Challenges in passenger use of mixed reality headsets in cars and other transportation

This paper examines key challenges in supporting passenger use of augmented and virtual reality headsets in transit. These headsets will allow passengers to break free from the restraints of physical displays placed in constrained environments such as cars, trains and planes. Moreover, they have the potential to allow passengers to make better use of their time by making travel more productive and enjoyable, supporting both privacy and immersion. However, there are significant barriers to headset usage by passengers in transit contexts. These barriers range from impediments that would entirely prevent safe usage and function (e.g. motion sickness) to those that might impair their adoption (e.g. social acceptability). We identify the key challenges that need to be overcome and discuss the necessary resolutions and research required to facilitate adoption and realize the potential advantages of using mixed reality headsets in transit

To be or not to be? Assessment on using touchscreen as inceptor in flight operation

Introduction. The innovative concept on applying touchscreen controls on the flight deck design had been discussed for a long time. However, there are some potential risks on touchscreen applications constrained by the issues associated with turbulence and pilots’ inadvertent activation. Research questions. This research aims to evaluate human-computer interactions and handling quality using touchscreens as inceptor in flight operations. Method. The scenario was set to conduct an instrument landing on the final approach using Future System Simulator (FSS). There are 8 commercial pilots (flight hours M = 4475.0, SD = 2742.1) using three different inceptors including traditional sidestick, touchscreen and gamepad for ILS landing. Results. There was a significant difference among three inceptors on handling quality in both landing without turbulence (F (2,14) = 6.25, p =.01, ηp2 = .47) and landing with turbulence (F (2,14) = 3.93, p =.04, ηp2 = .36) scenarios. Furthermore, post Hoc comparisons revealed that the handling quality of touchscreen was significantly lower than sidestick and gamepad. Discussion. By analyzing participants’ empirical experiences, the touchscreen inceptor was rated as the lowest handling quality among three inceptors due to the novel and lack of practice effects in flight operations. However, there is a potential on the information supply for touchscreen inceptor based on pilots’ feedbacks. Conclusion. Touchscreens provide numerous benefits for making flight decks simpler, but the usage as an inceptor is still in its infancy and there are still lots of problems that need to be fixed. Future Systems Simulator (FSS) is a highly reconfigurable modular flight simulator that allows pilots/researchers to explore the potential on future flight decks design for single pilot operations. There are some potential benefits on the implementation touchscreen inceptor for future flight deck design if the human-centred design principle can be integrated in the early stage

The Long or the Post of It? Temporality, Suffering, and Uncertainty in Narratives Following COVID-19

Long COVID affects millions of individuals worldwide but remains poorly understood and contested. This article turns to accounts of patients' experiences to ask: What might narrative be doing both to long COVID and for those who live with the condition? What particular narrative strategies were present in 2020, as millions of people became ill, en masse, with a novel virus, which have prevailed three years after the first lockdowns? And what can this tell us about illness and narrative and about the importance of literary critical approaches to the topic in a digital, post-pandemic age? Through a close reading of journalist Lucy Adams's autobiographical accounts of long COVID, this article explores the interplay between individual illness narratives and the collective narrativizing (or making) of an illness. Our focus on temporality and suffering knits together the phenomenological and the social with the aim of opening up Adams's narrative and ascertaining a deeper understanding of what it means to live with the condition. Finally, we look to the stories currently circulating around long COVID and consider how illness narratives-and open, curious, patient-centered approaches to them-might shape medicine, patient involvement, and critical medical humanities research

Transnational Ireland on Stage: America to Middle East in Three Texts

British imperialism had once channelled Ireland into becoming not only a subjugator of non-white colonies while itself subjugated, but also a transnational agent that nestled exceedingly well between cultural homogenisation and differentiation. Having said this, this essay will initiate a conversation among three dramatic texts that either question the ambiguity of the Irish role in international politics or unveil the ignored experiences of Irish exiles and their interactions with ethnic Others in a distant land. These Irish texts, to differing degrees, resist the normative impositions of a globalised world-view, and present a hybridised yet unsettling facet of Irish diasporic life in America, France, and Middle East, as it is mediated with the difficulties of changing concepts of space and time in a transnational landscape. The discussion on the three texts will illuminate not only the commonality of ethical problems in general, but also how the individual playwrights reflect on the emerging ethical crises through Irish people's own historical experiences and the concurrent Middle East conflict. The three plays to be discussed are Sebastian Barry's White Woman Street (1992), Frank McGuinness's Someone Who'll Watch Over Me (1992), and Colin Teevan's How Many Miles to Basra? (2006)

