Pilot mental workload: how well do pilots really perform?

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of increasing mental demands on various aspects of aircrew performance. In particular, the robustness of the prioritization and allocation hierarchy of aviate-navigate-communicate was examined, a hierarchy commonly used within the aviation industry. A total of 42 trainee pilots were divided into three workload groups (low, medium, high) to complete a desktop, computer-based exercise that simulated combinations of generic flight deck activities: flight control manipulation, rule-based actions and higher level cognitive processing, in addition to Air Traffic Control instructions that varied in length from one chunk of auditory information to seven chunks. It was found that as mental workload and auditory input increased, participants experienced considerable difficulty in carrying out the primary manipulation task. A similar decline in prioritization was also observed. Moreover, when pilots were under a high mental workload their ability to comprehend more than two chunks of auditory data deteriorated rapidly.     

How well do pilots sleep during long-haul flights?

It is imperative that shiftworkers in safety-critical workplaces obtain sufficient sleep to operate effectively. This presents a challenge to long-haul airline pilots who are required to supplement normal bed sleep with sleep on-board an aircraft during flight. In the current study, the sleep/wake behaviour of 301 airline pilots operating long-haul flight patterns was monitored for at least 2 weeks using self-report sleep diaries and wrist activity monitors. The data indicate that sleep opportunities in on-board rest facilities during long-haul flights result in a similar amount of sleep, but only 70% as much recovery, as duration-matched bed sleeps.

Statement of Relevance: This study indicates that in-flight sleep provides airline pilots with 70% as much restoration as duration-matched bed sleep. To increase the restoration provided by in-flight sleep, airlines could take measures to improve the quality, or increase the amount, of sleep obtained by pilots during flights.     

What's skill got to do with it? Vehicle automation and driver mental workload

Previous research has found that vehicle automation systems can reduce driver mental workload, with implications for attentional resources that can be detrimental to performance. The present paper considers how the development of automaticity within the driving task may influence performance in underload situations. Driver skill and vehicle automation were manipulated in a driving simulator, with four levels of each variable. Mental workload was assessed using a secondary task measure and eye movements were recorded to infer attentional capacity. The effects of automation on driver mental workload were quite robust across skill levels, but the most intriguing findings were from the eye movement data. It was found that, with little exception, attentional capacity and mental workload were directly related at all levels of driver skill, consistent with earlier studies. The results are discussed with reference to applied theories of cognition and the design of automation.     

Conceptual EuroModelling: how do SSADM and MERISE compare?

The systems development methods SSADM and MERISE are the de facto standard methods of the UK and France respectively, and as such will heavily influence the outcome of the current Euromethod programme, one of whose aims is to arrive at a standard framework for systems development for use by the governments within the European Community (EC) in the mid-1990s. This is intended to simplify the procurement of systems, to open up markets, to rationalise staff training and to assist in the movement of IT expertise. As a contribution to the aims of this programme, our work looks at the structural (data) modelling part of both methods and compares them using an abstract framework, addressing questions such as method similarities and differences and the mapping between both methods.     

How well do truck drivers sleep in cabin sleeper berths?

The aim of this study was to evaluate the sleep obtained by livestock transport truck drivers while resting in truck sleeper berths during long-haul commercial operations. Operations were carried out in the very remote regions of Australia. The sample comprised of 32 drivers who wore wrist activity monitors and reported bed-times for a two-week period. Drivers had a mean (±standard deviation) age of 35.41 (± 9.78) years and had worked as truck drivers for 13.83 (± 9.11) years. On average, they obtained 6.07 (± 1.18) hours of sleep/24-h period. The majority of sleep occurred at night, but drivers occasionally supplemented their main sleep with a daytime nap. Consistent with operational demands, drivers were most likely to sleep in cabin sleeper berths (n = 394, 77%). Only a small proportion of sleeps were sampled at home (n = 63, 12%) or at truck depots (n = 56, 11%). Mixed-model ANOVA revealed that while earlier bed-times at home yielded more sleep, there were only marginal differences in sleep quality across location. No intrinsic safety concerns associated with the use of sleeper berths were identified across consecutive days of long-haul transport operations.     

