I’ve found many of these infographics to be packed with spelling and grammatical errors.  For example, try to find the error in this visualization of U.S. debt holders.  With enormous font sizes and few words, any spelling or grammatical error really stands out.  Such easily identifiable problems make me question the integrity of the statistics (and implicit arguments) these infographics present.  Where did the data come from and how reliable are the sources?  Many infographics do not provide references, so how am I to know that it isn’t just some ten year old kid making this stuff up?  What if multiple sources produce conflicting results?  In such cases, it’s almost guaranteed that the infographic creator just picked the result/data that best furthered his or her argument.  Lastly, what information is not presented?  When reading an infographic, I always wonder if I am seeing the whole picture.  With so little information actually presented, I have no doubt that most of these infographics leave out plenty, especially stuff that hurts the creator’s argument.

I admit that infographics pique my interest in a subject to which I haven’t given much thought.  However, with minimal content and questionable integrity, they may be no more than chartjunk.

The prevailing attitude of drivers comes in two flavors.  First, they argue that the speed differential is too great to make cycling safe.  This may be true, but shouldn’t drivers be paying enough attention to deal with any potential obstacles?  Any driver should prepare to see a downed tree around the next corner or be aware that an oncoming car could turn left in front of him.  As a cyclist and driver, I think about these things constantly on the road, but it seems that most drivers do not.  Despite being the most dangerous method of transportation, most drivers think that accidents happen to other people but not to them.

The second argument is that cyclists do not obey the traffic laws.  Several of the comments in the above article whine about cyclists blowing through lights and turning in front of cars.  I admit I started out as one of the cyclist mavericks drivers complain about.  It wasn’t long before I realized that if I wanted to stay alive, I couldn’t just go through a light despite the lack of cross traffic.  A car I couldn’t see would more than likely appear out of nowhere.  Even as I follow the rules, plenty of cars come out of nowhere and now I pretty much expect oncoming cars to turn in front of me and to pull out in front of me when I approach an intersection.

There seems to be a double standard when it comes to drivers and cyclists.  If I so much as tear through a yellow light, someone will yell or honk.  I could almost guarantee that driver probably blew through several red lights himself in the past week.  Just sit at a busy intersection in Virginia Beach and just count the cars that go through red lights, turn right on red without stopping, or don’t use their turn signal.  I’ll bet that within a few minutes there would be more violations than those performed by all cyclists in the city for that day.

An ad-hoc report linked from the Freakonomics blog seems to back this up: in studying over 2,500 cyclist-involved accident reports, vehicles were at fault more than 90 percent of the time.  Most cases occurred when a car stopped at a stop sign or red light would pull out in front of a cyclist who had the right of way.  This happens to me at least several times per week.  The study was performed by a Canadian physician and the police reports were from Toronto, so I could only imagine the situation is worse in the United States.  The report goes on to say that Toronto cyclists are six times more likely to die than a cyclist in the Netherlands.  It also reports that despite the existence of poor weather, Ontario non-cyclists are most discouraged from getting on their bikes due to the lack of bike-friendly infrastructure and antagonistic drivers.  Lastly, the report cites evidence linking the lack of cycling to an increase in health problems and obesity.

Of course, the study was performed by a cyclist, posted on a cycling team website, and was not peer reviewed.  The statistics may be an upper bound for the number of driver-induced accidents.  There is also the DOT-endorsed Hurt Report, which was a similar study involving motorcycle accidents in the Los Angeles area.  In the Hurt Report, drivers were at fault 66 percent of the time in motorcycle-involved accidents.  In this case, all of the investigators just to happened to be motorcyclists, so it also may be difficult to draw valid conclusions.

Regardless of whether or not the statistics are valid, it pays to be extra careful when cycling in the age of texting and driving.  As drivers have become more distracted over the past years, I definitely have experienced more near misses.  The extra vigilance I have gained while on the bike has also been a significant help as a driver.  If today’s antagonistic drivers had spent more time on their bikes as kids, they probably would make the roads a much safer place.

I recall a discussion in the locker room after cross country practice about a teammate I had never met.  I don’t recall his name, but this guy had graduated before I even got to college.  John, one of the well respected fifth year seniors said this guy wanted to go to NCAAs as part of the seven-man travel squad, but only “wanted to travel to the course, warm up with the team, and get a t-shirt.”  He did not want to actually run the race.  This guy never made the travel squad to NCAAs.  To him, and many others, it’s all about instant gratification without any of the work.  Running competitively isn’t like a movie where all the hard work is abstracted away and all that’s shown is the glorious win over the evil opponents.  To date, our team has qualified for every national meet since 1997, one of only five schools.   To do that takes considerable effort and years of training for hours every day.  You can’t just fast forward to the good parts.

