Situation awareness measurement: a review of applicability for C4i environments

The construct of situation awareness (SA) has become a core theme within the human factors (HF) research community. Consequently, there have been numerous attempts to develop reliable and valid measures of SA but there is a lack of techniques developed specifically for the assessment of SA in command, control, communication, computers and intelligence (C4i) environments. During the design, development and evaluation of novel systems, technology and procedures, valid and reliable situation awareness measurement techniques are required for the assessment of individual and team SA, in order to determine the improvements (or in some cases decrements) resulting from proposed design and technological interventions. The paper presents a review of existing situation awareness measurement techniques for their suitability for use in the assessment of SA in C4i environments. Seventeen SA measures were evaluated against a set of HF methods criteria. It was concluded that current SA measurement techniques are inadequate by themselves for use in the assessment of SA in C4i environments, and a multiple-measure approach utilising different approaches is recommended.     

Erratum to “Behavioural change phases of different stakeholders involved in the implementation process of ergonomics measures in bricklaying”: [Applied Ergonomics 36 (2005) 449-459]

The objective of this qualitative study was to assess whether a hypothesised sequential order of behavioural change phases would be fulfilled in different groups of stakeholders involved at the start of a process to implement ergonomic measures in bricklaying teams. The measures include trestles, bricklaying scaffolds, mast climbing work platforms and cranes. The behavioural change phases were: (1) being aware of measures, (2) understanding measures, (3) wanting measures, (4) intention to buy or hire measures, (5) ability to use measures, (6) using measures (experience), and (7) continuing to use measures. Structured interviews were conducted to examine the change phases in two groups of stakeholders (employers/work planners (n=11) and foremen/bricklayers (n=9) from nine companies) thought to be relevant in the decision to adopt and use the ergonomic measures. The results show that the fulfilled behavioural change phases differ between individual stakeholders, groups of stakeholders, companies and also between ergonomic measures. The hypothesised order of fulfilled consecutive behavioural change phases for individual stakeholders has not been confirmed by this study. The relationship between fulfilled and unfulfilled change phases by each stakeholder (group) and actual use of each ergonomic measure requires further study, so as to improve the selection of suitable implementation strategies.     

Box-Jenkins identification revisited—Part III : Multivariable systems

Part I of this series of three papers handles the identification of single input single output Box-Jenkins models on arbitrary frequency grids in an open and closed loop setting. Part II discusses the computational aspects and illustrates the theory on simulations and a real life problem. This paper extends the results of Parts I and II to multiple input multiple output systems. Contrary to the classical time domain approach, the presented technique does not require symbolic calculus for multiple output polynomial Box-Jenkins models.     

An international comparison of technology adoption : Testing the UTAUT model

We examined the relationships of the constructs in the UTAUT model to determine how they are affected by culture. In our study, we used data from Korea and the U.S. to examine two technologies: the MP3 player and Internet banking. Results showed that the UTAUT model fits our data well. The comparison of Korea and the U.S. revealed that the effects of effort expectancy on behavioral intention and the effects of behavioral intention on use behavior were greater in the U.S. sample. The implications of this are discussed.     

Good programming in transactional memory : Game theory meets multicore architecture

In a multicore transactional memory (TM) system, concurrent execution threads interact and interfere with each other through shared memory. The less interference a thread provokes the better for the system. However, as a programmer is primarily interested in optimizing her individual code’s performance rather than the system’s overall performance, she does not have a natural incentive to provoke as little interference as possible. Hence, a TM system must be designed compatible with good programming incentives (GPI), i.e., writing efficient code for the overall system should coincide with writing code that optimizes an individual thread’s performance. We show that with most contention managers (CM) proposed in the literature so far, TM systems are not GPI compatible. We provide a generic framework for CMs that base their decisions on priorities and explain how to modify Timestamp-like CMs so as to feature GPI compatibility. In general, however, priority-based conflict resolution policies are prone to be exploited by selfish programmers. In contrast, a simple non-priority-based manager that resolves conflicts at random is GPI compatible.