c.v.
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medium

Press: Mosquitoes
Press: Headless fruitflies
Press: Tongue illusions

Selected paper - if you read just one

• What if we fed mosquitoes from artificial feeders so that a) they wouldn't feed from people so much and b) they wouldn't evolve resistance to the method of control?  This paper addresses concerns that may come to mind about whether this would be an effective way to control malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases on a global scale.

Human factors

• Hospitals are not safe, not the way air travel is safe. Here is an explanation of one attempt to engineer one small part of one hospital using principles derived from aviation safety.
• Here is a description of from another part of that project: this paper is about how we helped a children's hospital place patient status monitors in the family waiting room.
• In this poster, we explore the different sorts of errors made by injection-experienced and injection-inexperienced users as they start to use a new injection device.
• HE:75 is a document that is accepted as a standard reference on how to design usable medical devices. We find that the standard itself is not always especially usable. In this poster, we show how a designer can be misled by the HE:75 document into producing less usable designs. We offer suggestions for improvement, which we expect to be reflected in the next edition of HE:75.

Perception

• Fruit fly bodies - that is to say, the bodies of decapitated fruit flies - can do all sorts of things, including walking, flying, tasting, and learning. Now, it turns out, they respond to a light turning on, too.
• Human tongue illusions: you might experience these if your tongue is flexible enough.
• How can you tell if a perceptual illusion that you think you have discovered is real? Here is a method for verifying the existence of a newly discovered perceptual illusion (say, a new tongue illusion).
• It turns out that children diagnosed with autism have unusual neural responses to rapidly presented tones.  Can this be used to identify autism in pre-linguistic children? My contribution to this paper is the data on simultaneous MEG/EEG, a technical challenge to use two forms of neuroimaging at the same time. 

Consciousness

Evolution

• Do females prefer males because they were healthy juveniles? Read all about parasites, sexual selection, and the Hamilton-Zuk model in bowerbirds.
• Here is a way to get parasites to evolve into into less-harmful forms.
• Applying the same idea as above more specifically to mosquitoes: what if we fed mosquitoes from artificial feeders, so that a) they wouldn't feed from people so much, and b) they wouldn't evolve resistance to the method of control?
• And here is my review of Susan Oyama's book The Ontogeny of Information, apologies it is behind a paywall.

Etc.

Check out Core Human Factors, Inc., and contact me!