Resilience markers for safer systems and organisations

If computer systems are to be designed to foster resilient performance it is important to be able to identify contributors to resilience. The emerging practice of Resilience Engineering has identified that people are still a primary source of resilience, and that the design of distributed systems should provide ways of helping people and organisations to cope with complexity. Although resilience has been identified as a desired property, researchers and practitioners do not have a clear understanding of what manifestations of resilience look like. This paper discusses some examples of strategies that people can adopt that improve the resilience of a system. Critically, analysis reveals that the generation of these strategies is only possible if the system facilitates them. As an example, this paper discusses practices, such as reflection, that are known to encourage resilient behavior in people. Reflection allows systems to better prepare for oncoming demands. We show that contributors to the practice of reflection manifest themselves at different levels of abstraction: from individual strategies to practices in, for example, control room environments. The analysis of interaction at these levels enables resilient properties of a system to be ‘seen’, so that systems can be designed to explicitly support them. We then present an analysis of resilience at an organisational level within the nuclear domain. This highlights some of the challenges facing the Resilience Engineering approach and the need for using a collective language to articulate knowledge of resilient practices across domains

Authentic Corporate Social Responsibility Based on Authentic Empowerment: An Exemplary Business Leadership Case

Authors Dillon, Back, and Manz examine the underpinnings of genuine or authentic Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), noting the direct nexus between stakeholder empowerment and the socially-responsible actions of authentic leaders. Such an empowering leadership approach– involving structural, psychological, developmental, and financial components – is particularly exemplified by a family-owned (Back) wine and cheese company (Fairview Trust), situate in South Africa

Overview of Solid Target Studies for a Neutrino Factory

The UK pro­gramme of high power tar­get de­vel­op­ments for a Neu­tri­no Fac­to­ry is cen­tred on the study of high-Z ma­te­ri­als (tung­sten, tan­ta­lum). A de­scrip­tion of life­time shock tests on can­di­date ma­te­ri­als is given as part of the re­search into a solid tar­get so­lu­tion. A fast high cur­rent pulse is ap­plied to a thin wire of the sam­ple ma­te­ri­al and the life­time mea­sured from the num­ber of puls­es be­fore fail­ure. These mea­sure­ments are made at tem­per­a­tures up to ~2000 K. The stress on the wire is cal­cu­lat­ed using the LS-DY­NA code and com­pared to the stress ex­pect­ed in the real Neu­tri­no Fac­to­ry tar­get. It has been found that tan­ta­lum is too weak to sus­tain pro­longed stress at these tem­per­a­tures but a tung­sten wire has reached over 26 mil­lion puls­es (equiv­a­lent to more than ten years of op­er­a­tion at the Neu­tri­no Fac­to­ry). An ac­count is given of the op­ti­mi­sa­tion of sec­ondary pion pro­duc­tion from the tar­get and the is­sues re­lat­ed to mount­ing the tar­get in the muon cap­ture solenoid and tar­get sta­tion are dis­cussed

Energy and system dependence of high-pTp_T triggered two-particle near-side correlations

Previous studies have indicated that the near-side peak of high-$p_T$ triggered correlations can be decomposed into two parts, the \textit{Jet} and the \textit{Ridge}. We present data on the yield per trigger of the \textit{Jet} and the \textit{Ridge} from $d+Au$, $Cu+Cu$ and $Au+Au$ collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 62.4 GeV and 200 GeV and compare data on the \textit{Jet} to PYTHIA 8.1 simulations for $p+p$. PYTHIA describes the \textit{Jet} component up to a scaling factor, meaning that PYTHIA can provide a better understanding of the \textit{Ridge} by giving insight into the effects of the kinematic cuts. We present collision energy and system dependence of the \textit{Ridge} yield, which should help distinguish models for the production mechanism of the \textit{Ridge}.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures, proceedings for Hot Quarks in Estes Park, Colorad

Questioning, exploring, narrating and playing in the control room to maintain system safety

Systems whose design is primarily aimed at ensuring efficient, effective and safe working, such as control rooms, have traditionally been evaluated in terms of criteria that correspond directly to those values: functional correctness, time to complete tasks, etc. This paper reports on a study of control room working that identified other factors that contributed directly to overall system safety. These factors included the ability of staff to manage uncertainty, to learn in an exploratory way, to reflect on their actions, and to engage in problem-solving that has many of the hallmarks of playing puzzles which, in turn, supports exploratory learning. These factors, while currently difficult to measure or explicitly design for, must be recognized and valued in design

Field Work Reflections: Journeys in Knowing and Not-Knowing

In this paper, I retrace my interest in narrative forms of inquiry. I begin by revisiting a series of research projects that I conducted early in my career, describing some of my own dissatisfactions with the methods I used at the time. I move on to a detailed reexamination of my first piece of narrative research, completed during my PhD. In that project I used a narrative pointed psychosocial method in an attempt to develop new knowledge in the field of drugs, ‘race’ and ethnicity. In the final section, I consider what I have learned from this approach in terms of knowing and not-knowing and how I have used this experience to explore different approaches to narrative inquiry. I finish by drawing out some lessons I have learned from these different studies, which I hope might be of relevance to other social work researchers

Verification-guided modelling of salience and cognitive load

Well-designed interfaces use procedural and sensory cues to increase the cognitive salience of appropriate actions. However, empirical studies suggest that cognitive load can influence the strength of those cues. We formalise the relationship between salience and cognitive load revealed by empirical data. We add these rules to our abstract cognitive architecture, based on higher-order logic and developed for the formal verification of usability properties. The interface of a fire engine dispatch task from the empirical studies is then formally modelled and verified. The outcomes of this verification and their comparison with the empirical data provide a way of assessing our salience and load rules. They also guide further iterative refinements of these rules. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of the outcomes of formal analysis and empirical studies suggests new experimental hypotheses, thus providing input to researchers in cognitive science