A natural approach to teaching a visual concept, e.g. a bird species, is to show relevant images. However, not all relevant images represent a concept equally well. In other words, they are not necessarily iconic. This observation raises three questions. Is iconicity a subjective property? If not, can we predict iconicity? And what exactly makes an image iconic? We provide answers to these ques...

: A high redundancy actuator (HRA) is composed of a high number of actuation elements, increasing both the travel and the force above the capability of an individual element. This provides inherent fault tolerance: if one of the elements fails, the capabilities of the actuator may be reduced, but it does not become dysfunctional. This paper analyses the likelihood of reductions in capabilities....

Speech perception is remarkably robust despite many potential communicative obstacles such as background noise and talker variation. One reason for this is that speech sounds are selected to be auditorily distinctive even under adverse listening conditions. For many years, my colleagues and I have been exploring a general account of the distinctiveness of vowels and consonants referred to as th...

with control signals from the skin, core and muscles and thus simulate temperature regulation in any environment. During. the, past five years. operations in space and underwater have stimulated a wide search for new fundamental experimental data useful in computer models of human performance. The present. short but instructive book will prove valuable as a brief introduction to any graduate co...

In this paper we investigate whether paragraphs can be identified automatically in different languages and domains. We propose a machine learning approach which exploits textual and discourse cues and we assess how well humans perform on this task. Our best models achieve an accuracy that is significantly higher than the best baseline and, for most data sets, comes to within 6% of human perform...

Inclusion of catch stabilization mechanisms have been tested in the current HCR and are considered precautionary as they do not increase the probability of SSB< Blim above 0.05. Over the entire time period examined there are no significant differences in catch either with or without the stabilizers. The 50–50 rule may lead to considerably reduced interannual variation (IAV), but can generate hi...

This study focused on the barriers that middle school teachers faced when implementing technology-enhanced problem-based learning (PBL) in their classrooms. Using a human performance-based model, we interviewed teachers, administrators, university faculty and technical support staff to determine the perceived importance of multiple barriers to the implementation of technology-enhanced PBL. Twen...

The goal of the data collection and analyses described in this paper was to investigate the effects of incorrect output from a CAD tool on the reliability of the decisions of its human users. Our work follows on a clinical trial that evaluated the impact of introducing a computerised prompting tool (R2 ImageChecker) as part of the breast screening programme in the UK. Our goal was to use data o...

Positive effects of practice are ubiquitous in human performance, but a finding from memory research suggests that negative effects are possible also. The finding is that memory for items on a list depends on the time interval between item presentations. This finding predicts a negative effect of practice on procedural performance under conditions of task interruption. As steps of a procedure a...