Large Systems and ATC

How to Regulate Emotions

2012-02-03T06:47:00.000-08:00

The crux of this article from the point of daily application is:

“ Emotional processing can also be modulated through deliberate and conscious application of top-down executive control over processing of an emotional stimulus”.

You can find how this is done:
1- One page outline made of quotations from the original article
2- 4 Pages of my notes made of quotations from the original article
3- Original article itself.

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Emotional processing in anterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortex
Amit Etkin1,2, Tobias Egner3 and Raffael Kalisch4

In summary, the pattern of anatomical connectivity supports an important role for the sgACC, pgACC and adACC in interacting with the limbic system, including its effector regions, and for the adACC and pdACC in communicating with other dorsal and lateral frontal areas that are important for top-down forms of regulation [72].

Fear conditioning and extinction in humans

Thus, the dorsal ACC and mPFC seem to function generally in the appraisal and expression of fear or anxiety.

To elucidate how fear is regulated, we next discuss activations associated with extinction of learned fear. In extinction, the CS is repeatedly presented in the absence of reinforcement, leading to the formation of a CS(conditioned stimulus)–no US(unconditioned stimulus) association (or extinction memory) that competes with the original fear memory for control over behavior [28–30]. Hence, extinction induces conflicting appraisals of, and response tendencies to, the CS because it now signals both threat and safety, a situation that requires regulation, as outlined above.

Emotional conflict regulation
The circuitry we find to be specific for regulation of emotional conflict (ventral ACC and mPFC and amygdala) is very similar to that involved in extinction.

Top-down control of emotion
During emotional conflict regulation, emotional processing is spontaneously modulated in the absence of an explicit instruction to regulate emotion. Emotional processing can also be modulated through deliberate and conscious application of top-down executive control over processing of an
emotional stimulus. The best-studied strategy for the latter type of regulation is reappraisal, a cognitive technique whereby appraisal of a stimulus is modified to change its ability to elicit an emotional reaction [42]. Reappraisal involves both the initial emotional appraisal process and
the reappraisal process proper, whereby an additional positive appraisal is created that competes with the initial negative emotional appraisal.

These data suggest that controlled top-down regulation, like emotional conflict regulation, uses ventral ACC and mPFC areas to inhibit negative emotional processing in the amygdala, thus dampening task interference.

The ventral ACC and mPFC might thus perform a generic negative emotion inhibitory function that can be recruited by other regions (e.g. dorsal ACC and mPFC and lateral PFC) when there is a need to suppress limbic reactivity [10].

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Emotional processing in anterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortex
Amit Etkin1,2, Tobias Egner3 and Raffael Kalisch4
1 Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
2 Sierra Pacific Mental Illness, Research, Education, and Clinical Center (MIRECC) at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, Palo Alto, CA, USA
3 Department of Psychology & Neuroscience and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
4 Institute for Systems Neuroscience and NeuroImage Nord, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE), Hamburg, Germany

Negative emotional stimuli activate a broad network of brain regions, including the medial prefrontal (mPFC) and anterior cingulate (ACC) cortices. An early influential view dichotomized these regions into dorsal–caudal cognitive and ventral–rostral affective subdivisions. In this review, we examine a wealth of recent research on negative emotions in animals and humans, using the example of fear or anxiety, and conclude that, contrary to the traditional dichotomy, both subdivisions make key
contributions to emotional processing. Specifically, dorsal– caudal regions of the ACC and mPFC are involved in appraisal and expression of negative emotion, whereas ventral–rostral portions of the ACC and mPFC have a regulatory role with respect to limbic regions involved in generating emotional responses. Moreover, this new framework is broadly consistent with emerging data on other negative and positive emotions.
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Glossary
Appraisal: evaluation of the meaning of an internal or external stimulus to the organism. Only stimuli that are appraised as motivationally significant will induce an emotional reaction, and the magnitude, duration and quality of the emotional reaction are a direct result of the appraisal process. Moreover,
appraisal can be automatic and focus on basic affective stimulus dimensions such as novelty, valence or value, or expectation discrepancy, or may be slower and sometimes even require controlled conscious processing, which permits a more sophisticated context-dependent analysis.

Fear conditioning: learning paradigm in which a previously neutral stimulus, termed the conditioned stimulus (CS), is temporally paired with a non-learned aversive stimulus, termed the unconditioned stimulus (US). After pairing, the CS predicts the US and hence elicits a conditioned response (CR). For example, pairing of a tone with a foot shock results in elicitation of fear behavior during
subsequent responses to a non-paired tone.

Extinction: learning process created by repeatedly presenting a CS without pairing with an US (i.e. teaching the animal that the CS no longer predicts the US) after fear conditioning has been established. This results in formation of an extinction memory, which inhibits expression of, but does not erase, the original fear memory.

Reappraisal: specific method for explicit emotion regulation whereby a conscious deliberate effort is engaged to alter the meaning (appraisal) of an emotional stimulus. For example, a picture of a woman crying can be reappraised from a negative meaning to a positive one by favoring an
interpretation that she is crying tears of joy.

Regulation: general process by which conflicting appraisals and response tendencies are arbitrated between to allow selection of a course of action. Typically, regulation is thought to have an element of inhibition and/or enhancement for managing competing appraisals and response tendencies.
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Box 1. Anatomy of the ACC and mPFC
...
In summary, the pattern of anatomical connectivity supports an important role for the sgACC, pgACC and adACC in interacting with the limbic system, including its effector regions, and for the adACC and pdACC in communicating with other dorsal and lateral frontal areas that are important for top-down forms of regulation [72].
...
Fear conditioning and extinction in humans
The paradigms used in the acquisition and extinction of learned fear are particularly valuable for isolating the neural substrates of fear processing because the anticipatory fear or anxiety triggered by the previously neutral conditioned stimulus (CS) can be dissociated from the reaction to the aversive unconditioned stimulus (US) per se. This is not possible in studies that, for example, use
aversive images to evoke emotional responses. Furthermore, comparison between fear conditioning and fear extinction facilitates an initial coarse distinction between regions associated with either the appraisal of fear-relevant stimuli and generation of fear responses (fear conditioning), for the inhibitory regulation of these processes (extinction).
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sympathetic nervous system activity correlates positively primarily with dorsal ACC and mPFC regions and negatively primarily with ventral ACC and mPFC regions, which supports a role for the dorsal ACC and mPFC in fear expression (c).
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These processes are intermixed with, and supported by, learning processes, namely, acquisition, consolidation and storage of a fear memory (CS–US association), and retrieval of the fear memory on subsequent CS presentations.
...
Thus, the dorsal ACC and mPFC seem to function generally in the appraisal and expression of fear or anxiety.
...
To elucidate how fear is regulated, we next discuss activations associated with extinction of learned fear. In extinction, the CS is repeatedly presented in the absence of reinforcement, leading to the formation of a CS–no US association (or extinction memory) that competes with the original fear memory for control over behavior [28–30]. Hence, extinction induces conflicting appraisals of, and response tendencies to, the CS because it now signals both threat and safety, a situation that requires regulation, as outlined above.
...
Emotional conflict regulation
...
The circuitry we find to be specific for regulation of emotional conflict (ventral ACC and mPFC and amygdala) is very similar to that involved in extinction. ... Much like the relationship between improved emotional conflict regulation and decreased conflict evaluation-related activation in the dorsal ACC and mPFC, more successful extinction is associated with decreased CS-driven activation in the dorsal ACC and mPFC of humans and rodents [40,41]. Thus, the most parsimonious explanation for these data is that emotional conflict evaluation-related functions involve overlapping neural mechanisms with appraisal and expression of fear, and that regulation of emotional conflict also involves circuitry that overlaps with fear extinction.
...
Top-down control of emotion
During emotional conflict regulation, emotional processing is spontaneously modulated in the absence of an explicit instruction to regulate emotion. Emotional processing can also be modulated through deliberate and conscious application of top-down executive control over processing of an
emotional stimulus. The best-studied strategy for the latter type of regulation is reappraisal, a cognitive technique whereby appraisal of a stimulus is modified to change its ability to elicit an emotional reaction [42]. Reappraisal involves both the initial emotional appraisal process and
the reappraisal process proper, whereby an additional positive appraisal is created that competes with the initial negative emotional appraisal. Thus, we would expect reappraisal to involve the dorsal ACC and mPFC regions that we observed to be important for emotional conflict detection (Figure 2a). Consistent with this prediction, a meta-analysis found that reappraisal was reliably associated with activation in the dorsal ACC and mPFC (Figure 2b) [43].

This reappraisal meta-analysis, interestingly, did not implicate a consistent role for the ventral ACC and mPFC [43], which suggests that reappraisal does not primarily work by suppressing the processing of an undesired emotional stimulus. Nevertheless, activity in the ventral ACC and mPFC in some instances is negatively correlated with activity in the amygdala in paradigms in which reappraisal resulted in downregulation of amygdalar activity in response to negative pictures [44,45]. ...
These data suggest that controlled top-down regulation, like emotional conflict regulation, uses ventral ACC and mPFC areas to inhibit negative emotional processing in the amygdala, thus dampening task interference. The ventral ACC and mPFC might thus perform a generic negative emotion inhibitory function that can be recruited by other regions (e.g. dorsal ACC and mPFC and lateral PFC) when there is a need to suppress limbic reactivity [10]. This would be a prime example of parsimonious use of a basic emotional circuitry, conserved between rodents and humans (Box 2), for the purpose of higher-level cognitive functions possible only in humans.
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Amygdala–ACC and –mPFC functional connectivity
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In addition, during regulation tasks, connectivity was restricted to the ventral ACC and mPFC and was primarily negative (Figure 2d). These data thus lend further support to our proposal of a dorso–ventral separation in terms of negative emotion generation (appraisal and expression) and inhibition (regulation).
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Integration with other perspectives on ACC and mPFC function and other emotions
Although less developed than the literature on fear and anxiety, studies on other emotions are broadly consistent with our formulation of ACC and mPFC function. On the negative emotion appraisal and expression side, direct experience of pain, or empathy for others experiencing
pain, activates the dorsal ACC and mPFC [49], and lesions of the dACC also serve as treatment for chronic pain [50]. Similarly, increased sensitivity to a range of negative emotions is associated with greater engagement of the dorsal ACC and mPFC, including disgust [51] and rejection [52], and transcranial-magnetic-stimulation-induced disruption of the dmPFC interferes with anger processing [53]. Uncertainty or ambiguity, which can induce anxiety and relates to emotional conflict, leads to activation in the dACC and dmPFC [54].
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Positive emotion, which can serve to regulate and diminish negative emotion, has been associated in a metaanalysis with activation in the sgACC, vmPFC and pgACC [58]. Extinction of appetitive learning activates the vmPFC [59], much as extinction of learned fear does. The evaluation of positive stimuli and reward is more complicated. For instance, Rushworth and co-workers proposed that the processes carried out by the adACC are mirrored by similar contributions to reinforcement-guided decision-making from the orbitofrontal cortex, with the distinction that the adACC is concerned with computing reinforcement value of actions whereas the orbitofrontal cortex is concerned with gauging the reinforcement values of stimuli [60].

Taken together, these data broadly support our dorsal–ventral distinction along appraisal–expression versus regulation lines, with respect specifically to negative emotion.
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understanding the interaction between cognition and emotion

2012-01-21T10:27:00.000-08:00

Short Notes from:
Cognitive and emotional influences in anterior cingulate cortex
George Bush, Phan Luu and Michael I. Posner

Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is a part of the brain’s limbic system. Classically, this region has been related to affect, on the basis of lesion studies in humans and in animals.
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ACC might be the brain’s error detection and correction device.
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ACC is a part of a circuit involved in a form of attention that serves to regulate both cognitive and emotional processing. Neuroimaging studies showing that separate areas of ACC are involved in cognition and emotion.
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(1) Cingulate cortex includes specific processing modules for sensory, motor, cognitive and emotional information.
(2) As a whole, cingulate cortex integrates input from various sources (including motivation, evaluation of error, and representations from cognitive and emotional networks).
(3) Cingulate cortex acts by influencing activity in other brain regions and modulating cognitive, motor, endocrine and visceral responses.
...

cingulate cortex encompasses numerous specialized subdivisions that subserve a vast array of cognitive, emotional, motor, nociceptive and visuospatial functions.
...
Its two major subdivisions subserve distinct functions. These include a dorsal cognitive division (ACcd; areas 24b9-c9 and 329) and a rostral–ventral affective division (ACad; rostral areas 24a–c and 32, and ventral areas 25 and 33).
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The cognitive subdivision is part of a distributed attentional network. It maintains strong reciprocal interconnections with lateral prefrontal cortex (BA 46/9), parietal cortex (BA 7), and premotor and supplementary motor areas6. Various functions have been ascribed to the ACcd, including modulation of attention or executive functions by influencing sensory or response selection (or both); monitoring competition, complex motor control, motivation, novelty, error detection and working memory; and anticipation of cognitively demanding tasks (see Refs 1,3,5,6,14–17 for reviews).

The affective subdivision, by contrast, is connected to the amygdala, periaqueductal gray, nucleus accumbens, hypothalamus, anterior insula, hippocampus and orbitofrontal cortex6, and has outflow to autonomic, visceromotor and endocrine systems. The ACad is primarily involved in assessing the salience of emotional and motivational information and the regulation of emotional responses5,6,15,18.
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The cognitive division (ACcd) has been activated (Fig. 2a) by cognitively demanding tasks that involve stimulus– response selection in the face of competing streams of information, including Color Stroop and Stroop-like tasks, divided- attention tasks, verbal- and motor-response selection tasks and many working-memory tasks. The affective division (ACad) has been activated (Fig. 2a) by affect-related tasks, including studies of emotional processing in normal healthy volunteers and symptom provocation studies in a number of psychiatric disorders (anxiety, simple phobia and obsessive–compulsive disorder). It has also been activated repeatedly by induced sadness in normal subjects
and in individuals with major depression.
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Combining functional imaging, anatomical and behavioral methods will be important for understanding the interaction between cognition and emotion.
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These studies suggest that both dorsal ACC and areas of the lateral prefrontal cortex operate together during tasks that involve high levels of mental effort.
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According to this hypothesis, the cognitive division of the ACC serves to monitor crosstalk or conflict
between brain areas, and this computation signals the need for control processes. Lateral areas of the cortex are then activated to provide control operations, which might include increasing or inhibiting neural activity within distinct brain areas so as to eliminate the confusion between modules.

Short Notes from Conflict and Cogntive Control in the Brain

2012-01-02T08:24:00.000-08:00

Short Notes for Interested People from

Conflict and Cogntive Control in the brain
Vincent van Veen1 and Cameron S. Carter2
1Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh, and 2Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry, University of California, Davis

ABSTRACT—Recent research from cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience has suggested that the control mechanisms by which people are able to regulate task performance can be dissociated into evaluative and executive components. One process, implemented in the anterior cingulate cortex of the brain, monitors the amount of conflict that occurs during information processing; another process, implemented in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, is involved with maintaining the requirements of the task at hand and with biasing information processing in favor of appropriate responses.
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Whenever one performs a task, one has to make sure that one selects the relevant information (stimuli, actions) and not get distracted by stimuli or thoughts that are irrelevant to the task. Such distraction might lead to inappropriate actions, such as errors. How the brain manages to do this is the central question in this paper: specifically, how people manage to pay more attention after they have either made an error or almost made an error.

One of the key aspects of cognitive control is how flexible it is. The issue of how people monitor and correct for errors has become a popular topic of inquiry in cognitive research;
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ATTENTIONAL CONTROL AND THE PREFRONTAL CORTEX
Many phenomena from cognitive and social psychology are thought to depend on automatic processes. Processes can be automatic when they are innate or highly practiced, because they are part of a strongly activated schema, or because they are imposed by a powerful social context or a strong motivational or emotional state, among other reasons.

Of all the stimuli that one encounters, only a limited set is relevant to what one is trying to accomplish; nevertheless, both relevant and irrelevant stimuli compete for access to the response system. Such competition can be difficult to overcome when the processing of irrelevant information is relatively automatic. When the irrelevant information is associated with a response, reliance on automatic processing might facilitate the task if this response is desirable. However, when the irrelevant, automatically processed information is associated with an inappropriate response, the resulting conflict between appropriate and inappropriate responses might be difficult to overcome.
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This is thought to occur because word reading is relatively more automatic than color naming; therefore the word is hard to ignore, and it activates the associated response. During incongruent trials, the responses associated with the color compete with those associated with the word. When conflicts occur, attentional control is needed to overcome the conflict by selecting the relevant information and suppressing the processing of irrelevant information. Control is often conceptualized as the ability to represent and maintain the task requirements, to support the processing of information relevant to the goals of the current task, and to suppress irrelevant information. Many neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies have shown that an important brain structure that supports this ability is the prefrontal cortex (PFC ).
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The PFC is also involved in the control of other forms of higher-order cognition. For instance, many neurophysiological and neuroimaging studies have shown that this region is able to maintain task-relevant information for brief periods of time, which has supported the notion that this region constitutes a neural basis for working memory. Also, the PFC is involved in task preparation and switching between different tasks. Therefore, it is thought to be involved in many aspects of the executive control over our thoughts and actions.
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PERFORMANCE MONITORING
The notion that control regulates other types of information processing begs the question, how is control itself regulated? Without a clear answer to this question, the notion of attentional control becomes homuncular, posing the same questions as it is supposed to answer. Therefore, an answer to this question is fundamental to understanding the flexible nature of attentional control.

We and other researchers have argued that the amount of conflict occurring in the information-processing system plays a central role in regulating how much control is exerted and when control is withdrawn. The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) of the brain, located on the medial surface of the frontal lobe, has (possibly among other functions) the role of detecting situations in which there are conflicts within the information-processing stream and which therefore require attention to be resolved
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This activation of the incorrect response is followed by activation of the correct response. If the initial incorrect activation does not manage to reach response threshold and the correct response manages to override the incorrect response, the response to the trial ends up being correct. Errors in speeded-response tasks are typically fast, impulsive responses based on incomplete stimulus evaluation. The timing of response activation during error trials does not differ much from that during correct trials, the main exception being that during error trials the initial activation of the incorrect response does reach response threshold. The subsequent activation of the correct response is manifested as the tendency to ‘‘correct’’ the error
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FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Many studies, including subliminal-priming studies, have suggested that conflict can occur in the absence of awareness; however, studies have not been conclusive as to whether this conflict also engages the ACC or whether such conflict is associated with a subsequent increase in attention.
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Similarly, these areas have also been suggested to play a role in cognitive dissonance; Harmon-Jones (2004) has hypothesized that the ACC detects conflicts (dissonance) between actions and attitudes and alerts the PFC to reduce this dissonance.

The Singularity of Mind

2011-12-13T10:23:00.001-08:00

“Mein Sohn! Tue das, was in (deinem) Herzen (ist)”
“My son! Do what in your heart is.”

Cognition exists as the processes of division or unision. The difficulty of the unknown is divided to its parts and a solution turns out to knowledge when united with the existing solutions.

Mind exists abstractly as a complex system of functional abilities of the brain. When the brain is faced with a difficulty it divides itself to different compartments. Infact, in the beginning of self, when a two year old child is faced with the difficulty of speaking, he/she chooses inevitably to identify self. Speaking forces the use of ‘I’ hence dividing the world as others and ‘self’. Camın Ötesine Geçmek(http://alirizasaral.blogspot.com/2008/12/camin-tesine-gemek.html)

The child mind’s skill of dividing self to face difficulties continues in the rest of the life. We develop many subpersonalities to handle the difficulties of various contexts that we live in our daily life, father/mother, family relations, job relations, neighbors, friend circles, professional expertises etc.

Through all the divisions that mind undergoes, one thing remains constant, self-consciousness. Individual percieves self as a single person that he knows as. Sometimes we feel ashamed or we can not associate what we do with what we feel ourselves as but still the reference to the self remains constant. OR sometimes we do things that we accept we do not expect to achive by ourselves.

One reason that causes the sense of constant self-perception is the basic education and the cultural tendency of the society at that period of time. I believe, the Turkish society is still living a predominantly romantic period and this is effecting the child rear up and the self-perception of the grownups.

Singularity of the human-mind is a wrong perception taught by the society, child bring up, basic education, religion and so on. Infact, research in the last 20 years have physically proved that, for various functions of mind, different sections of brain gets activated.

The below quotation is taken from the sum up section of:
PREFRONTAL AND ANTERIOR CINGULATE CONTRIBUTIONS TO VOLITION IN DEPRESSION
Jack B. Nitschke and Kristen L. Mackiewicz
Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior
Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology, University of Wisconsin

It explains how the human volition is implemented by the brain. Two specific and distinct regions interact to achieve the volition function.
“In this chapter, we have outlined two constituent components in the neural circuitry of volition: the DLPFC and the ACC. These structures have distinct roles that contribute to the selection and implementation of action plans.”

DLPFC and ACC’s functions:
“Subserving cognitive control, the DLPFC is involved in the representation and selection of goals and in the implementation of action plans and behavioral change.”

“The ACC has been implicated in monitoring conflict among external and internal cues, with the dorsal ACC modulating cognitive aspects and the ventral ACC more involved in affect.”

Interaction between ACC and DLPFC:
“It plays a central role in signaling and recruiting additional brain regions, particularly the DLPFC, to resolve the conflict and initiate the appropriate action. “

Collective function of both:
“Working in concert, these two key regions form the cornerstones of the neural signature of volition, especially with regard to the implementation of volitional action plans. “

“The cascade of events that occurs allows for the eventual selection of new goal‐directed behaviors that override previously established behavior patterns.”

Our brain is formed of many centers and works like a dynamic complex multiprocessor system. But human mind percieves self as a single unity. Infact, there are some cultural hints that point out to some possibilities of making use of the multiplicity of the brain.

Daisuke YOSHIDA’s book “Die Syntax des althethitischen substantivischen Genitivs” page 5 alludes to
An Anatolian Hittite King’s thousands of years old advise:

“Mein Sohn! Tue das, was in (deinem) Herzen (ist)”
My son! Do what in your heart is.

The seperation of decision processing between two seperate centers, brain and heart clearly resembles the DLPFC and ACC processing...

If throughly studied one can find similar cultural elements in relation to the thinking-processing speed. The brain uses different types of processing for different tasks. For example, things related to safety requires a “clear and unhesitating, calm mind”. This may be related to not only the character of the situation processed but also the specific processing center(s) being used for that task.

An notorious other multiplicity is the emotions and cognition split. When carefully studied one can easily find the strong affects of romantism in the Turkish culture in this area. The tendency to bring up children with a singular mind is reflected in the feel-think duality and the importance of feelings etc...

I believe, in a century with increasing complexity of systems that we use, we are faced with the necessity of changing our education and child bring up systems. We should stop bringing up people who concentrate uncontrollably when faced with emergencies or difficulties. We should stop creating human triggers who can not change what they do once they are trigged. We should train flexible people who can react to big emergencies but return to normal function afterwards in a short while.
We should bring up controllers who can control may be 2-3 times more air traffic using more complex and sophisticated systems.

This is a task much further than that can be achieved with current computer games or action movies.
We are faced with an immense task of changing our education and child bring up system in order to create the modern individual who can percieve his own depths of multiplicity and use the hidden advantages against the terrible risks.

Volition at James’s Principles of Psychology

2011-10-05T00:48:00.000-07:00

“Will is a Relation Between the Mind and its 'Ideas’ (James, W).”

This is a one page quick reference to ‘volition’ at James’s book “The Principles of Psychology”, 1890. James’s approach to the matter of the subject at the section ‘Will’ is dispalyed with allusions. A three pages relatively extensive reference that I have extracted follows for the interested.

The term ‘mind’[1] is the name used to express the functional abilities of our organ ‘brain’[2]. Mind’s functional abilities can be grouped as ‘cognition[3]’, ‘affection[4]’, ‘conation[5] (volition[6])’.

Cognition deals with logical mathematical and other sorts of knowledge processing including the gathering, storing and handling of it. Affection is about emotions and how we percieve them as feelings.

Volition is the scientific word used for ‘will’. Volition is the power of choosing. The word ‘volition’ has much more implications than its daily counterpart ‘will’. Besides its functional meaning in the mind volition may be mapped to certain parts of the human brain such as PFC-Pre Frontal Cortex and Anterior Cingulate.

Every action is preceded by a stimulus or an idea. Feelings may change to a desire to do something and hence form a stimulus. ‘but if we believe that the end is in our power’ namely we have a chance to achieve our goal, ‘we will that the desired feeling, having, or doing shall be real;’ we execute our will and reach our aim as a result.

When the will is not healthy: ‘. The action may follow the stimulus or idea too rapidly, leaving no time for the arousal of restraining associates - we then have a precipitate will . Or, although the associates may come, the ratio which the impulsive and inhibitive forces normally bear to each other may be distorted, and we then have a will which is perverse’. ... Briefly, we may call them respectively the obstructed and the explosive will .

The Explosive Will.
‘There is a normal type of character, for example, in which impulses seem to discharge so promptly into movements that inhibitions get no time to arise.’

‘Exhaustion of nervous energy always lessens the inhibitory power.’
‘'Irritability' is one manifestation of this. Many persons have so small a stock of reserve brain-power - that most valuable of all brain-qualities - that it is soon used up, and you see at once that they lose their power of self-control very soon.’
...
The Obstructed Will.
‘In striking contrast with the cases in which inhibition is insufficient or impulsion in excess are those in which impulsion is insufficient or inhibition of in excess.’

Will is a Relation Between the Mind and its 'Ideas.'
‘... consider the conditions which make ideas prevail in the mind.’
With the prevalence, once there as a fact, of the motive idea the psychology of volition properly stops.’

‘... The willing terminates with the prevalence of the idea; and whether the act then follows or not is a matter quite immaterial, so far as the willing itself goes. I will to write, and the act follows.’

‘We have now brought things to a point at which we see that attention with effort is all that any case of volition implies. The essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most 'voluntary,' is to ATTEND to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind . The so-doing is the fiat ; and it is a mere physiological incident that when the object is thus attended to, immediate motor consequences should ensue.’

The Feeling of Effort.
‘... consciousness ... is in its nature impulsive ...(but-ARS) it must be sufficiently intense... ‘

Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will...
‘ The difficulty is mental; it is that of getting the idea of the wise action to stay before our mind at all.
The strong-willed man, however, is the man who hears the still small voice unflinchingly, and who, when the death-bringing consideration comes, looks at its face, consents to its presence, clings to it, affirms it, and holds it fast, in spite of the host of exciting mental images which rise in revolt against it and would expel it from the mind.’

[1] mind n. 1. The human consciousness that originates in the brain and is manifested especially in thought, perception, emotion, will, memory, and imagination(Free Dictionary).

[2] brain n.1. a. The portion of the vertebrate central nervous system that is enclosed within the cranium, continuous with the spinal cord, and composed of gray matter and white matter. It is the primary center for the regulation and control of bodily activities, receiving and interpreting sensory impulses, and transmitting information to the muscles and body organs. It is also the seat of consciousness, thought, memory, and emotion.

[3] cog•ni•tion n. 1. The mental process of knowing, including aspects such as awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment. 2. That which comes to be known, as through perception, reasoning, or intuition; knowledge.

[4] af•fec•tion n.1. A tender feeling toward another; fondness. See Synonyms at love.
2. Feeling or emotion. Often used in the plural: an unbalanced state of affections. 3. A disposition to feel, do, or say; a propensity.

[5] co•na•tion n. Psychology The aspect of mental processes or behavior directed toward action or change and including impulse, desire, volition, and striving.

[6] vo•li•tion n. 1. The act or an instance of making a conscious choice or decision. 2. A conscious choice or decision. 3. The power or faculty of choosing; the will.

James, W, “The Principles of Psychology”, 1890

The Principles of Psychology, by William James
Chapter 261
Will.
Desire, wish, will, are states of mind which everyone knows, and which no definition can make plainer. We desire to feel, to have, to do, all sorts of things which at the moment are not felt, had, or done. If with the desire there goes a sense that attainment is not possible, we simply wish ; but if we believe that the end is in our power, we will that the desired feeling, having, or doing shall be real; and real it presently becomes, either immediately upon the willing or after certain preliminaries have been fulfilled.

The Feeling of Effort.
... consciousness ... is in its nature impulsive ...(but-ARS) it must be sufficiently intense . Now there are remarkable differences in the power of different sorts of consciousness to excite movement. The intensity of some feelings is practically apt to be below the discharging point, whilst that of others is apt to be above it. By practically apt, I mean apt under ordinary circumstances.
...
Healthiness of will moreover requires a certain amount of complication in the process which precedes the fiat or the act. Each stimulus or idea, at the same time that it wakens its own impulse, must arouse other ideas (associated and consequential) with their impulses, and action must follow, neither too slowly nor too rapidly, as the resultant of all the forces thus engaged. Even when the decision is very prompt, there is thus a sort of preliminary survey of the field and a vision of which course is best before the fiat comes. And where the will is healthy, the vision must be right (i.e., the motives must be on the whole in a normal or not too unusual ratio to each other), and the action must obey the vision's lead .

Unhealthiness of will may thus come about in many ways . The action may follow the stimulus or idea too rapidly, leaving no time for the arousal of restraining associates - we then have a precipitate will . Or, although the associates may come, the ratio which the impulsive and inhibitive forces normally bear to each other may be distorted, and we then have a will which is perverse . The perversity, in turn, may be due to either of many causes - too much intensity, or too little, here; too much or too little inertia there; or elsewhere too much or too little inhibitory power. If we compare the outward symptoms of perversity together, they fall into two groups , in one of which normal actions are impossible, and in the other abnormal ones are irrepressible. Briefly, we may call them respectively the obstructed and the explosive will .

It must be kept in mind, however, that since the resultant action is always due to the ratio between the obstructive and the explosive forces which are present, we never can tell by the mere outward symptoms to what elementary cause the perversion of a man's will may be due, whether to an increase of one component or a diminution of the other. One may grow explosive as readily by losing the usual brakes as by getting up more of the impulsive steam; and one may find things impossible as well through the enfeeblement of the original desire as through the advent of new lions in the path. As Dr. Clouston says, "the driver may be so weak that he cannot control well-broken horses, or the horses may be so hard-mouthed that no driver can pull them up." In some concrete cases (whether of explosive or of obstructed will) it is difficult to tell whether the trouble is due to inhibitory or to impulsive change. Generally, however, we can make a plausible guess at the truth.
...
The Explosive Will.
There is a normal type of character, for example, in which impulses seem to discharge so promptly into movements that inhibitions get no time to arise. These are the 'dare-devil' and 'mercurial' temperaments, overflowing with animation, and fizzling with talk, which are so common in the Latin and Celtic races, and with which the cold-blooded and long-headed English character forms so marked a contrast. Monkeys these people seem to us, whilst we seem to them reptilian.
...
But the judicious fellow all the while may have all these possibilities and more besides, ready to break out in the same or even a more violent way, if only the brakes were taken off. It is the absence of scruples, of consequences, of considerations, the extraordinary simplification of each moment's mental outlook, that gives to the explosive individual such motor energy and ease; it need not be the greater intensity of any of his passions, motives, or thoughts.
...
Exhaustion of nervous energy always lessens the inhibitory power.
'Irritability' is one manifestation of this. Many persons have so small a stock of reserve brain-power - that most valuable of all brain-qualities - that it is soon used up, and you see at once that they lose their power of self-control very soon.
...
The Obstructed Will.
In striking contrast with the cases in which inhibition is insufficient or impulsion in excess are those in which impulsion is insufficient or inhibition of in excess.
...
Will is a Relation Between the Mind and its 'Ideas.'
... consider the conditions which make ideas prevail in the mind.
With the prevalence, once there as a fact, of the motive idea the psychology of volition properly stops. ... The willing terminates with the prevalence of the idea; and whether the act then follows or not is a matter quite immaterial, so far as the willing itself goes. I will to write, and the act follows.
We have now brought things to a point at which we see that attention with effort is all that any case of volition implies. The essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most 'voluntary,' is to ATTEND to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind . The so-doing is the fiat ; and it is a mere physiological incident that when the object is thus attended to, immediate motor consequences should ensue.

Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will...
The difficulty is mental; it is that of getting the idea of the wise action to stay before our mind at all.
The strong-willed man, however, is the man who hears the still small voice unflinchingly, and who, when the death-bringing consideration comes, looks at its face, consents to its presence, clings to it, affirms it, and holds it fast, in spite of the host of exciting mental images which rise in revolt against it and would expel it from the mind.
The idea to be consented to must be kept from flickering and going out. It must be held steadily before the mind until it fills the mind. Such filling of the mind by an idea, with its congruous associates, is consent to the idea and to the fact which the idea represents.
...
To sum it all up in a word, the terminus of the psychological process in volition, the point to which the will is directly applied, is always an idea . There are at all times some ideas from which we shy away like frightened horses the moment we get a glimpse of their forbidding profile upon the threshold of our thought. The only resistance which our will can possibly experience is the resistance which such an idea offers to being attended to at all . To attend to it is the volitional act, and the only inward volitional act which we ever perform.

When Symbols Fail

2011-08-14T11:30:00.000-07:00

When Symbols Fail

"something that stands for or suggests something else by reason of relationship, association, convention, or accidental resemblance(merriam-webster)".

A symbol is an abstraction of a thing, a system, a concept, an idea or a belief.

Computer icons, mental models, metaphors, analogies and SYMBOLs all simplify the task of handling the thing they abstract.

Symbol is a small figure, a simple picture when absolute. A simplifying or delegating behaviour, concept, idea when abstract. A head carve tha symbolizes the belief of a woman for example.

A symbol must be very simple to percieve and be able to trigger the abstract or complex thing it signifies.

When symbols fail:

1. When the symbol fails to indicate the true thing it signifies.

El Al cargo plane loses its motor but the captain thinks else because the motor symbol shows OK in the terrible accident at Amsterdam in the past.

2. The symbol oversimplifies or makes things look more simple then they are.

Simple rules that may help to indicate whether you belong to this or that religion may help people to conform easily but the average quality falls and the basic human facts that make religions are forgotten by some. Systems should be difficult to use, difficult enough to bring forth the operators who are mature and who have the aptitude to think in depth when flexibility is needed.

3. Symbols increase design complexity.

Every absraction done in the design adds on the implementation and maintenance work. It is not a virtue to want this or that everything you imagine at the requirements phase. Increased complexity means increased difficulty hence increased risk. It has to be worth.

4. Symbols reduce flexibility both from the point of useability and design creativity.

Introduction of uncertainity at the beginning of a large system provides ample space for later introduction of new elements or redefinition of them, maythis system be a religious belief or a modern fly-by-wire aircraft.

Kind regards.

Ali R+ SARAL
Ora et Labora

The Role of Volition in Emergency Response

2011-07-20T12:35:00.000-07:00

The response to an emergency situation may be pressing a brake of a vehicle. Or it may be a complex situation that has to be managed via “Cognitive strategies, such as, tolerating uncertainty, managing workload, planning for contingencies, and self-monitoring (Kontogiannis,1999)”. Emergency response may require the collective effort of a team controlling a dynamic complex system such as an electric or nuclear reactor.

The simplest response of an operator is a well memorized schemata, such as pressing the brake. He does not think about how to press it, this reaction to an emergency is an automatic process. Many drivers do not even remember how they managed to stop and escape from danger in serious accident conditions. They reacted with automatic processes which do not run in the working memory (Baars et al., 2007).

“all mental events are initiated and developed unconsciously. Indeed most mental events are probably completely unconscious(see Velmans, 1991). The chief difference between conscious and unconscious events could be the duration of the processes giving rise to them. If the duration is too brief, the event remains unconscious; it only reaches the awareness level if the duration is sufficiently long (Libet, 2006).”

This means, the faster we do things the more automatic processes we use. When we are doing something if an other thing interferes we try to continue the first job automatically. At first we may continue with attention division, doing two tasks with some attention dedicated to both. If the workload of the second task increases we try to continue the first task with automatic processes, namely using resources out of the working memory.

Automatic processes are fast but not flexible as conscious processes. Pressing the brake is simple, fast and does not require elaboration. Things get more complex when the duration and variety of reactions that make up the emergency response increase. For example, the situation of the road, other cars etc. In any case, a series of automatic processes may have to get mixed with conscious decision etc…

My point of this complete notedepends on:
Emergency response not only requires the execution of automatic processes but also their timely triggering, which has to be automatic.

Automatic triggering of events in the mind is done by setting intentions such as : if this happens, do that. There is a condition what to do if that condition is realized. This condition can be anything, time, place, event, feeling… For example, you can teach a child not to cry when she falls down.

Automatic triggering of events in the mind is simple teaching, training in the most general sense. More specificly, it is conditioning. You condition the operator, to react specificly under specific conditions.

The problem is: the training cases have to be limited in content and not too complex, because they have to be responded automatically. It is impossible to cover every and each condition that may happen in an emergency case. Automatic processes can not be flexible and adaptive.
Automatic process triggering can be viewed as a specialized memory process. Remembering something requires cues, keys to retrieve data. An automatic process triggering condition is the key to its action. For example, you set the intention that you will remember to buy bread when you come to the corner of your home’s street, then afterwards, you remember it when you come to the corner(Eysenck et al., 1996), provided that your workload and motivation and mental health enables it.

Last but not the least, It is crucial to foster and underpin an other form of volition in regards to this problem:motivation. Motivation supports and sustains every and each cognitive activity. It supports human creativity, serenity, drive anything that may help the operator in trouble. Cognitive flexibility depends on the availability of sufficient motivation.

A due reference to various religious practices may be: fasting which is supposed to be automatic, begins with setting intention. It is done with the first pronoun ‘I’ and using reflective consciousness. It is interesting that human uses self while promising that self is going to abide by the rule when consciously it will not be there…

The beauty of the human mind.

Ali R+ SARAL

Kontogiannis, T. 1999. Training Effective Human Performance in the Management of Stressful Emergencies . COMPUTER SCIENCE, Cognition, Technology & Work, Volume 1, Number 1, 7-24, DOI: 10.1007/s101110050007.

Baars, B. J., Franklin, S. 2007, An architectural model of conscious and unconscious brain functions: Global Workspace Theory and IDA, Elsevier, Neural Networks Journal, Volume 20 Issue 9, November, 2007

Libet, B. 2006, Reflections on the Interaction of Mind and Brain, Elsevier Progress in Neurobiology 78 (2006) 322 – 326.

Eysenck, M. W., Keane M. T. 1996, Cognitive Psychology

The Role of Affections in Decision Making

2011-05-29T11:51:00.000-07:00

“many forms of decision making, especially those that involve a high level of risk and uncertainty, involve biases and emotions that act at an implicit level[1].” Experiences and conditioning that has been acquired in critical conditions may contribute to the repetitive triggering of previous correct decisions due to the feelings felt in the body or affections at the same time.

Affections make us select the cognitive processses according to the situation that we are in[2]. “For example, when things go smoothly and we face no hurdles in the pursuit of our goals, we are likely to rely on our pre-existing knowledge structures and routines, which have served us well in the past. Once things go wrong, however, we abandon this reliance on our usual routines and focus on the specifics at hand to determine what went wrong and what can be done about it. Hence, our actions, and the context in which we pursue them, are represented at a greater level of detail when things go wrong than when things go well (see Wegner & Vallacher, 1986).”

“Consistent with these conjectures, being in a negative affective state is associated with a narrowed focus of attention (e.g., Broadbent, 1971; Bruner, Matter, & Papanek, 1955; Easterbrook, 1959) and a higher level of spontaneous causal reasoning (e.g., Bohner, Bless, Schwarz, & Strack, 1988), paralleling the observation that failure to obtain a desired outcome shifts attention to a lower level of abstraction (e.g., Wegner & Vallacher, 1986)[2].”

“Intention is a form of volition. Intention depends on the condition based on time, place, event or other. Intention mechanism can be vitally important to exit or in being unable to exit pre-reflective consciousness in the cases of emrgency or contemplation[3].”

“the attentional blink has been shown to be modulated by emotional stimuli, as subjects are significantly better at detecting T2 when it is an emotion-laden word (e.g., rape) than when it is a neutral word (Anderson, 2005).[4]”

“Emotional content can change the formation and recollection of a memory event, consistent with findings in both human and animal studies. Compared to neutral items, humans remember better emotionally arousing information, including emotionally charged stories, film clips, pictures, and words[4].”

“The French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal once wrote, ‘The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of.’ This message – that emotion and cognition are separate systems that seldom interact – has a long history in Western philosophy and science. However, the past two decades have seen a remarkable shift in this view as behavioral and neuroscience data have demonstrated that emotion and cognition not only interact, but that their integrative operation is necessary for adaptive functioning[5].”

With my wishes of good will.
Ali R+ SARAL

REFERENCES:
[1] Nasir Naqvi, Baba Shiv, and Antoine Bechara, 2006 Association for Psychological Science , Current Directions in Psychologial Science, “The Role of Emotion in Decision Making, A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective”, Division of Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Neurology, University of Iowa College of Medicine; Graduate School of Business, Stanford University; and Brain and Creativity Institute, and Department of Psychology, University of SouthernCalifornia
[2] Norbert Schwarz, Situated Cognition and the Wisdom of Feelings: Cognitive Tuning, University of Michigan Manuscript of a chapter in L. Feldman Barrett & P. Salovey (eds.), The wisdom in feeling (pp. 144-166). New York, Guilford Press, 2002
[3] Ali R+ SARAL, The Function of Volition in Providing Consciousness , http://largesystems-atc-en.blogspot.com/2011/04/function-of-volition-in-providing.html
[4] Luiz Pessoa, “Cognition and Emotion”, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN,http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Cognition_and_emotion
[5] Kevin N. Ochsner1 and Elizabeth Phelps, “Emerging perspectives on emotion–cognition interactions”, Department of Psychology, Columbia University, 1190 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027, USA, Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA

The Function of Volition in Providing Consciousness

2011-04-23T09:10:00.000-07:00

-Love stays vigil through thinking-

Volition is a form of feeling. Consciousness is a higher function which determines the form of cognition.

There are various types of consciousness[2]:
- Reflected
- Pre-reflected
- Others

In the reflective or observing consciousness one is aware of his/her self. One uses the subject ‘I’ in his/her inner talk. One observes what he/she id doing and is aware of it being done by one’s self[4].

In the pre-reflective, non-observing consciousness one is not aware of what he/she is doing. For example one is not aware of how he has driven from home to job. Tasks are done without the observational awareness.

Intention is a form of volition. Intention depends on the condition based on time, place, event or other. Intention mechanism can be vitally important to exit or in being unable to exit pre-reflective consciousness in the cases of emrgency or contemplation.

Intent and volition limit and direct cognition[3].

Feelings think.

REFERENCES:
[1] Saral, Ali R+, Gözlemci Bilincin Dikkat Hataları:
http://largesystems-atc.blogspot.com/2011/03/gozlemci-bilincin-dikkat-hatalar.html
[2] Saral, Ali R+, Attention Mistakes of the Pre-Reflective Consciousness
http://largesystems-atc-en.blogspot.com/2011/04/attention-mistakes-of-pre-reflective.html
[3] edited by Benjamin Libet, Anthony Freeman and Keith Sutherland.The volitional brain : towards a neuroscience of free will, Thorverton : Imprint Academic, 1999.
[4] Gallagher Shaun, Zaham Dan, The Phenomenological Mind,Routledge, 2009.

Attention Mistakes of the Pre-reflective Consciousness

2011-04-01T10:39:00.000-07:00

Pre-reflective consciousness is ‘Gözlemci Bilinç’ or exactly ‘ön-yansıtıcı bilinç’ in Turkish.
Reflective consciousness is ‘yansıtıcı bilinç’.

Reflective consciousness is the consciousness that we use when we talk, think etc. As in saying ‘I have the command’. We are aware of not only doing something but also that it is we(I) that is doing it.
The pre-reflective consciousness deals with only the perception of the task, the necessary response giving and doing the job. As if it is somebody else acting… The reason behind the term pre-reflective is
İn this type of consciousness although a sense of self is missing the task is actually done by that person.
The person feels its existance by performing that task but naming or identifying that being is not the condition. ‘Pre-reflective’ consciousness is a reflection of consciousness from the environment that interacts. This indirect reflection of consciousness from the environment is not ‘reflective’ as in the case of consciousness adrressing itself.

Please note the reference below which you can find from the Library of Congress.

Effortless attention : a new perspective in the cognitive science of attention and action / edited by Brian Bruya. Cambridge, Mass. : The MIT Press, c2010.

There are other types of consciousnesses or levels of consciousness. Non-conscious or automatic etc.
Sub-conscious processes are a type of non-conscious processes. I will ponder on the how and where to use of these in the future.

In an accident close to the Rhein-Karldap control region in the year 1992 the pilot had entered the height level wrong. There have been many developments and research in many areas since then. In the spot light of these my question is: What may be the reason for attention mistakes during the use of pre-reflective consciousness? What can be done to stop these?

An ATCO has to do many things in a difficult situation, so he uses divided attention. His concentration increases too. This leads to an increase in his thinking speed. The increase in his thinking speed pushes his mind from reflective consciousness to pre-reflective consciousness. The operational conversations moves towards the standard jargon also.

Now the question is, why do mistakes or mishaps, slips happen during the use of pre-reflective consciousness?

1-Overload. Some external reasons make cause attention mistakes.

2-Internal reasons. Affective or self related problems may cause the pre-reflective consciousness fail.
When you say or think ‘I’ or feel a feeling or the worst of it if you feel need for something the pre-reflective consciousness weakens.

3-Motivation. I will ponder on this later. Will and intention are keys in the control of the type of consciousness. A general malaise in volition may cause serious problems in the level of pre-consciousness. I have caused once an interrupt of service to the airplanes in the air during my service at Karlsruhe-Germany ATC area control center and severe lack of motivation was one of the reasons.

Some interesting references:

Unconscious Behavioral Guidance Systems, John A. Bargh,Department of Psychology, Yale University
Ezequiel Morsella, Department of Psychology, San Francisco State University; Department of Neurology, University of California, San Francisco - 2009

Oxford handbook of human action / edited by Ezequiel Morsella, John A. Bargh,Peter M. Gollwitzer. - 2009

Towards a Computational Model of Perception and Action in Human Computer Interaction
Pascal Haazebroek and Bernhard Hommel, Cognitive Psychology Unit & Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition,Wassenaarseweg 52, Leiden, 2333 AK The Netherlands - 2009

Situation Awareness vs Self Awareness

2011-02-26T10:21:00.000-08:00

'to exist is, for consciousness, to appear to itself' (Sartre, [1]).

Situation Awareness is the Perception of the elements in the Environment within a Volume of Time and Space, the Comprehension of their Meaning,and the Projection of their Status in the Near Future (Endsley, [2]).

SA is related to medical, safety(fire), defense, energy, transportation, any large systems, that require performance abilities from pilots, captains, drivers, operators or performers.

An airline pilot's SA may include[2]:
Geographic(location of own A/C, airport, cities, way points etc),
spatial(altitude,heading, velocity, flight path etc),
system(A/C status info etc),
environmental(weather, visibility etc.)

Situation Awareness is the result of operator consciousness.

Awareness is the result of the function named consciousness:
Towards a Mathematical Model of Consciousness(http://largesystems-atc.blogspot.com/2010/12/towards-mathmetical-model-of.html)

Awareness = Consciousness( time, subject, context,experience, knowledge, affections, algorithm )

algoritm = Neural Network (previous Consciousnesses())

Situation Awareness is the result of the algorithm used at that moment by the operator in correlation with the context, experience, knowledge and affections.

Namely, situation awareness is determined by the type and character of the consciousness that the operator has at that moment.

There are different types of consciousnesses.
reflective consciousness - self-awareness - feel your own existence while you act
pre-reflective consciousness - unify with the objects, percieve your existence through the objects you interact
unreflected consciousness - autonomous processing

Different operational situations may require different type of consciousness or set of mind.

The operator/performer should not only be aware of the situation he is in but also be aware of the mode of consciousness he has.

Ali R+ SARAL

[1] Sartre-P10,'Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions', 'according to Husserl'.

[2] 2001, Endsley: Training for Situation Awareness
http://www.raes-hfg.com/reports/22may01-SitAssessment/220501-endsley.pdf

[3] 2000, Endsley: Theoretical Underpinnings of Situation Awareness-A Critical Review
http://zonecours.hec.ca/documents/A2007-1-1399574.TheoricalUnderpinningsofSituationAwareness_ACriticalReview.pdf

[4] 1996, Endsley, Rogers: ATTENTION DISTRIBUTION AND SITUATION AWARENESS IN AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL
http://www.satechnologies.com/Papers/pdf/HFES96-ATC-SA.pdf

The Effect of Concentration on Self

2011-01-14T11:07:00.000-08:00

When we hold something in our hand we feel its shape, heat, texture, humidity and thoughness.

We feel the same attributes of our hand relative to that object at the same time.

Anything that we percieve with our body makes us percieve our body also.

Everything that we percieve with our body reminds us the self. They nourish the self and makes it stronger.

Any kind of systems operator - from a simple driver to a pilot or air traffic controller, nuclear – thermal energy reactor operator –must control how much they concentrate and which things they divide their attention.

Situation awareness requires the preservation of self at even the most critical moments against full automaticity.

High concentration directed at external things stops the effect of their reflections on the self.

This situation causes the air traffic controller who has just solved a critical route conflict, to forget the other minor cases which still require to be handled.

The controller should use tactile control instruments (driving wheel design etc) or touch things while controlling so that he maintains self through touching. Moving, touching control strips are necessary for the maintanance of controller’s self and hence his viewpoint.

Body neurishes self.

TOWARDS A MATHMETICAL MODEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS

2010-12-06T12:08:00.000-08:00

Consciousness is a function. Its output is awareness.

Awareness = Consciousness( … )

Consciousness may produce different awarenesses qualitatively or quantitatively depending on time. For example the awareness of self may change at different moments of the day. Consciousness depends on time.

Awareness = Consciousness( time, … )

Consciousness changes for different subjects. A person may be more cost aware while an other does not. Also we can talk about the consciousnesses of a single person or a group of person. For example, human rights consciousness of a country or nation.

Awareness = Consciousness( time, subject, … )

Consciousness may change based on the context. Different contexts may cause the consciousness function to produce different awarenesses. Seeing a piano carried may make you think the weight of it while listening a performance may make you think about the instrument quality of it. Consciousness depends on context.

Awareness = Consciousness( time, subject, context, … )

Consciousness may change according to the experience of the person it belongs to. An experienced engineer may handle a problem and estimate its difficulty much different than a novice. Experience helps form the consciousness indirectly and as part of the background. A collection of past awarenesses may help form the experience. Experience is more than a collection of awarenesses but it also includes their interactions with each other and with knowledge as a whole.

Awareness = Consciousness( time, subject, context, experience, … )

Consciousness may change according to the amount and quality of knowledge it belongs to.

Awareness = Consciousness( time, subject, context, experience, knowledge, … )

Consciousness is a function or a process. The outcome is awareness. Awareness must be calculated from the input parameters, time, subject, context, experience, knowledge and the last parameter. This calculation may be done with an algorithm. Actually this algorithm can be defined as Consciousness itself… This brings us to the conclusion that Conciousness is
somewhat recursive.

Awareness = Consciousness( time, subject, context, experience, knowledge, Consciousness(…) )

Thinking of the development process of a child, and taking consciousness function as a constant such as sleeping vs being awake, the formula given above can explain the accumulation of experience and knowledge.

The problem with this approach is Consciousness function itself is not constant even during a day and also it changes gradually through a longer period of time. Consciousness learns and improves itself. This can be seen in artificial neuralworks with a learning mechanism.
If we make a change according to this point, a final formula could be:

Awareness = Consciousness( time, subject, context,
experience, knowledge, algorithm )
algoritm = Neural Network (previous Consciousnesses())

I admit that this may look quite subjective for some but it is possible to reduce this assertion to concrete examples and narrow the subjectivity to the point of objectivity.

For example, if we design a system which checks numbers in its input, and senses a sequence that increases by two, the context becomes absolute. Experience may be formulated as past sequences that comply with the increase by two rule. Knowledge becomes the mathmetical calculation. The biggest difficulty is simulating the evolution from experience to knowledge. Knowledge may be limited first as sensing a regular increase, than sensing a regular increase of two. Neural Network algorithm and its learning ability may be used to teach this to the system.

Again, the key thing here is application. This model may be useful, if only applied in a specific domain to handle a specific problem.

On the Nature of Decision Making

2010-11-27T11:54:00.000-08:00

The difficulty of making decisions can be made easier by choosing the right decision process. The approach, the epistemology of decision making has to be correctly chosen to make a difficult decision.

We have developed various techniques for making difficult decisions. Partial decisions, delayed decisions, temporary decisions, imperfact decisions, incomplete decisions, reduced decisions, extended decisions.. When studied closely each of these make decision taking easier.

Partial decisions may be implemented in many ways. The basic principle is dividing a difficult task to smaller pieces. The decision may be taken as an aggregate of decisions made on various parts of the main task. The sub divisions may even be given by different individuals. A decision may be divided to subdecisions which are spreaded through time. This may be useful for time dependent tasks. Flight Plan Processing uses this tecnique for ensuring the safe surveillence of air craft.

Delayed decisions also help to clarify complex situations and minimize risk. Air traffic controllers try to delay their decisions as much as possible to avoid unnecessary moves and reduce risk.

Temporary decisions are used when nothing is clear but something has to be done. The chances are your choice may be correct. It is used emergency situations. Temporary decisions are used by companies when they do not have the ability to see the economic situation or the situation of their operations.

Imperfact decisions are made when the ability of the workers or company is not enough. An imperfact decision is taken nevertheless to continue working and improve it ASAP.

An incomplete decision is not an imperfact decision. You make an incomplete decision with open options to be selected later on. It is used when flexibility is required.

Reduced decisions are logically reduced from the required decisions. They are not necessarily the same as the original decision but its results give the linearly independent items of the original decision.

Extended decisions may make things easier by enhancing the results area of the original decision.

It is not enough to educate and train students who can just think excellently. Students of mentally demanding professions should be trained to develop skills and habits of how they can reduce their load of thinking.

A Mathematical Model of Abstraction

2010-10-12T11:38:00.000-07:00

Soyutlamanın Matematiksel Bir Modeli
A Mathematical Model of Abstraction

Soyutlamalar = { [a1 .. ai] a is a name and i € ( 1… N+) }
Abstractions = { [a1 .. ai] a bir isim ve i € ( 1… N+) }

ai = { name, [item1 .. itemj] name is the name of ith abstraction, item is the name of any object, j € ( 1… N+)}
ai = { isim, [şey1 .. şeyj] isim i. Soyutlamanın ismi, şey herhangi bir nesnenin ismi, j € ( 1… N+)}

Abstraction is realized by selecting a unifying attribute of a certain group of objects. The later use of this abstraction is done through looking up the existing abstractions list. As a first step the existing abstractions list is defined for this reason. Large systems require the frequent use of many terms, abbreviations, and acronyms. Each item of these is a list of abstractions of the problem domain.

Soyutlama belirli bir grup nesnenin ortak özellikleri seçilip buna bir isim vererek gerçekleşir. Bu soyutlamanın daha sonraki kullanımları ise ‘Soyutlamalar’ adlı varolanlar listesine bakarak gerçekleşir. Bu nedenle ilk olarak bir var olan soyutlamalar listesi tanımlanmıştır. Büyük sistemler çok sayıda kısaltma ve teknik deyim kullanımını gerektirir. Bunlara ilişkin sözlüklerin herbiri aslında birer varolan ‘soyutlamalar’ listesidir.

Indeed all airplanes form a single group. But if we view them from the point of passenger count or power they may be grouped otherwise. As seen in the second formula abstraction is grouping. Abstraction can be made up of any group of items. These items may also be abstract things. Thus an abstraction may be a grouping of other abstractions. For example, airplanes may be grouped as jets, propeller planes, an abstraction of two other abstractions.

İkinci formulde görüldüğü gibi soyutlamak gruplamaktır. Soyutlama herhangi bir nesneler grubundan oluşabilir.Bu nesneler soyut nesneler de olabilir. Yani bir soyutlama diğer soyutlamaların gruplaması olabilir. Örneğin uçaklar Jet uçakları, pervaneli uçaklar diye iki soyutlamadan oluşur. Bu iki grupta yolcu ve özel uçaklardan… Ama hepsi kanatlıdır ve motorludur. Eğer bu açıdan bakarsak uçaklar tek bir soyut gruptur. Eğer yolcu sayısı ve
kullanım açısından bakarsak uçaklar farklı alt gruplardan oluşur.

The flexibility of abstraction gives us the ability to approach different problems from different point of views.
Soyutlamadaki esneklik farklı sorunlara çeşitli açılardan yaklaşma imkanını verir.

Soyutlamanın Nesne Yönelimli Tanımı
An Object Oriented Definition of Abstraction

public abstract class AbstAbstraction {

ABSTRACTION IS GROUPING

2010-09-21T10:32:00.000-07:00

ABSTRACTION IS GROUPING
SOYUTLAMAK GRUPLAMAKTIR

Miller(1956) has stated that human attention can focus on seven plus/minus two things at the same time.

Miller(1956) insan ilgisinin aynı anda yedi artı/eksi iki şey üzerinde yoğunlaşabileceğini ileri sürdü.

Abstraction enables us to handle more than nine things at the same time. Abstraction reduces things to one of their attributes. This eleveates the burden of handling the unnecessary mental load of treating a whole thing. For example, a ticket seller treats his customers as simple buyers nothing else.

Soyutlama bizeaynı anda dokuzdan daha çok şeyi idare etmemizi sağlar. Soyutlama şeyleri yalnızca bir özelliklerine indirger. Bu bizi şeyin tümünü ele almanın gereksiz yükünden kurtarır. Örneğin, bilet satan kişi müşterilerinin yalnız bilet almasıyla ilgilidir.

Abstraction is grouping. You can reduce five apples and ten peares (of different types) to two by handling them as just apples and peares. You can even reduce that to one by treating them as just fruits.

Soyutlamak gruplamaktır. Çeşitli tipte beş elma ve yine çeşitli on armutu yalnızca elma ve armuta indirgeyebilirsiniz. Hatta tümünü meyva olarak ele alıp tek bir gruba indirgeyebilirsiniz.

ABSTRACT (1)

2010-09-07T02:28:00.000-07:00

ABSTRACT

1 a : disassociated from any specific instance
b : difficult to understand : ABSTRUSE
c : insufficiently factual : FORMAL

2: expressing a quality apart from an object

3 a : dealing with a subject in its abstract aspects : THEORETICAL
b : IMPERSONAL, DETACHED

4: having only intrinsic form with little or no attempt at pictorial representation or narrative content

TO ABSTRACT
1: REMOVE, SEPARATE

2: to consider apart from application to or association with a particular instance

3: to make an abstract of : SUMMARIZE

4: to draw away the attention of

Origin:
Medieval Latin abstractus, from Latin, past participle of abstrahere to drag away, from abs-, ab- + trahere to pull, draw

First Known Use: 14th century

Source: Merriam - Webster Online
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/abstract

The Effect of Feelings on Concentration - II

2010-02-21T09:32:00.000-08:00

What is forgetting? Anything which has remained a minimum period of time in our memory gets written in our long term memory. Anything which considerably gains our attention cannot be forgotten at all. There are limits to the quality of remembering though. A healthy person cannot forget his/her parents’ names for example. It is a fact that we have increasing difficulty to remember the details of the past as time proceeds. This should not make you think that you have forgotten everything. You lose the means to reach the memories not the memories themselves. Many times has a person got astonished at how many details he remember when he enters the same classroom he has gone to primary school.

What is temporary forgetting? Indeed all forgetting is temporary as we do not forget anything in our long term memory. I mean short term forgetting with temporary. For example when you are eating your favorite meal you forget the rest of the world. When you are studying for a critical exam you forget the rest of the world. When you go to shopping you forget to buy the most needed item.

Air Traffic Controllers do forget also. After solving a critical situation, it is not rare that they forget they have to handle a secondary one. The large system controllers’ brains blank out or forget some critical data sometimes. I remember an airplane accident, in which the pilots socialized with some small talk and forget to enter a route point to the flight computer …

Concentration causes forgetting. It focuses the attention on a certain subject area and considers only things related to this area. This causes the loss of access to the secondary areas and hence the temporary forgetting of them. Situation awareness concept is developed to handle this problem. Situation awareness requires continuous tracing of system variables whenever possible.

Concentrating is good when absolute concentration on a single thing is needed. When a partial attention is required for a specific task besides the task of general surveillance of others it is not good to concentrate too much. Divided attention requires not too much concentration on only one of specific tasks. Concentration causes masking.

Everybody remembers a student who forgets her line when reading a poem from her memory in primary school. Excitement, strong feelings cause memory retrieval failures also. In this situation, concentration
is not the culprit. Concentration is required and obtained. The required mental resources are ready.
What is the thing that makes the child forget while reading the poem from her memory?

Another similar situation can be observed when you are walking down the apartment stairs. If you look at each step and each stair you step on, you tumble… If you get excited and afraid you get stiff your muscles harden. If you ‘let it go’, ‘let it lose’ a little bit and walk with confidence (to something out of your control) you walk down the stairs easily…

If you concentrate too much, more than necessary and increase the stiffness of your posture, you increase your brain’s cognitive section’s control. On the other hand, remembering requires the functioning of your subconscious. You do not remember things with using your logic. You give hints, keys and then your subconscious finds and brings them to your conscious. Remembering requires a fine balance between conscious and subconscious entities. So, the primary school student who stiffens and gets excited does not give a chance to her subconscious to retrieve the lines. She fails.

Tonus – posture, In fact, there is more to the problem than stiffening or hardening the muscles… Yes, when concentration increases cognitive abilities increase and they use most of the brain resources but how does this happen? How is the balance obtained between different functional parts of the brain?
How does a professional theater actor remember thousands of lines without any mistake? What does a pianist learn in many years of education that she does not forget in the concert?

A professional learns to orchestrate his brains functional parts through education and professional practice. Choosing the right thinking speed sets the right timeframes to enable the brain to activate its right functional part itself. Excessive concentration hurts memory retrieval not only because of the muscle stiffening and hardened posture but also because of the thinking speed cognition reaches. Cognition can reach thinking speeds that feelings use by the help of high concentration. This may hurt the overall functioning of the brain and may be the subconscious (I have a few more words on that for the future articles).

