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This book provides a detailed examination of judicial decision-making in Japanese cases involving sexual violence. It describes the culture of 'eroticised violence' in Japan, which sees the feminine body as culpable and the legal system which encourages homogeneity and conformity in decision-making and shows how the legal constraints confronting women claiming sexual assaults are enormous. It includes analysis of specific case studies and a discussion of recent moves to address the problem

Computer displays are being designed for increasingly larger industrial systems. As the application domain scales up, maintaining integration across different kinds of views becomes more challenging. This paper presents the results of a study of three different approaches to integration based on the spatial and temporal proximity of related information objects. The domain used for evaluation was a simulation of an industry-scale conventional power plant. All three displays were ecological displays developed using an abstraction hierarchy analysis. Views were integrated in a high-space/low-time, low-space/high-time, and high-space/high-time integration of means-end related objects. During a fault detection and diagnosis task, it as found that a low level of integration, high-space/low-time, provided the fastest fault detection time. However, the most integrated condition, high-space/high-time, resulted in the fastest and most accurate fault diagnosis performance. Actual or potential applications of this research include computer displays for large-scale systems such as network management or process control, for which problem solving is critical and integration must be maintained.

Objective: Increasingly, people work in socially networked environments. With growing adoption of enterprise social network technologies, supporting effective social community is becoming an important factor in organizational success. Background: Relatively few human factors methods have been applied to social connection in communities. Although team methods provide a contribution, they do not suit design for communities.  Wenger's community of practice concept, combined with cognitive work analysis, provided one way of designing for community. Method: We used a cognitive work analysis approach modified with principles for supporting communities of practice to generate a new website design. Over several months, the community using the site was studied to examine their degree of social connectedness and communication levels. Results: Social network analysis and communications analysis, conducted at three different intervals, showed increases in connections between people and between people and organizations, as well as increased communication following the launch of the new design. Conclusion: In this work, we suggest that human factors approaches can be effective in social environments, when applied considering social community principles. Application: This work has implications for the development of new human factors methods as well as the design of interfaces for sociotechnical systems that have community building requirements.

This paper examines consumer co-operatives and members' perceptions of food safety. Japan is an ideal place to study given it is undoubtedly the 'best example of a successful consumer co-operative sector in the postwar period' (Birchall, 2002, p. 79). While some co-operatives have evolved into a considerable political force, not all consumer co-operatives are as large or as politically active. This study qualitatively explores the views of the members of two small, less politically active co-operatives in Tokushima. Of particular relevance are the types of produce being consumed by members, and why (and how) purchasing behaviour has been shaped by food safety concerns, post-Fukushima.

Cognitive systems engineering has been widely applied in the design of safety critical systems such as nuclear power, aviation, and military command-and-control. More recently, these methods are being applied to the design of health and medical systems, in order to improve health care quality, reduce errors and adverse events, and improve efficiencies. This book provides an overview of cognitive systems engineering principles in the context of healthcare, and uses state-of-the-art examples of applications in health care which can be used and adapted by health care practitioners interested in s

As methods in cognitive work analysis become more widely applied, questions regarding the impact of modeling choices and similarities in modeling efforts across projects and domains are increasingly relevant. However, no explicit comparison of models of similar systems has been reported. This paper compares independently developed work domain analysis (WDA) models of two command and control environments. Similarities in model content and the types of nodes included provide evidence that WDA techniques can capture fundamental elements regarding purposes and constraints. These points of agreement provide a common starting point for developing work domain representations of military command and control systems. The comparison also revealed differences between the models. Although differences in content reflected differences in scope of coverage and level of detail, other differences corresponded to more fundamental choices in modeling approach. These included the treatment of sensors, level of integration in the model, and representation of particular abstract constraints. Examination of these more fundamental differences pointed to important degrees of freedom in how to represent a WDA and clarified the implications of these modeling choices for guiding design. Actual or potential applications of this research include aiding analysts in making work domain modeling choices as well as producing work domain models of command and control environments.

