Unavoidable Accident Research Articles

A case study of unavoidable accidents of autonomous vehicles

Objective: Autonomous driving technology eliminates human errors, and thus it is a promising solution for reducing road traffic fatalities and injuries. While future autonomous driving technology may be able to reduce the number of collision accidents, it will not be able to avoid all collision accidents. This study is aimed to demonstrate why some accidents will still be unavoidable even with advanced perceiving and controlling capabilities. Methods: Because fully autonomous vehicles are currently in the laboratory stage, we used the prospective method to study the unavoidable accident of autonomous vehicles. Suitable traffic accident cases were screened from the China In-Depth Accident Study (CIDAS). Videos of the accidents were analyzed and the accidents were reconstructed using PC-Crash software. We assumed that target vehicle possesses near-perfect autonomous driving capabilities. Unavoidable accidents were determined based on vehicle dynamics and traffic constraints. The time from perceiving hazard to collision was calculated for each accident. Results: Among the 112 accidents screened, 15 cases of unavoidable accidents were identified. Three typical cases are presented in detail in this study. Based on the reasons why the target vehicles cannot avoid the collisions, we classified the unavoidable accidents into time-limit type and space-limit type. Time-limit means that vehicle cannot stop or steer out of danger in time, and space-limit means that the traffic environment does not have sufficient space for vehicle to avoid collision. Conclusions: Collision accidents will still occur even with perfect autonomous driving technology. We used the prospective method to investigate scenarios and characteristics of unavoidable accidents of autonomous vehicles. The time-limit type and the space-limit type were identified as two categories of unavoidable accidents. For the time-limit unavoidable accidents, the time from perceiving hazard to collision is typically not longer than 1.5s. The characteristics of unavoidable accidents and the estimated pre-crash warning time can provide some reference for establishing future occupant protection strategies. This study also showed the limitations of active safety and the necessity of passive safety.

Addressing inequal risk exposure in the development of automated vehicles

Automated vehicles (AVs) are expected to operate on public roads, together with non-automated vehicles and other road users such as pedestrians or bicycles. Recent ethical reports and guidelines raise worries that AVs will introduce injustice or reinforce existing social inequalities in road traffic. One major injustice concern in today’s traffic is that different types of road users are exposed differently to risks of corporal harm. In the first part of the paper, we discuss the responsibility of AV developers to address existing injustice concerns regarding risk exposure as well as approaches on how to fulfill the responsibility for a fairer distribution of risk. In contrast to popular approaches on the ethics of risk distribution in unavoidable accident cases, we focus on low and moderate risk situations, referred to as routine driving. For routine driving, the obligation to distribute risks fairly must be discussed in the context of risk-taking and risk-acceptance, balancing safety objectives of occupants and other road users with driving utility. In the second part of the paper, we present a typical architecture for decentralized automated driving which contains a dedicated module for real-time risk estimation and management. We examine how risk estimation modules can be adjusted and parameterized to redress some inequalities.

The Liability of the Custodian If the Victim is Proven to Have Contributed to the Damage

Aims: This study aims to address the custodian liability for losses caused by an object under his control, especially for the damages occurred by mechanical machines, and showing the effect of split liability on the custodian’s liability especially in cases of paying compensation to the victim. On the other hand, this study discusses the custodian liability under the Jordanian law and some of the Arab laws.
 
 Materials and methods: Following identification of the study objectives, the researcher compared the legal frames in Jordan and other surrounding countries. The researcher was able to formulate the present study. 
 
 Study findings: The legal text in Article (261) of the Jordanian Civil Code exempts the custodian in its main text from paying compensation under some conditions such as natural disaster, unavoidable accident, force majeure, an act of a third party, or act of the person suffering loss, while at the same time the Article ended with the phrase “unless otherwise stipulated by law or agreement.” Which I think is unnecessary here and shall be omitted. The Jordanian legislation also neglected to clarify the types of fault that may be caused by the victim especially, if it is proved that the victim has contributed to causing the damage, the fault of the custodian, in this case, can be rebutted.
 
 Conclusion: The Jordanian legislator did not comprehensively specify the types of the victim’s fault, while the Lebanese legislator has clarified those types. Explicitly, there is no need for the part of Article (261) of the Jordanian Civil Law which says that "otherwise or agreement" because the text is clear and fulfills its intended purpose.