There are many implications of the thinking speed. But, I will note here only, you must select the right timeframe and hence the right thinking speed in order to be successful in any task. Be careful feelings are the fastest processing brain activity, emergency processes(programmed), automatic processes (thinks you do by memorizing) are the second, cognitive processes the third, safety related risk sensing(the slowest). So, next time you lock the door of your house, do not behave as if you are typing on your computer. Last but not the least, the speed of cognition can be controlled by concentration. Some of the emergency processes such as fear etc. are built-in feelings, I indicate learned processes as emergency processes.

It is vital to select the right posture and muscle tonus which will give the correct message to our brain at first. Then one must set the right salience, the right time frame and thinking speed and then increase the concentration to the required level, nothing more nothing less… One can set himself the right mood to do a task by using his education and PERSONALITY. Each person is a different solution and each profession requires a specific mental set of human mind.

The Effect of Feelings on Concentration

2010-01-04T12:39:00.000-08:00

This is about the effect of feelings on focused attention and concentration. There is a difference between focused attention and high concentration. Focused attention requires the use of attention resources for a very limited area or task. Concentration is different from focused attention. Concentration does not exclude whole areas of interest unless they can be linked to the subject at one or other level of abstraction. That’s why we talk about deep concentration but not deep focusing.

The effect of feelings, namely getting sentimental or a certain affective mood during a task may have certain effects to the quality of the work done. These effects may be positive in the short term as increasing motivation under /against too much load. They may be negative as the effect of an airplane accident on the air traffic controllers who must still continue to control the remaining hundreds of aircrafts in the air.

Feelings control the thinking speed hence control the depth and establish the context of thinking. Thinking speed is a commonly used term but diffrent hormones effect different parts of the brain and may cause working speeds in those regions. It may not be wise to use thinking speed in place of a global brain speed performance as in CPU speeds of the computers. I refer to the cognitive processing speed of the brain when I mention thinking speed. It is also interesting to question what exactly thinking speed means. Is it the propagation speed of signals in the neural networks via chemical reactions? Or is it the inverse of the resolution duration of a minimal decision taking in the neural networks?

There certainly exist time frames in the brain processing which establish time limits for the propagation of signals in the neural networks. These time limits may be set by hormones which control the chemical conditions that in turn control the propagation conditions in these networks. Feelings effect the hormon production and flow in the body. Hence feelings effect our cognitive abilities, namely decisions.

Speaking of thinking speed, one must not forget the dynamic character and differentiate between minimal and major variations. The effect of minimal variations may be positive on the thinking performance while the reverse on major variations. Also, one must consider the gradual and sudden changes. The effect of gradual changes may create complex situations such as the loss of the situational awareness in pilots while making smalltalk with colleagues. The effect of sudden changes may be good when the operator is well trained and can control the extra influx of the hormones to increase his performance in emergencies.

Last but not the least, the feeling of taste is the key to understanding feelings as much as seeing for understanding cognition. Tasting sets the way to feeling and seeing to thinking, developmentally and evolutionarily.

To Look at Spaces

2009-11-29T01:09:00.000-08:00

To look at the space is different by its definition from looking at an object. To look at a space is by definition to look at a space inside an area or volume. Because there exists at least the observer.

Our eyes focus when we look at an object. Our attention concentrate on that object.

When we look at a panaroma-general view we use a special technique of looking. We do not look at individual objects but view the general view. In fact this may be the closest way to look at space. Indeed when we view a panaroma we do not look at the elements that form the general view but the abstract volume that they create…

What is abstract volume then? Abstarct volume is the entity that is created in multiple dimensions by a set of abstarct entities.

If we reutrn back to the beginning once more… Looking at space should trig the opposite of looking functions that are based on focusing (and the other cognitive functions such as attention and concentration). For example, to look at individual trees in a sparsely populated woods vs. looking at the spaces between trees and comparing them etc. may help to difuse concentration and get relaxed. Looking at nothing or not dpecific things may help to relax.

The Right of Time

2009-09-25T07:39:00.001-07:00

Time has its own rights. Humans, animals, nature, children, plants, almost everything has some basic rights. Time has its basic rights also…

At the moment that an event takes place between two opponents, justice gets set as one is right the other is wrong or at least to a degree or on the basis of some limiting conditions. Among all these conditions time has a special privilege, it has a right also in establishing the justice.

After the initial conditions that establish the ‘right’ on the basis of justice, time begins to tick. If the conditions related to the dispute are dependent on time, at the end of a certain period of time the ‘winning’ side at the beginning may find itself as ‘losing’…

An other example from engineering: To solve a technical problem, it is not enough to know the subject… You must do research and then analyse the problem, diagnose and locate the problem, etc… You must put your time into solving the problem. In the beginning some problems seem impossible to solve but if you put the necessary time and may be some more it is certain you will solve the problem. It is only a matter of time. Because it is the right of time.

The perception and assignment of meaning to randomness

2009-08-27T01:18:00.000-07:00

Somewhere on the Aegean coast of Turkey, two miniscule particles of sand lies together on the beach. Infact millions of them lie together there… Is it a coincidence or contingency that they lie together? It is not even a coincidence. There is not any meaning to it. If you name it as coincidence it is because you percieve things a intentional or coincidence etc… it is how you percieve things nothing else… Also the words ‘sand particle’, ‘beach’, ‘coast’ would not exist and we would not name those ‘things’ as as such if we did not have a vacation there, if we did not come to meet these things… There were not any coasts, sand dooms etc on the Mars or any planet till we, the human beings come and ‘discover’ them and gave them names…

Perceptions lie at the bottom of every mental activity – including cognition in general. Nature builds intelligence based on perception. Once we meet the sand particles, and many of them, we simple see or feel the warmth of them. We do not assign any meaning to them at this phase. The necessity to tell them or to remember them easily causes us to desribe them. Finally it is easier to give them a name. How we name things depend on how we relate to them rather than to their internal attributes.

The naming process causes us to use deeper levels of meaning as we get to learn more about things and the interaction between things develop. While there is a minimum common ground of the meanings of words, there still are different views to things which bring different meanings to their names.

Different levels of meanings create abstraction and the abstract names and concepts. This creates the possibility to use basic names with different meanings in different contexts.

The way we name sand particles on the beach displays our tendencies to name randomness. Some times we name random things as if they are absolute entities (accompanied with a strong sense of belief). Sometimes we do not care whether it is random or not and name the whole thing or process – as beach. Sometimes we get so high in abstraction that we name it as if from somewhere high in the atmosphere – as coast…

The perception and assignment of meaning to ramdomness is a critical mental process which displays the strength and weaknesses of the individual human mind. It is no coincidence that the initial signs of many behavioral or clinic mental problems are related to the deficiencies in this area.

The Necessity of Noise

2009-07-04T10:56:00.000-07:00

What is noise? It is a threshold. A threshold at which point a signal loses its identifiability. Here, signal means meaningful activity which has a purpose or value. A group of people sitting at a bar, makes noise because of talking with each other relative to the silent state of the bar or relative to the music being played at that moment.
Noise may carry abstract meanings and may carry various threshold functions such as noise in public decision enquettes or unrelated information on a subject you are trying to make a decision.

If we think of neural networks in our brains, these circuits make correct decisions although they get some garbage(noise) in their inputs, namely not very clear situtions.

Mysteriously, noise may decide what is wrong what is right because it sets the environment to make a decision.
It eliminates what is relevant what is not according to the subject, it sets the boundaries of the elemnts that will make the decision.

Noise sets the threshold for making a decision. In situations where the input namely our observations of the phenomena around us are not clear, we try to clear things by changing or adjusting to the environment before we make decisions. In fact we solve the problem by adjusting the noise threshold. Noise may be necessary in order to make healthy decisions when the inputs are not completely clear.

THE FUNCTION OF SYMBOLS IN ATC AND ITS MENTAL EFFECTS

2009-06-07T12:56:00.000-07:00

INTRODUCTION
Miller’s rule states that a human can handle seven plus minus one things in his/her mind at the same time. If the number increases the human mind groups these items so that the number of groups remain less than seven plus minus one(attention span).

Grouping things according to a certain point of view is called abstraction.You can group things first than you can group the groups you have formed and so on. Every step of grouping in this process is called an abstraction level.

Whenever the human mind tries to handle things that overpassess its capacity to handle things simultaneously
it does abstraction. Air traffic control(ATC) is no exception of this fact. ATC systems are complex discrete event dynamic systems. These systems are huge in the sense that they can handle the whole air space of large countries such as Germany or Turkey.

An air traffic control system ensures that airplanes move safely from one geographical point to another. In order to do this each airplane’s safety is given to the responsibility of an air traffic control officer (ATCO) at each point of time in its journey.

The complexity arises from the fact that you have to establish areas of control responsibility for each controller. An ATCO can handle upto 12-13 airplanes at the same time depending on the size of its control area and density of the air traffic. So, in order to control an air space as large as Turkey there must be quiet a number of control sectors. Actually, you generally have first, a number of air spaces depending on the geography and the height, such as eastern Turkey, western Turkey air spaces and lower air space and higher air space which may be divided at flight level 280. The more the number of sectors the more difficult it is to assign tasks to these sectors in coordination with others.

It is inevitable to use abstractions when one just imagines the complexity and the size of an ATC system and the risks involved with it. The first abstraction is the types of control, such as area control, approach control and tower control. The type of the traffic specifies the character of the system that handles it. For the sake of simplicity, and due to my experience I will mention only the area control from now on.

THE USES OF SYMBOLS
The human-kind expressed itself with symbols long before he/she found the letters and writing[1]. Symbols provide a visual representation of an idea or word as can be observed in Far Eastern alphabets and languages. The symbols played a vital role in the development process of alphabets. One can only imagine a little bit the difficulty people experienced in inventing a language first, then writing and then creating an alphabet. But it should be simple even for a dummy to appreciate the importance of using symbols in our life to fight against the difficulties that we meet.
“Symbols provide a visual representation of an idea or word. Children who find difficulty in reading can be helped to visualise the meanings of words by seeing a symbol.” Symbols In Education - Why we use symbols [2].
“Unlike things, feelings and ideas are difficult to exchange. People wishing to exchange physical objects may simply hand them to each other. Feelings and ideas, however, are without physical substance. They cannot be handed directly to another person. Rather, they must be exchanged through the use of symbols–things that represent or stand for other things.”[3]
The origins of our existence, the meaning of life und so weiter are no simple things to handle and this situtaion is not an exception to our ways of handling difficulties. For example : “The concept of using images in worship finds its origins in the Old Testament. The Temple contained numerous visual images, including the cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant. The Temple Solomon built for the Lord contained many carvings of trees, gourds, flowers, and angels (1 Kings 6). It is clear that God did not forbid images used in the Sanctuary to glorify God[4].”
Abstraction and the use of symbols are vital elements in solving math problems or others in science. The use of arbitrary symbols and the process of symbolisation have made possible the discourse of modern mathematics and logic. “Mathematics uses symbols in creative ways. Two such methods, one dealing with the process of `alphabetisation' and the other based on the notion of `formal similarity', are described. Through these processes, originally meaningless symbols get embodied and coded with meaning through mathematical writing and praxis[5].”
We use symbols when things are difficult to rxpress such as feelings, like a red rose for a lady. Arts is a wide spread application area of this use of symbols. “In the play Macbeth, Shakespeare uses many symbols to add to his story. His use of blood, water, light, dark, rampant animals, and even the witches are examples of how he used symbols to add depth to his play. These symbols were often times recurring and they were all related to the central plot of the play[6].”

THE FUNCTION OF SYMBOLS
1- Symbol extracts what is important – relevant and preserves it
2- Symbol makes it reacheable against all odds its a KEY
3- Symbol provides insulation – better cooperation at the related levels.
4- Symbol provides preservation.
5- Symbol increases processing speed.
6- Symbol decreases mental workload and the amount of relevant speech.
7- Symbol provides space for future enhancements by making abstractions.

THE USE OF SYMBOLS IN ATC
The air space used by the airplanes have to be abstracted so that a human being can easily manage the airplanes flying in his own area of responsibility. Simply this means a map but that does not suffice alone…

You must abstract the height, the third dimension in a humanly controllable manner: This means flight levels. The height difference between FL’s are something around 300Ms. Breaking the third dimension to constant and seperate flight levels gives us many facilities: the ability to fly at a certain direction at each level, given a certain filight level you do not have to worry on vertical seperation, limitation references for ascends and descends and many more…

After you have the airspace map, you should choose reference points to fly from and to fly to, also reference points where certain actions have to be taken such as entry and exit points where adjacent centers or sectors have to be acknowledged…

If you think about the size of the German air space, and the number of planes flying concurrently, you can quickly appreciate that a single controller is vital but totally insufficient to do the job. A single ATCO can control 12-15 aircrafts(A/C) at the same time. So you must divide the airspace into enough small sized sectors to reduce the workload to humanly manageable levels. Once more we made an abstraction and created sectors.
Each sector has a symbol, a few characters long to symbolize the section of the airspace they stand for.

An other abstraction is done to facilitate the route declaration in the voice and electronic communications.
Instead of telling each point the A/C is going to fly over, the pilot says uppergreenone (UG1), this indicates a sequence of many points in direction depending on the departure and arrival airport. Each route has a symbol like UG1 which identifies it.

All the symbols used in ATC, points, routes, and their attributes such as entry(NP),exit(XP) etc. are identified in a static data storage or Static Data Bank(SDB). SDB is the symbol of the Static Data Bank. The marvelous character abstraction is you can do abstractions to create the entities that are used to make abstractions of the real life. The Term SDB is used by both ATC interface people who change the static properties of the system and also by the engineers who maintain the software system that supports the operations. The world of the ATC engineers is a complete abstraction full of symbols, actually they use online dictionaries while it is impossible to remember everything.

SDB handles the static properties of the air traffic. The dynamic properties of the air traffic is handled in the Dynamic Data Bank – DDB. Flight level changes, mid air entries, category changes, speed changes usw. all are recorded in the DDB. DDB is an abstraction of the dynamic attributes of the air traffic. It is defined via many symbols that reflect these attributes.

Actually the ATCOs are generally not aware of what is in DDB or SDB. They use other abstractions and many symbols. A flight plan is an abstraction of what a pilot tends to do with his airplane indicating departure and arrival aerodromes, speed, height over all the route points, route, time schedule etc. Strips are small strip of paper which outlines this information in this small area with many symbols. The area must be as small as possible because of the spae limitation on the ATCOs control table. The controller has also the keyboard and display system, the radar screen and ATN messages to use. All of these are highly abstract modellings of the real life air traffic. All of them use many symbols.

THE ROLE OF SYMBOLS IN ATC
From the point of an air traffic controller using symbols is not only being able to identify them but also having the right feel of them. Aviation is not only a science based technological area but it is also an art and air traffic control is no exception to that.

The use of symbols makes things more identifiable and increases comprehension by the use of phrasepology in the pilot – controller voice communication. An air plane appears as a small symbol and a vector indicates the direction and speed it flies on the radar screen. There is height, speed etc data all written as symbols + numeric values… The static control points, airports etc. all are indicated as symbols. There is even a book of ICAO which you can find these values.

But, the controller is not supposed to see all these symbols and overabundance of information, in all this mass, he simply has to keep the mental picture of the traffic in his mind. Similar to a theatre artist, he should not try to remember the text or what movements he should do, he has to keep his audience going according to the point where they are in the act.

This is also reflected in the evolution of a controller. He begins with the easiest sector and like performer he rehearses his role many times and gets to know the stage he is acting. If you remember my example about the use of symbols in Sheakspear plays, symbols help the controller to get hold of the reality, the actual reality at that moment of time during the play… Symbols play a crucial role in helping the air traffic controller to do so.

THE EFFECT OF SYMBOLS ON THE ATCO FROM THE POINT OF SYSTEMS PSYCHOLOGY
The use of symbols reduce the mental load of the air traffic controller. Unfortunately, the homeostatic
tendency and ever increasing traffic load causes the air traffic controller get more load in this situation.
At the end of the day, the use of symbols causes the air traffic controller to get more traffic load.

Similarly spatial processing increases the load of the controller instead of decreasing it. Large radar screens provide ample space to hold many more symbols, tables, etc.

One important point to remember; symbols contribute to our subconscious. Anything we do not understand goes to our subconscious. When concentrating on a traffic situation both on voice and radar a controller’s subconscious gets busy with the other things, and these are symbols which he does not have attentional resources to deal with. So, they go to the subconscious. Just like watching and art work that you do not understand.
You try to make an abstraction to overcome the difficulty you face by pushing that thing into your subconscious.
If you know how to interact with your subconscious then your subconscious will pop up the problem back to you, and in percieving the problem once more you will have formed abstraction of it, namely ah that flight that ı skipped.

In fact, symbols are the key to understanding the character of air traffic control. Phraseology reminds me abstract languages, the rule based structure the logic, all the symbols on the radar screen and the slow stepwise movements of airplanes has a certain lyric effect almost poetic, and the strength of symbols has a religious tone, with all the controllers and engineers walking slowly in and around the control center like the Branchid priests serving at the antic oracle’s Didyma.

KAYNAKLAR:
[1] The Park Ridge Center, al.hurd@advocatehealth.com
“Before the written word, human beings used symbols as the primary means of self-expression. Hope and fear, joy and sorrow, sickness and health, love and hate, good and evil, yin and yang, feminine and masculine — all found early expressions as symbols.”
[2] Symbols In Education - Why we use symbols
“Symbols provide a visual representation of an idea or word. Children who find difficulty in reading can be helped to visualise the meanings of words by seeing a symbol.”
[3] Britannica Student's Encyclopedia
“Unlike things, feelings and ideas are difficult to exchange. People wishing to exchange physical objects may simply hand them to each other. Feelings and ideas, however, are without physical substance. They cannot be handed directly to another person. Rather, they must be exchanged through the use of symbols–things that represent or stand for other things.”
[4] The use of Images, Signs, and Symbols in Anglican Worship By Rev. Rebecca
“The concept of using images in worship finds its origins in the Old Testament. The Temple contained numerous visual images, including the cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant. The Temple Solomon built for the Lord contained many carvings of trees, gourds, flowers, and angels (1 Kings 6). It is clear that God did not forbid images used in the Sanctuary to glorify God .”
[5] The Use of Symbols in Mathematics and Logic by Sundar Sarukkai
“Abstract. It is commonly believed that the use of arbitrary symbols and the process of symbolisation have made possible the discourse of modern mathematics as well as modern, symbolic logic. This paper discusses the role of symbols in logic and mathematics, and in particular analyses whether symbols remain arbitrary in the process of symbolisation. It begins with a brief summary of the relation between sign and logic as exempli_ed in Indian logic in order to illustrate a logical system where the notion of `natural' sign-signi_ed relation is privileged. Mathematics uses symbols in creative ways. Two such methods, one dealing with the process of `alphabetisation' and the other based on the notion of `formal similarity', are described. Through these processes, originally meaningless symbols get embodied and coded with meaning through mathematical writing and praxis. It is also argued that mathematics and logic di_er in the way they use symbols. As a consequence, logicism becomes untenable even at the discursive level, in the ways in which symbols are created, used and gather meaning.”

[6] ESSAY SAMPLE ON "THE USE OF SYMBOLS IN MACBETH" The Use of Symbols in Macbeth
“In the play Macbeth, Shakespeare uses many symbols to add to his story. His use of blood, water, light, dark, rampant animals, and even the witches are examples of how he used symbols to add depth to his play. These symbols were often times recurring and they were all related to the central plot of the play.”

TO TRANSCEND THE GLASS

2009-01-15T08:34:00.000-08:00

Many times that I have stood in front of a toy seller’s shop, had this small boy in me wished to transcend the glass shield and reach out to one of the toys on the display. Although light can pass through the glass we can not. This feeling that you feel against the seperating property of a shield of glass, the feeling of powerlessness because of the inability to reach something you yearn for hurts me deeply. On the other hand, “one should not reach out to the things he is not able to catch” says our parents.

As the years pass by, notices one that our lives are divided with glass shields, a compartment next to another… Sometimes there exists nothing, not even a glass shield between. Somebody new born to this system of life does not notice these ‘glass’ compartments in the beginning, only till he tries to reach something he does not deserve…

To speak is a privelege of this type. When you look around everybody talks. It’s just as simple as happening by itself without any effort… But, when it is up to you to speak to a foreigner, to a teacher, to a supervisor or to one of your students or a farmer, just try and see what happens… One notices that it is not as simple as it looks to speak to others, just like does a small kid who tries to reach something higher than his own height…

Imagine a child aged around two years old! He can understand what’s going on around him. He keeps track of every close thing . He is even aware that he is a seperate being which owns its own life. But he cannot speak… An unseen shield of glass stops his voice to be heard when tries to speak… He is aware that he has a voice. He does not know what he cannot do. He tries to reach out to and touch things that only his words could touch. He fails. He does not succeed because there is an unseen transparent thing between. Indeed he tries to find what that is. At the end, he does find it. A few words come out of his mouth. Something like “mom, dad”… The foundations of the structure which have been laid underneath will help him stand up for the rest of his life. This is the name of the thing that stands between him and others: SELF.

Each person who succeeds to speak lives similar difficulties a couple of more times in their life. The most striking example of these situations is learning the first foreign language. Specially if one goes to a country of which language he does not know well and learns it slowly day by day like a small kid, this situation becomes quiet similar to the process in his very childhood. Psychological problems that may appear in people living abroad may have substantial relation with this phenomenon. If scrutinized, schizophrenia and other similar problems have some roots in this difficult period of life around 2 years old.

Many have English as a second language in Turkey. Unfortunately, as one of my visiting European colleagues has mentioned ‘Everybody speaks Turkish in Turkey, but all does so badly.’ Hence we are a society who can speak the second language not so good. OK, what happens if one tries to learn the 3rd and even 4th languages as many do in Europe? Unfortunately, the number of people who knows this, who has tried and succeeded are very few in Turkey compared to key European countries. When pushed to learn the 3rd language your second language begins to waver, you begin to forget some words etc… When pushing the 4th language the grammar difficulties in every language including your mother tongue may appear… You forget words, or mix languages using French words in English etc. Even worse is,you think you are speaking your native tongue when speaking an other language, your students although benefiting from this, politely make fun of it. The worst, because of not knowing which language to listen while passing people are speaking on the street you may think some Germans are speaking quiet good Turkish. The rest of your life, you hear French, German, English words in the noise that you hear…

Foreign language education is a strategically important subject in our country. Around our country lies Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian and other ex-Yuogoslavian, Romenic, Hungarian, Russian, Ukranian, Moldovian, Checnic, and other ex-Russian, Armenian, Persian, Arabic speaking countries. From the European perspective we have to count English, French, German, Italian and Spanish to name a few… Turkey can succeed against this great challenge by only good organization, planning and specialization, not by acts of good luck.

The complexity of the Turkish geography surrounded with oceans has created the obligation of a closed culture in a single umbrella language and culture. The physical largeness and the neessity to keep everything in order has caused the development of practices that may not be in parallel with Europe for many centuries…

Turkey tries to improve her relations with the European Union primarily for economical obligations. But similar to the child learning to speak for the first time Turkey has communication difficulties with Europe. The struggle to express her own concerns and convince her counterparts to give her deserved rights, is driving Turkey to redefine and find herself anew in the 21st century world. When mixed with the effort to reown her own culture coming from the past, the effort to transcend the invisible glass between Europe and Turkey, pushes the Turkish society to the limits of her cultural and sipiritual strengths. An adventure initiated by economical obligations is having much wider and unforeseen effects on our society driving her to the limits of healthy development.

ON THE NATURE OF PROBLEMS

2009-01-03T06:10:00.000-08:00

Fighting Techniques II

To the memory of our father Hasan SARAL.

“the chemist Kekule came upon one of the most important discoveries of organic chemistry, the structure of the benzene ring, in a dream. Having pondered the problem for some time, he turned his chair to the fire and fell asleep:’Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes…. My mental eye…could now distinguish larger structures…all twining and twisting in snkae-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke.” The spontaneous inner image of the snake biting its own tail suggested to Kekule that organic compounds, such as benzene, are not open structures but closed rings[1].”

Everyday, we fight with many difficulties of many kinds. Some of these are as simple and short as loosening of the shoelaces. Some of them are as difficult and long as making an invention and some of them as abrupt and serious as a traffic accident… If you have a look at the many problems that we fight with you will notice that we can categorize them and their solutions in different groups. Although these groups may carry similarities in their quantity, quality and content attributes, their use by individual persons and the importance assigned to them may differ. Also, even though the problems and their solutions may be similar the personalities of the individuals that they interact may cause them to appear different.

Studying the nature of problems makes it possible for us to solve similar problems easily and also understand ourselves better We can categorize problems in various ways. For example, problems that repeat endlessly are called chronic in medicine. I am afraid, some of our political problems may be called the same. On the other hand some problems are seasonal. For example, opening the streets to transportation by cleaning the snow. These problems repeat with more or less a certain period. Acute problems happen suddenly and are serious to handle. For example, a sewage pipe gets broken in your house… Some problems are ubiqutious. You meet them in many areas of life. Some are wide spread with in a limited area. Your computer program does not work. When nothing works at all you have made a main mistake with wide results. Focused problems affect a certain functionality and the system recovers as soon as you fix it. Like a tooth ache…

Some problems are light but persist for a long duration. In fact, we can group the problems by their durations that they sustain, short – long etc. or according to their largeness. The way the problems happen may be classified also. Few or many in quantity. Fighting with more than one problem at the same time increases the total difficulty. The way we categorize problems is not constant. It changes according to the subject of the problem and the context it happens. To put a tiny piece of thread through a sewing needle may be percieved as difficult while a much more concentration demanding computer programming task may be percieved easier, just like a technical problem may be percieved much more difficult after midnight than at noon.

The fact that our perception of the problems is variable makes our categorization of the problems more difficult and hence reduces the benefit that arises from the categorization. If you are throwing anything you get hold of to your target in a chaos that you can not apprehend you have come to that point where you have to take a deep breath and try to categorize the problems correctly. If you can categorize the problems as convenieint as possible to reach the target your chance of hitting your target via a similar solution. Solving problems is basically a problem of classification.

I had mentioned the chronic problems in the beginning. The word ‘chronic’ means ‘: marked by long duration or frequent recurrence’ by Merriam-Webster. The most apparent characteristic of a chronic problem
is repetition or continuity. Reduction of the repetition intervals indicates that the problem gets severe or light. For example, a severe crisis give way to the lighter ones but more frequent or irregular problem periods, or the increase in the severity of problems and the increase of the frequency may indicate a worsening.

The repetition of the problem in chronic problems may happen in various ways:

1-The problem arises in a flow of random events. The crux of the issue here is; the events other than the chronic problem are random and carry no relation with the problem.

2- The chronic problem happens after a chain of happening events. After each occurence things repeat the same iteration of events. In this case, repeating event is not only the chronic problem but the events that prepare it.
The events’ iteration does not have to be constant array of events. The presence of some events may be obligatory, but two seperate iterations may be composed of completely different events. But most of the events that form the iteration belong to the set of events that form the reasons of chronic problem.

If we look at a chronic problem from a closer point of view, we may observe that a single crisis begins at a moment in time, continues and finishes, or the problem has begun at a moment and continues for a long duration without any interruption. Aset of the general conditions that prepare the outbreak of the crisis, a set of the causes that push the events to happen and a set of the triggers which may come just before the crisis may be observed. In the case of the repeating crisis, there is a set of conditions that prepare, a set of causes that make it happen and a set of triggers that initiate the end of the crisis.

One component of the equation that gives rise to the chronic event is a function which may change by time but may also be accepted as constant for relatively short periods of time. This function may be related to the events in the past or to the material dependent on the nature of the interacting elements/participants of the problem.

When studided closely, the reasons, the causes and the triggers that lead to the outbreak of the crisis may be related to their own previous values and also may be related to the previous crises values. For example, the seriousness of a previous crisis, its duration, its attack/sustain/release durations. Sometimes the slowness of the evolution of the problem, namely slowness in its attack period, mathematically its 1st and 2nd derivatives being small, or precautions that balance and slow sudden changes may stop the forming of crisis episodes. The dependence of the reasons that form the chronic crisis to the characteristics of previous crises and to its own evolution leads to the unmanageable repetition of a chronic problem.

Above, I had mentioned a chronic problem that occurs among unrelated random events. There may be such problems that may be dependent on only themselves and their own past iterations. These self triggering chronic problems are recursive[3] in nature. In fact they may be evaluated as a special case of functions mentioned in the 2. item.

If I may return back to the beginning of this article, if we have a closer look at the story of the chemist who found the benzene ring, we may now come to appreciate the value of the symbol ‘the snake which bites its own tail’. The metaphor of ‘the snake which bites its own tail’ or ‘the scorpion biting itself’ is a method utilized in solving problems that are very difficult. The problem is so difficult that it can not be solved or cured by external effects such as, force, medicine etc. It becomes inevitable that the energy at the source of the problem may be used to kill itself. This kind of solutions may not be present or evident. I believe, chronic problems have the ability to be solved by using the metaphor of ‘the snake which bites its own tail’ on the premises of their own definition.

Ali R+ SARAL

Note: My simple article ‘A Mathematical Model of Chronic Problems’ is available at my blog
http://tekne-techne.blogspot.com in Turkish.

Kaynaklar:
[1] Rober H. McKim, Experiences in Visual Thinking , Brooks/Cole Pub. Co. Monterey, California, s. 11.
[2] Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Main Entry: chronic
Etymology: French chronique, from Greek chronikos of time, from chronos
Date: 1601
1 a: marked by long duration or frequent recurrence : not acute b: suffering from a chronic disease the 2 a: always present or encountered ; especially : constantly vexing, weakening, or troubling
Medical Merriam-Webster:.
1 a : marked by long duration, by frequent recurrence over a long time, and often by slowly progressing seriousness : not acute Chronic her b : suffering from a disease or ailment of long duration or frequent recurrence chronic
2 a : having a slow progressive course of indefinite duration -- used especially of degenerative invasive diseases, some infections, psychoses, and inflammations chronic-- comparre ACUTE 2b(1) b : infected with a disease-causing agent (as a virus) and remaining infectious over a long period of time but not necessarily expressing symptoms
[3] Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Main Entry: re•cur•sion
Pronunciation: \ri-ˈkər-zhən\
Function: noun
Etymology: Late Latin recursion-, recursio, from recurrere
Date: 1616
1: RETURN 2 : the determination of a succession of elements (as numbers or functions) by operation on one or more preceding elements according to a rule or formula involving a finite number of steps 3 : a computer programming technique involving the use of a procedure, subroutine, function, or algorithm that calls itself one or more times until a specified condition is met at which time the rest of each repetition is processed from the last one called to the first — compare ITERATION

Main Entry: it•er•a•tion
Pronunciation: \ˌi-tə-ˈrā-shən\
Function: noun
Date: 15th century
1: the action or a process of iterating or repeating: as a: a procedure in which repetition of a sequence of operations yields results successively closer to a desired result b: the repetition of a sequence of computer instructions a specified number of times or until a condition is met —compare RECURSION 2: one execution of a sequence of operations or instructions in an iteration

”MISTAKES ARE BEAUTIFUL”

2008-11-04T11:00:00.001-08:00

“Mistakes are beautiful.” Because they introduce a touch of reality to the perfect beauty. They make flawlessness breathe. I have written this article originally for my Turkish fellow citizens. I learned this adage from a conversation at BBC Prime. I believe mistakes are beautiful everywhere on the earth. But please excuse my verbosity for my heartfelt urge to speak out for the benefit of my country’s sensuous people. My word stands primarily for them.

