Interdisciplinary safety analysis of complex socio-technological systems based on the Functional Resonance Accident Model: An application to railway traffic supervision. Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, 2011, 96, pp. AbstractThis paper presents an application of Functional Resonance Accident Models (FRAM) for the safety analysis of complex socio-technological systems, i.e. systems which include not only technological, but also human and organizational components. The supervision of certain industrial domains provides a good example of such systems, because although more and more actions for piloting installations are now automatized, there always remains a decision level (at least in the management of degraded modes) involving human behavior and organizations. The field of application of the study presented here is railway traffic supervision, using modern Automatic Train Supervision (ATS) systems. Examples taken from railway traffic supervision irrelevant information likely to distract operators).

BackgroundRegularity effect can affect performance in prospective memory (PM), but little is known on the cognitive processes linked to this effect. Moreover, its impacts with regard to aging remain unknown. To our knowledge, this study is the first to examine regularity effect in PM in a lifespan perspective, with a sample of young, intermediate, and older adults.Objective and designOur study examined the regularity effect in PM in three groups of participants: 28 young adults (18–30), 16 intermediate adults (40–55), and 25 older adults (65–80). The task, adapted from the Virtual Week, was designed to manipulate the regularity of the various activities of daily life that were to be recalled (regular repeated activities vs. irregular non-repeated activities). We examine the role of several cognitive functions including certain dimensions of executive functions (planning, inhibition, shifting, and binding), short-term memory, and retrospective episodic memory to identify those involved in PM, according to regularity and age.ResultsA mixed-design ANOVA showed a main effect of task regularity and an interaction between age and regularity: an age-related difference in PM performances was found for irregular activities (older < young), but not for regular activities. All participants recalled more regular activities than irregular ones with no age effect. It appeared that recalling of regular activities only involved planning for both intermediate and older adults, while recalling of irregular ones were linked to planning, inhibition, short-term memory, binding, and retrospective episodic memory.ConclusionTaken together, our data suggest that planning capacities seem to play a major role in remembering to perform intended actions with advancing age. Furthermore, the age-PM-paradox may be attenuated when the experimental design is adapted by implementing a familiar context through the use of activities of daily living. The clinical implications of regularity effect are discussed.

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Background. Authors of scientific articles in one language are often required to provide abstracts of their papers in a second language, and they use a variety of ways to achieve this. Aims. The aims of our studies were (i) to assess the effects of using native English speakers to improve non-native speakers' translations of their abstracts, and (ii) to explore the variations in edits produced by different native speakers. Methods. In Study 1, a French abstract was translated into English by two French authors. Each of these English abstracts was then edited by two native speakers of English (leading to four abstracts altogether). Textual and stylistic analyses were made of these four abstracts. In Study 2, over 200 academics rated these four abstracts on a series of semantic-differential scales to see how readers judged each abstract and what discriminations they made between them. Results. Study 1 showed how the two English editors imposed their own particular styles of writing on to the anglicized French abstracts, and how each changed the meaning in different ways. Study 2 showed that readers did in fact evaluate these pairs of English abstracts differently, indicating that the two English editors wrote in recognizably different `voices', whilst ostensibly carrying out the same task. Comparing the results of Study 1 (using textual analyses) with those of Study 2 (using readers' judgements), it appeared that improving readability and changing style were independent skills, and each had differing effects on meaning and understanding. Conclusions . These data suggest that there are benefits from using native English speakers to edit translated abstracts, but that there will never be a `one-to-one' translation from one language to another, and that different measures may reveal different effects.