Year 8 Vol.No: (94) November 2017 Oil Price ( Monthly) US Dollar 61,14M O N T H LY N E W S

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In this Issue

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Al-Shaheen Honors ISD and ITD

Implementation of SAP GRC Risk Management and Process Control

King of the Corvettes: 210-mph 2019 ZR1 packs a scorching 755 horsepower

Safety and Performance

Excellence: Simplifying Safety

External Inspection

Process in SAP

KJO Participates in RECSO Beach Clean-up DayOn Tuesday, October 24th, 2017, Khafji Joint Operations (KJO) participated in the Beach Clean-up Day in cooperation with the Regional Clean Sea Organization (RECSO). KJO Terminal and Marine Department (TMD) led the campaign in cooperation with the other KJO Departments and Government Sectors in Khafji Governorate, with the participation of more than 60 students. A welcoming ceremony was arranged in this occasion in King Salman Civilization Center in the presence of Deputy Khafji Governor Zaid Al-Dughaibi, C-JOC Eng. Saeed Al-Shaheen, KJO Executive Directors and Department Managers, and directors of Government Departments in Khafji Governorate.

Musaed Al-Suba’ei, from PGD Media Division, delivered the welcoming word, then Eng. Mohammad Al-Balawi, from ISD, presented the Safety Moment, while Ibrahim Al-Suwaid, from TMD, delivered a word on behalf of TMD. Then two lectures were delivered; one about sea pollution and its negative effects on people and environment, by Eng. Khalid Al-Mo’men, and one about the wastes breaking down/decomposition period in sea, by Eng. Mubarak Al-Qattan. Afterwards, Deputy Khafji Governor and C-JOC presented trophies to KJO Executive Directors and Department Managers, as well as the Government Officials who participated in the campaign.The gathering then proceeded to Khafji

Corniche and started beach clean-up activities with the participation of KJO employees, Khafji students and cleaners under the logo of “Cleaner and Safer Environment for GCC Countries”. It is worth mentioning that RECSO is an oil industry co-operative organization functioning on the concept of «mutual aid». It was officially set up in 1972 by 13 founder members. The oil companies in the region at that time recognized a need for collective response to major oil pollution incidents and thus came together to achieve a common objective - protecting the Gulf›s resources from oil pollution.

KJO Participates in RECSO Beach Clean-up Day

Al-Shaheen awards Al-Thuwainy memorial gift

Al-Shaheen and Al-Suwaid during beach cleanup day

Al-Dughailbi and Al-Shaheen during the event

Al-Dughaibi and Al-Shaheen with Governmental Dept. Managers

The Executive Management in a group photo with the participants

Al-Khafji Municipality participated in the meeting

Year 8 Vol.No: (94) November 2017Joint Operation’s News

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On Wednesday, November 1st, 2017, C-JOC Eng. Saeed Al-Shaheen honored both of the Information Technology Department (ITD) and the Industrial Security and Safety Department (ISD) for their distinguished efforts, dedication, teamwork and invention in implementing and operating the

Security Fingerprinting System. The honoring was attended by EDO Eng. Mohammad Al-Khatib, EDB Abdulrauf Allarakia, EDI Eng. Abdullah Al-Qahtani, A/EDH Mubarak Al-Saeedi, and many department managers and superintendents.

In this regard, Al-Shaheen stated that the employees and contractors of Khafji Joint Operations are the most valuable asset and key factor for our success. He emphasized that KJO is keen to motivate the employees to give their best, take the initiative, and make unique achievements.

Al-Shaheen Honors ISD and ITD

The Community and Business Services Department (CBD) opened registration for this year Employee Family Omra Trip.The schedule of the trip starts from 23rd to 25th November 2017, and the interested employees can fill out the circulated form and send it back to CBD via email (cbdadmin@kjo.com.sa). The applications will be checked by a committee formed for this purpose, and the Committee will shortlist the most eligible applicants. As for the criteria, Superintendent/ Eng. Bader Al-Theeb stated that this trip targets KJO employees and their families, and the priority will be given to those who never availed this program before.Supervisor/ Saleem Al-Taisan demonstrated the applicable conditions and stated that the shortlisted applicants will travel by air from Kuwait to Makkah, wherein they will stay at Al-Tawheed Hotel, and will be provided with transportation, food and dual room services. He added that the cost per person is KD 140.00, non-refundable in case of cancellation, to be paid by the shortlisted applicants before Tuesday November 7th. It is worth mentioning that KJO is keen to arrange these events and many other programs out of its commitment to social responsibility.

