Future needs of human reliability analysis: The interaction between new technology, crew roles and performance

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Entrepreneurial learning in an academic entrepreneurship perspective : a qualitative study

Bakgrunn: Kommersialisering av forskning er en av norske universiteter og høyskoler sine ansvarsområder. Dette har medført at stadig flere har fått tilknytning til en TTO eller kommersialiseringsaktør, med det formål å etablere spin‐off bedrifter basert på forskningen de utfører. Slike bedrifter ledes av enten surrogat‐ eller forskerentreprenører, som på flere måter skiller seg fra “generelle” entreprenører. Ettersom surrogat‐ og forskerentreprenører stadig spiller en viktigere rolle for kommersialisering av forskning er det interessant å studere hvordan disse entreprenørtypene tilegner seg kompetansen som kreves for å få forskning ut i et marked. Hensikt: Hensikten med denne studien har vært å studere kompetanseervervelse for å forstå hvordan surrogat‐ og forskerentreprenører lærer, hvilke erfaringer forbundet med oppstarten av en spin‐off bedrift som fører til læring, og hvilke forskjeller og likheter som finnes mellom disse entreprenørtypene. For å få svar på dette er følgende problemstilling satt opp: Hvordan tilegner surrogatentreprenører og forskerentreprenører seg entreprenøriell kompetanse gjennom utførelse av kjerneoppgaver tilknyttet oppstartsfasen av spin-off bedrifter? Metode: For å svare på denne problemstillingen er det blitt gjennomført fenomenologiske dybdeintervjuer. Informantene benyttet i denne studien var surrogat‐ og forskerentreprenører med tilknytning til to av Norges ledende kommersialiseringsaktører. Funn og implikasjoner: Studien har kartlagt hvilke erfaringer med entreprenørielle kjerneoppgaver og aktiviteter som bidrar til kompetanseutvikling blant surrogat‐ og forskerentreprenører. Våre funn tyder på at disse entreprenørene opplever vesentlig mer kompetanseutvikling gjennom enkeltkretslæring enn de gjør ved dobbeltkretslæring, og at de tilegner seg mye kompetanse uten nødvendigvis å være klar over dette selv. Surrogat‐ og forskerentreprenører opplever også at deres tidligere yrkeserfaring har vært svært viktig for dem som entreprenører, ettersom mye av deres tidligere erfaring har hatt stor overførbarhet til deres nåværende arbeidsoppgaver. Et spesielt interessant funn var at dette gjaldt forskerentreprenørene så vel som surrogatentreprenørene.Background: Commercialization of research is an area of responsibility for Norwegian universities and colleges. Thus, increasingly more of these have been linked to a TTO or a commercialization actor with the purpose of establishing spin‐off businesses based on their research and development projects. Such businesses are managed by either surrogate or research entrepreneurs, which in several ways differs from "general" entrepreneurs. Because these types of entrepreneurs play an increasingly important role in the commercialization of research, we have decided to study how these types of entrepreneurs acquire the skills required to get their research into today’s market. Purpose: The purpose of this study has been to study competence acquisition in order to understand how surrogate and research entrepreneurs learn, what experiences associated with the startup of a spin‐off enterprise that leads to learning, and what differences and similarities exist between these entrepreneurial types. To answer this, the following thesis has been put forward: How do surrogate entrepreneurs and research entrepreneurs acquire entrepreneurial competence through the execution of core tasks associated with the start-up phase in a spin-off business? Method: In order to answer this question, phenomenological depth interviews were conducted with surrogate and research entrepreneurs from two of Norway's leading commercialization actors. Findings and implications: The study has charted out which experiences entrepreneurial core tasks and activities gave, that contributed to competence development among surrogate and research entrepreneurs. Our findings indicate that these types of entrepreneurs experience significantly more competence development through single‐loop learning than from double‐loop learning, and that they acquire quite a lot of competence without necessarily being aware of this themselves. Surrogate and research entrepreneurs also find that their previous work experience has been very important to them as entrepreneurs, as much of their previous experience has had great transferability to their current work tasks. An interesting find is that this particularly applied to the research entrepreneurs.M-E

Aircraft-based observations of air-sea fluxes over Denmark Strait and the Irminger sea during high wind speed conditions

