The Normal Operations Safety Survey (NOSS) is an observational methodology to collect safety data during normal Air Traffic Control (ATC) operations. It aims to inform organizations about safety matters by using trained ATC staff to take a structured look at everyday operations. By monitoring normal operations through the use of direct over-the-shoulder observations, it is believed that safety deficiencies can be identified in a proactive manner prior to the occurrence of accidents or incidents. NOSS was developed as a collaborative effort between the International Civil Aviation Organization, ATC providers, controller representatives, government regulators, and academics to fill a gap in available ATC safety information. System designers consider three basic assumptions: the technology needed to achieve the system production goals, the training necessary for people to operate the technology, and the regulations that dictate system behavior. These assumptions represent the expected performance. When systems are deployed, however, particularly in realms as complex as ATC, they do not perform quite as designed. NOSS aims to capture the operational drift that invariably occurs upon system deployment. NOSS captures how the ATC system operates in reality, as opposed to how it was intended to operate. NOSS is premised on the Threat and Error Management (TEM) framework. TEM frames human performance in complex and dynamic settings from an operational perspective by simultaneously focusing on the environment and how operators respond to that environment. TEM posits that threats and errors are a part of everyday operations in ATC and must be managed in order to maintain safety margins. This dissertation describes NOSS and its contributions to ATC safety management systems. It addresses the validity and reliability of NOSS data and presents case studies from field trials conducted by a number of ATC providers. / text

This exploratory study examines the lived experience of Green Cross traumatologists deployed to the New York City World Trade Center disaster. The deployment took place five days after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The author was a member of a ten member advance team that provided crisis stabilization services to an international union in Lower Manhattan. Disaster Mental Health Services and community outreach were provided for a month. The purpose of the study was to describe in an anthropologically holistic perspective the lived experience of traumatologists, who as Americans were also affected by the terrorist disaster. Thirty-one traumatologists participated in the study. Ethnographic methods included participant observation and informal interviews during the first week of the deployment. In-depth interviews were conducted after deployment and ranged from one to three hours in length. Interviews were audio taped, transcribed and analyzed with the assistance of N-vivo software. The author's story is among the narratives. Narratives of lived experience reflect the continuity of life and give meaning to experience within a cultural context. Findings reveal the shared meaning attributed to lived experience in a disaster environment, cultural continuity and change and impact of disaster deployment on the health and safety of the helper. Recommendations for future research, policy and training are offered.

As living standards improve and population numbers increase in China and India, the demand and consumption of electricity will continue to intensify.  Although both countries maintain a strong dependence on fossil fuels to meet energy demands, a recognition of the importance of a low carbon transition is apparent from the governments of both countries.  China and India have both made commitments to abate global climate change, reduce poverty rates and enhance efforts to reduce fossil fuel dependence.  Solar energy has experienced phenomenal growth in the last twenty years due to technological advances, priced reductions and governmental support policies. Yet in China and India policy development has been very erratic.  This paper takes a case study approach to examine solar energy policies, particularly solar energy auctions, in China and India.  Thus, this thesis aims to examine solar energy policy in China and India, and compare the potential of each country for energy security and sustainable development under the IRENA framework to Evaluate Renewable Energy Policy.  The performance of solar energy policy in China and India is assessed on criteria of effectiveness, efficiency, equity and institutional feasibility.  This study find that China has installed more cumulative solar capacity than India and that overall that solar energy policy in China is stronger than in India.  However, at an individual policy level, India’s solar energy auction policy is stronger than China’s.  Thus, the long-term sustainability of solar energy policy and deployment in both countries is a complex and multifaceted issue.  This thesis concludes that for energy security and sustainable development the continuation of policy support is necessary in both countries to ensure that solar will continue to grow in significance.

Mobile ad hoc networks create communication links without the aid of any infrastructure, forwarding packets among mobile nodes. The MANET research community has identified several fundamental challenges, among which the most prominent is discovering an optimal route between two nodes. Existing work has proposed a plethora of routing protocols. Since each protocol implements its own philosophy and algorithm to target a specific purpose, routing protocols in MANETs show very different characteristics. Selecting a particular protocol for an application or deployment environment involves evaluating many complex inter-dependent tradeoffs and can be an overwhelming task for an application designer. However, this decision can have a significant impact on the success of a system in terms of performance, cost, and responsiveness. Emerging distributed applications deployed in MANETs inherently experience highly dynamic situations, which necessitate real-time routing protocol selection in response to varying scenarios. Most of the relevant research in this area relies on simulation studies or empirical analysis to select a routing protocol, requiring an infeasible amount of time and resources for the approaches to be used in real-time decision making. In my dissertation work, I designed the Chameleon framework to facilitate real-time routing protocol decisions based on given application and environmental characteristics. My approach develops analytical models for important network layer performance measures capturing various inter-dependent factors that affect routing protocol behavior. I provide an analytical framework that expresses protocol performance metrics in terms of environment-, protocol-, and application-dependent parameters. This effort has resulted in detailed models for two important metrics: end-to-end delay and throughput. I specify detailed models for the parameters embedded in the models with respect to the ability of network deployers, protocol designers, and application developers to reasonably provide the information. Finally, in a systematic manner, I outline the Chameleon software framework to integrate the analytical models with parameters specified by these three groups of stakeholders. / text

