State of Science: ergonomics and global issues.

In his 1993 IEA keynote address, Neville Moray urged the ergonomics discipline to face up to the global problems facing humanity and consider how ergonomics might help find some of the solutions. In this State of Science article we critically evaluate what the ergonomics discipline has achieved in the last two and a half decades to help create a secure future for humanity. Moray's challenges for ergonomics included deriving a value structure that moves us beyond a Westernised view of worker-organisation-technology fit, taking a multidisciplinary approach which engages with other social and biological sciences, considering the gross cross-cultural factors that determine how different societies function, paying more attention to mindful consumption, and embracing the complexity of our interconnected world.

Paternity testing under the cloak of recreational genetics.

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) internet companies are selling widely advertised and highly popular genetic ancestry tests to the broad public. These tests are often classified as falling within the scope of so-called 'recreational genetics', but little is known about the impact of using these services. In this study, a particular focus is whether minors (and under what conditions) should be able to participate in the use of these DTC tests.

Quantitative modelling in cognitive ergonomics: predicting signals passed at danger.

This paper shows how to combine field observations, experimental data and mathematical modelling to produce quantitative explanations and predictions of complex events in human-machine interaction. As an example, we consider a major railway accident. In 1999, a commuter train passed a red signal near Ladbroke Grove, UK, into the path of an express.

The good, the bad, and the future: on the archaeology of ergonomics.

Objective: This article places the 50th anniversary edition of the Human Factors journal in a historical context.

Background: It is appropriate to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of Human Factors and the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, but in so doing, we celebrate only the recent history of ergonomics.

Method: By digging into the history of ergonomics, we can better understand the evolution of method, practice, and concepts in the human factors discipline.

Analysing and modelling train driver performance.

Arguments for the importance of contextual factors in understanding human performance have been made extremely persuasively in the context of the process control industries. This paper puts these arguments into the context of the train driving task, drawing on an extensive analysis of driver performance with the Automatic Warning System (AWS). The paper summarises a number of constructs from applied psychological research thought to be important in understanding train driver performance.