The impact of targeted sonde observations on the 1-3 day forecasts for northern Europe is evaluated using the Met Office four-dimensional variational data assimilation scheme and a 24 km gridlength limited-area version of the Unified Model (MetUM). The targeted observations were carried out during February and March 2007 as part of the Greenland Flow Distortion Experiment, using a research aircraft based in Iceland. Sensitive area predictions using either total energy singular vectors or an ensemble transform Kalman filter were used to predict where additional observations should be made to reduce errors in the initial conditions of forecasts for northern Europe. Targeted sonde data was assimilated operationally into the MetUM. Hindcasts show that the impact of the sondes was mixed. Only two out of the five cases showed clear forecast improvement; the maximum forecast improvement seen over the verifying region was approximately 5% of the forecast error 24 hours into the forecast. These two cases are presented in more detail: in the first the improvement propagates into the verification region with a developing polar low; and in the second the improvement is associated with an upper-level trough. The impact of cycling targeted data in the background of the forecast (including the memory of previous targeted observations) is investigated. This is shown to cause a greater forecast impact, but does not necessarily lead to a greater forecast improvement. Finally, the robustness of the results is assessed using a small ensemble of forecasts

Lessons Learned on Benchmarking from the International Human Reliability Analysis Empirical Study

The International Human Reliability Analysis (HRA) Empirical Study is a comparative benchmark of the prediction of HRA methods to the performance of nuclear power plant crews in a control room simulator. There are a number of unique aspects to the present study that distinguish it from previous HRA benchmarks, most notably the emphasis on a method-to-data comparison instead of a method-to-method comparison. This paper reviews seven lessons learned about HRA benchmarking from conducting the study: (1) the dual purposes of the study afforded by joining another HRA study; (2) the importance of comparing not only quantitative but also qualitative aspects of HRA; (3) consideration of both negative and positive drivers on crew performance; (4) a relatively large sample size of crews; (5) the use of multiple methods and scenarios to provide a well-rounded view of HRA performance; (6) the importance of clearly defined human failure events; and (7) the use of a common comparison language to “translate” the results of different HRA methods. These seven lessons learned highlight how the present study can serve as a useful template for future benchmarking studies

Capturing Control Room Simulator Data with the HERA Database

The Human Event Repository and Analysis (HERA) system has been developed as a tool for classifying and recording human performance data extracted from primary data sources. This paper reviews the process of extracting data from simulator studies for use in HERA. Simulator studies pose unique data collection challenges, both in types and quality of data measures, but such studies are ideally suited to gather operator performance data, including the full spectrum of performance shaping factors used in a HERA analysis. This paper provides suggestions for obtaining relevant human performance data for a HERA analysis from a control room simulator study and for inputting those data in a format suitable for HERA

The effect of breaking waves on a coupled model of wind and ocean surface waves. Part II : growing seas

Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2008. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Physical Oceanography 38 (2008): 2164–2184, doi:10.1175/2008JPO3962.1.This is the second part of a two-part investigation of a coupled wind and wave model that includes the enhanced form drag of breaking waves. The model is based on the wave energy balance and the conservation of air-side momentum and energy. In Part I, coupled nonlinear advance–delay differential equations were derived, which govern the wave height spectrum, the distribution of breaking waves, and vertical air side profiles of the turbulent stress and wind speed. Numeric solutions were determined for mature seas. Here, numeric solutions for a wide range of wind and wave conditions are obtained, including young, strongly forced wind waves. Furthermore, the “spatial sheltering effect” is introduced so that smaller waves in airflow separation regions of breaking longer waves cannot be forced by the wind. The solutions strongly depend on the wave height curvature spectrum at high wavenumbers (the “threshold saturation level”). As the threshold saturation level is reduced, the effect of breaking waves becomes stronger. For young strongly forced waves (laboratory conditions), breaking waves close to the spectral peak dominate the wind input and previous solutions of a model with only input to breaking waves are recovered. Model results of the normalized roughness length are generally consistent with previous laboratory and field measurements. For field conditions, the wind stress depends sensitively on the wave height spectrum. The spatial sheltering may modify the number of breaking shorter waves, in particular, for younger seas.This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (Grant OCE- 0526177) and the U.S. Office of Naval Research (Grant N00014–06–10729)

Drag coefficient reduction at very high wind speeds

The correct representation of the 10-m drag coefficient for momentum (K10) at extreme wind speeds is very important for modeling the development of tropical depressions and may also be relevant to the understanding of other intense marine meteorological phenomena. We present a unified boundary layer model for (K10), which takes account of both the wave field and spray production, and asymptotes to the growing wind wave state in the absence of spray. The theoretical development is based on an air-sea system with shear layers in both fluids and contains three constants that must be determined empirically. This is done using data from observations, and the resulting behavior is interpreted in terms of spray. A feature of the results is the prediction of a broad maximum in K10. For a spray velocity of 9 m s-1, it is found that a maximum of K10 ~ 2.0 × 10-3 occurs for a 10-m wind speed, u10 ~ 40 m s-1, in agreement with recent GPS sonde data in tropical cyclones. Thus K10 is ‘‘capped’’ at its maximum value for all higher wind speeds expected. A physically based model, where spray droplets are injected horizontally into the airflow and maintained in suspension by air turbulence, gives qualitatively similar results. The effect of spray is also shown to flatten the sea surface by transferring energy to longer wavelengths