High visibility or quiet operation?: A statistical inference model of the wiper operation quality by the dual-code theory

The motor industry has assured drivers that it will continually provide quality vehicles without compromising safety and comfort. In this sense, the quality of a product always needs to be determined by what the customer actually perceives, which has not been the case in the domain of wiper operation quality.     

余额宝:包容or取缔? 放任or监管?

正在包容、支持的政策下,重视监管层面的改革与创新,相信互联网金融将迎来健康发展的光明前景。一石激起千层浪,余额宝引发大论战近期,央视证券资讯频道执行总编辑兼首席新闻评论员钮文新发表名为《取缔余额宝》的文章。在文章中,钮文新表示,余额宝不仅冲击银行,更冲击全社会的融资成本和国家经济安全。"当余额宝和其前端的货币基金将2%的收益放入自己兜里,而将4%到6%的收益分给成千上万的余额宝客户的时候,整个中国实体经济、也就是最终的贷款客户将成为这一成本的最终买单人。"与此同时,他将余额宝和银行做比较,表示银行是通过经营贷款风险之后才获得的风险收益;而余额宝"睡着觉就可以从240亿元的收益中分走80亿元,而且风险比打劫还小。"     

Software: Hero or Zero?

People might love to support underdogs, but they also love to kick them when they're down. And, at this point in time at least, software is the world's technological underdog!     

公有云:美酒or毒药?

<正>几大国际巨头争相布局,公有云市场变幻莫测,而无论这块市场是美酒还是毒药,他们都在翘首期盼。随着"双11"的胜利落幕,关于公有云的争论又甚嚣尘上,好像"得公有云者得天下",今天还没有跳入公有云的I T厂商好像都是"痴汉"。到底公有云的真实机会在哪里?公有云到底是美酒还是毒药?自从几大公有云巨头开始布局中国市场,包括亚马逊、微软、阿里巴巴、     

Chernobyl operators: criminals or victims?

The blame for the 1986 Chernobyl disaster has been variously attributed to the operating personnel, the plant management, the design of the reactor, and the lack of adequate safety information in the Soviet nuclear industry. This paper considers a number of design faults, operational shortcomings and human errors that combined in the accident. It examines the sequence of events leading up to the accident, design problems in the reactor and cooling rods, and the course of the accident itself. It considers the ergonomics aspects, and expresses the view that the main cause of the accident was inadequate human-machine interaction. Finally, it stresses the continuing inadequacies of the Soviet nuclear system, and emphasizes that unless the ergonomics lessons are fully learned, a similar disaster could still occur.     

知识管理:效率or创新?

不久前某房地产公司老总谈到，他对知识管理的要求就是两点，一是能把过去老项目的成熟做法和经验教训迅速推广到各地分公司和新的项目中去，二是能让新员工尽快上手，能像有经验的员工一样完成工作。可以看出，这家公司实施知识管王甲的着眼点偏重于运营     

Wireless Networking: Nirvana or Nightmare?

If the marketing hype is to believed then wireless local area networks (LANs) are set to be the greatest development in networking since ARPANET was conceived. They bring true mobility to users within an office block or throughout a campus, provide faster installation with greater flexibility than traditionally wired LANs and considerably reduce the cost of ownership. However, before an organization rushes out to buy a base station and a wireless networking card, it should stand back, look at its network configuration and consider some of the security implications of implementing a wireless LAN.     

Imitation Game: Threshold or Watershed?

Showing remarkable insight into the relationship between language and thought, Alan Turing in 1950 proposed the Imitation Game as a proxy for the question “Can machines think?” and its meaning and practicality have been debated hotly ever since. The Imitation Game has come under criticism within the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence communities with leading scientists proposing alternatives, revisions, or even that the Game be abandoned entirely. Yet Turing’s imagined conversational fragments between human and machine are rich with complex instances of inference of implied information, reasoning from generalizations, and meta-reasoning, challenges AI practitioners have wrestled with since at least 1980 and continue to study. We argue that the very fact the Imitation Game is so difficult may be the very reason it shouldn’t be changed or abandoned. The semi-decidability of the game at this point hints at the possibility of a hard limit to the powers of technology.

     

Social robots: Things or agents?

This paper tackles our ordinary engagements with social robots to focus on their materiality. In considering how an educational robot is encountered as a part of everyday practices in social robotics, the focus is on the robot’s materiality that is interactionally achieved. The attention to tactile exploration, spatial arrangements, and multimodal interactional aspects that characterize the encounter indicates how the robot is simultaneously enacted as a thing and as a social agent. The paper proposes that social agency of the robot is mutually constituted with its materiality and that to conceive of the robot’s social character its thing-like aspects need to be taken into account.     

Quality management: fad or future?

