Posts by James Green
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@Ben. I agree with all you've said. As I believe I said, I was putting forward a best practice argument for smacking based on theory, not advancing an argument for preferring punishment to reward. There is actually some argument, that I'm not up to date on, that pain doesn't the same rules as other punishments.
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public-service TV commercials created to warn would-be drugged drivers of the legal, moral and physical consequences of getting behind the wheel
This is depressing. In all the fluff around reducing the road toll, I think there is an absence of a real critical look at these advertising campaigns.
I went to a seminar recently which was focussed on this kind of large scale public persuasion. As an example, the speaker mentioned Clinton's $2bn campaign to reduce drug use. Designed by marketing firms, it was felt that frequency was more important than quality in terms of getting the message across. There was no pre-testing, no control group, and no real attempt to analyse the effectiveness.
It was eventually analysed in a dose-response design, and the more ads people saw, the more drugs they used. There is also research suggesting that overly graphic messages to tend to encourage avoidance/resistance (channel changing, counter-arguments), and that sometimes mis-directed messages (ones that don't appear relevant to the target group are more effective). Finally, knowledge of risk is not usually predictive of engagement in the target behaviour (people don't drink-drive, speed, smoke cigarettes because they're unaware of the consequences).
So road safety campaigns in the media? They often increase advertising at the same time as they change other rules (so can't tell if ads themselves are working). Do they go for quality or frequency? Avoidance/resistance -- how many people change channel, grab a drink, ignore these ads because the ads are aversive? Are they trying to get a risk message across? Because nobody's aware that drink driving's dangerous, right?
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the right to deliver delayed violence in the event of child misbehaviour
Robyn linked to an article discussing the effectiveness of smacking, which was mostly about the in effectiveness of smacking. But under what would 'best' practice smacking be?
The effectiveness of a reinforcer is in part dictated by contiguity -- that is the temporal and spatial relationship between the stimulus (bad behaviour) and the response (the smack). Essentially, the closer in time and space the stimulus and response are, the more effective the learning. There can also be a bit of a conceptual element, so that if the negative response makes sense in relation to the stimulus it can help.
This is all kind of theoretical. I'm not sure if does experimental reserach on this?? I do know that in terms of punishment and the cat, I can squirt her with a waterpistol, but I can't bring myself to flick her ear. And she is quite bitey, which seems to have worked as an effective learning tool for me, unfortunately.
One last thing on behaviourism, I sometimes wonder whether a better understanding of reinforcement would help parenting. Give in to that child and buy the lollies they're tantruming over, and you've just reinforced the tantrum behaviour. Mint.
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In semi-related news, the proportion of yes voting correlates with proportion of green vote in same electorate at last election at .76, labour .47, nats -.27, nzfirst -.52, act -.06.
Incidentally, I can confirm that the low-low group that ChrisW noted before ALL had a noticeably lower turnout at the last election.
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@Chris -- an interesting trend. The closest I've seen to a curvilinear trend in ages. However, I think you're right not to interpret it that way. The negative correlation you refer to is a tripartite relationship: high yes vote, low turnout, high informal votes. The first seems a conscious endorsement of the present law, and I think the latter two are for the most part symptomatic of that as well.
The low_low turnout group are better interpreted away from that trend -- as electorates that have low turnout not because of dissatisfaction with the question.
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Ponsonby Intermediate School suffered from acronymphobia when I was there.
Uh, the Tertiary Education Union has um, a Combined Unions Negotiating Team.
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Found a few more studies now. It seems that lowering the BAC from 80 to 50 is likely to have some impact, but it's quite a small effect. Of course, when you're talking about fatalities, small effects become much more interesting.
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I will provide the research and evidence, which is the same Min. Transport and LTNZ (or whatever they are now) have also used in the road safety strategy.
That's interesting. I just had a quick nose, and found a swedish study. They autopsy 97% of all road fatalities including full toxicology. Presently the Swedish limit is 20mg, but the upswing in fatal crashes occurs around 100mg. It might be of course that because their limit is so low that people are either behaving and not driving at all, or are mostly driving drunk. However, it was interesting that their findings neatly mapped onto those from an Australian study and Washington state.
Note the interesting data is not displayed in the abstract. That is, of 1403 drivers killed over 5 years, 21% had BAC over 50mg, 19% over 80 mg, 19% over 100mg. The 2% different between 50 and 80mg represents 17 driver deaths (or 3.4 per year).
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research strongly suggests lowering the blood alcohol limit would indeed save lives
Hi Ross. The AA recently argued that that was not the case -- that the relationship between blood alcohol level and crash rates was not very clear cut, and that the evidence for a lower rate being beneficial was not at all clear. Can you point me to some alternate evidence?
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So from a random spammy twitter request I got to this person yesterday.
http://twitter.com/blonderaider21
Feel free to discuss the semiotic, religious and political madness.