12,546 research outputs found
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
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
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 āseenā, 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
Consequences of energy conservation in relativistic heavy-ion collisions
Complete characterization of particle production and emission in relativistic
heavy-ion collisions is in general not feasible experimentally. This work
demonstrates, however, that the availability of essentially complete
pseudorapidity distributions for charged particles allows for a reliable
estimate of the average transverse momenta and energy of emitted particles by
requiring energy conservation in the process. The results of such an analysis
for Au+Au collisions at sqrt{s_{NN}}= 130 and 200 GeV are compared with
measurements of mean-p_T and mean-E_T in regions where such measurements are
available. The mean-p_T dependence on pseudorapidity for Au+Au collisions at
130 and 200 GeV is given for different collision centralities.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, Submitted to Phys. Rev.
Overview of Solid Target Studies for a Neutrino Factory
The UK proĀgramme of high power tarĀget deĀvelĀopĀments for a NeuĀtriĀno FacĀtoĀry is cenĀtred on the study of high-Z maĀteĀriĀals (tungĀsten, tanĀtaĀlum). A deĀscripĀtion of lifeĀtime shock tests on canĀdiĀdate maĀteĀriĀals is given as part of the reĀsearch into a solid tarĀget soĀluĀtion. A fast high curĀrent pulse is apĀplied to a thin wire of the samĀple maĀteĀriĀal and the lifeĀtime meaĀsured from the numĀber of pulsĀes beĀfore failĀure. These meaĀsureĀments are made at temĀperĀaĀtures up to ~2000 K. The stress on the wire is calĀcuĀlatĀed using the LS-DYĀNA code and comĀpared to the stress exĀpectĀed in the real NeuĀtriĀno FacĀtoĀry tarĀget. It has been found that tanĀtaĀlum is too weak to susĀtain proĀlonged stress at these temĀperĀaĀtures but a tungĀsten wire has reached over 26 milĀlion pulsĀes (equivĀaĀlent to more than ten years of opĀerĀaĀtion at the NeuĀtriĀno FacĀtoĀry). An acĀcount is given of the opĀtiĀmiĀsaĀtion of secĀondary pion proĀducĀtion from the tarĀget and the isĀsues reĀlatĀed to mountĀing the tarĀget in the muon capĀture solenoid and tarĀget staĀtion are disĀcussed
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 approachā involving structural, psychological, developmental, and financial components ā is particularly exemplified by a family-owned (Back) wine and cheese company (Fairview Trust), situate in South Africa
Exploring the importance of reflection in the control room
While currently difficult to measure or explicitly design for, evidence suggests that providing people
with opportunities to reflect on experience must be recognized and valued during safety-critical
work. We provide an insight into reflection as a mechanism that can help to maintain both individual
and team goals. In the control room, reflection can be task-based, critical for the 'smooth' day-to-day
operational performance of a socio-technical system, or can foster learning and organisational change
by enabling new understandings gained from experience. In this position paper we argue that
technology should be designed to support the reflective capacity of people. There are many
interaction designs and artefacts that aim to support problem-solving, but very few that support
self-reflection and group reflection. Traditional paradigms for safety-critical systems have focussed
on ensuring the functional correctness of designs, minimising the time to complete tasks, etc. Work
in the area of user experience design may be of increasing relevance when generating artefacts that
aim to encourage reflection
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