E297 - Another Format Change

So how was your break? How was your Your time out, because it was a bit stressful before Christmas, wasn't it? Oh, yeah. Okay. So let's actually hang on really quick. If we're going to alter the the format of the show, I should probably start us off with we're back. I don't know.

This is a new, different territory that we're taking here. If this is a new intro you're listening to this, perhaps live, perhaps not live. We're recording potentially, I don't know, on January 11th, 2014. No. I went back in time 10 years. You're the second person who's done that today. Where I was in a, I was in a formal review and they put the slides up as 2014 instead of 2024.

Made me laugh. Sorry. January 11th, 2024. You're listening or watching live. Perhaps on any one of these platforms, such as YouTube, LinkedIn. TwitterX, formerly known as Twitter. We are now on Instagram as well. Which you can see this little graphic here on

Instagram. But if you want to watch on any of the other platforms, you can see our faces.

And see what the face to these voices sound, look like. Unless you're on Instagram, which isn't, it shows you the middle of the screen, which everybody else can see. Everyone else can see that too. It's ugly. And I'm going to try to figure out a solution to this. I don't know what the solution to this is.

Have you not got one of the setups where you could just put us into your landscape your portrait mode? We could, but then it would mess it up for all the other platforms. And Instagram is the only vertical platform. So I don't know, this is like the happy medium for now anyway. Welcome.

This is human factors cast. Maybe if we're going that direction. So Barry, you, before the show, actually, we were talking a little bit about our holiday season and. Something that I wanted to catch everybody up with. So yes, it was stressful for me. Very stressful. Before we left I and we had some fits and starts there in the in the holiday break because it was.

It was in between me trying to find jobs and lots of life events happening around the same time. Good news, I have a job. Very pleased. Haven't officially made the LinkedIn post. Humble bragging about that yet, but we'll do shortly, but that side of, Thank you.

Thank you. So that side of it is taken care of the podcast side, however, look like I've been busy with life things, obviously. And so we're trying to get ourselves back on track here, meaning we look every week for new stories. To talk about here on the show. Now there's a couple of really notable things in the news right now that we could talk about and probably we'll touch on, but going forward, I'm not sure.

I mentioned this at the start of our live stream here. I'm not sure if the format of the show going forward is going to be these hyper focused topics on just one thing. We've changed the format of the show throughout the years, right? This is just me speaking candidly where we started off as more of an educational series where it was more lecture based, pick a topic, talk about that topic from.

An education perspective and then we shortly moved out of that into news when we realized it wouldn't be sustainable and the news then where it was three topics. It was three topics. The banter was up front. So we would. Do all of our bantering at the front of the show and lose a lot of interest, honestly, which is why we moved it to the back.

If people want to get acquainted with us and our personalities, that's fine. You can do that, but we're going to put it at the back of the show because as human factors people, we are literally human factors ing. Podcast episodes, and we did that for a very long time, and then we realized these three stories a week were not getting the, we were not able to give them the attention that we wanted to give them.

So we shifted that to a one story a week model. Now that one story a week model was fine, and we selected that. We self selected that. We switched to the format again a little later on. And we shifted it to where we are no longer selecting the stories. We're selecting a pool of stories. But then you all, the listeners, you all get to choose what it is that we talk about on the show.

And that's great. And that worked out great. With a little bit of encouragement. Anyway. The problem with that is that it's it's a lot of work behind the scenes to go through and look at all those news stories. And, and then to select them, and then to push out the poll every week, and that's, I'm just being honest here.

And what the future of the show is, all this to say, what the future of the show is, I don't know. I still want this, community driven aspect of the show. I love having you guys pick the stories for us, so that way we can talk about what you want to hear about. What people in the Human Factors UX communities want to hear about.

That is incredibly important to me. At least, that we are putting stuff out there that is valuable to the community, that is a discussion starter for the community. And my best guess as to how to do this is to like, I don't know, throw stories at us while we're live. Let's talk about this live. I guess the At risk of Bill O'Reilly ing this I think we'll do it live.

I guess there's a couple of flavors that we can, and we can mercilessly steal from the way that other people do podcasts as well. There's some podcasts there that do different hashtag type events throughout a month. So we could do, if you looked at say, we're doing four of these a month, so one a week Two of them could be properly planned out stories, like the usual format and two hangouts.

Or we could do three in one, or we could do, and then we, people can search for the different styles through use of hashtags or something like that. And so we're mixing up the format during a month because these hangouts are less, yeah, less less planning because we both just rocked up here tonight and switched it on and said, yeah, let's go.

But even then we couldn't help ourselves. We did share a couple of stories beforehand to to potentially talk about. Then I think there is value as well in having a bit of time to make sure it is, we do know what we're talking about. Yeah. In other and I think the happy medium for me is let's, if we can get enough folks here live watching and participating, let's throw in stories as potential next week's topics. And then we have like maybe two segments of the show on. Honestly we did away with it came from for a little bit. I almost thinking the whole show could be, it came from where it's a mix of stories and questions and topics that we're all talking about.

And so it's not necessarily just the news stories anymore. It could be potentially questions from the community that are good discussion starters. And. I like that. And the workflow, if you will of this new format would look something like this. Okay, tonight, Thursday night the 11th of 2024 we have a conversation with you all, the community.

We source out news stories, we find things interesting, and we're like, oh, that's a good one, that's a good one. Earmark that for next week, earmark that for next week. And what we do is then Next week, which would be what, 18? That's seven days from now. Why is my calendar not working? Oh, you're right. Yeah, it's 18.

So next week, 18. We take those stories that you all had suggested this week, and we come forward and say, hey look, these were great stories. We've gone and done some research, and here's some like human factors y things on it. And then towards the end of that discussion, we then open it up again.

Hey, what do you want to hear about next week? And it's an open discussion. I would love to have more of a live element to this. So is that also maybe how we use or utilize pre and post show? It could be. There's elements of that, isn't it? Or we make, or we scrap pre and post show and just have, it's an hour.

No, I do having the pre and post show, because it gets us into a mood for the show and then it gets us out, but I like those elements, and I think you're right, that fits there, and the only thing that I think we're missing for me is having that sourcing be within the episode itself, because I want that To be in the episode, right?

Such that anyone listening later on can still contribute to the discussion throughout the week. And if we get a comment on a YouTube video later on, or, an email on our website or something. From somebody who's Oh, this story, they need to talk about this next week. We can still pivot very easily.

Up to next week, but it's all driven by the community. So that's my vision. I think for 2024 and beyond changing the format just a little bit. We'll still be here. We're still going to provide commentary. So we're still going to prepare. How do you fancy doing a live trial? If we could test this now with everybody who's watching, listening.

Chuck into the comments or the, yeah, the comment section of whatever platform you're using, give us, I don't know give us a human practice topic that you know, that is topical now today. And then Chuck that in and we don't, we're not spelling or anything like that, but put the topic and we could see whether we could talk about it.

Otherwise we're not going to say anything now until somebody puts something into a comment and you're just going to have two hours of silence.

This isn't working as well as I thought it was going to. Nope. Alright. So here's let me back up here because you asked me a question. I pivoted and said what about the change of direction in the show? Let me get back to your question about how my holiday was. Figured out the job thing.

Great. There's actually a really interesting Oh, this gets into some dangerous territory here. I guess I can fully admit this and Start discussing it. Half of this makes me feel like a bad parent. Other half of this makes me feel brilliant. All right, here it goes. So video games, right?

We're on a couple of these video game platforms, Twitch. Hi. We got a topic. Sorry. We got a topic. We did. So it works. So anyway, carry on. Okay. All right. We'll get to the topic in just a second. Let me finish this thought. So Fortnite, the thing all the kids are playing. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. It was, look. It was Fortnite classic, and now there's this new multiverse approach to Fortnite, where there's different games within Fortnite, which is actually cool. So they do racing now is one mode, and then they have what what Rock Band used to be, where you do the controller with actually songs mapped to inputs that you play.

Cool. That's cool too. Okay, but the thing that I was really excited about is Lego Fortnite. And Yes. This Okay. I don't know how to go on about this without sound half bad parent, half brilliant. I like Legos. You like Legos. My son loves Legos too. And so what if I start playing Lego Fortnite with my son?

