Multi-million Dollar Facilities Research Articles

Keeping our Healthcare Workers Safe–Ebola and COVID-19

Introduction:Over the past decade, the world has wrestled with two major pandemics: Ebola and COVID-19. While Ebola revealed that we needed a strategy, Covid-19 showed we still didn't have one. Apart from ensuring that we isolate and contain the virus, one of the major concerns in responding to a pandemic is limiting transmission to healthcare personnel.Method:This presentation describes a clinician's experience with employing the same infection control strategies used for Ebola in a makeshift Ebola Treatment Unit in a school in Sierra Leone and at a COVID-19 alternate care facility built in a convention center in the US.Results:Transmission control strategies used for healthcare workers during Ebola were also successful for COVID-19. Both facilities, despite grossly different access to financial resources, ensured all clinicians didn’t break protocol of safety, due to rigorous donning and doffing entrances and exits, internalized individual risk, separated spaces with tape, and zoned areas.Conclusion:Two facilities with access to vastly different resources to treat two distinct infectious diseases used the same infection control measures for staff with success. Highlighting the priority of internalization of risk by healthcare workers alongside critical infection control measures proves to be the most valuable resource over multi-million dollar facilities erected during COVID.

Technology Focus: Well Integrity (January 2019)

Technology Focus Since the beginning of deepwater operations, hydrocarbons in the riser, especially natural gas, have been a plague to the oil and gas industry. The reports of gas-in-riser-related accidents are many, including deaths, blowouts, damage to multimillion-dollar facilities, collapsing risers, and environmental effects. Most infamous was the Deepwater Horizon blowout. If there had been any timely means of detecting the gas coming up the riser, all of these events could have been avoided easily by closing the blowout preventer. Since the 1980s, many technical works have focused on improving the ability to detect hydrocarbons inside the riser and safely remove them from the system. This trend gained extra momentum with the advent of systems such as riser-gas handlers and managed-pressure drilling. One very important recent development in terms of research on gas in risers is happening at Louisiana State University (LSU). LSU was awarded a $4.91 million grant by the Gulf Research Program, an independent science-based program managed by the National Academy of Sciences. The 3-year project, currently under way, will use an actual well at the LSU Petroleum Engineering Research and Technology Transfer Laboratory to be recompleted with modern distributed instrumentation in combination with other laboratory-scale experiments being performed at LSU and project partners at Texas A&M University. The experimental data will be very important in verifying the theoretical parts of the project. Faculty members of both institutions will conduct the research studies. This project is expected not only to bring scientific and technical dividends, but also to develop competence and expertise of the personnel involved with the project. Furthermore, it will provide LSU with research facilities that may be used in other related full-scale projects and training of industry personnel in the prevention and controlling of gas-in-riser events. Recommended additional reading at OnePetro: www.onepetro.org. OTC 27242 Mitigating Gas-in-Riser Rapid Unloading for Deepwater Dual-Gradient Well Control by Zhaoguang Yuan, Schlumberger, et al. SPE 180292 Mathematical Modeling of Gas in Riser by Ulf Jakob Flø Aarsnes, IRIS/DrillWell, et al. SPE/IADC 189403 Well Integrity: Next Developments by Bjorn Brechan, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, et al.

Distributed state machine supervision for long-baseline gravitational-wave detectors.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) consists of two identical yet independent, widely separated, long-baseline gravitational-wave detectors. Each Advanced LIGO detector consists of complex optical-mechanical systems isolated from the ground by multiple layers of active seismic isolation, all controlled by hundreds of fast, digital, feedback control systems. This article describes a novel state machine-based automation platform developed to handle the automation and supervisory control challenges of these detectors. The platform, called Guardian, consists of distributed, independent, state machine automaton nodes organized hierarchically for full detector control. User code is written in standard Python and the platform is designed to facilitate the fast-paced development process associated with commissioning the complicated Advanced LIGO instruments. While developed specifically for the Advanced LIGO detectors, Guardian is a generic state machine automation platform that is useful for experimental control at all levels, from simple table-top setups to large-scale multi-million dollar facilities.

Upgrading Wastewater Facilities without Multi-Million Dollar Facility Upgrades

Upgrading Wastewater Facilities without Multi-Million Dollar Facility Upgrades

North by Midwest: Moving the World Chess Hall of Fame and Museum from Miami to St. Louis

After seven years of commendably representing the rich history of chess in Miami, Florida, the World Chess Hall of Fame and Museum is scheduled to re-open its doors in St. Louis, Missouri in September 2011. The road to St. Louis has been a long and winding one for this young institution, which counts its new home as the fourth in its relatively brief twenty-seven year history. From its modest beginnings in a basement in New Windsor, New York to a new multimillion-dollar facility in St. Louis’ upscale shopping and dining district, the hall of fame has had to adapt to a number of different spaces and environments, all the while maintaining its mission to commemorate the game's greatest players, as well as to educate visitors about the long and remarkable history of the game and the impact it has had on cultures worldwide. After a brief look at the origins of the World Chess Hall of Fame and Museum, this essay will explore how the museum came to move from Miami to St. Louis, the procedures used to make this transition as organized and efficient as possible, and the obstacles the organizers have faced-and will face-in the months leading up to and following the opening in fall 2011.

