The need for product safety regulation is no longer a source of debate. It should be the primary aim in any consumer protection policy. This is due to the fact that there are a lot of consumer goods that are heterogeneous and more technologically advanced that are continually being introduced to consumers. Cosmetic products are currently one of the most popular consumer products. Their increase in sales is evident globally including in developing countries. They are no longer solely associated with women but are being used by all people, of all ages. With such popularity, cosmetics producers are eager to make a profit, which sometimes has resulted in the introduction of cosmetics which are not safe and cause adverse effects. This suggests that there might be a loophole in the adequacy of the safety laws or regulations. The possibility of these safety issues occurring anywhere is generally acknowledged, which makes it a global issue. Although such cases are not as frequent as for other consumer goods such as foods or pharmaceuticals, there is a need to investigate the cosmetics safety mechanisms in order to see if consumers are adequately protected and if the safety mechanisms for cosmetics are efficient. In realising this aim, the study takes three jurisdictions to compare, namely the EU, the USA and Malaysia. Through analysis, the ideal features of cosmetics regulations based on the larger picture of safety regulation generally are also considered. This study contrasts the EU and Malaysia, that have in place government regulation of cosmetics, with the USA that has a different regime for cosmetics, more dependent on self-regulation. Out of the three, Malaysia is the newest country that has introduced a new law on cosmetic products and this has been adopted from the EU model. Although discussions on cosmetic regulations have been undertaken in Malaysia, the legal safety issues to which they give rise have not been investigated systematically in comparison with the EU and the USA. Even in these jurisdictions cosmetics safety is not discussed as much as other consumer products. This thesis also investigates why Malaysia has adopted the EU policy and not some other policy such as the American one. Once the above issues have been considered, the impact of the new emerging technology of nano-cosmetics is analysed. The thesis found that, Malaysia, as with any newly introduced system, has experienced some setbacks and encountered teething problems due to a lack of resources, structure, technical facilities and qualified personnel. However, as a developing nation, it certainly has benefited from the adoption of the EU system. Although there is still much room for improvement, this borrowing has benefited consumers, in so far as safety is concerned, because of the common and standard safety assessments and the responsibility of safety now being placed on the manufacturers. Consumers can also enjoy more products due to the elimination of trade barriers through free movement and cooperation between member states

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Recently, there has been a growth of risk-based governance in coal mining safety regulation in many European and commonwealth countries. However, it is puzzling that the progress is much slower in the U.S. This dissertation seeks to explore this puzzle by examining the question what are the barriers keeping the American coal mining industry and the U.S. government from moving toward risk-based governance? Based on the theoretical framework introduced by Braithwaite and Drahos (2000), particularly the theory of modeling, this research found three major barriers that keep the American coal mining industry from fully embracing the model of risk management. First, the existence of a large number of small operators prevents this model from being diffused in the industry. Second, increasingly prescriptive regulations have consumed the resources that companies could use to develop risk management systems and have created a mentality of compliance that is not compatible with the idea of risk management. Third, a group of model mongers, missionaries, and mercenaries have advocated a competing model — behavior-based safety — that is more attractive to the industry. This dissertation also found that the lack of three factors helps explain the failure of the U.S. government's move toward risk-based governance: (1) strong imitative pressure from general occupational heath and safety (OHS) regulation; (2) strong model mongers, missionaries, and mercenaries; and (3) webs of dialogue. / Ph. D.

The outputs that form the basis of this PhD submission include a web site that summarises a unique collection of over 200 Court Judgments in personal injury claims for work-related upper limb disorders heard in the UK, together with a number of more conventional publications. Individually, these outputs all address upper limb disorders associated with work although they each had slightly different objectives and the audiences for which they were produced significantly influenced the type of publication in which they appeared. Together, they help illustrate when, how and, to some extent, why upper limb disorders associated with keyboard use became the issue it did in the UK in the late 1980s and 1990s. While many might now regard keyboard or computer use as an innocuous task, in the late 1980s and 1990s upper limb disorders associated with keyboard use, particularly computer use, became the subject of litigation, legislation, industrial disputes and widespread publicity. The outputs on which this submission is based, together, suggest that following the importation of the concept of repetitive strain injuries (RSI) from Australia in the later 1980s, the activities of trades unions and journalists in the UK promoted work-relevant upper limb symptoms and disorders associated with keyboard use as work-induced injuries. Subsequently, a small number of successful, union-backed, personal injury claims, which involved contentious medical evidence and perhaps an element of iatrogenesis, were widely promoted as proof that computer use causes injury. Around the same time, the government chose to implement flawed Regulations relating to the design and use of computer workstations, which failed to distinguish between that which might give rise to discomfort, fatigue and frustration and that which might give rise to injury. The existence of these Regulations, which among other things require regular, individual risk assessments of computer users, unlike any other type of work, could be interpreted as further 'proof' that computer use causes injury. The approach to the prevention and management of musculoskeletal disorders advocated in current HSE guidance, including the risk assessment strategy, remain capable of generating distorted perceptions of the risks arising from keyboard and computer use.