SOA adoption in business networks: do service-oriented architectures really advance inter-organizational integration?

The emergence of the Internet as a global communication infrastructure has dramatically reduced interaction costs within and across organizations, with significant impact on inter-organizational relationships, vertical industry structures, and markets. More recently, service-oriented architectures (SOA) and Web services have introduced the next paradigm shift and foster the idea of dynamic business networks with quick connect and disconnect relationships. However, little research has systematically analyzed how companies leverage SOA to improve their inter-organizational relationships and reshape their business networks. In addition, the mature research stream on inter-organizational information systems (IOS) has not yet sufficiently considered SOA. In order to close this gap, our research seeks to improve the fundamental understanding of how SOA is applied in business networks and how it differs from prior forms of IOS. Using an exploratory research approach, we investigate 33 SOA cases to identify focus areas and patterns of SOA adoption in business networks. Our case analysis builds on a multi-dimensional classification scheme which we derived from prior literature. While our empirical findings do not confirm all promising propositions related to SOA, they underline the specific contribution of SOA compared to prior forms of IOS. We conclude by suggesting five clusters of SOA adoption in the inter-organizational domain, each of those introducing new aspects in the coordination of distributed business networks.     

Eliciting children’s recall of events: how do computers compare with humans?

This study investigated the usefulness of an interactive computer program in eliciting children's reports about an event. Fifty-four 5–6- and fifty-nine 7–8-year old children participated in an event with their regular class teacher which involved several activities and a mildly negative secret. Four days and again 14 days later, the children were interviewed individually by computer (alone) or by a human interviewer. The computer program incorporated animation and audio whereby an animated figure asked the questions and the children were required to provide a verbal response. The accuracy and detail of the children’s reports was similar across the interview conditions. The children were more willing to review their answers with the computer than the adult interviewer. However, responses to the computer were less consistent across the interviews, and the children were less willing to disclose the secret in the second interview to the computer compared with the human interviewer. Overall, the computer revealed little benefit in eliciting children’s recall of the event over the standard face-to-face interview.     

How many cores do we need to run a parallel workload: A test drive of the Intel SCC platform?

As semiconductor manufacturing technology continues to improve, it is possible to integrate more and more transistors onto a single processor. Many-core processor design has resulted in part from the search to utilize this enormous transistor real estate. The Single-Chip Cloud Computer (SCC) is an experimental many-core processor created by Intel Labs. In this paper we present a study in which we analyze this innovative many-core system by running several workloads with distinctive parallelism characteristics. We investigate the effect on system performance by monitoring specific hardware performance counters. Then, we experiment on varying different hardware configuration parameters such as number of cores, clock frequency and voltage levels. We execute the chosen workloads and collect the timing, power consumption and energy consumption information on such a many-core research platform. Thus, we can comprehensively analyze the behavior and scalability of the Intel SCC system with the introduced workload in terms of performance and energy consumption. Our results show that the profiled parallel workload execution has a communication bottleneck on the Intel SCC system. Moreover, our results indicate that we should carefully choose the number of cores to execute different workloads in order to yield a balance between execution performance and energy efficiency for different applications.     

Why and how do middle school students exchange ideas during science inquiry?

