Research: a personal approach

Fundamental Psychology •Individual Cognition, Motivation and Emotion •Cognitive bio-social approaches to human and animal life Applied Psychology •Health Psychology; Psychology in physical medicine •Customer Psychology; Psychology of product developmen

Measuring sensory and marketing influences on consumers' choices among food and beverage product brands

Advance in food science depends on measuring the factors in human perception that influence eaters' activities with branded products. Assessed samples must include at least two levels of a sensed material characteristic (e.g. sucrose) or conceptual marketing attribute (e.g. “low fat”), minimally confounded by other features. Each feature needs to be measured for its effect on the individual's objective achievement of choosing among the samples for a familiar context of use. These influences interact, consciously and unconsciously. This theory of how a mind works has generated a wide range of scientifically illuminating and commercially practical examples, illustrated in this review

Scientific requirements for an engineered model of consciousness

The building of a non-natural conscious system requires more than the design of physical or virtual machines with intuitively conceived abilities, philosophically elucidated architecture or hardware homologous to an animal’s brain. Human society might one day treat a type of robot or computing system as an artificial person. Yet that would not answer scientific questions about the machine’s consciousness or otherwise. Indeed, empirical tests for consciousness are impossible because no such entity is denoted within the theoretical structure of the science of mind, i.e. psychology. However, contemporary experimental psychology can identify if a specific mental process is conscious in particular circumstances, by theory-based interpretation of the overt performance of human beings. Thus, if we are to build a conscious machine, the artificial systems must be used as a test-bed for theory developed from the existing science that distinguishes conscious from non-conscious causation in natural systems. Only such a rich and realistic account of hypothetical processes accounting for observed input/output relationships can establish whether or not an engineered system is a model of consciousness. It follows that any research project on machine consciousness needs a programme of psychological experiments on the demonstration systems and that the programme should be designed to deliver a fully detailed scientific theory of the type of artificial mind being developed – a Psychology of that Machine

Configuring of extero- and interoceptive senses in actions on food

This paper reviews all the published evidence on the theory that the act of selecting a piece of food or drink structurally coordinates quantitative information across several sensory modalities. The existing data show that the momentary disposition to consume the item is strengthened or weakened by learnt configurations of stimuli perceived through both exteroceptive and interoceptive senses. The observed configural structure of performance shows that the multimodal stimuli are interacting perceptually, rather than merely combining quantities of information from the senses into the observed response

Identifying customer expectations is key to evidence based service delivery

As librarians and information professionals we share a common rationale: to deliver enhanced services for our customers. The importance of this is self-evident - if we don’t have customers we don't have a job. We therefore put our services at peril if we don’t put the customer at the heart of what we are trying to do. The now-familiar description of evidence based library and information practice reminds us that we need "to integrate user-reported, practitioner-observed and research-derived evidence as an explicit basis for decision-making" (Booth, 2006). This begs several important questions - Who are our users? How can we best capture reports from these users regarding their expected outcomes? How might we as library practitioners observe (and act upon!) what our users require? In attempting to answer such questions we discover potential value in methodologies with a business orientation; utilising tools from the commercial sector such as Customer Value Discovery research (McKnight, 2007a; McKnight & Berrington, 2008)

Solid state switch

Solid state switching circuit design to increase current capacity of low rated relay contact

Zero gravity liquid mixer

An apparatus for mixing liquids under conditions of zero gravity is disclosed. The apparatus is comprised of a closed reservoir for the liquids, with a means for maintaining a positive pressure on the liquids in the reservoir. A valved liquid supply line is connected to the reservoir for supplying the reservoir with the liquids to be mixed in the reservoir. The portion of the reservoir containing the liquids to be mixed is in communication with a pump which alternately causes a portion of the liquids to flow out of the pump and into the reservoir to mix the liquids. The fluids in the reservoir are in communication through a conduit with the pump which alternately causes a portion of the fluids to flow out of the pump and into the sphere. The conduit connecting the pump and sphere may contain a nozzle or other jet-forming structure such as a venturi for further mixing the fluids

Healthcare services managers: what information do they need and use?

Objectives: To gain insight into the information behaviour of healthcare services managers as they draw on information while engaged in decision making unrelated to individual patient care. Objectives – The purpose of this research project was to gain insight into the information behaviour of healthcare services managers as they use information while engaged in decision-making unrelated to individual patient care. Methods – This small-scale, exploratory, multiple case study used the critical incident technique in nineteen semi-structured interviews. Responses were analyzed using ‘Framework,’ a matrix-based content analysis system. Results – This paper presents findings related to the internal information that healthcare services managers need and use. Their decisions are influenced by a wide variety of factors. They must often make decisions without all of the information they would prefer to have. Internal information and practical experience set the context for new research-based information, so they are generally considered first. Conclusions – Healthcare services managers support decisions with both facts and value-based information. These results may inform both delivery of health library services delivery and strategic health information management planning. They may also support librarians who extend their skills beyond managing library collections and teaching published information retrieval skills, to managing internal and external information, teaching information literacy, and supporting information sharing

Air removal device

The disclosure concerns a device suitable for removing air from water under both zero and one 'g' gravity conditions. The device is comprised of a pair of spaced membranes on being hydrophobic and the other being hydrophilic. The air-water mixture is introduced into the space therebetween, and the selective action of the membranes yields removal of the air from the water