Conceptualising In-Flight Experience: An air Traveller Perspective

The aviation industry has evolved rapidly in recent years, and so have consumer expectations with regard to air travel. This study examines how air travellers conceptualise in-flight experience. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study is divided into two phases. First, semi-structured qualitative interviews were undertaken with 32 members of the flying public and analysed using thematic analysis. Second, based upon the key themes identified in the first phase, a questionnaire (with both quantitative and qualitative questions) was developed and administered to 151 participants. The first phase identified the different ways air travellers conceptualise in-flight experience, with the most important elements being food and drinks, flight attendants, entertainment, seat comfort, and leg room. In the second phase these important elements are shown to have statistically significant effects upon in-flight experience (using a t-test and chi-squared goodness of fit test), however, the size of their effects varied. A Friedman test (with post-hoc Wilcoxon signed-rank test) demonstrates that air travellers rank the contribution of each of these elements towards in-flight experience differently. The findings allow airline managers to prioritise different aspects of in-flight experience based upon their relative importance to air travellers

Biosignal controlled recommendation in entertainment systems

With the explosive growth of the entertainment contents and the ubiquitous access of them via fixed or mobile computing devices, recommendation systems become essential tools to help the user to find the right entertainment at the right time and location. I envision that by integrating the bio signal input into the recommendation process, it will help the users not only to find interesting contents, but also to increase one’s comfort level by taking into account the biosginal feedback from the users. The goal of this project was to develop a biosignal controlled entertainment recommendation system that increases the user’s comfort level by reducing the level of stress. As the starting point, this project aims to contribute to the field of recommendation systems with two points. The first is the mechanism of embedding the biosignal non-intrusively into the recommendation process. The second is the strategy of the biosignal controlled recommendation to reduce stress. Heart rate controlled in-flight music recommendation is chosen as its application domain. The hypothesis of this application is that, the passenger's heart rate deviates from the normal due to unusual long haul flight cabin environment. By properly designing a music recommendation system to recommend heart rate controlled personalized music playlists to the passenger, the passengers' heart rate can be uplifted, down-lifted back to normal or kept within normal, thus their stress can be reduced. Four research questions have been formulated based on this hypothesis. After the literature study, the project went mainly through three phases: framework design, system implementation and user evaluation to answer these research questions. During the framework design phase, the heart rate was firstly modeled as the states of bradycardia, normal and tachycardia. The objective of the framework is that, if the user's heart rate is higher or lower than the normal heart rate, the system recommends a personalized music playlist accordingly to transfer the user’s heart rate back to normal, otherwise to keep it at normal. The adaptive framework integrates the concepts of context adaptive systems, user profiling, and the methods of using music to adjust the heart rate in a feedback control system. In the feedback loop, the playlists were composed using a Markov decision process. Yet, the framework allows the user to reject the recommendations and to manually select the favorite music items. During this process, the system logs the interactions between the user and the system for later learning the user’s latest music preferences. The designed framework was then implemented with platform independent software architecture. The architecture has five abstraction levels. The lowest resource level contains the music source, the heart rate sensors and the user profile information. The second layer is for resource management. In this layer are the manager components to manage the resources from the first layer and to modulate the access from upper layers to these resources. The third layer is the database, acting as a data repository. The fourth layer is for the adaptive control, which includes the user feedback log, the inference engine and the preference learning component. The top layer is the user interface. In this architecture, the layers and the components in the layers are loosely coupled, which ensures the flexibility. The implemented system was used in the user experiments to validate the hypothesis. The experiments simulated the long haul flights from Amsterdam to Shanghai with the same time schedule as the KLM flights. Twelve subjects were invited to participate in the experiments. Six were allocated to the controlled group and others were allocated to the treatment group. In addition to a normal entertainment system for the control group, the treatment group was also provided with the heart rate controlled music recommendation system. The experiments results validated the hypothesis and answered the research questions. The passenger's heart rate deviates from normal. In our user experiments, the passenger's heart rate was in the bradycardia state 24.6% of time and was in the tachycardia state 7.3% of time. The recommended uplifting music reduces the average bradycardia state duration from 14.78 seconds in the control group to 6.86 seconds in the treatment group. The recommended keeping music increases the average normal state duration from 24.66 seconds in the control group to 29.79 seconds in the treatment group. The recommended down-lifting music reduces the average tachycardia state duration from 13.89 seconds in the control group to 6.53 seconds in the treatment group. Compared to the control group, the stress of the treatment group has been reduced significantly