Science is increasingly characterized by participation in knowledge communities. To meaningfully engage in science inquiry, students must be able to evaluate diverse sources of information, articulate informed ideas, and share ideas with peers. This study explores how technology can support idea exchanges in ways that value individuals’ prior ideas, and allow students to use these ideas to benefit their own and their peers’ learning. We used the Idea Manager, a curriculum-integrated tool that enables students to collect and exchange ideas during science inquiry projects. We investigated how students exchanged ideas, how these exchanges impacted the explanations they ultimately produced, and how the tool impacted teachers’ instruction. We implemented the tool with 297 grade 7 students, who were studying a web-based unit on cancer and cell division. Among other results, we found a relationship between the diversity of students’ ideas, and the sources of those ideas (i.e., whether they came from the students themselves or from their peers), and the quality of students’ scientific explanations. Specifically, students who collected more unique ideas (i.e., ideas not already represented in their private idea collections) as opposed to redundant ideas (i.e., ideas that reiterated ideas already present in their private idea collections) tended to write poorer explanations; and students who generated their own redundant ideas, as opposed to choosing peers’ ideas that were redundant, tended to write better explanations. We discuss implications for formative assessment, and for the role of technology in supporting students to engage more meaningfully with peers’ ideas.     

Australia's cultural network: Why and how?

As the Internet rapidly changes the way we communicate and carry out our business, what are the challenges and opportunities for the cultural sector? Will national cultural identities be subsumed in an emerging global mono‐culture? What is the role of government in this situation? This paper discusses these questions and describes why and how the Australian Government responded with a new cultural online service ‐ Australia's Cultural Network <http://www.acn.net.au/> ‐ to provide a single access point for the general public and a resource exchange for those in the Australian cultural community wanting to make the transition to the growing online economy.     

How well do shopbots represent online markets? A study of shopbots’ vendor coverage strategy

Consumers often use shopbots to search for information when making purchase decisions in Internet markets. Although they have varying sensitivity to shopbot bias, consumers generally prefer accurate market representation. However, in choosing the accuracy of market representation, shopbots must balance the desires of consumers with the costs of providing their services and with the desires of the vendors, who are often the largest source of their revenue. In this paper, we study how accurately shopbots represent a market and analyze the strategies shopbots adopt to achieve market representativeness. We theoretically identify two important drivers in shopbot vendor coverage strategy – how many vendors it covers (shopbot size) and which vendors it covers (shopbot affiliation) – and analytically show how the drivers affect shopbot market representativeness. We report the results of a large-scale study in which we collected 2.2 million vendor price listings from eight shopbots and develop metrics for measuring shopbot size, shopbot affiliation, and shopbot market representativeness. We found that (1) shopbots do not represent markets equally well; (2) size drives a shopbot's market representativeness positively whereas affiliation drives a shopbot's market representativeness negatively; (3) shopbots follow differnet vendor representative strategies to pursue market representativeness.     

To var or not to var: how do C# developers use and misuse implicit and explicit typing?

When implicit typing with the “var” keyword was introduced into C#, it prompted contradictory opinions among developers. This paper starts by explaining the difference between implicit and explicit typing and then provides an overview of developers’ opinions and guidelines that are available online. This paper then reports on the results of a study that investigated how C# developers use and misuse implicit and explicit typing. This study involved analyzing the source code of 10 different open-source software projects including more than 16,500,000 lines of code and more than 930,000 variables. This study investigated to what extent developers use a form of typing that affects the readability of a variable’s type and the length of its declaration. It also investigated whether or not there is an adoption of a consistent set of guidelines in general and across each software project. A tool called “Code Analysis and Refactoring Engine for C#” (Care#) was developed and used to conduct the code analysis for this study.

     

Analysis of submarine steering: effects of cognitive and perceptual–motor requirements on the mental workload and performance of helmsmen

The purpose of the study is to model manual submarine steering and its effects on helmsmen in terms of performance and mental workload. This activity is first formalized according to (a) cognitive requirements, by identifying different levels of control, and (b) perceptual–motor requirements, by analysing the directional compatibility of control–display design. An experiment is then carried out on a simulator designed by a world leader in military naval shipbuilding. This experiment follows a unique scenario including two driving situations with different levels of cognitive requirements (approach and stabilization phases). It is achieved by two groups, each carrying out a perceptual–motor task on a specific steering control–display configuration proposed by the naval shipbuilder (one with a standard numeric display and one with a new visual–spatial representation, both tasks controlled by the same joystick). The findings of this study show that the cognitive requirements during the stabilization phase with high propulsion speed produce increased mental workload, and the perceptual–motor requirements also produce increased mental workload when a direction-of-motion stereotype is violated (upward–forward relationship).     

