Crew workload strategies in advanced cockpits

Many methods of measuring and predicting operator workload have been developed that provide useful information in the design, evaluation, and operation of complex systems and which aid in developing models of human attention and performance. However, the relationships between such measures, imposed task demands, and measures of performance remain complex and even contradictory. It appears that we have ignored an important factor: people do not passively translate task demands into performance. Rather, they actively manage their time, resources, and effort to achieve an acceptable level of performance while maintaining a comfortable level of workload. While such adaptive, creative, and strategic behaviors are the primary reason that human operators remain an essential component of all advanced man-machine systems, they also result in individual differences in the way people respond to the same task demands and inconsistent relationships among measures. Finally, we are able to measure workload and performance, but interpreting such measures remains difficult; it is still not clear how much workload is too much or too little nor the consequences of suboptimal workload on system performance and the mental, physical, and emotional well-being of the human operators. The rationale and philosophy of a program of research developed to address these issues will be reviewed and contrasted to traditional methods of defining, measuring, and predicting human operator workload. Viewgraphs are given

Changing health professionals’ scope of practice: how do we continue to make progress?

Executive Summary What are the issues related to health professionals’ changing scope of practice in Australia? There is evidence that the current organisation of health professionals and health practitioners, and their associated scope of practice, are not suited to meet the needs of the Australian health system. This is contributing to unsafe and inefficient care delivery. There have been substantial changes in population health needs and the technologies, structures and processes of the health care system, yet there has been little change in the health workforce to adapt to the system requirements. Many of the difficulties in adapting the workforce are created by existing legislation and regulation, the funding models for health professional services, and entrenched professional cultures. There is no agreement on coherent policy for the health workforce even though the national, state, and territory governments have focused on this issue What are the implications if these issues are not addressed? Individual health services and health systems will be unable to implement changes to their health professional and practitioner workforce that enable them to meet the access, quality and financial targets necessary for sustainable operation of the public health system. What can we do? While there have been a range of health practitioner scope of practice changes documented in the literature, there is no analytical framework to categorise the changes to enable benchmarking of achievements and outcomes. In addition, few of the scope of practice changes have been evaluated, and those that have, suffer from poor methodology and lack of economic evaluation. This suggests that there are no ready-made solutions waiting on the shelf and leads to the following recommendations. Include health professional and practitioner scope of practice as a standing item on the national, and state and territory health policy agendas, with the goal to develop national policy directions that are supported by all parties. Three actions are required to procure the data needed to enable this policy development to proceed: Establish and maintain a central repository of Australian health professional and practitioner scopes of practice. Develop inter-disciplinary agreement on essential work roles in community and primary care, mental health, aged and chronic care and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health. Prioritise health services research directed to evaluation of changes in health professional and health practitioner scope of practice. Once the policy has been developed, undertake legislative changes to facilitate scope of practice changes, amend health service purchasing rules to encourage safe service delivery by a broader range of health professionals, and reform health professional education to better address the workforce needs of the health system. These changes will be required to support health workforce policy that encourages a flexible approach to health practitioner scope of practice, but that still ensures sufficient protection for the population

An Expert System for Managing an Activated Sludge Wastewater Treatment Plant

A diagnostic expert system for an activated sludge wastewater treatment plant has been designed to link with a relational database management system for obtaining operational parameter values that are used by the program to diagnose operational problems that may occur in the process. The problems that are dealt with by the system are bulking sludge, floating sludge, defloculation, ashing, solids washout, foaming problems, high soluble effluent BOD and problems in the aeration system. The link between the expert system and the database is accomplished via programming that is initiated by the expert system program. The operator of the system is not required to perform any action in order for the appropriate retrievals of operational parameter values to occur. The system is designed such that parameter values are retrieved from the database if such a database exists and contains appropriate values and, if no such database exists or if the appropriate values are not present, the operator is queried for the parameter values. Since many wastewater treatment plants maintain database management systems for operational parameter values, such an expert system has advantages over stand alone systems. However, an override of the database query is possible, making the system useful for experimental queries and for training

The use of visual cues for vehicle control and navigation

At least three levels of control are required to operate most vehicles: (1) inner-loop control to counteract the momentary effects of disturbances on vehicle position; (2) intermittent maneuvers to avoid obstacles, and (3) outer-loop control to maintain a planned route. Operators monitor dynamic optical relationships in their immediate surroundings to estimate momentary changes in forward, lateral, and vertical position, rates of change in speed and direction of motion, and distance from obstacles. The process of searching the external scene to find landmarks (for navigation) is intermittent and deliberate, while monitoring and responding to subtle changes in the visual scene (for vehicle control) is relatively continuous and 'automatic'. However, since operators may perform both tasks simultaneously, the dynamic optical cues available for a vehicle control task may be determined by the operator's direction of gaze for wayfinding. An attempt to relate the visual processes involved in vehicle control and wayfinding is presented. The frames of reference and information used by different operators (e.g., automobile drivers, airline pilots, and helicopter pilots) are reviewed with particular emphasis on the special problems encountered by helicopter pilots flying nap of the earth (NOE). The goal of this overview is to describe the context within which different vehicle control tasks are performed and to suggest ways in which the use of visual cues for geographical orientation might influence visually guided control activities