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is growing prominence as an automated identification technology able to turn everyday objects into an ad-hoc network of mobile nodes; which can track, trigger events and perform actions. Energy scavenging and backscattering techniques are the foundation of low-cost identification solutions for RFIDs. The performance of these two techniques, being wireless, significantly depends on the underlying communication architecture and affect the overall operation of RFID systems. Current RFID systems are based on a centralized master-slave architecture hindering the overall performance, scalability and usability. Several proposals have aimed at improving performance at the physical, medium access, and application layers. Although such proposals achieve significant performance gains in terms of reading range and reading rates, they require significant changes in both software and hardware architectures while bounded by inherited performance bottlenecks, i.e., master-slave architecture. Performance constraints need to be addressed in order to further facilitate RFID adoption; especially for ultra large scale applications such as Internet of Things. A natural approach is re-thinking the distributed communication architecture of RFID systems; wherein control and data tasks are decoupled from a central authority and dispersed amongst spatially distributed low-power wireless devices. The distributed architecture, by adjusting the tag's reflectivity coefficient creates micro interrogation zones which are interrogated in parallel. We investigate this promising direction in order to significantly increase the reading rates and reading range of RFID tags, and also to enhance overall system scalability. We address the problems of energy-efficient tag singulations, optimal power control schemes and load aware reader placement algorithms for RFID systems. We modify the conventional set cover approximation algorithm to determine the minimal number of RFID readers with minimal overlapping and balanced number of tags amongst them. We show, via extensive simulation analysis, that our approach has the potential to increase the performance of RFID technology and hence, to enable RFID systems for ultra large scale applications. / Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2011-08-30 23:41:02.937

Technological change when a large social technology is under the processes of deployment and development are complex and uncertain. In this dynamic context, risks and uncertainties (R&U) incurred are unavoidable, which might obstruct the progression of the technology implementation and innovation. Hence, a set of mechanism and strategy are required from the stakeholders to facilitate these two processes and to deal with R&U arise. This research studied biofuels in the UK by looking at the context of a regulated market. The Scottish Government and two oil companies (BP and Shell) were selected as cases studied. Subsequently, an overarching research question was formulated to drive the research “How these major actors interact with one and another to deal with R&U arising from technological change during a technology deployment and development?” By using Social Shaping of Technology (SST), integrating with Risk Governance and the Risk Regulated Regime; an interdisciplinary concept has been developed. The application of SST was to broaden the risk governance and risk regulated regime, helped to look at R&U of technological change from a social dimension. The research was grounded on social constructionism under an exploratory study. A qualitative case study approach was adopted, backed by three data collection methods-interview, observation and document analysis. This research was aimed to investigate the driving forces for the government and oil companies in taking biofuels as the current energy source for transport; their roles and responsibilities in biofuels deployment and development; interactions taken place, R&U faced during two processes, as well as counteracting strategy implemented to deal with these R&U. After that, explanation building and time series analysis were adopted for data analysis. The research points out there were different types of R&U (expected and unexpected) arose when a technology undergoes the processes of technological change. These different types of R&U required different strategies to deal with. Therefore, the regulators have to set a clear direction for a technology deployment and development, as well as to have the control mechanism with precautionary principle instituted, in order to facilitate the technology implementation and innovation. Meanwhile, oil companies are collaborating with the governments, to commit consistent biofuels supply which fulfil the requirements set by the regulators; as well as established various types of partnership with biotechnology institutions/agriculture industry to conduct the next generation biofuels (NBG) R&D. Such seamless interactions and cooperation, not only aim to reduce the possibilities of R&U occurrence, to minimise the impacts, but also to set a path for the ease of technology adoption and innovation. Therefore, apart from satisfying their respective internal interests of political and economic gains; these two actors have to safeguard the social, economic and environmental benefits for the interests of the general public.

This study used mixed methods to examine the impact of service-members‟ knowledge and acknowledgement of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) on relationship satisfaction of both the service-members and their spouses. Family stress theory was used to conceptualize the relationship between the occurrence of PTSD and relationship satisfaction. Forty individuals (i.e., 20 couples) completed questionnaires containing self-report measures of knowledge of PTSD, experience of PTSD symptoms, severity of PTSD symptoms, and relationship satisfaction. Participants also completed semi-structured interviews concerning PTSD symptoms, impact of PTSD symptoms on their relationship, and attitudes observed about PTSD. No significant links were found between knowledge, acknowledgement, and relationship satisfaction. Qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews found that the couples‟ experiences of PTSD symptoms and the impact of PTSD on the couple relationships were consistent with the existing literature. Common attitudes regarding PTSD were reported by the couples, indicating a persistent negative attitude of PTSD.

