Mutual Awareness Research Articles

Makah IndianTribe – U.S. Coast Guard Memorandum of Agreement A Model for Meaningful Tribal-Federal Engagement

On 12 April 2013, the Makah Tribal Council Chairman and the District Commander of the 13th Coast Guard District (D13) signed into effect the “Memorandum of Agreement between the United States Coast Guard and the Makah Indian Tribe Regarding Interoperability and Coordination”. The purpose of this “Makah-USCG MOA” is to establish terms by which the two parties will coordinate and collaborate in the fulfillment of their mutual trust responsibility. The MOA's focus is to enhance consultation, improve leveraging of resources within each party's authorities, and improve collective all-hazards prevention and response posture in the Makah Treaty Area. Such an agreement between a federal agency and an Indian tribe is authorized by Executive Order 13175 - Consultation and Coordination with Indian Tribal Governments, signed in 2000 and is consistent with the 2011 Department of Homeland Security Tribal Consultation Policy. This groundbreaking document represents a 20 year relationship between key members of the Makah Tribe and the oil spill response members of CG D13 and Sector Puget Sound, and the trust developed over that period while working together to mutually support each party's oil spill prevention, preparedness and response readiness, as well as the desire to help and support each other by harmonizing efforts. With recent legislation such as the 2010 Coast Guard Authorization act, authorizing resources to engage tribes into training, exercises and other spill response preparedness activities particularly in the Northwest, it became clear there was a need to memorialize the strong supportive working relationship between the Makah and the CG, and provide some structure to our planning and development efforts. The MOA lays out a minimum of semi-annual meetings during which the two parties discuss overarching items of mutual interest and determine a work list of concrete, achievable goals to complete within the next 6 month period. An initial work list of common interest issues and responsibilities are outlined in the MOA, and fall into three general categories: Prevention; Preparedness and Response. The MOA also addresses the importance of Communication with the goal of enhancing mutual situational awareness via improved communication protocols between the Coast Guard and the Makah Tribe.

Revised cloud storage structure for light-weight data archiving in LHD

The LHD data archiving system has newly selected GlusterFS distributed filesystem for the replacement of the present cloud storage software named “IznaStor/dSS”. Even though the prior software provided many favorable functionalities of hot plug and play node insertion, internal auto-replication of data files, and symmetric load balancing between all member nodes, it revealed a poor feature in recovering from an accidental malfunction of a storage node. Once a failure happened, the recovering process usually took at least several days or sometimes more than a week with a heavy cpu load. In some cases they fell into the so-called “split-brain” or “amnesia” condition, not to get recovered from it. Since the recovery time tightly depends on the capacity size of the fault node, individual HDD management is more desirable than large volumes of HDD arrays. In addition, the dynamic mutual awareness of data location information may be removed if some other static data distribution method can be applied. In this study, the candidate middleware of “OpenStack/Swift” and “GlusterFS” has been tested by using the real mass of LHD data for more than half a year, and finally GlusterFS has been selected to replace the present IznaStor. It has implemented very limited functionalities of cloud storage but a simplified RAID10-like structure, which may consequently provide lighter-weight read/write ability. Since the LABCOM data system is implemented to be independent of the storage structure, it is easy to plug off the IznaStor and on the new GlusterFS. The effective I/O speed is also confirmed to be on the same level as the estimated one from raw performance of disk hardware. This achievement may be informative to implement the ITER CODAC and the remote archiving system.

Cultural Awareness, a Form of Risk Management in International Business: Case Study of China

Mutual awareness of cultural references is essential in international business as levels of formality vary greatly among cultures. The emergence of capitalism into China induces international firms’ investment in the country. This resulted to creation of a production base to explore the inexpensive factors of production, particularly low-cost labour. The study examines cultural awareness as a form of risk management in international business, using China as a case study. The study uses ‘XYZ International’, with western cultural background, as a hypothetical international business that operates in China market. The study explores international trade and global organisations; considers barriers to international business; outlines cultural awareness as a form of risk management in international business; highlights Chinese business culture; outlines the impact of culture on negotiation; appraises Chinese businessman culture and its impact in the Chinese market; and justifies reasons to support conducting trade with China. The study findings indicate that mutual awareness of cultural references is essential in international business, and levels of formality vary greatly among cultures. The implication for practice is that culture induces each country societal prevailing life-styles because culture and life-style influence patterns of consumption, manufacturing, agriculture, service, distribution and investment.

The Day-to-Day Co-Production of Ageing in Place.