“A player has to pass through some furniture on the stage and run to the front… Unfortunately, an other player hits a chair and the first player’s running way is closed. What would a master player do in this situation? What would you yourself do in this situation?

“According to the character of the play, a master player chooses to: 1- ‘Oh, God would this happen to me also?’, if the play is a serious one such as a tragedy. 2– ‘Haha, only this was missing on my way!’, if the play is a comedy. In the mean time, somebody would rempve the chair from his way.

An experienced performer or artist makes the best out of the unexpected and sometime unwelcome ingredients he meets during his creative process.

A master performance artist, a violonist, shows his skill when he makes a glitch. He uses this slip as a touch of naturalness or may be as a little spicing and converts it to a natural element of her performance.

Isn’t it the same in our daily lives? The more we accept as natural, the mishaps or mistakes we encounter and manage them to our purpose, don’t we get the less hurt and be successful?

Mistakes are beautiful. Because they introduce a touch of reality to the perfect beauty. They make flawlessness breathe.

If mistakes are beautiful, then are errors also beautiful?

Hmm, I am not sure. Because as a result of an error somebody gets hurt, or irrecoverable loses may occur sometimes. But this does not mean that, we should live without making any errors. Is it possible not to make any mistakes? If you have done a mistake you pay or make up for its consequences and you continue. Even if you are punished heavily, sometimes some errors may end up with good or beautiful consequences.

Adam and Eve’s story from the Hollybooks tell this gracefully. After Adam and Eve eat the apple, they
Pay the cost of this error by being thrown out of the paradise. Just think, when viewed from the point of its consequences, aren’t the Holly Books giving the message, that not only the mistakes but even the errors may end up happily at the end of the day?

One should not forget discrepancies. If somebody’s discrepancy or misjudgings have caused the failure of a task, this is the deficiency of that person. One other meaning of deficiency is: a part or element of a finished work which does not comply with generally accepted rules or is not percieved good according to the established appreciation habits.

The role of mistakes and discrepancies in creativity can hardly be ignored. Mozart and many other genius artists’ works are full of ‘discrepancies’ or mistakes that do not abide by the rules that are thought at schools. If a creator does not make mistakes, and apply only the rules written in the theory books, then he can not create original works. It is not the fact that you have made a mistake, but
the way you correct it. How you make that mistake meaningful in such a way that it does not hurt your personality… It is being able. Being able to make a mistake...

Forget about the fear of making a mistake or doing something that will not abide by the principles of your way of doing things. Instead welcome every error and mistake with joy. Wonder what is the thing that has caused you or opponent do this mistake. What can you do with this information? How can you update your point of view and how can you say and do more effective things? Wonder how can you make up for this error and more important make it meaningful?

I wonder, how can a mistake be made more beautiful?

Note: A company, any institution or society has to define what is discrepancy, what is mistake or error
without any hesitation in order to be successful.

THINKING STABILITY

2008-08-19T09:40:00.000-07:00

(draft)

Thinking stability is a phenomenon that can be observed in brain’s cognitive processes. Stability is an issue in not only cognitive but also emotional processes. It is also possible to witness the word stability in relation with mental stability. On the other hand, stability is a recent issue in neural network models, which are supposedly the basis of brain’s working. Philosophically, Sartre has pondered about a ‘psychic balance’ which has homeostatic limits.

Imagine a friend who has just returned from a long distance vacation and joined your company of three at a caffee… She not only tells everthing she has seen but also changes the subject frequently and tells many unrelated things about her voyage. This is a socially common situation. If a firm context has not been established, the content of the talk can not have stability around a single subject.

You can observe the use of fluently changing subjects by some teachers. The teacher changes the subject so that, his pupil get the opportunity to look at the original subject matter from very different possibly almost unrelated viewpoints… At the end, the teacher succeeds not to tell the fact but make his students understand the truth themselves.

Teaching is a strongly destabilizing process. Learning process requires instability by definition. We should open ourselves to new ideas and accept to discuss the strength of our old ideas. This causes instability both cognitively and possibly emotionally in the case of young people.

Whether done for voluntary or involuntary reasons, changing of subject with a not well formed context, or continuous changing of content are strong signs of the loss of thinking stability.

Thinking depth is the depth in terms of abstraction levels from the subject matter. For example, if you talk about a specific person and then make comments on the nature of women on general and continue on to the character of the human-beings, you have increased the thinking depth three levels of abstraction. Increasing the thinking depth unnecessarily or doing so in every little subject you talk about indicates there is instability in your thinking.

An other case is, the speaker does not increase the depth but gives many examples and continues to give details making the listeners bored. Thinking more than necessary details continuously etc. indicates that there is a problem in your stopping process of your thinking. Thinking stability requires enough details and economic use of mental energy so that there is space for continued mental activity.

Thinking happens in a social environment. If the speed of your information flow to the listeners is much higher than they can understand, this indicates an instability in your communication ability or the structure of your thinking. The functionality of the elements of your thinking and its general structure establish its stability.
The quality of thinking is also important. If you are speaking about a subject but can not reach a conclusion this may also indicate an instability in your thinking. A stable thinking should run into its end. In some cases, such as scetching in art or in brain-storming instability is required by definition.

A special case of thinking instability is remembering things from the past too many. A healthy, stable way of thinking does not get obsessed with the past, of course unless you are a historian writing a history book. Thinking stability requires a healthy balance in the sense of time; past, now and future.

Thinking stability requires a balanced approach to the importance of things in life, family, profession, nation, beliefs, ideas, feelings, everything. Getting obsessed with one of these for long durations hurts the thinking stability of that person. On the other hand, obsession is a precious mental tool that helps us to overcome difficulties. Some professions such as engineering, art etc. requires frequent use of obsessions. It is no wonder, a rate of thinking instability of varying degrees from utilization to mental instability is not uncommon in these professions.

Other than cognition, many examples for perceptional, emotional and motor stability, can be given. For example, sometimes you may need to move and do something continuously or you may answer and react to people extremely quickly and later on find you have said something wrong etc. These examples may be stretched from temporary behavioral abnomolies to mental stability problems in terms of health seriousness.

Loss of thinking stability as a continuous situation may be an indication of various mental problems. On the other hand, a constant strong stability in thinking may also be indicative of other mental problems. A healthy level of dinamism may be necessary to cope with the difficulties of life. The relentless change in our lives requires a certain level of elasticity in our thinking.

Unfortunately, the loss of thinking stability is a daily situation for many professionals from various professions, such as large systems operators, pilots, engineers, artists, musicians, etc. Thinking instability may be caused by creativity, continuous learning, long duration high concentration, decision making under stress working environments. The thinking instability caused by today’s professions is also amplified by the obligation to learn and use 2-3 foreign languages at the same time, which is extremely destabilizing. Correct use of motivation, social environment, family may play the role of stabilizers on a daily basis for these professionals.

Thinking stability may be caused by increase in the thinking speed. SwitchCapacitor filters in electronics loss their stability when the sampling frequency or speed increases relative to the frequency they are desingned for. Similarly, our brain tends to function differently when it works faster. Changing subjects, thinking deeper are known phenomenons.

This is not enough to claim that every thinking instability is caused by some increase in the thinking speed. Neither can I claim that thinking speed increase is caused by the thinking instability… But it is common that problems in thinking stability are generally accompanied by thinking speed problems.
Thinking speed problems can also be related with the SPeaking speed. Similar to thinking stability, speaking speech problems can not be directly attributed to thinking speed problems. But in many cases, they look correlated. Moreover people speaking fast and thinking fast tend to change the subject too much or get too deep, namely they think instablely.
Thinking instability can most easily be detected from the thinking speed and actually the speaking speed. If your colleague is talking too fast continuously, regardless of the situation that may not be a good sign, although it looks like he is getting more clever or more effectively professional.

Trying to speak or think slowly to slow down your thinking may not help either. Thinking speed is adjusted automatically by your brain (probably subconscious), it is impossible to control it directly. There are some indirect methods to control it if things have not got out of control totally. In that worst case, keeping the thinking speed low may become more important than anything else.

I believe, the highness of thinking speed may not pose an issue as much as having all the tools and processes that enable it. These tools and processes remedy high thinking speed’s bad effects automatically, afterwards with adequate relaxation. If you lose these skills because of excessive high concentration, it may become inevitable to gain somewhat time by any possible means to recover them again. Preserving thinking stability is a precious mental asset.

As a last note, I would like to define thinking stability in terms of thinking speed. I believe thinking stability is the ability to automatically adjust the thinking speed. Thinking stability is maintaining a healthy thinking speed which may change according to temporal situations that returns back to pivotal normal level afterwards keeping an affordably low average value overall.

THINKING SPEED

2008-07-25T05:07:00.000-07:00

University entrance exams in Turkey or TOEFLE, GRE exams measure mathematics, social, science, Foreign language knowledge and specific skills. It is not enough to know by itself, the person who answers more and correct win, so the person who thinks fast wins.

Every person has moments, hours, days even months that he or she thinks faster than normal. In the months of spring and autumn, specially in September and October, as if God motivates us for the approaching difficulties of the winter, drives us to think faster on the average.

The fast thinking person evaluates events deeper with his/her increased brain energy, real or not, true or false he relates things more and remembers more things ‘related’ to the subject.

If the thinking speed continues to get even faster, digressions to subjects more distantly related to the topic may increase. If the effects of thinking speed increase remains as much as excessive sensitivity, loss of concentration while driving, its affects remain limited by effecting the content of thinking process and the personal success.

Pronin and Wagner wrote about their experiments that showed thinking speed effects mood in their article “Manic Thinking – Independent Effects of Thought Speed and Thought Content on Mood” of 2006. High thinking speed creates and elevated feeling, happiness etc., and in some cases a subjective selfconfidence and grandeur.

Similarly, Winkielman et all. states that high fluency in information processing, for ex. listening to a fluent and easily understandable message, causes the message to be percieved more positive than it really is. ‘Generally speaking, high fluency indicates things are positive, and low fluency negative.’ This ability, given by the creator to us, is named as ‘marking the data hedonically’ or ‘hedonic marking’.

Perceptional fluency, as in the fluency of advertisements, triggers the feeling of positive appraisal. Fluency signal is formed at the very beginning of the input signal. Fluency signal constitutes the best reference when there is little information that can be drawn from the input signal. People sometimes prefer the new, complex and surprising arousal signals to simple and known signals because of this. Thinking speed is an important element in the management of peoples preferences.

Intentionally or not, each person utilizes his/her thinking speed for own purposes by his/her own. Being able to do extraordinary things in emergency situations can be attributed to the skills God has given as much as the individual abilities he/she possess. Human mind and body works with a higher speed in emergency situations.

Even in normal situations, we increase our thinking speed to overcome the difficulties we are faced.
Concentration is to handle everything ve percieve and think from a certain reference point. Focusing is to limit our whole thinking capacity to a singel subject and cognitively process things only within that region. In each of these cases, we leave some part of our brain’s neural network out of functioning and pump blood to only regions that are related.

Another way that we regulate our thinking speed is ‘to feel an emotion.’ Emotions affect the signal propagation and its conditions in the brain via the hormones that trigger them and the hormones the emotions, themselves trigger in response. This situation affects and changes the threshholds that determine the decisions. For example, a driver under the effect of the early days of spring, takes more risk than he does under normal conditions, or political activists participate in higher risk actions. Just imagine that all the threshholds of a society changes approximately at the same time of the year. This also functions as a unique window of opportunity for change and novelties in the human society which is inherently conservative and conformist.

I believe, thinking speed should be proportionate with the thinking energy. In his “Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions”, Sarte says, ‘if one can not handle a situation with his cognitive abilities he then transforms his “psychic energy”, he becomes afraid.’ The increase of thinking speed, should be one of the ways to decrease the psychic energy, I believe… The increase of thinking speed, causes the appearence of our abilities such as imagination, planning, obsession, that help us to manage the difficulties that we are faced with.

Our ability to be successfull is not solely determined by our cogitive abilities. An affective maturity which nourishes, manages and sustains its cognitive abilities is also required. This is necessary for the success of a team as well as a single person, from the point of Crew Resource Management.

In an airplane accident at USA, the dispatcher send the airplane into a region with bad weather forecast, to land in a certain opportunity window. The plane hits the ground. The investigation shows that the copilot effects the pilot decision positively in every and each decision he has made, like ‘No problem we will make it or it’s OK we will land!’ In fact, the pilot and the copilot should have acted as parts of an unity. While the captain was open to the effects of the surroundings and the aircraft, the copilot should be adjusting his affective situation and regulate his decision threshholds. The problem in this situation was the copilot did the adjustment not so well.

In our country too and unfortunately there have been quiet a few accidents in which pilots became martyrs landing in bad visual conditions etc… To reduce these cases, maybe, we should look at Barbara E. HOLDER’s Phd Thesis once more:

“A dominance interaction occurs when one pilot does everything—processes instrument representations, speaks, acts, decides, without assistance or concurrence from his partner. The other pilot tends to remain a passive partner even if he was not passive before. This pattern is often characterized by a unidirectional flow of representations centering on one pilot. Pilots construct an understanding of the situation independent of
each other and the understanding of the dominant pilot may sway the understanding of the other pilot. Communication between pilots tends to be one-sided flowing from the dominating pilot to the other pilot with little or no opportunity for negotiation and discussion.“

I am afraid, our people’s dominant character which has made our country run from victory to victory
is being evaluated as a single ‘pilot’s mistake’ in the current airplane accidents or at least is being pronounciated as such...

Holder has prepared her thesis by attending sea helicopter trainings and has recorded the trainings of other people in helicopter simulators. She has interesting comments on the effect of pilot copilot rank relations…. After everything is explained about the Isparta accident and when precautions are being discussed this rank issue could be pondered upon. It is possible to find Holder’s thesis on the internet.

I have studied the God given ability of thinking speed and its application from the individual, social,
economical and aviation applications in this article. I have pointed at the relation between thinking speed, psychic energy and emotions. I would like to ponder on the transformation of psychich energy
to thinking speed as in imagination, planning and affections in my next articles. The conversion of imagination to dreams, day dreams and sleep etc… The role of the sense of time in this etc…

TO FEEL RIGHT?

2008-07-15T03:00:00.000-07:00

What does it mean ‘to feel right’ or ‘to feel the right emotion’? Can we have an objective judgment on this? What good will it do after all? Will it help us to increase the quality of our lives? Will it help special people as air traffic controllers, nuclear plant or transportation systems operators, large systems engineers in coping with the difficulties of their jobs?

If most of the people watching a movie feel the emotion of sorrow, and you also feel sorrow, that means you feel the right emotion or at least the socially acceptable emotion. This is a great simplification, though. If you are a foreigner, you may not understand the jokes in a movie and you may not laugh when others do… An other example, from the point of precision or repeatability could be; You should feel approximately the same emotions everytime you watch your favorite movie… This is also a great simplification because it does not take into account the time and the accumulation of experience and knowledge(and sometimes boredom).

To feel the right feeling depends not only on the precision but also on the accuracy. What you feel should be ‘appropriate’ to your personality and to the situation that you are in. I may be getting dangerously subjective, I know. What is appropriate may change according to time, society, individual, family, culture, education etc… But still, there is a limit to appropriateness…
The sense of self sets a rough border to what is appropriate and what is not.

‘Is this me who feels this?’ is the golden question to ask. But even then, self is not a constant, undeveloping, non-spontaneous entity. So, I admit, my starting question does not have an objective answer, I deeply doubt it has any either.

Please, let me change my question then… Why can’t we decide we feel right or wrong? Unfortunately for me, the answer of this question has been given well ahead.

Sartre has stated that ‘emotional conciousness is non-reflective at first’. He says ‘The emotional consciousness is primarily the consciousness of the world’. So, when you feel afraid of something you get under its magic effect which causes you to concentrate on it more and more rather than percieving your own self and situation. In his ‘Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions’ (Translated by Philip Mairet – Routledge Classics) Sartre states in fact ‘ The self does not appear at all in ‘ this type of automatic process.

The reason we do not feel whether our feeling is right or wrong is, feeling is not a reflective process. Sartre chooses not to call it an automatic process. He says ‘unreflective conduct is not unconscious conduct’. The unreflective character of feeling can be observed in the situation where you become aware of your feelings. For example, when you become aware that you are very angry, your feeling disappears.

If it is impossible to decide whether our feeling is right or appropriate how come so many people happen to feel the same and mostly the ‘right’ feeling? It may be related to the way we learn our feelings first of all. The first feeling we learn is ‘trust’. We human beings develop the feeling of trust by getting ‘feeded’ regularly by our mamas in the beginning of our lives. It’s no surprise getting regular good food is critically important at large systems, ATC centers etc., where everthing is designed on a single human feeling, namely ‘trust’.

Secondly, our emotions are continuously conditioned by life, by the society we live in or the team we work in etc... The culture that we live in sets the noetic thresholds for our emotions. My Singaporean fiancee once had mentioned ‘Everything in Turkey is hyper! Even the cows in the picture on the milk bottles look hyper!’... The character of a people is set by its culture. Music, in all cultures, teaches and conditions people to what should be expected within a given mood.

Sartre states “In a word, to experience any object as horrible, is to see it against the background of a world which reveals itself as already horrible.” Sartre does not mention mood in his book but I believe what he calls at the very end of his sketch as ‘background of a world’ can also be related to ‘mood’.

If we are conditioned to feel certain emotions under certain conditions or moods, the new question should be “Would it be possible to bring ourselves up to become a better self or a better ourselves?”. And “Would it be possible to better train so that large systems engineers, ATCOs, pilots and other large systems operators feel better while they are doing their jobs, react to emergencies much better and faster so that they be more successful in their professions?” I believe, Sartre’s ‘Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions’ is a precious legacy which must be studied by the aviation community, specially the trainers and teachers and their training institutes.

Sartre’s work helps us to understand ourselves better, consequently, to know.

Ali R+ SARAL

The Importance of Sartre's 'Sketch for a Theory of Emotions' for Aviation

2008-07-05T11:25:00.000-07:00

Sartre's 'Sketch for a Theory of Emotions' could prove to be a tangible asset for air traffic controller and pilot training. It could be a solid reference for the teachers who have to teach the role of emotions in decision making.

Large Systems engineers would definitely benefit from it forcontrolling themselves when working under heavy load or usinghigh concentration for long durations.

Philip Mairet's translation from Routledge Classics says"A conciousness becoming emotional is rather like a consciousness dropping asleep" p. 51.

In fact Sartre refers to emotions as a special type of consciousness as in an "unreflective conduct" which is not unconscious as in the act of writing.

He explains the origin of emotions as a " lesser existence or a lesser presence(or a greater existence, etc.). In a word, during emotion, it is the body which, directed by the consciousness,changes its relationship with the world so that the worldshould change its qualities. If emotion is playacting, the play is one that we believe in p. 41.

As Sartre suggests, we degrade ourselves into a lower, fictionalworld when we are faced with facts that we cannot manage to overcomewith our ususal abilities. At this point, our consciousness "gets caught in its own snare." It has created a fictional world to escape into and now it believes what it has created, as in dreams p.52.

Sartre's explanation on p. 52 of Rouledge's edition may explain vertigo situations and false sense of safety caused by'over confidence' and similar feelings in aviation.

Sartre's 'Sketch for a Theory of Emotions' is a difficult to absorb but a precious treasury that can be used to understand Crew Resource Management and other situations in aviations. It has to be studied by teachers and the results have to betaught to pilots, ATCO's and engineers. The aviation world could be a better place if only this were done.

Ali R+ SARAL
Kış Eğitim Merkezi Komutanlığı
Bursa, Uludağ Orduevi

HOMEOSTASIS IN ATC

2008-06-25T13:59:00.000-07:00

Homeostasis (from Greek: ὅμος, homos, "equal"; and ιστημι, histemi, "to stand" lit. "to stand equally"; coined by Walter Bradford Cannon) is the property of either an open system or a closed system, especially a living organism, that regulates its internal environment so as to maintain a stable, constant condition. Multiple dynamic equilibrium adjustments and regulation mechanisms make homeostasis possible. The concept was created by Claude Bernard, often considered as the father of physiology, and published in 1865. (WIKIPEDIA)

Air Traffic Control systems are discreet event dynamic large systems. They are composed of three sub systems the visualization of the traffic data – radar data processing, the planning and partitioning of the operational load – flight data processing, and all the related communications – ATN . There is also the substructure which provides the necessary services for these three subsystems – SYSTEMS. ATC system are also a combination of human and machine elements. There are many operators of different types.

I would like to point out at the homeostasis in the air traffic control systems between the technical and operational groups. The operational group comprises air traffic controllers and the various people in their management hierarchy. Most of these people come from an air traffic controller back ground.
The technical group is composed of a mix of engineers and air traffic controllers… Some of the engineers come from a technical background while some of them come from math and science university education and engineering faculties. Air traffic controllers in the technical group function as interface to the operational group. They work in requirements specification, quality control, configuration management and testing.

The safety created by an air traffic control center is the result of a combination of the work of the operational and technical work done. When the technical side fails, the operational measures are used. For example, seperation is increased. Also, when the technical facilities get old and are out of date, operator load increases. For ex. if the radar views are not good, operators have to cope with this difficulty somehow.

The homeostasis between the technical and operational side works in ATC so that when the technical side goes down the role of the operational side increases or vie versa. When everything is perfact operational side relaxes a little bit.

Why am I writing this note? It is not a big deal up to this point. The interesting phenomenon begins when we observe: If one of the two elements that comprise the homeostasis dominates the relation,
what happens then? For ex. operational side effects the technical decisions for various reasons…
These decisions may vary from setting unrealistic deadlines to deciding which technical systems to buy…

The dynamic nature of the homeostatic balance may determine the sudden or unjustified changes in the balance. In fact the flexibility of the system is designed so that even if the radar views are lost air traffic control can continue with the strips. The risk of losing touch with the technical reality is more on the long run. I believe, it is very difficult to maintain and develop a technically upto date system while carrying on the day to day ATC duties.

There is a tangible risk in ATC which may arise from the tendency of one of the technical and operational groups to dominate the other.

Ali R+

Note: I woke up to the importance of this issue because of the contrast I noticed btw Turkey and Karlsruhe in regards to this matter. Thanks again to Herr Ehrenberger (ECO).

ON THE NATURE OF CONCENTRATION

2008-06-07T12:03:00.000-07:00

To Mr. Cevdet ACAR

This is the first of a series of my articles on the nature of human concentration. Actually, concntration is not an exclusive attribute of the human-being.

Concentration is an attribute of matter. Concentration is described as ‘the situation of coming together at one point.’ Concentric means ‘having a common centre.’

The meaning changes a bit when it comes to the concentration ability of the human mind. Merriam-Webster defines it as ‘direction of attention to a single object’. It is misinterpreted as focusing in the daily usage.

An easy way to understand, demonstrate and control the abilities of the human mind is to think visually. In terms of looking with our eyes, concentrating means to look at something and see other things only in relation to this reference point. To focus means to look at something and not see other things at all.

To focus means to limit your attention to a specific object(for ex. inclusion of something into attention). To concentrate means to change the character of your attention so that included thing appears in your focus on the basis of some sort of exclusion of others, so to speak.

It is possible to lose concentration but keep focus, when looking. You can relax your attention, but change the size of the area that you look at, for ex.a whole person or a face. This is important for implementing relaxed attention.

You may also increase your concentration but lose focus, if you like, a little bit more complex though. You may look at nothing specific, but enjoy fully the wide wiew on the coast of Istanbul Bosphorus.

Concentration and focusing abilities are not totally visual. These can be observed in all forms of perception, cognition, motor faculties. The embodiment of self, the sense of being is closely related with the sense of time. We feel our being, our existence at the moment we are in, namely ‘the specious present’, or now.

The length of specious present changes, according to the situation we are in. Also, the frequency of the renewal of our sense of now or feeling one’s self or being changes. When we are doing something we do not feel our being directly all the time. In fact concentrating on the thing we do reduces the frequency of our feeling of self. This also reduces the sense of time. This frequency also corresponds to the perception frequency. When the perception frequency increases sensitivity increases.

The specious present concept is somewhat belaguered at this point. The specious present is a duration of perception, of which total duration is effected-determined by concentration.

Attention is an abstraction of focus. Attention determines the limits of things we deal with at one moment. If we deal with more than one thing the length of the moment expands, so the specious present increases.

This explains why with high concentration sometimes, we do not feel the time that passes and sometimes we do feel it longer than it really is. If we do a single simple thing with high concentration, specious present is short, so we do not feel the time, or feel it as if shorter. On the contrary, if we do a complex thing with high concentration we feel as if the time passed is much longer than it really is.

The specious present are the moments that we feel our being, self.The specious present are the times that the brain’s cognition works consciously. Healthy functioning of human mind depends on the average balance between the conscious and subconscious activities. For example, to understand a foreign language with facility, you should not concentrate too much but you should relax a little bit, so that the things you hear at the specious durations get processed between them by your subconscious.

Working on complex tasks with high concentration for long durations, causes us to develop skills that enable us keep our specious present as long as possible, with the highest frequency. If one is not well equipped and trained to handle these skills, long duration high concentration complex jobs may suppress and hurt the human subconscious or increase the perception to the point of seeing-hearing halucinations. The suppression of subconscious may inevitably hurt the whole psychology and cause the human mind to react in a series of psychosis.

In order to avoid all this mess, you should simply apply the 20 20 20 rule while working. “Every 20 minutes, pause whatever you’re doing and stare at something 20 feet away about 10-15 paces away) for 20 seconds.”

The bottom line is, this type of jobs are one of many choices, you may choose to climb a high mountain or serve at an air traffic control center as an engineer or air traffic controller, or choose to serve as a surgeon. It is up to you.

TO BECOME A STREET JANITOR

2008-05-07T20:23:00.001-07:00

The street janitors of Koşuyolu are special. This attribute arises because of the structure of the vicinity which is mostly houses with small gardens and relatively large deserted streets. In fact, the janitors of all the vicinities in Istanbul are special.

I have always been amazed by the magic of the janitors since I was a small child. The first individuals that I had a chance to meet out of my family were the street janitor, the postman, the ‘simit’ seller and after that the ice cream seller… In distance the grocery shp owner, the butcher and others…

It was very difficult for me to depart from my mother for a whole day when I began to the primary School with out going to kindergarten first… It has been carefully noted in our family jargon that I had cried “I won’t ever go to school, I will become a janitor!” in response to my father’s military offcer smile mixed with a ‘shining golden tooth’ in it, which generally indicated an intrigue. As far as I could see At that moment, being a janitor was the closest job that I could perform closest to my father.

Being a janitor has its magic like any other job. A service job… Our vicinity’s janitors have always been people who clean up around silently, avoiding personal contact and they use to disappear in an unknown time as they appear… Carefully, they give succinct but not predominant answers when conversed…. What matters in their relation with the inhabitants of the street is the service.

I love to watch how the janitors perform their jobs since my chidhood… These ‘guys’ are masters of the ‘let it go’ philosophy. As you know, our people in Turkey are not brought up with personal discipline of cleanness yet, unfortunately. So, the janitors have a lot to do every day… I can observe that the janitors in Istanbul have it ‘ab die Nase – up tp their noses…’ The thing that most excites me is to watch how these heavily loaded janitors manage to confront this difficulty.

Working discipline, to protect their own health and patience, to preserve his energy for his family and the people themselves they serve… Choices between all these are reduced practically to choosing the various types of rubbish that lie on the side way or the street and sweep them into his handheld bucket with his room. Janitors are masters of ‘let it go’ or ‘may it stay’.

Sweetly… The janitor stands on the street with an inner peace, grace and confidence that mar s, if he leaves something on the street, he will find it somewhere close the next day.

Ali R+
April the 23rd 2008(Turkish Children’s Day), Koşuyolu

THE ROLE OF TIMEFRAME IN DECISIONMAKING

2008-02-16T19:38:00.000-08:00

What is the reason that makes a decision correct? It is first of all the availability of correct and sufficient information. “You should not have an opinion before you have sufficient information!” said Uğur MUMCU, a renown newspaper researcher-writer and assassin of fundemantalist activists. On the other hand, the governors of countries which have the largest information sources and means can and do make mistakes. There must be some other reasons…
What is the role of time in the correctness of the decision? Is being at the “Right time right place” enough? “Thinking in the speed of light” or “To understand papa before hearing the pa”, (“Leb demeden leblebiyi anlamak”, a Turkish addage) etc… Does thinking fast provide correctness to the decision or even contribute to it?

Is it good to make all decisions quickly? Is this approach that speed is more important than anything else as in the cowboy duels valid in all other cultures? Should it be valid? Does speed in the decision making process guarantee correctness?

There is also the case, in the Turkish culture where a village child, under the pressure of life, can not answer the question of a TV reporter because he is afraid of saying anything wrong… Maybe that is the reason our educators emphasize ‘make a decision as quick as possible and say something rather than remain silent’….

In fact, we can look from a view point so that these two vastly seperate examples can appear to be not so far. This point of view is not the speed of the decision making process but the time, the duration dedicated to making a decision.

The thing that determines the correctness of a decision is the timeframe dedicated to its formation and the chosen moment for its declaration. One should decide first when the decision should be taken in order to make the right decision. Then decide how long it should take, the timeframe necessary to make this decision. Determining the timeframe correctly and applying it give the result of a correct decision.

The processing of information in our brains does not happen in a moment… It takes time. Just try it when you can not remember something. Try to recall a few things related to the thing that you can not remember. The second or third degree things related to these… Leave some space in between and hesitate. You will remember the missing thing innately in a while…

The phenomena related to the decision while making it are processed in our mind or in the common wisdom similarly to the above. Phenomena trigger other phenomena that are semantically related to them. The depths reached by chain triggering or cascade connections increase according to the seriousness of the situation. Things that have to be accounted for must be kept in the working memory where they can easily be noticed. The solution of the problem may require obsession and concentration even focusing to the matter. While some of these effect the efficiency of processing, all of these happen and are controlled according to the sense of time provided by the timeframe.

The timeframe, namely the duration and the deadline to make a decision is a unique subsistance for making the right decision. If you do not put in enough time you may miss all the phenomenons related to the subject. You may miss the chains of phenomena related to each other, the cause and result relations… You may make decision quickly and easily because your working memory is not overloaded. This gives you the possibility to handle more difficult decisions to come.

If you dedicate more than necessary time to decision making, you may get lost in apparently related but not vital details and get drowned in depths. Your working memory gets overloaded, you may lose the freshness necessary to make healthy decisions. Obsession, concentration and focusing becomes an open-end purpose in themselves when they are not directed to a substantial aim and may damage your personal health permanently.

Determining the right moment and the timeframe to make a decision provides correctness. This is difficult to apply in actual life ofcourse… For ex. in the emergency intervention of some cases, is the timeframe shorter than duration necessary for choosing the right option.

The doctor that intervenes to an emergency situation is forced to choose at least ONE of the available options rather than the best one of the available ones. It is not more important to find the best choice than applying at least one choice as quick as possible to give the patient a chance to live… The timeframe alone determines the correctness of the decision in emergency conditions.

The statesmen are sometimes in a similar situation when the necessary timeframe is much longer than available time to make a decision… They can not wait and see the preliminary results of their decisions and apply recursion to correct them, which may take quiet sometime in social matters.
It is not a surprise good politicians have fortitude and clairvoyance.

