Charting the edges of human performance

In the Horizon 2020 funded Future Sky Safety programme, the Human Performance Envelope project pushed airline pilots to the edges of their performance in real-time cockpit simulations, by increasing stress and workload, and decreasing situation awareness. The aim was to find out how such factors interact, and to detect the edges of human performance where some form of automation support should be employed to ensure safe continued flight. A battery of measures was used, from behavioural to physiological (e.g. heart rate, eye tracking and pupil dilation), to monitoring pilot performance in real time. Several measures – e.g. heart rate, heart rate variability, eye tracking, cognitive walkthrough, and Human Machine Interface (HMI) usability analysis – proved to be useful and relatively robust in detecting performance degradation, and determining where changes in information presentation are required to better support pilot performance in challenging situations. These results led to proposed changes in a prototype future cockpit human-machine interface, which were subsequently validated in a final simulation. The results also informed the development of a ‘Smart-Vest’ that can be worn by pilots to monitor a range of signals linked to performance

Physiological Correlates of Volunteering

We review research on physiological correlates of volunteering, a neglected but promising research field. Some of these correlates seem to be causal factors influencing volunteering. Volunteers tend to have better physical health, both self-reported and expert-assessed, better mental health, and perform better on cognitive tasks. Research thus far has rarely examined neurological, neurochemical, hormonal, and genetic correlates of volunteering to any significant extent, especially controlling for other factors as potential confounds. Evolutionary theory and behavioral genetic research suggest the importance of such physiological factors in humans. Basically, many aspects of social relationships and social activities have effects on health (e.g., Newman and Roberts 2013; Uchino 2004), as the widely used biopsychosocial (BPS) model suggests (Institute of Medicine 2001). Studies of formal volunteering (FV), charitable giving, and altruistic behavior suggest that physiological characteristics are related to volunteering, including specific genes (such as oxytocin receptor [OXTR] genes, Arginine vasopressin receptor [AVPR] genes, dopamine D4 receptor [DRD4] genes, and 5-HTTLPR). We recommend that future research on physiological factors be extended to non-Western populations, focusing specifically on volunteering, and differentiating between different forms and types of volunteering and civic participation

Alignment of the CMS tracker with LHC and cosmic ray data

© CERN 2014 for the benefit of the CMS collaboration, published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License by IOP Publishing Ltd and Sissa Medialab srl. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation and DOI.The central component of the CMS detector is the largest silicon tracker ever built. The precise alignment of this complex device is a formidable challenge, and only achievable with a significant extension of the technologies routinely used for tracking detectors in the past. This article describes the full-scale alignment procedure as it is used during LHC operations. Among the specific features of the method are the simultaneous determination of up to 200 000 alignment parameters with tracks, the measurement of individual sensor curvature parameters, the control of systematic misalignment effects, and the implementation of the whole procedure in a multi-processor environment for high execution speed. Overall, the achieved statistical accuracy on the module alignment is found to be significantly better than 10μm

Multi-ancestry genome-wide association analyses improve resolution of genes and pathways influencing lung function and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease risk

Lung-function impairment underlies chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and predicts mortality. In the largest multi-ancestry genome-wide association meta-analysis of lung function to date, comprising 580,869 participants, we identified 1,020 independent association signals implicating 559 genes supported by ≥2 criteria from a systematic variant-to-gene mapping framework. These genes were enriched in 29 pathways. Individual variants showed heterogeneity across ancestries, age and smoking groups, and collectively as a genetic risk score showed strong association with COPD across ancestry groups. We undertook phenome-wide association studies for selected associated variants as well as trait and pathway-specific genetic risk scores to infer possible consequences of intervening in pathways underlying lung function. We highlight new putative causal variants, genes, proteins and pathways, including those targeted by existing drugs. These findings bring us closer to understanding the mechanisms underlying lung function and COPD, and should inform functional genomics experiments and potentially future COPD therapies

Research and Design of a Routing Protocol in Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

无线传感器网络，作为全球未来十大技术之一，集成了传感器技术、嵌入式计算技术、分布式信息处理和自组织网技术，可实时感知、采集、处理、传输网络分布区域内的各种信息数据，在军事国防、生物医疗、环境监测、抢险救灾、防恐反恐、危险区域远程控制等领域具有十分广阔的应用前景。 本文研究分析了无线传感器网络的已有路由协议，并针对大规模的无线传感器网络设计了一种树状路由协议，它根据节点地址信息来形成路由，从而简化了复杂繁冗的路由表查找和维护，节省了不必要的开销，提高了路由效率，实现了快速有效的数据传输。 为支持此路由协议本文提出了一种自适应动态地址分配算——ADAR（AdaptiveDynamicAddre...As one of the ten high technologies in the future, wireless sensor network, which is the integration of micro-sensors, embedded computing, modern network and Ad Hoc technologies, can apperceive, collect, process and transmit various information data within the region. It can be used in military defense, biomedical, environmental monitoring, disaster relief, counter-terrorism, remote control of haz...学位：工学硕士院系专业：信息科学与技术学院通信工程系_通信与信息系统学号：2332007115216

Pilots’ Willingness to Report Aviation Incidents

This paper reports results from a survey-based study among eighty-six airline pilots investigating their willingness to report safety-relevant events and incidents. Pilots have been asked to report how many events they have experienced in thirty-five different contextual areas and how often they have reported these cases. Thus, underreporting rates, respectively dark figures, were calculated and listed. These results and the willingness to report are discussed within an aviation operation’s background. Most of these surveyed underreporting rates are very high, which means a substantial source of uncertainty in airlines’ safety reporting databases, and thus for airlines’ safety management systems

Risk analysis of the EASA minimum fuel requirements considering the ACARE-defined safety target

We present the results of flight simulator experiments (60 runs) with randomly selected airline pilots under realistic operational conditions and discuss them in light of current fuel regulations and potential fuel starvation. The experiments were conducted to assess flight crew performance in handling complex technical malfunctions including decision-making in fourth-generation jet aircraft. Our analysis shows that the current fuel requirements of the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) are not sufficient to guarantee the safety target of the Advisory Council for Aviation Research and Innovation in Europe (ACARE), which is less than one accident in 10 million flights. To comply with this safety target, we recommend increasing the Final Reserve Fuel from 30 min to 45 min for jet aircraft. The minimum dispatched fuel upon landing should be at least 1 h