The purpose of this study was to determine food safety knowledge and practices of older adult participants in the Food Stamp Nutrition Education Program (FSNEP) in Virginia. One hundred and sixty-five FSNEP participants were assigned to two possible intervention groups, group one received the food safety lesson from the Healthy Futures Series currently used in FSNEP, while group two received the food safety lesson plus an additional food safety video. FSNEP participants completed food safety knowledge and practices questionnaires at baseline and at the end of FSNEP program. Observations of some FSNEP participants were also made. Results of this study indicate the FSNEP program was effective in making positive changes in participants' food safety knowledge and practices. However, FSNEP participants have inadequate food safety practices in the areas of proper storage of leftovers and raw ground meat, maintenance of refrigerator temperatures and use of meat thermometers. These areas should be emphasized in future food safety lessons used in FSNEP. In addition, participants who received only the current food safety lesson used in FSNEP had higher gains in food safety knowledge and practices, than participants who received both the current lesson food safety lesson and the instructional food safety video. Also, no strong relationships between demographic variables and FSNEP participants' food safety knowledge and practices were found. / Master of Science

The current study investigated the impact of a training program on a peer-to-peer intervention designed to increase the use of bicycle helmets on a large college campus. The training program was evaluated by the number of interactions a peer change agent--an individual who attempts to make a positive change in another person's behavior, had with bicyclists. The results suggest the training program may be effective in increasing change agent interactions for change agents who are already commitment to the intervention leading to more interactions per capita between committed trained change agents and bicyclists than untrained change agent and bicyclists. However, these results must be interpreted with caution due to small and unequal sample sizes. / Master of Science

The research presented in this thesis results from efforts to evaluate current design methodologies for safety benches in surface aggregate quarries. Proper bench design is important for preventing rockfall related accidents and injuries without wasting the reserves held in the benches. An in depth analysis has been performed using the results from 230 rockfall tests conducted at two surface quarries. The goal of this project is to give practitioners the tools they need for improved bench design. Principal Components and Cluster Analysis, techniques not previously applied to rockfall investigations, have been performed on the test data. The results indicate that both are valid analytical methods which show that the factors affecting the rollout distance of a rock are wall configuration, rock dimensions, and rock energy. The test results were then compared to the Ritchie Criteria, Modified Ritchie Criterion, Ryan and Pryor Criterion, Oregon Department of Transportation design charts, and RocFall computer simulations. Analysis shows that the lognormal distribution curves fitted to the test data provide an excellent yet quick design reference. The recommended design method is computer simulation using RocFall because of the ease of simulation and the site specific nature of the program. For the two quarries studied, RocFall analysis showed that 20 ft benches with a 4 ft berm will hold over 95% of rockfalls, a design supported by the field testing. Conducting site-specific rockfall testing is also recommended to obtain realistic input parameters for the simulations and to provide design justification to regulatory agencies. / Master of Science

Attacks on the heap are an increasingly severe threat. State-of-the-art secure dynamic memory allocators can offer protection, however their memory consumption is high, making them suboptimal in many situations. We introduce sys, a secure allocator whose design is driven by memory efficiency. Among other features, sys uses an efficient fine-grain size classes indexing mechanism and implements a novel dynamic canary scheme. It offers a low memory overhead due its size classes optimized for canary usage, its on-demand metadata allocation, and the combination of randomized allocations and over-provisioning into a single memory efficient security feature. sys protects against widespread heap-related attacks such as overflows, over-reads, double/invalid free, and use-after-free. Evaluation over a wide range of applications shows that it offers a significant reduction in memory consumption compared to the state-of-the-art secure allocator (up to 2x in macro-benchmarks), while offering similar or better security guarantees and good performance. / Master of Science / Attacks targeting on the runtime memory (heap allocator) are severe threats to software safety. Statistical results shown that the numbers of heap-related attacks has doubled since 2016. A large number of research works are designed to solve the security problems by offering different techniques to prevent some specific attacks. Not only are they very secure but also fast. However, these secure heap allocators sacrifice the memory usage, all of them at least double the memory consumption. Our work is trying to design and implement a heap allocator, in which it can defend against different attacks, as well as fast and memory-efficient. We carefully re-design some security features in our heap allocator while keep memory-efficient in mind. In the end, we evaluated sys and found that it offers significant reduction on different benchmarks suites. Evaluation also showed that sys can detect a lot of vulnerabilities in the software, while offer the same good performance as the state-of-the-art heap allocator.

No / Patient safety is a major priority for health services. It is a multi-disciplinary problem and requires a multi-disciplinary solution; any education should therefore be a multi-disciplinary endeavour, from conception to implementation. The starting point should be at undergraduate level and medical education should not be an exception. It is apparent that current educational provision in patient safety lacks a systematic approach, is not linked to formal assessment and is detached from the reality of practice. If patient safety education is to be fit for purpose, it should link theory and the reality of practice; a human factors approach offers a framework to create this linkage. Learning outcomes should be competency based and generic content explicitly linked to specific patient safety content. Students should ultimately be able to demonstrate the impact of what they learn in improving their clinical performance. It is essential that the patient safety curriculum spans the entire undergraduate programme; we argue here for a spiral model incorporating innovative, multi-method assessment which examines knowledge, skills, attitudes and values. Students are increasingly learning from patient experiences, we advocate learning directly from patients wherever possible. Undergraduate provision should provide a platform for continuing education in patient safety, all of which should be subject to periodic evaluation with a particular emphasis on practice impact.

