Crash test dummies are widely used to show the impact of a crash on the driver of the car and their passenger.  They've even been used to show the impact of a car hitting a pedestrian.  As far as I know however, no such tests have been done to show the impact of a collision between motorist and cyclist.  Until now that is.

The following video does just that.  It was produced in Germany and sees crash tests involving electric bicycles hitting fellow cyclists, motorists and pedestrians.

Along with Radiohead, Arcade Fire are probably my favourite contemporary band.  The nice thing about both bands is that they're not just innovative with their music but innovative in the way they sell and promote their music.  Radiohead for instance sent shockwaves through the music industry when they split from their record label and went alone, offering up their In Rainbows album via their website.  What made the move even bolder was that they offered the album for whatever price people wanted to pay.  This was in the midst of the file sharing craze when many would have assumed everyone would freeload and download the record for free.  Instead the average price paid was £4 and the record sold in huge numbers.

Arcade Fire have used slightly more traditional distribution methods but they have been very creative in their use of videos to market and extend their songs.  They first tried out using video alongside their songs for the Neon Bible album.  They provided an interactive video for the Neon Bible song where you get to control the hands of lead singer Win Butler.  Their latest attempts have taken this a step further though.

For instance they created an interactive video mashup with Google Streetview for their song We Used to Wait where people could have the song playing as a character ran through a location of their choice.  It was one of the first videos to make extensive use of HTML 5 and won the band an army of new fans.

They've been at it again though this week with the launch of an interactive video for their record Sprawl II: Mountains Beyond Mountains.  The record is famous for being, unusually for the band, great to dance to, with co-band leader Regine strutting her stuff throughout the live version of the song.  The new interactive version lets you control the video by dancing along with the song.  It uses your webcam to capture how you move your hands.  The faster you move your hands, the faster the video plays.

All pretty cool and a great way to introduce people to their music in new and unique ways.  The one thing I feel they're missing a trick on is not letting people share their 'creations'.  With We Used to Wait it was wonderfully viral because you could easily share the video you'd 'created' with friends.  It isn't possible with the Sprawl version however.  Still kinda cool though.  Have a play now.

http://www.sprawl2.com/

Rightio loyal readers, this will be my final blog until Tuesday.  Jitka and I are off to the lovely village of Rodmell in Sussex for the weekend.

We're returning to Deep Thatch Cottage, a smashing place that we stayed in earlier in the year.

It's run by Carol and provides a really nice contrast to the hustle and bustle of London.  Carol takes care of everything so the place is nicely stocked with goodies when you arrive, so you can spend the weekend doing nothing but relax.

The weather forecast looks perfect so it should be a good weekend and a lovely way of celebrating Jitka's birthday.  I'm not planning on touching the web for 4 days (which will be bloody hard), so see you all on Tuesday.

Ordinarily I cycle to work.  Last Friday though the forecast was looking pretty bad so I wimped out and got the bus.  I figured I was in no great rush and could spend the hour on the bus catching up on some reading.  The journey is around about 12km long, and as the advertised journey time is 40 minutes an hour was safely conservative.  By the time I finally made it home, 2 hours had passed.  Suffice to say, not a nice experience and one I'll be repeating anytime soon.

So the latest in a sadly busy line of well duh research concludes that cycling (and indeed walking) to work leads to a less stressful individual.  The research was conducted by Lund University in Sweden.

They declared "Generally car and public transport users suffered more everyday stress, poorer sleep quality, exhaustion and, on a seven point scale, felt that they struggled with their health compared to the active commuters."

Apparently if you travel by public transport your stress levels increase in line with your journey time.  If you drive however, your stress levels are highest for journeys under an hour, which kinda suggests most stress is caused by inner city congestion.

So despite having to encounter the joys of Old Kent road each day on my ride to/from work, this is without doubt a case of better the devil you know.  What is nice to see of course is the ever increasing number of two wheeled brethren on my daily commute.  Even as the weather is getting worse the number of cyclists on the road is pretty impressive.  Long may it continue.

Ok, so I saw 500 Days of Summer last weekend, having spent much of last week replaying Us by Regina Spektor.  And, well, it's a nice movie, but being a sucker for these things I did kinda want them to, y'know, sail off into the sunset together.

Anyway, here's a pretty neat video of the two of them dancing together in a bank (there are some lessons here for Halifax on how to make this sort of thing cool rather than naff perhaps)

Sure will be nice to get back to Italy next summer. Not sure quite yet what rides shall be attempted, but there has to be some tasty mountains involved.

A couple of girls at work (who shall remain nameless) are currently undergoing the latest trendy diet.  The diet seems to involve gorging on one particular food type at any one time.  So protein might be allowed one week, carbohydrates the next, and so on.  Suffice to say I'm not sold on any of these (often expensive) diets, so it's refreshing to read today about a chap undertaking an experiment to show just what simple exercise and good diet can achieve.

