Research about the Radiation Safety Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Research about the Radiation Safety - Essay Example This paper aims at discussing radiation and its safety, how radiation can be measured, how it affects the lives of human beings and how these negative effects can be reduced. Radiation is majorly categorized into either non-ionizing or ionizing radiation. This classification is done in accordance to whether the radiation ionizes or does not ionize common compound matter. A radiation that ionizes ordinary chemical matter is referred to as ionizing radiation while that that does not cause ionization to chemical matter is known as non-ionizing radiation. The term radiation is under various circumstances used in referring to ionizing radiations. The most common forms of ionizing radiation are X-rays and gamma rays (Gale and Lax 123). However, radiation might also be used in referring to non-ionizing radiations such as microwaves, radio waves, heat, or visible light. During radiation, wave radiate or particles travel away from the source in every direction. This characteristic enables a t echnique of physical units and measurements applicable in both ionizing and non-ionizing radiations (Pettigrew 98). Both forms of radiation’s power trail an inverse-square law that relates to its source’s distance. This is because of the fact that both types of radiation tend to expand as they travel through space. This law only applies when the radiation is travelling in a vacuum. Radiation with the required high energy has the capability of knocking electrons off atoms thus creating ions. As much as both types of radiations can be dangerous to living organisms, ionizing radiation is by far more dangerous per unit of energy deposited. This is because even the powers from law ionizing radiations have the capability of causing DNA damage in living things. Because the cells of living things and DNA in the cell can be negatively affected by the ionization, then this type of radiation can easily lead to higher chances of getting cancer. Given that a single living cell cons ists of billions of atoms, only a small fraction of the atoms will be affected by radiation with low powers (Gale and Lax 187). Therefore, the possibility of cancer being caused by ionizing radiation on the amount of radiation that has been absorbed and the sensitivity of the tissue or organism. Particles and photons the energy of more than 10 electron volts (eV) should be referred to as ionizing. Beta particles, gamma rays, cosmic rays, X-rays, and alpha particles have enough energy that can ionize atoms. Free electrons can also be ionizing due to their ability have attraction with matter. Free electrons might occur as a result of ionization. Ionizing radiations originate from X-ray tubes, radioactive materials, particle accelerators, and some also naturally exist in the environment. Ionizing radiation is usually invisible and cannot be easily detected by any of the other four human senses. This is the reason as to why the equipment like Geiger counters are always needed to detect the presence of ionizing radiations. Ionizing radiation can be might lead to the production of some visible light when they interact with matter, as experienced during radio-luminescence and Cherenkov radiation ionizing radiation can be used in many ways in the field of medicine but can be a health hazard if not used in an appropriate way (Kudriashov 145). Exposing someone to ionizing radiation can result to the damage of his/ her living tissues. Higher doses of exposure to

Being a Good Leader in the Marines Essay -- Marines Leadership Counsel

Being a Good Leader in the Marines â€Å"In order to be a good leader, there are two things to remember. Lead from the Front and always set the Example. From these two leadership principles, everything else will fall into place.† These are the words that have ended all of my counseling sheets with since I began writing them as a Corporal and will continue to do as long as I counsel Marines. I was brought up in the Marine Corps with this philosophy and have adopted it as my own. Leading from the front is often times one of the leadership principles that is easier said by some than actually done. Those so called leaders that would tell their Marines to do something that ‘they’ would never really do themselves. Coming in font of your Marines on a Monday morning without a fresh haircut or pressed uniform and actually having the nerve to address them on how ‘unsatisfactory’ they appear. I have actually had the unpleasant experience of witnessing this, from a receiving perspective. Is this what anyone would call Setting the Example? I have had both the pleasure and discomfort of being led by good and bad leaders. The way I simply define leadership is by being able to do as you say. Lead from the front and Set the example. There are several different items that I have stored in my leadership â€Å"bag of tricks†. The one that I find myself applying the most is the ability to be both stern but flexible. I am a true believer in the statement that no one is perfect. As a leader I feel tha...

