Individual differences and personality correlates of navigational performance in the virtual route learning task

Research on the mechanisms and processes underlying navigation has traditionally been limited by the practical problems of setting up and controlling navigation in a real-world setting. Thanks to advances in technology, a growing number of researchers are making use of computer-based virtual environments to draw inferences about real-world navigation. However, little research has been done on factors affecting human–computer interactions in navigation tasks. In this study female students completed a virtual route learning task and filled out a battery of questionnaires, which determined levels of computer experience, wayfinding anxiety, neuroticism, extraversion, psychoticism and immersive tendencies as well as their preference for a route or survey strategy. Scores on personality traits and individual differences were then correlated with the time taken to complete the navigation task, the length of path travelled,the velocity of the virtual walk and the number of errors. Navigation performance was significantly influenced by wayfinding anxiety, psychoticism, involvement and overall immersive tendencies and was improved in those participants who adopted a survey strategy. In other words, navigation in virtual environments is effected not only by navigational strategy, but also an individual’s personality, and other factors such as their level of experience with computers. An understanding of these differences is crucial before performance in virtual environments can be generalised to real-world navigational performance.

Do we need to rethink our waterways? Values of ageing waterways in current and future society

In the past canals were developed, and some rivers were heavily altered, driven by the need for good transportation infrastructure. Major investments were made in navigation locks, weirs and artificial embankments, and many of these assets are now reaching the end of their technical lifetime. Since then the concept of integrated water resource management (IWRM) emerged as a concept to manage and develop water-bodies in general. Two pressing problems arise from these developments: (1) major reinvestment is needed in order to maintain the transportation function of these waterways, and (2), it is not clear how the implementation of the concept of IWRM can be brought into harmony with such reinvestment. This paper aims to illustrate the problems in capital-intensive parts of waterway systems, and argues for exploring value-driven solutions that rely on the inclusion of multiple values, thus solving both funding problems and stakeholder conflicts. The focus on value in cooperative strategies is key to defining viable implementation strategies for waterway projects.

Value creation in capital waterway projects: Application of a transaction cost and transaction benefit framework for the Miami River and the New Orleans Inner Harbour Navigation Canal

Waterways have many more ties with society than as a medium for the transportation of goods alone. Waterway systems offer society many kinds of socio-economic value. Waterway authorities responsible for management and (re)development need to optimize the public benefits for the investments made. However, due to the many trade-offs in the system these agencies have multiple options for achieving this goal. Because they can invest resources in a great many different ways, they need a way to calculate the efficiency of the decisions they make. Transaction cost theory, and the analysis that goes with it, has emerged as an important means of justifying efficiency decisions in the economic arena. To improve our understanding of the value-creating and coordination problems for waterway authorities, such a framework is applied to this sector. This paper describes the findings for two cases, which reflect two common multi trade-off situations for waterway (re)development. Our first case study focuses on the Miami River, an urban revitalized waterway. The second case describes the Inner Harbour Navigation Canal in New Orleans, a canal and lock in an industrialized zone, in need of an upgrade to keep pace with market developments. The transaction cost framework appears to be useful in exposing a wide variety of value-creating opportunities and the resistances that come with it. These insights can offer infrastructure managers guidance on how to seize these opportunities.

Fluid Ontologies in the Search for MH370

This paper gives an account of the disappearance of Malaysian Airways Flight MH370 into the southern Indian Ocean in March 2014 and analyses the rare glimpses into remote ocean space this incident opened up. It follows the tenuous clues as to where the aeroplane might have come to rest after it disappeared from radar screens – seven satellite pings, hundreds of pieces of floating debris and six underwater sonic recordings – as ways of entering into and thinking about ocean space. The paper pays attention to and analyses this space on three registers – first, as a fluid, more-than-human materiality with particular properties and agencies; second, as a synthetic situation, a composite of informational bits and pieces scopically articulated and augmented; and third, as geopolitics, delineated by the protocols of international search and rescue. On all three registers – as matter, as data and as law – the ocean is shown to be ontologically fluid, a world defined by movement, flow and flux, posing intractable difficulties for human interactions with it.