Inpatient Data of Occupational Burn Injuries Treated at a Tertiary Burn Center.

Occupational burns are among the important causes of work-related injuries. We aimed to investigate the epidemiology and reasons of occupational burns and thereby to emphasize preventive measures. Between January 2017 and December 2018, the data of major occupational burn injury patients admitted to our burn center were evaluated in this cross-sectional retrospective study. During the study period 342 patients older than 16 years were admitted to the burn center. Among them 80 patients with occupational burns (23.4%) were identified. The mean age of the patients was 34.73 ± 12.3 years. Seventy-eight patients (97.5%) were male. Electrical burns and flame burns were the two leading type of occupational burns. The most common occupation of our patients was construction work. Dangerous behavior, carelessness, lack of protective equipment, and failure to follow instructions were causes of injury. Only 14 patients (17.5%) experienced unavoidable accident. Thirty-seven patients (46.3%) worked on temporary basis. Occupational experience was under 5 years in majority of the cases (62.5%). For the occupational burns the percentage of burned TBSA was 17.08 ± 14.5 (1-60) and the length of hospital stay was 23.94 ± 21.9 days (2-106). There were no significant differences between occupational and nonoccupational burn injuries considering TBSA, total length of hospital stay, and complications (P > .05). Occupational burn injuries are common in less experienced and younger workers. Therefore, recognition of the problem and maintaining awareness is important. In order to prevent occupational accidents and burns, occupational health and safety rules must be obeyed.

Critical Decision Making Using Neural Networks

Decision Making influenced by different scenarios is an important feature that needs to be integrated in the computing systems. In this paper, the system takes prompt decisions in emotionally motivated use-cases like in an unavoidable car accident. The system extracts the features from the available visual and processes it in the Neural network. In addition to that the facial recognition plays a key role in returning factors critical to the scenario and hence alter the final decision. Finally, each recognized subject is categorized into six distinct classes which is utilised by the system for intelligent decision-making. Such a system can form the basis of dynamic and intelligent decision-making systems of the future which include elements of emotional intelligence.

Killing by Autonomous Vehicles and the Legal Doctrine of Necessity

How should autonomous vehicles (aka self-driving cars) be programmed to behave in the event of an unavoidable accident in which the only choice open is one between causing different damages or losses to different objects or persons? This paper addresses this ethical question starting from the normative principles elaborated in the law to regulate difficult choices in other emergency scenarios. In particular, the paper offers a rational reconstruction of some major principles and norms embedded in the Anglo-American jurisprudence and case law on the “doctrine of necessity”; and assesses which, if any, of these principles and norms can be utilized to find reasonable guidelines for solving the ethical issue of the regulation of the programming of autonomous vehicles in emergency situations. The paper covers the following topics: the distinction between “justification” and “excuse”, the legal prohibition of intentional killing outside self-defence, the incommensurability of goods, and the legal constrains to the use of lethal force set by normative positions: obligations, responsibility, rights, and authority. For each of these principles and constrains the possible application to the programming of autonomous vehicles is discussed. Based on the analysis, some practical suggestions are offered.

O DEVIR-DEFICIENTE DA PEDAGOGIA: NOTAS PARA UMA ANTROPOLOGIA FILOSÓFICO-EDUCACIONAL DA PLASTICIDADE

This essay discusses the formative processes while antropotechnic processes. The expectation is to contribute for the debate about the meanings inherent in speeches that promote and disseminate multiple devices for inclusion of differences. The central argument defends that the abandonment of reflection on the notion of plasticity has deprived the philosophy of education to think the exposure processes of lives that do not allow themselves to double the existing normative codes, hiding a possible becomingdeficient's own pedagogy. The becoming-deficient pedagogy goes through expressive manifestations of the life forms that explode and are made disaster. Plasticity is configured so as a condition of possibility and as a threat to domesticating humanism. Following the reflections of Peter Sloterdijk and Catherine Malabou, plasticity is thought of as an indication that all human life is an unavoidable accident, and disability only a limit on biopolitics attempts to reconstruct an ideal or totalizing model of the human. Disabled people can save some disturbing lessons about our pedagogical maxims. The becoming-deficient pedagogy points an ethical-political will to think about human development beyond the notion of perfectibility, jeopardizing one of the esoteric secrets of Western pedagogical reflection.

