Personality factors in the selection of civilians for isolated northern stations.

An investigation of personality characteristics associated with favorable adjustment to northern isolated living, and the usefulness of psychological tests in the selection of personnel for northern posting. 197 electronic technicians already screened on other psychological tests completed MMPI, Edwards Personal and Brainard Preference tests, and General Information and Arctic Interest questionnaires prior to 1 year of isolation duty on the mid-Canada Line. Adequacy of work and social adjustment was associated with 11 of 35 test variables and 3 of 26 questionnaire items. The discriminating function of the MMPI was reduced by the use of the K correction. It was suggested that despite the highly select nature of the sample used, the test battery has potential value in the selection of civilians to work in the far north.—(17 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences and autonomic control: Absorption, hypnotic susceptibility, and the unilateral control of skin temperature.

Proposed to (a) replicate earlier findings that human Ss could voluntarily control peripheral skin temperature, (b) test the hypothesis that hypnotic susceptibility and the capacity for absorbed, imaginative attention would enhance autonomic learning and performance, and (c) demonstrate a learning effect, if one exists. A comparison was made with 7 Ss who scored high and 7 Ss who scored low on both a modified version of the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility and the Tellegen Absorption Scale. Auditory feedback was used to train Ss to produce a difference in skin temperature in one hand relative to the other in a direction specified by the E. Large and reliable performance and learning effects were found, but they were unrelated to hypnotic susceptibility or the capacity for absorbed, imaginative attention. Variables that might account for individual differences in learning and performance are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Corporate ergonomics programme at BCM Airdrie. Boots Contract Manufacturing

The production processes at the BCM Airdrie site range from manual loading tasks in the manufacturing areas to high frequency packaging assembly tasks on the production lines. Both are jobs that are known to carry risk to musculoskeletal health, so an ergonomist was appointed to design and co-ordinate an ergonomics programme for the site to control these risks. This paper details the programme that has evolved to proactively manage musculoskeletal risks in the design of both new and existing equipment and processes. The ergonomics procedures described primarily involve the engineers from all areas of the factory, and the process for ergonomics involvement with engineering design projects is described. Shop-floor personnel involvement is considered to be an essential part of the programme and 'Ergonomics Champions' are being trained on the packing lines to monitor the risks that are sometimes introduced with the different designs of product packaging.     

Dosimetry study for a new in vivo X-ray fluorescence (XRF) bone lead measurement system

A new ¹⁰⁹Cd γ-ray induced bone lead measurement system has been developed to reduce the minimum detectable limit (MDL) of the system. The system consists of four 16 mm diameter detectors. It requires a stronger source compared to the “conventional” system. A dosimetry study has been performed to estimate the dose delivered by this system. The study was carried out by using human-equivalent phantoms. Three sets of phantoms were made to estimate the dose delivered to three age groups: 5-year old, 10-year old and adults. Three approaches have been applied to evaluate the dose: calculations, Monte Carlo (MC) simulations, and experiments. Experimental results and analytical calculations were used to validate MC simulation. The experiments were performed by placing Panasonic UD-803AS TLDs at different places in phantoms that representing different organs. Due to the difficulty of obtaining the organ dose and the whole body dose solely by experiments and traditional calculations, the equivalent dose and effective dose were calculated by MC simulations. The result showed that the doses delivered to the organs other than the targeted lower leg are negligibly small. The total effective doses to the three age groups are 8.45/9.37 μSv (female/male), 4.20 μSv, and 0.26 μSv for 5-year old, 10-year old and adult, respectively. An approval to conduct human measurements on this system has been received from the Research Ethics Board based on this research.     

