of data. The results show that the amount and the type of questions the students were able to pose during the intervention changed, from most of questions on data or information, to most of researchable questions, subsequently, the importance of designing teaching approaches to foster this ability was proved.

Nuclear power safety economics

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Legasov, V.A.; Demin, V.F.; Shevelev, Ya.V.

1984-01-01

The existing conceptual and methodical basis for the decision-making process insuring safety of the nuclear power and other (industrial and non-industrial) human activities is critically analyzed. Necessity of development a generalized economic safety analysis method (GESAM) is shown. Its purpose is justifying safety measures. Problems of GESAM development are considered including the problem of costing human risk. A number of suggestions on solving them are given. Using the discounting procedure in the assessment of risk or detriment caused by harmful impact on human health is substantiated. Examples of analyzing some safety systems in the nuclear power and other spheres of human activity are given

LABOUR PROTECTION AND INDUSTRIAL SAFETY IN UKRAINE: PROBLEMS OF TRANSITION PERIOD AND PERSPECTIVE WAYS OF DEVELOPMENT

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

A. P. BOCHKOVSKY

2016-12-01

Full Text Available Based on comparative analysis of the industrial accident causes in Ukraine and EU countries this article establishes that the main accident reasons are organizational ones (50 to 70% of the total number of cases, however such indicators as the registered in Ukraine fatal cases frequency coefficient (per 1 thousand of employees and the fatal accidents-total accidents number ratio are greater than the similar indicators in Europe by about 2- and 100-fold, respectively. It is noted that the issues of improving the work safety in Ukraine towards the association with the European Union should be considered in the context of two main planes, which are associated with changes in the legislative and educational systems. Within this article, the authors analyse the main inter-sectoral and sectoral regulatory legal acts on labour protection, in particular in the field of providing for fire, explosion and electrical safety, and relevant documents relating to the creation and maintenance of a comfortable environment at work. Based on the conducted analysis, the problems of adapting the national legislation in the field of labour protection and industrial safety to the legal framework of EU, the problems concerning the unsystematic character and selective approach to the implementation of appropriate changes, and potential hazards that can occur at all stages of the life cycle of technical systems in the event of their introduction are determined. The main differences in the systematic approach to the professional training of students in higher educational institutions (HEI of Ukraine and EU countries (Poland, for example in the field of labour protection and industrial safety are singled out. It is noted that in the Republic of Poland numbering the population correlative with Ukraine the quantity of special educational institutions preparing specialists in the field of labour protection in relation to the total number of higher educational establishment is

Early Safety Assessment of Automotive Systems Using Sabotage Simulation-Based Fault Injection Framework

OpenAIRE

Juez, Garazi; Amparan, Estíbaliz; Lattarulo, Ray; Ruíz, Alejandra; Perez, Joshue; Espinoza, Huascar

2017-01-01

As road vehicles increase their autonomy and the driver reduces his role in the control loop, novel challenges on dependability assessment arise. Model-based design combined with a simulation-based fault injection technique and a virtual vehicle poses as a promising solution for an early safety assessment of automotive systems. To start with, the design, where no safety was considered, is stimulated with a set of fault injection simulations (fault forecasting). By doing so, safety strategies ...

Automatic generation of statistical pose and shape models for articulated joints.

Science.gov (United States)

Xin Chen; Graham, Jim; Hutchinson, Charles; Muir, Lindsay

2014-02-01

Statistical analysis of motion patterns of body joints is potentially useful for detecting and quantifying pathologies. However, building a statistical motion model across different subjects remains a challenging task, especially for a complex joint like the wrist. We present a novel framework for simultaneous registration and segmentation of multiple 3-D (CT or MR) volumes of different subjects at various articulated positions. The framework starts with a pose model generated from 3-D volumes captured at different articulated positions of a single subject (template). This initial pose model is used to register the template volume to image volumes from new subjects. During this process, the Grow-Cut algorithm is used in an iterative refinement of the segmentation of the bone along with the pose parameters. As each new subject is registered and segmented, the pose model is updated, improving the accuracy of successive registrations. We applied the algorithm to CT images of the wrist from 25 subjects, each at five different wrist positions and demonstrated that it performed robustly and accurately. More importantly, the resulting segmentations allowed a statistical pose model of the carpal bones to be generated automatically without interaction. The evaluation results show that our proposed framework achieved accurate registration with an average mean target registration error of 0.34 ±0.27 mm. The automatic segmentation results also show high consistency with the ground truth obtained semi-automatically. Furthermore, we demonstrated the capability of the resulting statistical pose and shape models by using them to generate a measurement tool for scaphoid-lunate dissociation diagnosis, which achieved 90% sensitivity and specificity.

Road safety in developing countries.

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Schreuder, D.A.

1991-01-01

This paper presents a classification of countries (developing and developed alike), divided into two main categories: an economical and historical entry. When road safety problems are placed into the economical context, it then appears that, among other things: (1) The road safety problem in the

Numerical investigation of the inverse blackbody radiation problem

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Xin Tan, Guo-zhen Yang, Ben-yuan Gu

1994-01-01

A numerical algorithm for the inverse blackbody radiation problem, which is the determination of the temperature distribution of a thermal radiator (TDTR) from its total radiated power spectrum (TRPS), is presented, based on the general theory of amplitude-phase retrieval. With application of this new algorithm, the ill-posed nature of the Fredholm equation of the first kind can be largely overcome and a convergent solution to high accuracy can be obtained. By incorporation of the hybrid input-output algorithm into our algorithm, the convergent process can be substantially expedited and the stagnation problem of the solution can be averted. From model calculations it is found that the new algorithm can also provide a robust reconstruction of the TDTR from the noise-corrupted data of the TRPS. Therefore the new algorithm may offer a useful approach to solving the ill-posed inverse problem. 18 refs., 9 figs

Single leg balancing in ballet: effects of shoe conditions and poses.