Pre-collision systems for urban environment accidents avoidance

Primary security systems are oriented to avoid accidents, secondary, on the other hand, focus in reducing the consequences of them. There is a group of systems that stands halfway of both sets, they use information sources from first set, but usually they pursue the objectives of the second set, they are pre-collision systems. Pre-collision systems that were taken into account on this research work consider the actions to perform to control the vehicle (steering or breaking), and the generation of signals to deploy the security systems to be activated before the collision. In the present paper, a pre-collision system is presented, the system is able to avoid hits and collisions, or in the event of unavoidable accident, it minimizes the possible damage caused. The development of the mitigation maneuvers depends on the accurate analysis and the correct understanding of the environment. Following this statement, the present work provides obstacle detection, evaluation of risk and avoidance possibility.

Guardians of finance: making regulators work for us

The recent financial crisis was an accident, a “perfect storm” fueled by an unforeseeable confluence of events that unfortunately combined to bring down the global financial systems. And policy makers? They did everything they could, given their limited authority. It was all a terrible, unavoidable accident. Or at least this is the story told and retold by a chorus of luminaries that includes Timothy Geithner, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, Ben Bernanke, and Alan Greenspan. In Guardians of Finance, economists James Barth, Gerard Caprio, and Ross Levine argue that the financial meltdown of 2007 to 2009 was no accident; it was negligent homicide. They show that senior regulatory officials around the world knew or should have known that their policies were destabilizing the global financial system, had years to process the evidence that risks were rising, had the authority to change their policies--and yet chose not to act until the crisis had fully emerged. The current system, the authors write, is simply not designed to make policy choices on behalf of the public. It is virtually impossible for the public and its elected officials to obtain informed and impartial assessment of financial regulation and to hold regulators accountable. Barth, Caprio, and Levine propose a reform to counter this systemic failure: the establishment of a “Sentinel” to provide an informed, expert, and independent assessment of financial regulation. Its sole power would be to demand information and to evaluate it from the perspective of the public--rather than that of the financial industry, the regulators, or politicians.

Too big to fall: America's failing infrastructure and the way forward

This book evaluates how the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis collapsed in August 2007, which killed 13 people and injured 145 others. Investigations following the tragedy revealed that it was not an unavoidable accident, but one that could have been prevented. The book shows how this type of tragedy threatens to be repeated at many thousands of bridges located across the nation. Already more than 50 percent of our bridges are past their intended lifespan. Using the I-35W Bridge as a starting point, the book chronicles the problems that led to that catastrophe, poor bridge design, shoddy maintenance, ignored expert recommendations for repair, and misallocated funding. The book then explores the responses to the tragedy, including the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) document which failed to report the full story to the nation. From here the book evaluates what the I-35W Bridge collapse means for the country as a whole and outlines the possibility of a nationwide infrastructure breakdown. The author exposes government failure on a national as well as state level and uncovers how the nation’s transportation system prioritizes funding for new projects over maintenance funding for aging infrastructure. The author explains the imperatives for why this country must maintain an effective infrastructure system, and how it plays a central role in supporting both the nation’s economic strength and national security. Written both for those who can effect change and for those who must demand it, the book presents an eye-opening critique of a bureaucratic system that has allowed political best interests to trump those of the American people.

Unavoidable Accident

In negligence law, “unavoidable accident” is the risk that remains when an actor has used due care. The counterpart of unavoidable accident is “negligent harm.” Negligence law makes parties immune for unavoidable accident even when they have used less than due care. Courts have developed a number of methods by which they “sort” accidents to unavoidable accident or to negligent harm, holding parties liable only for the latter. These sorting techniques are interesting in their own right and also provide a way of conceptualizing the relationship between specific negligence and res ipsa loquitur, which are two variants of the negligence rule. One judicial sorting technique reveals a paradox of negligence law. New safety technology often reduces the amount of unavoidable accident and simultaneously increases the expected number of “compliance errors,” or routine negligent lapses, that actors will make. Paradoxically, an actor’s use of new safety technology can make it more likely that a court will sort an accident to negligent harm as opposed to unavoidable accident. The article develops these theoretical ideas through a series of graphical illustrations analogous to those of traditional price theory.