No / Mental ill health in the workplace is a high profile issue, but what are the starting points for successful policies and interventions?

Yes / Command centres have been piloted in some hospitals across the developed world in the last few years. Their impact on patient safety, however, has not been systematically studied. Hence, we aimed to investigate this. This is a retrospective population-based cohort study. Participants were patients who visited Bradford Royal Infirmary Hospital and Calderdale & Huddersfield hospitals between 1 January 2018 and 31 August 2021. A five-phase, interrupted time series, linear regression analysis was used. After introduction of a Command Centre, while mortality and readmissions marginally improved, there was no statistically significant impact on postoperative sepsis. In the intervention hospital, when compared with the preintervention period, mortality decreased by 1.4% (95% CI 0.8% to 1.9%), 1.5% (95% CI 0.9% to 2.1%), 1.3% (95% CI 0.7% to 1.8%) and 2.5% (95% CI 1.7% to 3.4%) during successive phases of the command centre programme, including roll-in and activation of the technology and preparatory quality improvement work. However, in the control site, compared with the baseline, the weekly mortality also decreased by 2.0% (95% CI 0.9 to 3.1), 2.3% (95% CI 1.1 to 3.5), 1.3% (95% CI 0.2 to 2.4), 3.1% (95% CI 1.4 to 4.8) for the respective intervention phases. No impact on any of the indicators was observed when only the software technology part of the Command Centre was considered. Implementation of a hospital Command Centre may have a marginal positive impact on patient safety when implemented as part of a broader hospital-wide improvement programme including colocation of operations and clinical leads in a central location. However, improvement in patient safety indicators was also observed for a comparable period in the control site. Further evaluative research into the impact of hospital command centres on a broader range of patient safety and other outcomes is warranted. / This research is supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Yorkshire and Humber Patient Safety Translational Research Centre (NIHR Yorkshire and Humber PSTRC).

The standard method for assessing traffic safety is to use the predictive method outlined in the Highway Safety Manual (HSM). This method is site-level, data-intensive, and does not account for interactions between sites, making it difficult to assess larger areas. This dissertation develops a corridor-level approach to traffic safety which uses less data than the HSM predictive method and views roadways holistically rather than combinations of individual, independent sites. First, a corridor definition is developed and applied to 10 urban Florida counties with a history of many crashes, resulting in the identification of 1,048 corridors. These corridors were primarily defined using context classification and lane count, with additional considerations for data availability and minimum length. From 2017–2021, these corridors experienced 459,603 unique crashes. After preliminary modeling and scope refinement, 559 corridors received supplemental data collection. Between the two datasets, a total of 11 models were developed using either negative binomial (NB) or random forest (RF) regression. NB models can be used for network screening purposes or identifying the impacts of potential safety improvements, while RF models can be used to identify variables important to the accuracy of the prediction. Potential safety improvements identified from the NB models include increasing proactive law enforcement patrols for dangerous driving behaviors and installing corridor lighting in corridors without lighting. While both NB and RF models were accurate, NB models were recommended due to resulting in a definite equation and overdispersion parameter that could be used with the empirical Bayes (EB) method to improve prediction accuracy. Overall, the corridor-level NB models outperformed the HSM models in terms of accuracy and statistical reliability. Using a corridor-level approach can help agencies quickly network screen their systems to identify high-risk corridors in need of safety improvements or supplement site-level analyses.

This study was conducted to see if the engagement variables from the TummySafe 2022 online course as well as the participants’ demographic variables were positively correlated with the TummySafe certification exam score. The study examined factors that explained participants’ exam performance. The results indicated that there was little to no correlation between demographics or engagement variables and the certification exam score. Findings indicated that 22.8% of the overall variance in certification exam performance was explained by number of prior certifications (10%), race (6.5%), gender (3.5%), ethnicity (.2%), days between last course activity and exam (1.7%), in-course assessment (1%), total activity (2.3%), and page views (.2%). Participants’ in-course assessments and number of prior certifications were good indicators to predict if a student would pass or fail the certification exam.

Master of Science / Department of Agricultural Economics / John A. Fox / The United States has been inspecting commercial meat processing for over 100 years. Currently there is a push to increase the number of bacteria that meat processors are responsible to test for, which would lead to an increase in the costs of production. The goal of this thesis was to investigate antimicrobial practices used in small beef processing facilities across the Great Plains and the costs associated with those practices. A survey instrument was constructed and administered resulting in a total of 39 usable surveys for analysis. Preliminary analysis of the data was followed by an ordinary least squares regression to determine cost increasing or decreasing practices and attributes of the small processors. It was determined that on average small meat processors face a per ton variable cost of $914.71 or $0.46 per pound. Regression analysis indicated that plants can benefit from economies of scale. It was also determined there are no cost savings from being a state inspected as opposed to a federally inspected plant. Certain practices such as dry aging beef to increase quality and decrease bacterial load were found to increase the variable cost per pound. Microbial testing accounted for only 0.5% of the total variable cost of production.