Construction Safety Risk Modeling and Simulation

By building on a genetic‐inspired attribute‐based conceptual framework for safety risk analysis, we propose a novel approach to define, model, and simulate univariate and bivariate construction safety risk at the situational level. Our fully data‐driven techniques provide construction practitioners and academicians with an easy and automated way of getting valuable empirical insights from attribute‐based data extracted from unstructured textual injury reports. By applying our methodology on a data set of 814 injury reports, we first show the frequency‐magnitude distribution of construction safety risk to be very similar to that of many natural phenomena such as precipitation or earthquakes. Motivated by this observation, and drawing on state‐of‐the‐art techniques in hydroclimatology and insurance, we then introduce univariate and bivariate nonparametric stochastic safety risk generators based on kernel density estimators and copulas. These generators enable the user to produce large numbers of synthetic safety risk values faithful to the original data, allowing safety‐related decision making under uncertainty to be grounded on extensive empirical evidence. One of the implications of our study is that like natural phenomena, construction safety may benefit from being studied quantitatively by leveraging empirical data rather than strictly being approached through a managerial perspective using subjective data, which is the current industry standard. Finally, a side but interesting finding is that in our data set, attributes related to high energy levels (e.g., machinery, hazardous substance) and to human error (e.g., improper security of tools) emerge as strong risk shapers.     

Title IX: Consequences for Gender Relations in Sport

Legal interventions have succeeded in creating new opportunities for female athletes, but some argue that this is at the expense of opportunities for male athletes. In this review, we examine the consequences of a particular legal intervention in sport, the US education law Title IX, for female athletes, male athletes, and the construction of gender. Research indicates that sport participation is linked to important attainment outcomes, such as completing education and receiving higher salaries, for both male and female athletes. In addition, playing sports has several protective effects for women’s and girls’ mental and physical health. While positive effects for male athletes are important, courts’ interpretations of Title IX do not require the elimination of men’s opportunities but also do not protect those opportunities in current enforcement. Legal interventions that assure female sports participation also challenge the ways sport is used to create and reproduce definitions of masculinity, exposing dangerous emphases on toughness, aggressiveness, and heterosexual conquest that are damaging to both female and male athletes.     

Short Notices

Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (1978), xi+291 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £10.00).

D. W. Howell, Land and People in Nineteenth‐Century Wales (1977), xv+207 (Routledge &; Kegan Paul, £6.95).

Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London 1616–1649 (1977), xii+251 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £9.00).

George Huppert, Les Bourgeois Gentilshommes. An Essay on the Definition of Élites in Renaissance France (1977), xii+237 (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, £12.95).

Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert and Lee Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers ‐ Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (1977), 244 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £12.50).

D. Philips, Crime and Authority in Victorian England: The Black Country 1835–1860 (1977), 321 (Croom Helm, £8.50).

Brenda Swann and Maureen Turnbull, Records of Interest to Social Scientists 1919–1919: Employment and Unemployment (1978), v+590 (HMSO, paperback, £13.50).     

Making Firefighters Deployable

Although sociologists have devoted a considerable amount of research to exploring high-risk organizations, they have not yet developed an adequate explanation as to why individuals working within such organizations place themselves in harm’s way and how organizations ensure they remain there. This article addresses this gap by analyzing how the United States Forest Service motivates wildland firefighters to participate in life-threatening activity. Drawing on ethnographic research and content analyses of official documents, it describes the process by which firefighters come to develop a specific disposition towards risk taking, a disposition through which they view firefighting as an activity void of danger, and how this disposition maintains its shape, and even grows stronger, after confronting its biggest challenge: the death of a firefighter.     

Regional Religions?: Extending the “Semi-involuntary” Thesis of African-American Religious Participation

This research examines religious affiliation and church attendance among African-Americans in three different regions of the United States to evaluate the thesis that the Black church represents a semi-involuntary institution shaped by historical dynamics of segregation in the rural South. We extend the analyses of others who have found the rural South to have distinctive church participation patterns by examining two nationally representative data sets (the 1972–1996 General Social Surveys and the 1984 National Alcohol Study). We explore both level and type of church attendance of African-Americans, and how patterns differ by region. Further, we refine prior analyses by (1) differentiating between members of historically White and conservative churches from those in the black mainline, (2) examining racial segregation, and (3) focusing on the type of church attendance (rather than just overall level). Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and logistic regression models support the thesis that the rural South exhibits some distinctive patterns that make the semi-involuntary institution notion a useful concept, although patterns not predicted by the thesis are also found. The semi-involuntary thesis is also used to illuminate some church attendance patterns observed outside the rural South.     

Assessing Engineering Resilience for Systems with Multiple Performance Measures

Recently, efforts to model and assess a system's resilience to disruptions due to environmental and adversarial threats have increased substantially. Researchers have investigated resilience in many disciplines, including sociology, psychology, computer networks, and engineering systems, to name a few. When assessing engineering system resilience, the resilience assessment typically considers a single performance measure, a disruption, a loss of performance, the time required to recover, or a combination of these elements. We define and use a resilient engineered system definition that separates system resilience into platform and mission resilience. Most complex systems have multiple performance measures; this research proposes using multiple objective decision analysis to assess system resilience for systems with multiple performance measures using two distinct methods. The first method quantifies platform resilience and includes resilience and other “ilities” directly in the value hierarchy, while the second method quantifies mission resilience and uses the “ilities” in the calculation of the expected mission performance for every performance measure in the value hierarchy. We illustrate the mission resilience method using a transportation systems‐of‐systems network with varying levels of resilience due to the level of connectivity and autonomy of the vehicles and platform resilience by using a notional military example. Our analysis found that it is necessary to quantify performance in context with specific mission(s) and scenario(s) under specific threat(s) and then use modeling and simulation to help determine the resilience of a system for a given set of conditions. The example demonstrates how incorporating system mission resilience can improve performance for some performance measures while negatively affecting others.