Organizations typically have a reason for deciding to implement a particular business application, for example an Enterprise Resources Planning or a Human Resources management system. The reasons run the entire gamut from wanting to be the first (thus gaining a competitive edge) to playing catch-up (herd mentality perhaps) if everyone is deploying the solution. In between these extremes, there are organizations which take a technology agnostic view and thus set out to garner a good understanding of business challenges, opportunities, threats and risks to mitigate before seeking to deploy a particular solution. The objective of this study was to understand the business drivers and thought processes that the University of KwaZulu-Natal followed in selecting Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 technology. It was also the objective of the study to understand the deployment model chosen as well as understanding the attendant corporate governance put in place as well as the usage patterns once operational. The study followed a qualitative research format primarily using case study as the research design. Qualitative research was chosen because it is amenable to the collection, analysis and interpretation of data that cannot be easily or meaningfully quantified and summarized in the form of numbers. The case study research design was chosen because it allows the researcher to focus on one instance of a ‘thing’ to be investigated which then becomes the subject of an in-depth study using interviews and observation as a primary tool for data generation. A major finding of the study was that the University of KwaZulu-Natal followed an organic bottom-up approach which typically starts by providing collaborative sites and, as users find values in these sites, the implementation grows organically over a period of time. Another major finding was the absence of a formal documented corporate governance model that would include a SharePoint Delivery Plan for the organization. Consequently, of the four colleges within the university, only one college uses SharePoint technology. The adoption rate at the cluster or support services level is also markedly low. / Thesis (M.Com.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2013.

Many countries have formulated their eHealth visions and billions of dollars have been spent on supporting the eHealth development throughout the world. An important part of the development is the electronic patient record (EPR). To enable sharing and increase cooperation between care providers, most Swedish county councils have decided to use a region-wide EPR. The health professionals often experience numerous problems and consider the region-wide EPR to be too generic and require them to tailor their practices instead of the system evolving towards supporting their needs. The aim of the PhD research is to gain knowledge of adoption when deploying and using region-wide health IT systems. This is accomplished by studying, analysing and reflecting upon what region-wide health IT systems are and how professionals use them in their practice. In the research a grounded theory method has been used, which means that the empirical data, not theories and hypotheses, have driven the research process. The data-gathering methods have been interviews, observations, participating in meetings, questionnaires, seminars and conducting literature reviews. In order to be able to improve the adoption, a set of four key principles has been identified: (1) Evolving systems-Engaged users, (2) Treat IT deployment and usage as part of organisational development, (3) Identify, respect and support differences, and (4) Identify what must be customised and what can be centralised. These four principles challenge the traditional way of developing enterprise-wide IT and emphasise the importance that users must engage in the development, procurement and deployment process to identify their similar and unique needs and procedures. It is crucial that both the similarities and uniqueness are respected and supported. The similarities can be supported by a centralised, standardised solution, while uniqueness requires a customised solution. In order to accomplish that, the IT deployment and usage needs to be treated as an important part of the on-going organisational development, and the IT systems must evolve, i.e., be continuously developed in order to engage the users to participate.

Wireless access networks today consume 0.5 percent of the global energy. Rapidly growing demand for new services and ubiqutious connectivity, will further increase the energy consumption. This situation imposes a big challenge for mobile operators not only due to soaring cost of energy, but also increasing concern for global warming and sustainable development. This thesis focuses on the energy efficiency issue at the system level and studies how to incorporate energy-awareness into the design of future wireless access networks. The main contributions have been given in the areas of energy efficiency assessment, architectural and operational solutions, and total cost of investment analysis. The precise evaluation of energy efficiency is the first essential step to determine optimized solutions where metrics and models constitute the two key elements.We show that maximizing energy efficiency is not always equivalent to minimizing energy consumption which is one of the main reasons behind the presented contradictory and disputable conclusions in the literature. Further we indicate that in order to avoid the debatable directions, energy efficient network design problems should be formulated with well defined coverage and capacity requirements. Moreover, we propose novel backhaul power consumption models considering various technology and architectural options relevant for urban and rural environments and show that backhaul will potentially become a bottleneck in future ultra-high capacity wireless access networks. Second, we focus on clean-slate network deployment solutions satisfying different quality of service requirements in a more energy efficient manner. We identify that the ratio between idle- and transmit power dependent power consumption of a base station as well as the network capacity requirement are the two key parameters that affect the energy-optimum design.While results show that macro cellular systems are the most energy efficient solution for moderate average traffic density, Hetnet solutions prevail homogeneous deployment due to their ability to increase the capacity with a relatively lower energy consumption and thus enable significant energy savings in medium and high capacity demand regions. Moreover, we investigate the energy saving potential of short-term energy aware management approach, i.e., cell DTX, taking advantage of low resource utilization in the current networks arising from strict QoS requirements. With the help of developed novel quantitative method, we show that Cell DTX brings striking reduction in energy consumption and further savings are achievable if the networks are designed taking into account the fact that network deployment and operation are closely related. Finally, we develop a general framework for investigating the main cost elements and for evaluating the viability of energy efficient solutions.We first reveal the strong positive impact of spectrum on both energy and infrastructure cost and further indicate that applying sustainable solutions might also bring total cost reduction, but the viability highly depends on unit cost values as well as the indirect cost benefits of energy efficiency. Results obtained in this dissertation might provide guidelines for the network designers to achieve future high-capacity and sustainable wireless access networks. / <p>QC 20140505</p>