Case Studies Homework Essay

Sally is suffering from a debilitating illness which will eventually rob of her speech and mobility. She has requested that the hospital staff do not resuscitate her if she has a heart attack. This is a limitation on use of restrictions on rights because Sally does not want the right to life anymore if it means that she cannot speak and move without help. A pregnant single woman wants to abort her baby. However, the natural father wants her to keep the child. This freedom of expression as the woman has the rights to her own body and she can say what she wants and decide what she wants to happen to the baby as it is her body. An atheist teacher at a Roman Catholic school feels he has been prevented from gaining promotion due to his religious beliefs. This is a prohibition of discrimination because he should be treat professionally and not any different because of his religious beliefs. An asylum seeker is being threatened with expulsion from the United Kingdom. He is frightened to return to his home country because of threats of detainment or even death. He expressed political views against the government; he knows he won’t get a fair trial. This is against the right to life as his life could be taken away by others. It is also against the prohibition of torture because he could be tortured by others in his home country. Also, it is against the right to a fair trial and no punishment without law because he would not be given a fair trial in his country and be punished without breaking the law.

The Political Aspects of Ozone Depletion essays

The Political Aspects of Ozone Depletion essays Environmental Studies Group Project: The Political Effects of Ozone Depletion Unlike most environmental issues, there was widespread acceptance of scientific predictions concerning ozone depletion. Protecting the ozone layer by controlling the production of ozone-depleting substances (ODPs), has been a major environmental concern since the mid-1970's. At this time, two scientists, Molina and Rowland published a study demonstrating the ability of CFCs to catalytically breakdown ozone in the presence of high frequency UV light. This ozone, along with oxygen in the stratosphere absorbs almost all UV. The main problem is that CFCs, halons, chlorinated solvents, and methyl bromide are unstable to UV-C in the stratosphere and will photolyze to form chlorine radicals. These chlorine radicals are a major ozone-depleting substance with very high ozone depleting potential. There are many serious consequences of ozone depletion, not only on the environment but on human health as well. Like any other major environmental issue there is politics and controversy surroundin g it; that is what will be discussed in the following paragraphs. As Rowland and Molinas paper discussing CFCs as ozone depleting substances was being written, global consumption of the main ODSs were increasing rapidly, being used in applications like aerosol propellants and refrigeration coolants. While many were skeptical and wanted further evidence, the environmental protection agency (EPA) in the U.S. argued that non-essential CFCs, as in aerosols should be banned as a precautionary measure. The major chemical companies, such as Du Pont argued that scientific evidence that their products effected the ozone layer would be needed before they introduced any restrictions. The CFC industry was worth about eight billion dollars a year in the United States during the early 1970's and this fact buys a lot of lobbying and advert...

