What Will Happen to This Dog? A Qualitative Analysis of Rehoming Organisations' Pre-adoption Dog Behaviour Screening Policies and Procedures

Rehoming organisations often undertake some type of behaviour evaluation to determine dogs' suitability for rehoming and/or the type of suitable home. Assessments can carry considerable weight in determining dogs' fates. Although evaluation of the validity and reliability of any test is important, a more fundamental consideration is if the nature of the information sought and the weight given to this in organisations' decision making is of more than anecdotal value. Therefore, this study's aim was to conduct a qualitative analysis of organisations' pre-adoption dog behaviour screenings and potential justifications, comparing this with the available scientific evidence. A written enquiry was sent electronically to rehoming organisations in the UK and US from February 2016-July 2017. Of 73 respondents, the majority conducted assessments for all dogs. Using a thematic analysis, nine themes and 71 sub-themes emerged concerning the types of information respondents aim to gather from assessments. The majority of respondents used, at least partially, pass/fail scoring, i.e., certain outcomes would lead to dogs being deemed unadoptable. Forty-one sub-themes and one theme were identified as potentially leading to a dog being deemed unadoptable. The evidence base for these factors was identified from the scientific literature relating to: increased risk for relinquishment, impact on a dog's quality of life, and human safety risk. Evidence supported 10 factors: “aggression towards people”, “aggression towards cats or other animals”, “aggression towards dogs”, “biting or snapping”, “resource guarding”, “activity level or exercise needs”, “destructiveness”, “housetrained”, “fearfulness”, and “knowledge of basic commands and/or general training”. Of those, seven were associated only with relinquishment risk, two (“resource guarding”, “knowledge of basic commands”) with human safety risk, and one (“fearfulness”) with both. Thus, for >85% of characteristics organisations deemed important for dogs' adoptability, scientific evidence to support this is lacking. More research is needed to investigate the value of behaviour assessments, especially concerning the assessment of factors that could pose a public safety risk. However, given the current lack of scientific support for many decisions regarding dogs' rehoming suitability and recognised pressure on resources, it is suggested that organisations should focus on pre-adoption adopter education and post-adoption support.

Introduction: Black Swans and Sinatra Inferences

Public mismanagement as a threat to life and limb is a rare and highly improbable phenomenon—the proverbial Black Swan. Bridges and buildings collapse, claiming the lives of people who had every reason to believe that governmental agencies protect their physical integrity through public oversight and maintenance. Properly analyzed, however, these unlikely events reveal causal mechanisms of a general nature, strong enough to trigger fateful mismanagement even under the restrictive conditions of professional bureaucracies and democratic government. Hence the “Sinatra Inference”: When a mechanism is powerful enough ‘to make it there’—i.e., where causal leverage is supposedly low—it is likely to ‘make it everywhere’ as soon as leverage is enlarged by weaker accountability structures, lower professional standards and lesser values than human safety.

Conclusion: Strategic Learning and Situational High Reliability

Public authorities are not high reliability organizations per se but they need to act as one as soon as safety issues are at stake. When it comes to construction and public infrastructure, however, responsibility for human safety may compete with the perceived necessity to respond to quests for accelerated licensing, fostering the local economy and general urban development, cooperative relations with contractors and consultants, compromises in local politics and similar types of legitimate expectations of clientele and the general public. Strategic learning for the sake of sustainable prevention requires to realize the responsiveness versus responsibility trade-off in the first place and to acknowledge the consequences for personal conduct in office under specific situational conditions. In the essence, it is about the strength and strengthening of professional and institutional integrity for the sake of human safety as an integral part of good governance and mindful public management.

A Study on the Durability of Fire Hoses of Fire Hydrants

Although the number of fires has not changed considerably in recent times, property damage and casualties due to fires are increasing every year. Maintaining the performance of fire-fighting facilities installed in buildings has been emphasized for maximizing human safety and minimizing property damage caused by fires. As a result, since 2017, the maintenance of fire extinguishers throughout their service life, has been mandated. In case of a fire, initial fire extinguishing and fire spreading prevention are crucial. There have been no available measures for the maintenance and verification of indoor fire hydrants and outdoor fire hydrant hoses used for extinguishing fires and preventing combustion expansion. This study was therefore intended to present measures for ascertaining the service life of these fire extinguishers, by evaluating their firefighting abilities through sample analysis and case analysis of the fire hoses. Research shows that the degradation of performance of the fire hoses becomes evident between 9 and 10 years, so that 10 years of service life is considered appropriate for the fire hoses.

An Embedded Based Electric Shock Prevention for Human Safety

An electric shock is the effect of passing an electric current through the body. The minimum current a human can feel is thought to be about 1 milliampere (mA). The effect can range from minor tingling to muscle spasms, tissue damage, fibrillation of the heart, loss of consciousness, and even death. These effects depend on a variety of factors, including the strength of the current, duration of the current, the area of the body through which the current passes, and whether the person is grounded or insulated from the ground. Death caused by an electric shock is referred to as electrocution.

Counseling on the Importance of Electrical Installation Safety in Tegalpanjang Village

Electricity has a very vital role in everyday life, therefore the electricity network must be properly maintained and protected, otherwise, not only disrupt the need for electricity but it can also endanger human safety. One type of electrical hazard that often arises is fire that caused by the electrical equipment used was not under the PUIL Standard (General Requirements for Electrical Installation in Indonesia) and COE (Certificate of Operation Eligibility). Beside carelessly installation that not comply with regulations that often cause electrical short circuit.. The purpose of this community service is to provide knowledge about the safe and correct household electrical installations to residence of Tegalpanjang especially school student so they can also provide information to other community members about dangers and utilization of electricity as well as correct electrical installation. The result of this service activity is the participants has knowledge upgrading and understanding about the dangers and use of electrical installations to avoid fires caused by electrical short circuits.

Identifying diverse metal oxide nanomaterials with lethal effects on embryonic zebrafish using machine learning

Manufacturers of nanomaterial-enabled products need models of endpoints that are relevant to human safety to support the “safe by design” paradigm and avoid late-stage attrition. Increasingly, embryonic zebrafish (Danio Rerio) are recognised as a key human safety relevant in vivo test system. Hence, machine learning models were developed for identifying metal oxide nanomaterials causing lethality to embryonic zebrafish up to 24 hours post-fertilisation, or excess lethality in the period of 24–120 hours post-fertilisation, at concentrations of 250 ppm or less. Models were developed using data from the Nanomaterial Biological-Interactions Knowledgebase for a dataset of 44 diverse, coated and uncoated metal or, in one case, metalloid oxide nanomaterials. Different modelling approaches were evaluated using nested cross-validation on this dataset. Models were initially developed for both lethality endpoints using multiple descriptors representing the composition of the core, shell and surface functional groups, as well as particle characteristics. However, interestingly, the 24 hours post-fertilisation data were found to be harder to predict, which could reflect different exposure routes. Hence, subsequent analysis focused on the prediction of excess lethality at 120 hours-post fertilisation. The use of two data augmentation approaches, applied for the first time in nano-QSAR research, was explored, yet both failed to boost predictive performance. Interestingly, it was found that comparable results to those originally obtained using multiple descriptors could be obtained using a model based upon a single, simple descriptor: the Pauling electronegativity of the metal atom. Since it is widely recognised that a variety of intrinsic and extrinsic nanomaterial characteristics contribute to their toxicological effects, this is a surprising finding. This may partly reflect the need to investigate more sophisticated descriptors in future studies. Future studies are also required to examine how robust these modelling results are on truly external data, which were not used to select the single descriptor model. This will require further laboratory work to generate comparable data to those studied herein.