Mechanical device or touchscreen widget: the effects of input device and task size on data entry on the primary flight display

ABSTRACT: Due to their customizability, touchscreens continue to advance as a device of choice when designing aircraft cockpits. Previous studies investigated the effect of turbulence on human performance when using touchscreens, but few have evaluated its performance for realistic aviation-specific tasks. In this study, we compared four touchscreen widgets and three mechanical devices during realistic data input on a primary flight display (PFD). Twenty participants took part in the experiment at a constant level of vibration, while simultaneously completing a secondary tracking task. Results indicated that virtual keypads lead to faster completion time for medium to large changes while keeping error rates low. Rotary knobs were fastest for small changes. Virtual keypads also had lower workload and discomfort compared to rotary knobs and drag-based widgets. We found the completion time to be the most important factor in tracking task performance, which translated in higher precision for keypads. These findings suggest that virtual keypads represent an efficient and secure option for numerical data input at low-to-medium vibration

Metaphorical language in financial discourse

The aim of this paper is to apply the socio-cognitive approach to metaphorical language in financial discourse according to three levels of metaphorical salience and innovation – the experiential, the cultural, and the topical level. According to the results of the analysis, financial media discourse employs metaphors of these levels in a blended manner and as different mechanisms of legitimization. While a consistency between certain domains of the experiential and the cultural level exists, the topical level is best interpreted in terms of the traditional theory on metaphor. The consistency of the experiential and cultural metaphorical language shows how a metaphorically modelled target domain influences the choice of culture-specific lexicalizations. The mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion as legitimization devices portray finance as an objective and natural discourse of scientific status, while the topical level uses different rhetorical devices to engage the discourse recipients and to guide conceptualization. In summation, the socio-cognitive approach to other discursive genres in general can be fruitful in the classification and the study of the interaction of different metaphorical mappings and the way they integrate to make the discourse legitimate and coherent

Social influences on affective responses to negative experiences

As social human beings, the way we emotionally respond to what happens around us is often regulated by our interactions with others. The overall aim of this thesis is to advance the understanding of how social influences surrounding negative experiences can affect the formation, regulation and transfer of affective responses. Throughout four studies, we examined the impact of different kinds of social influences (face-to-face and online) surrounding various negative experiences (experimental analogues for trauma experiences), and how these social influences impact affective responses (from self-reported measures to physiological responses). In Study I, dyads of participants underwent a vicarious threat conditioning paradigm to investigate whether physiological synchrony between them during learning predicted the strength of observationally acquired conditioned responses and examine the potential role of trait empathy. As predicted, increased physiological synchronization during learning led to a stronger CS differentiation during the test phase, but unlike our predictions, self-reported empathy was not found to be related to physiological coupling. These findings support the role of social influences in the formation of affective responses and indicate that the physiological synchrony captured here may be more related to experience sharing rather than individuals’ tendency to empathize with others. Study II tested whether threat conditioning generated persistent intrusive memories of neutral stimuli, and whether different social support interactions after threat acquisition modulated the expression of emotional memories, as measured by skin-conductance responses and number of intrusive memories. Social support interactions consisted of two social support conditions (supportive social interaction versus unsupportive social interaction) and a control group (no social interaction). Our results indicated that threat conditioning generated intrusive memories, with greater number of intrusions of CS+ than CS- and these intrusive memories were still measurable one year later, especially for individuals with higher trait anxiety and a greater number of previous trauma experiences. Our findings support the literature indicating the contribution of associative processes in the formation of intrusive memories and demonstrate the advantage of adding the measure of intrusive memories to a standard Pavlovian threat conditioning paradigm for investigating short and long term intrusive memories. Finally, these findings suggest that the specific the support interactions used in this study might not modulate the processes underlying memory consolidation and call attention to the difficulty of operationalizing social support interactions in an experimental context. Study III is composed of two online sub-studies investigating the social transmission of threat and safety evaluations. In sub-study 1, we combined behavioral and computational modeling approaches to estimate the influence of others’ online evaluations of negative pictures on participant’s own evaluations. In sub-study 2, we replicated these findings and further demonstrated that others’ evaluations led participants to shift their affective response to these pictures. Interestingly, seeing that others evaluate pictures as safe resulted in individuals feeling less distressed towards these pictures, suggesting that the observation of social safety cues online could attenuate the spread of negative emotions. Our findings offer a mechanism for how people integrate their own and others’ experiences when exposed to emotional content online. Furthermore, knowing how threat and safety information propagate online and its impact on people’s wellbeing could be an important tool to prevent the impact of the spread of threatening information online. Study IV asked whether using the trauma film paradigm in an online setting could induce similar emotional responses as in-lab experiments. We also tested whether reading previous participants’ appraisals after watching the trauma film modulated participants’ emotional responses, as measured by changes in negative mood and number of intrusive memories during the subsequent seven days. The trauma film online replicated previous in-lab results, although with a somewhat lower mean number of intrusive memories. Our results indicated that reading positive comments after watching the film decreased negative mood, compared to reading negative comments or no comments. Reading others’ appraisal did not modulate the number of intrusive memories. These results demonstrate that the digital version of the trauma film paradigm can be used as an experimental analogue for exposure to aversive content online and enables the experimental investigation of how such content impacts mental health. Moreover, our findings indicate an improvement of mood following the exposure to negative visual content through positive social reappraisal, paving the way towards this goal. These four studies demonstrate that vast range of ways in which social interactions influence affective responses, from verbal to non-verbal exchanges in both face-to-face and online settings. Our work also illustrates the complexity of experimentally investigating social influences and the specific processes involved