We report findings from a study that set out to explore the experience of older people living with assisted living technologies and care services. We find that successful ‘ageing in place’ is socially and collaboratively accomplished – ‘co-produced’ – day-to-day by the efforts of older people, and their formal and informal networks of carers (e.g. family, friends, neighbours). First, we reveal how ‘bricolage’ allows care recipients and family members to customise assisted living technologies to individual needs. We argue that making customisation easier through better design must be part of making assisted living technologies ‘work’. Second, we draw attention to the importance of formal and informal carers establishing and maintaining mutual awareness of the older person’s circumstances day-to-day so they can act in a concerted and coordinated way when problems arise. Unfortunately, neither the design of most current assisted living technologies, nor the ways care services are typically configured, acknowledges these realities of ageing in place. We conclude that rather than more ‘advanced’ technologies, the success of ageing in place programmes will depend on effortful alignments in the technical, organisational and social configuration of support.

Mutually Enhancing Responsibility: A Theoretical Exploration of the Interaction Mechanisms Between Individual and Corporate Moral Responsibility

Moral responsibility for outcomes in corporate settings can be ascribed either to the individual members, the corporation, or both. In the latter case, the relationship between individual and corporate responsibility has been approached as inversely proportional, such that an increase in individual responsibility leads to a corresponding decrease in corporate responsibility and vice versa. In this article, we develop a non-proportionate approach, where, under specific conditions, individual and corporate moral responsibilities interact dynamically, leading to a mutual enhancement of responsibility: the more the corporation is responsible, the more the individuals become responsible and vice versa. We develop this mutually enhancing approach in terms of normative ascriptions of responsibility, while leaving aside empirical implications in terms of mutual awareness of responsibility between individuals and corporations. We explore conceptually the conditions and mechanisms that generate this mutual enhancement and also discuss the implications for research and practice.

Improving Veterans Affairs Services by Embracing a Communitarian Model for Mental Health Providers

Working as a mental health professional in the Veterans Affairs (VA) health care system can be very rewarding. Providers have the privilege of caring for America's heroes, many opportunities to learn and implement evidence-based practices, and the ability to work in interdisciplinary teams. However, providers also face some unique challenges. VA leadership and staff can embrace a communitarian approach to professional ethics by creating opportunities for mental health professionals to engage in mutual awareness, support, and accountability. The author describes five ideas for infusing this model at VA facilities to support and strengthen the mental health workforce.

Aligning technological and pedagogical considerations: Harnessing touch-technology to enhance opportunities for collaborative gameplay and reciprocal teaching in NZ early education

New Zealand early childhood education (ECE) aims to provide a mix of teacher and child-led learning. A non-prescriptive curriculum allows for broad and rich early years teaching and learning experiences, with teachers responsive to devising engaging activities to align with children’s diverse interests. However, such spontaneity presents an on-going challenge for teachers. Using a combination of Action Research, elements of User-Centered and Participatory Design, and Scrum software development approaches, we conducted a multi-disciplinary study which leveraged joint contributions of software engineers and experts, including practitioners (teachers), users (children and teachers), and domain experts (in ECE curriculum and pedagogy, and early childhood psychology). Examination of teacher–child interactions with our software demonstrated that our game was engaging, promoted collaborative gameplay (by promoting mutual awareness, opportunities for information, and equitable control) and supported reciprocal teaching (by aligning children’s interests with content knowledge). Finally, it opens new avenues for introducing research and pedagogy-informed interactive educational software in the NZ ECE domain.

The Persian Influence on Mughal India: Political, Social and Cultural Perspectives

The link between Persia and India dates back to the age of the Aryans. Research in archeology, anthropology, and the social sciences points to a fusion between ancient Iranian civilization and the civilization of the subcontinent. During all forays from the West, Persia has always been the ordained link, providing the base for the flow of men and ideas, and in the process, contributing to the enrichment of the Indian civilization. The inflow of travellers, mystics, and invaders promoted mutual awareness between India and its neighbours. This inflow of men, though not always Persian, carried with them the rich cultural heritage and refinement of Persia, making it a medium of civilizing the Eastern world. Although mutual exchange of cultural bearings had existed earlier, it was under the Mughals, who were conscious of their Central Asian background, that the influence became profound and enduring. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the culmination of the process of synthesis of two different forms of cultures interplaying, to the enrichment of both. This paper is an attempt to study the areas where this influence was more pronounced and in a subtle way, led to Mughal cultural transformation from Turko-Mongol robustness to Persian style and ceremonialism.

