Decline in accuracy of automatic speech recognition as a function of time on task: fatigue or voice drift?

Recognition accuracy of speech recognition devices tends to decline during an extended period of continuous use. Although this deterioration in performance is commonly acknowledged, there has been little systematic observation of the phenomenon, and no clear account of its causes is available. The aim of the present study was to provide some indication of the magnitude and time course of this decline in performance, and to clarify the nature of underlying changes in speech behaviour. There experiments are described. Experiment 1 confirmed that there is a fall-off in recognition accuracy during a half-hour session of a data entry task, and that this occurs for both naive and practised subjects. In Experiment 2, no recovery was observed in recognition performance when short rest breaks were scheduled, indicating that vocal fatigue was not a major factor. The effects of template retraining in mid-session were investigated in Experiment 3. This procedure was found to be effective in restoring recognition accuracy, and the retrained templates were relatively robust. The implications of these findings for operational use of speech recognition devices are briefly discussed. For most applications, one-off template retraining is seen as a more appropriate solution to the problem of voice drift than more complex solutions based on adaptive templates.     

Is SA shared or distributed in team work? An exploratory study in an intelligence analysis task

This study compared two theoretical approaches to Situation Awareness (SA): the psychological school of thought and the systems ergonomics school of thought, by assessing measurement of team SA within these frameworks. Two teams were assigned and organised into either a traditional Hierarchy or a Peer-to-Peer organisational structure in a single case study design. Measures derived from the psychological and systems ergonomics perspectives were applied to assess their sensitivity for assessing team SA. No statistically significant differences were found between the two teams when measures originating in the psychological tradition were considered: differences were found, however, for measures originating in the systems ergonomics tradition. Literature concerned with team SA reveals a lack of consensus with regards to explaining the nature of the phenomenon as well as its measurement. This paper argues for a debate in the field to clarify what constitutes appropriate measurement techniques for team SA and suggests that these are taken from the systems ergonomics tradition, as suggested by the present studies findings.

Relevance to industry

Teams are a major feature of most industrial applications of work, and maintaining good situation awareness is important to successful performance. A method for examining the situation awareness of teams is proposed and compared with the individual models. Analysing the team as a functional unit of situation awareness is presented for future work.     

Cyberloafing at the workplace: gain or drain on work?

This study examined the impact of cyberloafing on employees' emotion and work. We also examined gender differences in employees' perception towards cyberloafing. In general, respondents felt that some form of cyberloafing at work was acceptable. Men were also more likely to report that cyberloafing has a positive impact on work compared to women. As well, our findings suggest that browsing activities have a positive impact on employees' emotion while emailing activities have a negative impact. Results of our study provide useful insights for researchers and managers in understanding employees' attitudes towards cyberloafing, and how cyberloafing can result in gain or drain in employees' work productivity.     

Effects of sleep loss on team decision making: motivational loss or motivational gain?

OBJECTIVE: To examine the effects of 30 hr of sleep loss and continuous cognitive work on performance in a distributed team decision-making environment. BACKGROUND: To date, only a few studies have examined the effect of sleep loss on distributed team performance, and only one other to our knowledge has examined the relationship between sleep loss and social-motivational aspects of teams (Hoeksema-van Orden, Gaillard, & Buunk, 1998). METHOD: Sixteen teams participated; each comprised 4 members. Three team members made threat assessments on a military surveillance task and then forwarded their judgments electronically to a team leader, who made a final assessment on behalf of the team. RESULTS: Sleep loss had an antagonistic effect on team decision-making accuracy and decision time. However, the performance loss associated with fatigue attributable to sleep loss was mediated by being part of a team, as compared with performing the same task individually - that is, we found evidence of a "motivational gain" effect in these sleepy teams. We compare these results with those of Hoeksema-van Orden et al. (1998), who found clear evidence of a "social loafing" effect in sleepy teams. CONCLUSION: The divergent results are discussed in the context of the collective effort model (Karau & Williams, 1993) and are attributable in part to a difference between independent and interdependent team tasks. APPLICATION: The issues and findings have implications for a wide range of distributed, collaborative work environments, such as military network-enabled operations.     

