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Human Reliability
In the field of human factors and ergonomics, human reliability (also known as human performance or HU) is the probability that a human performs a task to a sufficient standard. Reliability of humans can be affected by many factors such as age, physical health, mental state, attitude, emotions, personal propensity for certain mistakes, and cognitive biases. Human reliability is important to the resilience of socio-technical systems, and has implications for fields like manufacturing, medicine and nuclear power. Attempts made to decrease human error and increase reliability in human interaction with technology include user-centered design and error-tolerant design. Factors Affecting Human Performance Human error, human performance, and human reliability are especially important to consider when work is performed in a complex and high-risk environment. Strategies for dealing with performance-shaping factors such as psychological stress, cognitive load, fatigue inc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Human Factors And Ergonomics
Humans (''Homo sapiens'') or modern humans are the most common and widespread species of primate, and the last surviving species of the genus ''Homo''. They are great apes characterized by their hairlessness, bipedalism, and high intelligence. Humans have large brains, enabling more advanced cognitive skills that facilitate successful adaptation to varied environments, development of sophisticated tools, and formation of complex social structures and civilizations. Humans are highly social, with individual humans tending to belong to a multi-layered network of distinct social groups — from families and peer groups to corporations and political states. As such, social interactions between humans have established a wide variety of values, social norms, languages, and traditions (collectively termed institutions), each of which bolsters human society. Humans are also highly curious: the desire to understand and influence phenomena has motivated humanity's de ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Human Error
Human error is an action that has been done but that was "not intended by the actor; not desired by a set of rules or an external observer; or that led the task or system outside its acceptable limits".Senders, J.W. and Moray, N.P. (1991) Human Error: Cause, Prediction, and Reduction'. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, p.25. . Human error has been cited as a primary cause and contributing factor in disasters and accidents in industries as diverse as Nuclear and radiation accidents and incidents, nuclear power (e.g., the Three Mile Island accident), Pilot error, aviation, List of spaceflight-related accidents and incidents, space exploration (e.g., the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and Space Shuttle Columbia disaster), and Medical error, medicine. Prevention of human error is generally seen as a major contributor to Data integrity, reliability and safety of (complex) systems. Human error is one of the many contributing causes of risk events. Definition Human error refers to somethi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Task Analysis
Task analysis is a fundamental tool of human factors engineering. It entails analyzing how a task is accomplished, including a detailed description of both manual and mental activities, task and element durations, task frequency, task allocation, task complexity, environmental conditions, necessary clothing and equipment, and any other unique factors involved in or required for one or more people to perform a given task. Information from a task analysis can then be used for many purposes, such as personnel selection and training, tool or equipment design, procedure design (e.g., design of checklists, or decision support systems) and automation. Though distinct, task analysis is related to user analysis. Applications The term "task" is often used interchangeably with activity or process. Task analysis often results in a hierarchical representation of what steps it takes to perform a task for which there is a goal and for which there is some lowest-level "action" or interaction ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Functional Decomposition
In engineering, functional decomposition is the process of resolving a functional relationship into its constituent parts in such a way that the original function can be reconstructed (i.e., recomposed) from those parts. This process of decomposition may be undertaken to gain insight into the identity of the constituent components, which may reflect individual physical processes of interest. Also, functional decomposition may result in a compressed representation of the global function, a task which is feasible only when the constituent processes possess a certain level of ''modularity'' (i.e., independence or non-interaction). Interaction (statistics) between the components are critical to the function of the collection. All interactions may not be , but possibly deduced through repetitive , synthesis, validation and verification of composite behavior. Motivation for decomposition Decomposition of a function into non-interacting components generally permits more economical r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Power Plant
A power station, also referred to as a power plant and sometimes generating station or generating plant, is an industrial facility for the electricity generation, generation of electric power. Power stations are generally connected to an electrical grid. Many power stations contain one or more Electric generator, generators, rotating machine that converts mechanical power into three-phase electric power. The relative motion between a magnetic field and a Electrical conductor, conductor creates an electric current. The energy source harnessed to turn the generator varies widely. Most power stations in the world burn fossil fuels such as coal, petroleum, oil, and natural gas to generate electricity. Low-carbon power sources include nuclear power, and use of renewable energy, renewables such as solar power, solar, wind power, wind, geothermal power, geothermal, and hydroelectricity, hydroelectric. History In early 1871 Belgian inventor Zénobe Gramme invented a generator powerfu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Control Theory
