From the article: > Designers refer to this sort of rule as a forcing function. These functions are everywhere and they keep us from doing all sorts of stupid

From the article: > Designers refer to this sort of rule as a forcing function. These functions are everywhere and they keep us from doing all sorts of stupid things. Just think of your car. There is, for instance, the reverse lockout, which prevents us from throwing a moving car into reverse and accidentally ripping apart the transmission. > whatever I write will be fact-checked and fully footnoted. I was interested in learning more about this "reverse lockout." From the Wikipedia entry [1] which is the top Google result for "reverse lockout" (I typed it into Google without quotes): > a forcing function or poka-yoke, is a technique used in error-tolerant design to prevent the user from making common errors or mistakes. One example is the reverse lockout on the transmission of a moving automobile. I don't want to spend time researching this further, but it's interesting that he came up with the same name and example of the concept as the Wikipedia article (without attribution). Wikipedia articles are supposed to be secondary sources -- "original research" is an explicitly discouraged category of content. But none of the links cited by the Wikipedia article mention "forcing function." So here's someone, writing a mea culpa about his past plagiarism, who uses a phrase and idea without proper footnoting of it (nebulously crediting "designers" with the idea); and a single Google search for the idea turns up a Wikipedia article which also mentions the idea without citing a source! [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavior-shaping_constraint http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavior-shaping_constraint