misc

Blog is 99% recovered

January 5, 2010

What started out as a small database glitch escalated into a problem where we lost almost all of our December posts.  We’ve recovered most of them (except the newest one) thanks to Google and Bing caches.  Unfortunately, we’ve lost some of your comments on those posts.  Please feel free to re-comment!  Meanwhile, we’ll be tweaking some things behind the scenes.  [...]

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Database failure–we’ll be back shortly

January 5, 2010
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We had a database failure and it turns out our daily backups are junk–thanks WordPress Database Backup Plugin!  Our December posts are missing but should return in the next few days.

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Usability/Design/HF Potpourri

December 4, 2009
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Just in time for the end of the year:  Top 10 interaction design books from Kicker Studio Making cooking safe for the blind (via Real World Design) Deciding when you need graphics (via uxforward) We’ve posted before about the man who designs the UIs in movies, but Gizmodo has posted his new streaming demo reel…fascinating. How will reading change with [...]

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Graph extravaganza: Who are our “users”?

November 13, 2009
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It’s Friday, so here are some interesting visitor statistics of the blog (based on the last 1580 visitors).  I meant to do this on our two year anniversary (two months ago) but better late than never. First, where are our visitors coming from?  Primarily in the U.S. and Europe with some visits from China. Zooming in on the U.S. and [...]

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HFES Conference in San Antonio, Part 1

October 24, 2009

Anne and I just got back from the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society conference held in San Antonio.  We plan on posting some snippets of posters/talks that we found interesting in an upcoming post.  But in the mean time, here is a panorama of the view from our hotel. Being in San Antonio, TX, we also visited a Cowboy bar [...]

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HF Potpourri

August 17, 2009
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Some interesting items that have passed through my reader: Jerk can be emulated in software.  Cars with continuously variable transmissions sound and behave differently from other cars.  In this video, the speedometer and RPM smoothly increases (in most cars the RPM would bobble as gears shift and you’d feel a slight jerk).  I don’t know how I reached this page [...]

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Applied Decision Making Aids in the News

June 12, 2009

NPR covers ways psychologists have discovered to nudge irrational decisions  in a better direction. An excerpt: In the city of Greensboro, N.C., there’s a program designed for teenage mothers. To prevent these teens from having another child, the city offers each of them $1 a day for every day they are not pregnant. It turns out that the psychological power [...]

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HF/Design/Usability Potpourri from around the Web

April 15, 2009

Here are some links to interesting things from the past few weeks. Wired reports on user complaints with the new Kindle ebook reader’s text rendering. Touch Usability’s Kevin Arthur posted a neat behind-the-scenes of how Nokia phones get tested for durability Smashing Magazine rounded up a list of well-designed tabbed navigation schemes from around the web.  Earlier they also evaluated/redesigned [...]

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The Human Factors “elevator speech”

February 18, 2009
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I was in the elevator with someone from our college grants office and a colleague who does research on medical devices and human factors (and is currently teaching a seminar on the topic). She asked my colleague, “what does psychology have to do with medical equipment?” After giving her a few sentences about the importance of understanding user capabilities and [...]

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You can now follow us on Twitter

January 20, 2009

In addition to being notified of new posts by RSS and E-mail, we are now on the Twitter bandwagon!  If you are an existing Twitter user, you can now “follow” our Twitter feed and get notified of new posts.  What is Twitter?  Well, here is what Wikipedia has to say: Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that [...]

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How does one get into Human Factors?

January 8, 2009

We got a great question from reader Matt: I’m still unsure whether I want to make the leap into lots of school…and I was wondering if I could ask you about your human factors stories…How did you get into HF/E?…How do corporate and academia differ? In addition to teaching and research, do you or have you done any other HF/E [...]

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