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.
The coronavirus is a family of viruses that cause different dangerous diseases that lead to death. Two types of this virus have been previously found: SARS-CoV, which causes a severe respiratory syndrome, and MERS-CoV, which causes a respiratory syndrome in the Middle East. The latest coronavirus, originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan, is known as the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a new kind of coronavirus that can harm people and was first discovered in Dec. 2019. According to the statistics of the World Health Organization (WHO), the number of people infected with this serious disease has reached more than seven million people from all over the world. In Iraq, the number of people infected has reached more than tw
... Show MoreThe economy is exceptionally reliant on agricultural productivity. Therefore, in domain of agriculture, plant infection discovery is a vital job because it gives promising advance towards the development of agricultural production. In this work, a framework for potato diseases classification based on feed foreword neural network is proposed. The objective of this work is presenting a system that can detect and classify four kinds of potato tubers diseases; black dot, common scab, potato virus Y and early blight based on their images. The presented PDCNN framework comprises three levels: the pre-processing is first level, which is based on K-means clustering algorithm to detect the infected area from potato image. The s
... Show MoreIn this research, optical communication coding systems are designed and constructed by utilizing Frequency Shift Code (FSC) technique. Calculations of the system quality represented by signal to noise ratio (S/N), Bit Error Rate (BER),and Power budget are done. In FSC system, the data of Nonreturn- to–zero (NRZ ) with bit rate at 190 kb/s was entered into FSC encoder circuit in transmitter unit. This data modulates the laser source HFCT-5205 with wavelength at 1310 nm by Intensity Modulation (IM) method, then this data is transferred through Single Mode (SM) optical fiber. The recovery of the NRZ is achieved using decoder circuit in receiver unit. The calculations of BER and S/N for FSC system a
... Show MoreThe aim of this paper is to design a PID controller based on an on-line tuning bat optimization algorithm for the step-down DC/DC buck converter system which is used in the battery operation of the mobile applications. In this paper, the bat optimization algorithm has been utilized to obtain the optimal parameters of the PID controller as a simple and fast on-line tuning technique to get the best control action for the system. The simulation results using (Matlab Package) show the robustness and the effectiveness of the proposed control system in terms of obtaining a suitable voltage control action as a smooth and unsaturated state of the buck converter input voltage of ( ) volt that will stabilize the buck converter sys
... Show MoreThe permeability determination in the reservoirs that are anisotropic and heterogeneous is a complicated problem due to the limited number of wells that contain core samples and well test data. This paper presents hydraulic flow units and flow zone indicator for predicting permeability of rock mass from core for Nahr-Umr reservoir/ Subba field. The Permeability measurement is better found in the laboratory work on the cored rock that taken from the formation. Nahr-Umr Formation is the main lower cretaceous sandstone reservoir in southern of Iraq. This formation is made up mainly of sandstone. Nahr-Umr formation was deposited on a gradually rising basin floor. The digenesis of Nahr-Umr sediments is very important du
... Show MoreImages hold important information, especially in military and commercial surveillance as well as in industrial inspection and communication. Therefore, the protection of the image from abuse, unauthorized access, and damage became a significant demand. This paper introduces a new Beta chaotic map for encrypting and confusing the color image with Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) sequence. First, the DNA addition operation is used for diffusing each component of the plain image. Then, a new Beta chaotic map is used for shuffling the DNA color image. In addition, two chaotic maps, namely the proposed new Beta and Sine chaotic maps, are used for key generation. Finally, the DNA XOR operation is applied between the generated key and shuffled DNA i
... Show MoreIn this paper, a design of the broadband thin metamaterial absorber (MMA) is presented. Compared with the previously reported metamaterial absorbers, the proposed structure provides a wide bandwidth with a compatible overall size. The designed absorber consists of a combination of octagon disk and split octagon resonator to provide a wide bandwidth over the Ku and K bands' frequency range. Cheap FR-4 material is chosen to be a substate of the proposed absorber with 1.6 thicknesses and 6.5×6.5 overall unit cell size. CST Studio Suite was used for the simulation of the proposed absorber. The proposed absorber provides a wide absorption bandwidth of 14.4 GHz over a frequency range of 12.8-27.5 GHz with more than %90 absorp
... Show MoreElectronic Health Record (EHR) systems are used as an efficient and effective method of exchanging patients’ health information with doctors and other key stakeholders in the health sector to obtain improved patient treatment decisions and diagnoses. As a result, questions regarding the security of sensitive user data are highlighted. To encourage people to move their sensitive health records to cloud networks, a secure authentication and access control mechanism that protects users’ data should be established. Furthermore, authentication and access control schemes are essential in the protection of health data, as numerous responsibilities exist to ensure security and privacy in a network. So, the main goal of our s
... Show MorePMMA/TiO2 homogeneous thin films were deposited by using plasma jet system under normal atmospheric pressure and room temperature. PMMA/TiO2 nanocomposite thin film synthesized by plasma polymerization. Titanium oxide was mixed with Methyl Methacrylate Monomer (MMA) with specific weight ratios (1, 3 and 5 grams of TiO2 per 100 ml of MMA). Optical properties of PMMA/TiO2 nanocomposite thin films were characterized by UV-Visible absorption spectra using a double beam UV-Vis-NIR Spectrophotometer. The thin films surface morphological analysis is carried out by employing SEM. The structure analysis are achieved by X-ray diffraction. UV-Visible absorption spectra shows that the increasing the concentration of titanium oxide added to the polym
... Show MoreThe flexible joint robot (FJR) typically experiences parametric variations, nonlinearities, underactuation, noise propagation, and external disturbances which seriously degrade the FJR tracking. This article proposes an adaptive integral sliding mode controller (AISMC) based on a singular perturbation method and two state observers for the FJR to achieve high performance. First, the underactuated FJR is modeled into two simple second-order fast and slow subsystems by using Olfati transformation and singular perturbation method, which handles underactuation while reducing noise amplification. Then, the AISMC is proposed to effectively accomplish the desired tracking performance, in which the integral sliding surface is designed to reduce cha
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