Fatal Accidents in Outdoor Recreation and Nature-Based Tourism in Norway: A Discourse Analysis

The purpose of this research is to investigate how the Norwegian outdoor-safety discourse develop between 2005 – 2015. Second, I examine the creation of meaning and understanding about risk and safety in the outdoors. The research affirms that important elements of opinion formation are discursively negotiated. The main line in the negotiations revolves around how to relate to ‘the mountain common sense line’, based on the code of conduct of ‘touring at your own risk’. The legal discourse, the energy industry safety discourse and the professional struggle draw towards less individual responsibility for own safety, and more towards institutional responsibility for people’s safety, more public regulation and more physical facilitations to reduce risk. On the other hand, lax regulatory legislation, the administrative apparatus, ‘the layman tradition’ and the friluftsliv discourse draws on individual responsibility for one’s own safety, limited institutional responsibility and public regulation, and moderate physical facilitations aimed at keeping people safe.

The Dynamic Testing of Gas Pressure Regulators

This paper outlines a new method of measuring the dynamic characteristics of gas regulators, which has been developed recently at the British Gas Corporation's Engineering Research Station (ERS). The method has the advantage of not requiring fast acting control valves as part of the test equipment, and the results obtained are not confused by test pipework effects, a problem with other methods. Furthermore, all common test methods can be used, including frequency response and stochastic, as well as the step tests in wide use at present. The new technique injects disturbance pressures into a closed-loop regulator, by means of a ‘pressure servo’ fitted into its sense line, and then measures those disturbances as they progress through various regulator components, such as the controller. The new method can be applied to regulators with deformable control elements as a way has been developed of directly measuring instantaneous gas sizing coefficients at frequencies up to 12 Hz without using position indicators. The test principle may have application in the dynamic testing of other regulation systems, such as electrical power supplies and heating equipment.