The new architecture of medical education

It will be much more than just another glittering multi-million dollar facility in booming Wild Rose Country. In fact, proponents believe the new $900 million state-of-the-art Edmonton Clinic, scheduled to open in 2011, will embody a revolutionary experiment in medical education: an attempt to

An Athletic Arms Race

MYLES Brand, a fellow former university president, is a friend of mine. He is, I believe, a person of unquestioned integrity and high principle. But as president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), he has been asked to fend off an unruly mob with a switch. In the present environment for collegiate sports, his chances for success are slight, at best. What Brand and the NCAA face today is a very real arms race, one fueled by an insatiable appetite on the part of students, alumni, and the general public for college athletic success. Fiscal restraint is not frequently in evidence. New, multimillion-dollar facilities now seem to be the rule, rather than the exception. As Brand has told me, Institutions hold mortgages on burgeoning facility expansion that represents on average 20% of intercollegiate athletics spending. Too few understand that only a handful of major intercollegiate athletic programs actually make money (fewer than 15 at last count). Meanwhile, the rest struggle to break even. Despite television income, growing ticket revenues, and contributions from supporters, big-time college athletics is a high-risk business. Let us not forget that marquee football and basketball coaches are paid millions of dollars a year, many times over what is allotted to outstanding faculty members and administrators. Not too many years ago, the million-dollar coach was a rarity. That is no longer the case, with at least 50 of the Football Bowl of NCAA Division I (formerly Division I-A) head coaches annually earning $1 million or more. There were five in 1999. Coaches at the Bowl Subdivision schools are making an average of more than $950,000 a year. Brand has said that the salaries of million-dollar coaches have averaged 3.1% of the schools' football budgets. University of Alabama paid Nick Saban $4 million a year to return the Crimson Tide to the glory days of legendary coach Bear Bryant. Saban is being paid 9% of the Alabama football budget. Too many athletic departments rely on some form of university subsidy, a sore point with faculty members and elected state officials. A growing number of elected federal officials believe that athletic departments have more influence than they should and need to be reined in. Members of the House Ways and Means Committee are threatening to take action, because they believe college athletic programs have moved too far away from their original and intended purposes and in many instances are undercutting institutional missions. threat is real. Some members of Congress see today's major college football and basketball programs as professional-like in nature and substance and resent their tax-exempt status. Former University of Michigan President James Duderstadt has said repeatedly, The simplest way to characterize the problem with college sports is to recognize that it is a very profitable commercial entertainment business that is moving farther and farther away from the original academic purposes of the university. Any congressional intrusion is certain to be actively discouraged by college presidents and their trustees, who will argue that they are best able to regulate collegiate sports. And I believe a clear majority of the House and Senate members will be careful to end up on the right political side of the issue, because they realize the immense and growing popularity of college football and basketball with the voters. …

Talking Cents: Public Discourse, State Oversight, and Democratic Education in East St. Louis

Since Jonathan Kozol's 1991 publication of Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools, East St. Louis, Illinois, District 189 has endured unswerving criticism and study. While Kozol's work made publicly known the horrible conditions of schools in the district, it did not bring immediate relief. In 1994, the state appointed a financial oversight panel to review the work of the local school board and to begin work on the district's budgetary problems. For the next ten years, this panel controlled all fiscal decisions for the schools in East St. Louis. District 189 moved from having a $5 million deficit and a total operating budget of $72 million to having $20 million in reserve funding and a $92 million operating budget. Using newspaper articles, state oversight panel reports, and budgetary data, we explore the tenuous, and at times untenable, public relationship between the local school board and the financial oversight committee. We are visitors, waiting. We wait for the children to come forth, for their performances to astound us, as they must. We know what they do not know, that the standing ovation is guaranteed, that the audience will applaud their achievement. We are educators bound by a silent expectation that we must, at least appear to, love children. It is this code, this unspoken rule that guides our interpretations, opens our eyes, admonishes our critique, and moves us to cheer. Here, in this multi-million dollar facility, we watch these children perform for a crowd that looks back with white eyes. What does it mean for these honey/chocolate/almond skinned young people to dance before us—an us that gazes with false promise? Do our cheers sound hollow and contrived or meaningful land sincere? In those brief moments, as they dance, they are present and we are engaged, connected in an unspoken political struggle which makes this dance much more than a dance. We wonder if anyone notices that they are dancing for their lives.

Ranking protective coatings: Laboratory vs. field experience

Environmentally protective coatings are used on a wide range of gas turbine components for survival in the harsh operating conditions of engines. A host of coatings are commercially available to protect hot-section components, ranging from simple aluminides to designer metallic overlays and ceramic thermal barrier coatings. A variety of coating-application processes are available, and they range from simple pack cementation processing to complex physical vapor deposition, which requires multimillion dollar facilities. Detailed databases are available for most coatings and coating/process combinations for a range of laboratory tests. Still, the analysis of components actually used in engines often yields surprises when compared against predicted coating behavior from laboratory testing. This paper highlights recent work to develop new laboratory tests that better simulate engine environments. Comparison of in-flight coating performance as well as industrial and factory engine testing on a range of hardware is presented along with laboratory predictions from standard testing and from recently developed cyclic burner-rig testing.

Naturalizing habitats for captive primates

There has been increasing interest in naturalizing habitats for captive primates in zoos and other primate facilities during the last decade. At present, there are at least six multimillion-dollar facilities of this type in design or under construction. This paper briefly reviews the recent history of this approach and the rationale behind it. Factors which contribute to the maintenance of successful plant growth in indoor and outdoor primate exhibits are also discussed. Other habitat enrichment concepts are suggested to provide habitats which strongly contribute to the mental and physical well-being of captive primates.