Guidelines for Verification Strategies to Minimize RISK Based on Mission Environment, -Application and -Lifetime (MEAL)

There is a trend of compromising verification testing to address the cost and schedule constraints, which poses a high-risk posture for programs/projects. Current and emerging aerospace scientific and/or human exploration programs continue to pose new technological challenges. These technological challenges combined with finite budgets and truncated schedules are forcing designers, scientists, engineers, and managers to push technologies to their physical limits. In addition, budget and schedule pressures challenge how those technologies/missions are verified. A clear understanding of the different verification processes is needed to ensure the proper verification of the technology within the mission (i.e., capabilities, advantages, and limitations). The goal of verification is to prove through test, analysis, inspection, and/or demonstration that a product provides its required function while meeting the performance requirements. It is important that verification yield understanding of representative performance under worst-case conditions so that margins to failure can be evaluated for proposed applications. The capabilities, advantages, and limitations of the testing and inspection performed at each level are different, and the risk incurred by omitting a verification step depends on the level of integration as well as Mission, Environment, Application and Lifetime (MEAL). This paper focuses on verification processes. The goal of the verification process is to ensure the given avionics technology could be safely implemented on the given MEAL consistent with the program/project risk posture

Supporting working time interruption management through persuasive design

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)Knowledge workers often suffer productivity loss because of unsuccessful interruption handling, which can lead to even more detrimental behaviors like "cyber-slacking" and procrastination. Many of the interruption management techniques proposed in the research literature focus on minimizing interruption occurrences. However, given the inevitability of internal and external interruptions in everyday life, it may be more practical to help people regulate how they respond to interruptions using persuasive technologies. The aim of this dissertation is to explore and evaluate the design of persuasive computer agents that encourage information workers to resume interrupted work. Based on a systematic review of interruptions in the workplace, theories of self-regulation, and theories guiding the design of persuasive technologies, this dissertation describes the creation of a prototype research platform, WiredIn. WiredIn enables researchers to explore a variety of interruption resumption support strategies on desktop computers. Two empirical studies that investigate the efficacy, attributes, and consequences of applying the paradigms embodied in WiredIn in controlled and real-life working environments are presented here. Both studies validate the effect of persuasive interventions on improving interruption management behaviors; the second study also provides design suggestions that can inform future work in supporting interruption management and multitasking

Workplace Violence and Security: Are there Lessons for Peacemaking?

Workplace violence has captured the attention of commentators, employers, and the public at large. Although statistically the incidents of workplace homicide and assault are decreasing, public awareness of the problem has heightened, largely through media reports of violent incidents. Employers are exhorted to address the problem of workplace violence and are offered a variety of programs and processes to prevent its occurrence. Many techniques, however, conflict with values that are critical to achieving sustainable peace. We focus on types of workplace violence that are triggered by organizational factors. From among the plethora of recommendations, we identify those responses that are most and least consistent with positive peace. We find that processes that promote privacy, transparency, and employee rights hold the most promise for peacemaking. We submit that such structures and processes can be transportable beyond the workplace to promote peace locally, nationally, and globally.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39920/3/wp535.pd

Models for an Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries

This document is one outcome from a workshop held in Gizo in October 2010 attended by 82 representatives from government, NGO's private sector, and communities. The target audience for the document is primarily organizations planning to work with coastal communities of Solomon Islands to implement Community-Based Resource Management (CBRM). It is however also envisaged that the document will serve as a reference for communities to better understand what to expect from their partners and also for donors, to be informed about agreed approaches amongst Solomon Islands stakeholders. This document does not attempt to summarize all the outcomes of the workshop; rather it focuses on the Solomon Islands Coral Triangle Initiative (CTI) National Plan of Action (NPoA): Theme 1: Support and implementation of CBRM and specifically, the scaling up of CBRM in Solomon Islands. Most of the principles given in this document are derived from experiences in coastal communities and ecosystems as, until relatively recently, these have received most attention in Solomon Islands resource management. It is recognized however that the majority of these principles will be applicable to both coastal and terrestrial initiatives. This document synthesizes information provided by stakeholders at the October 2010 workshop and covers some basic principles of engagement and implementation that have been learned over more than twenty years of activities by the stakeholder partners in Solomon Islands. The document updates and expands on a summary of guiding principles for CBRM which was originally prepared by the Solomon Islands Locally Managed Marine Area Network (SILMMA) in 2007