My child has a disability: an IPA study and meta-synthesis exploring the experience of parents

Raising a child is not easy for any parent, however for those whose child also has a disability, the process is even more complex. The papers presented here explore the experiences of parents who have a child with a disability. From understanding parents’ experiences in more details, it is hoped that support can be tailored to serve the needs of parents better and improve the outcomes for children. Chapter one details a meta-synthesis, reviewing qualitative articles which address the experience of parents’ with a child with congenital heart disease. Twelve overarching themes are presented, capturing parents’ responses, the parent-child attachment and parental resilience. Recommendations are made for how to support parents and areas of development for healthcare professionals are identified. Chapter two details a qualitative study examining the experiences of eight fathers of children with autism. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis is used to provide an in-depth account of their lived experiences and three superordinate themes are presented. The results identify resilience and challenges fathers experience, both within themselves and within their relationships. Clinical implications and future directions are discussed. Chapter three provides a reflective account of the research process. It addresses the issue of reflexivity, considering how the researcher’s position may have influenced the research and how the process of undertaking the research influenced the researcher

An Analysis of Current Accounting and Financial Matters

This document demonstrates and represents the work done over the course of a full year for Accounting 420, the Honors Thesis Practicum course under Dr. Dickinson at the University of Mississippi. The case studies following delve into a wide variety of topics mean to simulate what various future careers in accounting could like, as well as to expose current issues and debates that are ongoing in the business world

Understanding the lived experience and psychosocial needs of children and young people with Juvenile Dermatomyositis: A mixed methods study

Background Whilst causing profound muscle weakness and skin rashes, with no cure and a risk of mortality, the rare autoimmune disease ‘Juvenile Dermatomyositis’ can also have severe psychosocial implications. Aim To determine the psychosocial needs of children and young people with Juvenile Dermatomyositis and understand how these can be addressed more fully in the future. Method An exploratory, sequential design employed four phases. Hermeneutic phenomenology guided interviews with children and young people over the age of eight (Phase 1). A suite of questionnaires sought to establish resonance from early findings with children from 15 centres across the United Kingdom (Phase 2) and clinical teams completed a survey about their services and delivery of psychosocial care (Phase 3). A dissemination and intervention workshop was the final phase (Phase 4). Results The lived experience of Juvenile Dermatomyositis, described across 15 interviews was encapsulated in the metaphor of a ‘rollercoaster’. Data from 123 questionnaire respondents revealed that the population reported lower emotional distress than a normative population, with 81% feeling supported. Where emotional distress was reported it was correlated with uncertainty and a perception of burden. Concerns about school and lack of peer support emerged as new findings. All 40 professionals surveyed described doing their best to consider psychosocial needs, although services were limited in all centres. At the dissemination workshop the 33 participants agreed that school support and peer support must be prioritised. Conclusion The study offers new insights from a range of perspectives, built incrementally over four phases, refining the rollercoaster model and detailing where psychosocial care would be best placed to support children and young people. The mnemonic SAFE was introduced to support professionals in implementing these findings: Support, Ask, Friends, Education, reinforcing the importance of asking children and young people how they are coping, whilst living with Juvenile Dermatomyositis