HCI International News, Number 10, June 2005

In this Issue

Special Announcements

• Conference rate rooms at Caesars Palace have all been sold out.
• Please reserve your room as soon as possible but no later than June 13, 2005, at Flamingo Hotel, immediately across from Caesars Palace Hotel at a special conference rate of $115 + tax.
• When you register for HCII 2005, you can also subscribe to major professional journals or order books at a discounted price.
• The tickets for the tours must be purchased by June 13, 2005.
• If you have already registered for the Conference, but wish to register for additional Tutorials and/or purchase extra items (e.g., books, journals, T-shirts, etc), you have to login into the Conference Management System using your individual account details and fill-in a Supplementary Registration Form. If you would like to order any of the books listed in the registration from and receive it at the conference you must place your order by June 13, 2005.
• The Advance Program of HCII 2005 is available.

Book Review: Ten Questions About Human Error

In this 218-page book, the author tries to provide answer to 10 questions about human error. The 10 questions are:

• Was it mechanical failure or human error?
• Why do safe systems fail?
• Why are doctors more dangerous than gun owners?
• Don’t errors exist?
• If you lose situation awareness, what replaces it?
• Why do operators become complacent?
• Why don’t they follow the procedures?
• Can we automate human error out of the system?
• Will the system be safe?
• And finally, should we hold people accountable for their mistakes?

Although the author addresses all of these questions with examples, cases, and terminology taken from the transportation and aviation fields,
one might nevertheless easily extrapolate much of the discussion to other situations in related fields.
Even if you disagree with some of the author’s arguments, they trigger thinking and provoke reaction.
For example, in chapter 3, Dekker compares the number of doctors in the U.S. and number of people who die as a result of medical
errors to the number of gun owners in the U.S. and the number of accidental death caused by gun owner errors.
In my mind this triggers the question: Do the guns owners, by having guns, save lives as the doctors do on their everyday activities? Or,
in chapter 4, one wonders about the relationship between “error” and “violation” when the author states “In this world there are errors and
violations, and these errors and violations are quite real.” Thought-provoking topics like these make Ten Questions About Human Error not only
a “must have” book for all professionals and researchers in the field of human factors in transportation, aviation, and failure analysis, but
also interesting reading for all others professionals, like myself, working in related fields.

A.M.

Ten Questions About Human Error: A new View of Human Factors and System Safety,
Sidney W.A. Dekker, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2005, 219 pagesISBN 0-8058-4744-8

Few Exhibition Booths still available at HCII 2005

HCII 2005 Exhibition has moved to a new location to accommodate more exhibitors. Potential exhibitors, please hurry up and sign up by June 17, 2005, the last day to register for an exhibition booth. A variety of related product and technology companies will exhibit at HCII 2005. 60 Companies are already committed to a variety of state-of-the-art HCI technologies.List of Exhibitors and new Exhibition Map.

For more information, please contact Dr. Abbas Moallem, Communication and Exhibition Chair

Sponsorship of HCI International 2005

Sponsorship is now open. Organizations wishing to sponsor a special event or to be a general sponsor of the Conference are welcome to contact Dr. Abbas Moallem, Communication and Exhibition Chair

Interesting Recent Articles

“The Canonical Intranet Homepage”, Alertbox, May 23, 2005 “Nucleus Research Releases ROI Scorecards for CRM Markets”, Nucleus Research, Inc. - May 23, 2005
“Yahoo! Appoints Larry Tesler Head Of User Experience And Design”, Internet Ad Sales May 11, 2005
“Yahoo plucks Amazon.com design guru”, News.com, May 10, 2005
“'Tags' make sifting digital data easier”, Originally appeared on News-Journal Online, May 15, 2005
“NASA developing human-like robots”, Science & Theology News, May 19, 2005
“Explaining the mind: an interview with Steven Rose”, Science & Theology News, May 19, 2005
“Self-help for users”, Revolution, May 09, 2005
“Your Internet Search Results, in the Round”, New York Times, May 9, 2005

Upcoming HCI Conferences and Events

2-3 June: HCIL Symposium and Open House, The 22nd annual symposium and open house of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, College Park, MD, USA. 8-10 June: IDC 2005, 4th international conference on Interaction Design and Children, Boulder, CO, USA. 13-14 June: UMICS 2005, Ubiquitous Mobile Information and Collaboration Systems, Porto, Portugal. 13-16 June: C&T 2005, 2nd international conference on Communities and Technologies, Milano, Italy. 15-17 June: ACE 2005, ACM SIGCHI international conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment technology, Valencia, Spain. 21 June: V4HCI, IEEE workshop on Vision for Human-Computer Interaction, San Diego, CA, USA. 27 June-1 July: UPA 2005, Conference of the Usability Professionals' Association, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 28-29 June: 3AD, Third international conference on Appliance Design, Bristol, UK.

*Announcement

Call for Papers, Special Issue on Driver-Centered Design, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, deadline: 1 August 2005

Previous Issues of HCI International NEWS are available online.

http://www.hci-international.org/

Contribute to HCI International NEWS

We welcome your contribution to the HCI International News. Please send us interesting news, short articles, interesting websites, etc. We will consider your comments and contributions for upcoming issues.Please send your contribution to the Editor, Dr. Abbas Moallem.

About HCI International NEWS

The HCI International NEWS is a newsletter about Human - Computer Interaction topics, the HCII 2005 Conference, Exhibition and activities, news in the area of Human - Computer Interaction, and more.

If you have any questions or comments, or if you would like to contribute, please contact the Editor, Dr. Abbas Moallem.

The opinions that are expressed in this Newsletter are the sole responsibility of its authors and do not represent any institution or company