Does intense time pressure at work make older employees more vulnerable? A statistical analysis based on a French survey “SVP50”

Two general trends, the tightening of time constraints and the ageing of the working population, are likely to raise sensitive problems implying adjustment of both work and workers' characteristics. The statistical studies presented in this paper, referring to a French inter-professional survey conducted on health and work after fifty (11 213 employees), aim at verifying this assumption. The analyses presented are divided in four sub-questions: have part of employees over fifty been removed from time pressure situations? Is time pressure difficult to deal with for older workers (from their point of view)? Does intense time pressure imply increased prevalence of certain health disorders among senior employees? Does pressure increase the desire to end one's professional life early? The results show that intense time pressure raises serious problems for most of the employees in their fifties who are exposed to them. 80% consider this constraint to be “difficult”. They systematically show more frequent rates for most types of physical or psychological health disorders. “Sheltering from the job”, which implies being shifted from work “under pressure” to a job “without pressure”, is not uncommon but only solves a minority of situations. Lastly, the option of earlier retirement is not particularly developed in age group in its fifties working “under pressure”.     

The night float paradigm to decrease sleep deprivation: good solution or a new problem?

In the late 1980s physician residency training programs developed the night float rotation, characterized by a sequence of 5 - 15 days of night work without any daytime duties, thereby involving an abrupt reversal of the wake - sleep schedule. We examined the effect of the night float rotation on sleep, mood and performance of pediatric residents. Residents completed sleep diaries daily, and tests of mood (Profile of Mood States) and attention (Conner's Continuous Performance Test) three times a week during the two-week night float rotation, and during equivalent blocks of time of their daytime rotations. Results show that, despite having ample opportunity to sleep during the day, while on night float rotation residents slept less than during the nights of their normal daytime rotations, 6.3 h +/- 2.5 h and 7.2 h +/- 1.7 h, respectively, p < 0.0001. Also, during night float compared to daytime rotations residents had increased fatigue-inertia scores, 8.7 +/- 4.1 and 4.8 +/- 2.4, respectively, p < 0.0001, and decreased vigor-activity scores 10.7 +/- 5.4 and 14.8 +/- 5.3, respectively, p = 0.02. The scores for attention were not significantly different between night float and daytime rotations. The correlation coefficients of fatigue with measures of attention were not statistically significant for daytime rotations. However, for night float fatigue correlated with omission errors, r = 0.51, p = 0.001 and with attentiveness r = - 0.36, p = 0.03. Training programs that adopt the night float rotation must be aware of potential deleterious effects of the night float rotation as they may lead to serious consequences on residents' performance and patients' safety.     

Using ICT for school purposes: Is there a student-school disconnect?

Today's students are often portrayed in the literature as enthusiastic and wholehearted users of the Internet for school purposes, in contrast with today's schools, in which the situation is of high ICT access and low use. Via interviews with 25 post-primary students, this study examined student attitudes toward using the Internet for school purposes, revealing the reasoning behind patterns of after school ICT use and underlying perceptions of learning, the teacher's role and the desired role of ICT in schooling. Students were revealed to be ambivalent: they considered the Internet to be easy to use, reducing workload and “fun”, but at the same time “unreliable”, not “serious” enough, and not containing what they “need to know”. Thus, they primarily used it for “unimportant” assignments such as routine homework. Students described their learning goal as getting required “material” into their heads and saw the teachers as an (almost) exclusive authority regarding this required body of information, in line with schooling's information-focused agenda and teacher-centered practices. They were also less than enthusiastic about the integration of ICT into their curriculum. Although there is no apparent disconnect between school and students, it is argued that school should change in order to capitalize on the affordances of ICT and to better prepare students for life in the knowledge age.     

Environmental support hypothesis in designing multimedia training for older adults: Is less always more?

