by John Brooker | Apr 24, 2012 | Innovate
Yes! And… Creative Gorilla # 104 Controls need to take in to account the behaviour they provoke… “Police said crashes happened because motorists slowed down ahead of the camera and then speeded up once they were clear of it.” Report in Daily Mail (England) 7 Jan 2009 How can you ensure controls achieve what you want? Have you noticed when many motorists see a “fixed speed” camera, which measures an excess speed at a fixed point, they slow down until past the measuring lines and then accelerate madly – like the camera has some weird acceleration beam? However, when driving through sections of motorway with “average speed cameras” that measure your speed over a fixed distance, most people keep to the limit, although some slow down and speed up to meet the average. Passing through an “average speed” control area recently, I wondered how we might relate these behaviour patterns to organisations. Finding no instant answers, I placed a question on the Giants, Wizards and Goblins forum on Linked In. Here is a summary of the responses. What questions might they raise for your organisation? Speed cameras are a control to stop people taking risk. They should be sited only where there is most risk if they are not to have an adverse effect on traffic Speed cameras form part of an overall system to reduce fatalities. There is little evidence to show they have this effect [Source] Speed cameras, both types, measure speed. They do not tell us if the driver is incompetent, the tyres bald or the car uninsured Speed cameras are viewed as revenue earning systems...
by John Brooker | Feb 12, 2012 | Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 43 Creative people tend to have certain traits or characteristics. You can seek to emulate these… “This led me to reflect on the pictures (from a Camera Obscura). It was during these thoughts that the idea occurred to me…how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably and remain fixed upon the paper! And why should it not be possible I asked myself?” William Henry Fox Talbot (inventor of modern photography) Please click here for link. Can you develop the characteristics of a creative person? This week we had a few days on a farm in Wiltshire and visited Lacock Abbey. My children were keen to see the cloisters where several Harry Potter scenes were filmed and I spent some time looking at the Fox-Talbot Museum of Photography. Fox-Talbot invented the positive / negative photographic system in 1840 at Lacock Abbey, his family home. Here we have a wealthy Member of Parliament, an eminent mathematician, a translator of ancient texts with a keen interest in physics and other sciences. He had so many abilities but could not draw. Thus he found himself on honeymoon in 1835, on Lake Como in Italy, experimenting, as you do on honeymoon, using tracing paper with a portable Camera Obscura to draw pictures. [Please click here to understand the Camera Obscura]. This led to him recording the quotation above in his journal. His invention arose due to developments in two areas of science in which Fox Talbot was interested: Optics, which led to the portable Camera Obscura and Photochemistry, in which...