Mutual awareness in collaborative design: An Augmented Reality integrated telepresence system

Remote collaboration has become increasingly important and common in designers’ working routine. It is critical for geographically distributed designers to accurately perceive and comprehend other remote team members’ intentions and activities with a high level of awareness and presence as if they were working in the same room. More specifically, distributed cognition places emphasis on the social aspects of cognition and asserts that knowledge is distributed by placing memories, facts, or knowledge on objects, individuals, and tools in the environment they work. This paper proposes a new computer-mediated remote collaborative design system, TeleAR, to enhance the distributed cognition among remote designers by integrating Augmented Reality and telepresence technologies. This system can afford a high level externalization of shared resources, which includes gestures, design tools, design elements, and design materials. This paper further investigates how this system may affect designers’ communication and collaboration with focus on distributed cognition and mutual awareness. It also explores the critical communication-related issue addressed in the proposed system, including common ground and social capitals, perspective invariance, trust and spatial faithfulness.

HIV Partner Notification

HIV Partner Notification

Rural inter-firm networks as basis for multifunctional local system development: Evidence from an Italian alpine area

This paper analyses the relationships between firms involved in a pilot project to promote the creation of a multifunctional local system, a case of collective action. The project area is a rural alpine space in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region (NE Italy). The analysis, which is part of the pilot project, used Social Network Analysis tools to explore the structure and dynamics of firm relationships in terms of mutual awareness, types and strength of business ties, and extension and location of economic and social interactions. These characteristics are described at both complete and ego network levels. The findings can be used to design policies and rural development agendas. The analysis also revealed the potentials of Social Network Analysis in assessing networking projects and enhancing rural actors’ awareness of their relational system.

Alcohol treatment workers’ use of public health policy

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the views of drug and alcohol workers on existing alcohol-related public health policies in the UK. Alcohol consumption is closely linked to negative health outcomes, social problems and increasing cost burdens for the UK public, yet alcohol consumption is legal and drinking alcohol is a normalised feature of society. Design/methodology/approach – Nine drug and alcohol workers completed semi-structured interviews, exploring awareness of alcohol-related public health strategies, views on how both their clients and the public orient towards drinking behaviour, and perceptions of links between alcohol treatment and public health services. Findings – Ambivalence towards alcohol-related public health strategies, and a lack of mutual awareness and coordination between public health and treatment services were expressed by participants. Participants felt that public health strategies around alcohol were out of reach to their client group, and failing to have a behavioural change effect on the wider public. Participants proposed several ways of improving public health strategies. Research limitations/implications – Drug and alcohol workers are potentially valuable contributors in developing public health policy. Their views, based both on interactions with service users and on occupationally influenced observations of society, could be utilised more effectively than is currently the case. Originality/value – This study uniquely ties together public health and treatment aspects of alcohol services and employs a methodology that opens the way for further research and clinical development.

Kinscapes, timescapes and genescapes: families living with genetic risk

This article synthesises recent research examining how families live with genetic risk and the processes of genetic decision-making and disclosure among family members who have been or are at risk of transmitting a familial genetic condition. Its aim is to generate substantive theory that can inform our understanding of the interactional processes at work in the distribution of mutual knowledge and awareness of genetic risk in families. The article is structured around three interrelated concepts. Kinscape refers to the constellation of relations and relatedness that are recognised practically; timescape to the multiple temporal frames of social relations and their transformation and genescape to the constellation of knowledge, belief and practice surrounding genetic inheritance. All three concepts are simultaneously natural and cultural. Their intersections create the conditions of kinship and genetics.

Mobile Real-Time Collaboration for Semantic Multimedia

Advanced mobile applications that enable new ways of interaction with digital objects become increasingly important for on-site professional communities. These new ways of interaction, e.g. in Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) via position and 3D movement, are real needs for fieldwork domains such as cultural heritage management and the construction industry. In addition, on-site professional communities generate shared knowledge bases with multimedia content and semantic annotations through collaboration. However, current MAR applications lack real-time collaboration features. In practice, blending multimedia semantics in mobile real-time collaboration is challenging due to the limitations of mobile devices, the lack of mature dedicated designed communication infrastructures and the constraints of the remote environments. This paper presents a mobile real-time collaboration system for semantic multimedia annotations with augmented reality features. We use XMPP as a real-time protocol for the secure, scalable and interoperable processing of XML-based semantic multimedia metadata described in MPEG-7. Our prototype was evaluated in the digital documentation of historical sites for cultural heritage management. The evaluation results indicate potential for increased productivity and enhanced mutual awareness in on-site professional communities.

