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A brief background to the development of the rock engineering design process is given, showing that since the development of the science of mathematics, deterministic METHODs have been used to perform various calculations. The variability of rock properties and support characteristics have always been known. However, they were not explicitly used in design but compensated for by the use of a safety factor, i.e. making a design more stringent than required by the calculations. The problem with this procedure is that the effect of increasing a safety factor on the overall stability of the design cannot be known because the range of variability is not incorporated in the design. The only way to overcome this problem is to make use of the science of probability. In doing that, the ranges of rock qualities are explicitly included in the design and the probability of failure is exposed. Examples of common rock engineering calculations in mining are provided, showing that the probabilistic designs are not difficult or time consuming to perform and yield much more useful outcomes than merely using a safety factor.

Background: In many countries, disease registries are the main source of information necessary for planning and monitoring health-improving programs. In Iran, there is no unified registry system for deaths due to traffic accidents, so organizations that are involved in traffic accidents report different statistics. This study aimed to assess traffic accident mortality rate and completeness of death registries in Northern provinces of Iran from March 21, 2010 to March 20, 2011 using capture-recapture METHOD. METHODs: Data of all traffic accident victims including last name, age, sex, and time of death confirmed by traffic police legal forensics organization, and hospitals were used to collect. Then, different log-linear models proposed in the context of capture-recapture METHOD were fitted to predict the number of cases missed by the sources. Akaike information criterion (AIC) and Bayesian information criterion (BIC) were used as goodness of fit indices to identify preferred fitted models. Results: According to the prediction of the most fitted model, the total number of traffic accident deaths was 3857 of which, 727 cases were not documented by any of the responsible organizations. Mortality rate due to traffic accidents was ESTIMATEd as 53. 73 with 95% confidence interval (52. 41-55. 15) per 100000 population of the three provinces. The rates of legal medicine organization, hospitals, and traffic police department were 65. 95%, 36. 06%, and 16. 85%, respectively. Conclusions: Incidence rate of fatal traffic accidents in Northern provinces of Iran is higher in comparison with other provinces. It seems that statistics reported by responsible organizations are underESTIMATEd, hence the need for application of METHODs like the capture-recapture METHOD.

Reservoir permeability in upstream of petroleum engineering plays an essential role in crude oil production. Due to the high cost and difficulty in direct measurement of the permeability, having a robust model of this parameter based on the openhole logs and data is preferred. The sonic, volumetric density, gamma ray, total porosity, neutron porosity logs are available in the time of logging and have the highest correlation with reservoir permeability characteristics. To ESTIMATE the permeability of the reservoir based on these available data, a new intelligent METHOD of Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Wavelet Neural Network (WNN) is derived. In the developed model, a new objective function has been introduced. For avoiding more complexity of the objective function, the initializing weights of neural network has been done by GA. Then, the training levenberg marquardt algorithm is utilized to update the optimal weighting. In other words, wavelet as activation function of neural network enhances exploitation search abilities of the algorithm and leads to a robust model. In the following, a sample reservoir as a source of data in this field is selected to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in the permeability estimation. For the sake of comparison, two algorithms of BP-ANN and GA-BP, which have been already presented in the literature, are applied for the same data sets and the superiority of developed model in estimation has been illustrated.