The Decisive Moment \u3ci\u3eThe Science of Decision Making under Stress\u3c/i\u3e

I n January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 performed an emergency landing in the Hudson River after hitting a flock of birds and losing thrust in all engines. Decisions made by the pilot not to return to the airport of the flight\u27s origin or to attempt to land at surrounding airports, but instead to bring the aircraft down in the icy cold waters between New York City and New Jersey, saved all 155 people on board. A few years earlier, on September 11, 2001, another plane had flown down the Hudson River, this time intentionally crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Seventeen minutes later, hijackers flew a second plane into the upper floors of the South Tower. On that fateful morning, there were two other deliberate plane crashes, one into the Pentagon and the other into a field in Pennsylvania. People around the world watched intently as firefighters and other emergency responders made critical decisions in their efforts to rescue some 20,000 people thought to have been in the towers that day. Subsequently, in Afghanistan and Iraq, military commanders made life and death decisions on battlefields. Through the use of mass media, people around the world are often eyewitnesses in near real time to the decisive moment when leadership is on the line and critical decisions are made to adapt to the danger of extreme events. Those watching the decision makers have infinite time to second-guess after the fact, free of the stress and personal drama that surround these decisions

The Decisive Moment \u3ci\u3eThe Science of Decision Making under Stress\u3c/i\u3e

I n January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 performed an emergency landing in the Hudson River after hitting a flock of birds and losing thrust in all engines. Decisions made by the pilot not to return to the airport of the flight\u27s origin or to attempt to land at surrounding airports, but instead to bring the aircraft down in the icy cold waters between New York City and New Jersey, saved all 155 people on board. A few years earlier, on September 11, 2001, another plane had flown down the Hudson River, this time intentionally crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Seventeen minutes later, hijackers flew a second plane into the upper floors of the South Tower. On that fateful morning, there were two other deliberate plane crashes, one into the Pentagon and the other into a field in Pennsylvania. People around the world watched intently as firefighters and other emergency responders made critical decisions in their efforts to rescue some 20,000 people thought to have been in the towers that day. Subsequently, in Afghanistan and Iraq, military commanders made life and death decisions on battlefields. Through the use of mass media, people around the world are often eyewitnesses in near real time to the decisive moment when leadership is on the line and critical decisions are made to adapt to the danger of extreme events. Those watching the decision makers have infinite time to second-guess after the fact, free of the stress and personal drama that surround these decisions

Cross-modal Effects In Tactile And Visual Signaling

Using a wearable tactile display three experiments were conducted in which tactile messages were created emulating five standard US Army and Marine arm and hand signals for the military commands, namely: Attention , Halt , Rally , Move Out , and Nuclear Biological or Chemical event (NBC) . Response times and accuracy rates were collected for novices responding to visual and tactile representations of these messages, which were displayed either alone or together in congruent or incongruent combinations. Results indicated synergistic effects for concurrent, congruent message presentations showing superior response times when compared to individual presentations in either modality alone. This effect was mediated by participant strategy. Accuracy similarly improved when both the tactile and visual presentation were concurrently displayed as opposed to separately. In a low workload condition, participants could largely attend to a particular modality, with little interference from competing signals. If participants were not given instructions as to which modality to attend to, participants chose that modality which was received first. Lastly, initial learning and subsequent training of intuitive tactile signals occurred rapidly with large gains in performance in short training periods. These results confirm the promise for tactile messages to augment visual messaging in challenging and stressful environments particularly when visual messaging is maybe preferred but is not always feasible or possible

Learning Document Similarity Using Natural Language Processing

The recent considerable growth in the amount of easily available on-line text has brought to the foreground the need for large-scale natural language processing tools for text data mining. In this paper we address the problem of organizing documents into meaningful groups according to their content and to visualize a text collection, providing an overview of the range of documents and of their relationships, so that they can be browsed more easily. We use Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) (Kohonen 1984). Great efficiency challenges arise in creating these maps. We study linguistically-motivated ways of reducing the representation of a document to increase efficiency and ways to disambiguate the words in the documents

Subaru Spectroscopy and Spectral Modeling of Cygnus A

We present high angular resolution ($\sim$0.5$^\prime$$^\prime$) MIR spectra of the powerful radio galaxy, Cygnus A, obtained with the Subaru telescope. The overall shape of the spectra agree with previous high angular resolution MIR observations, as well as previous Spitzer spectra. Our spectra, both on and off nucleus, show a deep silicate absorption feature. The absorption feature can be modeled with a blackbody obscured by cold dust or a clumpy torus. The deep silicate feature is best fit by a simple model of a screened blackbody, suggesting foreground absorption plays a significant, if not dominant role, in shaping the spectrum of Cygnus A. This foreground absorption prevents a clear view of the central engine and surrounding torus, making it difficult to quantify the extent the torus attributes to the obscuration of the central engine, but does not eliminate the need for a torus in Cygnus A

Eating Disorders in Men: A Comprehensive Summary

Eating disorders (EDs) have detrimental effects on an individual’s physical and mental health, along with significant interpersonal, social and economic effects. Furthermore, men who are suffering with an ED face unique challenges with this. Men suffering with EDs have historically received little attention within ED research, diagnosis and intervention. However, the number of men suffering with these issues is significant and growing. Understanding of EDs tend to ignore male experiences, meaning many are left to suffer in silence until the ED has developed to a critical point. However, many now recognize the need to understand the issues facing men suffering with an ED. By improving our understanding, we can better improve early detection, diagnosis and treatment for those who are suffering. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive general introduction to this growing area of research and it is hoped that it will be of good use to interested researchers, students and the general public. Prevalence, presentation, history, diagnosis and more will be covered in order to provide a well-rounded understanding of EDs in men

Metabolomic Analysis of Oregon Coast Sediment Pore Waters using Ultrahigh Resolution Mass Spectrometry

One of the principal drivers of climate change is the concentration of greenhouse gases such as CO2 in the atmosphere. A large portion of this CO2 ends up in the waters off the continental coasts where it transforms into biomass. The major sink for this matter is the ocean sediments on continental margins where organic matter can be stored for thousands of years in extremely complex forms that are largely uncharacterized. Some of compounds remineralize into carbon dioxide and eventually re-enter the atmosphere, but others get locked into recalcitrant forms that are stored for millennia. Bacteria play a role in this cycle by transforming carbon from reactive forms to unreactive forms, but the mechanisms that this occurs by remains largely unclear. Progress in this field has largely been held back by the lack of available analytical tools to study the environment at such a small scale. New technologies such as Ultra High resolution mass spectrometry coupled with Liquid Chromatography gives us the ability to investigate these systems. Here, we investigated using 21T Fourier Transform Inductively Coupled Resonance Mass Spectrometry to conduct a metabolomic analysis of Oregon Coast sediment pore waters. This preliminary study has successfully predicted molecular formulas and classified compounds into groups of lipids, proteins, phytochemicals, carbohydrates, aminosugars, and nucleotides based on their stoichiometries. The method has allowed for elucidation of key differences between two distinct sediment regions (top of the sediments, and 4-8 cm into the sediments) efficiently using data plotting techniques such as van Krevelen diagrams and volcano plots. The study has captured the expected pattern of molecular weight distribution of DOM in the sediment pore waters, while also finding differences in oxidation states and compound class distributions that lead to additional research questions

International differences in self-reported health measures in 33 major metropolitan areas in Europe.

The increasing concentration of populations into large conurbations in recent decades has not been matched by international health assessments, which remain largely focused at the country level. We aimed to demonstrate the use of routine survey data to compare the health of large metropolitan centres across Europe and determine the extent to which differences are due to socio-economic factors