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The cube root law of assembly sizes applies to first or only chambers. It says that assembly size is approximately the cube root of the country's population, because this size minimizes the workload of a representative. This quantitatively predictive logical model agrees with the world averages. Smaller countries have fewer registered parties but more party members per 1,000 population.

All of the presidents of the Council of Ministers have left their mark, in areas ranging from EU agenda-setting to securing agreement after technical negotiations. Partly because their duties are multifarious and poorly defined, their success has been variable. Leadership has been of three kinds. Task-oriented leadership involves chairing meetings efficiently according to rules of procedure and its importance is generally underrated. Group-oriented leadership requiring sounding out positions and identifying acceptable solutions irrespective of their quality. Transformational leadership is aimed at proposing ambitious innovations for the longer term, adding to the agenda, and finding new solutions. Discontinuities and excessive workload have been corrected by team presidencies, annually from 2002 and over eighteen months since 2007. A stable President of the European Council devoted to transformational leadership would cause tensions with the rotating presidents and raise excessive expectations.

As the role of patents has become central in the knowledge economy, there is evidence that the current institutional and legal setting is unable to cope with the corresponding challenges. This difficulty is illustrated by the explosion of patent numbers and voluminosity, by recent controversies around genes and software, and by the inability of European countries to move forward with a more integrated patent system. This chapter presents a series of possible reforms based on economic analysis. These include putting the quality of patents first so as to reduce the number of applications; making procedures stricter for applicants; reinforcing the international integration of the system at a European level; and inscribing the economic mission of the system in the European Patent Convention so that the case law would integrate economic concerns.

This chapter describes how event-related potentials (ERPs) can be recorded and analyzed, and discusses research on a number of ERP components, focusing on those that are particularly relevant to human factors issues: the early-latency, attention-related P1 and N1; the long-latency P3 or P300; the mismatch negativity (MMN); the lateralized readiness potential (LRP); and the error-related negativity (ERN). It discusses the use of these ERP components to address four neuroergonomic issues: (1) assessment of mental workload; (2) understanding the neural basis of error detection and performance monitoring; (3) response readiness; and (4) studies of automatic processing. It outlines the specific advantages offered by ERPs in neuroergonomics research.

While those individuals who join trauma response teams come with many skills and strengths, generally they are new to this type of work. But in the course of providing mental health and peer support interventions in the context of emergency health, public safety, or disaster work, they will undoubtedly encounter new situations and challenges which will test the limits of their competence and undermine confidence. The challenge for team leaders therefore becomes one of continuously developing the skill levels of team members and maintaining commitment and motivation in light of a fluctuating workload. This chapter reviews several key elements of ongoing team maintenance including: administration of the team; continuous training; ensuring that there are rewards to maintain commitment and motivation; evaluation of team members; and ensuring the safety and self-care of team members so that they don’t burn out.

This chapter describes a series of recent neuroergonomic studies on vigilance, focusing on the use of noninvasive measurement of cerebral blood flow velocity. It uses a theoretical framework of attentional resources. Resource theory is the dominant theoretical approach to the assessment of human mental workload and also provides a major conceptual framework for understanding human vigilance performance. Consistent with the view first proposed by Sir Charles Sherrington, a considerable amount of research on brain imaging indicates that there is a close tie between cerebral blood flow and neural activity in the performance sustained vigilance. Applications include the ability to “monitor the monitor”, i.e., to ensure safety in systems where human monitoring of automated functions is required.

This chapter focuses on adaptive automation, which seeks to address some of the shortcomings of traditional automation. In adaptive automation, the level of automation or the number of systems operating under automation can be modified in real time. Changes in the state of automation can also be initiated by either the human or the system. Adaptive strategies, examples of adaptive automation systems, workload and situation awareness, human-computer etiquette, and living with adaptive automation are discussed.

As the number of girl evangelists increased and more attention came their way, some criticism developed. The more liberal religious press condemned girl evangelists often because they did not like revivalists of any stripe. They also had concerns about child labor. Some elements in the conservative religious press did not like female preachers – young or old. Such was Frank Bartleman, famous for writing a history of the Pentecostal Azusa Street revival. Then came concern from leaders in the Pentecostal movements, where most of the girls were located, that such was an exploitation of the girls. As well, Aimee Semple McPherson, the protégé of many of the girl evangelist, was involved in a number of scandals. All of this helped cause the decline of the phenomenon of the girl evangelist. A different kind of damage to girl evangelists was done as they were adopted into popular culture and its literature, where a sexual element was introduced. This would have tainted the image somewhat. The chapter discusses, too, how the rigorous workload led to a decline in girl evangelists.

