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 constructio
... Show MoreRecent phosphorus (P) pollution in the United States, mainly in Maine, has raised some severe concerns over the use of P fertilizer application rates in agriculture. Phosphorus is the second most limiting nutrient after nitrogen and has damaging impacts on crop yield if found to be deficient. Therefore, farmers tend to apply more P than is required to satisfy any P loss after its application at planting. Several important questions were raised in this study to improve P efficiency and reduce its pollution. The objective of this study was to find potential reasons for P pollution in water bodies despite a decrease in potato acreage. Historically, the potato was found to be responsible for P water contamination due to its high P sensitivity a
... Show MoreThis study proposes a new version of the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model using Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) denoted by ARIMA-NN. The new model incorporates a multi-layer perceptron with matrix multiplication within a feed-forward network. The logistic, hyperbolic tangent (tanh), and sigmoid activation functions are used for weight updates in ARIMA-NN. A new forecasting algorithm is proposed, and one-step and multiple-steps forecasting procedures are rigorously analyzed. The proposed model was evaluated against existing forecasting model using performance metrics such as the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and Bayesian Information Criterion (
... Show MoreKnowing the nature of the relationship in federal systems lies in studying the political, social, economic and cultural forces, for their role in laying the foundations and the federal system. No matter how important the pillars of that system are, and through this research, we will learn how the political elites were able to crystallize this unique system, until it became one of the political systems that some countries seek to copy and apply its experience.