Images on the Move

In contemporary society, digital images have become increasingly mobile. They are networked, shared on social media, and circulated across small and portable screens. Accordingly, the discourses of spreadability and circulation have come to supersede the focus on production, indexicality, and manipulability, which had dominated early conceptions of digital photography and film. However, the mobility of images is neither technologically nor conceptually limited to the realm of the digital. The edited volume re-examines the historical, aesthetical, and theoretical relevance of image mobility. The contributors provide a materialist account of images on the move - ranging from wired photography to postcards to streaming media

Images on the Move: Materiality - Networks - Formats

In contemporary society, digital images have become increasingly mobile. They are networked, shared on social media, and circulated across small and portable screens. Accordingly, the discourses of spreadability and circulation have come to supersede the focus on production, indexicality, and manipulability, which had dominated early conceptions of digital photography and film. However, the mobility of images is neither technologically nor conceptually limited to the realm of the digital. The edited volume re-examines the historical, aesthetical, and theoretical relevance of image mobility. The contributors provide a materialist account of images on the move - ranging from wired photography to postcards to streaming media

Images on the Move

In contemporary society, digital images have become increasingly mobile. They are networked, shared on social media, and circulated across small and portable screens. Accordingly, the discourses of spreadability and circulation have come to supersede the focus on production, indexicality, and manipulability, which had dominated early conceptions of digital photography and film. However, the mobility of images is neither technologically nor conceptually limited to the realm of the digital. The edited volume re-examines the historical, aesthetical, and theoretical relevance of image mobility. The contributors provide a materialist account of images on the move - ranging from wired photography to postcards to streaming media

Black Boxes : Airport Space, Liminal Mechanisms, and Systems of Autobiography

Treating the first-person experience of airport space as an ethnographic tool, this thesis examines spatial perception and its breakdown in multiple examples of imagined and real twentieth century spatial constructs. First, it considers examples of failed or redundant mechanisms which function as liminal constructs, either through their presence as physical objects or through use as tools with which to perceive liminal spaces. It emphasizes their function as points of access for narrative and delineates their status as examples of failure in relation to Bruno Latour's use of the term "black box," appropriated from the world of air crash investigation, and to Walter Benjamin's collection and juxtaposition of research in Tbe Arcades Project. Second, it explores the type and sequence of spaces encountered by a traveller in a large contemporary international airport, and those behaviours that are inscribed and prescribed upon people and mechanisms therein. It critiques Marc Auge' s ideas of the "non-place" through explorations of a distinctly airport-specific culture and possible deconstructions of airport space by passenger use and mechanical and architectural functions. Finally, it relates these to narrative space through an examination and practice of systemic approaches to autobiography in works by Georges Perec, Michel Leiris, and Raymond Queneau. It uses the first-person construction of a narrative of airport space-a first-person "silent reading" of public space-to construct a system of research through which twentieth-century liminal space may be inhabited and critiqued from within and on its own terms. Thus the constraint and potential offered by these diverse liminal spaces are deconstructed in terms of the personal narrative, and through use of airport space demonstrate an inhabiting of research through an innovative and revealing method

The Heart and Spirit of Transformational Leadership A Qualitative Case Study of Herb Kelleher’s Passion for Southwest Airlines

The notion of transformational leadership as developed by James MacGregor Burns has contributed significantly to a new consensus in the literature regarding the nature of leadership. Burns introduced the concept of transformational leadership, suggesting that leaders are individuals who transform their institutions by embracing competition and conflict, meeting the mutual goals of both leader and followers, successfully articulating their values to followers and drawing them into a common purpose and a shared vision, using power resources and politics to satisfy their followers’ needs and wants, and raising the moral aspirations of both leaders and led. While the contemporary literature on leadership has done much to further our understanding about the nature of transformational leadership, very few works provide us with case study examples of transformational leaders. Missing is an understanding of what leaders actually do in the process of leading followers and transforming organizations. The present study sought to provide a descriptive analysis of how one leader in charge of a major American corporation has shaped and transformed his institution. Through open-ended interviews and direct observation, this study examined Herbert D. Kelleher, the Chairman of the Board, President, and Chief Executive Officer of Southwest Airlines, a Dallas, Texas-based corporation that has a 15- year history, approximately 5,000 employees, and one billion dollars in assets. Key informant interviews were held with Kelleher and Southwest Airlines employees from different levels and a variety of positions within the corporation to determine the degree to which Kelleher personifies transformational leadership. This case study presents Herb Kelleher as an individual who has affected significant institutional change at Southwest Airlines by satisfying the wants and needs of his followers and by raising them to higher levels of motivation and morality. It was determined that Kelleher\u27s ability to successfully change his organization and meet the needs of his people is because he clearly demonstrates the qualities of transformational leadership