Interpretive Guidelines Lead Facilities To Refocus on Their Efforts to Reduce Falls

Interpretive Guidelines Lead Facilities To Refocus on Their Efforts to Reduce Falls

Why phantom nuclei must be considered in the Johnson-Mehl-Avrami-Kolmogoroff kinetics

In the Johnson-Mehl-Avrami-Kolmogoroff theory, the concepts of phantom nuclei and extended space, which caused not a little confusion among investigators, is an unavoidable accident of the theory. A straightforward mathematical derivation of that is presented. Besides, some interesting and important physical consequences related to phantom nuclei have been investigated.

Autobiography: Towards a Poetics of Experience (review)

Reviews127 the holy" (p. 141). For "the world, luce Heraclitus' world-fire, now has many meanings, and die context in which it appears is as wide as diinking can make it" (p. 142). Another way to put it is uiat the world no longer belongs to Dasein; radier, Dasein finds that he is part of the world. The "turn" to poetic thinking is part of a more general turn in Heidegger toward an open, celebrative way of being in the world. Halliburton suggests tentatively that Heidegger in his essay on the jug may be "building up a case for a new or revived religious spirit" (p. 174). Parallel to die contrast from darker to lighter mood, from anxiety to openness, there is also, Halliburton notes, a change to images of water and waves radier dian a house of being, suggesting a movement toward simplicity and harmony (p. 197), a "festive unity of die four" (p. 176), a world where mortals also think of the immortals and where "everything hinges on thinking the play of die world" (p. 213). Halliburton is to be commended for an interesting, clear, and well-grounded account of the development of "poetic thinking" in the later Heidegger. MacMurray CollegeRichard E. Palmer Autobiography: Towards a Poetics ofExperience, by Janet Varner Gunn; ? & 154 pp. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982, $16.50. As Professor Gunn observes, the "classical" theory of autobiography assumes uiat the "true self lies hidden beneath a misleading surface; uiat the individual alone has full access to the depuis where it resides; diat it is atemporal and unchanging; and diat its "fall" into the temporality of language is an unfortunate if unavoidable accident. Most fundamentally, perhaps, by locating the "true self with respect to distinctions between reality and appearance, depui and surface, subject and object, it "unsituates" the self and isolates it from the world. Although this conception of die self has come under increasingly heavy fire from various quarters, most efforts to assess die impact of its demise on the theory of autobiography have been limited to announcing the end of autobiography. Gunn's book is a brave if not wholly convincing effort to provide an alternative view of autobiography based on the conviction that the true self is the public or "displayed" self, and diat it exists only in time and in language. For her, autobiography is an activity that articulates the dialectic between depui and surface and situates die self in relation to its world. Gunn's starting point is not an isolated subject who seeks to express in writing an interiority immediately available to him, but a reader who seeks to make sense of a text. The autobiographer reads his life, and this reading can take place only in the context of a whole culture, including die readings others make of his text. Gunn derives her conception of the "autobiographical situation" in which this reading occurs mosdy from Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics (which has also left its mark on her sometimes excessively abstract style), supplemented by Frank Kermode's analysis of how narrative responds to our need to organize (temporal) experience into comprehensible wholes. In her view, die 128Philosophy and Literature reading/writing of autobiography is a hermeneutical, not an epistemological enterprise. Indeed, she concludes, "Autobiography can be said to model die interpretive activity that makes understanding possible and diat marks our common humanity" (p. 119). Some may object uiat such a formulation, feir from providing a distinctive uieory of autobiography, simply identifies it with the process of understanding in general and offers no criteria for distinguishing it from odier hermeneutical acts or literary genres. Gunn's claim, however, is not just uiat autobiography is an interpretive act among others, but diat it "models" such acts in the sense diat it provides a paradigm case of interpretation as well as "enacts" it. Autobiography could uius be said to be distinguished from other interpretive acts by its self-reflexive dramatization — or, as Paul de Man might put it, its allegory — of reading. While Gunn acknowledges that autobiography sometimes stresses die failures of selfunderstanding rather than its successes, in all the texts she examines (Thoreau's Waiden, Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," Proust's A...

