Introduction An article in the December 2002 issue of Safety & Health, asserted that behavior-based safety has run its course and is in decline. A construction worker and trades unionist for many years, I witnessed too many accidents resulting from unsafe behavior. Since then I have spent many years researching and implementing behavioral safety in 12 industries on four continents. I was a Prof...

Antibody therapies are the subject of discussion on both sides of the Atlantic this year. Britain and Germany are dealing with the serious fallout of a phase I trial this spring, and U.S. regulatory agencies are working to settle issues of dosing and treatment of antibody therapies in phase I trials. The phase I trial, using a drug developed by the German company TeGenero AG, is part of a new w...

Background: Recently, there have been many studies on the harmful effects of radiation and the regulations on radiation safety have been toughened both at the in nation and abroad. This study aims to identify the perceptions and actions taken as to radiation safety, and the degree of knowledge related to radiation held by the radiologists working in large hospitals. Materials and Methods: ...

The current study examined the role of co-worker support for safety within the broader context of perceived safety climate predicting safety behavior and outcomes for the mobile worker population of team truck drivers. Namely, the mediation, moderation, and incremental direct effects of co-worker support for safety were tested. The current study examined 366 team truck drivers from a single tru...

The astrophysics community uses different tools for computational tasks such as complex systems simulations, radiative transfer calculations or big data. Programming languages like Fortran, C or C++ are commonly present in these tools and, generally, the language choice was made based on the need for performance. However, this comes at a cost: safety. For instance, a common source of error is t...

This white paper lays out some foundational information about different approaches to safety: how various industries differ in their approaches to safety engineering, and a comparison of three general approaches to safety (system safety, industrial safety engineering, and reliability engineering). An attempt is made to lay out the properties of industries and systems that make one approach more...

Safety case development is not a post-development activity, rather it should occur throughout the system development lifecycle. The key components in a safety case are safety arguments. Too often, safety arguments are constructed without proper reasoning. Inappropriate reasoning in safety arguments could undermine a system’s safety claims, which in turn contributes to safety-related failures of...

As software-intensive systems become more pervasive, more and more safety-critical systems are being developed. In this column, I will use the concept of a quality model to define safety as a quality factor. Thus, safety (like security and survivability) is a kind of defensibility, which is a kind of dependability, which is a kind of quality. Next, I discuss the structure of quality requirement...

For any software system upon which lives depend, the most important question one can ask about it is, ‘How do we know the system is safe?’ Despite the critical importance of this question, no widely accepted, generally applicable answer exists. Instead, debate continues to rage over the question, with theorists and practitioners quarrelling with each other and amongst themselves. This paper sug...