Making an administrative trustee agent accountable: reason-based decision making within the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism

"Decisions within the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol are made by an expert body that acts as a trustee agent of the member states. Trustee agents help overcome the credible commitment problems of their principals and promise reason-based decisions. In contrast to traditional principal-agent settings, trusteeship relations are typically triadic. Beside the preferences of the principals and the trustee, decision criteria provide an external point of reference. They reflect the principals' long-term interest and define the trustee's decision rationale. The triadic structure helps protect the autonomy of trustees and allows for making them accountable for their decisions. Accountability mechanisms intend to ensure that a trustee's decisions are in line with established decision criteria. Against this backdrop, we explore the incentives created by the existing institutional arrangement for the making of CDM decisions and examine selected cases. We conclude that CDM arrangements provide a model for nonpartisan international regulation." (author's abstract

A Research of Speech Signal of Fire Information Display Interface

This study was conducted to investigate the effect of speech rate and tune on intelligibility of fire information words and sentences under the conditions with different levels of noise. The result showed that the types of signals and noise levels affect the intelligibility significantly .The appropriate tune for fire information display interface is mezzo-soprano. The appropriate voice rate is 5 characters per second for words display, 7 characters per second for usual sentences display and 6 characters per second for the sentences with numbers display

Culturel difference in structure of categories in Denmark and China

There is a difference in how Danish and Chinese people group object, method and concepts into categories. Difference in these points affect the information structure in applications, which involve menus, links and directories. This study involves groups from Chinese and Danish cultures and investigates how these two cultures group cards into different categories and how their cultural backgrounds affect the structure of their categories. Card Sort, Information Structure, Cultural Difference and Usability

Comparing User and Software Information Structures for Compatibility

Abstract. Eastern and Western cultures differ quite systematically in how they group objects, functions and concepts into categories [1,2,3]. This has implications for how navigation features, such as menus, links, directories, should be designed in software applications. This is particularly of interest when the application is developed in one culture for use in a second culture. This paper presents this problem and discusses some approaches to comparing user and software information architectures both visually and quantitatively

Working Paper nr. 03-2007 Cultural difference in structure of categories in

Culturel difference in structure of categories i

Culturel difference in structure of categories in Denmark and China

There is a difference in how Danish and Chinese people group object, method and concepts into categories. Difference in these points affect the information structure in applications, which involve menus, links and directories. This study involves groups from Chinese and Danish cultures and investigates how these two cultures group cards into different categories and how their cultural backgrounds affect the structure of their categories. Card Sort, Information Structure, Cultural Difference and Usability.na

Major Failure Events of Automated Highway Systems: Three Scenarios from the Driver’s Perspective

Automated Highway Systems (AHS) have the potential for offering large capacity and safety gains without requiring significant amounts of additional right-of-way. Since the general public will be the users of the AHS, human factors must play a pivotal role in the research and development of AVCS technologies and AHS operation. In two companion reports, three attributes critical to AHS human factors were identified and seven scenarios featuring variations in these attributes proposed. To ensure the identification of all major compounding attribute combinations, detailed operational events, from the perspective of the driver, were identified. This paper focuses on failure events, where a failure event is defined to be the occurrence of a functional failure during a normal operational event.After briefly reviewing the seven "first-generation'' scenarios, this report first describes the criteria for selecting the three "second-generation'' scenarios and then reports the selection result. While examining each of the normal operational events identified for the three scenarios, we identify possibly multiple major failure events by assuming the failure of one operational function at a time. Failure events resulting from the failure of multiple operational functions can be inferred. For each failure event, we also define possible failure consequences and possible system responses to resolve the failure event. These second-generation scenarios are selected for studying AHS human factors and are not being advocated by the authors as the better deployment choices among the seven first-generation scenarios, even from the human-factors point-of-view. Similarly, the responses provided for the major failure events are not being advocated as the better ones. Rather, to truly identify human capability in failure/emergency situations and not to rule out possible human abilities prematurely, we tend to stretchthe limit of human capability in the responses. The true human capability is a crucial subject for future investigation