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Aucbvax.1538 fa.apollo utzoo!duke!mhtsa!ucbvax!SHRAGE@WHARTON-10 Fri Jun 5 16:32:13 1981 Most recent IBM system's journal: vol 20, # 2 1981 Topic: "Human Factors"

Contents:

Forward: The Human Side of Computers (L.M.Branscomb) Procedures of the Human Factors Center at San Jose (R.S.Hirsch) [A rather nice discussion of data collection and analysis technique mainly of keyboard typing speed and errors. They discuss the ABCD and QWERTY with very brief mention of Dvorak. They discuss the Japanese keyboards at length. TOUCHLINE, AUDIOLINE and CRT readability, crosshair manipulation on a CRT, etc. Details of procedure and analysis are worth at least glancing at.]

Effects of Manual Style on Performance in Education and Machine Maintenance (J.M.Judisch, B.A.Rupp, and R.A.Dassinger) [Compares the GIM (graphic integrated manual) with a standard head on views manual. Experimental report -- design and results. Not interesting to me so I didn't read it in detail and thus can't report very well.]

Natural Lanuage Programming: Styles, Stratagies, and Contrasts. (Lance Miller [listed as L.A.Miller in IBMese]) [Examines the utility of NL by experiments designed to compare the under- standability and ease of writing of natural language vs. programming language instructions. Very nice -- too long to properly summarize but seriously worth the time if you are a Lance Miller fan or into NL. "The results provide insight both on the manner in which people express computer- like procedures ``naturally'' and on what features programming languages should include if they are to be made more ``natural-like''" (from the abstract)]

Human Factors in the Development of a Family of Plant Data Communications Terminals. (M.Ominsky) [I didn't read this -- looks like keyboard design.]

Human Factors in Communication. (J.C.Thomas and J.M.Carroll) [A very interesting, sometimes philosophical, mostly linguistic discussion of the application of naming (processes and objects), relationals, quantification conditionals, comments, connectives, etc as they are used in natural language and how the understanding of English (or whatever) can help us to communicate with interactive systems. This would be a great review article to hand out to a course in interactive systems.]

This issue is probably worth your time to pick up if any of the above interests you but you don't want particularly technical reading on it (the first article is somewhat technical in the experiemental analysis). Copyright for all quotes above to IBM corporation.

[If anyone knows of mailing lists such as "natural-language" or "interactive- systems" that would like this please make a copy to that list. Also, you might add my name there as well -- such mlists would probably interest me].

-- Jeff

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