Saturday, December 26, 2015

This Week in EID - Episode 86



This is the last week of EID for the year.  On behalf of the team at EID, I want to thank you for your support.  Whether you are the occasional reader, the active commenter, a frequent sharer, or some combination thereof. Without you, we would just be yelling into a canyon to hear our voice echo back at us.

A quick summary of the week.   

Monday had a fun story about end user license agreements and some karmic comeuppance.

Tuesday was a great example that the middle path is almost always better than the absolutist claims some designers, researchers, or policymakers try to force upon us. In this case on the balance of sensory mindfulness, cognitive focus, and mindwandering aimlessness. 

Wednesday shared a great cognitive heuristic that can lead to self-delusion.  When we rely on our smartphones to immediately access whatever information we need at the time, we significantly overestimate our own expertise and knowledge.  We lose track that we didn’t actually know anything, we looked it up.  It was just so fast that the help didn’t get tagged onto the memory.

Then Thursday we had the annual Goal Setting article, hopefully to help you make more effective New Year’s Resolutions as well as setting other kinds of goals throughout the year. 

We will ramp back up again on January 4th and I hope you will join us as we continue this journey into social media discussion and debate about Human Factors, Ergonomics, and all kinds of related topics, sciences, and domains.

Have a safe New Year Eve, a wonderful 2016, and see you on the other side.