A Brief History of the KGB and Its Origins

A Brief History of the KGB and Its Origins If you grafted the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), added a few hefty tablespoons of paranoia and repression, and translated the whole megillah into Russian, you might wind up with something like the KGB. The Soviet Unions main internal and external security agency from 1954 until the breakup of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, the KGB wasnt created from scratch, but rather inherited much of its techniques, personnel, and political orientation from the greatly feared agencies that preceded it. Before the KGB: The Cheka, the OGPU  and the NKVD In the aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917, Vladimir Lenin, the head of the newly formed U.S.S.R., needed a way to keep the population (and his fellow revolutionaries) in check. His answer was to create the Cheka, an abbreviation of The All-Russian Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage. During the Russian Civil War of 1918-1920, the Cheka - led by the one-time Polish aristocrat Felix - arrested, tortured, and executed thousands of citizens. In the course of this Red Terror, the Cheka perfected the system of summary execution used by subsequent Russian intelligence agencies: a single shot to the back of the victims neck, preferably in a dark dungeon. In 1923, the Cheka, still under Dzerzhinsky, mutated into the OGPU (the Joint State Political Directorate Under the  Council of Peoples Commissars  of the U.S.S.R. - Russians have never been good at catchy names). The OGPU operated during a relatively uneventful period in Soviet history (no massive purges, no internal deportations of millions of ethnic minorities), but this agency did preside over the creation of the first Soviet gulags. The OGPU also viciously persecuted religious organizations (including the Russian Orthodox Church) in addition to its usual duties of rooting out dissenters and saboteurs. Unusually for a director of a Soviet intelligence agency, Felix Dzerzhinsky died of natural causes, dropping dead of a heart attack after denouncing leftists to the Central Committee. Unlike these earlier agencies, the NKVD (The Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs) was purely the brainchild of Joseph Stalin. The NKVD was chartered around the same time Stalin orchestrated the murder of Sergei Kirov, an event he used as an excuse to purge the upper ranks of the Communist Party and strike terror into the populace. In the 12  years of its existence, from 1934 to 1946, the NKVD arrested and executed literally millions of people, stocked the gulags with millions more miserable souls, and relocated entire ethnic populations within the vast expanse of the U.S.S.R. Being an NKVD head was a dangerous occupation: Genrikh Yagoda was arrested and executed in 1938, Nikolai Yezhov in 1940, and Lavrenty Beria in 1953 (during the power struggle that followed the death of Stalin). The Ascension  of the KGB After the end of World War II  and before his execution, Lavrenty Beria presided over the Soviet security apparatus, which remained in a somewhat fluid state of multiple acronyms and organizational structures. Most of the time, this body was known as the MGB (The Ministry for State Security), sometimes as the NKGB (The Peoples Commissariat for State Security), and once, during the war, as the vaguely comical-sounding SMERSH (short for the Russian phrase smert shpionom, or death to spies). Only after the death of Stalin did the KGB, or Commissariat for State Security, formally come into being. Despite its fearsome reputation in the west, the KGB was actually more effective in policing the U.S.S.R. and its eastern European satellite states than in fomenting revolution in western Europe or stealing military secrets from the U.S. (The golden age of Russian espionage was in the years immediately following World War II, before the formation of the KGB, when the U.S.S.R. subverted western scientists in order to advance its own development of nuclear weapons.) The major foreign accomplishments of the KGB included suppressing the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968, as well as installing a Communist government in Afghanistan in the late 1970s; however, the agencys luck ran out in early 1980s Poland, where the anti-Communist Solidarity movement emerged victorious. All during this time, of course, the CIA and the KGB engaged in an elaborate international dance (often in third-world countries like Angola and Nicaragua),  involving agents, double agents, propaganda, disinformation, under-the-table arms sales, interference with elections, and nighttime exchanges of suitcases filled with rubles or hundred-dollar bills. The exact details of what transpired, and where, may never come to light; many of the agents and controllers from both sides are dead, and the current Russian government has not been forthcoming in declassifying the KGB archives. Inside the U.S.S.R., the attitude of the KGB toward suppressing dissent was largely dictated by government policy. During the reign of Nikita Khrushchev, from 1954 to 1964, a certain amount of openness was tolerated, as witnessed in the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyns Gulag-era memoir One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (an event that would have been unthinkable under the Stalin regime). The pendulum swung the other way with the ascension of Leonid Brezhnev in 1964, and, especially, the appointment of Yuri Andropov as the head of the KGB in 1967. Andropovs KGB hounded Solzhenitsyn out of the U.S.S.R. in 1974, turned the screws on the dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov, and generally made life miserable for any prominent figure even slightly dissatisfied with Soviet power. The Death (And Resurrection?) of the KGB In the late 1980s - partly because of the disastrous war in Afghanistan and partly because of an increasingly costly arms race with the U.S. - the U.S.S.R. began to fall apart at the seams, with rampant inflation, shortages of factory goods, and agitation by ethnic minorities. Premier Mikhail Gorbachev had already implemented perestroika (a restructuring of the economy and political structure of the Soviet Union) and glasnost (a policy of openness toward dissidents), but while this placated some of the population, it enraged hard-line Soviet bureaucrats who had grown accustomed to their privileges. As might have been predicted, the KGB was at the forefront of the counter-revolution. In late 1990,  then-KGB head Vladimir Kryuchkov recruited high-ranking members of the Soviet elite into a  tight-knit conspiratorial cell, which sprang into action the following  August after failing to convince Gorbachev to either resign in favor of its preferred candidate or declare a state of emergency. Armed combatants, some of them in tanks, stormed the Russian parliament building in Moscow, but Soviet President Boris Yeltsin held firm and the coup quickly fizzled out. Four months later, the U.S.S.R. officially disbanded, granting autonomy to the Soviet Socialist Republics along its western and southern borders and dissolving the KGB (along with all other Soviet governmental bodies). However, institutions like the KGB never really go away; they just assume different guises. Today, Russia is dominated by two security agencies, the FSB (The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) and the SVR (The Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation), which broadly correspond to the FBI and the CIA, respectively. More worrisome, though, is the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin spent 15 years in the KGB, from 1975 to 1990, and his increasingly autocratic rule shows that he has taken to heart the lessons he learned there. Its unlikely that Russia will ever again see a security agency as vicious as the NKVD, but a return to the darkest days of the KGB is clearly not out of the question.