Science.gov (United States)

Lobo da Costa, Paula H; Azevedo Nora, Fernanda G S; Vieira, Marcus Fraga; Bosch, Kerstin; Rosenbaum, Dieter

2013-03-01

The purpose of this study was to describe the effects of lower limb positioning and shoe conditions on stability levels of selected single leg ballet poses performed in demi-pointe position. Fourteen female non-professional ballet dancers (mean age of 18.4±2.8 years and mean body mass index of 21.5±2.8kg/m(2)) who had practiced ballet for at least seven years, without any musculoskeletal impairment volunteered to participate in this study. A capacitive pressure platform allowed for the assessment of center of pressure variables related to the execution of three single leg ballet poses in demi pointé position: attitude devant, attitude derriére, and attitude a la second. Peak pressures, contact areas, COP oscillation areas, anterior-posterior and medio-lateral COP oscillations and velocities were compared between two shoe conditions (barefoot versus slippers) and among the different poses. Barefoot performances produced more stable poses with significantly higher plantar contact areas, smaller COP oscillation areas and smaller anterior-posterior COP oscillations. COP oscillation areas, anterior-posterior COP oscillations and medio-lateral COP velocities indicated that attitude a la second is the least challenging and attitude derriére the most challenging pose. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Methods for safety culture improvement

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Sivintsev, Yu.V.

1998-01-01

New IAEA publication concerning the problems of safety assurance covering different aspects beginning from terminology applied and up to concrete examples of well and poor safety culture development at nuclear facilities is discussed. The safety culture is defined as such set of characteristics and specific activities of institutions and individual persons which states that safety problems of a nuclear facility are given the attention determined by their importance as being of highest priority. The statements of the new document have recommended, not mandatory character. It is emphasized that the process of safety culture improvement at nuclear facilities should be integral component of management procedure, not a bolt on extra

Health problems raised by the elimination of radioactive wastes and nuclear accidents; Problemes sanitaires poses par l'elimination des dechets radioactifs et par les accidents nucleaires

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Jammet, H; Mechali, D; Dousset, M [Commissariat a l' Energie Atomique, Fontenay-aux-Roses (France). Centre d' Etudes Nucleaires

1964-07-01

The rapid development of nuclear energy demands an urgent solution to the health problems arising from the discharge into the environment of radioactive residues produced by nuclear installations. - To be able to evaluate the risks run by the population and to fix tolerance limits for waste discharge, it is necessary to possess an exact knowledge of the course taken by the radioelements discharged, from their source until they reach man. The incorporation of radioelements in food cycles is the first risk to take into consideration. The factors involved in all stages of this transmission must be foreseen, whether they concern physical or biological media, because of their continuity and their interdependence. Finally, socio-economic and dietetic data must be collected in order that the risks and tolerance levels estimated are based on concrete and experimental rather than theoretical knowledge. The risk of nuclear accidents in the atomic industry, although very improbable, must be taken into consideration because of the seriousness of their consequences. The health problems arise in the field of professional hygiene on the one hand and in that of public hygiene on the other. In the first field the risk is two-fold and involves irradiation and contamination. The public sphere is reduced essentially to the risk of contamination by radioactive substances accidentally released in the surrounding medium. The health studies to be conducted in this field therefore include research not only on irradiation or contamination therapeutics but also on the transfer of radioelements from the accident site to man, mainly through food cycles, in their physical and in their biological components. Studies of this kind form the basis of decisions in the health field which would have to be taken in the case of an accident. (authors) [French] Le developpement rapide de l'energie nucleaire rend urgente la solution des problemes sanitaires poses par le rejet dans le milieu ambiant des

Validation and Verification of Future Integrated Safety-Critical Systems Operating under Off-Nominal Conditions

Science.gov (United States)

Belcastro, Christine M.

2010-01-01

Loss of control remains one of the largest contributors to aircraft fatal accidents worldwide. Aircraft loss-of-control accidents are highly complex in that they can result from numerous causal and contributing factors acting alone or (more often) in combination. Hence, there is no single intervention strategy to prevent these accidents and reducing them will require a holistic integrated intervention capability. Future onboard integrated system technologies developed for preventing loss of vehicle control accidents must be able to assure safe operation under the associated off-nominal conditions. The transition of these technologies into the commercial fleet will require their extensive validation and verification (V and V) and ultimate certification. The V and V of complex integrated systems poses major nontrivial technical challenges particularly for safety-critical operation under highly off-nominal conditions associated with aircraft loss-of-control events. This paper summarizes the V and V problem and presents a proposed process that could be applied to complex integrated safety-critical systems developed for preventing aircraft loss-of-control accidents. A summary of recent research accomplishments in this effort is also provided.

Application of Shape Similarity in Pose Selection and Virtual Screening in CSARdock2014 Exercise.

Science.gov (United States)