You'll no doubt have noticed that I'm a bit keen on bicycles and at the latest count, i.e just now and in my head, there are now 14 scattered about the house. They aren't all mine, they aren't all fit to ride and some of them are just waiting to be given away when the right person turns up. As I also walk about a lot one of my habits has been to recover abandoned bikes, or whatever good is left of them, and then produce a working bike out of the bits.
The frame, and most of the parts, of one of these found bikes was recently ridden by my son when, last month, we rode the middle hilly section of the first stage of next year's Tour de France where it runs through the Yorkshire Dales. The bike that I rode to accompany him may legally be mine but I was given it in the will my old friend John Wilson and as far as I'm concerned it's still John's bike.
We're lucky here in Scarborough to have delightful places to go for bike rides. If I've got a spare hour I often nip up onto Oliver's Mount and ride around the motorcycle racing circuit. The road surface is good, there isn't much traffic and there are plenty of different routes you can choose that either go around the top or up, down and around the sides of the hill.
Now whilst Oliver's Mount is generally quiet, as are most of the roads that lead up into the North York Moors or over the Yorkshire Wolds, riding around town or on major roads is a different matter. Despite a recent increase in popularity, cycling remains a minority pursuit and the attitudes of many other road users often leave a lot to be desired. In one of my earliest posts, Dispositional or Situational, I looked at the role our social identity plays in determining our attitudes to each other. As far as many motorist are concerned people on bikes are not only part of an out group, as opposed to the in group of fellow motorists, but also a minority out group, a group that doesn't fit in with the prevailing social norm. Hence when people on bikes end up in direct conflict with those in cars, trucks or vans there isn't always a meeting of minds*.
However, and this gets me to the point of this post, if or when I've been carved up by an inconsiderate motorist, and actually get the opportunity to let them know what I think about it, it's a stressful situation all round. My heart rate is elevated, there's a rush of fat and glycogen into my bloodstream, all in all a classic flight or fight response.
In the aftermath of one of these incidents, when I'd been dangerously overtaken as I was coming off Oliver's Mount, and as I was retrospectively rehearsing what I should have said in the heat of the moment, I remembered a book that I'd read many years ago by an American science writer James Gorman. The book was just a reprinted series of essays that had been published in Discover magazine and carried the title The Man with No Endorphins. Now whilst this was about the evolutionary fact that we'd evolved a natural pain killing mechanism, endorphins, for traditional sources of pain such as long distance running or getting bitten by fierce creatures, there was no mechanism for dealing with modern sources of "pain" such as that of a computer that freezes or of getting stuck in a traffic jam.
So, whilst I was getting an adrenalin rush so too was the driver of the vehicle but, while I was busy working this out of my system with a post dispute burst of physical activity, for which the response had evolved, he was stuck sat behind a steering wheel stewing in a flush of inappropriate hormones.
*It seems that the drivers of red vans are much more considerate of cyclists than those in white vans. A plausible explanation is that a good proportion of red vans in the UK are Post Office vans and a lot of Post Office workers still use bikes
Wednesday 25 September 2013
Thursday 12 September 2013
The exception proves the rule
You may have noticed from a previous post, Sniffing out litter, that I'm not too proud to pick up other people's litter. One of the more obvious observations is that litter breeds litter. Once a space has been completely cleared there's a noticeable delay before litter starts accumulating again. Trying to see if my observations were backed up by hard evidence I came upon a paper published in 1990 entitled "A Focus Theory of Normative Conduct: Recycling the Concept of Norms to Reduce Littering in Public Places" which describes a series of experiments carried out on subjects who'd been visiting a University Hospital and were returning to their parked cars.
On leaving the building the subjects were given a handbill, a potential piece of litter, and their subsequent behaviour was observed. The key variable was how much litter there was in the space between the entrance and the car park. To draw attention to the existing state of the space a confederate experimenter deliberately dropped a large piece of litter in front of the subject. A second confederate then decided if the subject had witnessed this and then noted if the subject then dropped litter themself.
The key finding of this part of the experiment was that if they'd seen someone drop litter into a clean space then this made it less likely that they'd drop litter themself and if they saw someone drop litter into a well littered space then it made it more likely they'd do it themself. The explanation being that witnessing the litter being dropped drew attention to the state of the space and thereby established the prevailing social norm.
A second experiment simply looked at the space, counted the existing number of pieces of litter, and timed how long it took for the next piece to be dropped. Surprisingly the longest time wasn't for when there wasn't any litter at all but for when there was exactly one piece. The explanation being that a single piece draws more attention to the prevailing social norm than if there's no litter at all. Clearly, the best strategy remains to pick up everything because then the time for the first piece of litter to be dropped gets added to the time from the first to the second.
As a rather literal minded youngster, I was always confused by the saying "the exception proves the rule". To my mind if there was an exception this meant that there wasn't a rule. I later came to realise that all it meant was that identifying something as an exception suggested that there must be a rule for it to be an exception to.
A few bits of litter are just enough to draw attention to the fact that only a minority of people are dropping it and that therefore the social norm, in this particular place, must be not to.
On leaving the building the subjects were given a handbill, a potential piece of litter, and their subsequent behaviour was observed. The key variable was how much litter there was in the space between the entrance and the car park. To draw attention to the existing state of the space a confederate experimenter deliberately dropped a large piece of litter in front of the subject. A second confederate then decided if the subject had witnessed this and then noted if the subject then dropped litter themself.
