Biomedical and Human Factors Requirements for a Manned Earth Orbiting Station

This report is the result of a study conducted by Republic Aviation Corporation in conjunction with Spacelabs, Inc.,in a team effort in which Republic Aviation Corporation was prime contractor. In order to determine the realistic engineering design requirements associated with the medical and human factors problems of a manned space station, an interdisciplinary team of personnel from the Research and Space Divisions was organized. This team included engineers, physicians, physiologists, psychologists, and physicists. Recognizing that the value of the study is dependent upon medical judgments as well as more quantifiable factors (such as design parameters) a group of highly qualified medical consultants participated in working sessions to determine which medical measurements are required to meet the objectives of the study. In addition, various Life Sciences personnel from NASA (Headquarters, Langley, MSC) participated in monthly review sessions. The organization, team members, consultants, and some of the part-time contributors are shown in Figure 1. This final report embodies contributions from all of these participants

Business Process Simulation: A Systematic Literature Review

Business process simulation marks an essential Business Process Management technique for analysing business processes and for reasoning about process improvement. Despite its importance, literature is lacking a comprehensive, updated overview of research contributions to the field of business process simulation. In this systematic literature review, we assess the present state of research on business process simulation including prior work between 1990 and 2016. Results reported in the present study assist in advancing the discussion on future research on business process simulation by compiling and analysing prior work. The present literature review focuses on prior research involving conceptual business process models, e.g., BPMN models, with a graphical model representation as a starting point for business process simulation and excludes other foundations to build simulation models

Quality-space theory in olfaction

Quality-space theory (QST) explains the nature of the mental qualities distinctive of perceptual states by appeal to their role in perceiving. QST is typically described in terms of the mental qualities that pertain to color. Here we apply QST to the olfactory modalities. Olfaction is in various respects more complex than vision, and so provides a useful test case for QST. To determine whether QST can deal with the challenges olfaction presents, we show how a quality space (QS) could be constructed relying on olfactory perceptible properties and the olfactory mental qualities then defined by appeal to that QS of olfactory perceptible properties. We also consider how to delimit the olfactory QS from other modalities. We further apply QST to the role that experience plays in refining our olfactory discriminative abilities and the occurrence of olfactory mental qualities in non-conscious olfactory states. QST is shown to be fully applicable to and useful for understanding the complex domain of olfaction

A browser-based modeling tool for studying the learning of conceptual modeling based on a multi-modal data collection approach

How do we learn conceptual modeling? What are common learning difficulties? Which tool support assists learners in what respect? The paper at hand reports on the design and development of a browser-based modeling tool integrated with a learning observatory in support of learning conceptual modeling and of studying the learning of conceptual modeling. Implementing a multimodal data collection approach, the learning observatory tracks learner-tool interactions, records verbal data from learners and surveys learners about their learning processes to provide for analyses at the individual and aggregate learner levels in the quest for identifying patterns of learning processes, learning barriers and difficulties. We report on the current state of prototype development, discuss its software architecture and outline future development steps