Customer perception of switch-feel in luxury sports utility vehicles

Successful new product introduction requires that product characteristics relate to the customer on functional, emotional, aesthetic and cultural levels. As a part of research into automotive human machine interfaces (HMI), this paper describes holistic customer research carried out to investigate how the haptics of switches in luxury sports utility vehicles (SUVs) are perceived by customers. The application of these techniques, including an initial proposal for objective specifications, is addressed within the broader new product introduction context, and benefits described. One-hundred and one customers of SUVs assessed the feel of automotive push switches, completing the tasks both in, and out of vehicles to investigate the effect of context. Using the semantic differential technique, hedonic testing, and content analysis of customers’ verbatim comments, a holistic picture has been built up of what influences the haptic experience. It was found that customers were able to partially discriminate differences in switch-feel, alongside considerations of visual appearance, image, and usability. Three factors named ‘Affective’, ‘Robustness and Precision’, and ‘Silkiness’ explained 61% of the variance in a principle components analysis. Correlations of the factors with acceptance scores were 0.505, 0.371, and 0.168, respectively

Implementing Safety-Critical Java Missions in Ada

Critical systems written in Ada are still reluctant to use dynamic memory allocation. The Ravenscar profile, for example, prohibits the dynamic creation of tasks. This is in spite of the availability of storage pools and the strong compile-time checking of access types. The Java community has, by necessity, taken a slightly less conservative approach. Safety-Critical Java (SCJ) supports a constrained use of dynamic memory allocation. This paper takes the SCJ approach and tries to implement it using Ada's storage pools. We show that the approach is not directly transferable to Ada due to the difference in the way that SCJ and Ada handle region-based memory management. However, an equivalent approach can be developed.</jats:p

Investigating the relationship between HIV testing and risk behaviour in Britain: National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles 2000.

OBJECTIVES: To estimate the prevalence of, and identify factors associated with, HIV testing in Britain. DESIGN: A large, stratified probability sample survey of sexual attitudes and lifestyles. METHODS: A total of 12,110 16-44 year olds completed a computer-assisted face-to-face interview and self-interview. Self-reports of HIV testing, i.e. the timing, reasons for and location of testing, were included. RESULTS: A total of 32.4% of men and 31.7% of women reported ever having had an HIV test, the majority of whom were tested through blood donation. When screening for blood donation and pregnancy were excluded, 9.0% of men and 4.6% of women had had a voluntary confidential HIV test (VCT) in the past 5 years. However, one third of injecting drug users and men who have sex with men had a VCT in the past 5 years. VCT in the past 5 years was significantly associated with age, residence, ethnicity, self-perceived HIV risk, reporting greater numbers of sexual partners, new sexual partners from abroad, previous sexually transmitted infection diagnosis, and injecting non-prescribed drugs for men and women, and same-sex partners (men only). Whereas sexually transmitted disease clinics were important sites for VCT, general practice accounted for almost a quarter of VCT. CONCLUSION: HIV testing is relatively common in Britain; however, it remains largely associated with population-based blood donation and antenatal screening programmes. In contrast, VCT remains highly associated with high-risk (sexual or drug-injecting) behaviours or population sub-groups at high risk. Strategies to reduce undiagnosed prevalent HIV infection will require further normalization and wider uptake of HIV testing

Real-Time Big Data: the JUNIPER Approach

REACTION 2014. 3rd International Workshop on Real-time and Distributed Computing in Emerging Applications. Rome, Italy. December 2nd, 2014.Cloud computing offers the possibility for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) to offload computation and utilise large stored data sets in order to increase the overall system utility. However, for cloud platforms and applications to be effective for CPS, they need to exhibit real-time behaviour so that some level of performance can be guaranteed to the CPS. This paper considers the infrastructure developed by the EU JUNIPER project for enabling real-time big data systems to be built so that appropriate guarantees can be given to the CPS components. The technologies developed include a real-time Java programming approach, hardware acceleration to provide performance, and operating system resource manage-ment (time and disk) based upon resource reservation in order to enhance timeliness.This work is partially funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement FP7-ICT-611731Publicad

Increasing prevalence of male homosexual partnerships and practices in Britain 1990-2000: evidence from national probability surveys.