Okay. I've got, okay. Okay. This is where the half bad parent comes in because I've fully set up him, his own account and we can play together in the same world and work on the same structures and build things. This kid, four years old. Is amazing me in so many ways, he is building contraptions, he's building these big staircases, and then putting balloons on them, knocking out the bottom of them, the whole staircase lifts up and floats, he's building these intricate structures, and he's four years old, and he's really lear he's learning coding, too, because he's, you can make these objects in the game there's thrusters, so you can put those onto a thing, and then you can put a little switch on the thing to turn the thrusters on and off, so he's learning basic logic with it.

Yesterday, we built a bunch of platforms and threw them up in the sky, and then that was a couple days ago, but yesterday we put a house, we knocked out the foundation and put balloons on the top, and so now we have a floating house and we built up in, in Lego Fortnite. It's actually, it's really cool, man!

It's really cool! And it's really great because we were just having a bunch of fun and we did a lot of that while there was some downtime. Doing a lot of that and yeah, that's good. Tell us a little bit about your holiday season. How did that go? Very quickly. Too quickly. It was good.

It was nice. We I said that I was going to take some definitive time off. I didn't go and do. I, I had at least a whole week or so where I didn't do any work which was cool. We ended up, so I think before our last episode, I think it was we ended up having a works Christmas do, which was nice.

It was great to have all the team in and all that sort of stuff. So we did all that. And then for Christmas itself, we had we did have all of our usual stuff, but instead of going away to visit all friends, family, and all that sort of stuff, we made most of them come to us. Which was amazing. So we our house remodeling is such that the kitchen is pretty much complete.

So I had a kitchen to cook in on Christmas day, which was amazing. And it just proves that you spent quite a lot of time doing task analysis on how the kitchen was designed and whether it was designed well enough And just clearly things that we need to change. But on the whole, no, that was all fantastic.

And then, Boxing Day, we went to visit my in laws. And then the day after, my parents came down to visit for a few days. And then we had some time to chill. And then it was back to work. I was, I saw it was one of these things that we were looking at and and saying I want to take some more time off.

So I was like, we'd had the Monday, Tuesday off and I was like, I'm going to work on the Wednesday, clear the decks and take Thursday, Friday off. And so I'd have a bit more time off and I was really looking forward to that until I went into the work on the Wednesday and my ability to clear the deck was, didn't work.

It, I ended up in fact, going right away to a client site on the Thursday and then working Friday and then it's like the holiday never happened. Did I get the, did I get the indoor? We didn't get the indoor microwave. Indoor microwaves in the UK are just not that popular. I would have had to have got it from Europe or or, I don't know, the States or get it imported.

Yeah, it didn't happen, which ironically it would have been helpful if it did because my son yes day before yesterday decided he, he had a couple of sliders. Small burgers and the instructions said to microwave the sliders, cover them in cling film and do them on microwave them for 20 seconds.

Unfortunately, he transplanted seconds for minutes. And so basically microwave these small little burgers and their buns for 20 minutes. And it caused a lot of smoke. So now the microwave is now broken and somewhere out in the garden because it got thrown out in a smoky mess. So we do now need another microwave.

Anyway, recommendations in the UK. Or if you do know where to get an indoor microwave in the UK, links very welcome. Alright, so what's the topic? I don't see it in the chat. What's the topic? No, so it's come on to my LinkedIn and Amanda wants to talk about the education system. Ooh. And how, so I'm going to extrapolate that to how we educate people for human factors which is really topical because one of the sidebar projects that I've given myself is to map out how people learn about human factors.

And the, Options available and that type of thing because certainly here in the UK, we don't have any bachelor's degrees. Any, so any undergraduate degrees that just do human factors, straight human factors, they've gone. They're not profitable for universities, therefore they just don't do them. The earliest you can get to do a full human factors degree is at master's level.

Which is, I, it's irritating on a number of levels because you don't, that means everybody's finding HF as a second career. You, when you're learning about how to do it, then, you're already at a higher level to trying to try and find work. You're more expensive, et cetera, et cetera. Nobody wants to, when you go through primary school, secondary school here in the UK, I can't remember what we call it in the States.

I'm sure you'll fill me in. We don't nobody wants to grow up to be an ergonomist. Nobody wants to group. Nobody has that everyone's to be astronauts or firefighters or Nurses or doctors and that type of thing know because I want to be an ergonomist when I grow up or a human factors practitioner It just doesn't happen.

How do we inspire young children early on that they want to do what we do? It's not there. And then if you do or do not do, so if you don't do a degree, you don't take that route, you want to do a more hands on approach, where are the vocational approaches to be able to do it? Here in the UK, we're trying to set up a vocational a a degree apprenticeship.

So you do your degree, but you'll do it when you're employed and make that work, and we're currently working through that at the moment. But that's hopefully going to become available next year. But that's a trial and let's see if it works, but even then that's still at a master's level.

It's not at a undergraduate level and not in the bachelor's level. So we're CIHF is now putting in these learning pathways so you can learn. Again, it's like more vocationally and remotely to do things. And on all the degree courses, you can do modules. So I've been trying to start to map this out and not really getting verified.

Cause it's like most of my side projects, I do a bit of it and then go away and then realize, Oh, I've started that I really should finish it. How does that compare with the States? How do you, what, how do you learn to be good to do human factors E type chisel in the States? Great question. Something that we're asking here, too.

I have a lot of thoughts on this, and I'm going to start with the basic, how do people find human factors? For me, it was an accident. And to compare the two, there are some bachelor's programs here that are focused on human factors, but not Many. And so it is predominantly master's PhD level here as well.

There are some undergrad systems engineering courses that mention it as a part of the curriculum. The interesting thing to me, though, is when you start talking about aspirations to be these things. I think we, we even talked to some folks at HFES last year that We're echoing the same thing. How do we grow up?

How do we create excitement around being a human factors practitioner, make children want to aspire to be them, right? Aspire. There it is. So the the interesting thing to me is that, or I guess the difficult challenge with that approach is that. For human factors, sorry for jobs that a lot of people want to aspire to be to doctors, astronauts firefighters, public servants, whatever, these are highly visible roles that may or may not interact with our everyday life.

So you have astronauts who have high profile media attention, okay, that there's coverage of these big. Leaps forward in, in space exploration with doctors, you interact with them every time you go to the doctors or dentist or, whatever, firefighters, they save lives. They're pretty high profile too.

And I think our challenge is that if our work is done correctly, we are invisible. And we have historically not taken enough credit for the things that we have done, because it's we don't want to step on the toes of stakeholders by saying, Hey, look, you got to build it this way, you got to do it this way, and then when it's done that way.

And nothing bad happens. It's linking it back to another topic that we talked about at HFES, the good news, right? It's, you only hear about human factors when it's bad stuff. And so how do you, yeah, how do you share that good news? And how do you, and I have some thoughts on this whole thing.

And my main thought is that we need to be media trained. Like seriously, yeah. No we would talk about this in the CIHF and as a counselor and we we need personalities there cause we do what we do and, through podcasts and things like that. And we try and inject our own enthusiasm into it, but I think I'm not insulting either of us by suggesting that we are enthusiastic amateurs in this space, when you look at people who.

Say probably media train, but also have that underlying ability and passion to be able to engage an audience in a way that, just inspires and does all that sort of stuff. Then that is a skill in its own right. It's good. And we need to find some of them. Some of them people to be almost ambassadors.

To what we do. So you get some of these people who go on like the science shows and things like that, and I think we have a few people in the UK who talk about science in a way that is accessible, meaningful and just. They just create good stories around it. In a way that I could only hope to even vaguely get anywhere near.

We need some people like that who buy into what it is that we're doing, but can communicate it and sell it in a meaningful motivating way. So anybody watching who fits that role and then please do give me a message because yeah, we need some of that. I think there's also another approach too that so the other approach would be like to reach out to current science educators that are widely seen as from the public's perspective as an authority figure on science.

And to get them like on it sounds weird, but to get them on a, a. A long term contract where they are obligated to talk about human factors in some way, shape, or form I don't know some sort of payment from the professional societies worldwide to come and talk at events about this topic.

That might be another avenue into this where, they can be fed feet, they can be fed talking points or whatever and talk about these things, but them as a science educator, they are the authority figure. With at least the public that once they start here, once Bill and I started talking about climate change over and over again, then you're like, okay, this is important to him.

And so it's, why is it important? He does a great job of explaining it, and depending on how you feel about those science educated, I think some of them are a little pretentious in their delivery, but I still think. That that is an important relationship that we should establish, at least with people who know how to speak intelligently on a topic, communicate science effectively, and honestly if you got down and got Bill Nye to explain human factors to kids you might, or, you know what, even, here's another approach, too start them really young.

