Rockfalls and landslides are major types of natural hazards worldwide that kill or injure a large number of individuals and cause very high costs every year. Risk assessment of such dangerous events requires an accurate evaluation of the geology, hydrogeology, morphology and interrelated factors such as environmental conditions and human activities. It is of particular importance for engineers ...

Mobiquitous systems are gaining more and more weight in our daily lives. They are becoming a reality from our home and work to our leisure. The use of Location-Based Services (LBS) in these systems is increasingly demanded by users. Yet, while on one hand they enable people to be more “connected”, on the other hand, they may expose people to serious privacy issues. The design and deployment of ...

Comprehensive Foot Examination and Risk Assessment: a Report of the Task Force of the Foot Care Interest Group of the American Diabetes Association, With Endorsement by the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists Andrew J.M. Boulton, David G. Armstrong, Stephen F. Albert, Robert G. Frykberg, Richard Hellman, M. Sue Kirkman, Lawrence A. Lavery, Joseph W. LeMaster, Joseph L. Mills, Sr.,...

Decision making based on the comparison of multiple criteria of two or more alternatives, is the subject of intensive research. In many decision making situations, a single criterion consists of more than one piece of information, and therefore might be regarded as a lump of aggregated information. This paper proposes a general method for aggregating information. To accomplish information aggre...

In this article, we propose a framework to accelerate the ubiquitous capitalization of Internet as a vehicle to merchandise goods and services. The motivation for proposing this framework derives from the fact that many consumers and small-to-medium-sized companies are still hesitant to use Internet to shop, trade and disclose sensitive information such as credit card numbers. While IT security...

‘Standard setting’ is a process through which the items prepared for the student assessment is standardized before and/or after the student assessment process. The main objective of standard setting is to determine the cut-off score, or pass mark, of an item or a test. The tests represent Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs), Short Answer Questions (SAQs), Objective Structured Practical or Clinical...

Thematic accuracy assessment of a map is a necessary condition for the comparison of research results and the appropriate use of geographic data analysis. Good practices of accuracy assessment already exist, but Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) is based on a partition of the spatial area of interest into polygons, which leads to specific issues. In this study, additional guidelin...

BACKGROUND Problem based learning (PBL) is used increasingly in undergraduate medical education, but there are few postgraduate medical studies. AIM To compare SHO learning outcomes for a PBL course with a traditional didactic course. METHODS As part of their protected teaching programme, 14 senior house officers (SHOs) were taught about paediatric dermatology using a traditional didactic c...

Dust explosions always claim lives and cause huge financial losses. Dust explosion risk can be prevented by inherently safer design or mitigated by engineering protective system. Design of explosion prevention and protection needs comprehensive knowledge and data on the process, workshop, equipment, and combustible materials. The knowledge includes standards, expertise of experts, and practical...

The quality of hazard identification has a significant impact on the quality of overall risk assessment and occupational accident prevention in workplace. Currently accepted hazard identification approaches tend to rely on knowledge of previous accidents, experience of the task, and participants’ imagination, although hazard identification itself is most important for new tasks and novices who ...