If carefully studied, one can observe that Einstein’s proof of Newton’s mechanical movement law is wrong in speeds close to the light’s, is based on looking at the phenomenon from a different point of observation, namely the timeframe that movements take place.

Timeframe determines correctness of the decision.

Ali R+ SARAL

http://csg.cizgi.com.tr/

TRIGGING MECHANISMS IN DECISION MAKING

2008-02-16T19:36:00.000-08:00

Abstract: CHRISTOPHER D. WICKENS has written an article titled ‘Multiple resources and performance prediction’ at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Institute of Aviation Willard Airport, Aviation Human Factors Division, Aviation Research Laboratory. This article proposes a model to predict human performance under conditions that require multiple mental resources. I will make use of the information provided in Wickens’s article to point at the importance of trigging in human cognition.

To my fellow Turkish aviator Mr. Servet BAŞOL,

A trigger is a simple, high “affordance”, easy to use mechanism. You should not think elaborate things to make it work. Its implementation should be independent from the logic of the system it starts. Starting the system must be totally insulated from the decision making. It should work as simple as a Texas cowboy firing his gun.

Our brain does multiprocessing, multitasking and distributed processing. We can talk and walk at the same time. We can talk to two different persons on different subjects in the same time interval. MRI pictures show that different parts of our brains get activated for different types of tasks. We perform these tasks using various resources of our minds.

“The multiple resource model proposes that there are four important categorical and dichotomous dimensions that account for variance in time-sharing performance. That is, each dimension has two discrete 'levels'. All other things being equal (i.e. equal resource demand or single task difficulty), two tasks that both demand one level of a given dimension (e.g. two tasks demanding visual perception) will interfere with each other more than two tasks that demand separate levels on the dimension (e.g. one visual, one auditory task). The four dimensions, shown schematically in figure 1, and described in greater detail in the following pages, are processing stages, perceptual modalities, visual channels, and processing codes. Consistent with the theoretical context of multiple resources, all of these dichotomies can be associated with distinct physiological mechanisms.”

Wickens’s model has been supported by many MRI works that study the brain locations activated by specific tasks. Unfortunately many mental tasks are complex. For ex. speech activates many parts of the brain at the same time. This makes it extremely difficult to drive some generalizations in regards to the character of these activated brain locations. Simply it is difficult to claim that there are simple, straight forward, seperate, ‘processors’ or even ‘centers’. Wickens’s aproach and ‘resources’ model serves its purpose without making unproved generalisations.

But, Wickens also states: “In employing multiple resource theory to guide such dichotomous categorical design decisions, it is of course important to bear in mind the other consequences of switching from one resource category to another, such as, for example, the fact that a visual-spatial map may be a more compatible means of delivering geographical information than via words.” Wickens’s statement points at the overload that arises because of changing the modality during task performance, namely driving a car and navigating at the same time. Wickens clearly assumes the existence of some sort of a trigging mechanism, which triggers an other modality with some mental performance cost.

Today, we certainly know that there are many neural networks in our brains. There are also connections between dedicated neural networks. My point is: Wickens’s ‘resources’ are triggable with some sort of trigging mechanisms, possibly hard and/or soft. Moreover believes this humble dreamer, mental triggers are ubiquitous. We can observe them beginning from low level physiological structures going up to skills, hobbies, professions, habits.

Trigging mechanisms can be built in many different ways. Seeing objects, images trigger our brain’s visual resources, hearing sounds triggers hearing resources… Visual and acoustic signals are recieved by different organs and this provides a hardware connection and filtering mechanism.

But it is not that simple. The sound and visual signals also have different data characteristics. The frequency bands for sound and image are different. It is not only the organs and physical connections that triggers our brain’s visual and acoustic centers but also the character, the format of the sound and the image signals.

It is amazing, how brain transforms and processes signals of different modalities such as sound and image. The signals loss their perception formats when they are taken into the working memory as semantic chunks… How does the central processor decide which processor to trig for which signal then?

There must be some encoding algoritm, maybe only the amount of data or the SPEED. The way the data is provided and processed could trigger the related processor. A neural network could simply work as an RC filter circuit besides its logical function and filter acoustic or visual signals as high or low pass filters, maybe.
Within a certain modality, content adrressing triggers related items at different semantic levels. For ex., when you see me, it triggers your previous impressions about me.

Trigging does not function linearly either. Same events do not trigger same reactions in our brain under all conditions. Anticipation, priming, mood, motivation, context and memory usage affects trigging mechanisms of our brain.

My second point is: Trigging is a vital element of our mental life both socially and individually… Sadly trigging can be used by people with bad intentions such as the assassination in the beginning of the first WW. On the other hand it is a rich human resource that can not be overused. Emergency psychology, decision making under stress, large systems, aviation, air traffic control have many applications for it. Slow progressing processes such as education, politics etc. also…

A trigger mechanism reduces flexibility but increases automacity when designed correctly. It brings a level of abstraction. There are different types of mental triggers: For remembering things, you could say ‘I will remember this tonight’, or ‘I will wake up 6 O’Clock in the morning’, ‘I will stop thinking about my job when I come to the stairs of my house, till I begin to drink my coffee after my dinner, I may remember it if necessary’…
It looks like the religious commitments that one makes before fasting etc…

Reaction triggers could be ‘I will push the brake to the bottom when it is inevitable’, but this should rather be a warmth in your right leg muscle rather than words… Sports is all about doing the right triggering.

Finally, cognition, a healthy mental life requires the development and maintenance of personal triggering mechanisms. Emergency processing, analysis, smalltalk, imagination, design, planning, mindfullness, high concentration, high concentration long duration working, recovering emotions after heavy cognitive work… Staying healthy as a successful professional requires maintenance and enhancement of your mental triggering processes so that you sustain your well-being.

TRIGGERS

2008-02-16T11:29:00.001-08:00

Nobody needs to think what to do with a hammer. Hammer’s form indicates its function. This is called affordance. Trigger is the same as hammer in this sense. A person who sees a gun understands immediately that he has to pull the trigger to fire. Trigger’s affordance is also high similar to hammer.

Imagine all the weapons or devices that begin to work by a single signal. A shotgun, a pistol, a hair dryer, an automobile, a computer and any device that has an open button… All of these have a button, switch etc. a mechanism that makes a device work, namely a trigger. Even a baby recognizes that she has to push a button to make something work. They usually make a game out of it though…

Trigger is very simple and compact. Its purpose is without any hesitation crystal clear. Its physical appearence, colour and purpose are easily percievable. If the mechanism that the trigger trigs is related to human life, these attributes are even more clear.

From the point of design should the trig mechanism not bear any cognitive function. The action of pulling the trigger should not involve any thinking. The safety mechanism of a gun requires the user to evaluate the situation. After the safety mechanism is released, pulling the trigger and trigging the gun to fire should be extremely easily.

A good trigger should enable its user to react immediately and as required. The Trigger should not have any evaluation, judging or logical ability. Trigger should immediately do what it is required to .

If abstracted, may these attributes of trig be applied to other mechanisms that start systems. For ex., the decision making techniques that we use under emergency conditions, which are very simple and results oriented.
When reacting to a person dying in an emergency room, it is not more important to decide which one is the most appropriate among the 2-3 available options than to apply one of them as quick as possible to give the patient at least some chance of survival… It is a ‘trigger’ that controls the behaviour of the doctor at that moment, a ‘trigger’ formed previously by his education and experience. It is vital to pull the trigger at that moment more than anything else, just like a Texas cowboy…

If we generalize a little bit, trigging is done after an algorithm, a logic, a decision making process. A good trig should be independent from this mechanism. You must first decide to shoot and after that pull the trig and shoot. The total duration to do this is yor response time infront of the threat directed to you. An other article of mine on how you can minimize this duration and the mental substructure of trigers will be available at http://largesystems-atc.blogspot.com in a short while….

It is possible to observe the existance of trigging mechanisms in every decision making process. To make a decision requires the evaluation of the available data and reaching a resolution at the end of this process. Reaching a resolution is the result of a TRIGGER mechanism. Large systems, pilots, air traffic controllers, firefighters, soldiers, doctors and other emergency personnel have to make decisions under stress. It is vital to have developed and prepared the correct TRIGGER mechanisms in these situations… The responsibility of the training and support for the mental health of these professions is yet to be resumed completely even by the European authorities.

Trigging mechanisms are subsistent for our minds in the daily life… The trig should be attached to a condition. Such as ‘I will wake up at 6 O’Clock in the morning’ or, ‘I will forget everything related to the job at the entrance stairs of my Home, till I drink my coffee after the dinner and relax when it may come back if necessary…’ As it is called ‘Niyet ettim …yapmağa’ (‘I commit myself to do…’) in religious commitments.

Even though trig may be considered trivial at the first glance, it is something used unconsciously in the human nature, a vital instrument in our interaction with the subconscious and our automatic processes… Wrong triggings may include suicides, deadly crimes and may cause unreversable loses and damage even in the social relations as seen in the assassination event at the beginning of the first World War.

Triggers are subsistent and indispensable. Trigger mechanisms are part of our natural beings as well as nature’s. Human mind and brain and also social and economical events, overall the nature of matter sustains trigger’s abundance. As the son of a commando training officer who trained many ‘trig like’ (interalia) brave soldiers and, in the warm memories of what he chose to teach us; my wish from you and advise is; the person who has read this short article till its end can do much more than a simple trigger can and, I believe, you should.

Kind regards.

Ali R+ SARAL

THE FEAR OF DARKNESS IN MY CHILDHOOD

2008-01-24T01:40:00.000-08:00

Peisaj [5]

I was three or four years old. My ‘baba’ (papa) was a military chief at Mardin Nusaybin (Syria border, southeast Turkey). Our Home was the only one built with cement in Nusaybin. It was located outside the village at the top of a small hill. Nusaybin did not have electricity at that time. My mother was a little bit nervous because of my father’s duties. My ‘baba’ had to go out to catch smugglers at nights. A deep darkness would sink over our Home those times… Sometimes would burials take place in the cemetery at distance right in front of our Home… Night burials, according to the local customs. I used to watch them secretly my hair rising… The groups walking in the darkness, candle lights, the dead being carried lying over ladders… Not really understanding what was going on…

Six months later my mother’s efforts succeeded. My father gave up his carrier. He applied for his well deserved retirement. We bought a new house at one of the then suburps of Istanbul. Our new Home had a large garden. We used to have nice evenings at the front-garden in hot summer nights. I remember, every now and then, my father used to send me to the back-garden to fetch some stuff during these night leisures. I was ‘damn’ afraid of going to the back-garden in darkness. Everybody would burst out into laughter and make fun of the situation rather than me and we would have a sweet time in the family about a small secret that belonged to us all.

Although the fear of darkness in my childhood decreased gradually, it followed me for many years. It transformed into a sensitivity and sense of prudence through time. I wonder, if I had not lived the experiences in Nusaybin at the ages of three to four, would I have a fear of darkness? I do not think so. I would not… Nevertheless, many people get nervous about darkness or fear from it. For many justifiable reasons.

OK then, what is the thing that makes darkness such a source of fear? Why is darkness fearsome? Is darkness the fearsome thing itself or is it something in ourselves that makes us afraid?
Is this secret thing located there in the darkness or is it somewhere else? Really, why do we think that something we can not see is located in the darkness, rather than somewhere else for example under the street lamp?

The reason that makes us nervous about darkness is it is not something we could hold in our hands, it is not an absolute object. Just like time… Difficult to understand… Specially difficult for people younger than age 16, who has not developed a concept about abstraction, yet. Darkness is not an object like a door, a table or a wall. Maybe it is rather something like tiredness or sadness…
Its opposite enlightenedness (aydınlık, tr) is rather like happiness, joy… In short is darkness a situation and a mood rather than an object.

Darkness is both a phsical situation and our perception of it. If sunlight falls on the furniture in our house our Home is ‘enlightened(aydınlık, tr)’. The sun light beams that are reflected from the furniture reach our eyes with enough intensity. But in the evening, the intensity of the sun light decreases. First, some colors begin to lose their liveliness and begin to appear as a shade of grey. Then, they become grey in semi-darkness and disappear in the darkness.

Our interaction with darkness in our modern lives is not the same as in the nature. We move from darkness to light and vice versa suddenly during our daily lives for many times. For example, when the child wishes ‘good night’ and goes to her room she has to go into darkness first and then open the light suddenly and then close it again… Or, when you are driving at night, the cars approaching from the other side of the road dazzle your eyes frequently.

Car, airplane or any vehicle drivers abide the night vision priciples. Airplane pilots’ night flying techniques include a different vision technique. “In daylight you have to look directly at the target object. At night, you have to look at slightly one side of the target object. Scanning the target by moving your eye permits “off-center” viewing. You should not look directly at the target object at night unless there is a special reason.”

“The explanation for this lies in the DUAL STRUCTURE OF OUR EYE’[4]. The cones work in day light and the rods at night. The rods are located on the periphary of a circle around the cones.

The cones need a greater intensity of light to function, and stop working in semidarkness.
The rods can function in 1 / 5000 th of light intensity. The cones are 100000 times sensitive in dark as they are in light. So, they work at night.”

The problem is; what do the rods do in the day light? The rods provide a grey scale view, while cones provide coloured… Rods lose their sensitivity after short exposure to light. This means less sensitivity is used only for percieving objects in the peripheral view…

In short, seeing is not as simple as we naturally presume. Our ability to see changes at different levels of light intensity… We can not see with the same quality in all conditions. Our ability to see in darkness is much less than in sun light. If explored, we can easily find that our seeing ability is not limited by only the availability of the sunlight. We have other limits also… The views of fast moving seperate things appear to us as if belonging to a single thing moving continuously, for example.

Seeing is not limited with the functions of the eye of course… Our brain first percieves then understands the things that our eyes see. We also have some limits in our brain’s visual perception naturally… We can not percieve the second event if two events happen too quick sequentially… They call this perceptional blink sometimes…

Our seeing abilities, given by the Creator, require a period of adaptation when the conditions of the environment change, the environment that we are temporarily in. When we move into darkness
suddenly, the rod cells in our eyes need some time to get activated. At these instances, give yourself sometime for your brain to get healthy-correct information from your eyes.

During the flow of times, we all experience sudden changes of things we are used to. The problem is not only the change in the conditions that we are accustomed to but also the fact that we, ouselves change. Whether we notice it or not, the way our body and mind work, changes according to the conditions that we are in. A small kid gets red spots on his skin suddenly, a software engineer approaches the end of his project, a pilot lands with his co-pilot in bad climate conditions, or an air traffic controller whose job is to keep airplanes apart from each other loses his radar system which enables him to see the skies…

When you fall into sudden darkness, I believe, there may be a few tricks that you may learn and borrow from an air traffic controller who has lost the view of airplanes on his radar. He at least has strips of papers in his hand that shows the locations and directions of his resumed airplanes... If the lights go off when you are on the stairway, you should have kept certain reference points in your mind beforehand, such as the location of the handrail, your relative position in the current floor stairs…

Darkness is not an object to be afraid of, it is a sitaution, a mental mood. To cope with darkness, you should have reference points that You have created before. We can not control everything in our lives but ‘knowing ourselves’ could make us stronger against the difficulties, at least.

Ali Riza SARAL

Note: The inspirational bases of this article lie in:

1. NIGHT VISION: A PEDAGOGICAL METAPHOR FOR AVIATION
http://largesystems-atc.blogspot.com/2008/01/night-vision-pedagogical-metaphor-for.html

2. Chip HEATH and Dan HEATH, MADE TO STICK – “the curse of knowledge”

3. HOW TO BE A DAMN SEXY MAN– “let the kids turn the page”
http://kristenbrookebeck.blogspot.com/2008/01/how-to-be-damn-sexy-man.html

4. AVIATION MEDICINE, Night Flight, http://www.pilotfriend.com/aeromed/medical/night_vision.htm
Helicopter Flight, http://meanwhile.com/?domain=helicfi.com

5. Bogdan GAVRUS, Peisaj, http://gavrusphoto.blogspot.com/

NIGHT VISION: A PEDAGOGICAL METAPHOR for AVIATION

2008-01-07T11:21:00.000-08:00

Vizual [0]

‘Autokinesis’ is a special visual hazard of night flying. When you look constantly at a small point in a dark night, you feel as if the light is moving, after a while. Otherwise, you may feel as if yourself is moving.

‘Autokinesis’ is only one of the discrepancies that we carry everyday without ever being aware of. Our discrepancies may appear not only at the edges of our abilities, such as night vision, but also in our routine daily activities. The sooner we get aware of them, the better the quality and fulfillment of our lives.

Unfortunately, we are created not to improve our abilities but primarily, to survive with them.
In any form of life comes improvement after survival. Our bodies, namely the embodiment of ourselves [1] is designed so that even if we loss some part of us we should survive.

Even if we lose an arm, after feeling the immediate shock, we should be able to continue our lives, together with a prosthetic device, and even feel as if we still have the lost arm in our minds as in some cases[2]…

I believe, a mental, behavioural discrepancy can and may become a part of ourselves, and our mental embodiment similar to a prosthestic device… A discrepancy may become part of our ‘subjective’ mental body till something happens and brings our attention to it, thus this discrepancy becomes our ‘objective’ mental body.

The problem is that, the transition from the subjective mental body to the objective one may cause pain and also damage the complex relations of choices a person has made to build his/her personality.

“In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain in terms of another, for example, understanding quantity in terms of directionality (e.g. "prices are rising"). “ [4] Using metaphors in psychological training of air traffic controllers, engineers and other aviation personnel, could be an effective pedagogical approach. Rather than doing not much while waiting for who is going to fall down…

If we return back to the night vision; ‘night flying requires a different visual technique than day flying’ [5]. In daylight you have to look directly at the target object. At night, you have to look at slightly one side of the target object. Scanning the target by moving your eye permits “off-center” viewing. You should not look directly at the target object at night unless there is a special reason.

‘The explanation for this lies in the DUAL STRUCTURE OF OUR EYE’[5]. The cones work in day light and the rods at night. The rods are located on the periphary of a circle around the cones.

The cones need a greater intensity of light to function, and stop working in semidarkness.
The rods can function in 1 / 5000 th of light intensity. The rods are 100000 times sensitive in dark as they are in light. So, they work at night.

The problem is; what do the rods do in the day light? The rods provide a grey scale view, while cones provide coloured… Rods lose their sensitivity after short exposure to light. This means less sensitivity is used only for percieving objects in the peripheral view…

My point is, the night vision metaphor may be used for teaching Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) awareness for aviators. OCD is a common problem among people working with risk.
It may be just a behavioural nuisance that can not be noticed or an increasing mental risk towards more serious situations. You have to be aware of what the people around you are doing, in order to warn them and not get affected by them.

Henry Szechtman and Erik Woody ‘s article “Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder as a Disturbance of Security Motivation” describes OCD as:
“We hypothesize that the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), despite their apparent non-rationality, have what might be termed an “epistemic” origin – that is, they stem from an inability to generate the normal “feeling of knowing” that would otherwise signal task completion and terminate the expression of a security motivational system.[7]”

Similar to the Night Vision mechanism of the eye, Security Motivation System is ‘hardwired’. It is highly tuned to certain kinds of input like the cones and rods working on different light intensities.
Probably much more complex than eye’s night vision mechanism, is the Security Motivation System also “automatic and autonomous, and “encapsulated,” or relatively isolated from information developed by other systems.”

The Night Vision metaphor provides a good example for teaching:
1. There are seperate resources in our mind and brain for different tasks.
2. There has to be an activation and stopping mechanism (homeostatic) for any resource.
3. There may be a switching mechanism which manages the processes related to different and competing tasks.

Moods, emotions, thinking speed in different situations may effect the switching mechanism and activation – deactivation mechanism of our minds and brains[8]. Selecting the right mood and time frame helps the team make the right decisions with the right mental resources.

Ali Riza SARAL

[1] “Phenomenological theorists distinguish between the subjective body(as lived and experienced) and the objective body (as observed and scientifically investigated). My lived body is an EMBODIED CONSCIOUSNESS which fluidly and pre-reflectively engages the world. As we engage in our daily activities, we tend not to be conscious of our bodies and we take them granted – body that is passed-by-in-silence (Jean-Paul SARTRE, 1943, Being and Nothingness)”.

[2] “Prothestic devices stretch the boundaries of the body. They create a continuity beyond the limits of the skin”(Carolien HERMANS, 2002, Embodiment: the flesh and bones of my body). “A body schema works on a subconscious level. It registers shape and posture of the body(without coming to awareness). It makes a record of the momentary relative disposition of one’s own body parts”. “Prothestic devices can be absorbed in the body schema. Just as a hammer in the carpenter’s hand is incorporated into his body schema, any virtual body part or interface(keyboard, mouse, joystick) can become part of the schema in a temporary or longlasting way…”

[3] For further reading: Embodiment and Man-Machine Interaction
http://largesystems-atc.blogspot.com/2007/07/embodiment-and-man-machine-interaction.html

[4] Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor
[5] “Night flying requires a different visual technique than day flying. You can see an object best during daylight by looking directly at it. At night, however, a scanning procedure is more effective - to permit "off center" viewing of the target. In other the words, you will find after some practice that you can see things more clearly and definitely at night by looking slightly to one side of them, rather than straight at them.
The explanation for this lies in the dual structure of your eye. There are two kinds of light-sensitive nerve endings at the back of your eye: (1) the cones, which distinguish colour and require considerable light to function, and (2) the rods, which detect objects only in shades of grey but can operate in very dim light.
The cones, because they need greater intensity of light to function, are used in day vision. In fact, the cones stop working altogether in semi darkness. Millions of these tiny structures are clustered at the back of the eyeball, directly behind the pupil. Not only do they distinguish colours, they pick up distant objects.
The rods are concentrated in a ring around the cones. Being colour-blind, they see only in greys and are used in peripheral vision during the day - that is, to perceive objects in motion out of the corner of the eye. Because the rods can still function in light of 1/5,000 the intensity at which the cones cease to function, they are used for night vision. These structures are 100,000 times as sensitive in the dark as they are in sunlight. However, they do need more time to adjust to darkness than the cones do to bright light. Your eyes become adapted to sunlight in 10 seconds, whereas they need 30 minutes to fully adjust to a dark night.
The fact that the rods are distributed in a band around the cones, and, therefore, do not lie directly behind the pupils, makes "off centre" viewing important to the pilot during night flight. If, in your attempts to practice the scanning procedures mentioned previously, you find that your eyes have a tendency to swing directly toward the target, force them to swing just past it so that the rods on the opposite side of the eyeball pick up the object.
Rods lose their sensitivity after short exposure to a light source, but regain it quickly after a moment of "rest." Consequently, a prolonged blink may be enough to renew the effectiveness of your vision if you are simply using the "off centre" technique, without scanning. Remember, too, that rods do not perceive objects while your eyes are in motion, only during the pauses.”
AVIATION MEDICINE, Night Flight, http://www.pilotfriend.com/aeromed/medical/night_vision.htm
Helicopter Flight, http://meanwhile.com/?domain=helicfi.com

[6] Ali Riza SARAL,
Kapanmayışlar, http://largesystems-atc.blogspot.com/2007/01/kapanmayilar.html
Kapanışlar, http://largesystems-atc.blogspot.com/2006/11/kapanilar.html

[7] “The psychological experience of compulsion is not well defined (Reed, 1985, p. 119), but nevertheless one can conceive of two broad mechanisms that would produce the intrusiveness and urgency characteristic of OCD symptoms. One is a pathological intensity of excitation of the particular thoughts, ideas or actions. The other is a relative failure of the systems that normally terminate such thoughts, ideas or actions.”

“Security Motivation System - … Such modular systems are innately specified and hardwired, highly tuned to certain kinds of input, comparatively automatic and autonomous, and “encapsulated,” or relatively isolated from information developed by other systems.“

“2. The system is readily activated, responding to even a slight chance of danger, and once activated, it has a long half-life, being slow to deactivate despite changes in the environment that feed into the appraisal process (Curio, 1993; Marks & Nesse, 1994; Masterson & Crawford, 1982). This easy-to-turn-on, hard-to-turn-off quality makes sense evolutionarily, because repeated false alarms are much less costly than even a single failure to prepare for upcoming danger.”

“Similarly, we hypothesize that an internally generated feeling of knowing provides not only a
phenomenological sign of goal-attainment but is also the physiological mechanism that actually
shuts-down security motivation.”

“An internally generated “feeling of knowing” (termed “yedasentience”) provides a phenomenological sign of goal-attainment and has as its consequence the termination of thoughts, ideas or actions motivated by concerns of harm to self or others. Failure to generate or experience this feeling produces symptoms characteristic of OCD.”

“Instead, according to the present model, the underlying problem is lack of closure -- the inability to turn off security motivation, which drives security-related thoughts, through the normal route of performing specific security-related behaviors.”

Henry Szechtman, McMaster University, Erik Woody, University of Waterloo, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder as a Disturbance of Security Motivation, http://inabis98.mcmaster.ca/reprints/MS02-082.pdf

[8] “The mechanics of the thinking process is affected by our emotions. Switching from one context to another, the rate of changing subjects, the amount of concentration, the depth of thinking through different abstraction levels, getting obsessed to solve the problem, thinking speed are dramatically affected by the affective situation we are in while thinking… “The various glands of the endocrine system release hormones into the bloodstream that have effects on specific sites in the brain, including those involved in emotion” says Cornelius [5] . A careful observer can notice that there are different working speeds of thinking in our brains. Our brains work in a slow mode when we are doing something related with safety or security(but not related to emergency) where as our ideas fly when we are doing something sentimental or dreaming… Thinking speed helps us to switch from one processor to another in our multiprocessor brain. Feelings and selecting the right mood help us to choose the right processor (or combination of processors) to do the ‘thinking’.”

Ali Riza SARAL, “Do Computers Feel?”,
http://largesystems-atc.blogspot.com/2007/12/do-computers-feel-1500words.html

[9] Gavrus BOGDAN, Vizual, http://gavrusphoto.blogspot.com

DO COMPUTERS FEEL? (1500 words)

2007-12-29T10:31:00.000-08:00

To Dr. David B. Williams,
ORAT, Illinois State University

Does computer feel? Does computer have emotions? Does computer feel joy, love, anger, fear, and others? Is the effect of the feelings of computer on its behaviour “pleasent or unpleasent, mild or intense, transient or long-lasting, and as interfering with or enhancing” [1] ? Do computers ‘experience emotions’? Do they react toward things in the environment that have such emotional qualities as frightening, cheering and saddening?

Schachter states “an emotional state may be considered a function of a state of physiological arousal and of a cognition appropriate to this state of arousal. The cognition, in a sense, exerts a steering function. Cognitions arising from the immediate situation as interpreted by past experience provide the framework within which one understands and labels his feelings. It is the cognition which determines whether the state of physiological arousal will be labelled as “anger”, “joy”, “fear”, or whatever. [4] ” Many more definitions of emotions have been made through the history beginning with 2nd cty BC, Aristotle. Descartes, Hume[3] , James, Cannon, Dewey[2], Freud, and many others.

Do computers have an ‘inner’ sentimental world? Too difficult to answer quickly… May be we should change the question a bit… Does any being except the human have feelings? Maybe the better: Do animals have feelings? Darwin writes about “most of the expressions and gestures involuntarily used by man and lower animals, under the influence of various emotions and sensations. [5]”

None of the animals can say “I feel sad.” Nevertheless, when a cat approaches a person sitting at a garden caffee, it bends its head to the ground and imitates as if it eats something. A careful observer may understand the animal needs food. Animals can communicate their needs. The problem is, most of us do not percieve the messages they are able to give. We should not judge neither animals nor computers as insensitive because they can not express themselves with the same emotional vocabulary as us the human-beings

Does this situation provide enough validity to the claim that ‘Computers do not feel’? Is there something wrong here ethically? Do we loss anything because of this silent assumption in our relations with computers? Are the Human Computer Interaction classes in many universities well equipped or even down-played as not technical enough? Why do many engineers and large system operators suffer from long duration high concentration jobs in front of their computers?

Indeed, computer does not have a face. A face like a human or even a mammal. It does not have eyes, ears, a skin, a head or a body… Wait a minute… Are you sure that computers can not see, hear or touch? What about scanner, microphone, keyboard? Computers do have many interaction functionalities similar to those that basic human senses provide.

The crux of the issue of ‘Do computers feel?’ is: Is it possible to think without feeling? Can cognition exist without emotions? Can you think even mathematics without feelings? Even if we assume that you really did not feel anything while solving a problem, you would still need to discharge the unused mental energy in some way. You might experience pride or humility depending on your success.

Even if you have the professional power to control everything, you must experience feelings when you are working in a cognitive job, like programming or air traffic control (ATC)… You can not avoid the pleasure from simple matching [6] . Otherwise, you may be working against the nature of thinking and you may hurt yourself mentally. In fact Winkielman [8] states “affective responses may also result from the dynamics of information processing itself.” ,[7], “ High fluency elicits positive affective reaction. [9] ”

The mechanics of the thinking process is affected by our emotions. Switching from one context to another, the rate of changing subjects, the amount of concentration, the depth of thinking through different abstraction levels, getting obsessed to solve the problem, thinking speed are dramatically affected by the affective situation we are in while thinking… “The various glands of the endocrine system release hormones into the bloodstream that have effects on specific sites in the brain, including those involved in emotion” says Cornelius [5] . There are different speed modes of thinking in our brains. Our brains work in a slow mode when we are doing something related with safety (not emergency) where as our ideas fly when we are doing something sentimental or dreaming… Thinking speed helps us to switch from one processor to another in our multiprocessor brain. Feelings and selecting the right mood help us to choose the right processor combination to do the ‘thinking’.

Freud states “ideas are cathexes-basically of memory traces- whilst affects and emotions correspond to processes of discharge, the final manifestations of which are percieved as feelings. [11] “ Hinde asks “Is it an intervening variable or a hypothetical construct? [12] ” and argues that “emotion is best defined in terms of chains or loops with emotion and cognition closely linked. [12] ” I believe, to reach a a conclusion on the question of “Do computers feel?” we shall have a look at the LINUX operating system books…

“An interrupt [13] is usually defined as an event that alters the sequence of instructions executed by a processor. Such events correspond to electrical signals generated by hardware circuits both inside and outside of the CPU chip.” “interrupt signals provide a way to divert the processor to code outside the normal flow of control. When an interrupt signal arrives, the CPU must stop what it's currently doing and switch to a new activity;”

If we make an analogy between Dewey’s emotion definition and work on the example of a touch to the keyboard; (1) the “feel“’s name is keyboard interrupt (2)purposeful behaviour is the interrupt handler program of Operating System (3) an object that has an emotional quality is the person who touches, namely the user. Dewey’s “Calm and Violent emotions” is analoguous to soft and hardware interrupts… The basis of the similarity between the human emotional system and the computer interrupt system arises from the very nature of cognition. Cognition can not exist without some sort of interaction with living matter.

