Improving design decomposition (extended version)

This study describes the concept of affordance-based procedure and its implementation in a triage station in a hospital emergency department. Rather than seeking to increase operators’ adherence to procedures, an affordance-based procedure (1) aims to induce task steps using affordances that also (2) support degrees of freedom for action. The design of this procedure was guided by the application of an extended version of cognitive work analysis, named “heuristic cognitive work analysis.” This design process produced a new procedural document: a reception card. Ten months after its implementation, a qualitative evaluation with 10 triage nurses shows that the reception card is viewed as supporting coordination between the different nurses’ tasks and providing an external memory to cope with frequent interruptions during high patient inflow, even though the document is used for convenience and with unexpected and partial uses of its items. The document assessed also afforded emerging benefits, that is, acceleration of ambulance release, higher level of confidentiality, assistance for staff hand-overs. Finally, novice triage nurses are particularly sensitive to the benefits brought by this affordance-based procedure.

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Implementation of an Expanded Decision-Making Technique to Comment on Sweden Readiness for Digital Tourism

Systems ◽

10.3390/systems9030050 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 9 (3) ◽

pp. 50

Author(s):

Shahryar Sorooshian

Keyword(s):

Information And Communication Technology ◽

Communication Technology ◽

Extended Version ◽

Industry Clusters ◽

Transition Readiness ◽

Information And Communication ◽

Farthest Point ◽

Topsis Technique ◽

Almost All ◽

New Framework

Tourism provides many advantages for Sweden and the whole world, as well as its travelers. Since almost all types of tourism are currently in crisis as a result of the current COVID-19 pandemic, information and communication technology is expected to play a role, not only during the crisis but also in the post-COVID-19 era. Thus, with no expectations from types of tourism, Sweden needs to broaden its digital tours. As a result, this letter aims to classify the transition readiness of industry clusters for this digitalization move. An extended version of the TOPSIS technique was formulated and validated, plus a new framework for measuring digitalization readiness for this purpose. Lastly, analysis of the collected data proves that business tourism could lead the change, though adventure and rural tourism are at the farthest point from being considered ready to change.

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Epistemic values of quantity and variety of evidence in biological mechanism research

European Journal for Philosophy of Science ◽

10.1007/s13194-021-00369-2 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Yin Chung Au

Keyword(s):

Experimental Data ◽

Causal Inference ◽

Case Studies ◽

Biological Mechanism ◽

Data Generation ◽

Extended Version ◽

Epistemic Values ◽

Difference Making ◽

Mechanism Research ◽

The Difference

AbstractThis paper proposes an extended version of the interventionist account for causal inference in the practical context of biological mechanism research. This paper studies the details of biological mechanism researchers’ practices of assessing the evidential legitimacy of experimental data, arguing why quantity and variety are two important criteria for this assessment. Because of the nature of biological mechanism research, the epistemic values of these two criteria result from the independence both between the causation of data generation and the causation in question and between different interventions, not techniques. The former independence ensures that the interventions in the causation in question are not affected by the causation that is responsible for data generation. The latter independence ensures the reliability of the final mechanisms not only in the empirical but also the formal aspects. This paper first explores how the researchers use quantity to check the effectiveness of interventions, where they at the same time determine the validity of the difference-making revealed by the results of interventions. Then, this paper draws a distinction between experimental interventions and experimental techniques, so that the reliability of mechanisms, as supported by the variety of evidence, can be safely ensured in the probabilistic sense. The latter process is where the researchers establish evidence of the mechanisms connecting the events of interest. By using case studies, this paper proposes to use ‘intervention’ as the fruitful connecting point of literature between evidence and mechanisms.

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