An Investigation of the Relationship Between Subjective Mental Workload and Objective Indicators of User Activity

Whilst the concept of physical workload is intuitively understood and readily applicable in system design, the same cannot be said of mental workload (MWL), despite its importance in our increasingly technological society. Despite its origin in the mid 20th century, the very concept of ”mental workload” is still a topic of debate in the literature, although it can be loosely defined as “the amount of mental work necessary for a person to complete a task” (Miller, 1956; Longo, 2014). Several methods have been utilized to measure of MWL, including physiological methods such as neuro-imagery, performance-based metrics, and subjective measures via questionnaires, such as the NASA-TLX method (NASA, 2022). In this work, the relationship between subjective measures of MWL and objective indicators of activity is examined. Herein, a series of web-based tasks have been developed with mouse-activity monitoring implemented in JavaScript in order to study this relationship. The experimental results indicate that user mouse activity does not correlate with subjective indicators of MWL

Death at sea - the true rate of occupational fatality within the Australian commercial fishing industry

Although the safety performance of the Australian commercial fishing industry has been the subject of multiple investigations, it has ultimately remained undefined. While most Australian industries notify industry regulators of significant workplace incidents and injuries in their operations, the majority of persons in the commercial fishing industry are contractors who are paid piecework and in some jurisdictions specifically excluded from the worker compensation legislation, meaning that most occupational injuries, including fatalities, are not captured in the centralized worker compensation data sets. This study presents the analysis of a systematic review of industry databases, published academic, and, Australian coroners reports to assist improve the definition of the nation\u27s commercial fishing industry safety performance. The analysis shows occupational fatality rates are significantly higher than currently reported, and recurring factors contributing to deaths at sea remain unaddressed. The study is significant as it demonstrates how workplace injuries and deaths can be hidden within data sets applying broad industry classification and provides a foundation for future research in Australian fishing and other industries

An examination of the impact of COVID-19 on assessment practices in higher education

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a rapid pivot to online learning across many higher education institutions globally. This paper investigates to what extent assessment strategies changed as a result of this pivot. It explores the case of Technological University Dublin (TU Dublin) in Ireland and finds that 95% of respondents altered their assessment practices in some way. Beyond identifying changing practice, the paper also develops a TARC (Typology of Assessment Responses to COVID-19) model which shows four categories of responses. Reactors are those academics who simply moved their assessments online. Adaptive Responders modified assessments slightly for the online environment. While Opportunists are those who used the opportunity of the pandemic to implement strategies they had been considering, the Committed Innovators engage in innovation in teaching and assessment strategies on an ongoing basis and, thus, they continued to do what they always did. The key factors that were considered in the decision-making about how to alter assessment strategies were pedagogical, practical considerations and the availability of support

Fine-grained Activities of People Worldwide

Every day, humans perform many closely related activities that involve subtle discriminative motions, such as putting on a shirt vs. putting on a jacket, or shaking hands vs. giving a high five. Activity recognition by ethical visual AI could provide insights into our patterns of daily life, however existing activity recognition datasets do not capture the massive diversity of these human activities around the world. To address this limitation, we introduce Collector, a free mobile app to record video while simultaneously annotating objects and activities of consented subjects. This new data collection platform was used to curate the Consented Activities of People (CAP) dataset, the first large-scale, fine-grained activity dataset of people worldwide. The CAP dataset contains 1.45M video clips of 512 fine grained activity labels of daily life, collected by 780 subjects in 33 countries. We provide activity classification and activity detection benchmarks for this dataset, and analyze baseline results to gain insight into how people around with world perform common activities. The dataset, benchmarks, evaluation tools, public leaderboards and mobile apps are available for use at visym.github.io/cap

Ecological urban planning and design: A systematic literature review

Urbanization is a defining feature of the modern age, yet the current model of urban development profoundly alters the natural environment, often reducing biodiversity and ultimately threatening human wellbeing. An ecologically based urban planning and design paradigm should consider a more harmonious relationship. Through a systematic literature review of 57 papers, this research identified relevant concepts and theories that could underpin this new paradigm. It revealed a noticeable increase in academic interest in this subject since 2013 and the development of concepts and theories that reflect a more holistic socio-ecological systems approach to urban planning and design based on a transdisciplinary integration and synthesis of research. Seven main themes underpin the academic literature: ecosystem services, socio-ecological systems, resilience, biodiversity, landscape, green infrastructure, as well as integrated and holistic approaches. Six of these can be organised into either a sustainability stream or a spatial stream, representing the foundations of a potential new ecological urban planning and design paradigm that applies sustainability-related concepts in a spatial setting. The final theme, integrated and holistic, includes concepts that reflect the fundamental characteristics of this new paradigm, which can be termed 'urban consonance'

Mutagenesis of the Catalytic Triad of Tissue Transglutaminase Abrogates Coeliac Disease Serum IgA Autoantibody Binding

Background and aims: Tissue transglutaminase (tTG) is an autoantigen in coeliac disease and the related disorder, dermatitis herpetiformis. The detection of autoantibodies directed against tTG is a highly specific marker of coeliac disease; however, it is unclear if there is a role for these autoantibodies in the disease process. The aim of this study was to investigate whether the catalytic triad of tTG is targeted by coeliac disease autoantibodies. Methods: A full-length wild-type recombinant tTG and a novel site-directed mutagenic variant lacking the catalytic triad were produced in Escherichia coli. Serum samples from 61 biopsy-proven coeliac disease and 10 dermatitis herpetiformis patients were tested for their recognition of both antigens in enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Results: Although IgA autoantibodies from sera of patients with coeliac disease and dermatitis herpetiformis bound wild-type tTG well, a dramatic decrease in binding to the mutant tTG was observed with a mean reduction of 79% in coeliac disease and 58% in dermatitis herpetiformis samples. IgG anti-tTG antibodies did not show a similar pattern of reduction, with no overall difference in recognition of the wild-type or mutant tTGs. Conclusions: These results suggest that the IgA anti-tTG response in coeliac disease and dermatitis herpetiformis is focused on the region of tTG responsible for its transamidation and deamidation reactions, whereas the IgG response may target other regions of the enzyme