Ads do change behavior: mine

Tracy Duvall

“Behavior change is hard” is a common lament among do-gooders. They’re referring to voluntary changes in people’s practices, like eating less beef or consistently wearing a condom during sex. Despite limited success, one popular approach to motivating behavioral change is through advertising – especially public-service announcements (PSAs). What many PSAs lack, though, is a comparable alternative to the naughty action: okay, I shouldn’t smoke, but what’s the satisfying substitute?

Maybe that’s part of why this ad from Sodastream worked so well on me: it suggested an equivalent product at an equivalent price (and less hassle):

But what also worked was that it made me feel stupid for buying soft-drink bottles when a fine alternative exists. Shame, indeed!

Undoubtedly this commercial doesn’t have the same effect on everyone. But, for me, watching it one time provoked a quick, profound, and lasting change. Could ads for the Impossible Whopper be tailored to…

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How to Change the World: My brief guide now available!

Tracy Duvall

I’ve distilled years of training, research, and practice into a short-and-sweet book on setting and achieving serious goals. The title is How to Change the World (Or Your Corner of It): Planning and Working for Success. It’s available from many sources, including Amazon and these major vendors.

Here’s the blurb:

Do you want to change the world—or yourself? To improve your work? To make the best decisions possible? Then this brief but comprehensive guide to planning, doing, and revising is for you.

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Electric scooters vs. electric bikes

I happily own an electric bike, but it’s not optimal for every purpose. So I jumped at the opportunity to rent an electric scooter, which is now possible in D.C., to see whether it’s better. For my purposes, it’s not, but for yours? Read on.

I rented a scooter from Lime four times to take short trips around town. Such rentals have great appeal to people with limited walking range (e.g. me) – especially for climbing hills.  But my focus here is on whether owning an electric scooter would be preferable to owning an electric bike. Before getting to the direct comparison, I’ll briefly discuss the positive and negative aspects of using an electric scooter for everyday transportation.

Vision Zero after zero progress?

Tracy Duvall

Washington, D.C., like other cities around the world, is trying to eliminate traffic deaths through a program called Vision Zero. Inspired by Sweden, this has been a model project in many ways, but the lack of positive results is testing its proponents.

Effecting change per se is my topic here, rather than the specific alterations that D.C. et al. have wrought as part of Vision Zero.

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Stealthing: Surveys won’t reveal it, trash might

A recent article in a law journal has drawn considerable attention to ‘stealthing‘: when a man secretly removes his condom and continues having sex. Aside from being a heinous violation of trust and hygiene, stealthing reveals one of the many weaknesses in surveys of condom use in East Africa. In short, people could answer honestly that they used condoms.

One of the many problems with condom-use surveys – aside from the rampant lying – is that they don’t ask how condoms are used.

Vitamin B6 for ME/CFS: Works for me

Recent research suggests that levels of vitamin B6 in the gut distinguish sufferers of ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis, aka chronic fatigue syndrome) from healthy people. “Good enough!” says I, “I’ll give it a shot.”

First, though, I looked for information on the most effective form and dosage. Here’s what I found:

Their goal is inclusive, so why not the app?

Recently, while searching for a story to report about world-changing, I read a press release about MyGIHealth, which seemed quite promising. As I understood it, people with gastrointestinal problems could use a free app or website to record their symptoms, get meaningful medical feedback, and share a rich record with their physicians. This seemed like a great way to help.

And probably it is for thousands of people. But it works fully only as an iOS app, so large numbers of potential users, including me, are shut out. Surely this results from a mismatch of goals and activities.

Trump dossier: A brief synopsis

I read the entire Trump dossier, downloaded from Buzzfeed. News coverage has been unfocused and overly pussyfooted, eliding the unverified, second-, third-, and fourthhand claims within. Even though some or all of the information is likely distorted or just plain wrong, the possibility that some or all of the claims are correct makes them vital to know. So here they are:

Garbology for research on condom use

Recently I completed a systematic review of research explaining patterns of condom use in five East African countries. The most basic conclusion is that researchers failed to answer this vital question. The most informative projects employed ethnographic participant-observation, and future researchers should emphasize this methodology – as opposed to the current focus on surveys, on which people demonstrably lie in large numbers. All of this is detailed in my comprehensive report, which is freely available online.

Nonetheless, participant-observation has its weaknesses, and one of these is in producing stats. Numerical evidence of trends is important for understanding whether a public-health program is working, and it’s something that policymakers and journalists expect. Since asking people directly about their sex lives yields disastrously unreliable answers, less-direct methods are needed.

Hadza agree: do more and live longer

Can the Hadza, a group of hunters and gatherers, help us understand how to maintain cardiovascular health? A recent study claims that the answer is yes, in two ways. First, we can correlate their health to their levels of activity. Second, we can extrapolate from these present-day hunters and gatherers to the thousands of generations in which the common ancestors of all humans lived similarly. That is, we can say that humanity evolved to thrive under certain levels of activity.