To think about the mind, the self, the will and consciousness used to be left to philosophy. Today neuroscience, genetics and computer science seem poised to take over these topics. Can we find a way to combine modern science with traditional ideas and ways of thinking? What is life? Can we make it? Can we make a person? Can machines think? Do we need the notion of a soul? How does consciousness arise? This book shows how to think about the relation between science and philosophy in order better to understand human nature in the light of modern and traditional knowledge. The aim is not to prove that one approach is better than the other, but to help the reader to form and discuss their own questions. It is a vessel to let you set sail on your own voyage of intellectual discovery.
The early years of modern experimental psychology were marked by a considerable amount of research on attention, and much work was carried out in the laboratories of Wundt, Titchener and Helmholtz. For various reasons, research on attention declined from 1920 until the 1950s. Under the early philosophy of behaviourism, attention became suspect as a ‘mentalistic’ concept. At the time of original publication in 1969, however, much work had been done to quantify and make objective research in this area. This was of increasing importance in a world dominated by communication networks, and ‘man-machine’ systems, in which the human element is the weakest link due to the limits on the rate at which man can handle information. Following the publication of Broadbent’s Perception and Communication in 1958, work on attention had begun to pour from an ever increasing number of laboratories. This book is dedicated to summarising what we knew, and attempts to survey the behavioural research in vision and hearing which throw light on how we share and direct attention, what are the limits of attention, to make some general methodological recommendations, to review current theories of the time, and to provide a guide to the relevant physiological work. As far as possible, work on memory has been omitted. A bibliography of the major work to the spring of 1969 is included.
This volume examines the nature of human error -- its causes and origins, its classifications, and the extent to which it is possible to predict and prevent errors and their impact. One of the first texts to deal with this topic in detail, it draws into a single cohesive account contributions from experts in a range of disciplines including psychology, philosophy, and engineering. Offering an insightful discussion of fundamental and necessary questions about the nature and source of human error, the book draws significant conclusions and identifies areas worthy of further exploration. This volume will be of interest to all who are concerned with the impact human error has on both the individual and society.
There is a resurgence of interest in mental models due to advances in our understanding of how they can be used to help design and due to the development of practical methods to elicit them. This book brings both areas together with a focus on reducing domestic energy consumption. The book focuses on how mental models can be applied in design to bring out behaviour change resulting in increased achievement of home heating goals (reduced waste and improved comfort). This book also offers a method to extract and apply mental models to interface design. The approach enables mental models to be applied across domains when behaviour change was sought, and is validated as a useful design method.
This ambitious book, newly available in paperback, examines the encounter between Gaels and Europeans in Scotland in the central Middle Ages, offering new insights into an important period in the formation of the Scots' national identity. It is based on a close reading of the texts of several thousand charters, indentures, brieves and other written sources that record the business conducted in royal and baronial courts across the length and breadth of the medieval kingdom between 1150 and 1400.Under the broad themes of land, law and people, this book explores how the customs, laws and traditions of the native inhabitants and those of incoming settlers interacted and influenced each other. Drawing on a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, the author places her subject matter firmly within the recent historiography of the British Isles and demonstrates how the experience of Scotland was both similar to, and a distinct manifestation of, a wider process of Europeanisation.
The volume brings together 330 documents from the reign of King Alexander III of Scotland, a key period in the history of the medieval kingdom, in one scholarly and accessible edition.
Whether used for aviation, manufacturing, oil and gas extraction, energy distribution, nuclear or fossil fuel power generation, surveillance or security, all control rooms share two common features. The people operating them are often remote from the processes that they are monitoring and controlling and the operations work 24/7. The twin demands o
Distributed Cognition and Reality puts theory into practice, as the first book to show how to apply the Perceptual Cycle Model in aviation decision making. Based on case studies, critical incident interviews and live observations in cockpits, the authors develop a new way to understand how pilots and crews make decisions. This book will be useful for practitioners involved in accident and incident investigations and decision-making training, researchers and students within the disciplines of Aviation, Human Factors, Ergonomics, Engineering, Computer Science, and Psychology. Dr Katherine L Plant is a New Frontiers Fellow in Human Factors Engineering at the University of Southampton in the UK. In 2014 she was awarded the Honourable Company of Air Pilots Prize for Aviation Safety Research. Professor Neville A Stanton holds the Chair in Human Factors Engineering at the University of Southampton in the UK. In 2007 The Royal Aeronautical Society awarded him the Hodgson Medal for his work on flight-deck safety.
