Another mechanism for Peltzman Effect?
The
Peltzman Effect is the hypothesized tendency of people to react to a safety regulation by increasing other risky behavior, offsetting some or all of the benefit of the regulation.
I had always thought of this as driven by the behavior of the people 'protected' -- they take extra risks. Turns out in the case of bicyclists, drivers nearby may take more risks when seeing a cyclist in a helmet.
University of Bath: Wearing a helmet puts cyclists at risk, suggests research
Drivers pass closer when overtaking cyclists wearing helmets than when overtaking bare-headed cyclists, increasing the risk of a collision, the research has found.
Dr Ian Walker, a traffic psychologist from the University of Bath in the UK, used a bicycle fitted with a computer and an ultrasonic distance sensor to record data from over 2,500 overtaking motorists in Salisbury and Bristol.
Dr Walker, who was struck by a bus and a truck in the course of the experiment, spent half the time wearing a cycle helmet and half the time bare-headed. He was wearing the helmet both times he was struck.
He found that drivers were as much as twice as likely to get particularly close to the bicycle when he was wearing the helmet.
Update: I just noticed that the researcher's title is
traffic psychologist. I wonder: does he find psychoanalysis or pharmacotherapy better at controlling traffic? Can we get 'failure to signal' into DSM-IV? When I dream I'm in a flying car, what does that
mean?
Tags: peltzman+effect, safety, helmets, regulation, cycling
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Donating labor to forge your own shackles
In a comment at an
O'Reilly Radar post about Google Image Labeler,
Thomas Lord throws a little cold water on crowdsourcing euphoria:
We ought to worry about the conjunction of (a) a return to the days of exchanging labor for goods and services by barter; (b) a very, very, very, (very) low price for labor; (c) the direction of of said cheap labor to the creation and improvement of privately held databases of non-trivial utility in population manipulation; (d) the difficulty of even experts to grasp the signficance of these databases, nevermind the average laborer who contributes to them. George Dyson just keeps sounding more and more right.
Not so worried about (a) specificially -- voluntary trade of any for any is AOK AFAIC -- but (b), (c), and (d) might have sharp edges in the future. Handle with care!
Tags: crowdsourcing, pessimism, contrarianism, thomas+lord, open+data, privacy
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I need a montage: vicarious Burning Man
If you missed Burning Man (like I did), Sean McCullough has some great
Burning Man 2006 Photos and a
video montage set to music.
Tags: burning+man, cricketschirping
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