Interrupt subsytem of computers is similar to the human physiology: “Both the hippocampus and amygdala are complexly interconnected with inputs from both the sensory organs and the viscera. … They, and perhaps other structures of the lymbic system, appear to integrate sensory information with information from the various organs of the viscera as well as feedback from the ANS to control the “output” of emotional expression in the ANS and other parts of the nervous system (LeDoux, 1986 Neurobiology of Emotion). [14]”

The nature of interaction requires the existence of a mechanism which processes “the inputs from the sensory organs [14]” When you touch the keyboard or click the mouse, press the Esc button, put a CD in the driver etc. the hardware connections, Interrupt Request Lines that carry this “sensory signal” instinctively work and trigger the interrupt controller, analogous to the amygdala…
The interrupt controller trigs the operating system very similar to the senses trigging emotions. The normal cognitive processing comes to a halt and the operating system runs the related interrupt service routine, which has a label analogous to Weyle’s “feel”… When the interrupt service routine does the task, for example writing to the disk, then returns back information about its success…
By the way, when the computer writes to the disk some trembling and noise indicate a similar situation to human “arousal”…

Aesop’s fable says; the fox tries to reach the grapes on the wine, but it can not. He says “They are sour anyway.” Sartre suggests “in emotion it is the body which, directed by consciousness, changes its relations with the world in order that the world may change its qualities. [15] ” When the computer meets a situation that it can not healthily handle, for example a division by 0, it issues a division exception and diverts the program execution to the related interrupt handler rather than abnormally ending…

Our initial question was “Do computers feel?” My answer is ‘no’ because they can not express their feelings with the same “feels” as humans, such as anger, fear. On the other hand, computers do have an embedded interrupt and exception system in soft and harware which is analogous to the human emotional system…

Then if my answer is ‘no’, why did I write this article with such an ambition? Because, the question “Do computers feel?” is wrong … A not so bad question chould be “Why don’t computers have emotions like us?” After all, it is us who have created computers with the knowledge and wisdom passed down from the distant past… Many man-years have been spent to create operating systems but relatively less on the effects of it on its users.

Large and complex systems such as ATC systems demand long duration high concentration working from engineers and controllers. I wish “Computers could feel” so that their users do not lose their feelings working with them…

Ali Rıza SARAL is an Electronics Engineer(ITU), composer(ISU) and a former civil servant of EUROCONTROL (European Agency for the Safety of Air Navigation) Software Team Karlsruhe. He has cured 24 documented Operational Deficiencies of the German KUIR airspace which includes Frankfurt.

REFERENCES:
[1] Strongman, The Psychology of Emotion, p. 1.
[2] Calhoun, Solomon, What is an Emotion, p.152, Dewey, The Theory of Emotion.
[3] Calhoun, Solomon, What is an Emotion, p.97, Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature.
[4] Calhoun, Solomon, What is an Emotion, p.174, Schachter and Singer, Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinans of Emotional State.
[5] Cornelius, ‘The Science of Emotion’, p. 23.
[6] Brian Bayly, The Brain’s Internal Reward from Matching, p. 1.
[7] Pronin, Wegner, Manic Thinking, Independent Effects of Thought Speed and Thought Content on Mood.
[8] Winkielman et al., The Hedonic Marking of Processing Fluency: Implications for Evaluative Judgment, p. 191.
[9] Winkielman et al., Affect and Processing Dynamics, Emotional Cognition, from Brain to Behaviour, p. 120.
[10] Cornelius, ‘The Science of Emotion’, p. 224.
[11] Calhoun, Solomon, What is an Emotion, p. 192, Freud, The Unconscious.
[12] Strongman, The Psychology of Emotion, p. 3.
[13] Daniel P. Bovet, Marco Cesati, Understanding the Linux Kernel, Interrupts and Exceptions, p. 96.
[14] Cornelius, ‘The Science of Emotion’, p. 226.
[15] Calhoun, Solomon, What is an Emotion, p.247, Sartre, The Emotions: A Sketch of a Theory.

My Address:
Ali Riza SARAL
Barbaros Mah. Sedef Sk. 13/13
Uskudar / ISTANBUL
TURKEY
Tel: 0090 (216) 474-8818
e-mail: arsaral(at)yahoo.com

DO COMPUTERS FEEL? (3000 words)

2007-12-29T10:29:00.000-08:00

To Dr. David Williams of ORAT-ISU

Does computer feel? Does computer have emotions? Does computer feel joy, love, anger, fear, happiness, guilt, sadness, embarressment, hope and many other emotions? Is the effect of the feelings of computer on its behaviour “pleasent or unpleasent, mild or intense, transient or long-lasting, and as interfering with or enhancing” [1] ? Do computers ‘experience emotions’? Do they react toward things in the environment that have such emotional qualities as frightening, cheering and saddening?

Dewey [2] defines emotion as a composition of (1) a “feel“ (the feeling of fear, pride, humility, etc.), (2)purposeful behaviour (3) an object that has an emotional quality. He describes the so-called
expressions of emotions as ‘the reduction of movements and stimulations originally useful into attitudes”. These reductions are grouped as “servicable associated habits”, “analogous stimuli”, “antithesis”, and “direct nervous discharge”.

Hume [3] states “pride and humility, tho’ directly contrary, have yet the same object. This object is self, or that succession of related ideas and impressions, of which we have an intimate memory and consciousness”. “the passions either take place alternately; or if they encounter, the one annihilates the other, as far as its strength goes, and the remainder only of that, which is superior, continues to operate upon the mind”. “we find, that a beatiful house, belonging to ourselves, produces pride.” “a quality I discover in these passions is their sensations, or the peculiar emotions they excite in the soul, and which constitute their very being and essence. Thus pride is a pleasent sensation, and humility a painful; and upon the removal of the pleasure and pain, there is in reality no pride nor humility.”

Schachter [4] states “an emotional state may be considered a function of a state of physiological arousal and of a cognition appropriate to this state of arousal. The cognition, in a sense, exerts a steering function. Cognitions arising from the immediate situation as interpreted by past experience provide the framework within which one understands and labels his feelings. It is the cognition which determines whether the state of physiological arousal will be labelled as “anger”, “joy”, “fear”, or whatever.”

Many more definitions of emotions have been made through the history beginning with 2nd century BC, Aristotle. Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Darwin, James, Cannon, Dewey, Schachter, Singer, Freud, Brentano, Scheler, Heidegger, Sarte and many others… Hoping to have enticed you to a wonderful journey in these precious people’s works I would like to repeat my initial question once more...

Do computers have an ‘inner’ sentimental world? Too difficult to answer quickly… May be we should change the question a bit… Does any being except the human have feelings? Maybe the better: Do animals have feelings? In his ‘The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals,’ Darwin writes “most of the expressions and gestures involuntarily used by man and lower animals, under the influence of various emotions and sensations.” You can find “Some of Darwin’s illustrations of familiar emotional expressions in animals [5] ” in Cornelius’s book ‘The Science of Emotions’.

None of the animals can speak like us. Neither can they say “I feel sad.” Nevertheless, when a cat or a bird approaches a person sitting at a garden caffee, it bends its head to the ground and imitates as if it eats something. A careful observer or a tender person with compassion understands or feels that the animal needs food. Animals can communicate their needs. The problem is, most of us do not percieve the messages they are able to give. We do not get nervous in front of a loud speaker playing music but many get afraid when a dog says simply a’hello’ just using his very limited vocabulary and powerful vocal tract.

We should not judge neither animals nor computers as insensitive because they can not express themselves with the same emotional vocabulary as us the human-beings. In order to percieve whether computer has feelings or not its emotions have to be easily percievable by us, namely we should share more or less the same ‘feels’ with computers as in animals. We can not percieve the emotional expressions of computers easily.

Does this situation provide enough validity to the claim that ‘Computers do not feel’? Is there something wrong here ethically? Do we loss anything because of this silent assumption in our relations with computers? Are the Human Computer Interaction classes in many universities well equipped or even down-played as not technical enough? Why do many engineers and large system operators suffer from long duration high concentration jobs in front of their computers?

Indeed, computer does not have a face. A face like a human or even a mammal. It does not have eyes, ears, a skin, a head or a body… Wait a minute… Are you sure? Are you sure that computers can not see, hear or touch? What about scanners, microphones, keyboard, power-on button? Don’t they provide the similar functionality as eyes, ears, skin… Computers do have many functionalities that basic human senses provide.

Computer has a head, that you can look into its face, namely the monitor, or a body that supports its being, namely the case or box that contains the mainboard. The problem is that they do not appear to our eyes as we are conditioned to see as a head or a body… Microsoft has invented a solution to this problem… They have a sweet doggy appearing at the side of the directory search. The doggy itches the ground or searches something in a book… It can express curiosity because it has a face… Microsoft uses the dog image to express the emotions of the computer during directory search. It has a healing effect on the user… It makes the user smile and lose concentration for a short while…

* * *

The crux of the issue of ‘Do computers feel?’ is: Is it possible to think without feeling? Can cognition exist without emotions? The pith of the matter is this. Can you think even mathematics without feelings? Can you study mathematics without feeling anything? Even if we assume that you really did not feel anything while solving a problem, but after that you will need to discharge the unused mental energy in some way. Besides, you will experience pride or humility depending on your success.

Even if you have become a great ‘professional’ who has the power to control everything, you must experience feelings when you are working in a cognitive job, like programming or air traffic control… [6] “ A spasm of pleasure can arise without any external stimulus, purely by operations within one’s own brain. For example, a person who has just woken from sleep may have an insight and experience a spasm of pleasure arising from it. The insight is cognitive, with neural correlates largely in the cortex, whereas the spasm of pleasure, physiologically quite separate, is largely subcortical.” As a finite human being you can not avoid the pleasure from simple matching [6] . Otherwise, you may be working against the nature of thinking and you may hurt yourself mentally.

In fact, even the thinking process itself creates emotions without any external inputs and it does so independent from the things you think [7] . Winkielman [8] et al. states “affective responses may also result from the dynamics of information processing itself.” “Fluency with which one can extract information from the presented stimulus is hedenocially marked. High fluency elicits positive affective reaction.” “ease of processing is consistently associated with more positive evaluations. [9] ”

Our feelings about our thinking process helps us to complete missing data or speed up our thinking process. “the fluency signal may be connected to affect by indicating the state of the ongoing processing operations. Thus, high fluency may indicate progress toward successful recognition and trigger positive affect due to the reinforcing value of maintaininfg the current, successful cognitive strategy and the ability to free resources for other tasks. [9] ” The link between the metacognitive system and the affect system is further supported by neuroimaging and elektropysiological data [9] .
It has been proved that brain’s parts related to metacognitive regulation and emotion processes or emotional control are the same [9].

The mechanics of the thinking process is affected by our emotions. Switching from one context to another, the rate of changing subjects, the amount of concentration, the depth of thinking through different abstraction levels, getting obsessed to solve the problem, thinking speed are dramatically affected by the affective situation we are in while thinking… “The various glands of the endocrine system release hormones into the bloodstream that have effects on specific sites in the brain, including those involved in emotion” says Cornelius [5] . A careful observer can notice that there are different working speeds of thinking in our brains. Our brains work in a slow mode when we are doing something related with safety or security(but not related to emergency) where as our ideas fly when we are doing something sentimental or dreaming… Thinking speed helps us to switch from one processor to another in our multiprocessor brain. Feelings and selecting the right mood help us to choose the right processor (or combination of processors) to do the ‘thinking’.

Let’s ask another question from the other side… Are feelings only a by-product of the thinking process, cognition? No. If you please read Schachter’s definition at the beginning of this article once more, you will notice that ‘physiological arousal’, trembling, increase in the blood temperature, heart rate etc. are also part of emotions. Also the instincts play a vital role besides the cognition element.
By observing human behaviour we can only notice that there is an intimate relation between emotion and cognition. We can go further by enhancing our sometimes ampirical experiments with today’s advanced neurological imaging techniques…

* * *

The main problem is to define ‘What is cognition?’ and ‘What is emotion?’ inorder to understand the character of the relation between them… Freud states “ideas are cathexes-basically of memory traces- whilst affects and emotions correspond to processes of discharge, the final manifestations of which are percieved as feelings. [11] ” He also adds “Even within the limits of normal life we can recognize that a constant struggle for primacy over affectivity goes on between the two systems Conscious and Unconscious, that certain spheres of influence are marked of from one another and that intermixtures between the operative forces occur. [11 ”

Hinde asks “the common view of emotion as a state has many attendant problems. Is it a motive or a trait? Is it an intervening variable or a hypothetical construct? [12] ” and argues that “emotion is best defined in terms of chains or loops with emotion and cognition closely linked. [12] ”
Strongman states “Emotions has sometimes been analysed as an intervening variable, anchored to observable stimuli and responses.”

I believe, any person who has studied data structures and computer architecture, can come to a similar conclusion after reading this article upto this point and maybe reading the references the better… Namely, a conclusion on the question of “Do computers feel?” Let’s have a look at the LINUX operating system books…

“An interrupt [13] is usually defined as an event that alters the sequence of instructions executed by a processor. Such events correspond to electrical signals generated by hardware circuits both inside and outside of the CPU chip.” “As the name suggests, interrupt signals provide a way to divert the processor to code outside the normal flow of control. When an interrupt signal arrives, the CPU must stop what it's currently doing and switch to a new activity;” “Each hardware device controller capable of issuing interrupt requests has an output line designated as an IRQ (Interrupt ReQuest). All existing IRQ lines are connected to the input pins of a hardware circuit called the Interrupt Controller, ”
“The Intel 80x86 microprocessors issue roughly 20 different exceptions. The kernel must provide a dedicated exception handler for each exception type. For some exceptions, the CPU control unit also generates a hardware error code and pushes it in the Kernel Mode stack before starting the exception handler.”

If we make an analogy between Dewey’s definition of emotion and work on the example of a touch to the keyboard; (1) the “feel“ (the feeling of fear, pride, humility)’s name is keyboard interrupt
(2)purposeful behaviour is the interrupt handler program of the LINUX Operating System (3) an object that has an emotional quality is the person who touches, namely the user. Freud states “certain spheres of influence are marked of from one another” in my above quotation from his article ‘Unconscious’. Which is analogous to “As the name suggests, interrupt signals provide a way to divert the processor to code outside the normal flow of control.” in my quotations from LINUX manuals. Dewey’s classifications of emotions have many similarities to interrupts and exceptions which also have different types. Dewey’s “Calm and Violent emotions” vs. soft and hardware interrupts… It is impossible to tell all the similarities between the interrupt processing subsystem of the computer operating system including the hardware architecture and the human emotion processing.

The basis of the similarity between the human emotional system and the computer interrupt system arises from the very nature of cognition. Cognition can not exist without some sort of interaction with living matter. The ideas in this article can not exist without being written on some sort of interaction media, may be a newspaper the better. By that, the journey of emotions begin, the reader holds the newspaper, maybe smells it, reads it and likes or even loves an article and binds to the newspaper with devotion…

Cornelius [14] outlines the results of recent neurophysiology research in his book “The Science of Emotion” in 10 pages. His book could outline the rest of all the past studies in 210 pages…
So if you want to have the answer of our question with his style in terms of physiology: “Both the hippocampus and amygdala are complexly interconnected with inputs from both the sensory organs and the viscera. They also serve as the origin of projections that connect them with Autonomic Nerve System as well as higher cortical areas. They, and perhaps other structures of the lymbic system, appear to integrate sensory information with information from the various organs of the viscera as well as feedback from the ANS to control the “output” of emotional expression in the ANS and other parts of the nervous system (LeDoux, 1986 Neurobiology of Emotion).”

The nature of interaction requires the existence of a mechanism which processes “the inputs from both the sensory organs. [14]” When you touch the keyboard or click the mouse, press the Esc button, put a CD in the driver etc. the hardware connections, Interrupt Request Lines carry this “sensory signal” instinctively work and trigger the interrupt controller, analogous to the amygdala…
The interrupt controller trigs the operating system very similar to the senses trigging emotions. The normal cognitive processing comes to a halt and the operating system runs the related interrupt service routine, which has a label analogous to Weyle’s “feel”… When the interrupt service routine does the task, for example writing to the disk, then returns back information about its success…
By the way, when the computer writes to the disk some trembling and noise indicate a similar situation to human “arousal”…

Aesop had told once upon a time a fable about the fox and the grapes; the fox tries to reach the grapes on the wine, but it can not. He says “They are sour anyway.” Sartre suggests “In short, in emotion it is the body which, directed by consciousness, changes its relations with the world in order that the world may change its qualities. [15] ” Isn’t it the same with computers? When the computer meets a situation that it can not healthily handle, for example a division by 0, it issues an exception of Divide error and diverts the program execution to the related interrupt handler rather than abruptly stopping…

Our initial question was “Do computers feel?” My answer is no because they can not express their feelings with the same “feels” as humans, such as joy, love, anger, fear, happiness, guilt, sadness, embarressment, hope usw. On the other hand, computers do have an embedded interrupt and exception system in both soft and harware which is analogous to the human limbic system…

Then if my answer is no, why did I write this article with such an ambition? Because, “Do computers feel?” is a wrong question… The right question should be “Why don’t computers have emotions like us?” It is us who have created computers together with the knowledge and wisdom passed to us from the distant past… We are the human-being who spend many man-years to create the operating systems but think very little on the effects of it on its users.

Large and complex systems, air traffic control systems and similar jobs demand long duration high concentration working from today’s engineers and system operators. Not to mention, the new growing engineers, toddlers who spend many hours on their computer games everyday… Have you noticed every soldier killed on the computer game, has to die convincingly, thus takes some time so that the kid’s concentration relaxes a bit in the mean time…

On the Christmas of 2008, I wish “Computers could feel” so that their users do not lose their feelings working with high concentration for long hours…

Ali Rıza SARAL is an Electronics Engineer(ITU) and a former civil servant of EUROCONTROL Software Team Karlsruhe. He has cured 24 Operational Deficiencies of the German KUIR airspace which includes Frankfurt.

REFERENCES:
[1] Strongman, The Psychology of Emotion, p. 1.
[2] Calhoun, Solomon, What is an Emotion, p.152, Dewey, The Theory of Emotion.
[3] Calhoun, Solomon, What is an Emotion, p.97, Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature.
[4] Calhoun, Solomon, What is an Emotion, p.174, Schachter and Singer, Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinans of Emotional State.
[5] Cornelius, ‘The Science of Emotion’, p. 23.
[6] Brian Bayly, The Brain’s Internal Reward from Matching, p. 1.
[7] Pronin, Wegner, Manic Thinking, Independent Effects of Thought Speed and Thought Content on Mood.
[8] Winkielman et al., The Hedonic Marking of Processing Fluency: Implications for Evaluative Judgment, p. 191.
[9] Winkielman et al., Affect and Processing Dynamics, Emotional Cognition, from Brain to Behaviour, p. 120.
[10] Cornelius, ‘The Science of Emotion’, p. 224.
[11] Calhoun, Solomon, What is an Emotion, p. 192, Freud, The Unconscious.
[12] Strongman, The Psychology of Emotion, p. 3.
[13] Daniel P. Bovet, Marco Cesati, Understanding the Linux Kernel, Interrupts and Exceptions, p. 96.
[14] Cornelius, ‘The Science of Emotion’, p. 226.
[15] Calhoun, Solomon, What is an Emotion, p.247, Sartre, The Emotions: A Sketch of a Theory.

HOW TO PREDICT AIR MISSES

2007-12-29T10:28:00.000-08:00

HOW TO PREDICT AIR MISSES

by Ali R+ SARAL

ABSTRACT : A method to predict the number of air-misses in a certain time duration and region based on performance, reliability, complexity and weather factors of an Air Traffic Control system.
KEYWORDS : ATC, air traffic control, vertigo, metrics, airmiss

ADDRESS: Ali R. SARAL
Barbaros Mah. Sedef Sok. Onur Sit. 13/13
Uskudar ISTANBUL
TURKEY-(TURKIYE)

MAIL ADDRESS: arsara(at)yahoo.com
TELEPHONE: 0090-(216)-474 8818

It is fatally important to ponder on the issues of Air Traffic Control (ATC) where the development pace of the available technologies may have overcome the development of the systems available and the belief in the unity of support to the people in the air is incidentally hurt in the wake of the recent air traffic accidents. I believe it is critically important to have the scientific communities' support and wide contribution in order to overcome the challenges that are coming ahead, the difficulties in the cooperation of Short Term Conflict Alert displays this alone.

This article proposes a prediction method to find the number of air misses in a given duration of time in a certain region. If it is applied concurrently and coherently it may point at where the first accident lying ahead is likely to happen. It depends on the fair and precise measurement of the controllers', ATC centers', airlines', technical support and systems' performance factors and the weather factors. The details of these metric values may be the subject of another article.

Air traffic control (ATC) system is a dynamic system. ATC system's behaviour changes through time according to the changes in the input and system parameters. In fact, 'the evolution of ATC system in time depends on the complex interactions of the timing of various discrete events' (1), such as the entry of many aircrafts in a certain period of time into a certain control region and the exit flowing rate of these aircrafts and how the ATC system reacts to this traffic both psychologically on the control team basis and the availability of the technical infra-structure of the system as a whole.

A mathematical model of an ATC system is given in equation [1]. This equation provides a metrical method, which may help to overcome the 'vertigo effect' of ATC, namely 'the false sense of safety'. Similar to any metrical value this equation may help to indicate the direction if not the value of the change of safety in the air provided that it is applied with vigorous consistency.
a*c
amiss = [ 1 - K * p * r * (1 - e * w ] * trd * dur (1)

amiss # of air misses for dur
trd average # of flights per day for the controlled duration and region [real num / day ]
dur total flight duration
p performance factor
r reliability factor
c complexity factor
w weather factor

K is a constant determined by the complex interaction of p, r, c, w. It reflects the composite effect of these factors. K can be determined and improved by using legal recording and other data.

a is a constant that determines the sensitivity of the traffic problem domain to the complexity of the ATC system. It may be determined heuristically in the beginning.

p,r,c,w are assumed constant for dur

0 < p =" 0," p =" 1," r =" 0," r =" 1," c =" 0," c =" 1," w =" 0," w =" 1" s =" amiss" safety =" number" s =" [" f =" amiss" size="1">NOTES
1- p(t) indicates performance factor which is calculated from the daily measurement of the control center, airlines and the airport performances.
2 - r(t) indicates the reliability of the ATC center availability or some of its facilities, the reliability of the airlines and the airports.
3 - c(t) indicates operational complexity such as route complexity, operational complexity and the technical system soft-hardware and support-development complexity.
4- w(t) indicates the risk affect of repeated or random weather difficulties in the controlled region.

REFERENCES
(1) Yu-chi Ho, "Performance Evaluation and Perturbation Analysis of Discrete Event Dynamic Systems", Transaction on Automatic Control, Vol. AC-32, No.7, July 1987
(2) Paul M. Frank, "Introduction to System Sensitivity Theory", Academic Press, New York, ISBN 0-12-265650-4
(3) Deutsche Flug Sicherung Presseinformation, Offenbach, 2 July 1996
(4) Rules for the Air and Air Traffic Services (Doc 4444 inter alia)
(5) The Karlsruhe Operating Data System EUROCONTROL

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ali R+ SARAL holds a M.Sc. (1985) degree in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering from Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, TURKEY and a second M.M. degree (1992)in Music Theory and Composition from Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois, USA. He has worked as a systems programmer in major banks and holdings in Istanbul and has served 5 years to the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation (EUROCONTROL) as a senior analyst programmer. The Operational Deficiencies he has fixed in concurrence with his colleaques' other works have contributed to the safety of people in Germany inter alia. Currently, he teaches at Yeditepe University, Istanbul.

MATCHING – THE ROLE OF EMOTIONS IN ENGINEERING

2007-12-29T10:27:00.001-08:00

You may wonder what relation do emotions have with engineering… Engineering is considered mostly in relation with mathematics and other positive sciences. This misconception arises from the wrong systems definition that we use to make. A system may roughly be defined as a structure that produces certain outputs for certain inputs outcome of which may be affected by some distortions from the environment. Although there exists a user in the real life which is excluded in this definition…

The inclusion of the user to the definition of the system may become a necessity in some cases. The complexity or largeness of the systems that are used requires the inclusion of the user to the system design. For ex. the safety and security of an airplane depends largely on the flight crew.
Thus the design of the system is designed according to this phenomenon.

An Air Traffic Control system, a nuclear reactor or even a traditional electric reactor, any system of which safety or security is vital depends on a single main human feeling: TRUST.
The pilots have to trust the air traffic controllers, the controllers have to TRUST the control devices and the engineers who develop and maintain them. The difficulty is not in assembling an electronic device box or running an assembler program but to BUILD THE TRUST of the users to this box or program.

Indeed, if you think a little bit, you may share the idea that, even though it is never expressed explicitly, from requirements to delivery and, from the calculation of costs to long term maintenance and enhancement, all over the project lies small and large, many conditions, suggestions and advises related to TRUST.

A good and successful engineer is one that you can easily trust, one that works like worshipping, one whose word is always true and when it is not, one who makes all the sacrifices to make his word come true with dignity, one who has no lies, no tricks, no guiles, one that can never be bribed, one does everything in his hand not to bribe and when he is obliged to do so one who knows very well that bribing hurts his very own efforts. Bribery and other kinds of social decay hurts first of all the feeling of TRUST in LARGE SYSTEMS and the projects that develop them.

When inspected closer, it can be easily seen that emotions such as fear and compassion may play secondary but important roles in some of the engineering projects… These effects can be observed in the behaviour of the teams at the end of the big projects or in the behavioural patterns of people performing jobs that may affect the lives of many people… The management of a project is not the application of some patterns such as MIL498, ISO12207 in a ‘military style’ without understanding their spirit.

The ability to control the motivation of a team and to lead it successfully through an engineering project lies in managing the emotions of that team. If you suggest otherwise, I would like to pose this question to you: The job is exciting, the payments are satisfying, then why do some of the engineers commit suicide?

You can find the name of a vitally important article related to this subject below at the end of my article. You may not only find the basis of some of my opinions above, but also health problems related to concentrating too much for too long durations, etc. which are related to the affective fundementals of large systems psychology. I will be concentrating on affections – affective disorders etc. subjects related to emotions in engineering in the near future.

Of course, belongs the last word to CONSCIENCE… European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation(EUROCONTROL)’s civil servant evaluation form which is filled every two years, has 12 items. One of these 12 items is ‘professional conscience’. May the forthcoming LARGE SYSTEMS companies of our ountry not forget the ‘professional conscience’ in their personnel evaluations. May our country not ‘give herself up’ to the European Union just for realizing this kind of simple things…

Ali R+ SARAL

Note: Please continue to Brian Bayly’s The Brain’s Internal Reward from Matching which you can find on the Internet. I have done a Turkish translation and editing of this article also. You may find it in the same blog. It resides here in the Turkish version.

THE DEVIATING MIND

2007-12-29T10:25:00.000-08:00

To Mr. Ahmet ARZIK,

Brain is one of our organs which does not have the ability to move. Think of the brain’s functional development during the process in which a new born grows up to become an adult. Our brains develop from the cognitive level of a little ‘snail’ which moves with its nutrition instinct, to a chess master who challenges a supercomputer…

What surprises us is not solely the impressive amount of change that our cognitive abilities undergo in our personal development process… This organ of ours which can not even move by itself, can deviate itself in a matter of a season, a couple of days or a few seconds because of the changing environment or its own inner conditions. According to our mood may this organ remember what it likes or forget what it does not, namely it deviates our remembering ability depending on the subject, it certainly does not work very well in hot summer days, on the other hand ina state of emergency, your brain orders your body to make the correct move in a much shorter time than you can consciously decide...

If we look in our cognitive activities closely, we can notice a complexity rising from variety and adjustability. This complexity increases because of the variety and uniqueness of each adult person’s individual solution in comparison to many others… ‘No two fingers of a single hand are the same’. On the other hand, ‘Every person is different but not different from all’…

The fact that our brains have many different abilities, gives us the possibility of creating our cognitive functions one by one through different combinations of these abilities. For example, a not very well educated person can still make quick and correct decisions with his/her feelings and instinct. University language preperatory school English teachers can at least handle ‘sharp’ students who have got much higher grades in the university entrance exam than them, with their teaching experience and knowledge. Our cognitive abilities can not only change depending on the mental, social and physical conditions but they also vary from person to person. The effect of his/her family’s child upbringing, the individual’s knowledge and experience reservoir, the point he/she stands in life, creates variety between individuals and how they survive in the competition to be successful.

Society and individuals reduce the difficulty of problems they meet by converting them to easily percievable models. Even to a single symbol or figure... In this process our brain is sometimes reduced to a small black box by the model makers. Society has the tendency to group everything related to cognitive ability under the title of ‘intellect’… Also, if a person is ‘sharp’ he/she is frequently considered to be so always and under all conditions whatsoever…

Everyone of us takes an important exam at one stage of his or her life. We all remember the level of ‘intellectual sharpness’ or acuteness we have reached during our preparations. On the other hand, there may be moments you may have difficulty to utter even a single word after you wake up in a hot summer morning. Then, which of these two people is you, yourself? The ‘sharp’ or the ‘moron’? The answer is ‘None of them solely’. Then what is wrong about the question? The mistake is in the way we look at the cognitive abilities of human-beings… We should never forget that, even though our brain can not move an inch by itself our mind does not have a static and frozen architecture or capacity. Our brain manages to cope with changing situations not by changing its location but by deviating its own self.

A person’s mental abilities change according to its age, the situation he is in, the current subjects he deals with and many similar factors. If an experiment were made, even the sharpest person on earth might not be able to make the right decision if he were being interrogated as a prisoner of war or if his airplane lose one of its motors at 10000m’s altitude, given that he does not have the necessary training and experience… Moreover, even if he had the knowledge and experience to do so, he might still not be able to make the right decision in some cases, because the professional human brain can not stay as constant as it were when it took the qualification exam…

When the architecture of the human mind is inspected, an anatomical and biological wealth can be observed underneath its functional variety. It is not a wonder such a complex living architecture can create personalities with extraordinary abilities… The most wonderful is the fact that brain is able to provide the human-being everything needed to cope for its complex social and individual challenges.

The complexity of our brains is reflected in the way we percieve and interact with things and other people. Designing tools and systems to be used by humans requires to handle this complexity in a simplified way. Faced with any complexity, we tend to make abstractions. Abstractions not only reduce the number of the things we are concerned but also limits the domains of their items. This also applies to our approaches to the complexity of our brains.

Wickens Information Model is developed to calculate how long it will take for the user to respond to an input. The below given depiction has got so much popular that it has gained a function similar to the model that describes to primary school kids the creation of seasons based on the so called ellipse shaped path of earth around the sun.

The Wickens Information Processing Model was created to provide a convenient method to calculate the response time of the user to a signal from a system.

………………….Attention Resources

Perception……………………Cognition…………Motor
(transfer to ……………….(math,decide,…………Response
working memory)………...memory transfer)

Short term sensory store……Long term memory

Visual Image Store………….Dltm=infinity
Dvis=1500[900-3500]msec…Mltm=infinity
Mvis=5[4.4-5.2]letters………Kltm=semantic
Kvis=Physical

Auditory Image Store…….. Working Memory
Daud=200[70-1000]msec….Dwm=3[2.5-4.1] chunks
Maud=17[7-17]items………Dwm(1chunk)=7[5-9]chunks
Kaud=Physical……………..Dwm(3chunks)=7[5-226]sec
……………………………...Mwm(1chunk)=73[73-226]sec
………………………………Mwm(3chunks)=7[5-34]sec
………………………………Kwm=Acoustic or visual

Transfer durations:
(Perception)--->100msec(cognition)-->70msec(motor)->70msec

- Attention resources are used in all three stages..
- D = decay, M= residing duration in memory, K= representation format of the information
(EBERTS, Prentice Hall, User Interface Design, sayfa 166).