Cette thèse étudie le rôle des coûts de construction et de réglementation de la sécurité sur la compétitivité de l'énergie nucléaire. L'analyse des coûts de construction est basée sur l'utilisation de données réelles provenant des parcs nucléaires français et américains. En particulier, nous étudions différents canaux à partir de laquelle des réductions de coûts pourraient survenir. Nous montrons que la normalisation est un critère crucial pour la compétitivité économique de l'énergie nucléaire, d'abord parce que les effets d'apprentissage positifs sont conditionnels à la technologie, ce qui signifie que les réductions de coûts ne peuvent venir que si le même type de réacteur est construit à plusieurs reprises, mais aussi parce qu'elle permet de réduire le coût indirectement par l'intermédiaire de courts délais de construction. Dans l'analyse du rôle de réglementation de la sécurité, nous évaluons d'abord l'effet du dernier accident nucléaire majeur (c.-à Fukushima Dai-ichi) de la probabilité de survenance d'un tel événement, puis les effets de l'incertitude concernant la façon dont les soins de la sécurité à réduire la probabilité d'un accident nucléaire dans l'établissement de normes de sécurité en vertu de l'aléa moral et responsabilité limitée. Nous constatons que la norme sera la moins stricte lorsque le régulateur adopte une approche pire des cas, et plus stricte lorsque le régulateur adopte l'approche de la robustesse de regret et il est optimiste quant à l'efficacité des soins de la sécurité pour réduire le risque d'accident. Toutefois, cette norme pourrait induire le non-respect par les opérateurs les moins efficaces. / This thesis studies the role of construction costs and safety regulation on nuclear power competitiveness. The analysis of the construction costs is based on the use of the actual data coming from the american and french nuclear fleet. In particular, we study different channels from which cost reductions might arise. We show that standardization is a key criterion for the economic competitiveness of nuclear power, first because the positive learning effects are conditional to the technology, this means that cost reductions will arise only if the same type of reactor is built several times, but also because it allows to reduce the cost indirectly through shorter construction lead-times. In the analysis of the role of safety regulation, we first asses the effect of the latest major nuclear accident (i.e Fukushima Dai-ichi) in the probability of occurrence of such an event and then the effects of the uncertainty regarding how safety care reduce the probability of a nuclear accident in setting safety standards under moral hazard and limited liability. We find that the standard will be stricter when the regulator is optimistic in the safety care effectiveness to reduce the risk of an accident, but simultaneously this policy might induce no compliance of the most inefficient operators.

This thesis is an attempt to constructively interpret and critically evaluate the liberal doctrine that we may not limit a person’s liberty for her own good, and to discuss its implications and alternatives in some concrete areas of public health policy. The thesis starts theoretical and goes ever more practical. The first paper is devoted to positive interpretation of anti-paternalism with special focus on the reason component – personal good. A novel generic definition of paternalism is proposed, intended to capture, in a generous fashion, the object of traditional liberal resistance to paternalism – the invocation of personal good reasons for limiting of or interfering with a person’s liberty. In the second paper, the normative aspect of this resistance is given a somewhat technical interpretation in terms of invalidation of reasons – the blocking of reasons from influencing the moral status of actions according to their strength. It is then argued that normative anti-paternalism so understood is unreasonable, on three grounds: 1) Since the doctrine only applies to sufficiently voluntary action, voluntariness determines validity of reasons, which is unwarranted and leads to wrong answers to moral questions. 2) Since voluntariness comes in degrees, a threshold must be set where personal good reasons are invalidated, leading to peculiar jumps in the justifiability of actions. 3) Anti-paternalism imposes an untenable and unhelpful distinction between the value of respecting choices that are sufficiently voluntary and choices that are not. The third paper adds to this critique the fourth argument that none of the action types typically proposed to specify the action component of paternalism is such that performing an action of that type out of benevolence is essentially morally problematic. The fourth paper ignores the critique in the second and third papers and proposes, in an anti-paternalistic spirit, a series of rules for the justification of option-restricting policies aimed at groups where some members consent to the policy and some do not. Such policies present the liberal with a dilemma where the value of not restricting people’s options without their consent conflicts with the value of allowing people to shape their lives according to their own wishes. The fifth paper applies the understanding of anti-paternalism developed in the earlier papers to product safety regulation, as an example of a public health policy area. The sixth paper explores in more detail a specific public health policy, namely that of mandatory alcohol interlocks in all cars, proposed by the former Swedish government and supported by the Swedish National Road Administration. The policy is evaluated for cost-effectiveness, for possible diffusion of individual responsibility, and for paternalistic treatment of drivers. The seventh paper argues for a liberal policy in the area of dissemination of information about uncertain threats to public health. The argument against paternalism is based on common sense consequentialist considerations, avoiding any appeal to the normative anti-paternalism rejected earlier in the thesis. / QC 20100714

