Abstract
Phillips shares the outcome of a preliminary noise survey in the projectionist’s workspace of a movie theater.
Freight railroads are important to the United States economy. It is a $60 billion industry providing 221,000 jobs. Rail freight accounts for almost 40% of U.S. freight by ton-miles (the distance freight travels). Most of rail freight (91%) is bulk commodities, such as agriculture, chemicals, and construction materials, and the remainder is containers with consumer goods and other products (“Freight Rail Today,” U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Railroad Administration, https://www.fra.dot.gov/Page/P0362).
To assemble the long trains that traverse the country, there are switchyards where operators remotely control the locomotives to hook cars together. Operators accomplish this using a control unit. Joseph McDonald, Sadaf Kazi, Cale Darling, Francis Durso, and Kenneth Glover share their insights on conducting an HF/E audit of the control unit and how they accomplished it under time constraints due to a tight redesign schedule.
Midsummer is not Oscars time, but many movies are released for families and those on school break. Elizabeth Phillips’s article might give you reason to pause the next time you visit a movie theater. She presents a cogent argument for the need to consider hazardous noise in work locations other than industrial and manufacturing settings. Phillips shares the outcome of a preliminary noise survey in the projectionist’s workspace of a movie theater, the questions about noise exposure, and other questions that future research should address.
Three-dimensional (3-D) movies became part of our regular movie experience after the huge success of Avatar in 2009. The technology was not new, however. In the 1950s, 3-D movies were very popular, and there was a resurgence in the 1980s and 1990s in specialty theaters (“3D Film,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_film). Since Avatar improved the process of 3-D technology, 3-D content has moved swiftly on the laptop. Rick Burks, Christy Harper, and Michael Bartha explore the perceptual qualities of active, passive, and autostereoscopic 3-D technologies for the laptop and ask whether viewers experience discomfort from close viewing of 3-D displays. The authors point out in their article that as 3-D content “becomes more common on computing devices used in homes, schools, and workplaces, it is important to better understand the ergonomic implications of viewing 3-D content at closer viewing distances.”
In a provocative Views article, Alexandra Proaps and Rebecca Kennedy share how they picked up on the messages conveyed by Human Factors and Ergonomics Society presidents Eduardo Salas and Francis Durso to collaborate with other disciplines. They summarize their interviews with colleagues renowned for their collaboration, Nancy Cooke and Ronald Shapiro. Both Cooke and Shapiro provide concrete examples of successful collaboration that, I hope, will inspire you or endorse your current efforts to work with those outside our profession.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) brings EID a prime example of the importance of collaboration between HF/E and other industries and disciplines. AHRQ supported a project to explore design methods used by other industries that might be relevant for the design of consumer health information technology (IT) applications. The intent is to improve design to enable broader acceptance of these tools and to lead to better health outcomes. The project culminated in a guide, “Designing Consumer Health IT: Lessons From the Design of Consumer Technologies—A Guide for Developers and Systems Designers.” Teresa Zayas-Cabán and Kevin Chaney summarize the guide and share the 10 recommendations of the methods for consumer health IT designers and developers to implement during the product development process.
Be sure to read our Books section and In the News, which captures interesting HF/E-related articles from the press and Web. I hope you enjoy this issue and have a good summer.
