PSE awarded 5-year, $23 Million contract with Lockheed Martin MS2 as subcontractor

Pacific Science & Engineering Group, with Lockheed Martin MS2 as subcontractor, has been awarded a 5-year, $23 Million contract to provide command and control research and engineering services to the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, Pacific. Work will support C2 net-centric operations, information management and decision support operations dealing with joint, Navy, Marine Corps, Army, and the Air Force, and their interfacing with civil and non-government components and capabilities. PSE also shall provide research, analysis, and prototype development in the areas of Human Computer Interfaces, and Human-System integration.

David A. Kobus nominated to national committees by APA

The American Psychological Association, partnering with the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and the Federation of Behavioral, Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, nominated Kobus, along with four other psychological scientists with expertise in human factors to serve on either of two new committees created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The two committees were established to develop an improved electronic infrastructure, which the Obama administration sees as an important predicate for health-care reform.

The two committees are Health Information Technology (HIT) Policy and HIT Standards. The latter will make recommendations to the national coordinator for HIT on standards, implementation specifications and certification criteria for the electronic exchange and use of health information. The nominees are: Sara Czaja, PhD; David Kobus, PhD; Donald Norman, PhD; Jacob Seagull, PhD; and David Woods, PhD.

New article in Cartographica builds on Harvey Smallman's Naïve Realism theory

Abstract

New interactive computer systems give their users great freedom and latitude to configure their displays as they please. This design philosophy is premised on the notion that users know what’s best for them. But do they? Building on PSE’s previous, well-known Naïve Realism theory (Smallman & St. John, 2005) this paper shows that experienced meteorologists and naïve undergraduates alike harbor misplaced faith in complex realistic displays. Groups intuit that complex displays will support simple weather judgments, when in fact the the complex displays slow judgments and impair accuracy. Users don’t always know what’s best for them and must get smart about results from perceptual research.

Reference: Hegarty, M., Smallman, H.S., Stull, A.T., and Canham, M. (2009) Naïve Cartography: How intuitions about display configuration can hurt performance. Cartographica, 44(3), 171-186.