What if, We had the money to do like a partnership with some of the kids personalities like Blippi or miss Kate, miss Rachel, what, do serious outreach with children's educational programs that have high reach. So that way, children can, Sesame Street do some serious outreach with those.

So that way we're starting super young. So instead of just firefighters and doctors and astronauts, you are now learning about ergonomists and systems engineers and like, all these different things that you could potentially do to impact, what it is that we do. And I think that, that would be another good approach.

How do I reach these kids on YouTube without being arrested? I think it's a bit too, but the, that, and that's, that is a really good point. I think we showed on this channel ages ago when and I haven't got them here. Oh, I do. When they, wait, what? U is for UX. H is for human factors.

Yeah, 10 books. They were really, they're really good. They're produced in such a way that it's appealing and you could easily give them to your younger children to start getting into it. And if we start getting into that sort of material, and so making available to to schools and things like that, then it feeds into their thing.

Though I'm intrigued. You just did a stroke of genius. The full ABCs of human fac Oh that, that could be fun. So you're doing your ABCs, but using human factors terms. Yeah so this is where I'm saying this format change is excellent, because some of the comments here are amazing.

So let me just, Let me just read some of these. So KW on YouTube, I would approach from what kids watch, Wendover Productions, Technology Connect even TikTok. And I think that TikTok approach is also really important. Let's talk, let's find influencers. On these platforms, seriously do a cross promotion if, these professional societies can set aside some funds for outreach, especially as it comes to paid partnerships with these with influencers or children's programs, I think that could go a long way.

But then the TikTok point and we've talked socials for some, it's not necessarily paying influence to do it. It's how do we generate the content. So at the moment, what we do is we take clips from these sections of what we've done, which is not what really good influencers do.

They actually create content specifically for, short form material, TikTok, reels, et cetera, and generate meaningful content that is, a bit more free flowing and all that sort of stuff. And engaging that way. So maybe we need to put, rather than seeing the socials or certainly the short form like TikTok as a, let's just snip up what we've already got, maybe we need to start producing content that is thought out for that platform.

And do stuff that way, but then it flips back to that's my work. And but if we're going to do it, then, it's the TikTok, the Snapchat, the, them sort of thing, engaging with them in the way that we need to. It's not an easy thing. It takes effort. It takes work, but it needs to, it's a really good thing to do.

Yeah, no, I think the difficulty here would be measuring the return on investment, right? And what kind of, to get a professional society to pay for it, it'd be like what does that mean in terms of return on investment for membership? I'm just thinking about HFES for example, right?

HFES, for example you say, all right, this year, let's dedicate. X number of funds to children's education. You can't measure that until years later as a longitudinal study, because then you have the children who's growing up with it now. But if we're doing it properly, and I'm about to put people on the spot now, the What we're talking about here is a, it's an international problem.

We've identified now, and we've identified before that because I did it, my conference speech last year and bits and bobs that the number of human factors, qualified human factors practitioners is going down. We know that the numbers in professional organizations are decreasing. So we have a worldwide issue.

Therefore, it needs a worldwide organization to solve it. So that's actually above HFES, but above CIHF, that's an IEA problem. And so actually what we should be doing is going to the IEA and saying We need to focus on this issue. A way of solving that is by getting people enthused much earlier on.

We need to appeal to to children who are either preschool, mid, young, starting school and producing specific artifacts, things like that to engage with them, people to get them excited about becoming ergonomists. And so then that has the benefit then of everybody can chip into it.

And, sorry, I have to jump in with this point too, because there's also follow on effects if we can explain it to a four or five year old, three, four, five year old. In preschool, these complex topics, we can then be sure that we can explain it to the stakeholders and it also helps us, right? Like the saying, if you can explain it to a, you don't understand it until you can explain it to a five year old.

And I think that forces us to step back, stop being so academic or technical about everything and just explaining how things are. And that is super cool. I think I want to address a couple of things here. In the chat, call me freckles in Twitch. We do a full ABCs of human factors. I think that's Barry, that's what you were bringing up there with the Hs for human factors.

You have those books handy. So that's one of them. Duh that's the, no, that's the back of that one used for UX. But as Cormac Freckle says, actually, if we did the, cause you have the A's for Apple, B's for, so we could actually develop something that I don't know quite how we get every letter going, but let's make let's make some of that happen.

I think it'd be, I think that'd be quite a laugh to do as a bit of a sidebar project links for the books. You can just Google. Google them. You can't buy them. They're not on general sale. They are done by, if you search for, on LinkedIn Pamela Sofron Gay, or even just Bold Insight.

Oh yeah, they are. Yeah, they're on resale. Hang on I'll throw this. John, we saw that? Oh. Oh, I don't know whether, it's just that they can't be sold outside the US or something like that. There was something weird, because they posted sets to us. Yeah we, we get no kickback on that link. Just let them know that human factors cast sent you.

I think, yeah, there's, yeah. Oh yeah, shipments are only available to US and EU.

Beautifully illustrated. They're, and the effort that has gone into just the prose inside the books is fantastic. Cause we all know that it's easy to write a lot of words. It's hard to write a few words and still get your messages across. And what they've done is just fantastic, I think. Yeah, so I have a few sets here.

Which is quite nice. I still need me a copy. Me, I should buy it. Yeah, no, I think that's a very interesting topic. And, Man, I, something about education just gets us going, Barry. Cause I think we have some skin in the game some stakes in education. So the other reason why I think Amanda might have brought this up as well is cause we, we have very different views to education that I think non mainstream views, I think that be described.

So I. When you look at the, so we as Human Factors Practitioners, we're interested in training, aren't we? So we want the right people to be trained to do the right sort of thing. So when you apply that to the education system as such, then you could argue that all of our education systems are broken.

That that they've become self sucking lollipops in their own right. That they don't largely fulfill what we will consider the remit to be. We send them off to send our children off to school for, a number of years from when they're very young to when they're not quite as young and then expect out the other end to form, have fully formed adults with knowledge and motivations and all that sort of stuff, and then send them out into the workplace.

Is that the right sort of educational model for the 21st century? Should we be doing it a different way? And, we are a home educating family, so we gave up on the school system quite a while ago. And, thankfully, our children they seem to be successful in what they're doing, which is good.

So we haven't broken them. So yeah, it's still time now. Quite right. So is there an element there that actually we so sucked into this traditional model of most center at four or five years old? We'll send them to school at 16 or 18 years old. We retrieve them from school. And they've gone through this machine this basically educational factory that churns out basically children that are all taught roughly the same way and we've stifled innovation, we've stifled creative thought and things like that.

We've got growing you are A. I. We've got things that do the process mandralic stuff. And what we need is that human creativity, because that's what we do best. And actually, school is not the best place to foster that type of skill. Yeah, I think you and I are aligned on this, Barry.

I don't know what else we can say about it. If we did a whole episode on this, if you recall and I am trying, I'm trying to find that episode right now as we talk because let's see. Cause, cause it is, it, it links to that important contact that those important concepts, because I think it was like an episode that we did on.

Robots and AI teaching classes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh sometimes there's some retention happening here. Let's see here. Education. I'll just search that on the Human Factors Cast website. We'll see what shows up. By the way, if you are interested in a specific topic, you can go to our website and search that topic and you'll get everything.

That we've ever talked about on those topics. Education school, maybe? There's a robust search function on our website. So it's a wealth of resources for you all. Oh, I've just had a very important email come through. Oh. My annual my continuing professional development review has passed.

And I get to retain my charter status for yet another year. Oh. That's great. Which also means that I'm about to start reviewing other people's. Try CPD input for their year to see. So what happens is for those who don't know every year as part of the UK Institute you have to keep a record of your continuing professional development and submit it the year.

And that is just The minimum is to do five different things and look, do three forward looks about what you're gonna do the following year. You can do more than that but that's the minimum. And then what happens is that at the end of the year, a random number is or a number of random one people's CPD selected and their peer reviewed to make sure that they're still meeting the standard for the, for chartership.

And so I've been a volunteer assessor now for the past few years. Quite a few years. That is one of my tasks that I get to do in January is assess other people's CPD. So yay for me, but it was quite tense last year because mine was being assessed. And so you get an email saying whether it's just, you don't even know if it's passed or whether you're being assessed.

