Mahmoud Abd El Hafez M. Adam

The operating room (OR) environment is surrounded by many hazards that include physical, chemical, and biological hazards. These potential hazards might endanger the safety of both patients and OR personnel (nurses, anesthesiologists, surgeons, workers, etc). However, these hazards can be preventable if they are identified and correctly dealt with. The aim of the present study is to assess the potential hazards in the OR, the study also proposed guidelines for safety practices in the OR. In order to achieve these aims, a total of 115 general surgeries were assessed and observed by the investigator as regarding to environmental safety issues and the OR personnel aseptic practices during surgeries using the OR Safety Assessment Tool (B). In addition to the general assessment of OR environment which assessed once using the OR Safety Assessment Tool (A). The result of the data analysis revealed deficiency regarding to the OR suitable environment and regarding to the OR personnel safe practices application during the 115 observed surgeries. The result showed also that the OR personnel had poor compliance with the OR attire and with following specific important OR aseptic practice that indicate the need for establishing OR written policies and procedures that has to be available to OR personnel, reviewed annually, and adhere with. The study concluded that, there is possible risk for patient and OR personnel working in the study setting. Based on these findings, the present study provided recommended guidelines for patients and personnel safety in the operating room.

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In 1937 Marshall Stone extended his celebrated representation theorem for Boolean algebras to distributive lattices. In modern terminology, the representing topological spaces are zero-dimensional stably compact, but typically not Hausdorff. In 1970, Hilary Priestley realised that Stone's topology could be enriched to yield order-disconnected compact ordered spaces.

In the present paper, we generalise Priestley duality to a representation theorem for strong proximity lattices. For these a “Stone-type” duality was given in 1995 in joint work between Philipp Sünderhauf and the second author, which established a close link between these algebraic structures and the class of all stably compact spaces. The feature which distinguishes the present work from this duality is that the proximity relation of strong proximity lattices is “preserved” in the dual, where it manifests itself as a form of “apartness.” This suggests a link with constructive mathematics which in this paper we can only hint at. Apartness seems particularly attractive in view of potential applications of the theory in areas of semantics where continuous phenomena play a role; there, it is the distinctness between different states which is observable, not equality.

The idea of separating states is also taken up in our discussion of possible morphisms for which the representation theorem extends to an equivalence of categories.

This paper proposes a particle swarm optimization (PSO) method for solving the economic dispatch (ED) problem in power systems. Many nonlinear characteristics of the generator are considered for practical generator operation, such as ramp rates, prohibited operating zones, and non smooth cost functions. The feasibility of the proposed .method is demonstrated for two different systems, and is compared with both Genetic Algorithm (GA) method and another PSO method in terms of the cost optimization and computation time where an improvement in both terms is achieved.