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.     

Using HIT to deliver integrated care for the frail elderly in the UK: current barriers and future challenges

In this paper we briefly describe the results of a 3 year project examining the use of Health Information Technologies (e.g., electronic patient record systems) to deliver integrated care. In particular, we focus on one group of patient (the frail elderly) and efforts to design an e-health supported healthcare pathway (the frail elderly pathway--FEP). The aim of FEP is to bring together clinicians and staff from health and social care and allow them to share patient information. Our findings show that progress in delivering a fully-supported and working FEP has been slow, not least because of the difficulties experienced by healthcare staff in using current IT systems. In addition, there are many strategic and technical issues which remain unresolved (e.g., systems interoperability).     

A usability gap between older adults and younger adults on interface design of an Internet-based telemedicine system

Internet-based telemedicine is becoming an effective tool to deliver home-healthcare services and health information on demand, especially in rural areas, where there is often a large elderly population with greater rates of preventable chronic diseases. However, the designs of current interfaces for these internet-based telemedicine systems do not take elderly user characteristics into consideration. This study conducted usability testing on the interface of an internet-based telemedicine system using two different age groups, young adults and older adults. Differences in overall performance and satisfaction between the two groups were identified. Based on these results, a future direction is suggested for the interfaces of Internet-based telemedicine systems.     

Labor Unions and Life Satisfaction: Evidence from New Data

While a growing literature demonstrates the impact of socio-political factors on citizens’ quality of life, scholars have paid comparatively little attention to the role political organizations such as labor unions play in this regard. We examine labor organization as a determinant of cross-national variation in life satisfaction across a sample of advanced industrial polities. Our findings strongly suggest that unions increase the life satisfaction of citizens, and that that this effect holds for non-union members as well. Moreover, we also find that labor organization has the strongest impact on the subjective well-being of citizens with lower incomes. We confirm these hypotheses using both individual and aggregate-level data from fourteen nations. We show these relationships to have an independent and separable impact from other economic, political, and cultural determinants. The implications for the study of life satisfaction and of labor unions as political actors in general are discussed.     

Hostage taking: Understanding terrorism event dynamics

This paper employs advanced time series methods to identify the dynamic properties of three hostage taking series. The immediate and long run multipliers of three covariates—successful past negotiations, violent ends, and deaths—are identified. Each hostage series responds differently to the covariates. Past concessions have the strongest impact on generating future kidnapping events, supporting the conventional wisdom to abide by a stated no-concession policy. Each hostage series has different changepoints caused by a variety of circumstances. Skyjackings and kidnappings are negatively correlated, while skyjackings and other hostage events are positively correlated. Policy recommendations are offered.     

The Middle‐class in the German Welfare State: Beneficial Involvement at Stake?

The working‐class is typically regarded as the driving force of welfare state development. Yet, some argue that the middle‐classes' beneficial involvement in the welfare state is crucial for its financial sustainability and popular legitimacy. Against this backdrop, we investigate how recent welfare state reforms in Germany which affect the status of the middle‐class are viewed and discussed by this group. Germany is a particularly interesting case because its welfare state is seen to be centred on the desires of the middle‐class, especially through its focus on status maintenance and horizontal redistribution over the life‐course. However, the move from status maintenance to minimum income support in unemployment provision and the strengthening of private old age provision challenge this assumption. Thus, we ask how the German middle‐class views the emerging abandonment of the principle of status maintenance and the shift from collective to individual responsibility. Based on qualitative material from focus groups, we find that individual responsibility is generally supported, but that the state is still assigned responsibility for providing basic levels of social security. Furthermore, for those groups seen as less capable of acting individually responsible (e.g. the poor or long‐term unemployed) the ‘inducement’ of – or assistance for – individually responsible behaviour by the state is demanded. Overall, while the principle of ‘individual responsibility’ seems to find some resonance among the middle‐class members interviewed, they still try to balance individual and collective responsibility.     

Determining Sample Size Using Fast and Slow Thinking

ABSTRACT

Using SPSS's bootstrapping procedures, this article demonstrates an approach to determining sample size that combines fast (heuristics or rules-of-thumb) and slow (statistical power analysis) thinking to balance statistical power, precision, and practicality. Sample size is determined for six commonly used statistical procedures: independent groups t-test, one-way ANOVA, one-way MANOVA, Pearson's r correlation, linear regression, and logistic regression. Overall, findings suggest that both approaches may under or over-estimate sample size. Both approaches yielded similar parameter and confidence interval estimates, but varied, sometimes by a factor of two, in their sample size requirements. It is hoped that this study's procedure and results will provide beginning reference points for sample size determination, and encourage researchers continue to search for resolutions for often difficult sample-size decisions.     

Should I Stay or Should I Go? Explaining Turnover Intentions with Organizational Identification and Job Satisfaction*

The social identity approach is a powerful theoretical framework for the understanding of individuals' behaviour. The main argument is that individuals think and act on behalf of the group they belong to because this group membership adds to their social identity, which partly determines one's self‐esteem. In the organizational world, social identity and self‐categorization theories state that a strong organizational identification is associated with low turnover intentions. Because identification is the more general perception of shared fate between employee and organization, we propose that the relationship between identification and turnover will be mediated by job satisfaction as the more specific evaluation of one's task and working conditions. In four samples we found organizational identification feeding into job satisfaction, which in turn predicts turnover intentions.     

On edge orienting methods for graph coloring

We consider the problem of orienting the edges of a graph so that the length of a longest path in the resulting digraph is minimum. As shown by Gallai, Roy and Vitaver, this edge orienting problem is equivalent to finding the chromatic number of a graph. We study various properties of edge orienting methods in the context of local search for graph coloring. We then exploit these properties to derive four tabu search algorithms, each based on a different neighborhood. We compare these algorithms numerically to determine which are the most promising and to give potential research directions.