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Coal mining on Vancouver Island was a conjunctural point for two complementary systems of dispossession: capitalism and colonialism. Soon after London granted the island and its minerals to the Hudson’s Bay Company in January 1849, industrial mining began to replace the previously non-capitalist organization of the coalfield. The island shifted into industrialization in part through its entanglement in Pacific markets hungry for coal. The tools and capital that returned on homeward voyages hastened mining’s development, while transoceanic maritime networks provided inflows of labour power. As energy capital developed internally, strategies to displace Indigenous organization of the land were matched by efforts to alienate miners from acting as a class in their own interests. Through analysis of archival evidence, this project demonstrates that Vancouver Island mining before 1903 proceeded through a series of compounding deprivations, generally beneficial to islanders occupying dominant economic positions. Toward unpacking this history, “Empire and Dispossession” asks three questions: how did the coal industry support the development of capitalist social relations in the Pacific, north of parallel forty-nine; how did transportation systems sustain the expansion of empires operating on the island; and what social, political, and economic relationships conditioned technical change in the mines? Taken together, the answers to these questions root the development of capitalism in active power relationships of class and race. This project’s original contributions to communication studies include a historical narrative of Western Canadian capitalism, otherwise absent in the field; the development of a transportation-focused approach to communication, rooted in the work of Karl Marx; a history of Indigenous transportation and communication labour at the origins of capitalism on Vancouver Island; and a reinterpretation and application of labour-process theory to the mutually constitutive development of coal-mining machinery, social class, and race in the island’s mines.

Cockpit automation has been developed to reduce pilots’ workload and increase pilots’ performance. However, previous studies have demonstrated that failures of automated systems have significantly impaired pilots’ situational awareness. The increased application of automation and the trend of pilots to rely on automation have changed pilot’s role from an operator to a supervisor in the cockpit. Based on the analysis of 257 ASRS reports, the result demonstrated that pilots represent the last line of defense during automation failures, though sometimes pilots did commit active failures combined with automation-induced human errors. Current research found that automation breakdown has direct associated with 4 categories of precondition of unsafe acts, including ‘adverse mental states’, ‘CRM’, ‘personal readiness’, and ‘technology environment’. Furthermore, the presence of ‘CRM’ almost 3.6 times, 12.7 times, 2.9 times, and 4 times more likely to occur concomitant failures in the categories of ‘decision-errors’, ‘skill-based error’, ‘perceptual errors’, and ‘violations’. Therefore, CRM is the most critical category for developing intervention of Human-Automation Interaction (HAI) issues to improve aviation safety. The study of human factors in automated cockpit is critical to understand how incidents/accidents had developed and how they could be prevented. Future HAI research should continue to increase the reliability of automation on the flight deck, develop backup systems for the occasional failures of cockpit automation, and train flight crews with competence of CRM skills in response to automation breakdowns.

Interregional brain communication is mediated by the brain's physical wiring (i.e., structural connectivity). Yet, it remains unclear whether models describing directed, functional interactions between latent neuronal populations-effective connectivity-benefit from incorporating macroscale structural connectivity. Here, we assess a hierarchical empirical Bayes method: structural connectivity-based priors constrain the inversion of group-level resting-state effective connectivity, using subject-level posteriors as input; subsequently, group-level posteriors serve as empirical priors for re-evaluating subject-level effective connectivity. This approach permits knowledge of the brain's structure to inform inference of (multilevel) effective connectivity. In 17 resting-state brain networks, we find that a positive, monotonic relationship between structural connectivity and the prior probability of group-level effective connectivity generalizes across sessions and samples. Providing further validation, we show that inter-network differences in the coupling between structural and effective connectivity recapitulate a well-known unimodal-transmodal hierarchy. Thus, our results provide support for the use of our method over structurally uninformed alternatives., Competing Interests: Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests.