It is a well-known fact that humans are subject to circadian alterations caused by the action of sunlight. This strongly affects their behaviour and skill, making them change their level of alertness from high at daytime to low at night-time. Taking into account this biological feature, and considering that commercial shipping is one of the oldest round-the-clock activities, raises the question whether bridge watchkeepers can carry out their tasks on night shifts with the same level of alertness as on day shifts. Furthermore, night bridge watchkeeping has to be performed in darkness or very dim light to improve the visual capacity of lookouts. A sample of vessel collisions was analysed and it was find out that this kind of accident tends to be more frequent and more serious during the darkness period of the solar day.

Catullus 17 poses a host of interpretational difficulties. The thorniest of these concerns its unity. How can the initial lines on the rickety state of Colonia's ponticulus be reconciled with the real focus of the poem, the precipitation from the bridge of a husband who is blind to his bride's erotic needs, in the hope of bringing him to his senses? Many attempts have been made to resolve the problem, but few persuade to any degree. This paper proposes that the key to the unity-question lies in Catullus’ adoption of the rare priapean metre. This manoeuvre expresses itself in two ways: first, by infusing the poem as a whole with the thematic colours ascribed to priapeans by ancient metricians, that is to say a ludic, countrified but also mock-epic ethos: second, and crucially, by constructing the doltish maritus, the thematic locus of the poem, as an alter ego of the eponymous deity of Priapean literature; for just like the god of that corpus, the husband of the poem is a conspicuous sexual under-achiever, the butt of mocking laughter, inurbane, and little more than an insensate block of wood. In sum, by reading c. 17 through a specifically Priapean lens it is possible to discover in it an otherwise elusive unity.

Introduction: Suicidal jumps from bridges into water are a unique blunt trauma mechanism. Impact into water produces substantial variation in injuries as compared to falls onto hard surfaces. Outcomes can be further complicated by submersion injuries. We identified cases through a multi-agency review in order to analyze injury patterns seen in EDs. Methods: Cases in British Columbia's Lower Mainland of jumps from bridges >12m into water between 2006 and 2017 were identified by retrospective review of Coast Guard and Police records. Records pertaining to identified incidents were located in ambulance and then hospital records. This multi-agency approach was necessary to generate a comprehensive case series, as case identification was not possible at the hospital level. Patient hospital charts were abstracted and injury incidence rates were analyzed. Results: Records were available for 41 of 52 patients. The population was 63% (26/41) male, median age 37 (IQR 29-48). Thirty-two cases were admitted to hospital, seven were deceased in the ED, one was discharged, and disposition is unknown for one. Most patients (85%) presented to Level One trauma centers. Bridge heights ranged from 15m to 70m; the mean fall height was 40.1m. Pulmonary injuries were nearly universal, including pneumothorax (51%), haemothorax (22%), and pulmonary infiltrate (34%). The primary cardiovascular concern was cardiac arrhythmia (51%). A quarter of cases had intraabdominal lacerations or ruptures (27%). Vertebral fractures at all levels were frequent (59%), although there was only one case each of cord transection and contusion. Neurological injuries were rare; 59% of patients presented to the ED with GCS ≥14 and the incidence of intracranial bleeding was low (7%). Rib fractures were commonly reported (37%) along with other fractures (32%). Body temperature was reported in 24 cases with 3 reports of moderate and 6 reports of mild hypothermia. Conclusion: This case series is the first to characterize injury patterns of jumps from bridges into water in Canada. Patterns are similar to reports in the literature from other countries. However, we found lower injury severity, and higher incidences of spinal fractures and cardiac arrhythmias. The low injury severity reflects the survivorship bias inherent to the sample: data was only obtained from patients who survived to be assessed the ED. These results suggest that patients with this mechanism of injury should be treated for both suspected trauma and cold-water immersion injuries.

New navigation-related technologies and complex ships' systems are associated with a considerable amount of information and alerts on navigational bridges. Each alert triggers a process conducted by the Officer Of the Watch (OOW), which includes data collection and interpretation, decision making, as well as appropriate actions. In the case of too many alerts or poorly managed alerts, the workload of the OOW may significantly increase, and situational awareness may be compromised, increasing the risk of errors. The main goal of this research is to analyse OOW actions triggered by the alerts. The research methods included an experiment on a bridge simulator with experienced officers, a questionnaire survey and a series of interviews. The main outcomes encompass the frequency of the alerts and the number and the processing times of single actions conducted upon an alert. The results indicate that, on average, during one watch, an OOW spends 22·4 minutes conducting 64 actions triggered by 16 alerts. However, officers consider 45% of the alerts as over-prioritised and distracting at the moment of their notification.

We study the asymptotic tail behavior of the first-passage time over a moving boundary for a random walk conditioned to return to zero, where the increments of the random walk have finite variance. Typically, the asymptotic tail behavior may be described through a regularly varying function with exponent -½, where the impact of the boundary is captured by the slowly varying function. Yet, the moving boundary may have a stronger effect when the tail is considered at a time close to the return point of the random walk bridge, leading to a possible phase transition depending on the order of the distance between zero and the moving boundary.

For an edge $uv$ in a graph $G$, $W_{u,v}^{G}$ denotes the set of all vertices of $G$ that are closer to $u$ than to $v$. A graph $G$ is said to be quasi-distance-balanced if there exists a constant $\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}>1$ such that $|W_{u,v}^{G}|=\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}^{\pm 1}|W_{v,u}^{G}|$ for every pair of adjacent vertices $u$ and $v$. The existence of nonbipartite quasi-distance-balanced graphs is an open problem. In this paper we investigate the possible structure of cycles in quasi-distance-balanced graphs and generalise the previously known result that every quasi-distance-balanced graph is triangle-free. We also prove that a connected quasi-distance-balanced graph admitting a bridge is isomorphic to a star. Several open problems are posed.

A phallic carving excavated by Northern Archaeological Associates in 2014 during investigations at Catterick, North Yorkshire, contained unique artistic features for a carving of this type in Roman Britain. Excavations were carried out as part of the A1 Leeming to Barton road upgrade scheme. The two features — a projecting line of ejaculate and an incised, triangular object — are here considered within the wider evidence base for phallic imagery in Roman Britain.

This study develops a neural network system to monitor the safety of a bridge structure. A truck of constant mass is driven at constant speed through the target bridge. Then, the maximal and minimal values of the bridge elongations are processed by a monitoring system to evaluate the current condition of the bridge. The monitoring system is composed of parallel backpropagation neural networks. Each neural network monitors a part of the bridge. The neural networks are trained using simulation data. The numerical example shows that the monitoring system is effective in the damage detection of the bridge.