‘Tis sport to have the social engineer…

…Hoist with his own petard.

OK, this is somewhat convoluted, but I’ll try to keep it as straight as I can.

The topic is public persuasion:  given that you want to minimize everyone’s carbon footprint, what’s the most effective way to get people to change their behavior?

What follows is basically my take on a story that can be found on the Climate Safety Blog, although the original poster, Tim Holmes, doesn’t seem to enjoy the irony as much as I do. Indeed, he doesn’t actually seem to notice it at all.

So.  The IPPR (the Institute for Public Policy Research; a UK left-wing think-tank with strong ties to the Labour party) commissioned some market research that was ‘designed to identify the communications approaches and policies needed to facilitate a change in behaviour among mainstream consumers’. Cultural Dynamics Strategy and Marketing was the company commissioned to do the research, and they used a ‘deliberative workshop’ approach with six small samples (n=7) of individuals from the ‘Now People’ subset of their ‘Values Modes’ model of psychographic types. They also conducted in-home observations and in-depth interviews with another(?) small group of ‘Now People’ (n=10).

*DIGRESSION*
I remain very skeptical about this whole approach — this ‘Values Modes’ model sounds like marketing bullshit to me, and as far as I’m aware the method has never been scientifically validated. The best supporting evidence offered by Cultural Dynamics themselves (according to a ‘note’ by Rose and Dade) seems to be that there is no relationship between the Values Modes system and the standard personality and behavioral based systems, such as MBTI. They manage to interpret this as a good thing — they conclude that they must therefore be measuring something completely new! — although in the absence of any evidence eg of repeatability or predictive power, it is hard to be sure that they’re actually measuring anything meaningful at all.

Nevertheless, Cultural Dynamics have gone ahead and collected and compiled UK survey data for decades. They claim that these survey data can be analyzed into clusters (no statistical methodology is described, but it would be quite surprising if they didn’t form clusters; so far so OK). They further claim that these clusters are meaningful (quite a sizeable leap of faith here; no independent validation is provided). And the money shot: They claim that you can leverage this analysis to target your ‘communications’ so as to maximally influence a population’s behavior. Well, we’re in fairyland at this point, but hey, they’re a marketing company and this is the particular variety of fairydust that they’re selling. And credit where credit’s due: they do a good job of making it sound plausible and ’sciency’ — good enough anyway to sell it to the IPPR.
*END OF DIGRESSION*

Taking this ‘Values Modes’ model at face value and assuming that it really works, the idea is that you can manipulate the behavior of an entire population by manipulating the behavior of these ‘Now People’. That is, change how the ‘Now People’ behave, and everyone else will follow. Based on their research, Cultural Dynamics came up with a report that included their ‘Top 10 tips for communicating with Now People about lower-carbon behaviours’. You can download the complete report here. This is pretty cynical, Machiavellian stuff — and who knows, it might even have worked — but anyway, now at last we get to the fun part…

The IPPR gets the report, and they now believe that they know how to manipulate the population in the desired direction (mwahahaha!). However, instead of quietly implementing their plan, these would-be social engineers decide to publicize it.

With an inept press release.

That is promptly misinterpreted by the media — with the hilarious result that high-carbon behaviors are now expected to become more entrenched in the general population than they were before.

Doh!

Propaganda. You’re doing it wrong. Goebbels must be spinning in his grave.

Double Entendre

Winner of the Finbarr Saunders award for September 2009 –

Fnarr fnarr

Miracle apple ‘completely genuine’

‘It’s remarkable.  It looks just like I painted it,’ said retired painter and decorator and noted local trickster Ken Morrish. ‘I mean really, you could go all week without seeing something like this.’

When newspapers called a scientist — who had not seen the apple — at 3 in the morning, he agreed that it was a ‘fucking miracle ‘ and that this kind of mutation was extremely unusual.  He estimated that the odds of finding such an apple were ‘100 to 1 at least, probably more.  How the fuck should I know?’

‘I originally thought the mutation was going to produce  an image of Jesus Christ,’ said Mr Morrish, ‘but then I remembered I wasn’t very good at faces. ‘

The Daily Telegraph expects to soon have pictures of a striped pear, while the Daily Mail said the exact same thing.