The number-one job of healthcare chief executive officer is to be the standard bearer for quality healthcare delivery, says the top man of the Chicago-based Lutheran General Health Care System, an extensive multicorporate health organization. As long as the CEO remains vigilant and personally responsible for quality at his or her institution, quality management cannot become just a passing fad.     

Menu search: random or systematic?

This paper questions the conclusion that menu search is random, not systematic. Three sources of evidence—search times per target as a function of target position, eye movement patterns during search, and the cumulative probability of locating a target as a function of time—cited in support of random search (Card, 1982, 1983) are re-examined and shown to be consistent with systematic, sequential search.     

Windows Me:to me?you or him?别无选择?

引子： 9月 14日,微软公司新的消费型 Windows版本—— Windows Me,即 Windows Millennium Edition在美国零售市场上面世了。作为 Windows 95、 Windows 98、 Windows 98第二版 (SE)之后的最新版本,距 1999年 6月 10日发布 Windows 98 SE仅时隔一年。对于这样一款产品,业界业外众说纷纭,有人说： Windows Me发出了 Windows 98死亡的咒语;也有人怀疑： Windows Me是否真的作出了重大的改进和升级;还有人惊呼： Windows Me排斥第三代应用程序。虽然 Windows Me还没有在中国上市,虽然此“ me”也非彼“ me”,但在不久的将来,他将对作为微软公司的 me、作为消费者的 you和作为第三方软件开发商以及 PC厂商的 him带来又一次重大的影响。     

High-speed backhaul networks: Myth or reality?

Wireless technology promises a realization of the long-standing vision of ubiquitous high-speed Internet access. WiFi-based wireless mesh networks that provide user access and wireless data transport over a multi-hop backhaul network are a promising incarnation of the above vision. However, while WiFi is successfully used to provide user connectivity via access points, we note that currently deployed wireless mesh networks show a dismal performance and lack mechanisms in the backhaul to provide an efficient and fair data transport over multiple hops. To assess the capabilities and the limitations of wireless backhaul networks, we are currently building MagNets, a next-generation wireless mesh network in the city of Berlin. Using MagNets, this paper provides insight on how to plan and design efficient wireless backhaul networks by describing the work breakdown and the lessons learned from the design and deployment process. Then, we perform a comprehensive performance evaluation to investigate the impact of a wide range of parameters to shed light on the potential and limitations of wireless backhaul networks.     

Subjective rating scales: science or art?

Subjective rating scales are widely used in almost every aspect of ergonomics research and practice for the assessment of workload, fatigue, usability, annoyance and comfort, and lesser known qualities such as urgency and presence, but are they truly scientific? This paper raises some of the key issues as a basis for debate. First, it is argued that all empirical observations, including those conventionally labelled as ‘objective’, are unavoidably subjective. Shared meaning between observers, or intersubjectivity, is the key criterion of scientific probity. The practical steps that can be taken to increase intersubjective agreement are discussed and the well-known sources of error and bias in human judgement reviewed. The role of conscious experience as a mechanism for appraising the environment and guiding behaviour has important implications for the interpretation of subjective reports. The view that psychometric measures do not conform to the requirements of truly ‘scientific’ measurement is discussed. Human judgement of subjective attributes is essentially ordinal and, unlike physical measures, can be matched to interval scales only with difficulty, but ordinal measures can be used successfully both to develop and test substantive theories using multivariate statistical techniques. Constructs such as fatigue are best understood as latent or inferred variables defined by a set of manifest or directly observed indicator variables. Both construct validity and predictive validity are viewed from this perspective and this helps to clarify several problems including the dissociation between measures of different aspects of a given construct, the question of whether physical (e.g. physiological) measures should be preferred to subjective measures and whether a single measure of constructs which are essentially multidimensional having both subjective and physical components is desirable. Finally, the fitness of subjective ratings to different purposes within the broad field of ergonomics research is discussed. For testing of competing hypotheses concerning the mechanisms underlying human performance, precise quantitative predictions are rarely needed. The same is frequently true of comparative evaluation of competing designs. In setting design standards, however, something approaching the level of measurement required for precise quantitative prediction is required, but this is difficult to achieve in practice. Although it may be possible to establish standards within restricted contexts, general standards for broadly conceived constructs such as workload are impractical owing to the requirement for representative sampling of tasks, work environments and personnel.     

疫苗之殇:国产or进口?

正国产疫苗又出事了,这次出事的是几十万只百白破疫苗,这是一种针对百日咳、白喉和破伤风的三联疫苗,主要的接种人群是刚刚出生三个月到半年的小婴儿。在家长们欲哭无泪,急着核对自家孩子有没有接种涉事疫苗的同时,不少人将"打进口疫苗"提上了日程。打进口疫苗并不是新鲜事。人们有很多理由想打进口疫苗:或许是对国产疫苗的不信任,或许只是单纯地想用比较贵的疫苗,或许只是因为想打的新型疫苗没有国产品种。