The key finding of this part of the experiment was that if they'd seen someone drop litter into a clean space then this made it less likely that they'd drop litter themself and if they saw someone drop litter into a well littered space then it made it more likely they'd do it themself. The explanation being that witnessing the litter being dropped drew attention to the state of the space and thereby established the prevailing social norm.
A second experiment simply looked at the space, counted the existing number of pieces of litter, and timed how long it took for the next piece to be dropped. Surprisingly the longest time wasn't for when there wasn't any litter at all but for when there was exactly one piece. The explanation being that a single piece draws more attention to the prevailing social norm than if there's no litter at all. Clearly, the best strategy remains to pick up everything because then the time for the first piece of litter to be dropped gets added to the time from the first to the second.
As a rather literal minded youngster, I was always confused by the saying "the exception proves the rule". To my mind if there was an exception this meant that there wasn't a rule. I later came to realise that all it meant was that identifying something as an exception suggested that there must be a rule for it to be an exception to.
A few bits of litter are just enough to draw attention to the fact that only a minority of people are dropping it and that therefore the social norm, in this particular place, must be not to.
Friday 6 September 2013
A poor weather writer
We've had a proper summer for a change. Though why we should call a succession of warm sunny days proper when a typical UK summer has few of these and far more of the damp slightly grizzly days that we've got today I don't know. Perhaps its just that they represent what we think summer should be rather than what we usually get. This is not to complain about the British weather which, as all proper weather should, changes from day to day and often hour to hour, but which I'm actually quite fond of. However, as someone who much prefers to be out than in, the good summer means I haven't spent much time in front of the keyboard and consequently this blog has been somewhat neglected.
This doesn't mean that I haven't had any ideas for blog posts, quite the contrary, its just that none of them have made it past the first few sentences of the unpublished phase. But one of the things that I have ended up thinking about is why we feel the urge to publish at all. Now you might argue that we're a social species and that most of our learning is done vicariously, by watching or listening to other people, and, at a group level, the urge to publish fits in with this rather well, but what's in it for the individual who does the writing? Fame, fortune, influence and status perhaps, but having never been too fussed about money, other than having just enough to not have to think about it too much, never having sought fame, at least not for its own sake, and having just about given up on influence or status, why do I still feel the urge to do it?
The one little introspective thought that I can bring to this puzzle is the nagging feeling that an idea that isn't shared is an idea that's been wasted. Of course, this doesn't mean subjecting everyone else to my own stream of consciousness, they've got their own to deal with, but it does mean making at least some effort to share any "new" conclusions. I say new here in the sense of new to me not new to the world. With the right search terms I expect I could find that someone else somewhere else had said, or is saying, just about the same sorts of things as I am, but not necessarily in the same order or in the same combinations.
A few years ago I got into meme theory, though in an interested by-standerly sort of way not as an academic. The basic idea is that cultural evolution follows similar sorts of rules to biological evolution. In his lovely book "On the origin of tepees" Jonnie Hughes explores these parallels but, whilst I can make sense of the biological urge to reproduce (those that don't have this urge leave few descendants) I never could quite get my head around why individuals had the urge to spread ideas. What biological advantage does this habit give?
Having given myself something to think about, I've noticed that the sun is coming out again and the dog, a short haired whippet who likes it dry, needs walking (or rather I feel the need to walk the dog). Now if I'd been a proper writer, as opposed to someone simply fulfilling an as yet ill defined biological urge, I suspect that I wouldn't have let the good weather stop me for quite so long.
This doesn't mean that I haven't had any ideas for blog posts, quite the contrary, its just that none of them have made it past the first few sentences of the unpublished phase. But one of the things that I have ended up thinking about is why we feel the urge to publish at all. Now you might argue that we're a social species and that most of our learning is done vicariously, by watching or listening to other people, and, at a group level, the urge to publish fits in with this rather well, but what's in it for the individual who does the writing? Fame, fortune, influence and status perhaps, but having never been too fussed about money, other than having just enough to not have to think about it too much, never having sought fame, at least not for its own sake, and having just about given up on influence or status, why do I still feel the urge to do it?
The one little introspective thought that I can bring to this puzzle is the nagging feeling that an idea that isn't shared is an idea that's been wasted. Of course, this doesn't mean subjecting everyone else to my own stream of consciousness, they've got their own to deal with, but it does mean making at least some effort to share any "new" conclusions. I say new here in the sense of new to me not new to the world. With the right search terms I expect I could find that someone else somewhere else had said, or is saying, just about the same sorts of things as I am, but not necessarily in the same order or in the same combinations.
A few years ago I got into meme theory, though in an interested by-standerly sort of way not as an academic. The basic idea is that cultural evolution follows similar sorts of rules to biological evolution. In his lovely book "On the origin of tepees" Jonnie Hughes explores these parallels but, whilst I can make sense of the biological urge to reproduce (those that don't have this urge leave few descendants) I never could quite get my head around why individuals had the urge to spread ideas. What biological advantage does this habit give?
Having given myself something to think about, I've noticed that the sun is coming out again and the dog, a short haired whippet who likes it dry, needs walking (or rather I feel the need to walk the dog). Now if I'd been a proper writer, as opposed to someone simply fulfilling an as yet ill defined biological urge, I suspect that I wouldn't have let the good weather stop me for quite so long.
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