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Anne McLaughlin

Exit Signs Across Cultures

by Anne McLaughlin
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Slate.com has a nice article on the difference between U.S. exit signs and the rest of the world, as well as a nice history of the evolution of the symbols.  Here is an excerpt to get you interested:
The text-based American exit sign has its origins in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, a blaze in a downtown Manhattan garment factory that [...]

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Making virtual worlds more accessible – a new context area for Human Factors

by Anne McLaughlin
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The Consumerist blog (of Consumer Reports) posted an article on the state of California suing Sony because their online Playstation services were not accessibly designed.
Quoted from The Consumerist post:
At the crux of the plaintiff’s failed case was their contention that, because PlayStation allows people all over the world to connect and play games together via their now-repaired PlayStation Network, that [...]

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Visual Search and Airport Security Screening

by Anne McLaughlin
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Funny I should have mentioned conjunction search the other day, since this post is all about new research by Jeremy Wolfe who has and continues to contribute to the visual search literature.
In this new work, already mentioned on i09, Wolfe and his former research assistant Michael van Wert investigated complex visual search as it applies to baggage scanning at airport [...]

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HF Graduate Programs: North Carolina State University

by Anne McLaughlin
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This is the second post in our 2-part look at some HF programs.  Rich’s post about Clemson’s program can be found here.

The psychology graduate program at NCSU in Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S.A, boasts eight faculty in the Human Factors and Ergonomics specialization. This is in addition to the faculty in our sister program in Industrial Engineering and related faculty in [...]

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The Spatial Demands of Assembly Instructions

by Anne McLaughlin
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I purchased a “build it yourself” cabinet over the internet, naively thinking that it couldn’t be too complicated if they really expected me to assemble it. Boy, was I wrong.
Take these instructions for example:
“Tap in post with a hammer to start and screw down with a screwdriver or with a small allen wrench until the shoulder of the post hits [...]

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Similar Medical Bottles Strike Again: Flu Shots and Insulin

by Anne McLaughlin
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One of this blogs most popular posts concerned the similarity of adult and pediatric containers for the blood thinner Heparin.  A story from 2008 concerns the mix up between “nearly identical” bottles of flu vaccine and insulin. When you don’t have high blood sugar, a shot of insulin is serious business and sends you straight to the hospital.
Five Bedford County [...]

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Environmental Controls: Spotlight on Volvo

by Anne McLaughlin
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I rode in a colleague’s new Volvo the other day and I love the environmental controls. The button lights up when active, showing where the airflow is going. Notice how the fan speed control is integrated into air direction display so they each add information to the other.
Compare to the older Volvo buttons, which had a similar theme but not [...]

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Distracted Driving: The Experience

by Anne McLaughlin
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We’ve posted quite a bit on driving before, but these new links are too good to be missed.
This first video from the NYT goes over the dangers of multi-tasking while driving (including on-the-street interviews of what American’s might think) and ends with an interview with David Strayer of the University of Utah, including a video of his lab simulator in [...]

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Database Three: Mining safety data

by Anne McLaughlin
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This post is part of a series on free data available to curious researchers and professionals:
Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA)
This database contains more searching capability than browsing. You need the specific geographic location of a mine before searching (state, county).
Once you zero in on a particular mine, the types of reports available are:

Overview
Inspections
Accidents
Violations
VPID ( Violations Per Inspection Day)
Health Samples
Mine [...]

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Database Two: Aviation safety data

by Anne McLaughlin
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This post is part of a series on free data available to curious researchers and professionals:
The Aviation Safety Network Database
The ASN Safety Database, updated every week, contains descriptions of over 12,200 airliner, military transport category aircraft and corporate jet aircraft safety occurrences since 1943.
Here is a link to their recording of the recent landing on the Hudson river by a [...]

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Pssssst! Free occupational safety data!

by Anne McLaughlin
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Do you love databases? Especially if you are interested in safety, there are a number of carefully archived databases of events out there. A couple of years ago, I found one of these while trying to answer the question “What kinds of human factors interventions would be most increase agricultural safety?” Six months of coding later, I had some [...]

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Medication Adherence Case Study

by Anne McLaughlin
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I talked with an 80 year old man last weekend about how he remembers to take his medication. His solution?
Put all the pills in one bottle and take out what he needs each day. It appears to be an anti-organizer.
If you or your loved ones are more interested in environmental support, a new free application created by Consumer Reports [...]

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The Toyota Saga Continues…

by Anne McLaughlin
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Update of an earlier post topic. From Consumer Reports:
Analysis shows over 40-percent of sudden acceleration complaints involve Toyotas
Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kaptainkobold/

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Dangers of Automatic Windows

by Anne McLaughlin
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Recently I posted on some potential human factors problems caused by Toyota’s design of their floor mats. For this post, I would like to compliment Toyota on their automatic power windows. The windows can be lowered fully and automatically by one quick press on the button. However, to be raised, the lever on the button must be continuously raised [...]

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Solving Beer Estimation Difficulties

by Anne McLaughlin
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The subtle change in the diameter of a glass can hide large changes in volume. Unfortunately for us, we’re terrible at estimating this, even when we logically know it to be true. For example, a few millimeters at the top of a pint glass equals an ounce of liquid, while the same height measure at the bottom of the [...]

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Human Factors vs. Bugs – Somebody stop my Toyota!

by Anne McLaughlin
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In one of my courses this year I had students talk about the kinds of human factors problems they had run across when using computers. There were a number of great anecdotes, but one thing that interested me was the difficulty they had discerning the difference between a software bug and a human factors problem. For example, one student complained [...]

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