Human-machine cooperation: a solution for life-critical Systems?

Decision-making plays an important role in life-critical systems. It entails cognitive functions such as monitoring, as well as fault prevention and recovery. Three kinds of objectives are typically considered: safety, efficiency and comfort. People involved in the control and management of such systems provide two kinds of contributions: positive with their unique involvement and capacity to deal with the unexpected; and negative with their ability to make errors. In the negative view, people are the problem and need to be supervised by regulatory systems in the form of operational constraints or by design. In the positive view, people are the solution and lead the game; they are decision-makers. The former view also deals with error resistance, and the latter with error tolerance, which, for example, enables cooperation between people and decision support systems (DSS). In the real life, both views should be considered with respect to appropriate situational factors, such as time constraints and very dangerous environments. This is known as function allocation between people and systems. This paper presents a possibility to reconcile both approaches into a joint human-machine organization, where the main dimensioning factors are safety and complexity. A framework for cooperative and fault tolerant systems is proposed, and illustrated by an example in Air Traffic Control.     

A Social Networks Approach to Public Relations on Twitter: Social Mediators and Mediated Public Relations

This study proposes theoretical and practical frameworks to systematically examine mediated public relations in social media spaces. We applied a social network conceptual framework to identify and characterize social mediators that connect the US State Department with its international public. The results showed that social mediators vary in terms of their formality and interdependence. Formal social mediators were primarily US government agencies while informal social mediators were nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and individuals. Notably, relationships with populations in the Middle East and North Africa were mediated primarily by informal actors, and formal mediators played a key role in connecting the public with everywhere else in the world. Government-related formal mediators and informal social mediators showed similar levels of bilateral relationships. In contrast, news media, the most traditional public relations mediators, were rarely found as social mediators and demonstrated the most unilateral relationships.     

Psychiatry in the age of neuroscience: the impact on clinical practice and lives of patients

Due to the progress being made in the neurosciences, higher expectations for the use of medication, even against the patient’s will, are arising in mental hospitals. In this article, we will discuss whether the neurosciences and new psychopharmacological solutions really support patients who suffer from mental illnesses. To answer this question, we will focus on the perspective of patients and their experiences with psychiatric (coercive) treatments. The analysis of one person’s story shows that other issues besides appropriate medication are important for recovery from a mental illness. In daily life, issues such as coping, rehabilitation and social support are of major importance for a patient suffering from psychiatric disease. Thus, although progress in the neurosciences is a positive development for clinical practice, it does not mean that (coercive) medication alone will carry a patient into recovery. A patient’s recovery is dependent, not only upon the process of finding the appropriate medication and trust between the psychiatrist and the patient, but also upon relational aspects, such as being recognised as a person, belonging, accepting responsibilities, developing friendships and trusting others. These findings lead to the conclusion that dealing with psychiatric diseases is more complex than what the biomedical model of neuroscience suggests and that one should include the social context of the patient in the recovery process.     

What is Flint? Place,storytelling, and social media narrative reclamation during the Flint water crisis

ABSTRACT

The Flint Water Crisis became a national news story in January of 2016, when major publishers such as The New York Times began covering the story. In the same month, an influx of social media activism occurred in response to the crisis, with citizens developing hashtag campaigns such as #FlintFwd in order to disseminate news and stories from a citizen’s perspective; these campaigns often positioned Flint positively ? as a recovering community ? rather than a city in the middle of a public health crisis, and often addressed not a national public but a local audience. This paper considers Flint-based social media activity to investigate the emergence of place-based activism within the ostensibly global network of social media. In doing so, it identifies three key themes; 1) leveraging social media to forward a critique of deficient journalistic storytelling; 2) using the affective process of storytelling via social media to claim authority over their own material offline existence, and 3) using place-based storytelling to implicate others as witnesses via the global network of social media. These themes coalesce around a distinctly critical logic of connectivity. This logic extends the notion of connectivity articulated by Van Dijck and Poell [2013. Understanding social media logic. Media and Communication, 1(1), 2–14.] and the strategies of platform activism explored by Tufekci [2017. Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. New Haven: Yale University Press.] to explain how social media works to expose discrepancies between the public story of the water crisis and material, lived conditions of Flint, rendering visible a discursive identity of Flint thus far unrecognized.     