OBJECTIVES: To estimate the prevalence and timing of homosexual experience among British men; to explore the patterns of sexual practices and partnerships in 2000, and behavioural and attitudinal changes between 1990 and 2000 among men who have sex with men (MSM). DESIGN: Two large, stratified probability sample surveys of the general population. METHODS: Trained interviewers administered a combination of face-to-face and self-completion questionnaires to men aged 16 to 44 years resident in Britain (n = 6000 in 1990 and n = 4762 in 2000). RESULTS: In 2000, 2.8% of British men reported sex with men in the past 5 years. 46.0% of MSM reported five or more partners in the past 5 years, and 59.8% reported unprotected anal intercourse in the past year. A total of 33.0% of MSM reported one or more female partner(s) in the past year. In comparison with 1990, there was a significant increase in the proportion of MSM in the population in 2000, and among these men, in the proportion reporting receptive anal intercourse in the past year [age-adjusted odds ratio (OR), 2.08; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.08-4.00], but no significant change in self-perceived HIV-risk (age-adjusted OR, 1.11; 95% CI, 0.49-2.51) or HIV testing in past 5 years (age-adjusted OR, 1.14; 95% CI, 0.57-2.25). CONCLUSIONS: Evidence of increasing prevalence of homosexual intercourse among the British male population coupled with increases in some HIV-risk behaviours among MSM suggests overall increasing numbers at risk in the population. Although these changes may partly reflect an increased willingness to report these behaviours, our results are consistent with increasing incidence of sexually transmitted infections and behavioural surveillance data

Improving the predictability of distributed stream processors

Next generation real-time applications demand big-data infrastructures to process huge and continuous data volumes under complex computational constraints. This type of application raises new issues on current big-data processing infrastructures. The first issue to be considered is that most of current infrastructures for big-data processing were defined for general purpose applications. Thus, they set aside real-time performance, which is in some cases an implicit requirement. A second important limitation is the lack of clear computational models that could be supported by current big-data frameworks. In an effort to reduce this gap, this article contributes along several lines. First, it provides a set of improvements to a computational model called distributed stream processing in order to formalize it as a real-time infrastructure. Second, it proposes some extensions to Storm, one of the most popular stream processors. These extensions are designed to gain an extra control over the resources used by the application in order to improve its predictability. Lastly, the article presents some empirical evidences on the performance that can be expected from this type of infrastructure.This work has been partially supported by HERMES (Healthy and Efficient Routes in Massive open-data basEd Smart cities). It has been also partially financed by Distributed Java Infrastructure for Real-Time Big Data (CAS14/00118). It has been also partially funded by eMadrid (S2013/ICE-2715) and by European Union’s 7th Framework Programme ​under Grant Agreement FP7-IC6-318763

Ethnic variations in sexual behaviour in Great Britain and risk of sexually transmitted infections: a probability survey.

BACKGROUND: Ethnic variations in the rate of diagnosed sexually transmitted infections (STIs) have been reported in many developed countries. We used data from the second British National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal 2000) to investigate the frequency of high-risk sexual behaviours and adverse sexual health outcomes in five ethnic groups in Great Britain. METHODS: We did a stratified probability sample survey of 11161 men and women aged 16-44 years, resident in Great Britain, using computer-assisted interviews. Additional sampling enabled us to do more detailed analyses for 949 black Caribbean, black African, Indian, and Pakistani respondents. We used logistic regression to assess reporting of STI diagnoses in the past 5 years, after controlling for demographic and behavioural variables. FINDINGS: We noted striking variations in number of sexual partnerships by ethnic group and between men and women. Reported numbers of sexual partnerships in a lifetime were highest in black Caribbean (median 9 [IQR 4-20]) and black African (9 [3-20]) men, and in white (5 [2-9]) and black Caribbean (4 [2-7]) women. Indian and Pakistani men and women reported fewer sexual partnerships, later first intercourse, and substantially lower prevalence of diagnosed STIs than did other groups. We recorded a significant association between ethnic origin and reported STIs in the past 5 years with increased risk in sexually active black Caribbean (OR 2.74 [95% CI 1.22-6.15]) and black African (2.95 [1.45-5.99]) men compared with white men, and black Caribbean (2.41 [1.35-4.28]) women compared with white women. Odds ratios changed little after controlling for age, number of sexual partnerships, homosexual and overseas partnerships, and condom use at last sexual intercourse. INTERPRETATION: Individual sexual behaviour is a key determinant of STI transmission risk, but alone does not explain the varying risk across ethnic groups. Our findings suggest a need for targeted and culturally competent prevention interventions

Ada and cc-NUMA Architectures What can be achieved with Ada 2005?

Abstract Real-time systems are finding it difficult to make the shift from single processor systems to multiprocessors because of the lack of support from programming platforms for multiprocessors. Although, Ada provides some support for SMPs, it&apos;s goal is to hide the complexity of the architectures so that the programmers are not distracted by low-level architectural issues. This paper argues that programmer should be given enough visibility to use the underlying architecture predictably and efficiently. We focus on the issue of memory management and memory accesses on a cc-NUMA architecture. A cc-NUMA architecture is chosen, as we believe it to be more scalable than SMP systems