The technology behind self-driving cars is being heavily promulgated as the solution to a variety of transport problems including safety, congestion, and impact on the environment. This text examines the key role that human factors plays in driving forward future vehicle automation in a way that realizes the benefits while avoiding the pitfalls. Driving Automation: A Human Factors Perspective addresses a range of issues related to vehicle automation beyond the 'can we' to 'how should we'. It covers important topics including mental workload and malleable attentional resources theory, effects of automation on driver performance, in-vehicle interface design, driver monitoring, eco-driving, responses to automation failure, and human-centred automation. The text will be useful for graduate students and professionals in diverse areas such as ergonomics/human factors, automobile engineering, industrial engineering, mechanical engineering, and health and safety.
During the course of any sporting event, critical cognitive and physical tasks are performed within a dynamic, complex, collaborative system comprising multiple humans and artifacts, under pressurized, complex, and rapidly changing conditions. Highly skilled, well-trained individuals walk a fine line between task success and failure, with only slig
This book presents the latest developments of Systems Thinking in Practice to the analysis and design of complex sociotechnical systems. The Event Analysis of Systemic Teamwork (EAST) method is applied to micro, meso and macro systems. Written by experts in the field, this text covers a diverse range of domains, including: automation, aviation, energy grid distribution, military command and control, road and rail transportation, sports, and urban planning. Extensions to the EAST method are presented along with future directions for the approach. Illustrates a contemporary review of the status of Distributed Cognition (DCOG) Presents examples of the application of Event Analysis of Systemic Teamwork (EAST) method Presents examples of the application of Event Analysis of Systemic Teamwork (EAST) method Discusses the metrics for the examination of social, task, and information networks Provides comparison of alternative networks with implications for design of DCOG in systems
Offering a unique perspective on vehicle design and on new developments in vehicle technology, this book seeks to bridge the gap between engineers, who design and build cars, and human factors, as a body of knowledge with considerable value in this domain. The work that forms the basis of the book represents more than 40 years of experience by the authors. Human Factors in Automotive Engineering and Technology imparts the authors' scientific background in human factors by way of actionable design guidance, combined with a set of case studies highly relevant to current technological challenges in vehicle design. The book presents a novel and accessible insight into a body of knowledge that will enable students, professionals and engineers to add significant value to their work.
A potentially troubling aspect of modern vehicle design – some would argue - is a trend for isolating the driver and reducing vehicle feedback, usually in the name of comfort and refinement but increasingly because of automation. There is little doubt cars have become more civilised over the years, yet despite this, the consequences of driver behaviour remain to a large extent anecdotal. Readers will have heard such anecdotes for themselves. They usually take the form of drivers of a certain age recalling their first cars from the 1970s or 80s, in which "doing 70 mph really felt like it". The question is whether such anecdotes actually reflect a bigger, more significant issue that could be better understood. Related questions have been explored in other domains such as aviation, where the change to ‘fly-by-wire’ did indeed bring about some occasionally serious performance issues that were not anticipated. Despite some clear parallels, automotive systems have been left relatively unstudied. The research described in this book aims to explore precisely these issues from a Human Factors perspective. This means connecting the topics of vehicle feel, vehicle dynamics, and automotive engineering with the latest research on driver situation awareness. The problem is explored experimentally from a variety of theoretical viewpoints but the outcomes are consistently practical. Here we have a promising new avenue along which the driver experience can be enhanced in novel and insightful ways. Tools and templates are provided so that engineers and designers can try different ways to boost vehicle safety, efficiency and enjoyment from a human-centered perspective. Association of American Publishers (AAP) Finalist for the 2019 PROSE Award Features Diagnosis of how vehicle feel impacts driver situation awareness, and how this could aid future vehicle designs Multi-theory approach to driver situation awareness, and how different views of this important concept give rise to different insights Comprehensive analysis of situation awareness in driving, the information requirements of drivers, and how these needs can be supported Practical descriptions of how state-of-science Human Factors methods have been applied in practice
Since its inception, just after the Second World War, Human Factors research has paid special attention to the issues surrounding human control of systems. Command and control environments continue to represent a challenging domain for human factors research. Modelling Command and Control takes a broad view of command and control research, to include C2 (command and control), C3 (command, control and communication), and C4 (command, control, communication and computers) as well as human supervisory control paradigms. The book presents case studies in diverse military applications (for example, land, sea and air) of command and control. The book explores the differences and similarities in the land, sea and air domains; the theoretical and methodological developments, approaches to system and interface design, and the workload and situation awareness issues involved. It places the role of humans as central and distinct from other aspects of the system. Using extensive case study material, Modelling Command and Control demonstrates how the social and technical domains interact, and why each require equal treatment and importance in the future.
