Premium data

This chapter provides a brief overview of the most important sources of rhetorical uncertainty in technical documentation in the workplace the dynamic uncertainty of hazardous environments the variability and unreliability of human performance the uncertainty of what one agency calls premium data uncertainty in social structures and organizations and the rhetorical incompleteness of any single viewpoint. As the examples in this chapter demonstrate, the material and institutional uncertainty of hazardous environments affects documentation practices at all levels. But documentation practices can also contribute to uncertainty, particularly when writers depend too heavily on agency conventions to structure recommendations and conclusions. 

MSHA s 1988 Coal Accident Analysis and Problem Identification Instruction Guide shows how a system of classification designed to collect premium data can become an artificial template that structures not only the activity of the inspection but also the conclusions that inspectors can draw from their data. The Instruction Guide provides a set of checklists, tally sheets, and planned inquiry sheets to help inspectors categorize accidents. The classification system in the Physical Barrier Analysis Matrix (Fig. 3.1) seems to support the conclusion that physical barriers are either not possible or practical in most of the cases reported on the form—a conclusion that might exempt management from responsibility for protecting workers. Because data from such an analysis directly affects policy and procedures, classification systems can have... 

To obtain what one document calls premium data, engineers must frequently draw conclusions and read between the lines to determine the cause of the disaster. One analyst admitted that few reports gave him the exact data he needed. To determine the number of accidents related to longwall mining, he was forced to draw conclusions from details in the report—the depth of the cut, the number of miners on the section, or the type of injury— since few reports he consulted actually categorized the type of mining conducted on the section. 

Because monitoring and data-logging facilities add to initial cost, some customers may be hesitant to choose between a simple configuration without those capabilities and a more complex model including them. The benefits associated with monitoring often outweigh the price premium, as they allow the user to ... 

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As a minimum, your baseline data set should include the labor, overhead, overtime premiums and other payroll costs of the maintenance department. It should also include all maintenance related contract services, excluding janitorial, and the total costs of spare parts inventories. The baseline should also include the percentage of unscheduled maintenance repairs versus scheduled actual repair costs on critical plant equipment and the annual availability of the plant. 

Sintered PVC separators are frequently produced only for captive consumption beyond that there are specialized producers for these separators [64,68,69] and for equipment for their production [64]. The data compiled in Table 6 comprise only premium products of independent producers. 

Exposure assessments have become an essential element of contemporary risk assessment (NAS/NRC, 1983). The primary purpose of exposure assessment is to qualitatively and/or quantitatively determine exposure and absorbed dose associated with a particular use practice or human activity. Contemporary exposure assessors and risk managers place a high premium on accurate data obtained by monitoring chemical exposure scenarios and critical human activities or work tasks. 

Some MAS probes are single-coil, allowing proton-only acquisition, and some are dual-coil, allowing the acquisition of 2-D proton-carbon data. Note that MAS probes can be used for ordinary solution work and though very labour-intensive to use, can give excellent sensitivity where the available compound is limited and signal to noise is at a premium. 

Estimates based on European data are more scarce, and present other problems. In universal public insurance systems, in which financing is not based on premiums, there is no interpersonal (intra-group) variability in the drag copayment rates, or if there is it is very small. Therefore, temporal data are used to quantify the reactions of demand to normative changes in co-payment rates. The problem here is that such changes have occurred on very few occasions, and concurrently with other sources of variation in demand. 

The thermodynamics are indicated in Figure 14.6, using data from [41]. There is a considerable drop in the equiUbrium isobutene concentration, from almost 60 mol% at 400 K to only about 30% at 1000 K. This places a premium on an active catalyst to obtain high conversions at temperatures that yield reasonably high equilibrium conversions. 

Considerable literature developed around the ability of numerical indices derived from graph theoretical considerations to correlate with S AR data. This was a source of mystery to me for some time. A colleague, loan Motoc, from Romania, with experience in this arena and a very strong intellect, helped me understand the ability of various indices to be useful parameters in QSAR equations [19-21]. loan correlated various indices with more physically relevant (at least to me) variables such as surface area and molecular volume. Since computational time was at a premium during the early days of QSAR and such indices could be calculated with minimal computations, they played a useful role and continue to be used. As a chemist, however, I am much more comfortable with parameters such as surface area or volume. 

Here, of course, we can only concentrate on the first two points. There is always the necessity to find a compromise between the maximum affordable measurement scatter and the data accumulation time necessary to reach it. To a considerable extent, the operator can influence the outcome of this compromise by placing a premium either on the precision or on the speed which is achieved primarily by adjusting the number of blocks in the multi-block experiments and the total number of scans. 

Seven ANL-PCS (Argonne National Laboratory - Premium Coal Sample) coals were analyzed by Py-FIMS in time resolved (TR) mode. Conventional characterization data on ANL-PCS coals have been described elsewhere (11). About 100 pg of -100 mesh coal were transferred into a quartz crucible and introduced into the high vacuum (10 Pa) of the ion source (200 C). The instrumental setup using a Finnigan... 

Figure 3. Activation energy for conversion to THF solubles vs. aliphatic hydrogen for Argonne Premium Coal sample bank bituminous coals. Data on proton distribution from Dr. Charles Bronnimann, Colorado State University.

Root Mean Square Error of Prediction (RMSEP) Plot (Model Diagnostic) Prediction error is a useful metric for selecting the optimum number of factors to include in the model. This is because the models are most often used to predict the concentrations in future unknown samples. There are two approaches for generating a validation set for estimating the prediction error internal validation (i.e., cross-validation with the calibration data), or external validation (i.e., perform prediction on a separate validation set). Samples are usually at a premium, and so we most often use a cross- validation approach. 

Third, economic data are more important when there is substantial budgetary impact. In some jurisdictions, technologies are selected for appraisal only if they have a substantial impact on the (national) health service (e.g., in the United Kingdom), or if the manufacturer wants a premium price over other drugs to treat the given health condition (e.g., in the Netherlands). In addition, in several countries the authorities require an estimation of overall budgetary impact as well as the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio. 

Torts induce efficient behavior in the presence of transaction costs only if they imitate the outcomes of contracts in the absence of transaction costs. If damage awards to victims are to substitute for the outcomes of an explicit risk-information market that does not exist because of transaction costs, then the damage awards must be based on data that reflect the willingness of people to accept known risks, such as wage premiums found in risky occupations. Instead, damage awards are usually based on an injured person s actual lost income, a figure that is lower than the wages people demand to accept known risks (Dewees 1986). 

Finally, insurance companies cover risks only because they have accurate information about the incidence of damages in the population. Without such data, they cannot adequately calculate insurance premiums. ... 

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