- Joined
- Aug 18, 2002
- Messages
- 19,408
I thought this was interesting (and quirky) - is it showing us our in built evolutionary wiring and can it really show national (and potentially stereotpyical) differences?
Source
As I know you'd all want to rush off I dug out that last paper:
Shiyomi, M. (2004) How are distances between individuals of grazing cows explained by a statistical model? Ecological Modelling. 172 (1). 87 -94.
On the beach
How much space do you need on a beach? Marc Abrahams has the answers
Tuesday February 15, 2005
The Guardian
Some 30 years ago, beachgoers in three countries found that strangers were coming up to them, asking strange questions. The strangers turned out to be fairly harmless. They were academics, driven by a fierce desire to understand how much space people appropriate for themselves when they plop down on a beach.
In 1973, Julian Edney and Nancy Jordan-Edney of the University of Arizona had travelled 2,000 miles east and spent five days striding up and down a beach. Their subsequent report, called Territorial Spacing on a Beach and published in the journal Sociometry, was a landmark in the history of studying territorial spacing on beaches.
The Edneys' artfully collected data, after careful crunching and interpretation, told them several things. As groups get bigger, they tend to grab less space per person. Men tend to grab more space than women. And there were nuances that were not so easily interpreted, then or now.
Seven years later another American, HW Smith, of the University of St Louis, went to Europe, determined to measure the spacing between people on a beach in France, and then on a beach in Germany. Smith succeeded. His report Territorial Spacing on a Beach Revisited: a Cross-National Exploration appeared in the journal Social Psychology Quarterly.
In both Germany and France, Smith found much the same thing that the Edneys had seen in America. And he discovered something more. "Lone Germans," Smith wrote, "had more circularly shaped claims than lone French persons." Also, Germans "overwhelmingly (99%) tended to structure very rigidly public space by building sand castles around their territories".
The urge to measure people's personal space has not been confined to beaches. In 1974, Paul Nesbitt of the University of Nevada, Reno, and Girard Steven of the University of California, Santa Barbara, published a report called Personal Space and Stimulus Intensity at a Southern California Amusement Park. They explain how they sent a young woman or man into the queues for various attractions at an amusement park. It was found that subjects stood further away when the stimulus persons wore brightly coloured clothes, and similarly when they used perfume or after-shave lotion.
Recently, Masae Shiyomi, of Ibaraki University in Mito, Japan, performed an Edney-esque set of measurements with cows. Details can be found and enjoyed in her report How are Distances Between Individuals of Grazing Cows Explained by a Statistical Model? in the journal Ecological Modeling. How, exactly, do cows form a crowd? The question drives Shiyomi; statistically minded farmers will want to follow her adventures.
Source
As I know you'd all want to rush off I dug out that last paper:
Shiyomi, M. (2004) How are distances between individuals of grazing cows explained by a statistical model? Ecological Modelling. 172 (1). 87 -94.
Abstract
A statistical model to describe how distances between individuals of grazing previous cows are explained is discussed in this paper. This model was constructed by the following five effects: (1) behavior of the entire crowd (measured by troop length in this study), (2) repulsive and attractive forces operating directly between two individuals (direct effect), (3) effect of third individual on distance between two given individuals (half-indirect effect), (4) effects of unconnected pairs on the distance between two given individuals (indirect effect), and (5) residual effect which cannot be explained by the above four effects to determine distances between individuals (random/involuntary movement effect). These effects were analyzed using simple and multiple regression equations. Whole data taken every 5 min were divided into two phases: a grazing phase and a resting phase.
The distances between two individuals in the grazing phase were much greater than the distances in the resting phase. The temporal variation of distances between two individuals in the grazing phase was much larger than the variation of distances in the resting phase. The order of the contributions of the five effects to the total variation of temporal changes in distances between individuals were: random movement effect>troop length effect~direct effect>half-indirect effect>indirect effect.
Author Keywords: Crowd; Distances between individuals; Grazing cattle; Model; Regression analysis