The mitigation hierarchy upside down – a study of nature protection measures in Danish infrastructure projects

This paper presents a Danish study of mitigation directed at nature protection in environmental impact assessment (EIA) of infrastructure projects. The study is based on a document analysis of EIA reports, a workshop held with EIA professionals, and a study of two cases. The paper takes a point of departure in the mitigation hierarchy as a central conceptual framework, identifies which mitigation measures have been suggested in the EIA reports, and compares this to the mitigation hierarchy. Further, the paper explores the dynamics behind which mitigation measures are chosen and later implemented. The findings point to a discrepancy between the prevention principle embedded in the mitigation hierarchy and the actual EIA practice with increased use of nature compensation. Further, the research reveals significant variation in the design of mitigation measures, e.g. in the level of detail used in describing them and the level of clarity as to aims and actions.     

Centralized i.v. team provides inpatient and home-care treatment

AIM: The study of the effects of the inhibitor of angiotensin converting enzyme ramipril (tritace) on the 24-h profile of blood pressure (BP) in patients with mild and moderate arterial hypertension. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Ramipril was given to 21 males aged 45-68 years with essential hypertension stage II (WHO criteria) with stable elevated diastolic blood pressure (95-114 mm Hg) in a single dose 2.5-10 mg/day. Captopril controls received 100 mg twice a day. BP was monitored using "SpaceLabs Medical" unit (model 90207, USA). RESULTS: Compared to placebo, ramipril lowered systolic and diastolic blood pressure both for the 24-h period and in the day time; captopril lowered only diastolic BP in the day time. Side effects of long-term application of ramipril occurred 2 times less frequently than in application of captopril. CONCLUSION: Long-term treatment with ramipril in the above regimen provides more effective control of BP than captopril in the above doses in patients with mild and moderate hypertension.     

Macro-ergonomic risk assessment in nuclear remediation industry

In this study, a macro-ergonomic risk assessment tool was developed based on criteria of scope, simplicity, practicality, usefulness, reliability and job-specificity. A relative stress index 'RSI' was formulated to take into account multiple parameters, such as frequency, duration, repetition, weight, force, travel distance and horizontal distance. This tool was tested in nuclear remediation industry. The results are presented and discussed.     

Taxonomy,technology and applications of smart objects

Deployment of embedded technologies is increasingly being examined in industrial supply chains as a means for improving efficiency through greater control over purchase orders, inventory and product related information. Central to this development has been the advent of technologies such as bar codes, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems, and wireless sensors which when attached to a product, form part of the product’s embedded systems infrastructure. The increasing integration of these technologies dramatically contributes to the evolving notion of a “smart product”, a product which is capable of incorporating itself into both physical and information environments. The future of this revolution in objects equipped with smart embedded technologies is one in which objects can not only identify themselves, but can also sense and store their condition, communicate with other objects and distributed infrastructures, and take decisions related to managing their life cycle. The object can essentially “plug” itself into a compatible systems infrastructure owned by different partners in a supply chain. However, as in any development process that will involve more than one end user, the establishment of a common foundation and understanding is essential for interoperability, efficient communication among involved parties and for developing novel applications. In this paper, we contribute to creating that common ground by providing a characterization to aid the specification and construction of “smart objects” and their underlying technologies. Furthermore, our work provides an extensive set of examples and potential applications of different categories of smart objects.     

