Culture of life versus ‘system of lies’

Author(s):  
Juraj Buzalka
Keyword(s):  
1990 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 178-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Lockeretz ◽  
Molly D. Anderson

AbstractInvolvement of farmers in sustainable agricultural research can have important benefits, since farmers originated many sustainable agriculture innovations and can contribute a valuable perspective different from that of researchers. However, this does not mean, as is sometimes said, that all kinds of sustainable agricultural research necessarily should give farmers a major role—perhaps the dominant role—in choosing topics and overseeing the work. This belief overlooks the fact that farmers are just one of many groups that publicly supported research is supposed to serve and that their interests do not by themselves embody the full range of goals that sustainable agriculture tries to achieve. Moreover, although farmers can bring valuable insights to research, these alone will not be enough to insure that a sustainable agriculture research program has an appropriate mix of applied versus basic, short-term versus long-term, and component-level versus system-level studies.


Author(s):  
Peter C. Burns ◽  
Patricia L. Trbovich ◽  
Joanne L. Harbluk ◽  
Tara McCurdie

The goal of this research was to determine whether system usability is requisite for system safety. To this end, the usability and safety of two multifunction in-vehicle interfaces were assessed to verify the hypothesis that the system scoring highest on usability testing would also score highest on safety testing. Two multifunctional systems were subjected to ( a) heuristic evaluations to assess usability and ( b) occlusion tests to assess safety. There were more heuristic violations, indicative of more usability problems, in System B relative to System A. Similarly, with regard to safety, results of occlusion testing showed that greater demands on time and visual resources were required to perform tasks when System B was used versus System A. Thus, the usability problems identified through heuristic evaluations represent possible precursors to the safety problems identified by occlusion tests. Given the latter and the fact that heuristic evaluations can be applied quickly and easily whereas occlusion testing can be costly and time-consuming, the results of the current research suggest that developers would benefit from correcting the usability limitations of a system before its safety performance is evaluated.


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