From the category archives:

safety

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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Redesigning Toyota’s Keyless Ignition System

by Richard Pak
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The LA Times reporters Ken Bensinger and Ralph Vartabedian recently wrote a story about keyless ignition systems and the associated HF issues (we blogged about it here).  In a follow-up story, they report that Toyota is considering redesigning the system so that instead of requiring a single 3-second press to shut off the engine, it now requires 3 consecutive [...]

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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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Keyless Ignition in Emergencies: Do you know what to do?

by Richard Pak
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This story in the LA Times illustrates several important HF/usability issues.  First, the  importance of knowing what the user knows before introducing new, seemingly “simple” technology, or changing the way they currently do things (in this case, what people know about ignition systems and how they start their cars).  Second, like the story about the alarms, it also clearly illustrates [...]

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Ahem…your heart has stopped

by Richard Pak
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Darin Ellis sends along this radio story about a woman’s robotic heart that has a malfunction warning system that literally breaks the textbook HF rules of alarm design.  I’ll let Darin explain the unfortunate issue:
This woman, who is living thanks to a robotic heart, related a story of the “heart” malfunctioning.  Apparently, although not prone to malfunction, there is a [...]

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Publically Available Databases for Research

by Richard Pak
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This is just a placeholder post to collect Anne’s collection of publicly available safety data:

Data visualization tools
Occupational safety
Aviation safety
Mining safety

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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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Human Factors in the World’s First “Purpose-Built” Law Enforcement Vehicle

by Richard Pak
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In the near future, you may see one of these cars in your rear-view mirror. They are new purpose-built law enforcement vehicles that will appear in 2012. I found this press release while searching for something else on the web. The cockpit was designed with human factors input from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI):

[...]

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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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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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Driving and Writing: Audi MMI

by Richard Pak
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The new Audi A8 sedan has a novel text entry input system:  writing.  Instead of using a knob (an indirect velocity control) or touchscreen (direct position control), the system accepts input using a touch sensitive pad (indirect position control) that can recognize letter input:
This seems to be an improvement over current systems that make you use an indirect input device [...]

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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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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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Error Leads to Radiation Overdose

by Richard Pak
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Not much detail but the LATimes is reporting that:
“There was a misunderstanding about an embedded default setting applied by the machine . . . ,” officials at the renowned Los Angeles hospital said in a written statement that provided no other details about how the error occurred. “As a result, the use of this protocol resulted in a higher than [...]

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