Coping with climatic shocks: local perspectives from Haiti’s rural mountain regions

Population and Environment - Haiti’s agrarian society is highly sensitive to changes in weather and climate conditions. Little is known about Haitian farmers’ perceptions of...     

The dynamic stochastic topic block model for dynamic networks with textual edges

Statistics and Computing - The present paper develops a probabilistic model to cluster the nodes of a dynamic graph, accounting for the content of textual edges as well as their frequency. Vertices...     

The recent history of the IEA: an analysis of IEA Congress presentations since 1961

In this paper we review historical material relating to the growth and coverage of past IEA meetings and congresses. In particular, we report on presentations at IEA Congresses dating back to the first one in Stockholm in 1961. A content analysis of Congress proceedings was carried out and we present findings on changes since 1961 covering: numbers and nationalities of conference participants and the types of topics presented at Congresses. Our findings point to evidence of widening participation at the conferences, in particular delegates drawn from Asia, South East Asia and the Far East. In addition, some topics (e.g., physiology, methodological papers and studies of workload) appear to have waned in popularity over the period, whereas some topics (e.g., ODAM, Cognitive Ergonomics) have grown in popularity. We discuss these findings in the light of other evidence covering historical trends and developments within human factors and ergonomics.     

Performance-based management and quality of work: an empirical assessment

In France, in the private sector as in the public sector, performance-based management tends to become a norm. Performance-based management is supposed to improve service quality, productivity and efficiency, transparency of allotted means and achieved results, and to better focus the activity of employees and of the whole organization. This text reports a study conducted for the French Ministry of Budget by a team of researchers in ergonomics, sociology and management science, in order to assess the impact of performance-based management on employees, on teams and on work organization. About 100 interviews were conducted with employees of all categories and 6 working groups were set up in order to discuss and validate or amend our first analyses. Results concern several aspects: workload and work intensification, indicators and performance management and the transformation of jobs induced by performance management.     

Use of graphical modality in a collaborative design distant setting

In this paper, we present an original environment, the Distributed Collaborative Design Studio (DCDS) which allows multimodal real-time remote exchanges, and which aims at re-creating remotely the conditions of co-present meetings. This environment associates a videoconference tool (supporting verbal and non-verbal communication) and an original realtime shared digital hand-drawn sketches system (supporting graphical communication). The users can import documents and annotate them in real-time at distance. In this paper, we are interested in studying the use of the graphical modality (digital sketch and document annotations) as a tool for collective design and remote communication. This study takes place in the framework of a collaborative architectural design studio, which has taken place during 3 month, and gathering students from Belgium and France to work together in 3 small groups mainly at distance. The study focuses on the role of graphical modality in the synchronous remote meetings supported by the DCDS. We identify the types of digital annotations made on the imported document, thanks to the electronic pen, and their role in the cognitive processes of designing and in the collaboration and communication processes. We also identify the different practices of digital sketching, according to the group and its collaborative strategies. We discuss the utility of the graphical modality as an efficient support for collaborative synchronous activities and show that the DCDS environment supports different strategies of collaborative design (co-design and distributed design). We conclude on recommendations for improving the system and for designing sketch-based collaborative environments.     

Intentions and ethical behavior in trust games

This paper explores if knowledge of one's partner's intention affects cooperative behavior. Results of a trust game experiment show that Player 1's elicited intentions are consistent over an imperfect information treatment, when Player 2 is not aware of her partner's intention, and a perfect information treatment, when she knows it. Evidence highlights that people's intentions on one side of the games shape their beliefs as to how their partner wants them to act when the roles are reversed. Moreover, in the perfect information treatment, participants act in a manner consistent with their own intentions, suggesting that ethical considerations permeate behavior.     

Different relationships for coping with ambiguity and uncertainty in organizations

This study seeks to shed light on the relationship between the situation and the activation of specific relationships. We hypothesized that the type of uncertainty present in a situation would prompt people to call upon different relationships based on different types of trust: cognitive trust for expertise and affective trust for friendship. We elaborated vignettes as name generators to test whether the colleagues called upon in different situations were perceived as being more friends or more experts. The perceived level of expertise and friendship were evaluated with Likert-style scales. The results support our theoretical argument to the effect that the “activation” of a relationship is influenced by the type of uncertainty a person is confronted to. Situations of information uncertainty elicit recourse to relationships based on expertise while ambiguous situations call for friendship.     

The Characteristics of Child Sexual Abuse in the School Environment in Turkey

School may represent a protective factor, boosting the mental health of the student body, while also representing a risk factor that heightens the potential for mental health problems. The present study aims to identify the individual and familial characteristics associated with the incidents of child sexual abuse (CSA) in Turkey’s school environment. The incidents involving school-related CSA constituted 5.6% (N = 125) of 2,238 cases. The following was discovered: an adult committed the majority (64%) of CSA in the school environment; most adult perpetrators were teachers (62.5%). This study determined that the perpetrators manipulated the victims via methods that included physical abuse (11.2%), threats (19.2%), tricks/deception (15.2%), and taking photographs/videos with sexual content (3.2%); and CSA incidents involved intercourse (15.2%); and almost three-quarter of the victims of CSA in the school environment reported the incident late. This study indicates that peer perpetrators abuse younger victims and a greater proportion of male victims relative to adult perpetrators. In light of these findings, school security must be improved, especially in public schools, and trainings aimed at preventing bullying and sexual abuse (SA) should be given to all school staff, students, and parents.