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Skeuomorphism has been around for a long time. Architects including Frank Lloyd Wright have eschewed it. Alan Cooper, known as one of the founding fathers of user interaction design for computer systems, decried it in the first edition of his classic text, About Face: Essentials of User Interaction Design. And more recently (~October 2012), people […]

The Cost Disease is both the name of a book, and the economic theory espoused by this book. The theory is relatively simple at its base. There are two segments to our modern economy, the progressive and the stagnant. The progressive sector makes rapid improvement in efficiency. Examples include manufacture, particularly of items such as […]

In the Beginning: VoiceEM Back in 1988, Ray Kurzweil came out with speech-recognition software, including something called VoiceEM. It was an emergency medicine physician charting application; there was also VoiceRAD for radiology. These were DOS programs that ran with that typical DOS 80 character x 25 character text screen. In addition to having a medical-specific vocabulary, VoiceEM had […]

“Out of sight, out of mind.” Ever heard the one about the early translation program that converted this aphorism into Chinese and then back? It came out as “invisible idiot.” Regardless, “out of sight, out of mind” is a good general psychological principle. In any nuclear power plant control station, air traffic control center, AWACS plane, aircraft cockpit, or any busy and confusing medical setting whether […]

Neatness counts. Trying to find my way from the entrance of my 12 year old daughter’s bedroom to the bed to kiss her goodnight, especially if barefoot, is considerably more dangerous than most of the search and rescue and disaster operations I’ve been on. Navigating the screens of medical software often seems like walking in […]