CBD Announces Registration for Employee Family Omra Trip

Al-Shaheen and Executive Directors honouring MIT Al-Najrani

Al-Shaheen and Executive Directors honouring Al-Ruwaili

Al-Shaheen and Executive Directors honouring MIS Al-Sadoun

Al-Taisan and Al-Khaldi during the family Omra trip registration

Al-Shaheen and Executive Directors honouring Al-Nufaey

Year 8 Vol.No: (94) November 2017Joint Operation’s News

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ITD take pleasure in announcing the Completion of successful Enhancement of SAP Plant Maintenance Module for ESD’s External visual inspection process, through In House ITD – Application Support Division–Project Team. It was the profound vision, full commitment & strong support from our ESD & ITD management that made this project a success.The scope of the project covered the core processes in visual inspection of all existing equipment within KJO facilities including associated structures to identify deficiencies and maintain its integrity. The design also considered the analyzed data to be connected to Enterprises risk management module and automate the risk escalation through SAP GRC process control.External mechanical, electrical and civil inspection(s) are carried out annually to all equipment located offshore and every two years to all equipment onshore such as boilers, piping, pressure vessels, storage tanks, valves, and associated support structures per SAEP-20. The inspector shall check each equipment or group of equipment, complete the applicable checklist and provide detailed report when an action is required.With this new application, existing paper based inspection sheet will be

eliminated, and automated inspection schedule will be made available for the ESD inspectors. An automated logical and accurate maintenance plan is executed by SAP system centrally. All relevant engineers within the business process can view scheduling information. Any delay or missing of inspections can be tracked centrally. Most importantly inspection findings and recommendations will be stored digitally, which can be a based data for any analysis in the future.The SAP Plant Maintenance Enhancement Project, which started in mid May 2017, & Ready to Go live by End of November 2017, is currently going through a Final Preparation phase. The present layer of implementation mostly addresses the basic operational / transactional aspects of ESD’s External Inspection business processes. More advanced layers of Analytics, Interface and automation to Risk management , which need a very stabilized & reliable foundation at the transactional level, can be planned in future as enhancements, further to the stabilization of the present implementation.The KJO Project team consisted of about five members of ITD- Application Support Division and four members from ESD department, playing the most important role of

“Core Team” of the project. The core team was the backbone of the entire project in its execution. From the business side, the core team was responsible for defining & clarifying the current business process details & future requirements, facilitating the creation of correct business environment in SAP, receiving, testing & accepting deliverables, preparing the correct & clean master data in SAP.Special mention must be made about the support offered by ESD process owners, especially in offering & sparing some of their best talent as core team members for the entire duration of the project and in forming special teams to ensure preparation of correct & clean master data. The master data preparation activity, which required a massive effort, was successfully completed by the special teams in all areas. Mention must also be made about our end users, who have spared their valuable time in defining & detailing business requirements, learning & practicing and using SAP application successfully.Mr. Aali Al Mutairi, ESD Inspector mentioned, “This initiative will enable us dynamic reporting and improved decision making with correct and timely availability of data insights. This will achieve process efficiency and compliance with operational excellence.”Mr. Mustafa Alshawarib re

iterated the commitment of ASD in ensuring process standardization and optimization”As mentioned by ESD Engineering Support Dept. Superintendent, Mr. Mansour Mishari Shalan “ Apart from the quantitative business benefits, SAP facilitates improving several elements of our work culture, such as – Completely digital based data entry, transparency in working, sharing of a single unified corporate vision & information base. SAP has surely brought in the much-desired cross-functional integration of processes, and people”.ITD Application Superintendent Mr. Mohammed Al Nufeay said “The External Inspection implementation project has been a unique experience. It was possible only due to the clear vision, guidance & support of our management and the dedicated & relentless efforts of the entire team. Taking this opportunity, he sincerely congratulated everyone & all who participated in the project to make it a grand success.”Information Technology Dept, Manager, Nabeel Mosleh Al Najrani added, “Our knowledge and working with SAP Application on new Inspection related business process deepened our understanding in key areas of SAP Plant Maintenance . It was something that KJO greatly benefitted from”

External Inspection Process in SAP

Al-Najrani with the Project Team

Joint Operation’s News

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Year 8 Vol.No: (94) November 2017