National parks and bioreserves are key conservation tools used to protect species and their habitats within the confines of fixed political boundaries. This inflexibility may be their "Achilles' heel" as conservation tools in the face of emerging global-scale environmental problems such as climate change. Global climate change, brought about by rising levels of greenhouse gases, threatens to alter the geographic distribution of many habitats and their component species. With these changes comes great uncertainty about the future ability of parks and protected areas to meet their conservation mandates. We report here on an analysis aimed at assessing the extent of mammalian species turnover that may be experienced in eight selected U.S. national parks if climate change causes mammalian species within the continental U.S. to relocate to new geographic locations. Due to species losses of up to 20% and drastic influxes of new species, national parks are not likely to meet their mandate of protecting current biodiversity within park boundaries. This approach represents a conservative prognosis. As species assemblages change, new interactions between species may lead to less predictable indirect effects of climate change, increasing the toll beyond that found in this study.

Objective: Performance and mental workload were observed for the administration of a rest break or exogenous vibrotactile signals in auditory and visual monitoring tasks. Background: Sustained attention is mentally demanding. Techniques are required to improve observer performance in vigilance tasks. Method: Participants ( N = 150) monitored an auditory or a visual display for changes in signal duration in a 40-min watch. During the watch, participants were administered a rest break or exogenous vibrotactile signals. Results: Detection accuracy was significantly greater in the auditory than in the visual modality. A short rest break restored detection accuracy in both sensory modalities following deterioration in performance. Participants experienced significantly lower mental workload when monitoring auditory than visual signals, and a rest break significantly reduced mental workload in both sensory modalities. Exogenous vibrotactile signals had no beneficial effects on performance, or mental workload. Conclusion: A rest break can restore performance in auditory and visual vigilance tasks. Although sensory differences in vigilance tasks have been studied, this study is the initial effort to investigate the effects of a rest break countermeasure in both auditory and visual vigilance tasks, and it is also the initial effort to explore the effects of the intervention of a rest break on the perceived mental workload of auditory and visual vigilance tasks. Further research is warranted to determine exact characteristics of effective exogenous vibrotactile signals in vigilance tasks. Application: Potential applications of this research include procedures for decreasing the temporal decline in observer performance and the high mental workload imposed by vigilance tasks.

A fundamental challenge in studying cognitive systems in context is how to move from the specific work setting studied to a more general understanding of distributed cognitive work and how to support it. We present a series of cognitive field studies that illustrate one response to this challenge. Our focus was on how nuclear power plant (NPP) operators monitor plant state during normal operating conditions. We studied operators at two NPPs with different control room interfaces. We identified strong consistencies with respect to factors that made monitoring difficult and the strategies that operators have developed to facilitate monitoring. We found that what makes monitoring difficult is not the need to identify subtle abnormal indications against a quiescent background, but rather the need to identify and pursue relevant findings against a noisy background. Operators devised proactive strategies to make important information more salient or reduce meaningless change, create new information, and off-load some cognitive processing onto the interface. These findings emphasize the active problem-solving nature of monitoring, and highlight the use of strategies for knowledge-driven monitoring and the proactive adaptation of the interface to support monitoring. Potential applications of this research include control room design for process control and alarm systems and user interfaces for complex systems.

Objective: We determine whether an ecological interface display for nuclear power plant operations supports improved situation awareness over traditional and user-centered displays in a realistic environment. Background: Ecological interface design (EID) has not yet been fully evaluated with real operators facing realistic scenarios. Method: Ecological displays were evaluated alongside traditional and user-centered "advanced" displays in a full-scope nuclear power plant simulation. Licensed plant operators used the displays in realistic scenarios that either had procedural support or did not have procedural support. All three displays were evaluated for their ability to support operator situation awareness. Results: A significant three-way interaction effect was observed on two independent measures of situation awareness. For both measures, ecological displays improved situation awareness in scenarios that did not have procedural support, primarily in the detection phases of those scenarios. No other pronounced effects appeared across both measures. Conclusions: The observed improvement was sufficiently large to suggest that EID could improve situation awareness in situations where procedures are unavailable. However, the EID displays did not lead to improved situation awareness in the other conditions of the evaluation, and participants using these displays occasionally underperformed on single measures of situation awareness. This suggests that the approach requires further development, particularly in integrating EID with procedural support. Application: This research has important findings for the ongoing development of the EID approach, the design of industrial operator displays, and design to support situation awareness.