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What Clown On a Unicycle?
R3d M3rcury writes "The New York Times has an article about walking and using a cellphone. 'The era of the mobile gadget is making mobility that much more perilous, particularly on crowded streets and in downtown areas where multiple multitaskers veer and swerve and walk to the beat of their own devices.' But the interesting part was an experiment run by Western Washington University this past fall. There was a student who knew how to ride a unicycle and a professor who had a clown suit. They dressed a student up as a clown and had him ride his unicycle around a popular campus square. Then they asked people, 'Did you see the Unicycling Clown?' 71% of the people walking in pairs said that they had. 51% of the people walking alone said that they had. But only 25% of the people talking on a cellphone said that they saw the unicycling clown. On the other hand, when asked 'Did you see anything unusual?' only about one person in three mentioned a unicycling clown. So maybe unicycling clowns aren't enough of a distraction at Western Washington University..."
oh hi goatseguy.
Thank gods I was on my cell reading slashdot, or I would of had to notice that. *shudder*
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
Unicycling clowns, a greased yoda up someone's ass, and linux.
Only on the internet would I not question finding these things on the same page.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
There is no question that one is less aware of its surroundings when using a cell phone. The real question is to see whether this lower perception is acually any danger for pedestrians. I have the feeling that when walking and using a cellphone, I am less aware of my distant environment but still keep a keen picture of everything that could hit me directly.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Wazu is known for being quite the party campus, so it surprises me not that students don't notice things like unicycling clowns, though it's highly unlikely that the cause is cellphones and not booze. What would have interested me is if they had the unicycling clown cycle around campus while talking on his cellphone and seeing how long it took for him to swerve into a parked car. And since it would be a clown, it'd be a lot more funny.
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
This study doesn't take into account that people aren't going to be searching the background, but instead look for threats in the foreground.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Reminded me of this observational skills test (by Transport For London to remind drivers to look out for the many cyclists on city streets): http://www.dothetest.co.uk/basketball.html
Unicycling clown? Unicycling clown? Back in my day, we had to walk uphill to college for miles while dodging unicycling elephants who came downhill. (It may sound absurd, but it makes sense--after all, can you imagine a unicycling elephant going uphill?)
More seriously, it seems to me that the important part of the test isn't necessarily whether you saw the unicycling elephant (or clown), but whether you detected the unicycling clown or elephant as an object that must be avoided. When one is walking in a crowded area or even driving, while there may be objects you consciously see, there are also a lot of obstacles that you navigate without thinking about it or that you see peripherally but don't think about. The important part is whether it affects your navigation. So if, for example, anyone collides with the unicycling elephant (or clown), then it might be appropriate to make a regulation about driving while talking on a cellphone in the vicinity of unicycling clowns...
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Pianos don't really fall from windows, and it's exceedingly rare for cars to leave the road.
People pay attention to what they need to. Do you notice every homeless person?
It's Western Washington University, not University of Western Washington.
What the study (or the reporting of it) failed to note is whether clowns, unicycling, or unicycling clowns are common on the campus. For example if everyone at the campus wears a clowns suit or unicycles then one more unicycling clown isn't noticible.
Bad reporting. No donuts.
So in a dark underpass, they cover a guy completely in a dark suit, and in a video the size of a postage stamp, it's supposed to be a surprise you don't see him?
That's camouflage, not "awareness".
Please help metamoderate.
They aren't going to see the truck coming either.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Did you really miss the huge differences between three categories of people, cellphone users during the experiment among them, that were mentioned in TFS?
One that hath name thou can not otter
On the other hand, when asked 'Did you see anything unusual?' only about one person in three mentioned a unicycling clown. So maybe unicycling clowns aren't enough of a distraction at the University of Western Washington..."
What would have been more interesting would have been including data on how many semesters people had been on campus. I strongly suspect that freshmen would be more likely to notice the guy on the unicycle, and seniors to ignore him.
College is where every flamboyant moron "expresses" himself/herself, so you get used to seeing unusual things. A unicycle is pretty normal for a clown- and a clown isn't that unusual for a college campus.
Please help metamoderate.
FTA:
“I was trying to think about what kind of distraction we could put out there, and I talked to this student who had a unicycle,” said Ira E. Hyman Jr., a professor in the university’s psychology department. “He said, ‘What’s more, I own a clown suit.’ You don’t have a student who unicycles in a clown suit every day, so you have to take advantage of these things.”
The student owned the clown suit.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
28 y.o. Toronto woman was killed by a 5 tonne delivery truck. She was on her phone and walked under the rear wheels of a truck, that was making a left turn. The driver could not have possibly seen her because of the truck length and the fact that he was making a left turn. She walked under the rear wheels herself because apparently she was unable to evaluate the situation around herself while on her cell phone.