In

2014, with its existing Enterprises Risk Management System coming to the end of its support life and no further development planned, the decision was made to look for a new solution. Consequently, ITD & ISD set out to find a system that would have both the flexibility and structure to support the company’s long-term growth. The Internal team spent six months talking to consultancies and reviewing all the major solutions in the market. “We knew we needed a global, integrated solution,” says Nabeel Al Najrani, Manager Information technology Department. “We also knew we couldn’t have a system that would constrain how we conducted our business at the time or in the future. So it was vitally important we made the right decision.” An in-depth analysis of all the solutions resulted in the team identifying right one that had the functionality that was needed to support the business.KJO eventually chose a GRC Risk Management & Process Control solution from SAP. KJO hired Ernst & Young as their implementation Partner along with ITD as an executor. ITD formed an internal project management team comprising expertise from ITD Application Support Division and Representatives from ISD Risk Management Division. “I’d had experience of SAP previously and knew some of the challenges. KJO Project Team technical expertise was excellent. They were able to answer all our questions and address all the concerns we had. They approached it from the point of view of wanting to deliver a business solution for us. They understood the business processes and how to apply SAP to them. That gave us the confidence that the solution would meet our needs,” says Sultan Mashari Sadoun, Manager, and Industrial Security & Safety Dept. KJO was impressed with how SAP software evolves. “We didn’t want to have to undertake a major implementation every few years because of fundamental changes to the software,” says Mohammad A. Al-Nufaey- Superintendent, ITD-ASD. “We could see that SAP software had evolved over the years, which gave us confidence that the same would happen in the future.” An important commitment from the beginning KJO involved key people from every aspect of the business in the implementation process. “It was a big commitment to take several people out of their day-to-day roles and dedicate them to the project,” explains Rashed H. Shammari- Superintendent, Industrial Security & Safety Dept. “But, from my point of view, it was absolutely essential to involve the key process owners. They had been running the business for years and knew exactly how it worked.” The key process owners worked with Project Team experts to blueprint the system. As processes were, blueprinted Project Team specialists configured them in the system. As the blueprinting and configuration progressed, ITD and ISD was also working on data migration. “Very early on in the project, the team was advised that data migration could be one of the biggest impediments to a successful implementation,” says Mohammad A. Al-Nufaey. “So we put a lot of effort into making sure our data was clean and accurate. We actually conducted multiple end user training sessions before the 1st Phase of Operation business Line implementation.”

Business as usualIt was decided to go pilot with the core business department first. OFD, EDD, OND, TMD, ITD and ISD went live on 15th May 2017, while MSS, ESD, ELD and PCD on 30th May 2017. Gradually all departments data was migrated into the system and the go-live announcement for SAP GRC Risk Management System was declared on October 2nd, 2017. “Throughout the implementation we kept our staff fully informed,” says Rashed Shammari. “In reality, there wasn’t a single area of the business that wasn’t involved or didn’t contribute in some way. I think that commitment, from the board down, is one of the reasons the project was so successful.” “The changeover was as smooth as could be expected and the impact on Quarterly update delay was reduced to a minimum,” adds Rashed. “Of course,

achieving that was the result of a lot of hard work by all those involved. The

breadth of knowledge intelligence had of SAP, coupled with the in-depth knowledge

of our own people and the outstanding teamwork between the two, were key reasons for

the success of the go-live.”Greater discipline The biggest single benefit that the system has delivered is an improved understanding of how the business is being performed. With the previous system getting management information was hard work and long-winded. With SAP, everything goes through the accounting module, which gives us a much better understanding of the Risk Management and Analysis. SAP GRC System made involved KJO staff more disciplined than before, they understand more clearly, what the impact of their actions on other departments will be. That is a major benefit in itself. Improved data input in Risk register has been noticed, more accurate analysis and controls are being planned. Simplified User InterfaceKeeping in kind of adoptability of end users, from the inception Project team worked on to keep the user interface as much as simple. With this approach, KJO succeeded in bringing a dashboard screen, which is one stop place for all Risk Management user to view/update/create data and conduct business transactions.KJO ITD adopted Ui5 technology for the first time, which is now allowing users to use drag and drop options to analyze the risk with minimal data entry on screen.Interactive dashboard display risk related to employee area and action treatment plan follow-up information is made available with the same dashboard page along with links to all-important reportsOnline Dashboard & Reports

Dashboards provide a central location for users to access, interact and analyze up-to-date Risk information so they can make smarter, data-driven decisions.

Dashboard enables to monitor and measure performance and metrics in real-time and on the go. KJO can visualize and analyze Risk data and focus on Key Risks from across the organization on a dashboard, helping KJO to gain valuable insight and drive quick and accurate decision making.

The Risk dashboard is designed to provide management with the ability to view risks across the organization, and assess the extent to which those risks are being managed by the different functions or units.Enables enterprise-wide visibility into GRC risk management. Compilation of quarterly report is made easy since latest data is already

available in GRC system. It also provided opportunity for business users to update/analyses the risk as and when required.

Solid starting pointHowever, perhaps the biggest benefit KJO has gained is that it now has a solid starting point that it can build on to deliver greater efficiency and rich data.“Thanks to the dedication of our own people and our SAP GRC system has been successfully implemented,” says Mohammed Al Saad, GRC Project Manager. “We can already see that it will make it easier for us to enhance our business by introducing new features and processes quickly and effectively in the future. Some of the areas we are considering include linking of Existing control to automated process control, which is becoming a fast growth area for us.” adds Mohammed Al Saad.

