Stefan Hirschberg is the Head of the Interdepartmental Laboratory for Energy Systems Analysis at the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI), Switzerland. The Laboratory consists of three Groups: Technology Assessment, Energy Economics, and Risk and Human Reliability. Since 1992, when Dr. Hirschberg joined PSI, he coordinates activities on “Comprehensive Assessment of Energy Systems” covering environmenta...

Bottle water is getting very popular all through the world; especially in the gulf countries as the main source of drinking water. However, concerns over leaching of toxic chemicals are increasing. In this study, a health risk assessment was conducted in accordance with the guidelines indicated by United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA). It is conducted based on leaching of Diethy...

Are ratings of any use in human–computer interaction and user studies at large? If ratings are of limited use, is there a better alternative for quantitative subjective assessment? Beyond the intrinsic shortcomings of human reporting, there are a number of supplementary limitations and fundamental methodological flaws associated with rating-based questionnaires – i.e., questionnaires that ask p...

For sediment contaminated with bioaccumulative pollutants (e.g., PCBs and organochorine pesticides), human consumption of seafood that contain bioaccumulated sediment-derived contaminants is a well-established exposure pathway. Historically, regulation and management of this bioaccumulation pathway has focused on site-specific risk assessment. The state of California (United States) is supporti...

Software architecture analysis methods of flexibility tend to concentrate on averages. Based on the changes incurred by a number of scenarios, the flexibility of the system is assessed. This approach holds the danger that really complex scenarios, scenarios that impose real risks, are overlooked or their effect gets smoothened. We propose a method aimed at finding and assessing the really compl...

introduction: nowadays ionizing radiation has a considerable contribution in medical diagnostic and treatment. using ionizing radiation is increasing rapidly, so biological effects of ionizing radiation should be considered more. x-rays in the range of diagnostic radiology have hazardous effects and risks that are defined as random effects. these effects obey the lnt hypothesis that occur at lo...

The effects of railway operation on soil environments are an important topic. In this research, samples were collected from two diesel-driven railways and electric in Japan. A positive matrix factorization (PMF) model was applied to investigate the sources eight heavy metals near railways. results showed that dominant anthropogenic source study areas among five potential sources, with contribut...