Aerospace medicine and biology. A continuing bibliography with indexes, supplement 235, August 1982

This bibliography lists 201 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information system in July 1982

Modeling the effect of trend information on human failure detection and diagnosis in spacecraft systems

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 166-170).Systems are performing increasingly complicated tasks, made possible by significant advances in hardware and software technology. This task complexity is reflected in the system design, with a corresponding increased demand on comprehensive design efforts. Fundamental to the safety and mission success of these systems is the tradeoffs between human tasking and system tasking, and the resultant human interface. The research presented in this thesis was motivated by the development of an early-stage system design tool. This tool includes models of human decision making in order to evaluate system design tradeoffs with regard to human performance. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the effect of trend information displays on human decision making performance. Decision latency and accuracy were examined as performance metrics. To elicit information regarding the subjects' decision making process, the Lens model was used to gather metrics on achievement and decision consistency. The experimental results showed that both detection latency and diagnosis accuracy improved when trend information about dynamic system parameters is explicitly available to operators of spacecraft systems. The presence of this additional information also improved decision consistency. However, it made no significant difference for subjects' detection accuracy, diagnosis latency or achievement. Other predictors of latency and accuracy included the type of failure and the spacecraft trajectory. This was expected as both of these factors are important contributors to an operator's mental model of normal system behavior, which is critical to detecting and identifying failures. From these results, it can be concluded that operators of spacecraft systems could benefit from the inclusion of trend information, since it improves failure detection and diagnosis performance which can improve overall mission safety and success.by Rachel L. Owen.S.M

Aerospace Medicine and Biology: A cumulative index to the 1982 issues

This publication is a cumulative index to the abstracts contained in the Supplements 229 through 240 of Aerospace Medicine and Biology: A continuing Bibliography. It includes three indexes: subject, personal author, and corporate source

On Self Organising Cyberdynamic Policy

The de facto model of what it means to be effectively organised, hence cybernetically viable, is Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM). Many studies attest to the efficacy of what the VSM proposes, however, these appear to be largely confined to human based organisations of particular types e.g. businesses of assorted sizes and governmental matters. The original contribution to the body of knowledge that this work makes, in contrast, has come from an unconventional source i.e. football (soccer) teams. The unique opportunity identified was to use the vast amounts of football player spatial data, as captured by match scanning technology, to obtain simultaneously the multi-recursive policy characteristics of a real viable system operating in real time under highly dynamical load (threat/opportunity) conditions. It accomplishes this by considering player movement as being representative of the output of the policy function of the viable system model that they, hence their whole team, are each mapped to. As each player decides what they must do at any moment, or might need to do in the immediate future, this is set against their capabilities to deliver against that. This can be said of every player during every stage of any match. As such, their actions (their policies as viable systems) inform, and are informed by, the actions of others. This results in the teams of players behaving in a self-organising manner. Accordingly, in spatially varying player location, one has a single metric that characterises player, hence team function, and ultimately whole team policy as the policy of a viable system, that is amenable to analysis. A key behavioural characteristic of a self-organising system is a power law. Accordingly, by searching for, and obtaining, a power law associated with player movement one thereby obtains the output of the policy function of that whole team as a viable system, and hence the viable system model that the team maps to. At the heart of such activity is communication between the players as they proceed to do what they need to do at any given time during a match. This has offered another unique opportunity to measure the amount of spatially underpinned Information exhibited by the opposing teams in their entirety and to set those in juxtaposition with their respective power law characteristics and associated match outcomes. This meant that the power law characteristic that represents the policy of the viable system, and the amount of Information associated with that could be, and was, examined in the context of success or failure outcomes (as criteria of viability) to discern if some combinations of both were more profitable than not. This was accomplished in this work by using player position data from an anonymous member of the English Premier Football League playing in an unknown season to provide a quantitative analysis accordingly