12,894 research outputs found

    Questioning, exploring, narrating and playing in the control room to maintain system safety

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    Systems whose design is primarily aimed at ensuring efficient, effective and safe working, such as control rooms, have traditionally been evaluated in terms of criteria that correspond directly to those values: functional correctness, time to complete tasks, etc. This paper reports on a study of control room working that identified other factors that contributed directly to overall system safety. These factors included the ability of staff to manage uncertainty, to learn in an exploratory way, to reflect on their actions, and to engage in problem-solving that has many of the hallmarks of playing puzzles which, in turn, supports exploratory learning. These factors, while currently difficult to measure or explicitly design for, must be recognized and valued in design

    Verification-guided modelling of salience and cognitive load

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    Well-designed interfaces use procedural and sensory cues to increase the cognitive salience of appropriate actions. However, empirical studies suggest that cognitive load can influence the strength of those cues. We formalise the relationship between salience and cognitive load revealed by empirical data. We add these rules to our abstract cognitive architecture, based on higher-order logic and developed for the formal verification of usability properties. The interface of a fire engine dispatch task from the empirical studies is then formally modelled and verified. The outcomes of this verification and their comparison with the empirical data provide a way of assessing our salience and load rules. They also guide further iterative refinements of these rules. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of the outcomes of formal analysis and empirical studies suggests new experimental hypotheses, thus providing input to researchers in cognitive science

    Resilience markers for safer systems and organisations

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    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 ā€˜seenā€™, 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

    Consequences of energy conservation in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

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    Complete characterization of particle production and emission in relativistic heavy-ion collisions is in general not feasible experimentally. This work demonstrates, however, that the availability of essentially complete pseudorapidity distributions for charged particles allows for a reliable estimate of the average transverse momenta and energy of emitted particles by requiring energy conservation in the process. The results of such an analysis for Au+Au collisions at sqrt{s_{NN}}= 130 and 200 GeV are compared with measurements of mean-p_T and mean-E_T in regions where such measurements are available. The mean-p_T dependence on pseudorapidity for Au+Au collisions at 130 and 200 GeV is given for different collision centralities.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, Submitted to Phys. Rev.

    Overview of Solid Target Studies for a Neutrino Factory

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    The UK proĀ­gramme of high power tarĀ­get deĀ­velĀ­opĀ­ments for a NeuĀ­triĀ­no FacĀ­toĀ­ry is cenĀ­tred on the study of high-Z maĀ­teĀ­riĀ­als (tungĀ­sten, tanĀ­taĀ­lum). A deĀ­scripĀ­tion of lifeĀ­time shock tests on canĀ­diĀ­date maĀ­teĀ­riĀ­als is given as part of the reĀ­search into a solid tarĀ­get soĀ­luĀ­tion. A fast high curĀ­rent pulse is apĀ­plied to a thin wire of the samĀ­ple maĀ­teĀ­riĀ­al and the lifeĀ­time meaĀ­sured from the numĀ­ber of pulsĀ­es beĀ­fore failĀ­ure. These meaĀ­sureĀ­ments are made at temĀ­perĀ­aĀ­tures up to ~2000 K. The stress on the wire is calĀ­cuĀ­latĀ­ed using the LS-DYĀ­NA code and comĀ­pared to the stress exĀ­pectĀ­ed in the real NeuĀ­triĀ­no FacĀ­toĀ­ry tarĀ­get. It has been found that tanĀ­taĀ­lum is too weak to susĀ­tain proĀ­longed stress at these temĀ­perĀ­aĀ­tures but a tungĀ­sten wire has reached over 26 milĀ­lion pulsĀ­es (equivĀ­aĀ­lent to more than ten years of opĀ­erĀ­aĀ­tion at the NeuĀ­triĀ­no FacĀ­toĀ­ry). An acĀ­count is given of the opĀ­tiĀ­miĀ­saĀ­tion of secĀ­ondary pion proĀ­ducĀ­tion from the tarĀ­get and the isĀ­sues reĀ­latĀ­ed to mountĀ­ing the tarĀ­get in the muon capĀ­ture solenoid and tarĀ­get staĀ­tion are disĀ­cussed

    Authentic Corporate Social Responsibility Based on Authentic Empowerment: An Exemplary Business Leadership Case

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    Authors Dillon, Back, and Manz examine the underpinnings of genuine or authentic Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), noting the direct nexus between stakeholder empowerment and the socially-responsible actions of authentic leaders. Such an empowering leadership approachā€“ involving structural, psychological, developmental, and financial components ā€“ is particularly exemplified by a family-owned (Back) wine and cheese company (Fairview Trust), situate in South Africa

    Exploring the importance of reflection in the control room

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    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

    Does being motivated to avoid procedural errors influence their systematicity?

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