October 25, 2009 | Read full article |
I stumbled across this “upside down” map of the world today, which prompted me to change my desktop background. And subsequently reminded me of one of my favorite West Wing episodes ever, the second “Big Block of Cheese” day episode, in which CJ meets with the “lunatic mapmakers.”
There’s a website showing the relevant clips from the episode, plus some information about the Peterson Project Map. It always baffles me that Greenland is shown so large on most maps. I’m reminded that not everything is the way it appears.
This week, every time I look at my desktop, the “upside down” map ..read more
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October 19, 2009 | Read full article |
Last week, Science Daily published an article about mood congruency in vacation advertising. Essentially it says that if you’re enjoying a relaxing evening, you’re more likely to respond favorably to an ad for a relaxing vacation than an exciting or adventurous one.
In scanning the related articles, however, I came across one that said people make purchases based on how they think it will make them feel. An example they used was a mid-winter vacation advertisement for someplace warm and sunny, saying it would be most effective to make the consumer first think about their current feelings about being in a ..read more
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October 6, 2009 | Read full article |
I had some x-rays done yesterday to see if I had a stress fracture (I don’t). The hospital I went to no longer prints films, but burns CDs with a program that allows the referring doctor to view the images.
So naturally, the first thing I did when I got home was pop the CD in my computer and check out my bones. And then make copies of all the images on my computer, and then print them all out and put them on my wall. It’s like a nice Halloween motif.
Imagine if everyone had electronic medical records with access ..read more
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October 2, 2009 | Read full article |
National Ergonomics Month has officially begun. I’d like to celebrate the month with a few more posts about human factors issues, but for now I’ll just include this little plug to advertise. After all, that’s what NEM is all about.
According to the website, NEM serves to promote human factors to the public “by providing information and services.” As part of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society at school, it seems like a lot of what HFES groups do is try to raise awareness about the field as a whole.
It’s a tough road. Most people I encounter have never heard of ..read more
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September 17, 2009 | Read full article |
During the past couple of days I’ve been trying to catch up on the blogs that I read. The first item that caught my eye was shared with me by a friend — a link to FontCapture, a website that creates a font from your handwriting.
Now, I recently switched to a Tablet PC, and I’m fascinated with the ability to turn my handwriting into text. Clearly the next logical step is to turn text into my handwriting.
Using FontCapture was really easy with a Tablet PC, because instead of printing out the template and filling everything out by hand, ..read more
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