This study explores younger and older adults learning of MS Publisher functionalities from a multimedia tutorial. Twenty younger and twenty three older adults assigned to a redundant (experimental) or non-redundant (control) condition were taught how to create a greeting card, while the results of their learning were assessed with immediate and delayed performance measures. While younger learners benefited from a non-redundant condition, older learners exhibited an opposite trend. Redundant condition was beneficial for their performance efficiency on a set of a transfer tasks, and their troubleshooting performance during the delayed session. From a cognitive load perspective, using a redundant text along with an audio narration overloads learner’s working memory by placing more strain on the visual pathway and not providing any additional cognitive advantage. From an environmental support standpoint and decreased processing resources view of cognitive aging, providing additional representational support helps reducing the task demands for older adults and results in better learning. The results have cognitive and practical implications for the design of multimedia learning environments for older adults.     

Pursue or shoot? Effects of exercise-induced fatigue on the transition from running to rifle shooting in a pursuit task

To investigate to what degree exercise-induced fatigue influences behavioural choices, participants' transition from running to rifle shooting in a pursue-and-shoot task was assessed. Participants ran on a treadmill and chased a target in a virtual environment and were free to choose when to stop the treadmill and shoot at the target. Fatigue increased progressively throughout the 20-minute test. Results indicated that shooting accuracy was not affected by fatigue. However, the distance to the target at which participants decided to shoot showed a U-shaped relationship with fatigue, R² = 0.884, p = 0.013. At low fatigue levels (ratings of perceived exertion [RPE] < 6.5), the distance to the target at which participants shot decreased, whereas at higher fatigue levels (RPE > 6.5) shooting distance increased again. At high levels of fatigue, participants stopped running sooner, aimed at the target longer and shot less often. Findings indicate that physiological parameters influence not only perception but also actual transitions between different actions.     

Dinosaur meets Archaeopteryx? or: Is there an alternative for Rational’s Unified Process?

Since 1999, Rationals Unified Process (RUP) is being offered as a guideline for software projects using the Unified Modeling Language (UML). RUP has been advertised to be iterative, and incremental, use case-driven and architecture-centric. These claims are discussed while RUP core concepts like phase, iteration, discipline (formerly: workflow) and milestone are reviewed in more detail. It turns out that the RUP constitutes a considerable step towards a broad dissemination of software process modelling ideas but some of the RUP definitions and structures lack clear structure and are too complex and overloaded for practical use.Among others, I see the following particular problems: (1) phases do still dominate the process and iteration structure, (2) the term software architecture is not clearly defined and its role is still underestimated, (3) RUP disciplines are a partly redundant concept complicating the process more than supporting it, (4) powerful and transparent structuring principles like recursion and orthogonality do not get the attention they deserve. As an alternative, our model for Evolutionary, Object-oriented Software development (EOS) is contrasted with the RUP.     

Unfriend or ignore tweets?: A time series analysis on Japanese Twitter users suffering from information overload

In recent years, with increased opportunities to post content on social media, a number of users are experiencing information overload in relation to social media use. This study addresses how Japanese Twitter users suffering from information overload cope with their stress, focusing on two actions: (1) The “unfriending” activities and (2) The changes in tweet processing methods. Objective data, such as numbers of friends, were collected through Twitter's open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and subjective data, such as perceived information overload and tweet processing methods, were collected through a web-based survey as a panel dataset (n = 778). The results demonstrated that although users experience information overload, they continue to increase their number of friends, and that the users who experience information overload modify their usage habits to avoid seeing all received tweets. In short, users do not choose a strategy to reduce the absolute number of received tweets, but only a strategy that involves changing the processing method of the received tweets.     

‘Requirements-Uncertainty’: Is it best formulated as a latent,aggregate or profile construct?

This paper identifies the strategies that experienced information systems (IS) project managers say they use to cope with requirements-uncertainty (RU) when managing development projects for external clients. It is shown that project managers (PMs) claim to use different strategies for coping with the different dimensions of requirements-uncertainty, as this notion has been formulated in IS literature. Based on this finding, it is proposed that perhaps requirements-uncertainty should be formulated as a profile construct, and not as a latent or aggregate construct, if it is to have pragmatic validity as a guide to action for project managers.     

A Scottish freedom of information regime for a denationalised environment: rhetorical or authentically practical?

