Posts by 81stcolumn
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Hard News: Lowering the Stakes, in reply to Kumara Republic,
I suspect the Oily one's antipathy cycling has something to do with this.
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Some thoughts about SIDSY or SMIDSY:
Perception is constructive and selective (as repeated in Psychology 101)
In broad terms we see what we want to see. More accurately put, we extract and make use of those parts of vision that are important or of interest to us. Two well used examples are the Gorilla test and priming effects we experience with the duck/bunny or young/old woman pictures. A controversial interpretation of this is that drivers don’t see cyclists as important and therefore do not see them even when looking at them. As accurately described by Hamish Makie in the Herald today motorists look for gaps and opportunities to get to where they want to go quicker. This assumes that drivers are looking at the correct part of the road at the correct time which is by no means guaranteed: Modern dashboard - Old dashboard.
When we add additional GPS and of course the mobile hands free kit (still not safe enough) what we get is a bloat of distractions in the car which encourage us not to look where we are going. At the same time the roads have been made safer for drivers. Better positioned lights and signs reduce the amount of actual decision making and risk associated with driving. My favourite is rumble strips which mean you don’t even have to look at the road in order to tell you that you are on it. Needless to say the addition of airbags etc. has also reduced the personal consequences of error. Incentives to look for cyclists have gone down reasons to look elsewhere have gone up.
More Psychology; Attributional bias
Humans are more prone to blame other people for their mistakes. This would explain why I was blamed for being run over at a junction where I had the right of way because I was wearing sunglasses (the fact that I was indicating with my arm was apparently irrelevant). More worrying is that people prefer to discuss the mistakes of others rather than their own; consequently they would far rather talk about what the naughty cyclist did. This stretches to assessment of personal behaviour, even when told they are being observed people will still over-report positive behaviour in a manner reflects their beliefs about themselves. They do this unconsciously probably because of the way in which memory works. To cap this problem, there are more motorists than cyclists this sets up a common social belief system of motorist good and cyclist bad. In turn this leads to confirmatory bias people can and do seek evidence that confirms pre-existing beliefs. Quite a nasty cycle if you will excuse the pun - the bigger point here is that this problem pervades society, community services and the justice system.
On the one hand I am all for making roads and laws safer for cycling but not without some effort to address the two issues outlined above. I do worry at times about giving drivers fewer reasons to acknowledge cyclists or excuses to say that they shouldn’t be on the road. I am growing quite hostile to proposals that cyclists should take more responsibility. It doesn’t matter what sort of measures you use to be visible if drivers do not look where they are driving – a lesson we have recently learned as a familly.
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That raze track is/was magic used to have two copies of the 12' and drop an ever so slightly off sync double track in the middle and then roll it back in #thosewerethedays
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Footnote: With respect to how many joints as opposed to how much THC/CBD it is worth making clear a distinction between acute, chronic and combined effects. That is to say how much in mg may have different effects to how often in frequency.
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Not all of them are as dramatic as above.
GM labeling anyone?
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and I'll also be open to guest posts
Srsly?
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Hard News: Mega Strange, in reply to BenWilson,
Yeah but the madness never ends when you consider that academics in NZ, UK and US are paid for by taxes and students. Students in a manner of speaking end up paying twice and having publishers clip the ticket because much of the content has been paid for.
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Regardless is makes no difference at all. Dropbox, Google Drive etc all offer no client-side encryption and operate in exactly the same way.
Sorry Dylan my badly made point was actually that cloud services are less prone to copying because they don't get lost and when encrypted by default they are hard to hack - unlike USB drives.
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So it seems. But it keeps being singled out in press statements from local rights owners.
And we are back to the same old argument in Pead's press release.
“Educational texts are being illegally shared at an alarming rate and it’s hurting New Zealand authors, publishers and distributors to the point where earning a viable living is becoming increasingly threatened,”
i) Most academics don't make enough off books to live.
ii) The book in question costs $120 hardback and $80 as E textSo who is making money here?
The PR people?
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As long as I don't share the link (or give the USB stick) to anyone else I'm not infringing any copyright as far as I can see.
And of course we all encrypt our USB drives so no-one can open them when we lose them...don't we?
@Ben Wilson
Expensive texts - who woulda thought?
Amen to that, and the background is unless you have a wildly popular text you are lucky to make the cost of a good meal in royalties (I know I've seen the cheque). It is unbelievable how may academic authors still don't get any digital royalties!