Darwin award, obviously, but it shows a case where a pedestrian was a hazard (this time to herself) because she was so distracted.
You can't handle the truth.
I wonder if they will spot near-east looking man with beard and a backpack.
it's how magicians do their thing...
"On the other hand, when asked 'Did you see anything unusual?' only about one person in three mentioned a unicycling clown. So maybe unicycling clowns aren't enough of a distraction at the University of Western Washington..."
That's not even close to "weird enough to lay down a pointer to something in the days events".
The truck was making the right turn, sorry and in this article they actually mention the cellphone. I just remembered this story from last year and thought it was quite appropriate.
You can't handle the truth.
Made me remember a joke in an old Lucky Luke comic. A circus goes to town. Then a drunk goes to the bar and say something like "You wont believe this Outside saw an elephant, and this one is gray!"
If in that campus everyday something weird happens you end not giving them attention. The normal could end being the new weird.
Funny that this about cellphones and not about the difference between people walking in pairs and people walking alone. That is much more interesting then the fact that people are bad in doing two things at the same time.
Why is it more interesting? Because it is counter intuitive. You would think that talking to somebody would be distracting (just like talking on the phone would be) yet it isn't.
If walking alone is the median to start from and placed at 100%, talking on the phone is 50% (as might be expected, as it is a distraction) and walking in pairs is 150% (wich is odd)
As the walking in pairs is the odd one out, that is what the students and professors should be focusing on.
What could be looked at then is gender specific coupling. Next what happens if there are three or more people? Does it go down? Also perhaps the increase is just that when together somebody is more likely to say: "Look at that clown on a unicycle." Then you can start looking if they are aware that the other said so, or if they thought it was their own observation.
And then the question. What if the same question was asked and there was NO clown on a unicycle? What would the results be then? Perhaps people together are more likely to say yes, because they would be afraid to admit they didn't and people on the phone are more prone to be honest as they are aware they are distracted and therefore even more alert. What about the single ones then? Well, they still might be not willing to admit not paying attention, but less so then with a friend.
So drop the phone part and concentrate on the other side of the results.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
That's what clowns do.
Maybe if it had been a normal person unicycling, or a clown simply walking, someone would have noticed.
oh, you mean THAT unicycling clown. Ya, I saw him.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
personally, i would have used a gorilla suit
Texting while doing stuff just needs to stop in general. A few friends and I went out last night to go ice skating. I saw two people texting while skating, and the rink was full enough that I suspect there were more I didn't see. As a college student, it's getting fucking ridiculous every time that I have to try to navigate around some clueless person on the sidewalk who's paying more attention to texting than the world around them.
If you wilfully ignore them, as the vast majority does.
At an amusement park, a female friend returned from the restroom relating how a man entered while talking on his cellphone, looked her dead in the eye then turned to enter a stall, talking all the while.
Other women heard him talking and asked "is that a guy in here?" She responded, "Yeah, he doesn't realize he's in the 'ladies', don't worry about it."
He finished the call, finished in the stall, came out and his eyes widened when he saw all the women.
I went to WWU. A clown on a unicycle isn't really that strange compared to what happens on campus. You see, there's another college on the WWU campus. Fairhaven College (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairhaven_College). Fairhaven students study such useful courses as 'Mushroom Identification', aren't graded, and generally live as if they are in the '60s. My first room-mate at WWU was one such student. I came back to college after a weekend visit and found him 'Making our room into a forest'. He was dragging evergreen boughs into our room and tucking them into every corner and under the mattresses, had a camp stove going, and listening to Bob Dylan. Needless to say, he had taken several hits of LSD. A clown on a unicycle? People probably just thought it was a Fairhaven student.
. . . it would have been a giant mushroom on a mini-bike.
And nobody would have reported seeing anything unusual that day.
What?
You can also answer "I believe I am not ignoring any" honestly.
That'd be one of the proximate things people do pay attention to. If you don't, well, it's not the iPod's fault.
I get tired of being forced to make way for self-absorbed clods attempting to walk down crowded sidewalks while shouting into their phones. They keep their heads down while having their ever-so-important conversations about who texted who last night. They do this partly to announce just how overwhelmingly great their social life is. Sometimes I deliberately block their path so as to force them to pay attention. Sometimes they walk straight into me, assuming I will clear a path for them. I expect to see one of them be run over by a bus one of these days and no, I am not looking forward to it.
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
This is a rerun of the classic Gorillas in our Midst experiment - look here for an abstract and more info from here and here
Hell, when I'm thinking about a programming problem I've been known to miss things stranger than that. No cellphone required.