The zeitgeist of today is marked by a lack of intrinsic motivation to undertake any long term efforts.  In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell cites James Flynn’s work on how Asian students work harder and longer on problems than their American counterparts.  Given a tough math problem, most American students will work on it for only a short while before giving up.  This ethos carries over into other areas.  An article in the New York Times states that 95 percent of blogs are abandoned, many of which only have one post.  The torrents of traffic and commenters envisioned by these blog posters just doesn’t happen overnight.  They think blogging fame will come immediately, but it doesn’t.  It takes time to build a reader base.  More to the point, the blog also has to have content that people are willing to read.  I’ll be surprised if many people read this post or others like it concerning my opinions and everyday life, but most of my traffic comes from my software troubleshooting/debugging and knee microfracture posts.  Even in my little corner of the Internet, I have made gradual traffic gains over the months.  People just don’t swarm in overnight:

Apparently, the same is true for Twitter: most users either abandon their account after signing up or just make one post.  Again, the problem boils down to effort: few are willing to make the effort and post meaningful content at frequent intervals.  Followers just don’t appear because you signed up.  Like blogs, it isn’t just the frequency of posts, but the value of the content: I really don’t care what you ate for lunch today.  I especially don’t care that you got a front row seat at the Apple Developer’s Conference after waiting in line since 4 AM.  Most Twitter posts aren’t much better than spam.  To attract followers, the posts have to carry some value to those beyond a small circle of friends.

Everyone just wants the massive blog readership or the Twitter following, but couldn’t care less about the content required to generate such traffic.   Sometimes, when the desired outcome can’t be achieved with lackluster efforts, many try to lower the bar.  Currently, there’s an effort in Virginia Beach to relax the public school grading scale from 7 point to 10 point.  Parents think this will even the playing field with other school systems that have switched to a 10 point scale, but it’s really just lowering the standards.  Parents want their kid to get in to his or her college of choice and to do it by studying less.  Also along these lines, a state representive recently proposed that more in state students should be accepted to Virginia public universities because a constituent complained that the acceptance standards were too tough and he didn’t get in.  I’m guessing that this “constituent” was probably the representative’s kid.  What is the real secret to getting in to your college of choice?  It isn’t done by getting easier As or by pushing out extremely well qualified out of state students.  Work harder, and anything can happen.

It’s pretty bad that so many people give up when they realize some effort is involved.  It’s worse when people lower their standards of success when their current efforts are clearly lacking.  Believe it or not, there are even worse characters out there that will do anything to get instant gratification: cheaters.  Instead of working hard for ten months researching state-of-the-art, tweaking out a system design, implementing the design, testing the design against existing works, and finally writing and submitting a research paper, some people are willing to cheat.  A recent study reports that an astounding  2% of researchers fake their results.  In a similar instance, some colleges are willing to fudge the statistics to improve their rankings.  They play with class sizes and give peer institutions poor reviews to improve their standing.  Instead of improving the school in an honest way, taking the time to hire more and better qualified faculty, increasing employee pay, and attracting better students, Clemson faked its way up 16 places in U.S. News reviews.

What is the real solution to this lack of motivation?  How can more people motivate themselves to post regularly on their blog?  How can people stick with something and work hard enough to achieve just rewards?  Some slick researchers tried paying students for earning good grades.  This approach improved state test scores by nearly 40 percentage points.  Did money provide the motivation for these students to work harder and longer on their math problems and not give up?  Apparently.  Proponents of this system argue that the “real world” functions much in this way: perform better and get paid more.  But money can’t be added as an outcome in every scenario.  How many blogs or Twitter accounts are raking in the dough?  Almost zero, I would guess.  Instead, people need intrinsic motivation to produce results over the long term.  I don’t write this post because I envision piles of Internet surfers reading and commenting on this.  I do it because there’s satisfaction in organizing my thoughts and ideas and writing them down.  I don’t care that nobody else will read this, but if someone else finds it interesting, then more power to them.

Aside from writing these inane blog posts, it is intrinsic motivation that keeps me working on long research projects.  It’s what gets me up in the morning with the hope that I’ll be able to run normally again after knee surgery.  I run slow, go out every other day,  only go ten minutes, and feel terrible, but I know if I do it enough I’ll be able to run faster and longer.  By keeping at it and going one step at a time, things will get done.

My initial thoughts of Wolfram Alpha are that it just doesn’t have enough data to make interesting results of most search queries, but the name search is interesting. Plugging in my name shows a quick rise and fall of its popularity, peaking right around my birthday. I guess my parents really bought into the Matthew hype. It’s like buying a new car and commenting that suddenly all the cars you see are the exact model you have. There is a chapter of Freakonomics that analyzes the popularity of birth names and how they rise and fall in cycles. They argue that the more well-to-do give birth names to their kids that may sound unusual at first, but then catch on with the general population. Eventually enough people are given the name that it becomes too popular and burns out.

It also reminds me of another analogy I read somewhere: “Why am I always in the longest checkout lane in the grocery store?” These popularity musings are mainly based on a self-centered perspective: every individual claims everyone else is doing the same thing, whether it be car choice, birth name choice, or checkout lane choice. Using a global perspective, it becomes clear why everyone else seems to think the same way. If I were to choose one person at random in the entire world, the odds are that he would be Chinese (again making use of Wolfram Alpha). Do the Chinese wonder why everyone else is Chinese? Using this perspective, think about the grocery checkout lanes: if you had to pick out one person at random in all of the lanes, the odds are that he would be in the lane with the most people. If someone is in a checkout lane, the odds are greater that he is in the longest line in comparison with all the others . This can also be applied to birth names: if a plurality of people are named Matthew, then the odds are that I would be named Matthew over any other name.