Information from the environment

The brain allowed greater and greater use of the environment since it, unlike the genes, had information from the environment, made useful in a rapid operational way and hence made possible environmental control by organisms. The brain developed its own coded information. 

The eye is a complex sensory organ, which receives visual information from the environment. It encodes optical information into complex electrical signals, which are transmitted to the cortex for visual imagery through the optical nerve. The visual efficiency primarily depends on the optical clarity of the eye (e.g., cornea, crystalline lens, and intraocular media) and the neural integrity of the visual pathway (e.g., retina, optic nerve, and visual cortex). 

Tactile touching sensors allow simple information from the environment to be recorded by touching the objects directly. In the simplest case, the sensor is a switch that sends a binary signal when set or not set. A variety of miniaturized switches are combined with line and matrix arrangements with integrated sensor data preprocessing to enable the creation of a tactile pattern recognition similar to the human sense of touch. 

Cognitive The ability to apply concepts and rules to information from the environment rmd from memory in order to select or generate a course of action or a plan. This includes communicating the course of action or plan to others. 

In order to be able to act on and react to environmental conditions, biological systems must be able to obtain information from the environment, pass information internally to integrative centers where it can be processed, and then send information to actuation stmctures. Biological systems have developed special structures to obtain information, called sensors, and have developed special mechanisms to transmit this information internally. 

Not all sensation leads to conununication, and not all actions are taken because a message was received by the actor. There are means to sense information from the environment that are in addition to the four modes discussed earlier. These include temperature, magnetism, and electrical fields. 

Taste buds are composed of several cell types and occur in all classes of vertebrates. In fish, these organs are found in members of all systematic groups which have been examined. Taste buds are intraepithelial organs whose size, shape, position and cellular composition varies greatly between systematic groups. Taste bud sensory cells may be classified into electron-lucent light cells and electron-dense dark cells some taxa may have also subtypes of light and dark cells. In some cases, basal cells are Merkel cell-like. In some taxa the taste buds have afferent and a few efferent synapses. Taste buds possibly provide different fishes with different information from the environment. 

Team situation awareness (TSA) is defined as the degree to which every team member possesses the SA reqnired for his or her responsibilities . (Ends-ley, 1995) In many cases, controllers estabhshed TSA withont verbal communication. However, to maintain TSA, they mostly nsed verbal communication. It is apparent that shared expert knowledge such as routines allows controllers to estabhshTSA without verbal communication. Furthermore, each controller obtained information from the environment such as the radar screen and flight strips, and continuously paid attention to his/her partner s action. As for TSA maintenance strategies, although verbal communication was more frequent, in some cases little concrete information was exchanged. 

The eye transmits any information on brightness, color, shape, size, and movements in the environment. The eye senses a limited wavelength range as light (Figure 6.15) it is able to differentiate between levels of brightness and a range of colors. Approximately 80% of all information from the environment is received via the eye. 

As the cofactor that mediates signalling protein function in transducing the information from the environment to the genome. 

Figure 2.7.6 shows the process of taking in information from the environment, processing it and taking actions. The general effects of the environment will be discussed in section 2.7.4.6. In section 2.7.4.2 we consider the question of individual differences in accident susceptibility because of the way an individual functions at each of these steps. 

The Environment Report (Reference 1.12).describes those elements of the APIOOO design that could directly impact a generic UK site. The Environment Report itself is supported by several technical reports, including the APIOOO Disposability Assessment - UKP-GW-GL-012 (Reference 1.13)andthe APIOOO Integrated Waste Strategy (Reference 1.14). Information from the Environment Report is used to imderpin those claims in the PCSR that refer to the management of environmental impact and radioactive waste disposal. 

Situation awareness—Situation awareness refers to the capacity to extract relevant information from the environment, understand it, and use it to anticipate future events. Teams should have shared situation awareness. 

After determining the sensor concept, the physical parameter for measuring with the sensor must be set up. Textile sensors that are part of the textile itself must react to all different kinds of forces. Therefore, various sensor concepts, which rely on physical, chemical and thermal parameters, are suitable for application. They help detect forces, displacements, thermal energy, humidity, chemicals, UV radiatimi and other actions. Then, the received information from the environment can be transformed into electric signals. In this third step, one must decide where to place the conductive threads between the nonconductive one, and which manufacturing technology is suitable for the product requirements. 

It is well known, that the human capacity to take in information from the environment is not unlimited. Broadbent (1958) has shown that the capacity to reproduce various pieces of information which have been transmitted at the same time is minimal. He has also introduced the somewhat disputed notion that incoming sensory information must pass a filter which, as a result of selective attentiveness, is either open or closed. At the present time it is no longer assumed that such a filter exists this model has been replaced by various concepts of limited capacity (Kahneman, 1973). The information which is most likely to pass through the gate is that which is familiar and that which is expected (Moray, 1979 Welford, 1976). Also, intensity, repetition, isolation, movement, change, and novelty are factors which claim one s attention. Even... 

Studies using rodents and monkeys have provided a variety of evidence of neurobehavioural alteration induced by lead exposure. In most cases these effects suggest impairment in learning, i.e., the process of appropriately modifying one s behaviour in response to information from the environment. Such behaviour involves the ability to receive, process, and remember information in various forms. Some studies indicate behavioural alterations of a more basic type, such as delayed development of certain reflexes. Other evidence suggests changes affecting rather complex behaviour in the form of social interactions. See papers by Rice and by Cory-Schlecta (this volume) for more detailed discussions of such types of effects found in animal... 

Currently, a large numbers of robots are equipped with sensors that allow them to obtain information from the environment. These sensors can provide global or local information to detect obstacles, which allows calculating free-collision paths using some planning strategies to move the robot step-by-step or to define a complete path in a workspace (Tibaduiza, 2008). 

Let us assume that SICUR is capable of managing M elements/entities and that the longest time required for managing any element/entity is G. (The notion of management denotes here the acquisition of information from the environment interface., the processing of the above, the comparison with other elements/entities controlled and the activation of strategies required to maintain an adequate degree of safety). 

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