This chapter explores the conditions under which the beliefs held by regulatory inspectors about the possible instrumental impact of prosecution enter prosecution decision-making. Inspectors find it difficult to assess the impact of prosecution, but many are sceptical about whether prosecution produces some desired practical impact. Furthermore, they tend to judge the impact of prosecution in terms of compliance rather than in reductions in hazards or accidents. Most strikingly, most inspectors were less concerned with the behaviour of actual or potential rule breakers, than with the impact of a prosecution case on their own time and workload. The chapter considers inspectors' theorizing about individual and general deterrence, and the paradox of regulatory control in which prosecution is most important, ironically, in being threatened, rather than actually used.

This chapter explores the hitherto underexplored affective dimensions of the lived experience of ‘doing’ flexible work arrangements for mothers in professional and managerial jobs. It focuses on the effects on mind, body, and spirit. For women navigating the transition simultaneously with a return to work following maternity leave, the maternal body was at the centre of the experience. Tiredness was not exclusive to new and nursing mothers, the physical and emotional impacts of working intensively in largely unadjusted jobs or inhospitable workplace contexts are viscerally present in women's accounts. Hochschild's concept of emotional labour is highly relevant to the professional motherhood project and this analysis shows how the scope and span of women's emotional workload increases when they work outside the home.

This chapter describes a range of theories of how cognition is influenced by stress. It uses a cognitive architecture, ACT-R (adaptive control of thought-rational), to represent these theories formally. The theories make suggestions for developing cognitive architectures, in that nearly all of them require that time-on-task influence performance, and at least one suggests that workload and strategies are monitored to access and cope with stress. By examining the theories as a whole, it becomes evident how the stress theories and the mechanisms that give rise to them can be tested. It can also be seen that they are incomplete, in that individually and as a group they do not make predictions that are consistent with data. For example, many of them do not predict that repeated serial subtraction (part of the Trier Social Stressor Task) will be affected by stress (and it is). This chapter also considers architectural overlays and describes a sample task to help explain the application of overlays.

Health and social care services across the UK are committed to involving users in the planning and development of their services. Involvement has taken various forms and its success depends on many factors, including how inclusive health professionals are, their own time and budgetary resources and their skills and motivation to get the job done. While user involvement has many positive impacts on services and research, unforeseen consequences can have a negative impact and threaten its success. For example, there are risks attached to involvement activities, including managerial and professional resistance, and the potential for involvement to increase inequalities and for those involved to experience a form of emotional labour that can have negative personal impacts. This chapter draws on research undertaken at the National Centre for Involvement, including a systematic review, an annual survey of involvement activity across NHS Trusts and a study of how involvement is being embedded into the commissioning of services. It identifies iatrogenic impacts and how these can be mitigated to ensure successful involvement within service development. The chapter suggests strategic and practical ways forward to enable the identification of iatrogenic impacts and to develop plans for incorporating these impacts in productive ways.

When joining two airports, aircraft must follow routes and beacons; these beacons are necessary for pilots to know their position during navigation and because of the small number of beacons on the ground they often represent crossing points of different airways. Crossing points may generate conflicts between aircraft when their trajectories converge on it at the same time and induce a risk of collision. At the dawn of civil aviation, pilots solved conflicts themselves because they always flew in good weather conditions (good visibility) with low-speed aircraft. In contrast, modern jet aircraft do not enable pilots to solve conflicts because of their high speed and their ability to fly with bad visibility. Therefore, pilots must be helped by an air traffic controller on the ground who has a global view of the current traffic distribution in the airspace and can give orders to the pilots to avoid collisions. As there are many aircraft simultaneously present in the sky, a single controller is not able to manage all of them. Airspace is then partitioned into different sectors, each of them being assigned to a controller. Sectoring is currently done in an empirical way by some airspace experts who apply rules they have learned with experience. The sectoring modifications are usually due to traffic evolution over long period and when a sector is regularly overloaded it has to be modified. To reach this aim, an ad hoc commission meets to identify new boundaries for the sectors in order to balance the workload. Afterward, sectoring is updated (until new problems arise). This way of working is relevant because it takes into account several practical aspects but has a limited effect on the local zone it treats. This process can be improved with an automatic approach in order to give a solution to the sectoring problem in the whole airspace and that solution could be refined by experts. Before specifying a mathematical description of our problem, it is necessary to set out our framework to introduce some simplifications for our model.