UPDATE: An invisible rabbit was seen absconding with the miracle apple in the early hours of Saturday morning. ‘Sadly, not a shred of evidence remains,’ said Mr Morrish, ‘But it was only a golden delicious, so it’s no great loss.’

The Things They Carried

It’s funny, innit, the improbable combinations of things one sometimes finds oneself carting around.  For instance this morning I brought into work, in addition to the usual umbrella, a bag of guns(*), a C-clamp, and a flowerpot.

Cos that’s how I roll, bitches.  Right on the edge.

(*) Water pistols and such.  So you can calm the fuck down, OK?

Next up:  a thrilling journey through the vegetable drawer in my fridge!

Misheard Advice

Open Letter to Ofcom

Mailed to:  Andrew.Dumbreck@ofcom.org.uk

Dear Mr Dumbreck,

I am writing you in regard to Ofcom’s proposed amendment to the BBC Free to View Ltd DTT high definition multiplex licence, viz. –

To add at the end of Condition 6: “(8) Nothing in this Condition 6 is to be construed as preventing the Licensee from entering into arrangements for the protection of intellectual property rights in High Definition television services where such arrangements have been approved by Ofcom in writing”.

From the Ofcom website:

What is Ofcom?

[...]

We make sure that people in the UK get the best from their communications services and are protected from scams and sharp practices, while ensuring that competition can thrive.

[...]

The [Communications Act 2003] says that Ofcom’s general duties should be to further the interests of citizens and of consumers.

I’d be very interested to learn how you intend to reconcile your regulatory obligations with your supine acquiescence to the demands of the DTLA.

Sincerely,

[misterfricative aka]

More on this at Boing Boing and EFF.

Thursday all right for you?

The cock bot has landed!  He arrived in the mail on Friday, lovingly cocooned in bubble wrap.  Here he is in all his magnificence –

Sadly, however, when I loaded him up with double AA’s to put him through his robotic paces, the mechanism whirred and ground away inside, but fuck all happened on the outside.  No walkable feet, no waving wings, no shooting bullets.  Nothing. The little guy was borked.

So I reached for a screwdriver…

Will CockBot ever walk again? Will he ever take his rightful place in the pantheon of robotic video stars? Or will he just stand immobile forever in his brightly colored box at the back of the toy cupboard?

I’m pretty sure I found the problem.  That red-circled cog — which incidentally is part of a really ingenious mechanism! — is slipping.  It looks like its collar might have split under the load — and this shaft is right at the heart of everything: it rotates (obviously); it slides up and down to sequentially distribute power to the legs, the wings, and the bullet launcher; and it even has an eccentric cog stuck on one end to mechanically toggle a light on and off.

Can I fix it?  I dunno.  Does superglue work on plastic?  If it does, then we’re probably laughing and he’ll be back on his walkable feet in no time.   Or in the immortal words of mechanics everywhere, ‘Thursday all right for you?’

Animal Behavior

So I’m out walking the dog and I come round the corner and there on the path in front of us is some kind of kerfuffle between a brown, 3-inch centipede and a blue-tailed skink. The skink is quite chubby, about 6 inches long, and half of that is its tail. Anyway, our skinky friend immediately darts for cover while the centipede continues to walk round and round in endless circles… and that’s how I left them.

(Centipedes are seriously retarded. Probably one of the dumbest animals I have ever met was a 5 inch centipede that, of its own free will, walked into an open fire and was killed TO DETH [as Scaryduck would say]. So this guy walking round in a tight, 9 inch diameter circle didn’t really strike me as especially odd. On reflection though, he was probably injured — maybe blinded in one eye, or with half his head crushed or something. I didn’t look too closely.)

Fifteen minutes later, I come back down the same path and now the skink has the centipede’s head in its mouth. Once again, the skink makes for cover, but this time somewhat more slowly since it isn’t about to let go of what I can only assume was going to be its next meal.

So there you have it: apparently skinks eat centipedes. Who knew? I mean, I always liked the little guys, with their fantastic, electric blue tails — and now I have reason to like them even more. Go skinks!

Blue-tailed  skink. The above image was lifted from Wikipedia and is apparently a juvenile Eumeces fasciatus. But I’m guessing our little Taiwanese guy was 麗紋石龍子 (Eumeces elegans)

Fish

But seriously, folks…

I’m not usually a big fan of photography, but this guy really delivers.  Yay Sergey.  Respect. And thanks to Boing Boing for the heads up.