An other name of this model is Discrete Stages Model. The contributions of the Wickens Model may be outlined as:

1. Perception does not happen in a single moment. On the contrary, human processes the inputs and a functional transformation (for ex. from visual to semantical) happens.

2. Processing information requires time. The time that passes between the moment input comes and human responses is called the reaction time.

3. The mental timing of events that happen in a single response process. The nomenclature of the stages, durations and the definition of operations or transformations done in each stage.

4. Transformations related to the presentation of information.

5. Limits that do exist in the time and quantity domains.

6. The unit of information. Miller’s seven plus/minus two rule is alluded above in the working memory. This also points at the effect of the gained experience on the size of chunks and thus determines the perception speed.

Today, all sorts of references to this model, are not limited to engineering books as it should. Many other psychology related books refer to this model or at least have similar approaches although this model is created primarily for guessing the response time of the human to certain systems.

In this model, there are visual and auditory image stores in the short term perception memory. When we think of memory we tend to imagine a single area or even a single organ. In fact, our brain is composed of many sub-structures and sub-functions, or sub-processors as in the computer nomenclature. The visual store should be located somewhere related to the visual part of the brain and auditory memory likewise…

Wickens model states that any information written into the longterm memory is never erased.
This does not mean that, that information is accessible. Commonly established belief is ‘our memory works linearly’. On the contrary, experiments have shown that we can remember some parts of the past better than others. For example, we may remember 30-40 year old events better than closer events in the past. Our memories do not work linearly on the time basis.

Our memories have an addressing mechanism which is triggered by content. Human memory is a marvel on one hand and an enigma on the other because of its non-linearity… The complexity of social events may be explained by the complexity of the minds of people who create them and the way their minds work… Writing to the memory and access to it is determined not only by content but also the environment, the mood, etc. Our memories’ refreshing mechanism is also not linear… It is a scientificly proven fact that a person who remembers a bad event in the past tends to remember bad things after this… An other example for the content triggered addressing mechanism is the fact that we can remember things related to ourselves better than other things…

The basic speciality of the Wickens model is the transformation of the information’s presentation format. For example, a figure percieved by the eye is stored in the visual image store in the physical format but transformed to the visual format when passed to the working memory…
It is the most reasonable approach to assume that these physically percieved information are accessed in the working memory through some buffer zones. This also implies that the working memory does not have a homogenous function as commonly assumed. The saying that people working under heavy mental load ‘can not see or think anything else than their work’ has a piece of truth in it. The increased mental load causes temporary changes in the memory usage. These people become forgetful or get easily distracted when doing even simple daily things. The reduction of perception abilities of people working under heavy mental load can be attributed to the reduction of input buffer space by the working memory to increase space for logical etc. cognitive tasks.

A common misunderstanding in the society that is fostered by the Wickens model is that human memory is a uniform single structure. For example the episodic bellek which is located in the frontal part of our brain is a special memory that helps to form the sense of time and reality. Episodic memory keeps track of events and provides information about sequence, duration, reality to the general use of our brain. People who work under heavy mental load frequently forget what they have done. They first take a book from the table and put it on the bookshelf, then a few moments later they forget what they have done and try to put the book on the shelf again, thus they can not find it on the table. While working at EUROCONTROL Software Team Karlsruhe, Chritian PETIT who was working on a difficult task in a terrible political climate had told me ‘This is a natural situation, I can not remember the color of the traffic light after I pass them while driving’ as an answer to my similar complaints.

If we study this example closely, with the assumption that the episodic memory has a buffer;
the events that have happened should have been written to the buffer in their happening sequence… If the working memory is overloaded during the events, the memory allocated to the episodic memory buffer is deallocated and put in the service of general purpose or other working memory. As a result of this the working memory allocated to the episodic memory buffers is cancelled or dramatically reduced. In this case, the mentally overloaded person can not remember an event which has happened a few moments ago, because the episodic memory input buffer related to that event has been erased and used for some other purpose.

An other example to the case of mental overload reducing the perception is: a person driving an automobile, airplane or any system loses control of command due to the increase in his reaction time caused by mental overload(mostly talking). A special case related to this situation is air traffic controllers making mistakes while working with divided attention (Investigating Controller Blindspots, Dr. Barry Kirwan, HINDSIGHT 5 – July 2007 ). When dealing with a difficult situation with a relatively calm background , the controllers have to focus on the high priority troublesome situation but after fixing this problem they should remember the cases in the background. Unfortunately in some cases it has been observed that after the primary problem is solved, some of the secondary problems related to the general situation have been completely forgotten and thus they have caused other important problems. The problem is the same as in the example of Ray EBERTS’s, User Interface Design book of a driver not hearing the radio when the traffic gets dense… I believe, the problem is not inability to percieve but the insufficiency of working memory resources(input buffers) which enables the resolution of the perception process in the consciousness.

Let’s study the hypothesis of mentally loaded person’s perception deficiency reversely. A person whose perception is heavily loaded should have reduced or weakened cognitive(logical, decision making etc) functions… Let’s imagine a commando soldier in a commando exercise as a person whose perception is heavily loaded. Fast moving targets appear suddenly or move in front of him during the exercise. The soldier is expected to fire and hit the targets with his reflexes rather than think and make decisions cognitively. Balthazar GRACIAN alludes to an old addage in his ‘The Art of Worldly Wisdom’… ‘It is difficult to make decisions when driving a horse’. The more the percieved things, the more buffers for different inputs… If you continue to increase the inputs even more, wrong actions produced by making decisions based only on reflexes rather than judgement appear. We end up with incidents such as the 1992 incident when an American pilot fired at an helicopter which carried American and Turkish officers.

An other aspect of this subject is how much should the system user be loaded when designing complex screens such as radar displays. Displaying every information spatially makes the access to them easy but the designers’ general tendency is to abuse this principle. The requirements creep also fosters this tendency… The output of these wrong tendencies is visually overloaded screens. The overloaded screens is developing at the expense of losing and leaving the judgement ability of the large systems or air traffic controller out of function… The large system controller is turning out to be a simple sensor that reacts rather than judges and decides…

Contrary to this phenomenon, Situation Awareness should depend on human mind’s variable thinking depth, variable thinking speed and ability to think with things it does not know or remember, its multi-processor pseudo-god control ability which directs its conscious-subconscious balance.

I tried to drive your attention to the common misbeliefs about the human mind. Besides this, I outlined the popular Wickens Model and noted some misunderstandings about it which reduces the system user to a simple sensor. I hope to be pondering on thinking speed vs thinking depth, the balance between conscious and subconscious and mental control vs automatic processes in my future articles.

An antique Hellenic philosopher has said ‘Know yourself’. A weak point of this adage is that the person or anonym persons who used this adage have at least a single self. The Anatolian-Eastern tolerance of Mevlana, although not that old, reflected in the adage ‘There is a self in myself’ would perhaps say ‘My son, be aware of yourself from time to time without any intention to do so and do not forget to feel your poor body once in a while’.

‘May your mind be fresh and be all the rest nice’.

Ali R+ SARAL

Note: Besides serving the benefit of the general public, has this article been written to be used in the education of air traffic controllers, large system operators and the engineers.

EMBODIMENT AND MAN – MACHINE INTERACTION

2007-12-29T10:22:00.000-08:00

To my kind colleague Herr EHRENBERGER
who drew my attention to the importance of HCI
after viewing an airplane accident replay
at Karlsrue Upper Info Control Center in 1992;

Through our bodies we reach other people and the world. To speak with others, to help others, to work, to create, to love we use our bodies. We exist with our bodies. We feel our existance through our bodies…

“Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, stands a mighty commander, an unknown sage – he is called Self. He lives in your body, he is your body.” (Nietzsche, 1883, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ from Learning Space – OpenLearn – The Open University).

We know our body by its abilities. We can turn our hand, open it, make it a fist, move our fingers one by one etc. We can also feel every movement our hand does if we listen it. We can feel it as a whole or its parts seperately...

If a human has a hand, he or she feels more or less the same abilities with his hand and similar basic feelings… But was the hand of Rembrandt the same as mine? Was the relation of Rembrandt’s hand with his mind the same as mine? Merlau-Ponty has written “I do not simply possess a body; I am my body” in ‘Phenomenology of Perception’. Rembrandt’s hand was not simply a hand, it was Rembrandt the painter’s hand… It was Rembrandt the painter himself.

“Phenomenological theorists distinguish between the subjective body(as lived and experienced) and the objective body (as observed and scientifically investigated). My lived body is an EMBODIED CONSCIOUSNESS which fluidly and pre-reflectively engages the world. As we engage in our daily activities, we tend not to be conscious of our bodies and we take them granted – body that is passed-by-in-silence (Jean-Paul SARTRE, 1943, Being and Nothingness)”.

“Embodiment is the process or state of living in a body.” All embodiments do not need to be the embodiment of living things… An existing thing can have a body and thus can be an embodiment of an identity that can be identified… For example, water is the embodiment of all the things that identify water. An aeroplane is an embodiment of everything that identifies it; it flies, carries goods, can stand difficult climate conditions, it has a speed, it carries an accumulation of expertise and experience, it has a history, it materializes the ambitions of many individuals both in the past and today…

All embodiments do not need to be simple or single embodiments… There can be composite embodiments in the world. Composite embodiments can and do exist. Composite embodiments form when simple embodiments of things mix and act together with a new and single identity, all interacting with each other and as a virtual self…

In 1996 I listened a piano concert at Darmstadt. The program was composed of a group of extremely difficult works by a single composer. The performer was not a single pianist as usual… The pianist was embodied by two seperate and different pianists… They had prepared collectively for this concert and played the series of pieces one by one in sequence. The pianist whose turn passes listened the other pianist performing.
Having prepared together gave them the ability to perform as if there is a single performer, with his single identity, feeling and so on… Using complex embodiment gave the two pianists the ability to do the impossible and achieve the extremely difficult.

Embodiment has the gift that enables us to achieve the impossible or extremely difficult things and create new things. A person holding a hammer is a composite embodiment. A hammer and a person are seperate embodiments. A hammer holding man is a different and composite embodiment… Moreover, the person that holds the hammer experiences knocking the nail as if the hammer is a part of his body himself… Because, he is aware that he is knocking the nail with the hammer… He is hammer using man… He is the embodiment of consciousness defined and required by nail knocking activity indicated by the affordance of the hammer.

“Embodiment is the process or state of living in a body”… Some of the composite embodiments form when we use a tool. “Prothestic devices stretch the boundaries of the body. They create a continuity beyond the limits of the skin”(Carolien HERMANS, 2002, Embodiment: the flesh and bones of my body). “A body schema works on a subconscious level. It registers shape and posture of the body(without coming to awareness). It makes a record of the momentary relative disposition of one’s own body parts”. “Prothestic devices can be absorbed in the body schema. Just as a hammer in the carpenter’s hand is incorporated into his body schema, any virtual body part or interface(keyboard, mouse, joystick) can become part of the schema in a temporary or longlasting way…”

"The driving of a car. We are intimately aware of how a particular car's gearshift needs to be treated, its ability to turn, accelerate, brake etc, and importantly, also of the dimensions of the vehicle. When we reflect on our own parking, it is remarkable that there are so few little bumps considering how many times we are actually forced to come very close. The car is absorbed into our body schema with almost the same precision that we have regarding our own spatiality. It becomes an "area of sensitivity" which extends "the scope and active radius of the touch" (Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. C. Smith (translator). Routledge & Kegan Paul.) and rather than thinking about the car, it is more accurate to suggest that we think from the point of view of the car, and consequently also perceive our environment in a different way".(Reynolds, Jack (2002). Merleau-Ponty. Amsterdam: internet.)

Going back to the hammer example… The person holding the hammer does not feel he is holding it when he is knocking. The subjective body of the composite identity focuses on the knocking process. Holding the hammer is not very different from moving his arm and using his muscles to produce force. The hammer has become part of the body schema of the nail knocking man… If something wrong happens and this process is interrupted, then the nail knocking man becomes aware of the hammer that he is holding and changes its direction etc… The hammer becomes the objective self of the nail knocking man.

My questions are: what happens when an accident happens while a human uses a tool, device or vehicle? What happens when an executive air traffic controller is over-loaded? What is the effect of stress on the embodiment of a large system operator like a nuclear reactor? What are the psychological effects of a complex software development tool such as Rational on a large systems software developer who has to work one year on the same difficult project?

Let’s think of a race car driver… He studies the race road before the race. During the race he must maximize his speed at every and each turn or straight part of the road. He tries to adjust and catch the max speed according to the road piece he faces and the status of his car… Actually it is the road and the car that orders him to change the gear and press the gas pedal as such… The driver has the ability to set the initial and previous conditions of the car, his choices determine the past and the cumulative effect of the past determine his effectiveness on the future… This intertwining can be seen in simple holding hands also:

"If I touch with my left hand my right hand while it touches an object, the right hand object is not the right hand touching: the first is an intertwining of bones, muscles and flesh bearing down on a point in space, the second traverses space as a rocket in order to discover the exterior object in its place" (Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1962)

If the driver forgets himself and begins to act only according to the messages he gets from the road, this may cause disaster. If the driving man identity is lost and the car which has become part of the man’s body schema takes over the control, the driver enters a turn with a speed which may be impossible for the car…
Forgetting the abilities of the system or misinterpretting them is also explained as a ‘mental model’ mistake which leads to an accident. Embodiment can explain accidents better as it provides more on the psychology of the operator and the intertwining between the environment and him.

Accidents happen because of anomalies in the embodiment of complex identities. A mistake in the embodiment of the car, and the human, such as a failing tire or a physical anomaly of the human(alcohol) will cause an accident. If the complex identity, the driver becomes too dominant, such as the drive to achieve a goal as a driver, and causes the abilities of the car and the driver as seperate embodiments to be forgotten, also accidents happen. Mistaking identities or losing, forgetting them causes the failure of the complex identity.
The successful operator is the one who can find the ultimum balance between the identities of the complex embodiment, namely the simple selves and the complex itself with in the prenoetic limits.

Driving a car or operating any system requires the operator to arrange his priorities… His priorities to take care of the simple embodiments as the car, its status, gas, oil etc… As the human being, tiredness, sleep, etc. as the complex embodiment, the driver, cruising speed, road status, possible obstacles etc…. Driver, the complex embodiment has to create a special consciousness to be successful. This conscioussness has to be subjective… You can not do all of these continiously with full concentration.

If we go back once more to SARTRE;
“Phenomenological theorists distinguish between the subjective body(as lived and experienced) and the objective body (as observed and scientifically investigated). My lived body is an EMBODIED CONSCIOUSNESS which fluidly and pre-reflectively engages the world. As we engage in our daily activities, we tend not to be conscious of our bodies and we take them granted – body that is passed-by-in-silence (Jean-Paul SARTRE, 1943, Being and Nothingness)”.

The danger in this is, our bodies have the tendency to execute their body schemas, namely to exist, subjectively. We try to do things automatically after we repeat them for a while. An experienced driver tends to do things automatically and forgets the rules after a while…

Hence a safety related systems operator such as an air traffic controller or a pilot, must rise above its complex identity as an embodied consciousness of the human and the system and foster a special awareness of things existing around in the cockpit or the control board. This is called situation awareness by a few ‘mortals’.

Ali Rıza SARAL is an Electronics Engineer(ITU), composer(ISU) and a former civil servant of EUROCONTROL (European Agency for the Safety of Air Navigation) Software Team Karlsruhe. He has cured 24 documented Operational Deficiencies of the German KUIR airspace which includes Frankfurt.

My Address:
Ali Riza SARAL
Barbaros Mah. Sedef Sk. 13/13
Uskudar / ISTANBUL
TURKEY
Tel: 0090 (216) 474-8818
e-mail: arsaral(at)yahoo.com

A Few Notes on the EUROCONTROL Safety R&D Seminar

2007-12-29T10:20:00.000-08:00

A Few Notes on the EUROCONTROL Safety R&D Seminar

Barcelona, Spain
25-27 October 2006

EUROCONTROL held a Safety R & D Seminar at Barselona late October 2006. This seminar took place in a decade that is marked not only by change in ATC technologies but also a continued trend of increase in air traffic. It must be noted that the increase in the air traffic is dramatic. For example the air traffic has risen from approx. 2000 flights per day to 4000 flights per day at KARLDAP central Germany and Europe. This is not a fast and natural load increase in a brand new system. The KARLDAP system is at the edge of a big transition to a brand new one and the technical staff is almost getting retired as a whole…

Big investments are being made for new systems… Yet Europe has seen her worst air traffic accident at Switzerland in this decade… Managers need to have objective methods and tools to justify new costs… The aviation industry is faced with increasing pressure to minimize its costs… Rationalisation sometimes causes experienced ATCOs to work two shifts 8 hours per day as DSF did in late 1990s…

These tendencies are reflected in the Swedish presentation on the “Impact of change processes on safety culture and organizational climate” and “Swed Lund Operational Readiness in Transition” and a not so good other presentation about the Switzerland accident “Human reaction to safety nets”…

I have witnessed the German KARLDAP and Turkish systems and I have not been able to find a comprehensive definition of SAFETY in these places… People are working with rule of thumbs and mutually FELT and SHARED feelings of safety but not objective understandings of it… The traffic load is increasing substantially but no one can judge what is exactly safe and what is not – accept to a certain degree simulation guys…
IATA comes into the arena with the “IATAData driven approach to ATM Safety” presentation in the EUROCONTROL seminar.

In order to measure whether a system is safe or not, one must first identify which risks associated with which hazards to measure… Here comes a group of presentations, first two by NLR “NLR Identification of emergent hazards and behaviour” and “NLR Identification of emergent hazards and behaviour”, and a special case “The Functional Resonance Accident Model” and last one from FAA “Human Error Safety Risk Analysis FAA Human Factors Research Group”…

Part of the problem arises from not having the data at all “Confidential Reporting”… Reporting methods, organization and environment are important according to EUROCONTROL presentation which indicates a method and independent Safety Group organisation. “Eliciting Info for Safety Assessment” is a similar presentation…

Once the data is gathered we have to assess it according to a method in order to evaluate the safety of our system… NLR steps in once more with the “NLR Need_for_novel_approach_to_aviation_safety_validation” article along with “resilience in safety assessment”.

Safety culture is the key phrase that is most emphasized in the seminar presentations… “ATM Safety Maturity Model”, “Boeing Safety Culture Survey”, Swedish “safety management system”, “UK Safety Regulation Group” presentation are noteworthy. I am impressed by the FAA, UK and NLR presentations but the Swedish quality and amount at most…

A FEW CORRECTIONS and SOME COMMENTS

2007-12-29T10:16:00.000-08:00

A FEW CORRECTIONS and SOME COMMENTS
ON EUROCONTROL’s Safety Regulation Requirement
ESARR 6 – Software in ATM Systems

CORRECTIONS

I - Mandatory Provisions, 1. General safety Requirements, item 1.2
a) The software requirements correctly state what is required by the software, in order to meet safety objectives and requirements, as identified by the risk assessment and mitigation process;

should rather be

a) The software requirements correctly state what is required from the software,

II - Requirements applying to the software safety assurance system, item 2.4,
b) the assurances corresponding to each software assurance level shall give sufficient confidence that the ATM software can be operated tolerably safely.

The term tolerably safe is not explained in the document, safety is defined as “freedom from unacceptable risk”,

Should rather be
… can be operated with acceptable risk
or
… can be operated with safety. (the flexibility in the definition itself suffices)

III – Item 2.6,
… developmental and non-developmental are unnecessary new words which do not contribute to the jargon more than the overhead they create.

IV. Requirements applying to the software assurance level, item 3.2

… the architectural and/or procedural defences identified

defences should be precautions or precaution systems if you like. (would be nice if it were football;-)

IV – Appendix A

Accuracy: The required precision of the computed results.

Accuracy and precision and the relation between them should be clearly defined. Some university books define precision as the “repeatibility of results” regardless of their accuracy. Accuracy is only the correctness of a measurement nothing else… …

V - Resource usage: The amount of resources within the computer system that can be used by the application software.

Should be

by a specific application in the software

VI - The definition for the word ‘risk’ is a little bit cumbersome but perfact in meaning…

VII – Safety: Freedom from unacceptable risk

implies that freedom includes acceptable risk which is quiet clever… And after this, safety is referred to in‘acceptable or tolerable safety’, which means ‘acceptable or tolerable acceptable risk situation’ according to the definition of ‘safety.’

acceptable or tolerable safety

Should be either

Safety

Or
Acceptable or tolerable risk (situation)…

VIII – The term ‘Software Timing Performances’ may have been used to bring in meaning flexibility for future developments and it is also out of any jargon that I have heard of… The definition given points at exactly the term ‘response time’. It does not sound ‘just’ to do things like this unless they are done unintentionally.

COMMENTS

I - This is a difficult document to write. Many who are involved with ATC rather closely would choose not to write it at all…

II -The document has to set a framework so that assigned authorities, service providers etc. should be gently leaded to a more formal way of doing things and maybe doing them better as a natural result. The document is good in this respect.

III - On the other hand, the document misses conscientious aspect of software development and maintenance in ATC in the thick cloud of gentle politics, interest balancing etc. Bluntly, there is nothing in the document which ensures the identification of who has done which software change or development item. ESARRs have conscientiously protected anonymity of engineers who may have caused involuntary harm to the air traffic. ESARR 6 falls short of adressing the individual responsibility in retrograde of this.

should be

6.4 A person who has done an error in the ATM software should be easily identifiable through the use of Configuration management.

IV – Testing should have been mentioned explicitly

VII – Software inspection by peers and group leaders should have been mentioned explicitly

The last two items are no less important or relevant than traceability in software requirements.

APPENDIX

TURKISH TRANSLATION OF ESARR 6
WORK IN PROGRESS
By Ali R+ SARAL

EUROCONTROL
Hava Seyrüseferi Güvenliği için Avrupa Kuruluşu
(EUROCONTROL-European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation)

EUROCONTROL Güvenlik Düzenleyici Şartnamesi
(ESARR–EUROCONTROL Safety Regulatory Requirement)

ESARR 6

Hava Trafik Yönetim Sistemlerindeki Yazılımlar
(Software in ATM Systems)

F.2 BELGE ÖZELLİKLERİ

ESARR6 yazılım güvenliği güvence sistemlerinin hayata geçirilmesi ile ilgilenir. Bu sistemler güvenlik ile ilgili yer yüzüne-konumlandırılmış ATM sistemlerindeki yazılımların kullanımlarına ilişkin risklerin hoş görülebilecek bir seviyeye indirilmesini güvenceye alır.

ESARR6 yazılım için herhangi bir destekleyici uyum yöntemi öngörmez. Bunu yapmak yazılım güvencesi standartlarının payına düşer. Dolayısıyla, özgün milli ve uluslararası yazılım güvencesi standartlarını harekete geçirmek bu şartnamenin sınırları dışındadır.

Bu şartnamenin amacı ATM güvenlik düzenleyici kuruluşları ve ATM hizmet sunucularına ATM sistemlerinde yazılım kullanımı için bütünsel ve uyumlu bir grup güvenlik düzenleme şartı sağlamaktır.

…

F.6 YÖNETİMSEL ÖZET

Bu EUROCONTROL Güvenlik Düzenleyici Şartnamesi(ESARR) Güvenlik Düenleyici Komisyon tarafından hazırlanmıştır.

ESARR6 yeryüzüne-konumlandırılmış ATM güvenlik sistemlerindeki yazılımların kullanım risklerinin hoş görülebilecek bir seviyeye indirilmesinden emin olmak için yazılım güvencesi sistemlerinin hayata geçirilmesi ile ilgilenir.

Bu yüzden, bu ESARR’ın amacı ATM sistemlerinde yazılım kullanımı için bir grup uyumlu güvenlik düzenleyici şartı sağlamaktır. Hiçbir yazılım güvencesi standardını kendi zorunlu koşullarını karşılamak için kabul edilebilir bir uyum yöntemi olarak belirlemez. Buna bağlı olarak, özgün milli ve uluslararası yazılım güvencesi standartlarını harekete geçirmek bu şartnamenin sınırları dışındadır.

Bu ESARR’ın koşulları EUROCONTROL Daimi Komisyonu tarafından onaylanmasından 3 yıl sonra uygulamaya girecektir.
…
…

TANITICI MALZEME

Bu kısımdaki koşullar zorunlu değildir.

A. KAPSAM

i. ESARR 6, sivil hava trafiğine ATM hizmetleri sağlamak için kullanılan, güvenlik ile ilgili, yeryüzüne konumlandırılmış ATM(hava trafik yönetimi) sistemlerinde yazılım kullanımıyla (cutover / hot swapping gibi tüm işletimsel yazılım değiştirme işlemleri dahil) ilişkilidir.
ii. ESARR 6’nın kapsamı ATM hizmet-sağlayıcının idari kontrolü altındaki yeryüzüne konumlandırılmış CNS gibi destek hizmetleri dahil, ATM’in yeryüzü bileşeni ile sınırlıdır. Değiştirilmediği ve uygun bir şekilde yeniden gözden geçirilmediği takdirde ESARR6 gökte ya da uzayda uçan ATM sistemi bileşenleri için uygulanamaz.

iii. Bu güvenlik düzenleyici şartnamenin koşulları, yazılım tarafından icra edilen ATM işlevleri dahil ATM’in tüm sahalarının gereğince değerlendirilmesinden emin olmak için, a priori, önkoşul olarak, etkin risk değerlendirme ve uygun bir seviyeye risk azaltması çalışması yapılması temelinde geliştirilmiştir.
iv. ESARR 6 yazılım için herhangi bir destekleyici uyum yöntemi öngörmez. Bunu yapmak yazılım güvencesi standartlarının payına düşer. Buna bağlı olarak, özgün milli ve uluslararası yazılım güvencesi standartlarını harekete geçirmek bu şartnamenin sınırları dışındadır.

B. GEREKÇE

i. SRC’nin 6/8/5 kararı SRC İş Programı içinde yazılım temelli ATM sistemleri için bir EUROCONTROL Güvenlik Düzenleyici Şartnamesi geliştirilmesini içermeyi onayladı. Aynı zamanda, ICAO standartları ve tavsiye edilen ICAO uygulamalarında ilk örnek teşkil edecek hiçbir şey olmadığı olgusu da kabul edildi.
ii. ESARR 3(Güvenlik Yönetim Sistemlerinin ATM hizmet sağlayıcıları tarafından kullanımı) ATM sistemine yapılan değişikliklerin önemlerine göre değerlendirilmesini ve ATM sistem işlevlerinin ciddiyetlerine göre sınıflandırılmasını güvenceye almak için güvenlik yönetim sistemlerinin Risk Değerlendirme ve Azaltma içermelerini şart koşar.
iii. ESARR 4 (Hava Trafik Yönetiminde Risk Değerlendirme ve Azaltma – Risk Assessment and Mitigation in ATM) Risk Değerlendirme ve Azaltma üzerinde ESARR3’ün şartlarını genişletir ve Hava Trafik Yönetimi sistemini insanlar, işlemler ve cihazlar (yazılım ve donanım) açısından ve onların ATM sisteminde değişiklik yapmaları / tasarlamaları açısından ele almak için her yönden kapsayıcı bir işlemler dizisi sağlar.
iv. ESARR 6 bu güvenlik düzenleyici geliştirme sürecinin devamıdır ce ATM sistemlerinin yazılım yanına ilişkin olarak ESARR 4’ü genişletir. Donanım yanı için tamamlayıcı güvenlik düzenleyici şartname değerlendirme altındadır.
v. Güvenlik ATM sistemlerinin temel bir özelliğidir. İşletimsel etkinlik üzerinde ağırlıklı bir çarpıcı etkiye sahiptir. Yığınsal ve sistemli yazılım kullanımı, daha önce elle icra edilen işletimsel işlevlerin otomasyonu ve sürekli büyüyen tümleşik ortamlarda önemli etkileşimler içeren ATM sistemleri güvenlik elde edilmesinde daha resmi-formal yaklaşımlar talep etmektedir.
vi. Bu ESARR’ın amacı ATM sistemlerinin kullanımı için ATM güvenlik kuruluşları ve ATM hizmet sunucularına bütünsel ve uyumlu bir grup güvenlik düzenleyici şart sağlamaktır.

C. GÜVENLİK HEDEFİ

Yazılım içeren ATM sistemlerinin sağlaması gereken birincil yazılım güvenlik amacı
ATM yazılımı kullanımı ile ilişkilendirilmiş risklerin hoş görülebilir bir seviyeye indirilmesinden emin olunmasıdır.

ZORUNLU KOŞULLAR

1. GENEL GÜVENLİK ŞARTLARI

1.1 Güvenlik Yönetim Sistemi yapısı içinde ve risk değerlendirme - azaltma faaliyetlerinin bir parçası olarak, ATM hizmet-sağlayıcısı sorunun yazılım ile ilgili yanlarını ele almak için (cutover/hot swapping gibi bütün kullanım sırasındaki işletimsel yazılım değişiklikleri dahil) bir Yazılım Güvencesi Sistemini uygulamaya koymalıdır.

1.2 ATM hizmet-sağlayıcı, Yazılım Güvenlik Güvencesi Sisteminde, en azından, şunlardan emin olmalıdır;

a) Yazılım şartnamesi, risk değerlendirme – azaltma sürecinde belirlendiği şekilde, güvenlik amaçlarını ve şartlarını sağlamak için yazılımın(?) yapması gereken şeyleri doğrulukla belirtir.
b) İzsürülebilirlik–traceability bütün yazılım şartları açısından ele alınmış;
c) Yazılım gerçekleştirliş şekli güvenliği olumsuz etkileyecek hiçbir işlev içermez;
d) ATM kendi yazılım şartnamesini yazılımın hayatiyeti ile tutarlı bir güvenlik seviyesi yüksekliğinde sağlar;
e) Yukarıdaki Genel Güvenlik Şartnamesi’nin sağlandığına ilişkin güvencelerin ve gereken güvencelerin sağlandığına ilişkin tartışmaların her zaman aşağıdakilere dayandırılması;

i. yazılımın belirli bir icra edilebilir sürümü
ii. bir dizi yapısal-kurulum–configuration verisi
iii. belirli bir grup yazılım ürünü ve o sürümün üretilişinde kullanılmış tanımlar(tarifnameler dahil).

1.3 ATM hizmet-sağlayıcısı Atanmış Otoriteye, yukarıda bölüm 1.2’deki şartların sağlandığına ilişkin gerekli güvenceleri sağlamalıdır.

2. YAZILIM GÜVENLİK GÜVENCESİ SİSTEMİNE UYGULANAN ŞARTLAR

ATM hizmet-sağlayıcı, Yazılım Güvenlik Güvencesi Sisteminin en azından şunları sağladığından emin olmalıdır;

2.1 Belgelenmiş olmalı, özellikle genel Risk Değerlenirme – Azaltma Belgeleme Sisteminin parçası olarak.

2.2 Bütün işletimsel ATM yazılım yazılım güvence seviyeleri ataması.

2.3 Aşağıdakilerin güvencelerine sahiptir;
a) Yazılım şartları geçerliliği–software requirements validity
b) yazılım doğrulama–software verification
c) yazılım yapısal-kurulum yönetimi–software configuration management
d) yazılım şartnamesi izsürülebilirliği – software requirements traceability

2.4 Güvencelerin hangi azim ve ısrar ile gerçekleştirildiğini belirler. Azim ve ısrar her yazılım güvencesi seviyesi için tanımlanmalı ve yazılımın hayatiyeti ile doğru orantılı artmalıdır. Bu amaçla;
a) Her yazılım güvencesi seviyesi başına güvence azim ve ısrarındaki değişim aşağıdaki kriterleri içermelidir:
i. bağımsız olarak başarılması gerekir
ii. başarılması gerekir
iii. şart değil.
b) Her yazılım güvence seviyesine denk düşen güvenceler ATM yazılımının hoş görülebilir(?) şekilde güvenli işletilebileceğine yeterli güven vermelidir.