It's all I say it's all random. So when, but when you get the email knowing that actually some, in fact, two people are going to review your CPD, it can be a bit harrowing, to an extent, knowing that it's actually being looked at especially when it was last year. Normally I'm very good at doing my CPD because I do find it a valuable exercise.

Last year it was just so frantic. It was all very lastminute. com and I didn't put the amount of effort in that. I usually do. I was like, oh, fine. I never get assessed. It'll be okay. And that's the first time. They can get the email saying, you're being assessed this year. And I was like, ooooh. Oh. Great.

Hey I'm doing a little bit more re bottling. You ready? I feel like this looks a little better. Let's just change it up. Here we go.

Yeah. We have no change. No, we did. Did you not notice the change? Have you just moved our names over here? That's before and that's after. Okay. Yeah, I see that. See, I'm tempted, so there is a button, because I've got my Instagram up here, just seeing how it looks, and there's a button there that says, request to join.

Oh, what happens if you press through? I'm gonna press the request to join, but let's see what happens. Do it. Let's see what happens. Nothing on my end yet. Nothing. Okay. I still don't see it. You haven't pressed the button yet. Are you pressing?

So I'm now back in, I could now share the video. I don't share it. It's interesting. Okay. But it's set, right? So it basically, I left it for a bit and then it comes said that show that you're in it. That's interesting. I don't know. And also the chat from. Oh, I missed a chat. We missed a chat. Missed a chat.

What's the chat? What are you restructuring? The site? No. Restructuring the visual elements here on the screen as we talk. I still want to do some more restructuring here. And I will in just a moment, but because look, There's only so much real estate that we have on the screen and I want to make sure that we optimize that real estate and we're going to, we're going to do it.

We're going to we're going to optimize that real estate right about now. Give me just a minute here. Yeah. Cause it's just come up again with a link saying send a request to be in human factors, cast live video, but I try and press that button. It just doesn't work. There might be something in the setup that says You know what, it might be because we're like quite new or something like that.

Yeah, I'm not sure. But then you'd think that if we couldn't do it, it wouldn't allow It wouldn't push the button up. Yeah, you would think. Bad UX. Bad UX. Which is why I said that it wouldn't be the first time. I don't know, I'm not super happy with this layout, but we'll yeah, we need to hang on.

Sorry. I'm one step ahead and I haven't shared it yet. I haven't shared my work. I should share my work before, before you make any comments here. Let me see here. Kill the second logo on the bottom right and toss another QR. That's almost exactly what I did here. You can see it in just a moment.

What I did was I actually moved the QR to the middle and I removed the second logo, centered our names. Here you go. Ready? That's before and that's after. So that's a little bit different, right? The QR code there, not quite a fan of the design of that, but it's it's a work in progress. You're seeing the sausage made right now, tonight on the show. But I think we're almost there. I like the name centered now. I think this is not bad. This is not a bad approach. I'll move my camera over.

Hold on though,

there might be an even more efficient way that we can do this because we have the trifold where's the trifold, like this is the trifold, right? Oh yeah, this episode brought to you by the, that's old. Okay. So we have the trifold and I feel like that's, it's a little different from what we're looking at there.

But I think we have the framework. I just need to figure out how all this stuff fits into the middle.

Amanda's also quite disparaging about my background. That I need to solve it a little bit more because it's dull as dishwater. I need to, because since I moved round to this setup, I've got, obviously I had the big 1202 logo in the background that fell and hit the deck. It's fine by the way.

It's okay. I just, the chain is broken. So I need to work out two ways. But it wouldn't work with this setup anyway. So I need to work out what to put in the background to be more interesting. But yeah, that makes people ask questions. That's always the best type of background.

So I'm just supposed to say she can't listen on Spotify or yeah, it's not live on Spotify. Maybe we should just put our like watch live. Yeah. I ripped this, so it's a it's a work in progress, people. I appreciate the feedback. And we'll take that feedback and apply it appropriately.

And this is you gotta understand here, we are we're doing this live. We're Bill O'Reilly ing it tonight. It's

the only way to do it. For me, this is more fun than than anything when you're dictating new changes and waiting for it to happen and then critiquing it. It's where I do my best work as a lot of people found out today. Yeah. All right. Let's see here. So the main change I want to make here is with these ones.

Yeah. Cause, oh yeah. Yeah. Okay. See, we have. We have the framework. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Oh, this is going to be good. We can keep talking. Is there anything else newsworthy happening recently? I think there was like a plane thing happening. So I've heard that Boeing have taken a convertible approach to their to, to the way that their windows work.

Oh, yes, that. I found a door in my backyard. That actually happened not too far from me. Oh, really? That's yeah, that's the airport that I fly out of. Not concerning at all. Of course, what we're referring to is the rapid depressurization of Boeing 737 Max. Flight out of Portland, Oregon to Ontario, California last week.

The details are still coming out and there's still an active investigation going on. So we're going to refrain from all the details at this point. But what we can say is what's out there in the public. The rapid depressurization happened, but also the the door. So in the, on the 737 MAX that, sorry, what's that?

That isn't a door. Until it is a door. It's not a door until it is a door. You're right. And so what it is a, it's a plug that they, it's a door that they like weld shut. And to the passengers, it doesn't appear as a door on the outside. It looks like a door. And it's only a door when it needs to be.

But it's a door when it's a door when the maintenance team need to access it from the outside. Or if the seating is in a configuration where there is more seating within the aircraft and they need a second or they need more emergency exits, then they can turn it into an emergency exit. But otherwise it is a, it is plugged up with a few bolts and things and apparently not very well tightened bolts.

So that's the part that we don't know yet. What exactly happened there? Why, what processes were involved in TSB is doing their investigation. Can't comment too much on it at this time. What is interesting though, is obviously in this, in the day and age that we are now, the, everybody's got the phones and all that sort of stuff.

So the ability to see. within the aircraft. So the, I always find it stunning that in any scenario like this, now somebody is recording video. And you've got to ask yourself why were you recording video in the first place in these sort of situations? It's cool, you'd be recording video. Well done.

And so to see that video of the Of that door just, or that, that plug just get blown out. At the time, nobody knew that it was a plug. It just looked like a straight up material failure around the window. And it blown out. That must have just been absolutely terrifying. Just have this how this happened.

Cause you're not expecting it. We know that flying is still one of the most, safest modes of transport. And the reason we're all talking about this event is because air issues really are quite rare. And so when Talk about the bad news and not the good ones, right? Exactly. So we don't talk about the tens of thousands of safe flights that happen every day.

We're going to talk about this one because it wasn't. And so It originally, it crossed, when it, as soon as the news came out, I did get a message from somebody who said, Oh, can't blame Human Factors on this one. Because and, but, then it's interesting to hear the development in the news, the way the media is recording it.

Because I think it is recording it. Slightly different, or it is playing out to a slightly differently than when the there was the original issues around the the 77 MAX aircraft. It is, this is being, feels like it's being fed to us in a different, in a slightly subtler or different way.

But the the way that it is not being reported about the way that these, things work and the factual bits around how this equipment works has been quite good. It's been quite intense and described. What's now interesting is obviously then the airline that it was grounded all of them aircraft straight away which is fairly standard protocol in this.

But then as they've gone into the investigations and the other airlines, the other carriers have. Of inspecting their own aircraft, they've found the similar issue or they're reporting that they're finding a similar issue. Haven't they grounded all 737 MAX? They have now, yes. So the certainly in the States they have.

So they're all down and they've all been inspected. They're all seem to be coming up with the same or similar issue. So it's one of these things that it seems to have happened. Thankfully, I don't believe, I don't believe there was any injuries around this. I think it was caught in time and the pilots come in, landed and offloaded.

Yeah, there was nobody sitting in that seat. Thankfully, which is both looks and good judgment. Yes. And so I think last I saw they had recovered two phones. One of them was an iPhone that was completely undamaged. So find out the the case that, that has that thing. But, and ironically, it was open to an email from Alaska, saying your flight confirmation, whatever they found two phones and then the door was in the backyard of some teacher.

And that's all I know. It's all over the local news, obviously, cause it like happened right here. Yeah. So it'd be interesting now to see where, because. As I say clearly, but I assume we're going to go, we should be diving back into maintenance and maintenance structures and how that is all maintained and whether it is checked or is it's bolted in et cetera, et cetera.

So it's going to be interesting to follow this story and see how the, how it happened and whether there was what procedures were in place or not in place. that could have stopped it from happening. So it's going to be it's going to be interesting to see, cause it does it for me, what is interesting is it does cover the end to end normally in an aircraft thing, there'll be, we'd all be blaming the pilot already.