Informal ties in organizations: a case study

Network techniques are applied to a case study. The results show that using a joint approach can help in giving further insight into the analysis of informal ties in an organization. Special emphasis is given to centrality. The concept of mutual awareness, both on an individual and a global levels, is introduced and illustrated.

Immersive Group-to-Group Telepresence

We present a novel immersive telepresence system that allows distributed groups of users to meet in a shared virtual 3D world. Our approach is based on two coupled projection-based multi-user setups, each providing multiple users with perspectively correct stereoscopic images. At each site the users and their local interaction space are continuously captured using a cluster of registered depth and color cameras. The captured 3D information is transferred to the respective other location, where the remote participants are virtually reconstructed. We explore the use of these virtual user representations in various interaction scenarios in which local and remote users are face-to-face, side-by-side or decoupled. Initial experiments with distributed user groups indicate the mutual understanding of pointing and tracing gestures independent of whether they were performed by local or remote participants. Our users were excited about the new possibilities of jointly exploring a virtual city, where they relied on a world-in-miniature metaphor for mutual awareness of their respective locations.

Detecting Mutual Awareness Events

It is quite common that multiple human observers attend to a single static interest point. This is known as a mutual awareness event (MAWE). A preferred way to monitor these situations is with a camera that captures the human observers while using existing face detection and head pose estimation algorithms. The current work studies the underlying geometric constraints of MAWEs and reformulates them in terms of image measurements. The constraints are then used in a method that 1) detects whether such an interest point does exist, 2) determines where it is located, 3) identifies who was attending to it, and 4) reports where and when each observer was while attending to it. The method is also applied on another interesting event when a single moving human observer fixates on a single static interest point. The method can deal with the general case of an uncalibrated camera in a general environment. This is in contrast to other work on similar problems that inherently assumes a known environment or a calibrated camera. The method was tested on about 75 images from various scenes and robustly detects MAWEs and estimates their related attributes. Most of the images were found by searching the Internet.

Reasoning and argumentation: Towards an integrated psychology of argumentation

Although argumentation plays an essential role in our lives, there is no integrated area of research on the psychology of argumentation. Instead research on argumentation is conducted in a number of separate research communities that are spread across disciplines and have only limited interaction. With a view to bridging these different strands, we first distinguish between three meanings of the word “argument”: argument as a reason, argument as a structured sequence of reasons and claims, and argument as a social exchange. All three meanings are integral to a complete understanding of human reasoning and cognition. Cognitive psychological research on argumentation has focused mostly on the first and second of these meanings, so we present perspectives on argumentation from outside of cognitive psychology, which focus on the second and third. Specifically, we give anoverview of the methods, goals, and disciplinary backgrounds of research on the production, the analysis, and the evaluation of arguments. Finally, inintroducing the experimental studies included in this special issue, which were conducted by researchers from a range of theoretical backgrounds, weunderline the breadth of argumentation research as well as stress opportunities for mutual awareness and integration.

Social reader: towards browsing the social web

We describe Social Reader, a feed-reader-plus-social-network aggregator that mines comments from social media in order to display a user's relational neighborhood as a navigable social network. Social Reader's network visualization enhances mutual awareness of blogger communities, facilitates their exploration and growth with a fully dragn- drop interface, and provides novel ways to filter and summarize people, groups, blogs and comments. We discuss the architecture behind the reader, highlight tasks it adds to the workflow of a typical reader, and assess their cost. We also explore the potential of mood-based features in social media applications. Mood is particularly relevant to social media, reflecting the personal nature of the medium. We explore two prototype mood-based features: colour coding the mood of recent posts according to a valence/arousal map, and a mood-based abstract of recent activity using image media. A six week study of the software involving 20 users confirmed the usefulness of the novel visual display, via a quantitative analysis of use logs, and an exit survey.

The curious case of Cuba.

As health professionals in the United States consider how to focus health care and coverage to ensure better, more equitable patient and population health outcomes, the experience of Cuba's National Health System over the last 5 decades may provide useful insights. Although mutual awareness has been limited by long-term political hostilities between the United States and Cuban governments, the history and details of the Cuban health system indicate that their health system merits attention as an example of a national integrated approach resulting in improved health status. More extensive analysis of the principles, practices, and outcomes in Cuba is warranted to inform health system transformation in the United States, despite differences in political-social systems and available resources.