I found this fascinating. Amongst other interpretations,

“[The Hawthorne effect is] an experimental effect in the direction expected but not for the reason expected; i.e., a significant positive effect that turns out to have no causal basis in the theoretical motivation for the intervention, but is apparently due to the effect on the participants of knowing themselves to be studied in connection with the outcomes measured.”

I’m often sceptical of surveys and the like (especially of the “X% of children surveyed said they carried a knife!” type) because I suspect that people lie to pollsters more than they like to admit. …

This display (look at the windows on the first - that’s the second for you American folks - floor) is at the top of Cockburn Street in Edinburgh. Although it is amazing how much coverage the US primaries are getting here (I saw a poster for the Independent newspaper at the weekend that simply read “Election Coverage” and had a US map underneath the text) this is admittedly a bit of a one off, and I suspect some Americans live in the flat. It surprised me though.

To be political for a moment, I don’t think that Hillary could inspire such…

My new blog! I have joined the intarweb properly now! I’m not sure how much I’ll update this, or even what exactly I’ll put on it, but I keep seeing things and thinking I want to write about them, and thinking of things to do that I’d want to record somewhere, and not having anywhere to do it, so I’ll do it here.

The name of the blog will probably change soon. I thought that “Jamie’s Web Log” was cleverly sort of post-Facebook ironic, but Em tells me that it’s really just “a bit geocities”, so I’ll have to mull it…