That is what most of us believe most of the time. They do happen, of course, sometimes with alarming frequency, sometimes with calamitous results. We explain these unnatural events as the consequences of lack of foresight, poor design, poor engineering andlor errors by some person or persons. Improve the design and production, admonish or train the persons to be more careful (less careless?) and they won't happen. It is easy to think of examples in the home, the laboratory, the office ... and in the public domain -for example, Chernobyl, Challenger, Bhopal, The Herald of Free Enterprise, King's Cross. The premise leads to an explanation of the cause, which in turn leads to the public inquiry recommending some action to prevent a similar accident occumng again. Chernobyl, for example, was blamed on a combination of unsatisfactory design and operator error. So also was the Zeebrugge disaster. So also ... and it is easy to make a long list including Flixborough, Torrey Canyon, Three Mile Island (TMI), to which King's Cross will probably soon be added. In each case the inquiry has prescribed corrective action based on this 'accidents are unnatural' (AAU) model: a technological fix plus wrist-slapping. In well-established technologies, in which we have many thousands or even millions of operating hours of experience. the repeated application of this process should by now have reduced the accident rate to zero -or, at the very least, to very nearly zero. Not a bit of it; there are no signs of this happening, and in some technologies the rate is rising. Could it be that we have got something wrong in our explanation?

Normal accidents. Living with high-risk technologies

Cognitive engineering

Will Tracz, our esteemed editor and Used-Program salesman, has written an entertaining, non-technical book dealing with the practice (and lack of) of software reuse. Its a collection of essays, mostly rehashed (reused?) and updated from various columns and papers published over the years.. Its a short (a bit over 200 pages) easy reading and enjoyable book (I read most of it in one sitting). Some of the essays discuss what was printed in the past and a discussion of the current status of the points.

Safeware: System Safety and Computers

A Study of Thinking

How can anyone be rational in a world where knowledge is limited, time is pressing, and deep thought is often an unattain- able luxury? Traditional models of unbounded rationality and optimization in cognitive science, economics, and animal behavior have tended to view decision-makers as possessing supernatural powers of reason, limitless knowledge, and endless time But understanding decisions in the real world requires a more psychologically plausible notion of bounded rationality In Simple heuristics that make us smart (Gigerenzer et al 1999), we explore fast and frugal heuristics - simple rules in the mind's adaptive toolbox for making decisions with realistic mental resources These heuristics can enable both living organisms and artificial systems to make smart choices quickly and with a minimum of information by exploiting the way that information is structured in particular environments In this precis, we show how simple building blocks that control information search, stop search, and make decisions can be put together to form classes of heuristics, including: ignorance-based and one-reason decision making for choice, elimination models for categorization, and satisficing heuristics for sequential search These simple heuristics perform comparably to more complex algorithms, particularly when generaliz- ing to new data - that is, simplicity leads to robustness We present evidence regarding when people use simple heuristics and describe the challenges to be addressed by this research program

/pdf/precis-of-simple-heuristics-that-make-us-smart-4nj10bejfm.pdf

Précis of "Simple heuristics that make us smart"

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1207/s15516709cog1204_4

Observational Learning From Internal Feedback: A Simulation of an Adaptive Learning Method

We investigated the role of domain structure, in designing for software usefulness and usability. We ran through the whole application development cycle, in miniature, from needs analysis through design, implementation, and evaluation, for planning needs of one NASA Mission Control group. Based on our needs analysis, we developed prototype software that matched domain structure better than did the legacy system. We compared our new prototype to the legacy application in a laboratory, high-fidelity analog of the natural planning work. We found large performance differences favoring the prototype, which better captured domain structure. Our research illustrates the importance of needs analysis (particularly Domain Structure Analysis), and the viability of the design process that we are exploring.

/pdf/benefits-of-matching-domain-structure-for-planning-software-1jxpychi5u.pdf

Benefits of matching domain structure for planning software: the right stuff

Skill and skill development in playing the game Othello were investigated. In particular, we studied the role of strategies and strategy change, rather than focusing on knowledge of particular board patterns. The history of the development of the game suggests a shift from positional to mobility strategies, a change which also is reproduced in the development of individual players. The first two studies used historical analysis of tournament transcripts to study strategy change. The third study investigated one possible basis for the greater accessibility or ease of positional versus mobility strategy, namely differential encoding and memorability of typical board patterns. Study 3 demonstrated that completely naive as well as positional players remember positional games and moves more easily than mobility games and moves. The easier mastery of positional strategy may be caused in part by the greater ease of encoding typical positional patterns. We suggest that strategic change and conceptual reorganization may be particularly important for domains where the naive encoding of events is not the most apt. We also suggest that similarities exist between strategy change in Othello and other domains.

Strategy knowledge and strategy change in skilled performance: a study of the game Othello.

Language Learnability and Language Development.

A critical resource for meeting the challenges of human exploration beyond near Earth orbit is greater reliance on spacecraft automation. If human-automation integration is not appropriately designed, however, increased automation may contribute to rather than alleviate these challenges. TRACLabs and San Jose State University are investigating the hypothesis that selecting units of work for automation based on procedures written for humans will improve human-automation designs. We conducted an exploratory study with human participants using TRACLabs' PRIDE software for authoring and executing electronic procedures to perform simulated spacecraft operations. Our research investigates manual, partially automated, and fully automated procedure execution, and support for these multiple modes. We report the results of participant use of automation functions in this paper.

Human performance with procedure automation to manage spacecraft systems

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