People who use a ride-hailing service might wonder what tussled enliven the minds of the automobile drivers—the drivers who choose to pick them up, and the drivers who choose not to. This study tries to solve some of that mystery: “An Empirical Investigation of Taxi Driver Response Behavior to Ride-Hailing Requests: A Spatio-Temporal Perspective,” Ke […]
Tag: driver
Effects of Various Music on Angry Automobile Drivers
The effects of different styles of music on angry automobile drivers were analyzed, to some extent, in this study: “The Effects of Various Music on Angry Drivers’ Subjective, Behavioral, and Physiological States,” Maryam FakhrHosseini and Myounghoon Jeon, Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications Adjunct, pp. 191-196. ACM, 2016. […]
A Yawn Detector, Networked
The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) as depicted above, was chosen as a reference for the ‘Networked Yawn Detector’ (a car-driver safety-monitor) developed by Zhengrong Yao and Haibo Li of the Department of Applied Physics and Electronics, Umeå University, Sweden. “We test our system publicly, 26 students from the Applied Physics and Electronic Engineering Department […]
Jerk analysis – and its relevance to safe driving
Would one expect to see an increased amount of jerks amongst drivers involved in accidents, rather than drivers who have not been involved in accidents? Yes, explain Omar Bagdadi [pictured] (of VTI, Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute, Borlänge, Sweden) and András Várhelyib (of Trafik och väg, Lunds Tekniska Högskola, Sweden), in a paper […]
Professorial Pizza Deliveries
You can probably count on the fingers of fewer than two hands the number of university professors who, as part of their research, have worked for 18 months as pizza delivery operatives. But that is exactly what either* professor Patrick T. Kinkade or* professor Michael A. Katovich of the Sociology and Anthropology Dept. at Texas […]
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 […]
Ig Nobel Prize winner Chris Frith lecturing at Harvard this week
The long-named Harvard Mind/Brain/Body Interfaculty Initiative announces: MBB 2013 Distinguished Lecture Series Uta Frith and Chris Frith (University College London) Uta Frith – Autism: The First Fifty Years Wednesday, April 24th, 5:15 p.m., Science Center Hall D Chris Frith – How the Brain Creates Culture Thursday, April 25th, 5 p.m., Science Center Hall D BACKGROUND: Chris Frith, […]
Celebrating the taxi-driver brain researcher
The Wellcome Trust celebrates Eleanor Maguire and her Ig Nobel Prize-winning research about the brains of London taxi drivers: Mapping memories – Eleanor Maguire and brain imaging To mark the 75th anniversary of the death of Henry Wellcome and the founding of the Wellcome Trust, we are publishing a series of 14 features on people […]
Physics problem: Drunk driver backseat sex
The Washington Post presents a classic physics problem, in the form of text from a court document in Fairfax County, Virginia. The case involves a man alleged to have been the driver in an automobile that crashed at high speed: Paragraph 10. “At the time of the collision, Defendant was going 85 miles per hour.” […]