Girls in The Boat: Sex Differences in Rowing Performance and Participation

Men outperform women in many athletic endeavors due to physiological and anatomical differences (e.g. larger and faster muscle); however, the observed sex differences in elite athletic performance are typically larger than expected, and may reflect sex-related differences in opportunity or incentives. As collegiate rowing in the United States has been largely incentivized for women over the last 20 years, but not men, the purpose of this study was to examine sex differences in elite rowing performance over that timeframe. Finishing times from grand finale races for collegiate championship on-water performances (n = 480) and junior indoor performances (n = 1,280) were compared between men and women across 20 years (1997–2016), weight classes (heavy vs. lightweight) and finishing place. Participation of the numbers of men and women rowers were also quantified across years. Men were faster than women across all finishing places, weight classes and years of competition and performance declined across finishing place for both men and women (P\u3c0.001). Interestingly, the reduction in performance time across finishing place was greater (P\u3c0.001) for collegiate men compared to women in the heavyweight division. This result is opposite to other sports (e.g. running and swimming), and to lightweight rowing in this study, which provides women fewer incentives than in heavyweight rowing. Correspondingly, participation in collegiate rowing has increased by ~113 women per year (P\u3c0.001), with no change (P = 0.899) for collegiate men. These results indicate that increased participation and incentives within collegiate rowing for women vs. men contribute to sex differences in athletic performance

The stability of charged-particle motion in sheared magnetic reversals

We consider the motion of charged particles in a static magnetic reversal with a shear component, which has application for the stability of current sheets, such as in the Earth's geotail and in solar flares. We examine how the topology of the phase space changes as a function of the shear component by. At zero by, the phase space may be characterized by regions of stochastic and regular orbits (KAM surfaces). Numerically, we find that as we vary by, the position of the periodic orbit at the centre of the KAM surfaces changes. We use multiple-timescale perturbation theory to predict this variation analytically. We also find that for some values of by, all the KAM surfaces are destroyed owing to a resonance effect between two timescales, making the phase space globally chaotic. By investigating the stability of the solutions in the vicinity of the fixed point, we are able to predict for what values of by this happens and when the KAM surfaces reappear

Helicopter human factors research

Helicopter flight is among the most demanding of all human-machine integrations. The inherent manual control complexities of rotorcraft are made even more challenging by the small margin for error created in certain operations, such as nap-of-the-Earth (NOE) flight, by the proximity of the terrain. Accident data recount numerous examples of unintended conflict between helicopters and terrain and attest to the perceptual and control difficulties associated with low altitude flight tasks. Ames Research Center, in cooperation with the U.S. Army Aeroflightdynamics Directorate, has initiated an ambitious research program aimed at increasing safety margins for both civilian and military rotorcraft operations. The program is broad, fundamental, and focused on the development of scientific understandings and technological countermeasures. Research being conducted in several areas is reviewed: workload assessment, prediction, and measure validation; development of advanced displays and effective pilot/automation interfaces; identification of visual cues necessary for low-level, low-visibility flight and modeling of visual flight-path control; and pilot training

Helmet-mounted pilot night vision systems: Human factors issues

Helmet-mounted displays of infrared imagery (forward-looking infrared (FLIR)) allow helicopter pilots to perform low level missions at night and in low visibility. However, pilots experience high visual and cognitive workload during these missions, and their performance capabilities may be reduced. Human factors problems inherent in existing systems stem from three primary sources: the nature of thermal imagery; the characteristics of specific FLIR systems; and the difficulty of using FLIR system for flying and/or visually acquiring and tracking objects in the environment. The pilot night vision system (PNVS) in the Apache AH-64 provides a monochrome, 30 by 40 deg helmet-mounted display of infrared imagery. Thermal imagery is inferior to television imagery in both resolution and contrast ratio. Gray shades represent temperatures differences rather than brightness variability, and images undergo significant changes over time. The limited field of view, displacement of the sensor from the pilot's eye position, and monocular presentation of a bright FLIR image (while the other eye remains dark-adapted) are all potential sources of disorientation, limitations in depth and distance estimation, sensations of apparent motion, and difficulties in target and obstacle detection. Insufficient information about human perceptual and performance limitations restrains the ability of human factors specialists to provide significantly improved specifications, training programs, or alternative designs. Additional research is required to determine the most critical problem areas and to propose solutions that consider the human as well as the development of technology