2.5 Yazılı Güvenlik Güvencesi Sisteminin ve güvence seviyelerinin atamasının uygun olduğunun doğrulanması için ATM yazılım tecrübesinden geri dönerek faydalanır. Bu amaçla, ESARR 2’ye göre raporlanmış ATM işletimsel tecrübesinden herhangi bir hata veya yazılım arızası sonucu etkiler ESARR 4 yapısı bağlamında değerlendirilmelidir.

2.6 Atanmış Otorite tarafından seçilmiş ve kabul edilmiş herhangi bir yöntem ile, eşit yazılım güvencesi seviyelerindeki, geliştirilmiş ya da hazır alınmış ATM yazılımı için(COTS vb.), eşit güvenlik seviyesi sağlar.

3. YAZILIM GÜVENCESİ SEVİYESİNE UYGULANAN ŞARTLAR

ATM servis-sağlayıcısı Yazılım Güvenliği Güvence Sistemi içinde, en azından şunlardan emin olmalıdır:

3.1 Yazılım güvencesi seviyesi, yazılım güvencelerinin azim ve ısrarını ATM yazılımının hayatiyetine, ESARR 4 ciddiyet sınıflama şeması ile belirli bir olumsuz etkinin oluşması olasılığını birleştirerek, ilişkilendirir. 1. yazılım güvencesi seviyesi en hayati seviyeyi belirtmek üzere, en az 4 yazılım güvencesi seviyesi tanımlanmalıdır.

3.2 Ayrılmış bir yazılım güvencesi seviyesi ESARR 4’e göre yazılım arızaları ve hatalarının neden olabileceği en olumsuz etki ile denk düşmelidir. Bu, yazılım arızaları ve hataları ile ilişkili riskleri ve belirlenmiş yapısal ve/veya işlem-dizisel-procedural savunmaları(?-tedbirleri demek istiyor-ARS) hesaba katmalıdır.

3.3 Birbirlerinden bağımsız oldukları gösterilemeyen ATM yazılım unsurları bağımlı unsurlar arasındaki en hayati yazılım güvencesi seviyesine ayrılmalıdır.

4. YAZILIM ŞARTNAMESİ GEÇERLİLİK GÜVENCELERİNE UYGULANAN ŞARTLAR

ATM servis-sağlayıcısı Yazılım Güvenliği Güvence Sistemi içinde, en azından yazılım şartlarının:

4.1 ATM yazılımının (normal ve geriseviyelendirilmiş-downgraded çalışma türlerinde) işlevsel davranışını, icra hız(?) seviyeleri, kapasite, doğruluk, hedef bilgisayarda yazılımın kaynak kullanımı, anormal işletimsel durumlarda ayakta kalma yeteneği - robustness
ve aşırı yüklenmeye dayanıklılık, uygun şekilde belirlemesi.

4.2 Tam ve doğru olmaları ve sistem güvenlik şartnamesi koşullarına uymaları gerekir.

5. YAZILIM DOĞRULAMA GÜVENCELERİNE UYGULANAN ŞARTLAR

ATM servis-sağlayıcısı Yazılım Güvenliği Güvence Sistemi içinde, en azından şunlardan emin olmalıdır:

5.1 ATM yazılımının işlevsel davranışının, icra hız(?) seviyeleri, kapasite, doğruluk, hedef bilgisayarda yazılımın kaynak kullanımı, anormal işletimsel durumlarda ayakta kalma yeteneği - robustness ve aşırı yüklenmeye dayanıklılığının yazılım şartnamesi koşullarını sağlar.

5.2 ATM yazılımı, Atanmış Otorite ile mutabakata varıldığı gibi, analiz ve/veya deneme ve/veya eşdeğer yöntemlerle uygun bir şekilde doğrulanır.

5.3 ATM yazılımının doğrulanması doğru ve tamdır.

6. YAZILIM KURULUM-YAPISI(configuration) YÖNETİMİ GÜVENCELERİNE UYGULANAN ŞARTLAR

ATM servis-sağlayıcısı Yazılım Güvenliği Güvence Sistemi içinde, en azından şunlardan emin olmalıdır:

6.1 Yapısal-kurulum–configuration belirlemesi, iz-sürülebilirlik ve durum takibi-status accounting vardır öyle ki, ATM yazılım yaşam-döngüsü-lifecycle boyunca yazılım yaşam-döngüsü verilerinin yapısal-kurulum kontrolü altında olduğu gösterilebilir.

6.2 Sorun raporlama, takip ve düzeltici eylemler vardır öyle ki yazılıma ilişkin güvenlik ile ilgili sorunların azaltıldığı gösterilebilir.

6.3 Öyle yeniden ele alma ve hizmete sunma eylem dizileri-procedure vardır ki ATM yazılım yaşam-döngüsü sırasında yazılım yaşam-döngüsü verileri yeniden canlandırılabilir ve teslim edilebilir.

7. YAZILIM ŞARTNAMESİ İZSÜRÜLEBİLİRLİK GÜVENCELERİNE UYGULANAN ŞARTLAR

ATM servis-sağlayıcısı Yazılım Güvenliği Güvence Sistemi içinde, en azından şunlardan emin olmalıdır:

7.1 Sağlandığı gösterilmiş olan her tasarım seviyesine her bir yazılım şartının izi-sürülebilir.

7.2 Tasarımdaki her seviyede, sağlandığı gösterilmiş olan her bir yazılım şartının bir sistem şartına kadar izi-sürülebilir.

8. UYGULANABİLİRLİK

8.1 Bu güvenlik şartnamesi idari kontrolleri altındaki, yeryüzüne-konuşlandırılmış ATM sistemleri ve destek hizmetleri (CNS gibi)’nden sorumlu olan sivil ve askeri ATM hizmet sağlayıcıları için geçerlidir.

8.2 Askeri ATM kuruluşunun doğrudan idari kontrolü altındaki ATM sistemlerinin zaten var olan yazılım güvencesi sistemi, ESARR 6’nın zorunlu koşulları ile denk düşmek şartı ile geçerli kabul edilebilir.

8.3 Bu ESARR’ın zorunlu koşulları milli güvenlik düzenleyici şartnamelerin asgari koşulu olacaktır.

9. GERÇEKLEŞTİRME

9.1 ESARR 6’nın koşulları EUROCOMTROL komisyonu tarafından onaylandığı tarihten itibaren 3 yıl içinde etkin olacaktır.

…

APPENDIX
…

Due Respect to Istanbul

2007-12-29T08:16:00.000-08:00

At the entrance of the Istanbul port,
there is a lighthouse,
in front of Haghia Sophia on the coast.
Lighthouse stands for FENER(lantern) in Turkish.
One of the reasons I like English more sometimes...

The name of this lighthouse is Ahirkapi Feneri
(heavy entrance lantern). Just above this lighthouse,
at the top of the small hill stands Haghia Sophia.
This museum enlightens our minds and shows us
how very large systems can be built to endure.
Previously, it was assigned to be a mosque by
Fatih Sultan Mehmed(Conquerror Sultan).
Before its conquerror, it was meant to be
built as a Church by a Byzantium Emperor.

There is a mysterious water sistern
in the same district left from the Byzantium,
Yerebatan Sarayi(The Sunken Palace).
The Sunken Serail can be visited easily,
walking on pedestrian bridges underground
over the water filled bottom... Its mystery
comes from a collossal head of Medusa dating
from pre-Christian times...

This antique marble head belonged to
a temple that was originally built at the
location of Haghia Sophia or the same vicinity.
The temples were built at the top of hills
to help ship navigation with their burning torches
in those past times. With their wisdom,
they not only guided their society through
violent times but also they managed navigation.
As my former EUROCONTROL colleague had mentioned
once funnyly, the oracle at Didyma, was one of them,
which also gave advises to the king, but the
king was responsible for the results of his decision.
The same principle applies to the pilot and the
Air Traffic controller in the upper airspace.

Returning back to the antique marble head,
turned upside down and used as a base for one of
many columns at the deepest point of the Sunken Palace-
water sistern, I would like to allude:

"just as we forbid sacrifices, so it is Our will that
the ornaments of public works shall be preserved"
The Survival of Roman Antiquities in the Middle Ages,
Michael GREENHALGH 1989 Duckworth, p.93,
Badische Landes Bibliothek.

Said one of the dieties just after the Christian
religion got established. Probably, the Byzantium
Christians liked this but they could not keep it
publicly because it was Pagan.

"From the mid-fourth century it became both
dangerous and unprofitable to be a pagan (survey in
Cochrane 1940, 329 ff.) as 'imparial legislation
offended the Christians a pretext for physical action'
against the cults(Borner, 1984, 346). In the year
365, worshipping images or sacrificing to them
became a capital offence (Cod Th. 16.10.6).

Infact, "pagans gave Christianity 'a good
deal of pagan culture and not a little pagan practice'
(Bonner, 1984, 356).

What strikes me most about ISTANBUL is how
she managed to keep different cultures in herself.
If you have an opportunity to come and visit Istanbul,
please keep an eye on how Istanbul has first hidden
then kept and finally brought her own to the sunlight
again, thus preserved her own culture...

If you sit at Harem and drink a tea at the
Damalis kaffee or at the miniature Virgin tower island,
you enjoy the 360 degrees view of Istanbul... I love
to drink my tea changing locations in the same afternoon,
looking at my city from different locations on the
Bosphorus... Istanbul is a marvelous city built on
seven hills, a water strait and three peninsula...
I grew up in ISTANBUL and with different views
of her.

Istanbul has been a center of ship navigation
and trade for thousands of years. Conquerror Sultan
Mehmed decided to KEEP the city as it is. You will be
able to see with your own eyes, when you visit Haghia Sophia.
He ordered the precious mosaics to be covered with
lime paint. Similar to Byzantians hiding the Medusa head.

Whoever conquers it, Istanbul is a city of TOLERANCE.
She is a country miniaturized in a city... She is a
thousand years time imbued in stone and flesh... She is
millions of soul in a single body. She deserves every bit of
minute interest she drives.

As the European Union is approaching Turkey and
expressing interest to reclaim its own and maybe its
source of aspiration for its next Renaissance,
Istanbul shines as a city of tolerance preserving
what belongs very much to Her.

Istanbul deserves due respect in everything she does.

I wish you a Merry Christmas and happy New Year...

Seasons Greetings to you all...

Ali R+ SARAL

SITUATION AWARENESS IN THE MAINTENANCE AND ENHANCEMENT OF ATC SYSTEMS

2007-12-29T08:08:00.000-08:00

This is the third of my four articles serie on FALSE SENSE OF SAFETY
in the Air Traffic Control systems. The fourth article will be on
the "Passenger's Right to Know"...

I would like to draw your attention to a brilliant article on the situation awareness of the air traffic controller:

ATTENTION DISTRIBUTION AND SITUATION AWARENESS IN AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL
by Endsley and Rodgers (1996).

You can find this article on the internet.

Endsley and Rodgers article is about a scientific experiment done to measure the situation awareness of air traffic controllers. "A study was conducted to investigate the way in which controllers deploy their attention in processing information in en route air traffic control scenarios.(1)" The article is 4 pages long and explains clearly the terms and conditions the test was made.

The test procedure was described as: The subjects do normal controlling in an area for which they were licensed. "Each scenario consisted of a recreation of the ten minutes immediately prior to the occurrence of
the OE(operational errors). Twice during each scenario, the recreation was halted and the screen blanked."

After that:

"Subjects were asked to indicate the location of all known aircraft on the map, and, for each aircraft, to indicate or make a judgment of:

(1) if the aircraft was:
(a) in the displayed sector’s control,
(b) other aircraft in the sector not under sector control, or
(c) would be in the sector’s control in the next two minutes,
(2) aircraft call sign,
(3) aircraft altitude,
(4) aircraft groundspeed,
(5) aircraft heading,
(6) the next sector the aircraft would transition to, (7) whether the aircraft was climbing, descending or
level,
(8) whether the aircraft was in a right turn, left turn or straight,
(9) which pairs of aircraft had lost or would lose separation if they stayed on their current
(assigned) courses,
(10) which aircraft would be leaving the sector in the next two minutes,
(11) which aircraft had received clearances that had not been completed, and, for those, whether the
aircraft received its clearance correctly and whether the aircraft was conforming to its clearance, and
(12) which aircraft were currently being impacted by weather or would be impacted in the next five
minutes."

The article describes the results and evaluation also:
"RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Subjects’ responses to each question were scored for accuracy based on computer data for each aircraft at the time of each freeze. Responses were scored as either correct or incorrect based on operationally determined tolerance intervals. Missing responses were scored as incorrect."

You can find the complete article at:
http://www.satechnologies.com/Papers/pdf/HFES96-ATC-SA.pdf

My point is: A similar experiment could be done for measuring SITUATION AWARENESS IN THE MAINTENANCE AND ENHANCEMENT OF ATC SYSTEMS. As an example, I will state below a number of SA criteria similar to the above given...
------------------------------------------------------

The persona who should be taking the test are:

1-Operationally responsible person from the software maintainer/developer
2-Operational interface person between the operational institution and the software maintainer/developer
3-their first aids or replacements
4-software configuration's responsible person
5-version control's responsible person
6-various group supervisors who are also quality inspectors such as Radar, FPP and ATN groups.
------------------------------------------------------

The questions they should answer could be:

1- How many releases are released in the last six months, one month, last week respectively?
2- How many errors and system abends were done for each month and each release in the last six months,
one month, last week?
3- How many operational deficiencies are solved in each release in the last six, one months and last week?
What are the operational and technical difficulties of these according to a well established complexity
criterium? (system LOC, change LOC, system complexity, changed region complexity).
4- What structure and content has the release? Multi-changes, small changes, big changes etc.
5- What direction is the system maintenance effort cruising in terms of four items above? More difficult, same or relaxed?

Human factors
1- What is the motivation level in the software team? Specially people who work on the current changes?
2- What is the number of hospital visits, doctor visits, nervous breakdowns in the team?
3- What is the number of sick days taken of by the software personnel?
4- What is the number of leaves taken from annual vacation?
5- What is the number of days that could not be used for vacation leaves although they were used?
6- What is the number of official complaints or telephone calls to the welfare services?
7- What is the total duration of time spent in technical and other meetings, including official but personal
ones?
8- What are the number and duration of telephone calls made in the team?
9- What is the daily and total working duration?
10- What is the number and duration of lates at lunch and other breaks?
11- What are the number of quarrels and heated discussions in the team?

Weather conditions
1- last week (sudden changes?)
2- at the planned time for the release.

Adjacent centers and other affiliates
1- Communication conditions
2- The availability of service at the adjacent centers 3- track record of adjacent centers' availabilities at that
time of the year

Military conditions
1- the level and quality of interaction with military
2- temporary reserved area situations
3- communication lines etc quality

Availability
1- system availability: hardware, planned maintenance etc.
2-personnel: leaves, new policies such as
personnel reduction, service time increase etc.

Airmisses
1- number of at that time of the year
2- track record of airmisses for the last
six months including the recent

Traffic
1- Number of flights:general, sector, point
2- Flights at that time of the year and at that hour
3- Number of special events at that time of the year
highjack, emergency sicknesses etc.

Flights of airlines involved
1-Airlines related with scheduled flights at the release moment

Night - day conditions

Operational team - controllers' condition
1- strike
2- reduced team for some reason
3- workload and experience of the controller directly involved.
4- personal condition if any of the controller

As the saying goes "You can not manage if you can not measure". These questions and possibly others have to be detailed and distributed to the related members and supervisors of the ATC software-maintenance team. They should regularly answer these questions and an automatic system should produce a single number indicating the RISK of realising the changes at that moment of the time.

This number could be conveyed to adjacent centers so that they could calculate their own risks. All of this is possible and meaningful in relation to a series of values taken through the time(as in (1)).

These are simple principles to think but very "complex" things to realise. The reason behind this is ATC people are generally "too busy" and "overloaded". Namely, their motivation is low.

If anybody had known there were 3 levels of maintenance or tech problems going on in Switzerland, they would not let an airplane full of chieldren go there... People SHOULD HAVE the RIGHT TO KNOW. And we the engineers should provide the existing information with due transparency and respect to human life.

Kind regards.

Ali R+ SARAL

Note:
REFERENCES:

1- (1996) In Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society ( pp. 82-85). Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

ATTENTION DISTRIBUTION AND SITUATION AWARENESS IN AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL
Mica R. Endsley Mark D. Rodgers
Texas Tech University Federal Aviation Administration Lubbock, TX Washington, D.C.

2- Schneidewind, Methodology for Validating Software Metrics
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering VOL 18 No 5 May 1992.

VERTIGO IN THE CONTROL ROOM

2007-12-29T08:04:00.000-08:00

This is the second of my four articles serie on FALSE SENSE OF SAFETY in the Air Traffic Control systems. The results and advices however not solid,may be considered valid for many large systems,such as nuclear energy reactors, railwaytransport systems etc...

The hardcore large systems guys may considerthese unnecessary or invalid but the developments in the psychology and neurologyin the last ten years have made the oldbooks out-of-date. Even these developmentsalone are precursory to discussthese issues, however subjective or notsolidly founded. The high rate ofmental diseases among people working in the large systems can not be and should not behidden any more... Also, finding thereasons for these mental breakdowns etc...may give us the chance to build evenmore complex systems. We are buildingcomplex systems that can not be controlledhealthily, namely the operator's health andthe mission's healthy success.

In this article, I will compare an internet article named "Night Operations"'s "Disorientation" section with an Air TrafficControl System's safety situation. I willmake a few references to the Swiss ATC accidentthat caused 45 Ukranian chieldren's death also.

"Disorientation, or vertigo, is actually a stateof temporary spatial confusion resulting frommisleading information sent to the brain by various sensory organs."

Every guy, and also the operational responsibleperson in an ATC system assumes that an accidentis inevitable. The technical stuff tries to improve the system so that the possible date ofthis inevitable accident is postponed into thefuture. So, the direction is the directionof the movement of a possible accident on thetime domain.

How can a disorientation happen in the mindsof technical stuff in an ATC system?Just like it happened in Switzerland.It was night, the most appropriate time todo technical changes. Apparently, there weretechnical maintenances on the system. Theoperational management, had considered thatthe changes they made and the operation itselfwould push the inevitable accident a way... But the fact was, telephones not working, short term conflict alert not working on the radar,etc...The operational managementwas fully disoriented...

An accident does not happen easily in a largesystem. There was also an other disorientationin the systems design of conflict alert of the airplane systems. They were designed tohelp the pilots but practically the procedureswere not clear on how to use it. The pilotsgot totally disoriented and one of them acted according to the advise of the controller notto the instrument, which is a typical vertigomistake. The pilot, although died, had actedright according to the rules. The real vertigowas in the minds of the Swiss operational managers.

"The most difficult adjustment that you must make as you acquire flying skill is a willingnessto believe that, under certain condition, yoursenses can be wrong." The fact is many largesystems were state owned and have recently beenprivatized. There is a strong hierarchy inthese organisations. Unfortunately,hierarchy not only gives the operational management the power to make singular individual decisions but also may slow down the information flow coming from the engineers working on the maintenance and enhancement floor.Even Lars Fredholm, from Swedish FireDepartment states "the problem concerns thecapacity to make co-ordinated decision atdifferent levels of the management. In astatic situation you have time to follow thesequence planning, executing, evaluating.In a dynamic situation the sequence is disturbedby the dynamics of emergency. The co-ordination of the decision making at different levels ofmanagement has to be more dynamic and flexible."Report 3111, Lund 1999... That night,the Swiss operation's management was in a dynamicsituation, I believe, according to myexperience at Karlsruhe UIR.

"If the rate of directional change is quitesmall - and not confirmed by eyes - the changewill be virtually on detectable and you willprobably will not sense any motion or whatsoever."When many successive changes are realizedsuccessfully, a sense of false safety forms.Things are going well, we did this, let's addthis modification also... Without reallyevaluating the possibility of falling into a situation where the system fails and must returnback to the backups where not all the modifications may have been done. Moreimportant, the current controller stuff may havedifficulty to remember which version has whichnew functions etc...

"Here's where trouble begins! Inside the airplane,if you are unable to see the ground and establishvisual reference you are just seconds awayfom the famous graveyard spiral."The writer from helicfi.com tells the solution.There must be reference points... There must bemetrics values carefully and insistingly usedin an ATC system. 10 years ago, at Karlsruhe,we only head retrospective reliability measures.In other words, how long the system has workedin the last year, for how long without interruptionit has worked. Nothing prospective... There must be measures as used in spaceshuttle andaerospace companies... to predict possibleproblems... It is a shame if an ATC centeris still not using these measures. I willwrite my next article on this matter whichcould have saved the lives of the Ukranian chieldren.

Metrics values about the ongoing maintenanceand enhancement activities, even the performanceof the controlling and technical personnel cangive a strong indication, and may be the AWARENESSthat could help the operational managementto rise out of their FALSE SENSE OF REALITY,when things seem to be going on routinemanners, in the "automatic processing" of theATC systems using pre-scheduled "schemata"...

Pity.

Ali R+ SARAL

FALSE SENSE OF SAFETY

2007-12-29T07:59:00.000-08:00

What is real, what is false?
How do we decide what we percieve through our sensesis an illusion or not?
How do we feel confidence in the information we get and the meaning we assign to it?

"If the rate of directional change is quite small - and not confirmedby the eyes - the change will be virtually undetectable and the pilotprobably will not sense any motion whatsoever".

In a large Air Traffic Control(ATC) system, a time span of continiousmaintenance activity with many successfull changes may cause the formation of a false sense of safety.

How can an operational manager decide what he percieves in a general sense is real or not?

Any changes he decides to be made to the large system causes an increase in the risk to the safety. On the other hand any necessary changes he decides to delay may cause an increasein the risk for the future safety.

How can he decide the risk he percieves at that moment is a real reasonable one?

Actually, we all face this dilemma in many facets of our lives... What is real, what is false? How do our brains decide what is real?

Some of our brain's mysterious algorithms are:

- Repetition or repeatibility: If stg is real, it has to be there when tested more than once.
-Episodic memory: It has to be remembered as a part of a sequence of events...
-Rightness anticipation: It has to be coherent with our knowledge and long term memory.
-Perceptibility: It has to be percived by our senses.

When carefully inspected all four of these ingredients carry thediscrepancies which form the false sense of safety in a large system.

The formation of the sense of reality in the human mind is reflectedto the air traffic control systems architecture(including the human element).

False sense of safety is the vertigo of Air Traffic Control system.

Ali Riza SARAL
Note:
I will be writing more on the psychological may be neurological basis of vertigo a bit in an article named "VERTIGO IN THE CONTROL ROOM". This article will also compare the concepts in a pilot's vertigo warning article with CONTROL ROOM VERTIGO. Second article will be on "Situation Awareness in the Maintenance and Enhancement of ATC systems".Third article will be on the "Passenger's Right to Know"...

WHAT IS GOING ON IN THE TURKISH AIRSPACE?

2007-12-29T07:55:00.001-08:00

This summer flights to Istanbul and Antalya had delays of around one hour. My sister's airplane had to wait one hour at London Heathrow airport the motors working. Luckily, EUROCONTROL's air traffic flow management center at Brussels keeps airplanes on the ground till there is a window of safe opportunity in the traffic.

What went wrong and why does the Turkish air traffic system can not handle heavy traffic loads? Is it safe to fly to Turkey during the heavy season, namely the June, July, August and the new year, Christmas season?
Is it safe?

The answers to these questions may be found in the EUROCONTROL Experimental Center's Report No: 396. "In 2003 the Turkish ANS Service Provider DHMI (Devlet Hava Meydanlari Isletmesi) requested assistance from EUROCONTROL for a series of simulations to analyse the current ATC sectorisation and routeing schemes within the Turkish airspace against forecast traffic growth until 2015 and propose a new sectorisation plan suitable to existing and planned route network". "The simulation study has to provide a “survival plan” for the existing system until SMART becomes operational, and to provide a revised
sectorisation plan for the new system up to the year 2015". SMART is DHMI's new project which is supposed to replace the current ATC system left from 1980's.

The SMART project bidding was won by the INDRA company last year. But the project was cancelled on the ground that although THOMSON had offered some 30 million Euros more they had also offered a more sophisticated technical system. DHMI cancelled the bidding and made an other this year, around
January... This time only two companies entered the bidding process. The bidding was cancelled once more when one of these companies withdrew... No reason was given...

It is impossible to tell every detail of EEC Report 396 here... You can find it on both EUROCONTROL and DHMI sites or you may request it from me.

The pith of the issue is, EEC report 396 states clearly that the Turkish ATC system, specially Istanbul and Antalya may not be able to respond healtily to the Air Traffic beginning with 2005 - 2010... You can see
careful and restrained warnings, such as "Additional sectorisation capability should be made as dynamic as possible to relieve temporary overload".

During this simulation there has been conflicts between the Turkish side and possibly members of the EUROCONTROL simulation theme because:
". Despite the fact that members of the working group have accepted restrictions only with a certain degree of hesitation it must be said that their application lead to the fact that no High or Upp sector is faced with serious problems. Contrary to this are the Ist-Mid-West and the Ank-South-Low sectors which show the highest loadings for this exercise. In Europe, strategic restriction of flight operation is in general use. The safe and orderly handling of the high number of flights could not be possible otherwise. Turkey has a tradition of offering, as far as possible, an unrestricted flight path to the operators. In the future however, in order to cope with the increased traffic demand and to provide a safe service, it will be necessary to consider restrictions with regard to flight levels, routes and times more regularly".

"As traffic grows yearly, solutions will be found gradually and constraints applied if and when necessary. The working group is convinced that useful and intelligent solutions will be tested and applied to assure the safe
and efficient control of the increasing traffic and refrain from making specific suggestions in this area".

". saturation of the Istanbul sectors depend to a large extent on the traffic in and outbound Istanbul. Since no restrictions apply, a flight entering at high level will penetrate all existing sectors during its descent. Departing flights climbing to a high level will also penetrate all sectors. With strategic restrictions the number of flights per sector and hour can be reduced".

The reporter TEWES declares the simulation target as impossible to achieve by:
"Despite that all these results are theoretical ones, they gave good indications and hints to the working group where to start to search for improvements, especially having in mind the traffic forecast for the year
2015. It was evident that the sector plan developed for the 2005 scenario was not able to cope with the traffic demand forecast for 2010."

There certainly are more to say about the report but I will suffice by making a few comparisons with a similar report of a simulation done for Bulgaria...

1-Bulgarians used both military and civil data in their simulations.
2-Bulgarians used only August data where as Turkish data is dispersed two different times of the year.
3-Bulgarian report indicates the names of the Bulgarian ATC personnel. The Turkish reports do not indicate any individual who would take conciencious responsibility.
4-Signs by comparison indicate that the DHMI system has discrepencies in Planning Controller and Radar Controller functionalities.
5-Signs by comparison indicate that the DHMI system is a system left from 1980's which does not have automatic strip printing.

By the way, strips are the last resort of air traffic controllers when the radar picture is lost...

Safety is a feeling at the personal level. I fully understand that you choose or not to fly over Istanbul under these conditions at specific times...

But, safety has also a technically established universal definition that is assigned to a meaning. No air traffic controller should claim his skill to be over his vigilance...

Ali R+ SARAL
Note: Any specific question is wellcome. I have a very detailed analysis of this report and what may have gone wrong there.

TRIBUTE TO THE CONSCIENTIOUS CONSCIENCE and IT’S VIGIL SUB

2007-12-29T07:52:00.000-08:00

I am not sure,
whom I learned these from.
An old sailor,
an Echo on the Alp mountains?
Or the scent of the trees
at a coffe cottage in the Black Forest…

The possibility that a human faced with an emergency situation after a long ruhig-calm period, may react correctly is little. Thus, there is a lesser possibility of a new accident before the aftermath of the previous gets forgotten.

After a long period without problem, Air Traffic Controllers have difficulty in handling a serious route conflict during their surveillance period.

The same with automobile driving. The relaxed driver takes over a truck appearing in front of him suddenly, with the same mood.

The problem is the source of this relaxed mood. The brains of people dealing with difficult or boring tasks learn the process of this task first. Once this schema has been formed in the brain, the related task can be done automatically with an automatic process.

Automatic processes may be triggered by both the concious or the sub-conscious. Suddenly faced with an emergency situation, the human brain has to stop the automatic process and initiate a controlled proces to be executed by the conscious.

The cause of the difficulty is the interruption of a process that is being executed by the sub-conscious… The fact of the matter is, if a process controlled by the sub-conscious is interruptable, then that may mean that, that process is not automatic.

The solution may be that the conscious may interrupt sub-conscious processes sporadically or the sub-conscious may pass the control to the conscious at the wake of a risk increasing over a threshold. The interruption of sub-conscious processes automatically may be a faster but difficult to recover solution. May be, this solution is a form of situation awareness.

Air Traffic Control, namely THE CONSCIENTIOUS CONSCIENCE and IT’S VIGIL SUB is a performance art. Air Traffic Controllers are chosen with special exams and health tests.
ATC(Air Traffic Control) is a very special human being. 300 controllers work at EUROCONTROL (European Agency for the Safety of Air Navigation)’s Maastricht Control Center according to the Dr.Vermeiren’s presentation on the internet. Each and every year 2-3 of them have to leave for mental reasons. This means roughly 30 of your colleagues have to bite the bullet at the end of 10 years.

We, the society have to appreciate the work of air traffic controllers and their mental sacrifice at this moment of the heavy summer season… Motivation is a not very well managed point in the European ATC, somehow lessened to stipend.

MISSING SPACES

2007-12-29T07:46:00.000-08:00

The art of civilized manners depend on the skill of leaving space.

I grew up listening the stories of how my father saved the remains of a US airplane at Toros mountains sometime in 1950s. My father was a Commando training officer.

Once I asked him to teach me how to protect myself like a commando soldier. He refused basicly. He taught me how to leave space instead.

Isn’t it the same when driving a car? You have to leave space Btw the car at the front and your own.

It is the same in air traffic control (ATC). The ATC controllers Communicate with the pilots and arrange things so that there is always enough physical space btw airplanes.

Actually, this space can be not only physical but also abstract. We must leave space fort he mistakes, weaknesses of others in order to be safe…

On July the 15th, 19:25 O’Clock. Over Camlica hill at İstanbul I saw a ‘heavily’ loaded airplane, which may be THY… If the structural capacity of a system is used fully for a long Duration, this means increased risk according to a normal load, Specially at landing in wet conditions, etc…

I wish, his graceful excellency Mr. PUTIN could make An arrangement so that these people carrying goods in their Baggages would use other means that do not endanger Anybody. It is not fare to risk people’s lives because of Confrontation or some other reason on both government sides.

The iron fist Russian rules mixed with weakness in authority at Istanbul may prove deadly.

What is the difference btw Rome and Istanbul? The public squares in Rome are much bigger. There are wide
Pedestrian areas and traffic crossroads in Rome. Something to think about for my fellow citizens. Strategic limits should be applied before it gets too late.