Cause that's, that's what we do. It's always whereas this, we are now reaching back into maintenance. We're now reaching back onto, the main, the initial installation where these things installed and checked where they or not, because it's only on the bolts cannot have been checked very much because they're all just magically loose now.

So yeah it's gone. And is there was there a legitimate reason why they should have been checked? Or is it just something that is completely overlooked? Nobody suspected it. Nobody thought it would be an issue. Therefore, why would you possibly go and check some random bolts in the door?

I don't know. So a couple of comments here that I want to bring up from social. So let's see here. First on, on the first one I saw was here on Insta. Schools out mow, Boeing bolts on 37 have 737 have been shown to be loose on several planes, grounding whole fleets. Yeah. And then call me freckles on Twitch.

I'm lucky enough to have a family member working for Horizon, who is an Alaska partner and has been wild. And then KW on YouTube, does it mean emergency exit seats will be cheaper in the future? I don't know, because that's an interesting point, because not only are the people in the emergency exit now more at risk potentially, or at least the perception is going to be there, but also they're responsible for helping people out the door, like they're responsible for being able to, they always go over a little debrief with them before the flight takes off.

To say, Hey are you able bodied and willing to open the door in case of emergency? And so you have an extra responsibility in those seats and the trade off is that you get a little bit more leg room, but yeah, should it be, should it cost less, but have a disclaimer on the site? I don't know.

School's out Mo on Instagram. One more, one more comment here. Japan plane landing, hit the Coast Guard plane sitting on the runway. Fair comment. Yeah, that happened last week as well. So there was a normal plane. I think it was coming into land. Yes, it was. She's written up there and there was the, but the Coast Guard plane didn't have the, is it the ATSB, the the the squawk tracking function in it, and I can't remember the proper name for it.

So through the technology, neither aircraft knew each other was there. And there was basically it came into land and and they crashed into each other again, I believe, and school's up, maybe qualify this. I think everybody so everybody out of the airline out of the airline had got out the plane landing.

I think there was unfortunately fatalities in the Coast Guard plane. There was three in there to my memory. But again, it, that, that is, doesn't seem, I don't think it's a pilot issue. I think that was a, an ATC. Based issue. But again, that's going to that is a new investigation at the moment, and we will no doubt hear about that in the future.

So that one thing just as we're talking that I'm finding really fascinating with this new approach just by the way, is that we're able to talk about some of these stories that we historically have avoided because there were not. Major reports on them yet, and we didn't want to necessarily talk about them before these reports came out.

And this is yeah, this is just a note on the format. This is great. The schools out mow on, on Instagram. Five people on the Coast Guard plane died. Yeah, to confirm your statement there. Call me freckles on Twitch. Is this the most live time engagement we've seen on a live episode?

I think so. It might just be the excitement of the new year. I don't know. I'm glad to have all of you here. Right now we're talking, to catch all of you up who are just joining us, we are taking a shift from our traditional approach of coming prepared with a story and we're sourcing stories.

I think at this point we should start sourcing stories for next week, so if you all have stories that you all want to hear about, us talk about, we can come prepared next week and talk a little bit more about these in more detail and we can bring some elements of our traditional shows to these conversations hey, here are some of the human factors, things that might have been at play here without us just thinking off the top of our heads which tends to go a little bit better, I think, for Some of the discussion.

I think Barry and I are trained professionals. We can talk a little bit about this at length without necessarily having that prep work, but But it certainly helps when we have a moment to prepare. So let's start to think about maybe stories that are happening today live that are like, I don't know, like I haven't even looked at the news in weeks to be honest.

So one, one story I, and I mentioned it to you prior to the show that is breaking in the UK, which I think is thoroughly fascinating from a human factors perspective, is there is what we, what is currently classed as the post office scandal. And this is a large political story as well as anything else, but it fundamentally goes back to, I think it's around 1992, 93.

Our, So our post office at that time was was publicly owned body. It was run, run by the government. And they decided to bring in a new computer system to manage all of the financial transactions to help postmasters and some postmasters manage the accounts, manage the financial aspects and report back up to the post office headquarters.

And so when you become a postmaster or sub postmaster, then you effectively sit, you're setting up your own little franchise of the post office. So you have to then report back to that. That's fine. What was happening was. They bought in this new system called Horizon developed by what is now it was developed on its own to begin with, but then bought out by Fujitsu.

Whenever, so the, there was one or two postmasters who would start putting in, say so there was a misbalance on the stamps, the sale of stamps. And so they may be putting in a couple of thousand, realize that was wrong. Go back to the manual about how to back that out. And so you go and say we'll remove it and then bring it back in.

And so they'd remove it and bring it back in, but suddenly that debt was doubled. And so there was clearly errors in the software. So then they, when they reported that back to the central post office. The central post office is going, no there's no problems with it. It's all fine. And nobody else is reporting this issue.

So it must be just you. And so all of these postmasters, these sub postmasters who were having these issues were not only sacked by the post office, but then they were criminal, they were charged by the investigating, charged by the post office for fraud. And that had been made to pay back some of the the monies that were, was reaching into tens to hundreds of thousands.

So the deaths would become tens of thousands, but because they'd also got taken to court costs were applied, and they were in, in debt for two to three hundred thousand pounds. And this, and they kept on being told that no, you're the only person that all nobody else has got this problem.

This is all on you. As it turns out, this was a widespread problem. Basically the post office was gaslighting all of these so postmasters to devastating effects. So a lot of these, a lot of these people were pillars of the local community. So then they were effectively. Bullied and called names and which had serious implications for mental health.

They were made, they were bankrupt. Some of them went to jail for for fraud and what they did. And so for numbers of years and then, and unfortunately, even some took their own lives because of this, because it was so devastating. As it turns out now, it was a software issue. When you look back, so now everybody is trying to blame everybody.

So the at the top, we're trying to blame ministers the ministers in charge at the time, because they didn't ask the right questions, or when they asked questions, they believed the answers that they were given. Everybody is wouldn't blame the post office at the time because obviously the post office was seen as this amazing organization because it was a publicly owned body and it just serves the government and says the people therefore it was seen as whiter than white and not to be questioned.

Everybody was quite Everybody then looks at the technology and nobody would actually believe that the technology could possibly be wrong. And so nobody was allowed to pretty much question that and bring that bring that there. And as it happens now, we found that the technology was at fault. No, the testing wasn't thorough enough and when, but when issues were raised they weren't taken seriously.

So there was no just culture there. There was no culture of let's solve the problem rather than like blame people for the money. So this is now it's been in play. Say the issue has been known about, I think since 1999, the system came in 1992. So it's been known about since 1999, when people were being prosecuted.

It's only taken, it's only been a a program, the dramatization program that was put onto our local ITV. So a local public network In the last couple of weeks that highlighted this story and bought it to the, bought it to the attention of the public in a way that made it digestible. Because obviously when we're talking about testing of software and financial software, that makes it quite difficult to understand.

But apparently, I haven't seen it yet, but this dramatization apparently has made it really good. To the point the government has now turned around and said, we're going to bring forward primary legislation to exonerate everybody. Which, It's good because it's mean, because these people need compensated all this sort of stuff.

These people sat with criminal records for something that was not their fault. So they need compensated, they need exonerated. But then that brings us another issue because whilst we're not, our courts are not decoupled in the way that your courts are in the States. We do believe in giving, leaving courts to be independent.

So it's the, if in this instance the government just turns around and says we're going to pardon all these people. It's not, in fact, it's not even a pardon. It is a exoneration, which is different. If we, if Parliament just exonerates all these people, what's to say that they don't do, can't do that in the future for something else that isn't quite as serious as what this is.

And there is the other argument that we are making the assumption that every one of these sub postmasters. was innocent and there is a potential that one or two of them might have been doing what they shouldn't have been doing. There is a whole swamp of issues from how do you, how did they conduct the usability testing, the engagement testing right early up front with this software?

How was it procured? Because it was procured because it was the cheapest. Version of the market apparently or the, it was the cheapest proposal. Where was the quality control in that? Then there is the talk all around culture and just culture and being able to report issues and have them taken seriously and not being blamed.

And have them sorted out. Cause people came forward and reported this in good faith. Only for the post office to turn around and say, Ah, the problem is clearly you. We're going to sack you and then investigate you and make your life a living hell. All the way through to, How do we communicate with The general public or how do we communicate with people?