Politics and Railroads in Burma and India

The impact of the political unification of Burma and India on the lives of the people living in these two countries has been little studied. Despite the extensive and varied literature available on Burma and on India, for the most; part scholars who have written about either or both of these countries look upon the annexation of Burma to India as an unavoidable accident of history which had relatively little effect on India and only slightly more on Burma. For the Burma historians, the most important aspect of unification was the political changes which occurred under alien rule. Specifically, the political progress toward self-rule in Burma prior to separation is interpreted by them as a by-product of Indian advances. They call attention to the effects of unlimited Indian migration upon the local economy and the rising nationalist movement. The historians who are oriented towards economic and social organization give attention to the role of the immigrant Indians as labourers and money lenders and note their effect upon the changing characteristic of Burma's economy. They also make reference to the different religious and social ideas which were held by Burmese and Indians and the racial conflicts which erupted. While these are significant results of unification, it is not the whole story. There were many less obvious and dramatic effects upon Burmese life, which, when more fully explored and understood may recast the present interpretation of the whole period.

Embankment Stability as a Factor in Adequate Sheeting and Bracing

involved in the everyday digging of trenches for sewers, water lines, or other facilities. To the uninitiated, such shallow excavations would appear to present no problem ; as a result, the great bulk of such miscellaneous digging is done with little, if any, engineering control or supervision. Control and supervision are also frequently inadequate on larger projects where one ordinarily might assume that responsible charge would be vested in construction men of experience, fully aware of the physical forces with which they were dealing. Relatively shallow trenches or cuts can be deceptively dangerous because the soil may be very difficult to dig and have high resistance to shearing displacement. The fact that the soil may stand unbraced for considerable periods of time contributes to the appearance of safety and, as a result, many excavations in such materials are left without support until a serious accident occurs. Even then, the occurrence often is accepted as an unavoidable accident or act of God, and the demonstration that physical laws have been violated passes with little attention or benefit to future practice. Scarcely a week passes in any large city without a headline reporting serious injury or, more probably, loss of life in a cave-in. Although no statistics have been prepared for this presentation, it can be noted that this type of accident occurs in every community with such frequency that it is hard to understand why it is not segregated in construction accident statistics.

Venous Thrombosis and Pulmonary Embolism

PULMONARY embolism, once regarded as an unavoidable accident of surgery, today preoccupies the minds of many clinicians, physicians and surgeons alike. For it is recognized as a threatened complication in the great field of serious diseases, injuries and operations that depress the patient and enforce life in bed.In the last decade, pathologists have shown that when post-mortem examinations of the legs are thoroughly made, thrombosis is found in the deep veins of the calf in nearly 50 per cent of all cases at autopsy. Much of this thrombosis is terminal and in no sense a cause of death. Yet . . .

Urology and the Roentgen Ray

In two decades mortality resulting from operations on the urinary tract has been reduced from one death in every five operations to a very small fraction, which may be considered as the mortality of unavoidable accident. Thus is due not only to advances in operative technique, more rigid asepsis or highly developed surgical skill, but primarily to improved methods of diagnostic precision. The existing disease is identified and localized to a definite division of the urinary tract. This permits a rapid surgical approach, a minimum of operative trauma, and a convalescence uncomplicated by the results of an extensive surgical exploration. Chief among the methods of diagnostic precision, an integral part of the entire investigation, without which the urologic surgeon would revert to practices of twenty years ago, we find the roentgen ray. What unforeseen developments have arisen since the day, twenty-seven years ago, when W. W. Keen stated that renal and bladder stones could not be diagnosed by the roentgen r...

REPORT ON AMPUTATIONS AT THE JUNCTURE OF THE TARSAL AND METATARSAL ARTICULATION.

I regret exceedingly that neither of the cases I desired to exhibit at this meeting are here. Owing to the fact that I am obliged to return to Omaha to-night, they will not be here in time for me to exhibit them. I secured transportation and gave them the necessary means to pay their expenses, but some unavoidable accident has delayed them. I believe the treatment that was applied to this case and one other since that I have operated is entirely unique. It is very difficult for me to describe to you accurately the treatment this case received. It was impossible for me to make a Lisfranc operation on account of the destruction of the tissues a little proximal to the tarsal and metatarsal articulation. In the customary treatment of these cases a Symes or Pirogoff operation would undoubtedly have been made. I explained to the patient, who was