Military command and control is not merely evolving, it is co-evolving. Technology is creating new opportunities for different types of command and control, and new types of command and control are creating new aspirations for technology. The question is how to manage this process, how to achieve a jointly optimised blend of socio and technical and create the kind of agility and self-synchronisation that modern forms of command and control promise. The answer put forward in this book is to re-visit sociotechnical systems theory. In doing so, the problems of 21st century command and control can be approached from an alternative, multi-disciplinary and above all human-centred perspective. Human factors (HF) is also co-evolving. The traditional conception of the field is to serve as a conduit for knowledge between engineering and psychology yet 21st century command and control presents an altogether different challenge. Viewing military command and control through the lens of sociotechnical theory forces us to confront difficult questions about the non-linear nature of people and technology: technology is changing, from platform centric to network centric; the interaction with that technology is changing, from prescribed to exploratory; and complexity is increasing, from behaviour that is linear to that which is emergent. The various chapters look at this transition and draw out ways in which sociotechnical systems theory can help to understand it. The sociotechnical perspective reveals itself as part of a conceptual toolkit through which military command and control can be transitioned, from notions of bureaucratic, hierarchical ways of operating to the devolved, agile, self-synchronising behaviour promised by modern forms of command and control like Network Enabled Capability (NEC). Sociotechnical system theory brings with it a sixty year legacy of practical application and this real-world grounding in business process re-engineering underlies the entire book. An attempt has been made to bring a set of sometimes abstract (but no less useful) principles down to the level of easy examples, design principles, evaluation criteria and actionable models. All of these are based on an extensive review of the current state of the art, new sociotechnical/NEC studies conducted by the authors, and insights derived from field studies of real-life command and control. Time and again, what emerges is a realisation that the most agile, self-synchronising component of all in command and control settings is the human.
Air power has been one of the key elements in modern warfare. This book, first published in 1986, analyses the likely changes to this key role as military technology and strategic thinking evolve. It begins with the history and present status of air power and assesses technical developments, and then discusses the character of future warfare, and its implications for planes and helicopters in land and sea campaigns. It also analyses issues like tactical air mobility, the vulnerability of airfields, aerial mass destruction, electronic warfare, and developments in NATO and Warsaw Pact. It concludes with an overview of the likely role of airpower in future warfare.
Since the 2007-8 financial crisis and its aftershocks, international capitalism has once again been in crisis. The crisis has been particularly marked in the UK and its outcome is currently unclear. Based upon a wealth of sources, from newspapers, journals, government, political party and polling organisation publications, as well as archival and secondary material, Neville Kirk examines the systemic crisis facing the nations of the UK. The book traces the crisis from the period following the 2016 EU referendum up to 2022, a period during which the crisis intensified and became more widespread. Kirk covers the elections of 2017 and 2019, political fragmentation, Scottish nationalism, Brexit, the coronavirus pandemic, continuing economic problems and conflicts around class, gender, race and nation. Finally, the book considers competing pathways out of the current impasse. Through his thorough examination of the UK's main political parties and players, Kirk offers the reader a new and original understanding of how we reached the present situation.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.