Search results for "Reliability and Quality"
showing 10 items of 386 documents
Sleepiness, sleep, and use of sleepiness countermeasures in shift-working long-haul truck drivers
2015
Driver sleepiness is a prevalent phenomenon among professional drivers working unconventional and irregular hours. For compromising occupational and traffic safety, sleepiness has become one of the major conundrums of road transportation. To further elucidate the phenomenon, an on-road study canvassing the under-explored relationship between working hours and sleepiness, sleep, and use of sleepiness countermeasures during and outside statutory rest breaks was conducted. Testing the association between the outcomes and working hours, generalized estimating equations models were fitted on a data collected from 54 long-haul truck drivers (mean 38.1 ± 10.5 years, one female) volunteering in the…
Are Latin American cycling commuters 'at risk'? A comparative study on cycling patterns, behaviors, and crashes with non-commuter cyclists
2020
Abstract Introduction As part of the transformation of urban transportation dynamics, commuter cycling has acquired a high relevance as an alternative mode of transport in different countries, and Latin America seems to be one of the main focus of this worldwide “revolution”. However, the high rates of crashes and injuries suffered by commuters have become a relevant issue in the field of road safety, especially in emerging regions with low cycling tradition, where social and infrastructural gaps may endanger the cyclists’ safety. Objectives This study had two objectives. First, to compare key safe cycling-related variables between cycling commuters and non-commuters; and second, to differe…
Reactivation of aerobic granular sludge for the treatment of industrial shipboard slop wastewater: Effects of long-term storage on granules structure…
2021
Abstract This work reports on reactivation of aerobic granular sludge (AGS) for the treatment of industrial recalcitrant wastewater (slop wastewater) characterized by high salinity and hydrocarbons. AGS were reactivated in two reactors, R1 and R2, to treat industrial slop wastewater after a long-term storage for 12-months at 4 °C. In R1, salt-adapted mature aerobic granules were previously subjected to a step-wise increase of hydrocarbons, whereas in R2 aerobic granules were previously cultivated in presence of salinity and hydrocarbons. After a short-term reactivation period, the slop dosage caused a simultaneous decrease of granules dimensions and proteins/polysaccharides (PN/PS) ratio do…
Pandemic Prevention and Personality Psychology: Gender Differences in Preventive Health Behaviors during COVID-19 and the Roles of Agreeableness and …
2022
One of the greatest public health crises in recent times, the COVID-19 pandemic, has come with a myriad of challenges in terms of health communication and public cooperation to prevent the spread of the disease. Understanding which are the key determinants that make certain individuals more cooperative is key in effectively tackling pandemics and similar future challenges. In the present study (N = 800), we investigated whether gender differences in compliance with preventive health behaviors (PHB) at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic could be established, and, if so, whether the personality traits of agreeableness and conscientiousness could help explain this presumed relationship. Consis…
Risk Assessment of Fuel Quantity Indicator Replacement in ATR72 Aircraft
2015
Aircraft maintenance activities are rife with opportunities for error. The concurrent in-flight failure of all of the engines of a non-scheduled airline flight and the following list of human lives highlight one of these opportunities. As commonly recognized among flight operators, each flight safety agency follows the criteria of the International Civil Aviation Organization Annex 16 in which all the evidences of the technical investigation pave the way for avoiding future flight accidents or incidents. On the other hand, when the Italian penal procedure code was applied for the Tuninter aircraft ATR 72 (identification code TS-LBB) crash at issue on 6 August 2005 near Palermo (Italy), the…
One-Pot Analysis: a New Integrated Methodology for Determination of TAG and FA Determination through LC/MS and in-silico Saponification
2017
Vegetable oils differ significantly for their lipid profile and are mainly constituted by triacylglycerols (TAGs). These are esters formed bonding glycerol to three fatty acids (FAs). To the best of our knowledge, FA and TAG profiles in oils and fats are obtained using at least two different experimental techniques. In particular, FA determination requires elaborated procedures for sample preparation and analyte derivatization. In this work, we propose a one-pot analysis able to determine both TAG and FA contents of edible oils, using experimental data obtained from a simple liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry determination of TAGs. This experimental procedure is followed by an in silic…
The effects of a subvention scheme for e-bikes on mode share and active mobility
2022
Hanne Beate Sundfør, Aslak Fyhri, The effects of a subvention scheme for e-bikes on mode share and active mobility, Journal of Transport & Health, Volume 26, 2022, 101403, ISSN 2214-1405, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jth.2022.101403 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214140522000755) Introduction Previous studies show substantial mode share effects from e-bikes. E-bike owners cycle more and drive less car than they would without access to an e-bike. Support schemes for e-bikes exist in a number of countries, but knowledge about the effect of subsidies on active transport is limited. The aim of this study is to assess the mode change and active mobility effects of a subvention…
Fruit and Vegetable Derived Waste as a Sustainable Alternative Source of Nutraceutical Compounds
2018
Dietary phytochemicals are widely investigated in the eld of chemistry, biology, nutrition, and medicine for their potential health-promoting eects. Indeed, many in vitro and in vivo studies provide evidence that a number of these compounds are involved in the prevention and/or control of chronic disorders such as cancer and cardiovascular diseases. e exponential growth of plant waste production from the agrofood industry is a critical global issue, considering its storage, disposal, environmental impact, and potential health risks. However, the exploitation of plant wastes/by-products for the recovery of added-value compounds oers new avenue for industrial growth and waste management. I…
Error-Based Interference Detection in WiFi Networks
2017
In this paper we show that inter-technology interference can be recognized by commodity WiFi devices by monitoring the statistics of receiver errors. Indeed, while for WiFi standard frames the error probability varies during the frame reception in different frame fields (PHY, MAC headers, payloads) protected with heterogeneous coding, errors may appear randomly at any point during the time the demodulator is trying to receive an exogenous interfering signal. We thus detect and identify cross-technology interference on off-the-shelf WiFi cards by monitoring the sequence of receiver errors (bad PLCP, bad PCS, invalid headers, etc.) and develop an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to recognize t…
Exploring the use of multi-gene genetic programming in regional models for the simulation of monthly river runoff series
2023
The use of new data-driven approaches based on the so-called expert systems to simulate runoff generation processes is a promising frontier that may allow for overcoming some modeling difficulties related to more complex traditional approaches. The present study highlights the potential of expert systems in creating regional hydrological models, for which they can benefit from the availability of large database. Different soft computing models for the reconstruction of the monthly natural runoff in river basins are explored, focusing on a new class of heuristic models, which is the Multi-Gene Genetic Programming (MGGP). The region under study is Sicily (Italy), where a regression based rain…