Perception of soundscapes : an interdisciplinary approach

This paper takes an overall view of findings from the Positive Soundscape Project, a large inter-disciplinary soundscapes study. Qualitative fieldwork (soundwalks and focus groups) have found that soundscape perception is influenced by cognitive effects such as the meaning of a soundscape and its components, and how information is conveyed by a soundscape, for example on the behaviour of people within the soundscape. Three significant clusters were found in the language people use to describe soundscapes: sound sources, sound descriptors and soundscape descriptors. Results from listening tests and soundwalks have been integrated to show that the two principal dimensions of soundscape emotional response seem to be calmness and vibrancy. Further, vibrancy seems to have two aspects: organisation of sounds and changes over time. The possible application of the results to soundscape assessment and design are briefly discussed

Investigation of UK Farmer Go/No-Go Decisions in Response to Tractor-Based Risk Scenarios

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Predictors of Attitudes Toward Non-Technical Skills in Farming

This research was funded by the University of Aberdeen.Peer reviewe

Watch Out for the Bull! Farmer Risk Perception and Decision-Making in Livestock Handling Scenarios

Acknowledgements The authors are grateful to all farmers and stakeholders for giving up their time to take part in this study. We would also like to thank organisational contacts who aided recruitment. Funding This research project was funded by the School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen.Peer reviewedPostprin

Product safety culture: a preliminary study in the UK manufacturing industry.

Do accidents where users are injured or killed by unsafe products reveal underlying weaknesses in the safety culture of the responsible organisations? While manufacturing firms have long been concerned with organizational culture factors that relate to product quality, there has been much less attention to the relationship with consumer safety. Product safety culture can be defined as the attitudes, norms, beliefs and behaviours of staff in manufacturing organisations that affect the integrity of a product in relation to the well-being of its users. There has been limited research into this type of safety culture, with the exception of several studies from the food industry. This exploratory study in one large company adopted a qualitative approach to identify the dimensions of product safety culture in the manufacture of engineered products. Study 1 consisted of phone interviews (8 managers, 2 workforce). Study 2 was on two UK manufacturing sites where interviews and focus groups were conducted (46 participants in total: 7 managers, 39 workforce). The transcriptions were coded using inductive thematic analysis to identify the main components of product safety culture. The findings indicated six principal dimensions: management commitment to product safety, communication, safety systems, trust, understanding of safety systems and product safety ethic. The first five dimensions are well-established components of culture relating to worker and process safety. The last dimension appears to be a distinctive component (compared to other types of safety culture) relating to an employee’s moral and ethical stance toward product safety, where user well-being is considered during product manufacture. This ethical component is a more novel feature which suggests that fostering concern for unknown product users may be an additional facet of product safety culture worth investigating in the effort to reduce the risks to consumers

Investigating the effects of accent on visual speech

Speechreading is a complex skill affected by both the observer's method of extracting visual speech information and talker-specific variation in speech production. This thesis focuses upon accent, a factor that can influence both an observer's viewing strategy and talker speechreadability. Auditory research demonstrates that an unfamiliar accent reduces speech intelligibility. The primary aim here was to determine whether accent type, familiarity or variation would alter visual speech intelligibility with consequential effects upon speechreading performance. Experiments 1 and 2 considered visual discrimination of native and non-native accented speech and the influence of non-native accent upon speechreading performance. Results indicated that observers were able to utilise visual cues for discrimination and were significantly poorer at speechreading a non-native accent. Experiments 3, 4 and 5 examined the influence of regional accent on speechreading performance. Results indicated that visual speech performance was significantly worse for Glaswegian-accented talkers than for talkers with a Nottingham accent. However, no clear advantage for accent familiarity was found. Experiment 6 examined the influence of accent type and talker variability upon speechreading performance. Accent type was consistently the dominant influence upon speechreading performance, above familiarity and variation. Experiments 7, 8, 9 and 10 examined the influence of exposure, context and repetition upon the effects of a Glaswegian accent. Here, the effect of the Glaswegian accent on talker speechreadability was reduced by context and repetition, but not removed entirely. In conclusion, while visual accent type mostly determines visual speech intelligibility, accent familiarity mostly determines auditory speech perception. Although spoken accent effects can be quickly reduced through exposure, no such effect was found here in the visual modality. Both context and repetition were necessary to improve the intelligibility of accented speech. This indicates a potential difference in the processing of accented speech across the two modalities and has implications for speechreading training

The Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer (PIPER)

The Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer (PIPER) is a balloon-borne cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarimeter designed to search for evidence of inflation by measuring the large-angular scale CMB polarization signal. BICEP2 recently reported a detection of B-mode power corresponding to the tensor-to-scalar ratio r = 0.2 on ~2 degree scales. If the BICEP2 signal is caused by inflationary gravitational waves (IGWs), then there should be a corresponding increase in B-mode power on angular scales larger than 18 degrees. PIPER is currently the only suborbital instrument capable of fully testing and extending the BICEP2 results by measuring the B-mode power spectrum on angular scales $\theta$ = ~0.6 deg to 90 deg, covering both the reionization bump and recombination peak, with sensitivity to measure the tensor-to-scalar ratio down to r = 0.007, and four frequency bands to distinguish foregrounds. PIPER will accomplish this by mapping 85% of the sky in four frequency bands (200, 270, 350, 600 GHz) over a series of 8 conventional balloon flights from the northern and southern hemispheres. The instrument has background-limited sensitivity provided by fully cryogenic (1.5 K) optics focusing the sky signal onto four 32x40-pixel arrays of time-domain multiplexed Transition-Edge Sensor (TES) bolometers held at 140 mK. Polarization sensitivity and systematic control are provided by front-end Variable-delay Polarization Modulators (VPMs), which rapidly modulate only the polarized sky signal at 3 Hz and allow PIPER to instantaneously measure the full Stokes vector (I, Q, U, V) for each pointing. We describe the PIPER instrument and progress towards its first flight.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures. To be published in Proceedings of SPIE Volume 9153. Presented at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2014, conference 915

Access Equity: Driving Indiana Infrastructure and Communities to the Next Level

For over 25 years the American’s with Disabilities Act has required communities to plan for and transition their infrastructure and programs to become accessible. However, many communities still have a long way to go. This presentation takes compliance to the next level and engages community partners in the discussion of what access equity looks like and why it has to be the goal of a solid ADA transition plan

Consequences and coping : Investigating client, co-worker and senior colleague incivility within veterinary practice

The data presented within this paper are not available publicly due to ethical and confidentiality constraints. The data will be shared by the corresponding author privately upon request.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

A qualitative systematic review on the application of the normalization of deviance phenomenon within high-risk industries

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