Measuring Workload Differences Between Short-term Memory and Long-term Memory Scenarios in a Simulated Flight Environment

Four highly experienced Air Force pilots each flew four simulated flight scenarios. Two scenarios required a great deal of aircraft maneuvering. The other two scenarios involved less maneuvering, but required remembering a number of items. All scenarios were designed to be equaly challenging. Pilot's Subjective Ratings for Activity-level, Complexity, Difficulty, Stress, and Workload were higher for the manuevering scenarios than the memory scenarios. At a moderate workload level, keeping the pilots active resulted in better aircraft control. When required to monitor and remember items, aircraft control tended to decrease. Pilots tended to weigh information about the spatial positioning and performance of their aircraft more heavily than other items

The impact of physical and mental tasks on pilot mental workoad

Seven instrument-rated pilots with a wide range of backgrounds and experience levels flew four different scenarios on a fixed-base simulator. The Baseline scenario was the simplest of the four and had few mental and physical tasks. An activity scenario had many physical but few mental tasks. The Planning scenario had few physical and many mental taks. A Combined scenario had high mental and physical task loads. The magnitude of each pilot's altitude and airspeed deviations was measured, subjective workload ratings were recorded, and the degree of pilot compliance with assigned memory/planning tasks was noted. Mental and physical performance was a strong function of the manual activity level, but not influenced by the mental task load. High manual task loads resulted in a large percentage of mental errors even under low mental task loads. Although all the pilots gave similar subjective ratings when the manual task load was high, subjective ratings showed greater individual differences with high mental task loads. Altitude or airspeed deviations and subjective ratings were most correlated when the total task load was very high. Although airspeed deviations, altitude deviations, and subjective workload ratings were similar for both low experience and high experience pilots, at very high total task loads, mental performance was much lower for the low experience pilots

Effect of time span and task load on pilot mental workload

Two sets of experiments were run to examine how the mental workload of a pilot might be measured. The effects of continuous manual control activity versus discrete assigned mental tasks (including the length of time between receiving an assignment and executing it) were examined. The first experiment evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of measuring mental workload with an objective perforamance (altitude deviations) and five subjective ratings (activity level, complexity, difficulty, stress, and workload). The second set of experiments built upon the first set by increasing workload intensities and adding another performance measure: airspeed deviation. The results are discussed for both low and high experience pilots

Effect of time span and task load on pilot mental workload

Two sets of simulations designed to examine how a pilot's mental workload is affected by continuous manual-control activity versus discrete mental tasks that included the length of time between receiving an assignment and executing it are described. The first experiment evaluated two types of measures: objective performance indicators and subjective ratings. Subjective ratings for the two missions were different, but the objective performance measures were similar. In the second experiments, workload levels were increased and a second performance measure was taken. Mental workload had no influence on either performance-based workload measure. Subjective ratings discriminated among the scenarios and correlated with performance measures for high-workload flights. The number of mental tasks performed did not influence error rates, although high manual workloads did increase errors

Remedies for migrant worker exploitation in Australia: Lessons from the 7-eleven wage repayment program

© 2017 Melbourne University Law Review. All rights reserved. Temporary migrants comprise approximately 11% of the Australian workforce and are systemically underpaid across a range of industries. The most vulnerable of these workers (including international students and backpackers) rarely successfully recover unpaid wages and entitlements. In 2015, media revealed systematic exploitation of 7-Eleven's international student workforce, reflecting practices that have since been identified in other major Australian franchises. In an unprecedented response, 7-Eleven head office established a wage repayment program, which operated until February 2017. As of mid- 2017, the program had determined claims worth over $150 million - by far the highest rectification of unpaid wages in Australian history. Drawing on interviews with international students and a range of stakeholders across Australia, this article uses 7-Eleven as a case study to illuminate systemic barriers that prevent temporary migrants from accessing remedies for unpaid entitlements within existing legal and institutional frameworks. We identify the unique attributes of the 7-Eleven wage repayment program that have contributed to its unusual accessibility and efficacy, and which may point to conditions needed to improve temporary migrants' access to justice through state-based institutions and business-led redress processes

Living Precariously: Understanding International Students' Housing Experiences in Australia

