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 ‘seen’, 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

A Correlation Between Hard Gamma-ray Sources and Cosmic Voids Along the Line of Sight

We estimate the galaxy density along lines of sight to hard extragalactic gamma-ray sources by correlating source positions on the sky with a void catalog based on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Extragalactic gamma-ray sources that are detected at very high energy (VHE; E>100 GeV) or have been highlighted as VHE-emitting candidates in the Fermi Large Area Telescope hard source catalog (together referred to as "VHE-like" sources) are distributed along underdense lines of sight at the 2.4 sigma level. There is also a less suggestive correlation for the Fermi hard source population (1.7 sigma). A correlation between 10-500 GeV flux and underdense fraction along the line of sight for VHE-like and Fermi hard sources is found at 2.4 sigma and 2.6 sigma, respectively. The preference for underdense sight lines is not displayed by gamma-ray emitting galaxies within the second Fermi catalog, containing sources detected above 100 MeV, or the SDSS DR7 quasar catalog. We investigate whether this marginal correlation might be a result of lower extragalactic background light (EBL) photon density within the underdense regions and find that, even in the most extreme case of a entirely underdense sight line, the EBL photon density is only 2% less than the nominal EBL density. Translating this into gamma-ray attenuation along the line of sight for a highly attenuated source with opacity tau(E,z) ~5, we estimate that the attentuation of gamma-rays decreases no more than 10%. This decrease, although non-neglible, is unable to account for the apparent hard source correlation with underdense lines of sight.Comment: Accepted by MNRA

Big Fires, Big Trees, and Big Plots: Enhancing our Ecological Understanding of Fire with Unprecedented Field Data

Wildfire is an inexorable process in western landscapes, posing a major challenge to land managers: how can we use fire to restore healthy forests without jeopardizing human communities? The purpose of this dissertation is to produce research that will help guide management and support effective wildland fire use in fire-prone forests. I utilized a longitudinal dataset from a single, large forest plot that burned under serendipitous circumstances during the 2013 Rim Fire. My research revealed that post-fire mortality models under-predict mortality of large trees, and may need to be re-calibrated to perform well under future climates. I used satellite-derived data to estimate fire severity, and found that while severity maps may be accurate at broad scales, they failed to capture fine-scale patterns in fire effects. I examined the spatial elements of fire-related mortality, and demonstrate that beetles, pathogens, and inter-tree competition mediated fire effects and provoked complex, spatially structured mortality for years following fire. Finally, I disentangled the interactive effects of fire, beetles, and drought to provide a more mechanistic understanding of compound disturbance dynamics. This represents the first collection of fire ecology research to emerge from a single, exhaustively sampled, longitudinal monitoring plot. This dissertation not only enhances our ecological understanding of fire, it demonstrates the profound potential for large-scale observational research to contribute novel perspectives to the field of fire science

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

Observation of O+ 4P-4D0 lines in proton aurora over Svalbard

Spectra of a proton aurora event show lines of O+ 4P-4D0 multiplet (4639–4696 Å) enhanced relative to the N2 +1N(0,2) compared to normal electron aurora. Conjugate satellite particle measurements are used as input to electron and proton transport models, to show that p/H precipitation is the dominant source of both the O+ and N2 +1N emissions. The emission cross-section of the multiplet in p collisions with O and O2 estimated from published work does not explain the observed O+ brightness, suggesting a higher emission cross-section for low energy p impact on O

Clasp together: composing for mind and machine

This paper will explore questions of agency, control and interaction and the embodied nature of musical performance in relation to the use of human-computer interaction (HCI), through the experimental work Clasp Together (beta) 2 for small ensemble and live electronics by J. Harry Whalley. This practice-led research is situated at the intersection of music neurotechnology for sound synthesis and brain-computer interfaces (BCI), and explores the use of neural patterns from Electroencephalography (EEG) as a control instrument. The composition departed from the traditional composer/performer paradigm by including both non-instrumental physical gestures and cognitive or emotive instructions integrated into the score

Cryogenic mechanisms for scanning and interchange of the Fabry-Perot interferometers in the ISO long wavelength spectrometer