Periocular recognition: how much facial expressions affect performance?

Using information near the human eye to perform biometric recognition has been gaining popularity. Previous works in this area, designated periocular recognition, show remarkably low error rates and particularly high robustness when data are acquired under less controlled conditions. In this field, one factor that remains to be studied is the effect of facial expressions on recognition performance, as expressions change the textural/shape information inside the periocular region. We have collected a multisession dataset whose single variation is the subjects’ facial expressions and analyzed the corresponding variations in performance, using the state-of-the-art periocular recognition strategy. The effectiveness attained by different strategies to handle the effects of facial expressions was compared: (1) single-sample enrollment; (2) multisample enrollment, and (3) multisample enrollment with facial expression recognition, with results also validated in the well-known Cohn–Kanade AU-Coded Expression dataset. Finally, the role of each type of facial expression in the biometrics menagerie effect is discussed.     

Applications: how far have we come? Part II

In this second of a two-part look at the evolution of critical issues and application areas, Computers in Healthcare Associate Editor Ellen Pollock examines how far integration, nursing systems, executive decision support and expert systems have come during the 1980s. Her top industry sources discuss the outlook for these applications in the near-term future, as well.     

Good vibrations: do electrical therapeutic massagers work?

Health, leisure and beauty activities are increasing in popularity, with a particular emphasis on self-help and alternative health practices. One product type that has increased sales with this expansion is the hand-held electric massager. These are products that use vibration as a means of alleviating muscular strains and pains, as well as promoting relaxation. Paradoxically, these products are extremely popular as gifts, but are soon discarded. A multi-disciplinary research team was commissioned by a British manufacturer of electrical consumer products to investigate user attitudes and perceptions of existing massagers, to identify areas of user dissatisfaction. The manufacturer was also concerned about a possible stigma attached to these products because of an association with sex aids. This paper provides an account of the perceptions of both consumers and therapists regarding the use of these products. Identifying the differences between the perceptions of consumers and therapists should help provide a basis for effective integration of user needs, manufacturer requirements, designers' skills and sound therapeutic practice. The results provide insight to support the development of more effective hand-held massagers.     

Interactive TV user interfaces: how fast is too fast?

The analysis presented in this paper is the search for optimal scrolling speeds of the user interface for interactive TV (iTV) navigation. The most popular navigation techniques for browsing through user interfaces usually incorporate scrolling. Furthermore, the latest set-top-boxes have enough processing power to support very fast scrolling, not only for texts, but also for photographs and other elements. We designed and performed an experiment to measure the optimal scrolling speed for different activities on a user interface. We found that the optimal speed depends on the type and complexity of the navigational elements (like text or graphics). We discovered that less-complex elements, such as numbered TV-channel names, tolerate much higher scrolling speeds than more-complex elements, such as graphical elements like movie posters. We also analyzed the impact of the direction of navigation (vertical, horizontal) on the optimal speeds and the results show no major impact on the graphical elements, while for the text elements the difference is obvious. The results of this study can improve the usability of the horizontal and vertical navigation techniques in modern iTV navigation.     

Online social networks: Why do students use facebook?

The growth and popularity of online social networks has created a new world of collaboration and communication. More than a billion individuals around the world are connected and networked together to create, collaborate, and contribute their knowledge and wisdom. Despite the importance of online social networks, there is relatively little theory-driven empirical research available to address this new type of communication and interaction phenomena. In this paper, we explored the factors that drive students to use online social networks (e.g., Facebook). Specifically, we conceptualized the use of online social networks as intentional social action and we examined the relative impact of social influence, social presence, and the five key values from the uses and gratification paradigm on We-Intention to use online social networks. An empirical study of Facebook users (n = 182) revealed that We-Intention to use online social networks is strongly determined by social presence. Among the five values, social related factors had the most significant impact on the intention to use. Implications for research and practice are discussed.