Parallelisation of the Lagrangian atmospheric dispersion model NAME

The NAME  Atmospheric Dispersion Model is a Lagrangian particle model used by the Met Office to predict the propagation and spread of pollutants in the atmosphere. The model is routinely used in emergency response applications, where it is important to obtain results as quickly as possible. This requirement for a short runtime and the increase in core number of commonly available CPUs, such as the Intel Xeon series, has motivated the parallelisation of NAME  in the OpenMP  shared memory framework. In this work we describe the implementation of this parallelisation strategy in NAME  and discuss the performance of the model for different setups. Due to the independence of the model particles, the parallelisation of the main compute intensive loops is relatively straightforward. The random number generator for modelling sub-grid scale turbulent motion needs to be adapted to ensure that different particles use independent sets of random numbers. We find that on Intel Xeon X5680 CPUs the model shows very good strong scaling up to 12 cores in a realistic emergency response application for predicting the dispersion of volcanic ash in the North Atlantic airspace. We implemented a mechanism for asynchronous reading of meteorological data from disk and demonstrate how this can reduce the runtime if disk access plays a significant role in a model run. To explore the performance on different chip architectures we also ported the part of the code which is used for calculating the gamma dose from a cloud of radioactive particles to a graphics processing unit (GPU) using CUDA-C. We were able to demonstrate a significant speedup of around one order of magnitude relative to the serial CPU version.     

An approach using Dempster–Shafer theory to fuse spatial data and satellite image derived crown metrics for estimation of forest stand leading species

Leading species at the forest stand level is a required forest inventory attribute. Information regarding leading species enables the calculation of volume and biomass in support of forest monitoring and reporting activities. In this study, approaches for leading species estimation based upon very high spatial resolution (pixel sided <1 m) have been developed and implemented, with opportunities for improving attribute accuracy using data fusion methods. Over a study region located in the Yukon Territory, Canada, we apply the Dempster–Shafer Theory (DST) to integrate multiple resolutions of satellite imagery (including spatial and spectral), topographic information, and fire disturbance history records for the estimation of leading species.Among the data source combinations tested in the study, the QuickBird panchromatic combined with selected optical channels from Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper (TM) imagery provided the highest overall accuracy (70.4%) for identifying leading species and improved the accuracy by 3.1% over a baseline from a classification-tree based method applied on all data sources. Additional insights to the application of DST to fuse satellite imagery with ancillary data sources to map leading stand species in a boreal environment are also elaborated upon, including the range and distribution of training data and DST mass function establishment.     

Disinfection by-product formation after biologically assisted GAC treatment of water supplies with different bromide and DOC content

Chlorination of drinking water in the presence of bromide and dissolved organic carbon (DOC) leads to the formation of brominated and chlorinated disinfection by-products (DBP). The concentration of bromide ions in the raw water is a significant factor in the speciation of DBP formed, and causes shifts in trihalomethane (THM) formation from chlorinated to brominated species. Drinking water treatment techniques that remove organic contaminants without affecting bromide ion concentrations cause increases in the brominated THM. For the present study, three water supplies containing different DOC and ambient bromide concentrations were filtered through biologically assisted granular activated carbon (BGAC). Similar to adsorption and coagulation treatment, this treatment does not remove bromide from drinking water; also, THMFP (trihalomethane formation potential) analysis indicated that the chlorinated effluent contained higher concentrations of brominated THM in comparison to the influent. Although BGAC may increase the brominated THM, which may be more toxic than the chlorinated THM, the overall reduction of THMFP by DOC removal far exceeds this negative change, thereby producing a much less toxic finished drinking water. This work is part of a study to make high DOC surface waters on the Canadian prairie safe and palatable for small volume users (individuals or small communities).     

Longitudinal relations between forgiveness and conflict resolution in marriage.

Does forgiveness predict later conflict resolution in married couples? Twelve-month follow-up data on conflict resolution were collected from the couples studied by F. D. Fincham, S. R. Beach, and J. Davila (see record 2004-11293-007), who had provided earlier reports of forgiveness and conflict resolution. For wives, the positive dimension of forgiveness or benevolence predicted husbands' later reports of better conflict resolution controlling for initial levels of conflict resolution. This finding was independent of wives' marital satisfaction and the degree of hurt engendered by husbands' transgressions. For husbands, the only predictor of wives' reports of later conflict resolution was initial level of conflict resolution. The findings are discussed in terms of the direction of effect between forgiveness and conflict resolution and of the mechanisms that might link them. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)