Accidents involving passenger trains happen regularly in India. The reasons for such accidents could be many; such as weather and flooding, faulty tracks, bridge collapse, collisions caused by signaling errors, mechanical failures, driver error, sabotage etc. The annual accident-related deaths as a percentage of the total number of passengers carried by Indian Railway may seem to be negligible, but the aim should be to achieve zero fatality as every single person killed is an irreplaceable loss to his/her family. It needs to be mentioned that in addition to fatalities for which exact numbers are not available, serious injuries and permanent disabilities caused by train accidents in India at present stand completely unaccounted for. In the absence of a large scale renovation and crash avoidance measures coupled with the propensity to increase the number of trains every year, enhancing passive safety is crucial i.e. crashworthiness and occupant safety of passenger coaches of Indian trains. In the current work, crashworthiness and occupant safety of the existing typical three-tier cabin passenger coach of Indian Railway in an event of collision accident are assessed with the aid of a finite element analysis. In the light of the published work on research in railroad equipment crashworthiness, the current work is intended to envisage the methodology to assess the Indian Railway passenger coach from the point of view of the crashworthiness and occupant safety using CAE (Computer aided engineering) based approach. It is involved with an extensive study of the structural crush behavior of an individual passenger coach car and its effect on the interaction between occupants and the coach interior. Here the structural crush behavior of a typical three-tier cabin passenger coach is evaluated for the head-on impact against a fixed and rigid barrier. The occupant response for the same scenario is also studied which can be viewed as a component of the actual occupant response due to the structural crush behavior of the passenger coach. This can give useful estimates of injury severity and fatalities that may occur in actual accidents. An FE model of the passenger coach structure was built and validated using International Railway Union (UIC) specified code OR 567-design requirements in terms of static loads constituting structural proof cases. These proof cases specify the static load values the coach body structure should withstand without any permanent deformation or failure when applied at the specified locations on the structural ends across the longitudinal axis. In addition, a favorable correlation between the simulation and actual experiment for drop impact behavior of the open section specimens, namely C-section and I-section, was obtained to validate the simulation methodology. LS-DYNA a nonlinear dynamic explicit FE solver was used to carry out all the dynamic impact simulations involved in the current work. The material modeling takes into account the strain rate effect which is essential for the material impact behavior study. The contact modeling was done using penalty contact method. The degrading effect of the buffer on the structural crush patterns which induced the undesirable global bending and jackknifing of the whole coach structure was demonstrated with the help of dynamic impact simulations of the coach structure. The quantification of occupant injury was done by occupant safety simulations using the Hybrid III 50th percentile male dummy FE model. The dummy having been designed for simulating automobile accident scenarios, its contacts had to be adapted to suit the excessive mobility conditions in the coach interior. The dummy was revalidated successfully for the head drop test, pendulum chest impact test, neck flexion and extension test and knee impact test. Impact simulations for three different speeds were performed by positioning the dummy close to the impact point. Injury criteria such as Head Injury Criterion, Chest Deceleration, Knee force level and Neck extension-flexion moments were used to estimate the injury severity level and fatality rate.

The diploma thesis deals with realization of an Ayurvedic pavilion in the premises of Saint Katerina Resort. The proposed new compound is designed to extend the leisure services of the Saint Katerina Resort in Počátky. The feasibility study of the main technological stages of the project is solved in this diploma thesis. The construction of the object is described in the technical report. Both a detailed itemized budget of the construction and a detailed timetable to show the duration of each process is elaborated for the construction technology project. Futhermore, the design of site construction equipment, design of machine assembly, time deployment of machines and staff balance is elaborated. The project includes a technological regulation of the realization of the skeleton supporting frame structure and both control and test schedule. The work safety for the assembly of the wooden building supporting frame is composed.