Personal trainer Drew Manning deliberately piled on an extra 70 pounds by trading his usual balanced diet for junk food. Manning plans to shed the weight as quickly as he can to demonstrate that it's possible to lose weight through diet and exercise. "Part of me fears it will be hard to curb some of my addictions," he says. "I keep a bottle of Mountain Dew and a bag of Cap'n Crunch under the bed."

You can see his 'before and after' pictures below.  I'll be interesting to see how he goes.

I remember reading a while back about an experiment whereby one person would stop in the street and start gazing at the sky.  People would generally ignore him and carry on with their business.  If another person joined them it still wouldn't trigger much of a response.  There comes a tipping point however where passers by are sucked into this behaviour and feel compelled to join in the star gazing, even if there's nothing obvious to capture their gaze.

New research has revealed that the status of the initial person has a big impact on whether people follow.  An Italian team examined whether our attention is grabbed by the gaze of politicians whose leanings match our own.

The team monitored the gaze of 28 participants from both right and left of the political spectrum.  Each participant was asked to look left if a square on the screen turned blue, or right if it turned orange.  A twist was that the square was located in the middle of the eyes of a politician.  Just before the square changed colour, the politicians eyes shifted direction to either match required by the subsequent colour change or oppose it.  The experiment used politicians from both ends of the political spectrum, including Berlusconi and Romano Prodi.

Whilst the gaze of the politician didn't influence the reaction speed of each participant, it did affect their accuracy.  Right leaning participants were strongly influenced by the gaze of  the right wing participants used in the experiment, but not by the left wing politicians.  Interestingly though, left leaning participants were not influenced, regardless of the leanings of the politicians.

The researchers concluded that their study shows how: "… a sophisticated blend of situational and dispositional factors underlies the capture of reflexive gaze-following exerted on voters by the gaze of politicians. Future studies on the plasticity of this effect may provide new insights in the fundamental aspect of the human tendency to coalesce in large groups and complex societies."

As anyone that's played sports will tell you, there are times when everything seems ridiculously easy.  In team sports it's long been regarded that once you get on a streak you're more likely to continue that streak.  So if you've scored goals in the last few games the chances are good you'll continue your form in the next match.

A famous study from the 80's tried to explode this myth.  Thomas Gilovich and his colleagues looked at the ‘hot hand’ belief in basketball, finding that there was no evidence of any ‘scoring streak’ in thousands of basketball games beyond what you would expect from natural variation in play.

That study drew analogies with flipping a coin.  For instance if you had flipped a coin three times and received three heads, this has no bearing on the chances of you landing heads next time.  Literally your last effort has no bearing on your next effort.

Research by Markus Raab however suggests that a so called hot hand can, and does, work.  He suggests that each shot is not independent and players that hit the mark may raise their chances of scoring the next time. They seem to draw inspiration from their successes.

The study utilised volleyball as their area of study to try and dampen the impact of someone on a hot streak being marked more heavily and so on.  In volleyball a number of factors exist to make it tougher to 'mark' a hot player out of the game.  Nevertheless, belief in hot streaks does exist in the sport, so it made a good area to investigate.

The research revealed that over half the players in Germany volleyball leagues went on scoring streaks.  They also found that other players were aware of who was on form, and made sure they passed to these players more often.  So the notion of a hot hand does appear to exist.

The challenge for coaches and players now though is to understand how one gets onto a hot streak, and subsequently how to ensure it's maintained for as long as possible.

Yesterday I went to the movies with some friends to watch Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy. Before hand we stopped off at a favourite haunt for a bite to eat – the Whole Meal cafe in Streatham.

It’s a fav of mine partly because they serve good food, and really good portions, but also because they have a world famous Banoffee Pie. Suffice to say this treasure came in a big ol’ slab as well, so my sweet tooth was suitably catered for.

Anyway, before I slobber too much at the memory of that sugary treat, the point of this blog. I quite like my cakes and assorted sweet things, so it’s interesting to read some research today suggesting that people with sweet tooth’s are naturally sweet people.

The research team asked participants to rate the agreeableness, extroversion and neuroticism of 100 people based on pictures of their face and a sentence identifying their favourite food.

People with a perchance for sweet food were found to be more agreeable than those without a sweet tooth. It seems a similar connection is made when we rate ourselves as well. Students who rated their own personality as more agreeable also tended to have a stronger preference (than their less agreeable peers) for sweet foods and drinks.

A separate study also found sweet toothed individuals to be more likely to volunteer their time, and thus be considered quite social people.

So it’s easy to see that the sweet toothed are apparently nicer people. The impact of sugar goes yet further though. The impact works if you just give people something sweet to eat. Another study found that simply giving people a piece of chocolate made them more inclined to volunteer their time compared to people given a sour sweet or a cracker.

“We are unaware of any studies showing that taste metaphors are consequential in predicting social functioning, and thus the findings are unique,” the researchers said. Why is there this link between sweet taste and personality and behaviour? Meier and his team think one possible root cause may lie in breast-feeding. “… [H]uman breast milk is decidedly sweet in taste and chemical composition and feeding episodes are marked by a close bond of mother and child,” they observed. “Thus, one of the earliest bases for later emotional attachments is also marked by a sweet-tasting ingested food.”