training

Game Players as Future Warriors

January 26, 2009

I heard an interview over the weekend on the use of robots in war. A fascinating bit from that story was that as modern warfare moves to soldiers manipulating robots from afar, the military leveraged the existing research and development of game companies in the design of hand held controllers (at 13:43 in the streaming interview). So the predator drone [...]

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Return of the Checklist!

January 21, 2009

Paper to the rescue again! From the January 14th New York Times: “Surgical complications are a considerable cause of death and disability around the world,” the researchers wrote in the online edition of The New England Journal of Medicine. “They are devastating to patients, costly to health care systems and often preventable.” But a year after surgical teams at eight [...]

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Milk Jug Usability

January 19, 2009

A square milk jug has lots of benefits; because of its square shape, they stack more efficiently compared to existing milk jugs.  The shape makes it so that cartons of milk won’t require milk crates.  The net result is reduced transportation costs. However, it seems they are not so easy to pour. According to the NYT article, training was required [...]

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1960′s Human Factors : The Titan II Missiles

January 12, 2009
Thumbnail image for 1960′s Human Factors : The Titan II Missiles

I went on a trip to Tucson over the holidays and toured the last Titan II missile silo. A brief history: from 1963-1982 these missiles were part of the cold war “peace through deterrance” and “assured mutual destruction.” In essence, they provided one reason not to attack the US: even were we destroyed, these missiles would still launch to destroy [...]

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Patient photos aid docs reading faceless CT scans – Yahoo! News

December 2, 2008

Here is a really neat study that found that adding a picture of a patient’s face on a CT scan caused doctors to be more careful when examining the images.  The researchers proposed mechanism for the effect is that the faces induced doctors to have more empathy for the patient which led them to more carefully analyze the images.  Whatever [...]

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Hospital Bracelets Face Hurdles as They Fix Hazard – NYTimes.com

September 27, 2008

New York’s 11 public hospitals are at the forefront of a national movement to standardize color coding of hospital wristbands to designate patient conditions, in which purple — the color of amethyst — means “Do Not Resuscitate.” Red, or ruby, indicates allergies, while yellow — call it amber — marks someone at risk for falling. The goal is to prevent [...]

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Inner and Outer Outed

August 24, 2008

Redesigned Beltline signs to drop ‘Inner’ and ‘Outer’ RALEIGH – No more “Inner” and “Outer” for Raleigh’s Beltline. Soon it will be Interstate 40 and Interstate 440, east and west. The state Department of Transportation is about to make good on a long-standing promise to get rid of the Inner Beltline and Outer Beltline signs that get lots of motorists [...]

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John Wayne, United Airways, and Human Factors

March 31, 2008

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 [...]

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Unusually quiet morning radio show

March 7, 2008

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 [...]

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Welcoming the Fireproof Elevator

January 25, 2008

NPR ran a story earlier this week on an intriguing new human factors problem: fire-safe elevators. The fall of the World Trade Center made it painfully obvious that stairs in skyscrapers do not function adequately in emergencies. We’ve always been warned away from elevators in case of fire, and I would go so far as to say it part of [...]

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Surgeons Hone Skills on Nintendo Wii

January 18, 2008

Improvements in simulator performance didn’t come from just any Wii (see image), or any game. Marble Mania is good, for example. Tennis (astonishingly fun to play on the Wii, which uses a motion-sensitive wireless control) isn’t so helpful. “The key is to have subtle hand movements,” Kanav Kahol one of the authors of the study, told the Health Blog. “You [...]

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