“Can I buy or sell a house without a solicitor?” Grigor & Young have newspaper cuttings books back to the 19th century, and that’s how one cutting from the mid-1980s is headlined. The body text continues: “In theory, you can do much of the work yourself. In theory, you can also remove your own appendix – given a sharp knife, a reliable textbook and a bit of practice.” Seth Godin picked up on this theme of expertise in a post on his daily blog. He asked: “Okay, how hard can it be? (to be an expert). Actually, it might be very hard. Actually, expertise has value. Actually, just because someone said it on the internet doesn’t mean it’s true. Or useful.” What’s the chance you’d be able to do such conveyancing or (especially) surgery yourself? Limited, you would think. Less than 10%? Less than 1%? And a small chance is what you would expect to have, in general, if you were hoping to overturn a finding of 10% contributory negligence in a personal injury Continue Reading
Encouraging child road safety awareness
Nearly two-thirds of parents do not think their children have a good understanding of the dangers or concentrate properly near roads That’s one of the findings of a YouGov survey commissioned by the Association of Personal Injuries for Injury Prevention Week 2020. In the UK-wide study, parents of school-age children were asked to think about how confident they are about their child or children’s road safety awareness. The child road safety survey results are as follows. The remainder said their children have a very good understanding of the dangers – which is great - but we want to address the near 2/3rds of parents who are not so confident. Your biggest helper comes in the form of the Green Cross Code. Arguably, it’s as important for children to learn as spelling and multiplication. The Highway Code says that children should be taught the Green Cross Code and should not be allowed out alone until they can understand and use it properly. This is Continue Reading
Pocket that phone and help prevent needless injuries on the roads
It does not look the sort of road you would expect to see a pedestrian try to cross. Other than at traffic lights. Or using a bridge or underpass. Viewed through the dashcam of the slow-moving car in queuing traffic, we can see it’s an urban environment. The road has 4 lanes in each direction (we’re in the 3rd lane). A continuous concrete barrier about 4 feet high forms the central reservation. A young woman steps off the pavement to our left and begins crossing from left to right – for her, crossing the first half of the road. She’s on her mobile. She’s holding it up to her right ear. We can see her left hand gesturing as she chats. The field of view is distorted by the wide angle lens of the dashcam – it makes things look further away than they are in fact. As the woman crosses in front of our vehicle, she bows slightly to thank us for making room for her to pass through. The outside lane to our right has been empty throughout the 8 seconds or so since she Continue Reading
Do you know how to tell if a car is about to reverse?
Once we know something, we find it difficult to imagine what it was like not to know it. This is known as the Curse of Knowledge. Here’s an example. In a 1990 experiment, pairs of people had to try to identify 120 well-known songs – e.g. Happy Birthday to You. One of them was to tap out the rhythm on a table and the other had to guess the song from that rhythm alone. On average, the listeners guessed only 3 out of 120 songs – a success rate of just 2.5%. Startlingly, though, when the tappers were asked to predict how many of the songs the listeners would guess, they reckoned the odds were 50/50 (50%). The tappers got their tune identified 1 time in 40, but they thought it would be 1 time in 2. Of course, the tappers were hearing the tune in their heads as they tapped. They couldn’t imagine what it was like for the listeners to hear isolated taps – more akin to Morse Code – rather than a song. The tappers’ knowledge had “cursed” them. In road safety terms, it Continue Reading