This paper provides an evaluation of the Scottish freedom of information regime in the modern denationalised environment. The authors conducted a pragmatic investigation by means of a real-world compliance inquiry which involved, among other things, the electronic submission of standardised requests for information to those local authority arm's-length external organisations which find themselves now subject to the provisions of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002. A compliance matrix, with several response measures, recorded the progression and outcome of the requests sent to each named ‘public authority’. The article is also furnished with a contextual overview of the interaction between the home nation FOI regimes and private enterprise with a nod to contemporaneous events. In turn, the paper reveals several quagmires for the operational practicality of FOI in the privatised arena: a pronounced reminder of the difficulties associated with maintaining a functioning and practical FOI regime in light of a myriad of public service delivery models in the denationalised epoch.     

Mapping urban areas on a global scale: which of the eight maps now available is more accurate?

Eight groups from government and academia have created 10 global maps that offer a ca 2000 portrait of land in urban use. Our initial investigation found that their estimates of the total amount of urban land differ by as much as an order of magnitude (0.27–3.52 ×10⁶ km²). Since it is not possible for these heterogeneous maps to all represent urban areas accurately, we undertake the first global accuracy assessment of these maps using a two-tiered approach that draws on a stratified random sample of 10 000 high-resolution Google Earth validation sites and 140 medium-resolution Landsat-based city maps. Employing a wide range of accuracy measures at different spatial scales, we conclude that the new MODIS 500 m resolution global urban map has the highest accuracy, followed by a thresholded version of the Global Impervious Surface Area map based on the Night-time Lights and LandScan datasets.     

Is it a tool suitable for learning? A critical review of the literature on Facebook as a technology‐enhanced learning environment

Despite its continuing popularity as the social network site par excellence, the educational value of Facebook has not been fully determined, and results from the mainstream educational paradigms are contradictory, with some scholars emphasizing its pedagogical affordances (e.g., widening context of learning, mixing information and learning resources, hybridization of expertise) and others cautioning against its use for educational purposes. Moreover, systematic reviews about documented educational usage of Facebook as a learning environment are lacking. This article attempts to provide a critical overview of current studies focusing on the use of Facebook as a technology‐enhanced learning environment, with the aim of exploring the extent to which its pedagogical potential is actually translated into practice. Only empirical studies published in peer‐reviewed academic journals with a specific focus on Facebook as a learning environment have been considered for the review. The authors conducted a comprehensive literature search that identified 23 relevant articles that were subsequently analysed according to a simplified list of guidelines. These articles were further analysed and recoded through a set of emerging categories. The results show that pedagogical affordances of Facebook have only been partially implemented and that there are still many obstacles that may prevent a full adoption of Facebook as a learning environment such as implicit institutional, teacher and student pedagogies, and cultural issues. Finally, a broad observation on the implications of the study is developed with some suggestions for future research.     

Generic screen representations for future-proof systems,is it possible?: There is more to a GUI than meets the eye

BackgroundFuture-proof EHR systems must be capable of interpreting information structures for medical concepts that were not available at the build-time of the system. The two-model approach of CEN 13606/openEHR using archetypes achieves this by separating generic clinical knowledge from domain-related knowledge. The presentation of this information can either itself be generic, or require design time awareness of the domain knowledge being employed.ObjectiveTo develop a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that would be capable of displaying previously unencountered clinical data structures in a meaningful way.MethodsThrough “reasoning by analogy” we defined an approach for the representation and implementation of “presentational knowledge”. A proof-of-concept implementation was built to validate its implementability and to test for unanticipated issues.ResultsA two-model approach to specifying and generating a screen representation for archetype-based information, inspired by the two-model approach of archetypes, was developed. There is a separation between software-related display knowledge and domain-related display knowledge and the toolkit is designed with the reuse of components in mind.ConclusionsThe approach leads to a flexible GUI that can adapt not only to information structures that had not been predefined within the receiving system, but also to novel ways of displaying the information. We also found that, ideally, the openEHR Archetype Definition Language should receive minor adjustments to allow for generic binding.