Are you one of those who believes that, when it comes to South African taxi drivers, road accidents are pre-destined, and not as a result of individual’s driving behaviour? If so, your beliefs could be erroneous – according to the results of a newly published study undertaken by Dr. Bright Mahembe (University of the […]
Tag: Cars
Beijing traffic jams and the number 4
Excessively polluting and timewasting heavy traffic congestion in central Beijing causes significant distress to drivers and residents alike. In a drive to identify root causes, researchers have put two and two together and come up with an improbable answer – the number ‘4‘. “In this work we estimate the effects of traffic congestion on subjective […]
Neuromarketing challenge: dinosaur automobiles
We pose this challenge about dinosaurs and automobiles and marketing. [BACKGROUND: Because the word “marketing” is no longer as futuristic as it was in the past, the still-kinda-new field of neuromarketing (read about it here, here, and here, or use your own cogno-intellectual powers to come up with your own definition) is the place to go […]
A logistics video: Automobile weaving
Here is another logistics video. The activities shown here can be modeled with standard mathematical techniques, should it appeal to you to do so: [vimeo]106226560[/vimeo] (Thanks to investigator Vaughn Tan for bringing this to our attention.)
Roundabout research (Laurier #2 of 4)
Improbable recently profiled the work of Dr. Eric Laurier, who is a Senior Lecturer in Geography & Interaction, at the Institute of Geography & the Lived Environment, University of Edinburgh. Specifically, his paper on ‘Why people say where they are during mobile phone calls‘ Dr. Laurier’s work centres around the realisation that we miss so much […]
The Moth to Flame Effect – is it real or not real?
‘The Moth to a Flame Effect’ (a.k.a ‘Perceptual Tropism’), was first formally described in 1953 by Clark, Nicholson and Graybiel in their paper ‘Fascination: a cause of pilot error‘ (for Journal of Aviation Medicine, 24(5):429-40.) Unfortunately, the paper doesn’t appear to be available online, but it describes how aircraft pilots sometimes fail to take evasive […]
Pedestrian-mounted brake lights: March 8 in Stuttgart
“There are many accidents such as bumping between walkers in crowded places. One of reasons for them is that it is difficult for each person to predict the behaviors of other people. On the other hand, cars implicitly communicate with other cars by presenting their contexts with equipments such as brake lights and turn signals. […]
Dumpling Fog in China – a Computer Simulation
Impressive though the Shanghai-Nanjing Expressway is (opened 1996) the Zhenjiang branch section does suffer from an occasional meteorological drawback. In the form of ‘Dumpling Fog’. Prompting Yan Mingliang and colleagues at the Key Laboratory of Meteorological Disaster of Ministry (of Education), Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, China, to attempt an algorithmic emulation of […]
Smooth bodywork in cars and women
Some have asked questions along the lines of : ‘Is smoothness a semiotic resource in which consumption-oriented superficiality interfaces with ideologically gendered images of women and cars on magazine covers?’ Take for example Dr. Mehita Iqani, who is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, and who […]
Cars and their faces (fMRI study)
A group of European researchers have asked the question : “What Kind of Face Sits Well on a Car’s Frontal Appearance?”. And to answer, the team (from the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland and the University of Bonn, Germany) employed an fMRI machine to scan the brains of (male*) experimental participants who were looking at pictures […]