Emergency egress for the elderly in care home fire situations

Practitioners are continuing to develop egress modelling software for the design of the built environment. These models require data about human behaviour and factors for calibration, validation and verification. This study aims to address the specific data and knowledge gap: emergency egress of the elderly. Such data are difficult to collect given privacy and consent concerns, with strong relationships generally being required between residences and researchers. Through the observation of nine fire drills at six Canadian long-term care (LTC) and retirement homes, specific evacuation actions and behaviour were observed for 37 staff members and information about the evacuation of 56 residents was collected. These drills demonstrated that emergency egress in LTC and retirement homes is highly staff dependent with 72% of residents recorded requiring full assistance at all stages of movement in evacuation, and that the type of announced/unannounced drill and level of resident care will affect the type of data collected. The development of travel speed and pre-movement is discussed subject to limitation with qualitative behavioural insights of residents that were observed. This study provides valuable methodological discussion on how to conduct behavioural studies in similar highly restricted research environments. Specific attention is given to understanding the considerations that must be made when using fire drills as data sources, and the impact that these can have on using such data for modelling. This study may inform the initial setup and programming of evacuation models from an actions and behavioural perspectives of staff members and residents.     

Engineering egress data considering pedestrians with reduced mobility

To quantify the evacuation process, evacuation practitioners use engineering egress data describing the occupant movement characteristics. These data are typically based to young and fit populations. However, the movement abilities of occupants who might be involved in evacuations are becoming more variable—with the building populations of today typically including increasing numbers of individuals: with impairments or who are otherwise elderly or generally less mobile. Thus, there will be an increasing proportion of building occupants with reduced ability to egress. For safe evacuation, there is therefore a need to provide valid engineering egress data considering pedestrians with disabilities. Gwynne and Boyce recently compiled a series of data sets related to the evacuation process to support practitioner activities in the chapter Engineering Data in the SFPE Handbook of Fire Protection Engineering. This paper supplements these data sets by providing information on and presenting data obtained from additional research related to the premovement and horizontal movement of participants with physical‐, cognitive‐, or age‐related disabilities. The aim is to provide an overview of currently available data sets related to, and key factors affecting the egress performance of, mixed ability populations which could be used to guide fire safety engineering decisions in the context of building design.     

Neuropsychological functioning of girls with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder followed prospectively into adolescence: Evidence for continuing deficits?

The current study prospectively followed girls with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), along with a matched comparison sample, 5 years after childhood neuropsychological assessments. Follow-up neuropsychological measures emphasized attentional skills, executive functions, and language abilities. Paralleling childhood findings, the childhood-diagnosed ADHD group displayed moderate to large deficits in executive/attentional performance as well as in rapid naming relative to the comparison group at follow up (Mage 14.2 years). ADHD-inattentive versus ADHD-combined contrasts were nonsignificant and of negligible effect size, even when a refined, sluggish cognitive tempo subgroup of the inattentive type was examined. Although ADHD versus comparison group differences largely withstood statistical control of baseline demographics and comorbidities, control of childhood IQ reduced executive function differences to nonsignificance. Yet when the subset of girls meeting diagnostic criteria for ADHD in adolescence was compared with the remainder of the participants, neuropsychological deficits emerged even with full statistical control. Overall, childhood ADHD in girls portends neuropsychological and executive deficits that persist for at least 5 years. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Application of Code Approach for Emergency Evacuation in a Rail Station

This paper presents an emergency evacuation analysis during a mid-platform train fire in an underground rail station. A time-based evacuation scenario is developed taking into account the stairway inaccessibility due to smoke blockage. The calculation approach in NFPA 130 is then applied to a parametric study of this time-based scenario and its reliability is examined using a micro-simulation model. Both methods give consistent predictions of the exiting times. The results demonstrate that with the division of the station into two zones, the exiting time could not meet the code requirements, whereas it does meet the required exiting time without the division. Such division is due to smoke blockage and creates an uneven ratio of the occupant load to the available exiting capacity. This shows that appropriate consideration of the fire and smoke effects is important for station egress evaluation. Other issues such as the fire growth rate and the pre-evacuation time are also discussed.     

EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATIONS ON LONGITUDINAL DISPERSION CHARACTERISTICS OF TIDAL RIVERS

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纵向零序电压保护新方案及其应用

由于结构设计的原因，综合性能较好的一些保护方案如横差保护和不完全纵差保护等将不能应用于大型超临界汽轮发电机。文中重点讨论了纵向零序电压保护方案的改进及其在应用中的问题。研究表明，发电机发生匝间短路故障时3次谐波电势减小，而机组外部故障时发电机3次谐波电势增大。因此，为了提高纵向零序电压保护方案的性能，可以根据故障时3次谐波电压增量的特性作为选取制动量的依据，从而提高保护性能。亦即:当3次谐波电压表现为负增量时，制动量取为0或接近0;而当3次谐波电压表现为正增量时，以该增量值作为制动量。此外，对匝间保护纵向零序电压元件增加一个小延时是可行的，它可以提高保护躲暂态3次谐波影响的能力。仿真计算表明，比例制动式纵向零序电压保护能可靠区分内外部故障，符合大型超临界汽轮发电机的保护要求。     

平衡纵剖面数值试验及其对防洪的影响研究

本文采用一维非恒定流非均匀沙的水沙数学模型，以长江中游螺山汉口河段为背景，进行了根化数值模拟试验，分析了该概化河段平衡纵剖面的变化规律及其与上游来水来沙条件的关系，并和相应的理论公式进行了比较。在此基础上，对水沙条件发生较在变化时的平衡纵比降以及带来的对长江中下游防洪的影响进行了分析。     

Strain waves in colliding bars having nonparallel faces

The paper reports the experimental investigation data for the effect that nonparallel faces of bars under impact exert on the parameters of longitudinal and bending strain waves generated in the bars. The changes in stress magnitudes in the bar under impact with growing angle of the impact faces offset are described. __________ Translated from Fiziko-Tekhnicheskie Problemy Razrabotki Poleznykh Iskopaemykh, No. 6, pp. 73–78, November–December, 2006.     

Development of adolescent reading comprehension in language 1 and language 2: A longitudinal analysis of constituent components.

This study investigated the relationship between reading comprehension development of 389 adolescents in their dominant language (Language 1 [L1], Dutch) and a foreign language (Language 2 [L2], English). In each consecutive year from Grades 8 through 10, a number of measurements were taken. Students' reading comprehension, their linguistic knowledge (vocabulary and grammar knowledge) and processing efficiency (speed of word recognition and sentence comprehension) in both languages, and their metacognitive knowledge about reading were assessed. The relative strengths of the effects of these components of reading were analyzed to distinguish among 3 hypotheses about the relationship between L1 and L2 reading comprehension: the transfer hypothesis, the threshold hypothesis, and the processing efficiency hypothesis. The transfer hypothesis predicts a strong relationship between L1 and L2 reading comprehension and a strong effect of metacognitive knowledge on L2 reading comprehension, whereas the threshold and processing efficiency hypotheses predict a more important role of language-specific knowledge and processing skills. Results support the transfer hypothesis, although language-specific knowledge and fluency also contribute to L2 reading performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

冷弯型钢纵向变形的理论分析及计算

对冷弯型钢的纵向变形过程进行了力学分析，得到了变形微分方程，求得了转动角的理论公式，并对其变形形状进行了分析计算。