Implementation of SAP GRC Risk Management and Process Control

Information Technology Building

MIT Eng. Nabeel Al-Najrani

www.kjo.com5

Year 8 Vol.No: (94) November 2017Joint Operation’s News

CBD is pleased to announce the open-ing of spring camp number one for this year from sunday, 19/11/2017 onwards. Please follow the below procedure for booking the camp:-

1. Reservation can be made on a daily basis from 9 A.M at spring camp by KJO ID CARD

2. Each employee is allowed to book only one tent at a time from 9 AM ro 11:30pm

For more information please contact4694/4442/4622

The season of salty roads, white lawns, and windshield ice is upon us. It’s winter, the part of the year where businesses across the board tend to just slug by. A couple years ago, Panera Bread announced a lackluster quarter of growth smack dab in the middle of the winter season.They blamed the snow, and just like Panera Bread, the oil and gas industry tends to feel the effects of a harsh winter as well.

Investopedia states that weather is a demand-side factor affecting prices. That simply means the weather can affect the way consumers use oil and gas. How exactly are these effects felt?Well, here’s a few.1. Demand for natural gas increases because homes need to be heated! In 2015 the EIA estimated households would use 60.2 gallons of natural gas to keep warm during the winter season. Multiply that by the 59 million American

homes that use natural gas, and that’s pretty substantial.2. If temperatures drop below a certain point, oil production can’t operate at max capacity. That’s less product getting injected into the supply stream, which definitely affects demand locally, nationally, and sometimes globally.3. Crude oil freezes between -40 and -60 degrees Fahrenheit—if temperatures drop that low, that’s a physical effect of winter on oil.

4. Snow causes a freeze in transportation. With less cars on the road, there’s less oil being consumed. And when multiplied across millions of people and cars, that’s a pretty substantial loss for major oil companies. Also, think about all the flights that get grounded!5. A freeze in transportation also affects the supply of oil to gas stations. If tankers can’t get on the road, then there could be a temporary discrepancy in supply as well.

5 Ways Winter Affects The Oil & Gas Industry

Panorama

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Safety

Management

Albert Einstein said, “If you can’t explain it to a five-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.” Some take this as an insult, but I have always thought of it as the ultimate challenge.Can you really dig down to the essence of a mat-ter and explain it in simple, understandable terms? We humans often overcompli- cate matters. We begin with a few basic principles then expand them into countless specific examples. This process has produced most organization’s safety rules, coupled with legal departments wanting to cover liability at every possible contingency.The problem with having too many rules is they don’t direct efforts or efficiently align decision-making. They tend to overwhelm rather than direct. Our clients who achieve the best results in safety are striving to simplify, rather than to multiply, safety directives and efforts. They are boiling safety down to principles rather than rules. Principles direct efforts in a variety of situations, whereas rules and proce-dures focus on a few or even a single situation.Are your safety programs teaching workers how to make safe decisions or are your programs trying to make every possible decision for workers?This neither is an endorsement nor a condemnation of safety rules and procedures. Rather, it is a challenge to get to the real essence of safety. Once we understand what it really is about, the specific applications of it are more apparent and the need to memorize a list of how to deal with each and every specific situation is less critical.Once we understand a principle of safety, we look for specific situations in which it applies and even expand our thinking into similar situations. Just as children were taught to look both ways before crossing the street, they soon realized it might ap-ply to a sidewalk, train track or pathway.Definition of SafetyWhen we ask workers their definition of safety, we get several common answers. These suggest that workers try to determine the real essence of safety but miss the mark in one way or another. Each of these answers suggests ways in which safety could be simplified and focused on the real, core issues that would empower them to make safer decisions:Safety is taking your time and not rushing. This answer is indicative of workers who have developed a dichotomy between pace and safety. They think accidents happen because one rushes. There can be truth to this view, but it also can be indicative of the lack of planning or pre-job inspection.Fast is not necessarily less safe. There usually are other factors that make fast work more risky. It also is dangerous to perpetuate the myth that speed is your only danger. You can work slowly and deliberately and still fail to recognize risks and take precautions. Rushing often is listed as a contributing factor in accidents, but less often is the only factor. In fact, rushing usually results in another oversight or shortcut which is the immediate cause of the accident.Safety is paying attention and thinking before you act. This answer presupposes that workers, given the opportunity, will identify and address risks. W. Edwards Deming said, “It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best.”Workers without the experience and/or training often are not aware of certain risks. Experience actually can diminish the sense of danger in cases where work-ers have taken low-probability risks and gotten away without injury.Hazard/risk analysis is not just a matter of common sense or paying attention. It is a technology which few have studied thoroughly and on which few workers have been trained. Deming likely would have replied that you must need to know what to pay attention to and what to think about before you act. Only then would this ap-proach be effective.Safety is following the rules and procedures and wearing your personal protective equipment (PPE). This response has been conditioned into many workers through safety training and meetings. Organizations have relied on rules, procedures and PPE to provide what the safety hierarchy of controls labels “administrative controls.” This is secondary to addressing the hazard through conditional means such as removal or substitution of the hazard with something less hazardous or non-hazardous.At the root of this is the mindset that worker behavior either is another risk to be controlled or another tool to control risks. Interestingly, when you ask workers if they can obey all the rules, follow all the procedures, wear the prescribed PPE and still get injured on the job, they overwhelmingly answer, “Yes!”The fact that workers readily admit their approach to safety is not complete or perfect suggests that safety still has some mystery or unknown factors for most workers. Most oversimplifications have obvious exceptions. True principles, on the other hand, do not. Principles are absolutes; they either are principles or they are not. When you try to get to the core of safety but can think of exceptions, you are not there yet!Simple definitions of what safety is, and is not, have proven to streamline and direct safety decisions for workers. Such definitions also can be principles which enhance a deep understanding of core issues. In five-year-old terms, we define safety as having three-parts: knowing what can hurt you, knowing how to keep it from hurting you and doing it every time without fail. In adult terms, we call it hazard recognition, taking those precautions every time. Accidents happen when workers either don’t know the risk, don’t know the proper precaution to take for that risk or fail to take the precaution.Avoid overcomplicating safety for workers. Give them the core definitions and clearly define how safety decisions should be made. Dispel the oversimplified definitions and focus on the true principles rather than the specific applications. Think of workers as the customers of your safety programs, not the problems to be controlled. Don’t try to govern workers. Teach them correct principles and let them govern themselves.http://www.ehstoday.com/safety-leadership/safety-and-performance-excellence-simplifying-safety

