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The paper presents a partial ethnography from the work setting of commercial jet aircraft. Data was collected through participant observation in the work role of stewardess, mostly on prestige overseas flights. The flight is therefore the unit of study and has been treated as a social occasion for sociological analysis. Post flight diaries were written up, additional data came from other airline sources, i.e. manuals of procedures, etc. The perspective is directed from the cabin crew as a performance team. The analysis is based on the everyday activities routinely performed as orderly events commonsensically produced by the persons located in the setting. The everyday work day's distinctive features i.e. crew impermanency, flight time and space pressures, excessively long on-duty periods, temporal marginality of duty periods, and stress norms, are described as a base from which to discuss team performances. The requirement to set up work units very quickly, crew impermanence and team performances are positively correlated to the need for members to know something about each other. Status dimensions and job specific preferred characteristics are therefore a relevant part of each person's floating biography which is occupationally positively functional as a base from which coworker selection is made. A setting orientation to ethnicity is an outcome of the presence of representatives from many cultural groups in the passenger population. Competency in the enactment of everyday activities is problematic and communication/interaction difficulties arise as a result. The lack of organizational structures to provide relevant kinds of information on passenger populations (relevant as defined by the members of the cabin crew) necessitates that they form cognitive visual maps of the setting and participants. It is suggested that this is typical to other occupations and settings. Other demographically related problems are discussed. Space and flight time pressures as related to territoriality, conflict behaviour and coercive practices used by the crew to maintain the social order are analyzed in terms of regions. An outcome of a lack of physical barriers is the socially constructed barriers of access to regions. Standardized patterns of work organization and social relationships are used to effect their fluctuating definitions. (They are mapped for visual reference.) Processes of personalization of participants is presented; contrastively, impersonalized service relationships are perceived to be an organizational work requirement, and are socially created by distinctive communication patterns for the purposes of getting the job done prior landing. Lastly, a flight is analyzed as a 'safe but dangerous' fateful event, organizationally constructed, and dramatized by the cabin crew. Ritual observance of passage of the take-off and landing stages of the occasion are imposed on all participants. Two products of safety management are the policing practices and gallows humor flight attendants are habituated to perceive as an everyday routine part of their job situation. / Arts, Faculty of / Sociology, Department of / Graduate

Configuring flight test systems can be a complex process due to the large number of choices that must be made. Making these choices requires system knowledge to build a working configuration in an efficient and timely manner. Historically, flight test systems have embedded this system knowledge in code. The limitation with these approaches is that any change or addition to the system knowledge is costly due to the significant work required to update and maintain the software. We see the philosophy of constraints as a promising path toward addressing these issues. In the context of flight test configuration, a set of constraints defines the limits of how a system may be configured to perform specific tasks. This paper describes an approach for simplifying configuration by moving the system knowledge out of hardcoded business rules and into a flexible architecture that leverages constraints for validation of system configurations.

Master of Science

</p> <p>The basis for this report was President Bush's proclamation that the u.S. should land astronauts on Mars by 2019 A.D. In such a trip, astronauts would be in a weightless environment for a considerable length of time. This report examines different conditions and environments that could cause stress during such a long duration space mission. Both psychological and physiological conditions are examined and the human factors implications of those potential problems are discussed. Finally, recommendations are made as to potential countermeasures and/or standards that should be followed.</p> / Master of Science

Long-duration spaceflight poses many challenging technical and non-technical problems that must be addressed. Past experience with long space missions has shown that the medical and psychological issues in the human factors realm that may arise are serious enough to require high-level consideration in the overall systems development process. <p> An essential aspect of the total systems development process for long-duration space missions entails the conception of a variety of countermeasures to combat the degradative effects of microgravity, isolation and confinement. These effects should be considered within a larger mission/systems framework. Additional factors within a broad systems perspective include the notion that context is an important attribute of the overall system state and may directly affect the astronauts' psychological health and the physical ability to perform required tasks. <p> A review of the literature in the psychosocial and medical realms is presented as these concerns impact the human factor within the macro-system goal of successful long-duration spaceflight mission completion. / Master of Science

Theropoda was one of the most successful dinosaurian clades during the Mesozoic and has remained a dominant component of faunas throughout the Cenozoic, with nearly 10,000 extant representatives. The discovery of Archaeopteryx provides evidence that avian theropods evolved at least 155 million years ago and that more than half of the tenure of avian theropods on Earth was during the Mesozoic. Considering the major changes in niche occupation for theropods resulting from the evolution of arboreal and flight capabilities, we have analyzed forelimb and hindlimb proportions among nonmaniraptoriform theropods, nonavian maniraptoriforms, and basal avialans using reduced major axis regressions, principal components analysis, canonical variates analysis, and discriminant function analysis. Our study is the first analysis on theropod limb proportions to apply phylogenetic independent contrasts and size corrections to the data to ensure that all the data are statistically independent and amenable to statistical analyses. The three ordination analyses we performed did not show any significant groupings or deviations between nonavian theropods and Mesozoic avian forms when including all limb elements. However, the bivariate regression analyses did show some significant trends between individual elements that suggested evolutionary trends of increased forelimb length relative to hindlimb length from nonmaniraptoriform theropods to nonavian maniraptoriforms to basal avialans. The increase in disparity and divergence away from the nonavian theropod body plan is well documented within Cenozoic forms. The lack of significant groupings among Mesozoic forms when examining the entire theropod body plan concurrently suggests that nonavian theropods and avian theropods did not substantially diverge in limb proportions until the Cenozoic. J. Morphol. 276:152-166, 2015.

Bibliography: pages 201-214. / Stressful aspects of work and non-work life were investigated amongst 101 female cabin attendants (CAs) who had worked at the South African Airways on either internal or external crew for a minimum of three years. A particular focus was on the subordinate service role of CAs. The research design consisted of different complementary phases. Firstly, extensive interviews were conducted with supervisors and co-ordinators, in order to gain background information on the organization and on the work of a CA. Secondly, semi-structured interviews of about 30 to 60 minutes duration were conducted with CAs while they were on stand-by duty. Thirdly, after the interview each one was asked to complete a self-report questionnaire which contained scales, to be returned at a later stage.

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