Talk to your Computer: Speech Recognition Made Easy by Dan Newman 2000, 191 pages, $14.95 Berkeley, CA: Waveside Publishing ISBN 0–9670389–3–6

THISISa welcome addition to the human performance literature because, although measurement and measures are inherent in almost every published paper, they tend to be overshadowed by everything else discussed in that paper. Human factors texts deal with the subject, when they do at all, in generalities. Gawron's book should make it easier to think concretely about measures. She provides an initial chapter on general experimental design to orient the reader to the context of applying measures. The three remaining chapters then describe more than 100 measures under the categories of human performance, workload, and situation awareness. Each measure begins with a general description of that measure, its strengths and weaknesses, its data requirements, thresholds involved, and references for further illustration of the measure. The measures described are not only generic ones (e.g., errors and time) but those developed for use with particular issues like workload, white collar work, and situation awareness. When planning an experiment, turn to this volume as a first resource. It is easy to recommend the book because it mines material from an extensive literature and makes it available to the rest of us who are not so industrious. The amount of research that must have gone into the development of this book is impressive. It will be useful for all those who are interested in performance (and who in our field is not?) and can be a very useful supplementary text for students of "Human Factors 101," to whom it may reveal some of the richness of measurement. Theory comes and goes; measurement and measures endure. Iam reluctant to describe any work as unique, but to a certain extent, this one is; there is nothing comparable that I know of in the general literature. If a reviewer must be critical of anything, it is that the author's aviation background tends toward somewhat greater emphasis on aviation-related measures, although attention is also given to driving and secondary tasks. Although they are implicit in some of the topics Gawron covers, more specific measures applicable to cognitive systems (if there are any such measures) would have been desirable. Another minor weakness is that the book does not tell the reader when he or she should or can use a particular measure. We should, however, be grateful for what we have received.