Science

Year 8 Vol.No: (94) November 2017

The goal of The Flexible Stance is to enable your business to adapt easily to changed conditions. That may entail expanding production in a boom, or contracting expenses in a slowdown, or shifting direction as a result of changed technology, customer demands, government regulation or competitive pressures. Staffing decisions can play a substantial role in flexibility, either positively or negatively.The goal of flexibility will sometimes conflict with the goal of minimizing costs. A friend of mine faced this problem at his small business. There are five specific functions involved in running the company. Least-cost operations probably entails one specialist for each function. The specialist is good at the job, producing a high volume of good quality work. But how does the firm expand? If they add one specialist, the other four functions don’t keep up with the one expanded function. But adding a person in each function is too big a jump. Even worse, when the economy slows down, how does the firm contract in size? Laying off one employee leaves the firm unable to perform all five necessary functions.The alternative staffing plan has cross-training so that the five employees can cover for each other. Ramping production up or down occurs much more smoothly, but the five cross-trained employees won’t be as efficient as five specialists. There is no right or wrong answer for all situations. Management must weigh the gains in efficiency from specialization against

the benefits of flexibility, which depends on the risk of business conditions changing significantly. Even though there is no one standard answer, the issue of flexibility, both in costs and benefits, must be considered in all cases.This article lays out some staffing decisions that impact flexibility. The first issue is “make versus buy.” A company can produce its own raw materials, intermediate goods, and final products, as Ford Motor Company once did at its Rouge plant. Ford mined iron ore and coal so that it could make its own steel. It bought a rubber plantation in Brazil so it could make its own tires. Over time, though Ford turned away from this approach bought goods from other companies.At the other extreme, some high tech companies now develop products that are manufactured by others. In the service sector, many Internet companies use cloud services from Amazon or Microsoft or Google to avoid running data centers. This service illustrates the tremendous value of contracting out. Imagine you’re starting a new Internet company. You make projections of how many users you’ll have, but those projections are mostly coming from thin air. In the traditional model, you set up servers for your anticipated traffic. You may also need someone to do nothing but oversee the “server farm.” If your traffic exceeds your expectations, then you cannot grow. In fact, you’ll likely shrink when the user experience deteriorates. But if you don’t meet your projections, you’ve spent