The Infrared Space Observatory (ISO) is an ESA cornerstone mission for infrared astronomy. Schedules for launch in 1993, its four scientific instruments will provide unprecedented sensitivity and spectral resolution at wavelengths which are inaccessible using ground-based techniques. One of these, the Long Wavelength Spectrometer (LWS), will operate in the 45 to 180 micron region (Emery et. al., 1985) and features two Fabry-Perot interferometers mounted on an interchange mechanism. The entire payload module of the spacecraft, comprising the 60 cm telescope and the four focal plane instruments, is maintained at 2 to 4 K by an onboard supply of liquid helium. The mechanical design and testing of the cryogenic interferometer and interchange mechanisms are described

ISO-LWS observations of IRAS16293-2422

We obtained LWS grating spectra toward IRAS 16293-2422 and the surrounding region, which covers the entire extent of the molecular outflow. The LWS spectra show that the region is relatively uncontaminated by PhotoDissociationRegion (PDR)-like emission, showing only a weak diffuse CII emission. The on-source spectrum revealed the presence of the OI(63μm) line and several lines from CO, H2O and OH molecules. In this work we derive the macroscopic quantities associated with the UV-illuminated emitting gas which surrounds IRAS16293-2422 and compare it with previous studies. We show that the molecular lines originate in a hot (~1600 K), dense (~ 3·104cm-3) and extended (~ 8·1016cm) region, that we interprete as the shock of the wind impacting obliquely with the walls of the cavity created by the wind itself. The OI(63μm) line observed by the Kuiper Airborne Observatory (KAO: Ceccarelli et al. 1997a) at ~ 1.2·1017cm west from the central source is hence interpreted as the head of the shock where the wind strikes the ambient gas. Finally we speculate that the OI(63μm) line emission seen on-source originates in the collapsing envelope that surrounds the central object(s

The Utah Forest Dynamics Plot: Long-Term Ecological Monitoring and Theoretical Ecology in a High-Elevation Subalpine Environment

The Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity has been advanced as a universal theory for species coexistence in forests worldwide, but few studies have examined its relevance to high-elevation, stressful environments. I established the Utah Forest Dynamics Plot (UFDP) in a heterogeneous subalpine forest at 3,091 m elevation on the Colorado Plateau to examine three underlying assumptions of neutral theory (functional equivalence, ecological equivalence, and habitat generality) and one prediction (the species abundance distribution). The UFDP comprises 27,845 stems ≥1 cm diameter at breast height of 17 species, 10 genera, and 6 families over 13.6 ha. The neutral model was a poor fit to the observed species abundance distribution, but I did not find the alternative lognormal model to provide a better fit. Using spatial pattern analyses of tree data, topography, and soil type, I found some limited support for the neutral theory assumptions of functional and ecological equivalency, with notable exceptions. Populus tremuloides, Pinus flexilis, and Pinus longaeva were characterized by non-neutral recruitment processes, and Abies bifolia and Populus tremuloides exhibited asymmetric competitive and facilitative interactions. The assumption of habitat generality was strongly contradicted, with all ten abundant species in the UFDP having habitat preference. In this subalpine temperate forest, species diversity and community structure are influenced more by habitat heterogeneity, species differences, and niche selection, with neutral processes playing a lesser role

Rudolf Gopas (1913-1983)

This thesis examines the life and New Zealand works of the Lithuanian born artist, Rudolf Gopas (1913 - 1983), Gopas has been credited with introducing German Expressionism into New Zealand and with being the father of expressionism in modern New Zealand art. At the same time he has been accused of failing to become a New Zealand artist. These claims are examined, when it becomes apparent that while it is questionable that he introduced German Expressionism into the country he did, for a time, paint in a German Expressionist style and can be viewed as the father of modern New Zealand expressionism. This was a brief interlude however, and to characterise him as a German Expressionist painter is inadequate. While he did accommodate to New Zealand, he is shown to have been conscious of the international character of twentieth century art. In the thesis the nature of German Expressionism is considered and related to the early experience of the artist. His biographical details are presented for a better understanding of his later New Zealand painting. This is followed by a detailed consideration of the New Zealand works, which are studied in relation to his reception for the light this sheds on his art. When this is done it becomes apparent that his works fall into three periods; an early period of adjustment and re-establishment as an artist, when the works were largely naturalistic; a middle one when German Expressionist influences predominated; and a late one when the cosmological works were produced, which is shown to have been his most creative and significant. Throughout his professional career Gopas was subjected to a variety of changing influences and these are shown to have been assimilated and integrated with his wide ranging interests into a new form of expression. In the preparation of this thesis, 169 works and three individual volumes of Nature Speaks were examined, nineteen interviews were conducted with collectors, associates and relations, as well as extensive correspondence entered into with various people