Virtual reality involves the creation of multisensory experience of an environment (its space and events) through artificial, electronic means; but that environment incorporates a sufficient number of features of the non-artificial world that it is experienced as “reality.” The cognitive issues of virtual reality are those that are involved in knowing and understanding about the virtual environment (cognitive: to perceive and to know). The knowledge we are concerned with in this chapter is both short term (Where am I in the environment? What do I see? Where do I go and how do I get there?), and long term (What can and do I learn about the environment as I see and explore it?). Given the recent interest in virtual reality as a concept (Rheingold, 1991; Wexelblat, 1993; Durlach and Mavor, 1994), it is important to consider that virtual reality is not, in fact, a unified thing, but can be broken down into a set of five features, any one of which can be present or absent to create a greater sense of reality. These features consist of the following five points. 1. Three-dimensional (perspective and/or stereoscopic) viewing vs. two-dimensional planar viewing. (Sedgwick, 1986; Wickens et al., 1989). Thus, the geography student who views a 3D representation of the environment has a more realistic view than one who views a 2D contour map. 2. Dynamic vs. static display. A video or movie is more real than a series of static images of the same material. 3. Closed-loop (interactive or learner-centered) vs. open-loop interaction. A more realistic closed-loop mode is one in which the learner has control over what aspect of the learning “world” is viewed or visited. That is, the learner is an active navigator as well as an observer. 4. Inside-out (ego-referenced) vs. outside-in (world-referenced) frame-of-reference. The more realistic inside-out frame-of-reference is one in which the image of the world on the display is viewed from the perspective of the point of ego-reference of the user (that point which is being manipulated by the control). This is often characterized as the property of “immersion.” Thus, the explorer of a virtual undersea environment will view that world from a perspective akin to that of a camera placed on the explorer’s head;

Good decisions come from good law. For government agencies, that means due process: good regulations and good procedures. The IRB regulations address so few issues that IRBs are relegated to subjectivity. IRBs may and do ignore all the elements of due process. And rules and procedures are empty without accountability, but IRBs are unaccountable. They may work in secret, researchers have no recourse against them, and they are not subject to standard hierarchical supervision. IRBs are trapped in inadequate procedures because adequate ones would crush IRBs already overburdened with tasks they lack the resources to accomplish. So they work without law and without accountability.

In this chapter the authors discuss barriers to participation in CPD, based on a national study of social workers in Ireland. In line with previous research, the findings suggest that heavy workloads, time constraints and a lack of funding are the main barriers. While these may be perennial problems, it is clear that support for CPD from employers has declined significantly over the last few years with the onset of recession and the imposition of major funding cutbacks to health and social services. Ironically, this has coincided with the setting up of a system of professional regulation whereby social workers will be required to undertake CPD in order to maintain their professional registration.

In the fourth section, Preparing, Teaching, and Ending the Course, readers will be guided through all aspects of online teaching chronologically, from preparing the classroom prior to the first day through posting final course grades. The teaching chapter focuses on the community of inquiry and clear teacher presence, and strategies are presented with which to meet the needs of students in diverse circumstances. Special attention is given to routines, efficiency strategies, and tips for working with students in various circumstances. A brief discussion of various learning management systems and organizational strategies is included to guide educators in their work for multiple institutions or in multiple online formats.

This chapter speaks to faculty who teach multiple courses or at multiple institutions to address workload and time management challenges. When time demands escalate or expectations differ, instructors face the serious need for efficiency strategies in order to teach effectively and prevent online teaching demands from expanding without boundaries. Readers will explore way in which time commitments can be projected, grading tools can be implemented, and new tools can be integrated conscientiously. This chapter ends with a brief summary of important points and an infographic designed to visually highlight specific strategies to effectively manage time, online teaching routines, differences between learning management systems, and teaching at institutions with differing instructor expectations.