The human brain is teeming with diversity. By plucking out delicate, live tissue during neurosurgery and then studying the resident cells, researchers have revealed a partial cast of neural characters that give rise to our thoughts, dreams and memories. So far, researchers with the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle have described the intricate shapes and electrical properties of about 100 nerve cells, or neurons, taken from the brains of 36 patients as they underwent surgery for conditions such as brain tumors or epilepsy. To reach the right spot, surgeons had to remove a small hunk of brain tissue, which is usually discarded as medical waste. In this case, the brain tissue was promptly packed up and sent — alive — to the researchers. Once there, the human tissue was kept on life support for several days as researchers analyzed the cells’ shape

and function. Some neurons underwent detailed microscopy, which revealed intricate branching structures and a wide array of shapes. The cells also underwent tiny zaps of electricity, which allowed researchers to see how the neurons might have communicated with other nerve cells in the brain. The Allen Institute released the first publicly available database of these neurons on October 25.A neuron called a pyramidal cell, for instance, has a bushy branch of dendrites (orange in 3-D computer reconstruction, above) reaching up from its cell body (white circle). Those dendrites collect signals from other neural neighbors. Other dendrites (red) branch out below. The cell’s axon (blue) sends signals to other cells that spur them to action.In another neuron called a chandelier cell (above), vertical branches of its signal-sending axon, which serves to quiet other cells, dangle

around the cell body.Like the chandelier cell, a Martinotti cell (below) quiets other cells with messages coming from its

tangled, tall axon, which spans several

layers of the brain’s cortex — the wrinkly, outer layer that’s involved in higher-level thought. And in a basket cell (above), axon branches, which allow the nerve cell to send messages to other neurons, cluster densely around the cell body.Because the neurons play different roles in the brain, the new collection could help researchers figure out the details of those diverse jobs. Similar data exist for cells taken from the brains of other animals, such as mice, but until now, data on live cells from people have been scarce.“These neurons are amazingly beautiful,” says Ed Lein, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute who works on the project. “They look like trees. They’re much more complex than similar cells in a mouse.”

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/see-these-first-kind-views-living-human-nerve-cells?tgt=nr

See these first-of-a-kind views of living human nerve cells

Safety and Perfor-mance Excellence: Simplifying Safety

Managing Your Business In An Uncertain Economy: Employment Decisions

Panorama

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Environment Health

Fruits and vegetables are a pivotal part of a health-ful diet, but their benefits are not limited to physi-cal health. New research finds that increasing fruit and vegetable consumption may improve psycho-logical well-being in as little as 2 weeks. Study leader Dr. Tamlin Conner, of the Department of Psychology at the University of Otago in New Zealand, and colleagues found that young adults who were given extra fruits and vegetables each day for 14 days ate more of the produce and experi-enced a boost in motivation and vitality. The researchers recently reported their findings in the journal PLOS One. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, adults should aim to consume around two cups of fruits and around two to three cups of vegetables daily. One cup of fruits is the equivalent to half a grape-fruit or a large orange, and one cup of vegetables is proportionate to one large red pepper or a large, baked sweet potato. As part of a healthful diet, fruits and vegetables can help reduce the risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and some types of cancer. In recent years, studies have suggested that fruit and vegetable intake may also improve mental health. For their study, Dr. Conner and team set out to investigate this association further. Increased motivation, vitality with higher intake of fruits and vegetablesThe researchers enrolled 171 students aged between 18 and 25 to their study, and they were divided into three groups for 2 weeks. One group continued with their normal eating pattern, one group was personally handed two additional servings of fresh fruits and vegetables (including carrots, kiwi fruit, apples, and oranges) each day, while the remaining group was given pre-paid produce vouchers and received text reminders to consume more fruits and vegetables. At the beginning and end of the study, participants were subjected to psychological assessments that evaluated mood, vitality, motivation, symptoms of depression and anxiety, and other determinants of mental health and well-being. The researchers found that participants who personally received extra fruits and vegetables consumed the most of these products over the 2 weeks, at 3.7 servings daily, and it was this group that experienced improvements in psychologi-cal well-being. In particular, these participants demonstrated improvements in vitality, motivation, and flourishing. The other two groups showed no improvements in psychological well-being over the 2-week period. Furthermore, no improvements were seen in symptoms of depression and anxiety in any of the groups. “The majority of research linking depres-sion to dietary patterns has been longitudinal, meaning that possible differences in ill-being may be established over a much longer period of time rather than our brief 2-week period,” note the authors. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/arti-cles/315781.php

Year 8 Vol.No: (94) November 2017

Eating more fruits, veg-

etables boosts psychological well-being in just 2 weeks

too much of your precious cash that could have been used for marketing. With cloud services, you spend a little more per actual user, but you can easily scale up or scale down as customer usage dictates.Some business leaders see staffing companies as a “employees in the cloud.” You can ask for more, or for fewer, on pretty short notice. Whenever flexibility would be valuable, it’s worth talking to a staffing company.Business preparedness for change goes beyond employment issues, including financing, sales, operations and logistics. But employees are usually the heart and soul of a company. Getting human resources in the Flexible Stance will go far toward building a business that can thrive in an uncertain economy.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/billconerly/2017/11/10/managing-your-business-in-an-uncertain-economy-employment-decisions/#18873dfa592e