Serious issues that are actually quite technically challenging to explain. Yeah, I think there's a lot for us that we could get stuck into with that. Again, it's one of these things that there is still an investigation ongoing. Or a it's a parliamentary investigation, so it's slightly different.

But I think everybody's quite up to speed with where that is as a topic and it just blows Your mind to a certain extent that this could be any business and you're there trying to report it in good faith And somebody turns around and you don't see the pressing the button of going press enter But on it should have taken it way.

She's doubled it and now it's thirty two thousand pounds. I'm in debt I'm now in debt sixty four thousand pounds When do we stop? How do we just make this and it's all the computers, isn't it? Crazy story. I don't even know where to start with that one. I think that might be a good topic of conversation for Sorry, what?

Yeah, I think that should be a that, that would be quite good for, because there's a book that's been written about it, which I think I, before we discuss it in depth, I want read first because, oh, yeah. I'm not gonna read a whole book, Barry. I'm sorry. I'm not gonna read a whole book before next week's episode.

That's why the dedication comes in. No, I read anyway. I actually want, there's an article I write on it as well. Okay. All right. Okay.

Just catching up on a couple of comments here. And I think this is a great idea here. Will call me Freckles on Twitch. Will there still be an option for folks to call in pre and post show in the new structure? I like that idea. There's no reason at all in this why people couldn't call in.

At any point that they wanted and they felt they had some, yeah. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna flash up a couple things. One, you could do this right now, even leave us a voicemail. I'm, I am attempting though to, oops. Does that work? Hold on. That doesn't, that needs to go vertical for it to capture the Insta stuff.

I know. I'm, look, I'm working on, I'm working on the Instagram stuff, man. I got it. It, why haven't you gotta sort it already? We've been doing, we've been on what, an hour and a bit now. I thought you found out all this nailed. Look, I, look okay.

You're killing me right now. This is half production and half, Interestingly, I logged on to LinkedIn today just before I came down to, to get wind up the computer and stuff. And he came up and said, do you want to verify? I said, Oh, that's interesting. Cause I verified on Facebook, but I'm not verified on LinkedIn.

And I thought the verification LinkedIn was only a us thing, but clearly they've rolled it out wider. And I was able to use. My passport and the chip within the passport to verify my my identification. And I'm now verified on LinkedIn because, and it was free. So I was, if you are on LinkedIn and you verify, that's quite a cool thing.

And the technology seems to work. I, yeah, I'm verified on LinkedIn too. I didn't even realize that what I was doing when it when it asked me that. I think in, yeah, in the States you've got more options open to you. Because you can get, you can verify by your employer and all sorts. Whereas in the UK we don't have such options.

Oh, come on. Sorry, I'm trying to make

Trying to make Things happen live. Ah, let me just say I'm inspired. Can I say I'm inspired? Is that fair to say? You can say you're inspired. As long as you are inspired. I don't know why you're saying you're not inspired. I am. I am. I am. Look here's okay.

This is the most folks that we've had on in a while. So thank you all for watching live. We're still going to be here. We're going to be here for another half hour. Plus seven minutes. We're going to be here for another 37 minutes. If you have stories that you want to hear about next week, leave them in the comments.

Preferably links so that way we can go back and source those. Feel free to let us know as much information as you can. We do have a submission form on our website too. You can go there. I'm, what I'm trying to get set up right now is this thing right here that you see to the right of me. But I'm trying to get it set up to where basically it has more information on it.

So you can support the show and we would be happy if you did. We'd love it if you did. That's how we pay for all the stuff that is allowing us to stream on all these platforms, plus Instagram now, which is great. Awesome. And by the way while we're talking about this, go follow us on TikTok because we need 10, 000 of you to go follow us there so we can stream on that platform as well.

And so we're quite a ways off on that, but please follow us there. The other thing I'm trying to do is I'm trying to make this a little bit more dynamic and engaging for folks who are seeing the vertical format, because right now it's just a picture and not very interesting. So what I'm trying to do is add like a little digital waveform to the video.

So that way you can tell that something is actually happening if you don't have. Your audio turned up because it might just look like, Oh, it's live. They, are they coming on soon? Is there, I don't know, like we're human factors in the podcast scene right now to try to get this to work and yeah, it's very interesting.

I would have thought Restream would have sorted out being able to throw out. You would think so. So what's interesting is that I noticed on some TikTok lives that they are able to to what you're able to do is it crops it to the middle from multiple sources. So it's if somebody is gaming it'll show the person up top and the game below.

And then when you tilt it to the side, it'll do picture in picture, but it'll show you the full wide screen. And I want that for this. I want your, I want you on, on, do you prefer, are you a top or a bottom, Barry? I basically figuring out how that all, the layout there, and then when people go and turn it sideways it's this but just taking our individual feeds and putting them top or bottom.

It'd be good for portrait and landscape versions. Exactly. There's got to be solutions for this, I feel like. Just, it feels like we're way past that point for some of these technology, for, why? I don't know, I thought I'd read something on a restream email or something like that, that either you could or it was in planning or something like that.

Maybe, let me just let's see, save as, export as. Local file. Custom. MP4. Yeah, no, none of that. This Instagram

See now, next week we might actually get more fancy with this Instagram thing, and I hope we do. But I want to make this still engaging for, and I still want to make it engaging for folks who have to look at this thing too, because what's happening right now is that I'm centered to halfway through this middle column here, and so are you. And I don't like that because then when we lean in it's not centered.

It's not centered. It's just, it's ugly. Exactly. If we both do this, what we both do behind the back screen. If you're doing that. Yeah. But I have a better solution to this, Barry, that I'm getting to right now. And let's see here. Playback hold on. I'm getting to the solution right now, and I hope that you'll stick with me for just a moment while I get this solution

figured out here.

Yeah, just look, you can't do both portrait and unskip. No. You will do portrait, but you can't switch when live, and Yeah. That's a bit of puns, isn't it? Okay. It's

I You know what, hang on. I gotta I gotta rename this file. I gotta rename this file. Oh, geez. Alright, hang on. And you'll see why here in a second. Just It's just A today thing.

It's just a today thing, but we'll get this figured out. Alright. We're losing people. Alright. I promise once I get this figured out, we'll get back on track. So the the option for folks to call in. Yes. If you want to call in feel free to do I'm going to throw up that QR code right now as we are what the heck is this font?

Is this is ugly font. There you go. No, that's still ugly. It's better than the other one. Yeah. Better. Be a live caller. Ready to join the conversation. We're excited to hear your thoughts. Scan the QR code here. Oh, did somebody scan it? No, I don't think so. Oh actually. It normally says at the top whether somebody scanned it.

Windows. And subscribe. Share. Alright, here we go Barry, you ready? I'm making this, okay, look, this is a mess right now, I get it, just give me a second, I promise it will not be a mess much longer it will be a mess for just approximately 30 seconds longer as I shoot, the only other thing that I forgot to do, which I need to do Is this, can I take this out

dog? All right. What is going on here? I'm just going to take this and copy that and we'll paste it down here. And we this is, yeah, the sausage is made right now, folks. This is how we do it.

Actually quite an interesting process. There's a lot of things content creation wise that happen behind the scenes that you don't necessarily think about until you start to do this. That is just a really. Fascinating here. All right. So let's use that one. We'll actually do this. Okay. Okay.

All right. All right. All right. We're getting there. Okay. Here, let's get rid of this QR code. I will next week. This is going to be a lot better. I promise that next week this is going to be better, but right now this is what we got and what the heck. Is happening in the top right. What is going on with our Patreon stuff there? I don't know. And what is, oh boy.

That waveform needs to go No, I, no, I, it's weird because it's a player and I can't, and just the, It's gonna be better next week guys, I promise. Ha! Yes, cause you can't on on Insta, you can't really see it because it's where, that's where all the chat is. So all the chats. Oh, is that where the chat is?

Oh, see, this is interesting because I'm looking at the web based version. Ha! We're human factors ing this. This is great. All right, so you, look, if you look at, whoa, where's it going? Look at that. Your chat goes up to about there. So all that stuff down here you can't really see. So you need to put your waveform about here.

No. Okay, that's, hang on. Can you send me a screenshot of that? Just in our, that's great. Yeah. Give me a screenshot of that. And what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna make, I'm gonna fix this up. I'm gonna fix all this up. Right here. For next week. I promise it will be so much better. If you wanna call in, and if you wanna leave us a voicemail, you can do either of those things.