Cognitive Akrasia in Moral Psychology and Normative Motivation

A number of persistent questions surround akrasia. Is akrasia (acting intentionally against one's own better judgment) possible? If it is, how best to explain akrasia in a way consistent with acceptable theories of normative motivation? I argue that akrasia is possible--in fact, akrasia is actual. Research in psychology and information science, suitably interpreted, contains an empirically informed account of akrasia that is consistent with the traditional philosophical concept of akrasia as notably explored by Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Hume, Hare, and Davidson. My account of akrasia appeals to our best current research in order to develop an account of how someone could have knowledge of the good without attending to that knowledge, or could make normative judgments that motivate, but that do not include all of the factors at play in a more complete normative judgment (i.e. better judgment) that would motivate the agent differently. Adopting this empirically informed account of akrasia requires abandoning positions that are incompatible with its existence. One such view is the view that normative judgments are necessarily connected to motivation (often called normative judgment internalism, or NJI). Drawing on works by Sarah Stroud and Ralph Wedgwood, I demonstrate that NJI can be amended to allow akrasia, long thought to be a straightforward counterexample to NJI, while preserving what is plausible about NJI. My account of akrasia is termed `cognitive akrasia' because I appeal to cognitive states as playing a central role in identifying and understanding akrasia. Preserving an amended NJI by means of a strongly cognitive understanding of akrasia means arguing against an opponent of NJI, which is normative judgment externalism (NJE). The most common form of NJE is Humean in character, and explains akrasia in terms of desiderative or other affective states. That is, one is akratic when one judges that A is better than B but has less desire to do A than B. My response to NJE as a view that explains akrasia is also empirically informed. I make use of clinical research into addiction and addiction treatment, because addiction has long been a fruitful source of examples of akrasia. Many addicts judge it better not to be addicts and yet occasionally or repeatedly fail to reform their addictive behavior. In this analysis, I provide a plausible family of everyday accounts of persons changing their behavior without changing their desires. I also point out that recent research indicates that specifically cognitive bias modification provides better clinical outcomes among addicts than approaches that attempt to change the addicts' desires. One important consequence of cognitive akrasia, then, is that it represents support for theories that hold that motivation can be a product of cognitive and not only affective states

Workplace Violence and Security: Are there Lessons for Peacemaking?

Workplace violence has captured the attention of commentators, employers, and the public at large. Although statistically the incidents of workplace homicide and assault are decreasing, public awareness of the problem has heightened, largely through media reports of violent incidents. Employers are exhorted to address the problem of workplace violence and are offered a variety of programs and processes to prevent its occurrence. Many techniques, however, conflict with values that are critical to achieving sustainable peace. We focus on types of workplace violence that are triggered by organizational factors. From among the plethora of recommendations, we identify those responses that are most and least consistent with positive peace. We find that processes that promote privacy, transparency, and employee rights hold the most promise for peacemaking. We submit that such structures and processes can be transportable beyond the workplace to promote peace locally, nationally, and globally.workplace violence, employee rights, sustainable peace, and corporate governance

An Examination of the Deaf Effect Response to Bad News Reporting in Information Systems Projects

Information systems project management has historically been a problematic area. One of the reasons for this has been the issue of escalation where resources continue to be committed to a failing course of action. While many causes of escalation have been proposed, this dissertation investigates one possible cause: that the project manager may not hear, ignores or overrules a report of bad news to continue a failing course of action: the Deaf Effect response to bad news reporting. This effect has not been previously studied within the information systems literature. In this dissertation, the Deaf Effect is examined through a series of three laboratory experiments and a case study. It finds that in a conducive environment, where the bad news reporter is not seen as credible, and the risk of project failure is seen as low, decision makers tend to view the report of bad news as irrelevant and thus ignore or overrule the report of bad news and continue the current course of action. Role Prescription of the bad news reporter, illusion of control and a perception of a highly politicized environment are factors that also increase the occurrence of the Deaf Effect

Context-Aware and Adaptable eLearning Systems

The full text file attached to this record contains a copy of the thesis without the authors publications attached. The list of publications that are attached to the complete thesis can be found on pages 6-7 in the thesis.This thesis proposed solutions to some shortcomings to current eLearning architectures. The proposed DeLC architecture supports context-aware and adaptable provision of eLearning services and electronic content. The architecture is fully distributed and integrates service-oriented development with agent technology. Central to this architecture is that a node is our unit of computation (known as eLearning node) which can have purely service-oriented architecture, agent-oriented architecture or mixed architecture. Three eLeaerning Nodes have been implemented in order to demonstrate the vitality of the DeLC concept. The Mobile eLearning Node uses a three-level communication network, called InfoStations network, supporting mobile service provision. The services, displayed on this node, are to be aware of its context, gather required learning material and adapted to the learner request. This is supported trough a multi-layered hybrid (service- and agent-oriented) architecture whose kernel is implemented as middleware. For testing of the middleware a simulation environment has been developed. In addition, the DeLC development approach is proposed. The second eLearning node has been implemented as Education Portal. The architecture of this node is poorly service-oriented and it adopts a client-server architecture. In the education portal, there are incorporated education services and system services, called engines. The electronic content is kept in Digital Libraries. Furthermore, in order to facilitate content creators in DeLC, the environment Selbo2 was developed. The environment allows for creating new content, editing available content, as well as generating educational units out of preexisting standardized elements. In the last two years, the portal is used in actual education at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, University of Plovdiv. The third eLearning node, known as Agent Village, exhibits a purely agent-oriented architecture. The purpose of this node is to provide intelligent assistance to the services deployed on the Education Pportal. Currently, two kinds of assistants are implemented in the node - eTesting Assistants and Refactoring eLearning Environment (ReLE). A more complex architecture, known as Education Cluster, is presented in this thesis as well. The Education Cluster incorporates two eLearning nodes, namely the Education Portal and the Agent Village. eLearning services and intelligent agents interact in the cluster