“This is an emergency announcement. We may shortly need to make an emergency landing on water.”
…
Passenger Michelle Lord said: “People were terrified, we all thought we were going to die. They said the pilot hit the wrong button because they were so close together.”
I certainly see the point of an automated message, since in the event of an upcoming crash the crew is almost certainly busy. But the heart attack I might have upon hearing the message in error would render a crash moot.
A train trestle in Durham, NC has a clearance of 11’8″.
The typical height of a large rental truck ranges from 11’6″ (don’t bounce!) to 13’6″.
How often do you think about clearance when driving? Do you think you could adjust to thinking about it 100% of the time in your rental truck?
I’ve seen parking garages that have a hanging bar well before the low ceiling to notify drivers that they are not going to make it. The bar, on chains, will bang the front of the truck but not peel the top off as the bridge does. The trucks in this video are going to quickly, this warning would have to come well before they crossed the intersection. This solution probably has problems too. I’m sure there would be drivers who were planning to turn before the bridge that get mad that a bar hit their truck. Also, getting someone to pay for and maintain the bar might be difficult as the trestle owners want to blame the drivers (and so do other drivers, if you read the comments on the video.)
More video and information is availible at 11foot8.com. Videos copyright Jürgen Henn – 11foot8.com.
The words “Clomiphene” and “Clomipramine” might look similar, but if you work in a pharmacy, you should know that they stand for very different things. Clomiphene is the generic version of the fertility drug Clomid. Clomipramine is a tricyclic antidepressant. A woman in Pittsburgh says that the pharmacy at a Giant Eagle grocery store gave her the antidepressant when she was prescribed the fertility drug. She had a severe allergic reaction and ended up in the emergency room.
Her work was inspired by our need to increase automation in aviation, due to increases in air traffic. However, automation does not come without costs — what happens the performance of air traffic controllers and pilots when the automation someday fails? At what point is the operator so “out of the loop” that recovery is impossible?
Sethumadhavan addressed this question by giving people different levels of automation and observing their performance after failures of the automated system. The more automated the system, the more errors occurred when that system failed.
She also measured the situation awareness of her participants in the different levels of automation — results were similar. Those who had more of their task automated had less situation awareness, and even after a system failure their awareness continued to be lower. In other words, they weren’t shocked out of complacency, as one might predict.
Sethumadhaven’s work directly contributes to understanding the human in the loop of the automated system, so that we can predict their behavior and explore design options to prevent errors due to putting the controller out of the loop.
You can read more on Dr. Sethumadhavan’s work here. Congratulations to her on this award!
Photo credit isafmedia under a Creative Commons license.
When it comes to efficiency, creating standard sizes and connections saves money, production efforts, and makes for easy substitution when one runs out of an object. For example, I was delighted that lid for one brand of pot perfectly fit my new frying pan. Unfortunately, there are times when we do not want parts of one object to fit another [...]
I‘m on a plane writing this post and I look harmless, or at least not threatening. According to work presented by Poornima Madhavan from Old Dominion University, being a female in the screening line means I am less likely to be hassled by a false alarm of a screener seeing a threat in my bag.* In work done with her [...]
Kim-Phuong L. Vu was this year’s winner of the Earl A. Allusi Award for early career achievement. Her presentation covered maximizing stimulus-response compatibility to optimize human performance. Vu reported on her studies of people’s performance under different levels of stimulus-response compatibility. For example, high stimulus response compatibility occurs when a blinking button needs to be pressed. The blinking is the stimulus [...]
Below is the preface and excerpt of Chapter 1 from our forthcoming book. The book will be released September 2010 and will be available where fine books are sold or directly from our publisher CRC Press. Until January 31, 2011, you can get 20% off the cover price when you purchase directly from CRC Press using this link and this code: 810DE. [...]
According to Peter Hancock, we are our tools. His 2010 presidential address “Mind, Machine, and Morality,” was as entertaining and wide-ranging as is typical of a Dr. Hancock talk. Two of his philosophical takes on our field are well suited to discussion, and I present them to invite comment. Part I: Self-symbiosis – Uniquely human? Self-symbiosis refers to our propensity [...]
I‘m just returning from APA 2010, where the Division of Applied Experimental & Engineering Psychology presented a number of cutting-edge human factors projects. I’m writing individual posts on many of these, so stay tuned! Here is a teaser: “How important is your HF work to the human race?” “Get ready for the pat-down, males!” “Too much help is a dangerous [...]
Enjoy memorizing this hospital sign! How about just announcing the issue rather than matching it first with a color? For example: “Attention, tornado!” seems like it would be effective. Elopement, by the way, means a patient with Alzheimer’s needs to be located. That makes “purple” a code within a code (and makes me want to watch Inception again). This is [...]
I ran across this fascinating article from ComputerWorld on Volvo’s goal of creating a zero fatality car by 2020. As I read it, a number of human factors issues jumped out at me, but the focus is almost entirely on engineering issues. This does not mean Volvo will ignore the human factor. After all, I’ve previously posted on their well-done [...]
From xadamx via Gizmodo. Similar Posts (auto-generated): This does not bode well for the on-device user experience… Ergonomics for kids Consumer Reports story on Automobile Ergonomics
Are you going to the annual Human Factors and Ergonomics conference this fall? If you are conference presenter or just browsing, make sure to stop by the Madness sessions. The purpose is to get a fun 25-second preview of the talks happening that day. It’s early in the morning but hopefully well worth it. We’ll host a concurrent website and [...]
Recently a friend posted this frustration with the system that supposedly keeps car stereo thieves from using a stereo. Unfortunately, it kept the owner from using it as well. Driving home last nite suddenly the dash lights up like an xmas tree. Lights turn off, alarms go off, etc. Climbing partner & I: “This is not good”. 1/2 second later everything’s [...]
After a long process and over a year of work, Anne’s and my book on user interface design for older adults is almost available! The cover of our book has been finalized (shown below). The book will be released September 21st, 2010 and will be available where fine books are sold or directly from our publisher CRC Press. We’ll give [...]