Research a Healthcare Facility along with a Information System (IS) Paper

A Healthcare Facility along with a Information System (IS) used at this facility - Research Paper Example In other words, the facility serves a population of close to 1.5 million per year. The number of licensed beds as of 2006 is 2,700: patient care as of 2006 was as follows; the annual inpatient admissions were 145,000, annual inpatient days were 733,000, annual outpatient visits was 1,050,000 and the annual home health visits was 233,000 (MedStar, 2007). Programs and services offered by MedStar Health include adult day services, after hours care, cancer services, cardiac services, clinical trials and research, diabetes and endocrinology, executive health services, home care, international services, MedStar Partners Business Diversity Program, MedStar pharmacy, MedStar sportshealth, mental health services, nursing home, orthopedics, outpatient services, RadAmerica – Radiation therapy, rehabilitation, retirement residence, and women’s services (MedStar Health, 2011). The users of health information in MedStar constitute physicians, ancillary staff, IT professions, and pharmacists. The health information revolves around these individuals. In order to meet the requirements of MedStar Health professionals and also reduce the resources and costs needed to run an international healthcare organization, the health facility adopted a hospital information system called Microsoft Amalga (also known as Azyxxi) (Microsoft Corporation, 2008). MedStar has a network of hospitals and other healthcare services; in order to have a glimpse of how users access health information, Washington Hospital Center will be used. MedStar Health is on the move of adopting Electronic Medical Records (EMR) or Electronic Health Records (EHR). Currently, Washington Hospital Center is using both paper records and electronic records. A big challenge to the implementation is the inability to share information with other electronic records systems (Washington

Ecological problems Case Study Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Ecological problems - Case Study Example For a start, it is prudent to acknowledge that such kinds of mishaps arise due to inexistence of clear-cut communication channels between various departments that constitute the City’s Fleet Operation Maintenance Bays. The situation can also be as a result of lack of quick and steadfast implementation of changes made over a given period of time in the City’s Fleet Operation Maintenance Bays and other departments that work in unison with it. Such kinds of mishaps have to be addressed amicably to ease managerial strains and enhance smooth operations in the bays and their affiliate departments. I therefore recommend that the four dumpsters lying at the power site remain there until an amicable solution to the quandary is constituted and implemented to the letter. This recommendation is based on the fact that, returning the dumpsters to the front of the City’s Fleet Operation Maintenance Bays would bring serious environmental repercussions and even unwarranted indust rial mishaps that would affect the Bays’ functioning and processes. Bringing back the dumpsters back to the bays would also pose grave health risks to the workforce that operates in the bays. In the meanwhile, before a lasting resolution to the impasse is found, I recommend that the concerned stakeholders in the department chart a temporary approach ahead to deal with dumpsters that will be filled before a permanent solution is instituted. What responsibility does Fleet Operations have? Fleet operations are charged with the ardent task of warranting cars and other automobiles within the City’s fleet are well maintained and execute performance to the uttermost. This calls for the personnel operating in the Bays to have experience in treating automobiles in the event of any required operation, executing habitual maintenance checks and make plans for repairs on malfunctioned or damaged motor cars and automobiles registered under fleet’s name. Furthermore, the fleet operations have the responsibility of reducing the number of oily rags disposed as a sign of being environmentally conscientious and more so, as a means of plummeting disposal expenses. To achieve this, the fleet operations ought to adopt effectual means and measures of reducing the number of disposable rags from the bays. Such measures include reducing drastically the average quantity of absorbents used and generated sequentially to reduce quantities of spills, drips/leaks and overfills that typically take place during operations (Committee on Health Effects of Waste Incineration, 2000). This is possible through implementation of trouble-free and minimal-cost pollution/contamination prevention mechanisms such as: Performing scheduled scrutiny of fluid storage spaces for spillages overfills or leaks. Perform habitual anticipatory maintenance checkups on equipment, automobile machinery and containers like replacing permeable container seals, and dispenser machines. Train baysâ€℠¢ personnel on how to implement and maintain excellent baykeeping measures and strategies. Curtail the trip numbers and distance correlated to substance shifting in order to lessen chances of inadvertent spills. Use of suitable storage and transfer equipment to avoid unnecessary spills, container breakages and loosening of seals. Case Scenario # 4 What are your first actions? My foremost reaction to such a scenario would be to ask the power plant supervisor to put off the cigarette since it is not advisable to smoke in such an establishment purely on health and hazard justifications. From his explanations that expose what one of the workers has unearthed, I direct him to thoroughly wash his hands because of his involvement in sorting out the garbage which is in essence, ‘ripe’ and has probably come into contact with the contaminated box. After he