Crested pigeons communicate without even opening their beaks. The birds have a built-in alarm system that’s set off by fluttering feathers when flying away from danger, researchers report November 9 in Current Biology.In animals, nonvocal sounds are not uncommon. “All animals produce sound as we move, even humans, and that sound can be useful to those that hear it,” says study coauthor Trevor Murray, a biologist at the Australian National University in Canberra.Among birds, the go-to instruments for creating these sounds are the wings. Some birds, like Ecuador’s club-winged manakins, use wing sounds in mating rituals, while other species such as mourning doves make nonvocal sounds in times of perceived peril (SN: 7/30/05, p. 67). But whether such noises truly represent communication in the same manner that bird songs and calls do is hard to prove.In addition to recording pigeons with and without various flight feathers, the researchers recorded takeoffs under

normal conditions (top) and when escaping a fake predator at high speed (bottom). The recordings demonstrate the influence of speed on the sound so that a fast exit alone serves as a warning signal to other birds.Crested pigeons (Ochyphaps lophotes) have 10 primary flight feathers on each wing. The eighth — that is, the third from the top of a bird’s extended wing — doesn’t look like a normal feather; it’s slender and oddly shaped. A 2009 study suggested that this specialized wing feather might be behind the noisy takeoffs that occur when crested pigeons sense danger.For the new study, Murray and his colleagues used high-speed video, audio recordings and feather-removal tests to take a closer look at this feather and how it might produce sound. When air flows across the feather’s pointed tip as the bird pushes down with its wing, the feather flutters and makes a high-frequency tone. The feather below may amplify this high tone, while the feather above helps produce a low tone as the

wing flaps up.When birds are fleeing, the two alternating tones increase in tempo, “much like you make footsteps in all locomotion, but the sound of you running from a threat may be a bit louder and more rapid than in walking,” says Christopher Clark, a biologist at the University of California, Riverside who also studies nonvocal sounds in birds.When pigeons heard a recording of the wing sound from a fleeing bird, they sought to flee as well. But the birds only responded to the sound when they heard the high tone, confirming that it is a true signal and that feather eight is vital to its broadcast.There is an advantage — for both the bird producing the alarm and the birds that respond — to this strategy of flying away. “If the entire flock flees, predators are less likely to catch any prey,” Murray says.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/crested-pigeons-sound-alarm-their-wings

Crested pigeons

sound the alarm with their wings

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Corvette’s ZR1 embodies the best and the worst of America. It’s brutally powerful but not always under control. It dazzles with performance, aggression and confidence, yet it could be considered a little vulgar and excessively plastic if you put it in a room full of Europeans. But there’s no question, it’s a hell of a lot of fun.In Dubai over the weekend, Chevrolet unveiled the much-anticipated 2019 model of the top dog in the Corvette family. The fastest and most powerful Corvette ever made, the new ZR1 looks like an absolute beast.The engine, a gas-guzzling LT5 6.2-liter V8, uses an intercooled supercharger that pushes 52 percent more air than the one on the Z06 to smash out a brutal 755 horsepower and 715 lb-ft of torque (563 kW / 969 Nm). To get the power figures up, the design team has used GM’s first ever dual fuel injection system. The carbon cover of the supercharger pokes through a “halo” hole in the hood to establish dominance over the rest of the Corvette line, and with four more radiators than the previous model, there’s now a

whopping 13 heat exchangers in the engine bay.Naturally, as a ZR1, it comes with a 7-speed manual gearbox, a nice one with Active Rev Match for downshifting. But in response to a growing segment of customers who’ve got no idea how to drive stick, as well as the fact that quick-shifting autos are demonstrably better these days for the majority of drivers, the 2019 becomes the first ZR1 that can be optioned with an 8-speed paddle shift automatic.In terms of aerodynamics, it’s horses for courses. With the standard low rear wing, the car is capable of more than 210 miles per hour (338 km/h) in a straight line. If you’re more about the cornering, you can option the large High Wing package that slows it down a little, but adds

significant downforce for hard cornering, as well as maximizing the visual punch in the face kicked off by those signature cannon exhausts.Aeros have been enhanced elsewhere too, with a front underwing

on all models boosting downforce and grip, and if

you go for that high wing in the ZTK performance package,

you’ll get a carbon-tipped front splitter too, as well as racier tires and magnetic ride control tuning for the suspension.Interior-wise, it’s available with the choice of regular leather seats, heated/vented leather seats, or competition sports seats, as well as other options like performance dataloggers and a Bose high-end sound system.As for the looks, well, these things are always subjective, but from some angles it’s got a fair bit of Nissan GT-R, or other high-end Japanese sportscar about it. The front underwing and grille look like they owe a small debt to the Lamborghini Huracan. From other angles, it’s apple-pie American.

