Construction is a hazardous industry with a high number of injuries. Prior research found that many industry injuries can be prevented by implementing an effective safety plan if prepared and maintained by qualified safety personnel. However, there are no specific guidelines on how to select qualified construction safety personnel and what criteria should be used to select an individual for a safety position in the United States (US) construction industry. To fill this gap in knowledge, the study goal was to identify the desired qualifications of safety personnel in the US construction industry. To achieve the study goal, the Delphi technique was used as the main methodology for determining the desired qualifications for construction safety personnel. As a result, a panel of 15 subject-matter experts was selected, and 4 rounds of surveys were carried out. The findings of the study led to the identification of the desired qualifications for three construction safety positions (safety entry, safety professional, and safety manager). The present study contributes to the body of theoretical knowledge on construction safety and presents practical guidelines to assist industry stakeholders select qualified safety personnel for their projects. The selection of qualified safety personnel is expected to improve workplace safety performance and positively reflect on other project outcomes. Construction stakeholders should pay attention to three key aspects (namely, education, experience, and certification) when determining the qualifications for a safety leadership position and take into consideration the type of position intended to be filled. This study fills the gap in knowledge by identifying the desired qualifications and criteria on how to select safety personnel in the US construction industry.
Notwithstanding the importance of international cooperation as the other facet of international interactions, a strategy of conflict resolution, a maintainer of international peace and security, its provision in the United Nations conventions, as an objective of the United Nations after the international peace and security, however, the recognition of international cooperation has not been underlined by global, intellectual think tanks. While realism emphasized on the state's role in achieving international cooperation to ensure mutual and multilateral interests, liberalism focused on the role of international organizations in building such cooperation. Additionally, constructivist approaches developed other sub-variables to contribute to t
... Show MoreIn this research, several estimators concerning the estimation are introduced. These estimators are closely related to the hazard function by using one of the nonparametric methods namely the kernel function for censored data type with varying bandwidth and kernel boundary. Two types of bandwidth are used: local bandwidth and global bandwidth. Moreover, four types of boundary kernel are used namely: Rectangle, Epanechnikov, Biquadratic and Triquadratic and the proposed function was employed with all kernel functions. Two different simulation techniques are also used for two experiments to compare these estimators. In most of the cases, the results have proved that the local bandwidth is the best for all the
... Show MoreCrop production is reduced by insufficient and/or excess soil water, which can significantly decrease plant growth and development. Therefore, conservation management practices such as cover crops (CCs) are used to optimize soil water dynamics, since CCs can conserve soil water. The objective of this study was to determine the effects of CCs on soil water dynamics on a corn (
The water quality index is the most common mathematical way of monitoring water characteristics due to the reasons for the water parameters to identify the type of water and the validity of its use, whether for drinking, agricultural, or industrial purposes. The water arithmetic indicator method was used to evaluate the drinking water of the Al-Muthana project, where the design capacity was (40000) m3/day, and it consists of traditional units used to treat raw water. Based on the water parameters (Turb, TDS, TH, SO4, NO2, NO3, Cl, Mg, and Ca), the evaluation results were that the quality of drinking water is within the second category of the requirements of the WHO (86.658%) and the first category of the standard has not been met du
... Show MoreClassification of imbalanced data is an important issue. Many algorithms have been developed for classification, such as Back Propagation (BP) neural networks, decision tree, Bayesian networks etc., and have been used repeatedly in many fields. These algorithms speak of the problem of imbalanced data, where there are situations that belong to more classes than others. Imbalanced data result in poor performance and bias to a class without other classes. In this paper, we proposed three techniques based on the Over-Sampling (O.S.) technique for processing imbalanced dataset and redistributing it and converting it into balanced dataset. These techniques are (Improved Synthetic Minority Over-Sampling Technique (Improved SMOTE), Border
... Show MoreThe performance quality and searching speed of Block Matching (BM) algorithm are affected by shapes and sizes of the search patterns used in the algorithm. In this paper, Kite Cross Hexagonal Search (KCHS) is proposed. This algorithm uses different search patterns (kite, cross, and hexagonal) to search for the best Motion Vector (MV). In first step, KCHS uses cross search pattern. In second step, it uses one of kite search patterns (up, down, left, or right depending on the first step). In subsequent steps, it uses large/small Hexagonal Search (HS) patterns. This new algorithm is compared with several known fast block matching algorithms. Comparisons are based on search points and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR). According to resul
... Show MoreThe performance evaluation process requires a set of criteria and for the purpose of measuring the level of performance achieved by the Unit and the actual level of development of its activities, and in view of the changes and of rapid and continuous variables surrounding the Performance is a reflection of the unit's ability to achieve its objectives, as these units are designed to achieve the objectives of exploiting a range of economic resources available to it, and the performance evaluation process is a form of censorship, focusing on the analysis of the results obtained from the achievement All its activities with a view to determining the extent to which the Unit has achieved its objectives using the resources available to it and h
... Show MoreThis paper includes a comparison between denoising techniques by using statistical approach, principal component analysis with local pixel grouping (PCA-LPG), this procedure is iterated second time to further improve the denoising performance, and other enhancement filters were used. Like adaptive Wiener low pass-filter to a grayscale image that has been degraded by constant power additive noise, based on statistics estimated from a local neighborhood of each pixel. Performs Median filter of the input noisy image, each output pixel contains the Median value in the M-by-N neighborhood around the corresponding pixel in the input image, Gaussian low pass-filter and Order-statistic filter also be used.
Experimental results shows LPG-
... Show MoreThe presence of different noise sources and continuous increase in crosstalk in the deep submicrometer technology raised concerns for on-chip communication reliability, leading to the incorporation of crosstalk avoidance techniques in error control coding schemes. This brief proposes joint crosstalk avoidance with adaptive error control scheme to reduce the power consumption by providing appropriate communication resiliency based on runtime noise level. By switching between shielding and duplication as the crosstalk avoidance technique and between hybrid automatic repeat request and forward error correction as the error control policies, three modes of error resiliencies are provided. The results show that, in reduced mode, the scheme achie
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