Medieval and modern women mystics: the evidential character of religious experience

This paper aims to show, first, that significant parallels exist between the function (the social significance and personal value) of religious experience in the 14th century Rhineland and among women and even men today. More specifically, I will suggest that this similarity is grounded in certain shared features of women’s social and especially ecclesiastical situation in the Middle Ages and the present. Finally, I wish to consider the implications of this parallel for an understanding of the evidential character of religious experience. That is, does the similarity that exists between the situation of religious women in the Middle Ages and today adequately account for the content or character of their experiences, or must we look further and deeper in order to fathom the meaning of these experiences for the women of the Middle Ages and our own time

Cognitive consequences of clumsy automation on high workload, high consequence human performance

The growth of computational power has fueled attempts to automate more of the human role in complex problem solving domains, especially those where system faults have high consequences and where periods of high workload may saturate the performance capacity of human operators. Examples of these domains include flightdecks, space stations, air traffic control, nuclear power operation, ground satellite control rooms, and surgical operating rooms. Automation efforts may have unanticipated effects on human performance, particularly if they increase the workload at peak workload times or change the practitioners' strategies for coping with workload. Smooth and effective changes in automation requires detailed understanding of the congnitive tasks confronting the user: it has been called user centered automation. The introduction of a new computerized technology in a group of hospital operating rooms used for heart surgery was observed. The study revealed how automation, especially 'clumsy automation', effects practitioner work patterns and suggest that clumsy automation constrains users in specific and significant ways. Users tailor both the new system and their tasks in order to accommodate the needs of process and production. The study of this tailoring may prove a powerful tool for exposing previously hidden patterns of user data processing, integration, and decision making which may, in turn, be useful in the design of more effective human-machine systems

FLORIDA AND THE FRESH STRAWBERRY INDUSTRY

Agribusiness,

Copepod Aggregations: Influences of Physics and Collective Behavior

Dense copepod aggregations form in Massachusetts Bay and provide an important resource for right whales. We re-examine the processes which might account for the high concentrations, investigating both horizontally convergent flow, which can increase the density of depth-keeping organisms, and social behavior. We argue that the two act in concert: social behavior creates small dense patches (on the scale of a few sensing radii); physical stirring brings them together so that they merge into aggregations with larger scales; it also moves them into areas of physical convergence which retain the increasingly large patch. But the turbulence can also break this apart, suggesting that the overall high density in the convergence zone will not be uniform but will instead be composed of multiple transient patches (which are still much larger than the sensing scale)