https://newatlas.com/corvette-zr1-2019/52159/

From KJO Archive

Science and Technology

Amazon makes Cambridge heart of Alexa and drone innovation with new offices

King of the Corvettes: 210-mph 2019 ZR1 packs a scorching 755 horsepower

Year 8 Vol.No: (94) November 2017

Amazon has reiterated its commitment to the UK by opening a new so-called Development Centre in the heart of Cambridge – three storeys of premium office space housing 400 employees dedicated to research for products from Amazon’s AI-assistant Alexa to the brave new field of Prime Air drone deliveries.The new development joins Amazon’s original Castle Park building in Cambridge to house an interdisciplinary team of engineers, scientists and researchers – dubbed Amazon Research Cambridge – dedicated to “pure innovation”, according to Amazon’s UK boss, Doug Gurr.“The UK has fantastic history of innovation, with hundreds of years at the absolute cutting edge of innovation, and that continues to be true today,” said Gurr. “When picking a site for a development centre you have to start with where you find the world’s best scientists, engineers and technologists. But it also has to be somewhere that people want to come and live. Cambridge is a fabulous town where people want to live and work.”The new building forms part of Amazon’s £6.4bn investment in the UK since 2010, and will contribute to the 5,000 jobs it has pledged to create in the UK during 2017. It’s not your average office lined with dull fluorescent lighting and rows and rows of soulless computer workstations, but it isn’t the wild and wacky fun-palace often associated with big US technology firms, either. There are no porthole doors or psychedelic rooms. The beanbags and bizarre egg chairs have been left at home, leaving room for intelligently designed open and closed spaces engineered to allow collaboration and chance encounters on the stairs or coffee point that often fosters real innovation.“We want the serendipitous, come-and-have-a-cup-of-coffee-for-a-chat environment, so we have open staircases between floors,” said Gurr. “But we’ll tend to focus on things that generate hard work and innovation rather than stuff that might be perceived as a bit more gimmicky.”The lockers still have images of space invaders or golden-age film stars, and there are still the “phone booths” – a small glass box with a desk and a phone where people can go to join a conference call without disturbing others – and the walls are lined art. A piece made of moss and blue plastic representing the Amazon river frames one corridor, while a set of stairs has what looks like the top of hundreds of Amazon Echos mounted into the wall.There is also a roof deck on every floor for staff to enjoy some outside space in a region that has half the national average rainfall each year, and two cafes over just three floors. Caffeine clearly plays a central role in Amazon’s innovation generation.The outside of the building is less interesting; walking past, you wouldn’t realise it contained any Amazon office space, a characteristic shared by even the biggest Amazon offices in its hometown of Seattle. It is the work that is being done inside that is the most interesting part of the new centre. Amazon’s distributed teams work across anything and everything, from features of the front-end site that people use to shop to the devices and technologies that are seen as Amazon’s future. The team in Cambridge plays a large role in the development of Alexa, for instance: from the machine learning that powers it, the back-end knowledge that lets it answer locally relevant questions such as “who is Dušan Tadiš”, to the speech synthesis systems that allow Alexa to sound almost human.While those are the kind of roles could be placed anywhere, they were created in the UK by Amazon’s purchase of a Cambridge-based AI firm Evi in 2012, which formed a significant chunk of Alexa and the availability of talented data scientists. Some roles are unique to the UK given the favourable regulatory climate.“One the reasons we do a lot of the Prime Air team work in Cambridge is that we signed the Pathfinder agreement with the Civil Aviation Authority, which allows us to test drones and real customer deliveries,” said Gurr. “It’s a rather progressive way of thinking about this – instead of sitting there and saying we’re going to write the regulation in isolation without understanding the technology, they’re going to be looking over our shoulder every step of the way and they’re going to develop the regulation hand-in-hand with the technology. If we do that we get better outcomes.”Beyond the Prime Air team, Cambridge also houses Amazon’s teams that work on the recently announced Amazon Cloud Cam, the Echo Look and Echo Show devices. Members of the UK innovation teams have been instrumental in the development of Amazon’s long-standing video services and its X-ray features that overlay information on ebooks and videos, such as current characters or actors. The new Cambridge site joins Amazon’s engineering and research teams in London and Edinburgh, which was set up 14 years ago in a basement but now has office space alongside Microsoft and the British Council in Waverley Gate, forming part of the 24,000 people employed by Amazon in the UK.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/11/amazon-uk-development-centre-cambridge-new-offices-alexa-prime-air-drone-deliveries

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