In 2019, the authors conducted a landmark survey of more than 5,000 international students in Australia. The Information for Impact survey sought to gather information on exploitative conduct encountered by international students in housing and at work, and identify effective responses including interventions to empower international students. This is the first of three reports on the survey, focused on international students' living conditions. It reveals that a share house is the most common first home for international students in Australia, and that the overwhelming majority organise this themselves online or through personal contacts. International students in share houses most frequently encountered illegal or poor living conditions compared with other housing types (57% experienced these conditions in their first share house alone). These include: overcrowding; accommodation that is unsafe to live in; paying in advance for accommodation that does not exist; intimidation or harassment by a landlord or another tenant; landlords moving extra people into the accommodation without the student’s consent; sudden increases in rent in the middle of a rental period; and unfair eviction. Exploitation and poor housing were not restricted to students in English language or vocational colleges - most problems were experienced by similar proportions of university students. Deception and poor housing conditions were just as common for international students who organised their housing in Australia, as for those who organised their housing from abroad. Problems were most commonly experienced among respondents who organised their share house through social media or a peer-to-peer sharing website. The report concludes with a range of recommendations to governments, education providers and other key stakeholders for developing systemic responses to prevent exploitation and assist international students to address problems when they arise

Wage Theft in Silence: Why Migrant Workers Do Not Recover Their Unpaid Wages In Australia

Wage Theft in Silence reveals that although the majority of migrant workers are paid well below minimum wage, very few ever take action to recover the wages they are owed. Most of those who tried to get their wages back were not successful. The report draws on responses of 4,322 international students, backpackers and other migrant workers who participated in the National Temporary Migrant Work Survey. It analyses the reasons why the overwhelming majority of participants had not sought to address their underpayment and makes recommendations for reform

Migrant workers’ access to remedy for exploitation in Australia: the role of the national Fair Work Ombudsman

© 2017 Australian Journal of Human Rights. Exploitation of temporary migrant workers in Australia has emerged as a significant human rights concern. However, limited attention has been paid to the State’s responsibility to ensure individual workers can access remedies for rights violations. This article considers whether Australia’s government agencies and institutional frameworks are suitable to enabling remedies for temporary migrant workers, and how well they deliver remedies to individuals in practice. Drawing on new empirical data, it focuses on the role of the national labour inspectorate, th Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO). FWO has undertaken various education, compliance and deterrence initiatives directed to systemically improving conditions for migrant workers. This article considers the extent to which individual migrant workers seek assistance from FWO to recover their personal unpaid wages, and the remedial outcomes of individual claims lodged with the agency. We illuminate structural factors contributing to migrants’ reluctance to engage with FWO, as well as factors contributing to low wage recovery rates for those who do contact FWO. We conclude that although these challenges are numerous and multi-layered, they are not all inevitable. Reforms should incorporate a new migrant-centred approach that recalibrates the risks and costs of seeking remedies against the likelihood of obtaining a just outcome

Large-scale Monte Carlo simulations of the isotropic three-dimensional Heisenberg spin glass

We study the Heisenberg spin glass by large-scale Monte Carlo simulations for sizes up to 32^3, down to temperatures below the transition temperature claimed in earlier work. The data for the larger sizes show more marginal behavior than that for the smaller sizes, indicating the lower critical dimension is close to, and possibly equal to three. We find that the spins and chiralities behave in a quite similar manner.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures. Replaced with published versio

Glueball masses in the large N limit

The lowest-lying glueball masses are computed in SU($N$) gauge theory on a spacetime lattice for constant value of the lattice spacing $a$ and for $N$ ranging from 3 to 8. The lattice spacing is fixed using the deconfinement temperature at temporal extension of the lattice $N_T = 6$. The calculation is conducted employing in each channel a variational ansatz performed on a large basis of operators that includes also torelon and (for the lightest states) scattering trial functions. This basis is constructed using an automatic algorithm that allows us to build operators of any size and shape in any irreducible representation of the cubic group. A good signal is extracted for the ground state and the first excitation in several symmetry channels. It is shown that all the observed states are well described by their large $N$ values, with modest ${\cal O}(1/N^2)$ corrections. In addition spurious states are identified that couple to torelon and scattering operators. As a byproduct of our calculation, the critical couplings for the deconfinement phase transition for N=5 and N=7 and temporal extension of the lattice $N_T=6$ are determined.Comment: 1+36 pages, 22 tables, 21 figures. Typos corrected, conclusions unchanged, matches the published versio