We'll have all the information right here for right now. It's just going to say subs like, and subscribe the, and subscribe keeps popping up there because it's such a short video to get the waveform going. But at least now it looks like there's something active happening on Instagram. And I've sent you two screenshots, so I've sent you screenshots of that, but I've also sent you a photo that I took in my hotel room early this morning, or more precisely in the lift of my hotel room.

Cause it's like that other. This is what you could show the people the, but it's a photo, it's a maintenance, the vacuum cleaners in operation. Isn't that cool? Oh, yeah that's the photo there. It says caution, robotic vacuum cleaners in operation. And so that was in the lift at my hotel, and I was like, I've never seen that before, ever.

That's brilliant. It also makes me want to get robotic vacuum cleaner. But but that's a different problem. Robot. Because we like robots. Do we? Do we? Is that a definitive statement? Because, do we? I like cutesy robots. So work we do with Calif University, part of their, the labs that we're using, they have cool robots in there that engage with you and ask you questions and are made to, to provide sort of healthcare services and engage with people and they've got big iPads as heads so you can get cool info, get cool videos and things from them.

I like them ones, I don't like the ones you get on Terminator, and Alien, and things like that, because they're nasty robots. Okay.

You're still trying to fix. Where does this go? What? Oh, jeez. What are you moving now? Oh, I'm just messing stuff up. That's all. That's all. Par for the course here. I think what the heck is happening here? What

the heck is happening? I guess technically we're post showed now, aren't we? Technically, yeah. I think I think technically yes, we did. Okay. I just wanna really quick, can I just remind everybody where we've been tonight? I just wanna show everybody how far we've come in. Two hours or an hour and a half.

Really. Okay. Look, when we started on Instagram I can't. I can't go back that far, but this is what we started with.

This is what we started with right here. And and Hey, now we're here, but we still need, we. Still gotta do something, because that's all ugly too, and hang on I got one more fix here for this, let's do, boom, how about that's a little bit better. It's getting there, yeah. It's getting there, it's getting there, the only thing that we need I think now is, like that waveform up, the like and subscribe to stop popping up, I think that's just a setting within, Yeah, you're yuck.

What is the setting for that? It's not cool. Preferences. Is it preferences? Let's see here. Is it

video subtitles, OSD enable show media? No. Yeah. Let's do that. Save. How about now? Will it? Okay, when it goes all the way over, will it do the thing? If not, then I've solved one issue. Dang it! What the heck? Alright, hang on. I wonder if that's Position, bottom, show media, enable on screen display. No.

How about that? Let's kick it to the end. We'll see.

Did you see it? Was it there? I could admit I wasn't looking. Let's look. Let's look. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Does it show up? No, it's, no, it did it. Alright. All right. Okay. Most of the problems are gone. Yeah, we can add more stuff to this later, but I'm excited. This is great. This is great. Okay.

Send us stuff for next week. What do you want us to talk about next week? I think there's still so obviously the postal story, Barry, can you find me a link for that? We can give a heads up on our socials to what we can talk about there. If there's more information about the 737 MAX stuff, we guess we can talk about that too.

I can look through. Our news sources, cause sometimes we get like some scientific articles that come through there that are actually pretty cool when it comes to to stuff let's see here, where are we? Let's see, human factors. Let's see

Oh, here you go. From the transportation research board rating concrete water permeability based on relativity measurements. Yes. Oh, how can I forget CES?

Dude, what's going on with CES? I haven't seen anything about CES this year. Has anybody been up to speed with what's going on at CES? Is that on now? Let's see here.

I feel like CES is happening. CES happens this year. CES 2024 preview. Okay, there's a preview. Okay, so IEEE Spectrum has posted a preview for CES this year, which I guess we could technically take a look at. There's the tricorder we've been waiting for. So it has ECG, blood oxygen, lung sounds, heart sounds, body temperature.

Okay, that's interesting. It's like a wearables or hold on here. We're going to make this better. Just a second. We're gonna make it better. Because now what I can do is screen two and hey, check it out. Now, Instagram has something to look at too. If this wants to work for me, maybe blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Where's the, nope. Get back here. Get back here. Get back there. Okay. Let's pull this over just a little bit to make it easier to read for folks. If it wants to go, how do I collapse the sidebar? Okay. I guess I can rig this up a little bit better. All right. We're rigging this just a little bit to be maybe a little easier to see.

All right. How's that? How's that? Is that pretty good? All right, cool. Let me bring this up a little bit. Ah, Oh my gosh, this is frustrating. I would be like hitting the screen. All right. Let's see here. We got a CES preview for for 2024. Oh, it kicked off on January 9th. Okay. So it's only, we're two days into this.

Let's see here in this category things to look at. New variations of spatial audio, more efficient solar cells, other energy harvesters, a neural network based on insect brains, and a silicon micromotor. So this is this the tricoder we've finally been waiting for? So this is the one that I was bringing up here.

And I realized, sorry, what? This is called BMO by Withings. And it's really quite neat. My colleagues sent it to me the other day, so I've had a bit of a look at it already and it does a lot of stuff that is really interesting in terms of being able to do just off the device that it is doing a single lead EEG, being able to do blood oxygen levels and things like that, which is so incredibly clever for a device that.

Is the way that it is. And it's actually not a million miles away from another product that I'm helping develop at the moment. So yeah it's clever. It's I w I want to play with it. That's cool. Yeah. So we can talk about I think CES 2024 would be a great thing to talk about next week, especially since it's just wrapped.

Okay. We can do that. We got mirror. Do I look stressed or depressed? And presumably this is what be mind. Yeah, so I don't need a mirror to tell me that I'm married. Oh boy. All right hopefully Amanda's not watching. Watch my DMs just blow up. Okay. We also have, let's see here, what is this?

Oh, magic mirror. Am I getting sick? Let's see, what is the concept behind this? Magic Mirror captures blood flow patterns and analyzes them to determine heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, cardiac workload, mental stress, diabetes risk, fatty liver disease risk, and other vital signs to decrease potentiation, potential, potentialities?

Last year, a company introduced some of these smartphone okay. Look Ma, no plug, this EV runs on solar. Cool. That's cool. The glove fits and fights the tremors in Parkinson's. This is really cool. I did see this. Have you seen this? These these gloves basically essentially have a gyroscope that sort of resists the hand movements that are associated with Parkinson's and counterbalancing.

They dampen them. So like you're, there's like literally nothing else to it. It's just counterbalancing the tremors, which is just. Clever. Cool. That's awesome. I love this. Do we really need a new way to cook? Oh, is this another air fryer? Let's see here. See, everyone was trying for ages. Everyone was trying to talk me into getting an air fryer.

And then now that. The best the received wisdom seems to be if you've got if you're just cooking for yourself, FRI is brilliant. If you're cooking for two of you, FRI is good. If you cook for three of you, FRI is all right. If you're doing anything more than that, use an oven like anybody else. Huh.

Cause people are trying to cook like entire, like large family meals. Yeah. And then in the FRI, like two or three times with like dual baskets and stuff. And he's you're using, you're not getting the benefits from the lower energy use. What is this? Beware of cats bearing gifts. Ooh. Is this like an AI cat door?

Hold on. Let's see. It just is a real problem and it's finding solutions to real problems. Yeah. Problem. Some cats like to bring home their owner's gifts. Gifts of prey, that is, from their hunting expeditions, the cats will carry the critters into the house, leaving owners to either dispose, okay.

Product Flappy is a cat door that recognizes a cat by its RFID chip. It opens only when the cat is not carrying a gift. If it spots such a gift, it sends a photo to the owner's phone.

Do you have 200, 400 for a cat door? No, because the only time that it's going to bring them gifts in is like in the middle of the night. We don't have cats anyway, but obviously. Yeah, you don't want a photo of me getting up at night saying, I have older children that do that, get in at two o'clock in the morning and try and creep in without waking me up.

So maybe they need to, if they decide to bring gifts back, that's where I need to be concerned. Let's see. What do we got here? But definitely a review of the CS stuff because I think yes. Yes is good. That'll be funny Scott. I'm a bit of a gadget freak anyway, so Yes, I would delight in going through and critiquing It'd be cool to take live callers next week to as we talk about CES, just get like opinions about what it is that that people like, or don't like, yeah, I like that.

I like that. Let's do live callers next week. All right. Let's see here. Ooh, I just realized something. The live caller link is going to change week to week. So that means I'd have to make this. Why does the live calling change every week? Oh, cause he's coming into this show isn't he? I'm wondering if there's some other technology that we can set up. I'm wondering. If anyone knows of a solution that might fit that, let me know.