Improved Variational Guiding of Smoke Animations

Smoke animations are hard to art‐direct because simple changes in parameters such as simulation resolution often lead to unpredictable changes in the final result. Previous work has addressed this problem with a guiding approach which couples low‐resolution simulations – that exhibit the desired flow and behaviour – to the final, high‐resolution simulation. This is done in such a way that the desired low frequency features are to some extent preserved in the high‐resolution simulation. However, the steady (i.e. constant) guiding used often leads to a lack of sufficiently high detail, and employing time‐dependent guiding is expensive because the matrix of the resulting set of equations needs to be recomputed at every iteration. We propose an improved mathematical model for Eulerian‐based simulations which is better suited for dynamic, time‐dependent guiding of smoke animations through a novel variational coupling of the low‐ and high‐resolution simulations. Our model results in a matrix that does not require re‐computation when the guiding changes over time, and hence we can employ time‐dependent guiding more efficiently both in terms of storage and computational requirements. We demonstrate that time‐dependent guiding allows for more high frequency detail to develop without losing correspondence to the low resolution simulation. Furthermore, we explore various artistic effects made possible by time‐dependent guiding.     

Left-forbidding cooperating distributed grammar systems

A left-forbidding grammar, introduced in this paper, is a context-free grammar, where a set of nonterminal symbols is attached to each context-free production. Such a production can rewrite a nonterminal provided that no symbol from the attached set occurs to the left of the rewritten nonterminal in the current sentential form. The present paper discusses cooperating distributed grammar systems with left-forbidding grammars as components and gives some new characterizations of language families of the Chomsky hierarchy. In addition, it also proves that twelve nonterminals are enough for cooperating distributed grammar systems working in the terminal derivation mode with two left-forbidding components (including erasing productions) to characterize the family of recursively enumerable languages.     

An adaptive, real-time, traffic monitoring system

In this paper we describe a computer vision-based traffic monitoring system able to detect individual vehicles in real-time. Our fully integrated system first obtains the main traffic variables: counting, speed and category; and then computes a complete set of statistical variables. The objective is to investigate some of the difficulties impeding existing traffic systems to achieve balanced accuracy in every condition; i.e. day and night transitions, shadows, heavy vehicles, occlusions, slow traffic and congestions. The system we present is autonomous, works for long periods of time without human intervention and adapts automatically to the changing environmental conditions. Several innovations, designed to deal with the above circumstances, are proposed in the paper: an integrated calibration and image rectification step, differentiated methods for day and night, an adaptive segmentation algorithm, a multistage shadow detection method and special considerations for heavy vehicle identification and treatment of slow traffic. A specific methodology has been developed to benchmark the accuracy of the different methods proposed.     

An Achilles heel: denial of service attacks on Australian critical information infrastructures

Critical, or national, information infrastructure protection, referred to as either CIIP or NIIP, has been highlighted as a critical factor in overall national security by the United States, the United Kingdom, India and the European Community. As nations move inexorably towards so-called ‘digital economies’, critical infrastructure depends on information systems to process, transfer, store and exchange information through the Internet. Electronic attacks such as denial of service attacks on critical information infrastructures challenge the law and raise concerns. A myriad of issues potentially plague the protection of critical information infrastructures owing to the lack of legal regulation aimed at ensuring the protection of critical information infrastructures. This paper will highlight the legal concerns that relate to the denial of service attacks on critical information infrastructures and provide an introductory overview of the law as it relates to CIIP in Australia.     

Adapting plans in progress in distributed supervisory work: aspects of complexity, coupling, and control

Distributed supervisory control systems often rely on complex and centralized plans to cope with a variety of unanticipated situations. Replanning requires practitioners to forgo standard procedures in favor of making simple plans without simplifying, managing task coupling, and anticipating team needs to provide decentralized and elaborate plans. This article proposes a plan classification scheme to study what features of plans facilitate or hinder adaptation and a framework to examine how features of plans influence the cognitive processes of replanning. The plan features have been assigned to the categories of plan complexity, coupling, and control. Plans are task networks sharing similar features of complexity and coupling to technical systems. The proposed framework sets out to explore how plan features influence the processes of recognizing plan disruptions, reviewing challenges and different team stances, repairing plans to resolve new risks, and reacting by coordinating team efforts to execute plans. The framework draws on the Extended Control Model (ECOM) to integrate the four processes of replanning into a set of control loops. The benefits of this framework are illustrated in the context of operator training and decision support.