Control theory is a field of control engineering and applied mathematics that deals with the control system, control of dynamical systems in engineered processes and machines. The objective is to develop a model or algorithm governing the application of system inputs to drive the system to a desired state, while minimizing any ''delay'', ''overshoot'', or ''steady-state error'' and ensuring a level of control Stability theory, stability; often with the aim to achieve a degree of Optimal control, optimality. To do this, a controller with the requisite corrective behavior is required. This controller monitors the controlled process variable (PV), and compares it with the reference or Setpoint (control system), set point (SP). The difference between actual and desired value of the process variable, called the ''error'' signal, or SP-PV error, is applied as feedback to generate a control action to bring the controlled process variable to the same value as the set point. Other aspects ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cognitive
Cognition is the "mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, imagination, intelligence, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem-solving and decision-making, comprehension and production of language. Cognitive processes use existing knowledge to discover new knowledge. Cognitive processes are analyzed from very different perspectives within different contexts, notably in the fields of linguistics, musicology, anesthesia, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, education, philosophy, anthropology, biology, systemics, logic, and computer science. These and other approaches to the analysis of cognition (such as embodied cognition) are synthesized in the developing field of cognitive science, a progressively auton ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Probabilistic Risk Assessment
Probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) is a systematic and comprehensive methodology to evaluate risks associated with a complex engineered technological entity (such as an airliner or a nuclear power plant) or the effects of stressors on the environment (probabilistic environmental risk assessment, or PERA). Risk in a PRA is defined as a feasible detrimental outcome of an activity or action. In a PRA, risk is characterized by two quantities: #the magnitude (severity) of the possible adverse consequence(s), and #the likelihood (probability) of occurrence of each consequence. Consequences are expressed numerically (e.g., the number of people potentially hurt or killed) and their likelihoods of occurrence are expressed as probabilities or frequencies (i.e., the number of occurrences or the probability of occurrence per unit time). The total risk is the expected loss: the sum of the products of the consequences multiplied by their probabilities. The spectrum of risks across classes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frequency Illusion
The frequency illusion (also known as the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon) is a cognitive bias in which a person notices a specific concept, word, or product more frequently after recently becoming aware of it. The name "Baader–Meinhof phenomenon" was coined in 1994 by Terry Mullen in a letter to the '' St. Paul Pioneer Press''. The letter describes how, after mentioning the name of the German militant group Baader–Meinhof once, he kept noticing it. This led to other readers sharing their own experiences of the phenomenon, leading it to gain recognition. It was not until 2005, when Stanford linguistics professor Arnold Zwicky wrote about this effect on his blog, that the name "frequency illusion" was coined. Causes Several possible causes behind frequency illusion have been put forth. However, the consensus seems to be that the main processes behind this illusion are other cognitive biases and attention-related effects that interact with frequency illusion. Zwicky considered t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Availability Heuristic
The availability heuristic, also known as availability bias, is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method, or decision. This heuristic, operating on the notion that, if something can be recalled, it must be important, or at least more important than alternative solutions not as readily recalled, is inherently biased toward recently acquired information. The mental availability of an action's consequences is positively related to those consequences' perceived magnitude. In other words, the easier it is to recall the consequences of something, the greater those consequences are often perceived to be. Most notably, people often rely on the content of their recall if its implications are not called into question by the difficulty they have in recalling it. Overview and history In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman began work on a series of papers examining ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias (also confirmatory bias, myside bias, or congeniality bias) is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or Value (ethics and social sciences), values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. Biased search for information, biased interpretation of this information and biased memory recall, have been invoked to explain four specific effects: # ''attitude polarization'' (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence) # ''belief perseverance'' (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false) # the ''irrational primacy effect'' (a greater relia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bias
Bias is a disproportionate weight ''in favor of'' or ''against'' an idea or thing, usually in a way that is inaccurate, closed-minded, prejudicial, or unfair. Biases can be innate or learned. People may develop biases for or against an individual, a group, or a belief. In science and engineering, a bias is a systematic error. Statistical bias results from an unfair sampling of a population, or from an estimation process that does not give accurate results on average. Etymology The word appears to derive from Old Provençal into Old French ''biais'', "sideways, askance, against the grain". Whence comes French ''biais'', "a slant, a slope, an oblique". It seems to have entered English via the game of bowls">English (language)">English via the game of bowls, where it referred to balls made with a greater weight on one side. Which expanded to the figurative use, "a one-sided tendency of the mind", and, at first especially in law, "undue propensity or prejudice". or ballast, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
