From the monthly archives:

March 2008

John Wayne, United Airways, and Human Factors

by Anne McLaughlin

Most everyone probably heard about the gun accidentally fired in the passenger plan cockpit last week.
But did you hear about the designs that lead to this human error?
I had to do some detective work (and quizzing gun owners) to find the following pictures:
Here is the gun in question (or similar enough) showing the safety and the spaces in front of [...]

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Educational (low-priced) laptops and cross-cultural Human Factors

by Richard Pak

In the past year, there has been an explosion of interest in the very low end of portable computing. This started with the introduction of the One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC). Quickly followed by the Asus EEE pc, Intel Classmate PC, and Everex Cloudbook. These bare bones and ultra portable laptop computers are ostensibly targeting users [...]

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Life imitates art (Nissan GT-R)

by Richard Pak

The new Nissan GT-R is a sports car that’s about to be released in the United States. The car has been a popular model in the Playstation game Grand Turismo. Apparently, the car’s striking information displays (the real car, not the game car) were designed by the creators of the Grand Turismo series (Polyphony Digital/Sony Computer Entertainment). [...]

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Response to “Paper Kills”

by Anne McLaughlin

I was reading a lengthy Q&A with Newt Gingrich in Freakonomics this morning, and came across the following:

Q: You discuss a united American front in your book. What healthcare platforms do you think Americans will unite around?
A: “… This system will have three characteristics, none of which are present in today’s system…. It will make use of information [...]

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Usability and Signing up for Campus Safety Alerts

by Richard Pak

With recent tragic events in the United States, there has been pressure for many University campuses to install emergency alert systems. These systems notify students, faculty, and employees of emergency events via email or mobile text messages.
A few months ago, I signed up to the one offered at my University. Today, I received the following note:
You recently signed [...]

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Death from Branding

by Anne McLaughlin
Thumbnail image for Death from Branding

If you’re Apple, you want people to see the similarities between their iPod and their iPhone. However, if you are a drug manufacturer, you do not want similarities between adult and pediatric medicine.
Above are bottles of Heparin, manufactured by Baxter Healthcare. Both blood thinners, one of these vials is 1,000 times more concentrated than the other. Confusion between these two [...]

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Unusually quiet morning radio show

by Anne McLaughlin

What if a Radio DJ hosted a morning show and no one heard?
Lesson learned! I will try to make certain to hit ‘publish’ at the end of this post.
From the article:
“”I’ve been doing the show three days a week for 10 months and always pressed the button at the right moment. Goodness knows why I forgot this time.
“Mr Dixon, the [...]

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