I don't drive without music playing, because the music provides enough stimulation that it keeps me from drifting off into hyperfocus.
A similar study was done several years ago using guys dressed up in gorilla suits, throwing beachballs to oneanother. Only about 50% of people noticed at all.
Which is why motorcyclists have to see for other people.
Deleted
I want to say "yes, they didn't see that clown because they were on a cell phone"
But could it be the mere fact that those people are engaged in a conversation and intentionally blocking out external distractions. That is to say, it's the "conversation" or the "doing something" that is to blame, not the cell phone itself.
So, how do you pick the correct "non-cellphone" users as your control? Do they need to also have been in a conversation so we can say that it's actually being on the cell phone that made the person so clueless about their surroundings?
We can argue that this doesn't matter, I suppose and that "hey look, cell phone use = more distraction no matter what the underlying reason for using one". And perhaps, this is a less practical thought exercise. But, specifics are a good thing. I'd rather see "distractions such as a conversation, which may be on a cell phone, will likely result in the talker missing out on a unicycle riding clown".
I'm just saying, if there are clowns on unicycles, I don't want to think I'll get to see one by simply avoiding cell phones. Show me how to see the clown. Not how to avoid not seeing it.
Wazu is known for being quite the party campus...
This is not about WSU, it's is about "Western", in Bellingham, WA not WSU Pulman, WA.
And BTW R3d M3rcury, it's called "Western Washington University" not "University of Western Washington".
I did go there after all...
People do a lot of stupid crap. I'm sure if there had been a clown on a unicycle on the streets where I live, I wouldn't have noticed. There's car alarms going off, people honking, yelling at each other, handing out leaflets, asking for change, street performers, street painters, street vendors, gawkers, kids running around, gaudy hipsters and fashionistas doing their thing, and public service workers on the job. Most of the time I'm in my own head simply because all of that stuff already seems annoying and I'm tuning it out, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Why would anyone pick up on some random clown on a unicycle? Maybe it's different on a school campus, but schools too have their fair share of motley crowds.
Twinstiq, game news
If you really have to check facebook before the traffic lights, well, it's not facebook's fault.
I suspect this study is fundamentally flawed, or at least the conclusion is. Here's why: it's been my observation that while doing some things (for example driving is a big case, but walking in a crowded place is also very much the same), my brain goes into a stream-of-thought mode. Basically, my brain sees and processes things around me in real time, as I need to deal with them. It pretty instantly makes decisions, I take action, then almost *immediately* forget about them. The brain throws that memory away because I don't need to remember every thing I ever see.
Now, if I'm bored, I think I'm more likely to remember the clown on a unicycle. If I'm in a good conversation with a friend where I'm thinking mostly about the conversation, and secondarily about walking and avoid obstacles/collisions, I might 'see' the unicyclist, but lets face it, seeing performance artists of all types on a college campus is far from unusual, so it's not going to register with me as that unusual, and so I'm likely to forget about it, but that doesn't mean I didn't actually see it. It just means that my brain *correctly* filtered that memory as unimportant and threw it away.
In fact, all answers really have an implicit "I believe" prepended. Unknown unknowns, and all that.
I would say that on an university area you can expect to find just about everything. So a clown on a unicycle isn't really strange.
Unusual would be if someone had put a live blue whale on the campus ground.
If students can get away with THIS, a clown on a unicycle is just another event in the day on campus.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
It is obviously about the clown suit, if the professor didn't have one, the student wouldn't know from which end to start and where to finish ;)
You can't handle the truth.
If I had seen someone unicycling on my campus, I wouldn't even blink. If I saw someone unicycling in a clown suit on my campus, I might think it was his day off - or he was on his way to a second job as a clown for a kids party. Or I might think that someone was doing an experiment. The only thing out of those three situations that would give me pause would be the thought of "what does unicycling in a clown outfit have to do with real science? is this some weird way to prove the Casimir effect?" (we didn't have many soft "sciences" at my university).
Nathan's blog
I'd thought this was a video game problem, with focus on the screen narrowing awareness to a narrow cone.
I own a horse, and horse barns tend to have teenagers around. The kids who ride usually have good situational awareness. Part of riding training is to ride in a busy ring, constantly aware of what all the other horses are doing. But often the parents drag along non-riding kids. When they're using their iPhone or Nintendo DS, they're totally oblivious.
Even offline, they're not aware of what's going on behind them. I've had the experience more than once of riding up behind a child and having to work at getting their attention just to get them out of the way. I'm not talking about not noticing something at a distance. There are kids that don't notice the horse's nose directly above their head. This is a lack of basic survival skills. What would these kids do in a bad neighborhood?
The first time this happened, about five years ago, I thought that perhaps someone had brought a retarded kid to the barn. But I've seen this too many times since then.
If you're bringing up kids, make sure they do something that forces wide situational awareness. Riding. Soccer. Martial arts. Paintball. Birdwatching. Otherwise you're bringing up a victim.
Dot only driving or walking, but more bicyclists talk on their phones too. And get into accidents.
"So maybe unicycling clowns aren't enough of a distraction at the University of Western Washington..."
That's because the psych dept. dresses someone up and sends them out into red square as often as they could sucker some student into it. Usually in fall or spring quarters, at least when I was there. I definitely wouldn't call in unusual. Hell, the Green Peace people were more distracting. After running into them you'd want to club a baby seal after you practically had to push some of them out of your way so you could get to class.
Inattentional blindness is the official term for this phenomenon, for those who didn't RTFA. It'd be a good idea to add it to the tags, too.
With or without a cellphone, this could be very closely related to Doug Adams' SEP effect. I think sometimes people see things that are so bizarre and out of context that it's easier to subconsciously edit out the image rather than try to make sense of it. Or, alternately, some people are so jaded and inattentive to begin with that the anomaly doesn't even register.
Case in point is a similar college campus experiment I read about. Researchers posed as clipboard-bearing survey takers. One would approach a student and begin asking questions. At some point, in a deftly choreographed stunt, two confederates posing as workmen would briefly pass between interviewer and interviewee, carrying a large door that momentarily obscured sight of the interviewer. A quick switch was made during the maneuver, so that when the door was no longer obscuring sight a few seconds later, there was now a completely different person conducting the interview, picking up where the first had left off and acting totally matter of fact, as if nothing unusual had just happened. What they found was that, even when using obvious extremes of appearance (say, a large African-American man replaced by a small Asian woman), a significant percentage of the subjects never batted an eye, and would later deny they had seen anything unusual when "debriefed" after the mock survey was completed.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
You've obviously never been to the Pacific Northwest if you think unicycling clowns are out of the norm.
I was busy watching the lady with big tits.
Have gnu, will travel.
A clown on a unicycle
cycling around a college campus
is considered unusuall?
Something unusual? There was a young guy wearing a suit and tie who didn't look like he was going to a job interview. Oh, wait, you're probably wondering if I saw the clown on the unicycle. He wasn't juggling knives and flaming torches like the kid who's usually here at lunchtime, so I just assumed he was headed somewhere else to work.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
someone could get hurt! we must ban it. why haven't they outlawed walking/driving with a radio too!
oh hi yodaseguy.
Here, corrected that for you 8p
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
You expect us to read TFA in the NY Times and get charged for it?
Have gnu, will travel.
Super-fast.
An astute reader by now knows I'm old and you're young. :-P
(This is funny, if you stop to think about it... it's depressing having to mention it's funny...)
They seem to have forgotten they are dealing with students, too. A sign saying "Free BBQ", or, better yet, "Free Beer", would be noticed by almost everyone who can see it.
A clown riding around on a unicycle is unlikely to offer any free stuff, and probably won't be very entertaining either, so they'll get ignored.
What a fail. Why do you think they call it Uni-versity? It's full of unicycles. And to see clowns in university? Pfftt.. Aren't they supposed to be filled with those too?
Next time, try a Scarlett Johansson nude doing a kick flip!!!
Or perhaps they thought they were in DC, watching members of Congress?!?
I can guarantee you that NO-one would see the clown in that case.
-- people that were *driving* with a cell phone held to their ear, pretty much oblivious to the world around them.
1. I was crossing a street at a cross walk, street lights, the whole nine yards, coming back to work from local lunch spot. Light turns red, I give it a moment, start across, car screeches to a halt about 4 inches from me, I look up a bit startled, lady is on her cell phone. At the time, it was not yet illegal to do so in my state, but the law had been passed to be effective about four months later.
2. Driving home after work, about two blocks from my house, I make a right hand turn to head down the last two blocks. There is a pickup about halfway down the block, in a driveway to my left. As I approach, the truck all of a sudden does a left hand turn into my lane, causing me to slam on my brakes to avoid hitting him. I look up and clearly see through is back window, he has his cell phone planted in his left ear.
The laws already on the books or about to be for such things (including texting) need to be A) made very broadly known and B) the punishment for violating such laws should be comparable to drunk driving, IMHO.
People are already, just in the normal day-to-day activity, pretty oblivious to the world around them, IMHO, worrying about work, attention on something else or whatever while driving, add cell phones to the mix and it just adds another layer of oblivion on top.
And don't get me started on people playing their music in their vehicles so loud, that it can be heard two blocks away....