I'm open to that. The. Nice thing about Restream is that it gives us control. We can chat with them before I actually put them on and screen callers that way. So no one's coming and going Yeah. You've seen the C SPAN calls. All right. I didn't realize, actually, because I've just been doing a thing for news, that Homeland Security host a Human Factors conference.

Which I think is quite interesting and I and this year's winter in human factors, 2024 winter Institute is looking at the human elements in the evolving threat landscape, which starts next week. Ooh, no, Tuesdays. Oh, so it's a longer term thing. Tuesdays, January 16th to March 5th until two EST.

All right. A new Olympics. Oh, what?

Okay. Hang on. This might be of interest to us. Hold on. Let me get this in place here. Ah, come on. Behave, please. Oh my gosh, I'd be frustrated if I was watching myself do this. Alright let's see here. A new Olympics event. Algorithmic video surveillance. As skiers shushed and swerved in a snowy park outside Beijing during the 2022 Wimperlip Winter Olympics.

String of towers. Did they know that those towers were collecting wavelengths across the spectrum? Okay.

Covering the entire Olympic village, connecting roads and rails, it would proceed under a temporary law allowing automated surveillance systems to detect predetermined events of the sort that might lead to terrorist attacks. AI driven mass surveillance is a dangerous political subject that could lead to broad violations of human rights.

Every action in a public space will get sucked up into a dragnet of surveillance infrastructure undermining fundamental civic freedoms. This is an interesting one. I don't know about you, but this is fascinating to me. When you think about Sort of grabbing all this data from wavelengths, did you see the stories about like how Wi Fi can tell exactly where you're at in a room by deducing the disturbances in the signal?

And exactly what you're doing and all that stuff. And I think that this is that, just on a larger scale. And It's one of these things that on the face of it, wow, what amazing technology and it can can do some really cool stuff. But it does, it takes us what seconds now to then go just how will this be used in a various way? It's this is not going to be used for.

Just pure good, is it? It's going to be, yeah temporary, it's a temporary surveillance law. Okay, it expires March 2025, written to avoid that outcome. It insists that algorithms under its authority do not process any biometric data and do not implement any facial recognition techniques. They cannot carry out any reconciliation, interconnection, or automated linking with other processing of personal data.

I'm almost quite disappointed by that because I'd love to see what it could do if you throw absolutely everything together and see where it gets to.

What officials can do instead of biometric analyses and face recognition is use computers for real time crowd analysis. The technique goes back a long time. Many aspects of crowd behavior have been studied. Let's see here. A crowd may not differ, really offer anonymity in its members. European civil society groups argued in an open letter that the surveillance would not necessarily would necessarily require isolating and therefore identifying individuals, depriving innocent people of their privacy rights.

People's behavior,

yeah. Errors, oops, where'd it go? There it is. You can tell I have some certain keywords here, like this is probably errors popping up here. My opinion, we have to certify the training pipeline. Yeah, okay. This is a great article. Dang, this is long and very thorough.

EFF gets a mention. Yeah, this is a good one. Let's see. All right, I'm going to throw up this graphic here while I continue looking.

2024 will be an exciting year in tech. What's happening in 2024? Is this top tech 2024? Okay. Oh, yeah. And then there's also the the Artemis news. Do you see the Artemis news? Does that make you sad? No. No. What was that? Oh, they're pushing it. Oh, really? Yeah, they're pushing it. That's not cool. Are they just pushing it back?

Okay. Hang on. Just really quick. That teams came from your end, right? Cause I'm like, where do I have teams up right now? Oh, yes. That's me. I leave it open. Which means that, I was like, I don't have teams on this computer right now. This is not don't. Oh, that. Okay. Let's see. Yes. In fact, that should be set for me to do not disturb.

There we go.

Okay. Okay. Here's, okay. So I know that you're not necessarily a huge transportation guy. Like that's not fair to say because you wouldn't let us forget you have a new car, but. I just don't get, is it as excited by NTSB stuff as you do? This headline here is really interesting to me. The effect of vehicle mix on crash frequency and crash severity.

Do people with with a Mustang Ford Mustangs monkeys, that I wanted to say model E mock ease. Do they get in more crashes, more severe crashes, or do people who have cyber trucks? Sure. The data is way, the data is not. New enough for that, but this would be an interesting one to, to investigate.

There's presumably an entire report. I am curious on what the required reading for that one would be. Let's see here. It's it was interesting because again, following on from our Cybertruck conversation the Received Wisdom at the moment, it just simply wouldn't be allowed in the UK. Because of the way it's been built and the lack of safety protections, like crumple zones, like the edges are like razor edges and stuff like this, it just wouldn't be allowed on the UK roads.

Which I thought was quite interesting. I wonder whether they, whether Tesla thought about that before they or even cared before they built it. Whereas I think all of the other Teslas have been developed in a way that is Applicable worldwide. But we shall see. Yeah. It wouldn't surprise me to see at least a couple Tesla trucks on the road at some point, but

I don't think they'd be allowed to be sold here. I won't download this for me into chapters. Okay. Here, save yourself Here. I'll just give you a little insight here. It's seven chapters long . It's a full book. All right. Anyway, yeah, there's that. Okay, everybody, I'm one of my tasks this year. I've been invited to help write a chapter of a book, which is very exciting.

That is exciting around climate ergonomics. Yeah, we get to play with that. But but we shall see how that goes. Okay. All right. If you have been with us since. The start tonight. Thank you. If you have been with us for five minutes. Thank you. Go back and watch the whole thing. I promise it's worth it.

I think this was an interesting take for this week. If you've been joining us on Instagram, thank you for that. This is our first week doing that. So let us know what you think. Is there another way that we can improve the formatting for Instagram? We're open to ideas. Next week on the show, we will have A way for you to interact with us.

You can always go to our website and leave us a voicemail. If you want to be featured on next week's show, we're more than happy to take those. We'll take those in the just send them to the website. There's a little button in the bottom right corner of our website that you can send us a little voicemail.

It says, Hi, leave us your name, where you're from and what you'd like to talk about. Or if you have a question for us or anything like that or if you want our thoughts on anything, we can do that as well. I think that's enough plug for the website. If you want to support the show, you can see the QR code is clear as day here in the middle of the screen.

That, that leads us to our Patreon. And of course we will take your money. We feel a little bit bad about it, but it also helps support the show. That. That's also something you can do. You can also tell your friends about us. A word of mouth is how we grow. And truly that's the best thing that you can do is around the water cooler.

Hey, these guys talk about human factors on a weekly basis and would love to get more folks involved in this discussion. If you want to send folks a link to this, let people know that we're adopting this new approach and would love more reliable. Consistent interaction from a lot of people.

That's another thing you can do. You can also leave us a five star review. I, this is like the end where we plug everything. Five star reviews are great. Helps other people unfamiliar with everything find the show too. So this is what I was talking about. Just so you're all aware, there's a little button down here in the lower right hand corner, you just click on that little guy and then you can leave us a voicemail, you start recording, just leave us your email, I think just so we can get back to you if we have any questions.

And and that's all that's required. You can even use a burner email if you want and just say profanities in there. We won't. Play that on the show, but if you want to let us know what you really feel about the show, you can do that here. All right. Barry, we usually do some more sign off stuff.

Can you want to tell people where they can find you? You find me on social media buzzer to score K all the other socials and Mr. BP Kirby. If you want to hear about you interviews with the human factors, people, and the human factors operations and jobs and type of that type of thing, probably 12 or two, the human factors podcast, which is a 12 com.

As for me. Yeah, I think so. I don't know. We don't have notes in front of us. It's weird. As for me, I'm your host Nick Rome. You can find me across social media at Nick underscore Rome. We also have a Discord if you want to join us there and get the discussion going. We can do conversations in between the shows, which is always a fun thing for human factors ergonomics professionals to do.

Thank you all for tuning in tonight and just genuinely this is an interesting shift in in the way that we're doing this format. So thank you. And I guess we'll see you next week. Same time, same place. If you found us here, you can find us there again. On your platform of choice.

And again, 10, 000 people on TikTok. We need 10, 000 of you to head on over to TikTok, follow us so that way we can stream on that platform as well. Alright, we're gonna go ahead and sign off for the night. Thank you all. Do we still do It Depends? I think we still do It Depends. You ready? 1, 2, 3 It Depends!