Determinants of microbat communities in urban forest remnants: a rapid landscape scale assessment

Urban Ecosystems - Urbanisation affects fauna in many ways; with some species persisting and going on to dominate urban habitats, while other species decline over time due to habitat disturbance...     

GOES-8 X-ray sensor variance stabilization using the multiscale data-driven Haar–Fisz transform

Summary.  We consider the stochastic mechanisms behind the data that were collected by the solar X-ray sensor (XRS) on board the GOES-8 satellite. We discover and justify a non-trivial mean–variance relationship within the XRS data. Transforming such data so that their variance is stable and its distribution is taken closer to the Gaussian distribution is the aim of many techniques (e.g. Anscombe and Box–Cox). Recently, new techniques based on the Haar–Fisz transform have been introduced that use a multiscale method to transform and stabilize data with a known mean–variance relationship. In many practical cases, such as the XRS data, the variance of the data can be assumed to increase with the mean, but other characteristics of the distribution are unknown. We introduce a method, the data-driven Haar–Fisz transform, which uses the Haar–Fisz transform but also estimates the mean–variance relationship. For known noise distributions, the data-driven Haar–Fisz transform is shown to be competitive with the fixed Haar–Fisz methods. We show how our data-driven Haar–Fisz transform method denoises the XRS series where other existing methods fail.     

The Prevalence of Destructive Leadership Behaviour

This study investigates the prevalence of the four types of destructive leadership behaviour in the destructive and constructive leadership behaviour model, in a representative sample of the Norwegian workforce. The study employs two estimation methods: the operational classification method (OCM) and latent class cluster (LCC) analysis. The total prevalence of destructive leadership behaviour varied from 33.5% (OCM) to 61% (LCC), indicating that destructive leadership is not an anomaly. Destructive leadership comes in many shapes and forms, with passive forms prevailing over more active ones. The results showed that laissez‐faire leadership behaviour was the most prevalent destructive leadership behaviour, followed by supportive–disloyal leadership and derailed leadership, while tyrannical leadership behaviour was the least prevalent destructive leadership behaviour. Furthermore, many leaders display constructive as well as destructive behaviours, indicating that leadership is not either constructive or destructive. The study contributes to a broader theoretical perspective on what must be seen as typical behaviour among leaders.     

I'm OK, You're (Not) OK: The Private Welfare State in the United States

The American welfare state has been premised on the mixture of substantial private, tax‐subsidized benefits rather than on more universalistic public benefits. That pattern is in some ways being undermined as private pension plans are increasingly going bankrupt and firms reduce the benefits they provide employees. On the other hand, however, the current Bush administration is attempting to enhance the private sector role by allowing individuals to invest at least a part of their social insurance contributions into private savings plans. These changes may in the end increase the role of the public sector as a regulator and underwriter at the same time that attempts are made to minimize public sector involvement.     

A structural approach to women's hometime and experience-earnings profiles: Maternity leave and public policy

The differential availability of maternity leave benefits is shown to be an important factor in the earnings attainment process of women. Interaction effects with this job characteristic are found for experience, occupational status, and crowding. The human capital model's explanation of the relationship between women's hometime, women's job choice, and public policy is critically examined. The results indicate that the provision of adequate child care needs to be coupled with parental leave policies if women are to make significant gains in earnings from reducing their time spent at home.The data and tabulations used in this study were made available by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. The data were originally collected by Robert P. Quinn and Graham L. Staines. Neither they nor the Consortium bear any responsibility for the analysis or interpretations presented here. This paper was presented at the 1989 American Sociological Association meetings.