CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years old!
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It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
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I tried electronic help at first but actually it tended to land me in hot water more often than not.
Now there are street maps on street corners everywhere I tend to navigate between them as much as possible - also tends to help to choose specific flags, such as parks and landmarks to help you navigate. Tougher in Edinburgh and Glasgow mind.
"...given that it's unlikely for landmarks to be removed in the real world..."
I imagine that the sorts of landmark that women tend to rely on are things like a coffee shop, or a library, or a petrol station, and so on. Recognising these, women are easily able to keep themselves correctly orientated.
In an artificial 3D world, when landmarks are removed, for the purposes of testing, women become more easily disorientated than men.
I tried electronic help at first but actually it tended to land me in hot water more often than not.
As well as helping to ensure that you are on the correct route, repeat markers - or route confirmation markers - like Hansel & Gretel's trail of breadcrumbs through the forest - in between the strategically-located direction signs - also provide regular physical cues to people, help to raise the awareness of motorists, and serve to establish a foundation for the cycle network, from which to build upwards.
"
I imagine that the sorts of landmark that women tend to rely on are things like a coffee shop, or a library, or a petrol station, and so on. Recognising these, women are easily able to keep themselves correctly orientated.
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Don't think 'even' Jeremy Clarkson would put it like that.
I'm female, I navigate by mountains, waterfronts etc.
what I logged in to say was that these stereotypes about men using maps and so forth are also highly cotningent to western modern societies and simply don't hold up elsewhere in the world.
Is that a compliment? I don't think it is.
I am just saying these rather than tall buildings.
"Recognising these, women are easily able to keep themselves correctly orientated."
Well, I've got binders full of incorrectly oriented women, so this is great news.
I'm not sure who this quote is from:
The art of not getting lost is 'staying found'
I'm intrigued by the idea of navigating by coffee shops. I'm assuming that Costa points north, Starbucks south, Cafe Nero east and Pret west. Is that right ladies?
To be fair Clarkson would have probably used severely exaggeratedly gender-stereotyped shops.
One of the fun things about reading books to a three-year-old is the on-the-fly editing and modification of stories required when some misogyny or objectionable gender-rôle normalisation crops up.
I've got to go for lunch now but can anyone think of a comment about Sigmund Freud and navigating using tall buildings as landmarks?
The reason that men (and most likely women as well)people don't ask for directions is because the chances of the person you ask actually knowing & being able to describe well the directions, are exceedingly low.
It is actually really difficult to describe directions when put on the spot to someone, even if you've lived in the area since a child. Remembering what are the landmarks, where the turns are, and the street names is really hard even for a route you take every day.
Inevitably, when you ask for directions the response normally includes something along the lines of, "You go next left, then you just go straight, you'll see it...". And you know that when you hear 'just go straight...', there'll be at least 1 or 2 turns in there that have been missed from the direction-givers memory.
Giving directions is especially fun when the question is being asked by someone in a car and you have to compensate for all the pedestrian-or-cycle-only bits.
@wingpig glad it wasn't just me that saw something freudian in there....
@SRD There's a mention somewhere upthread of culs-de-sac, too.
I imagine that the sorts of landmark that women tend to rely on are things like a coffee shop, or a library, or a petrol station, and so on. Recognising these, women are easily able to keep themselves correctly orientated.
Actually the library on George IVth bridge has some excellent maps, and I believe most petrol stations also have some rudimentary road maps. If only we men were as resourceful. As for coffee shops I think Morningsider is right, but caffeine disorientates me so I'm not sure.
A recent-ish one I had was a really hacked off looking family heading south at Morningside wanting the zoo.
I think I sent them in the general direction with the instruction to ask someone else in about 15 minutes or look for brown zoo signs.
I think the only time I could have given decent directions to someone was when I had a paper round, delivering the Herald&Post. It meant walking every street in the area and visiting every house on a weekly basis.
Due to boredom, you soon memorised every street name, letter box, plant, sign, road marking... well you get the picture
cb - what, you couldn't find a coffee shop in Morningside and tried to rely on signs instead
wingpig - bravo sir! I really did laugh out loud.
I've got to go for lunch now but can anyone think of a comment about Sigmund Freud and navigating using tall buildings as landmarks?
Given I located our little London office using the Gherkin to get my bearings, then yes, yes I can.
Giving directions is especially fun when the question is being asked by someone in a car
Especially when they don't speak enough English to understand your reply. I was walking in Balloch once and someone stopped and asked me how to get to Latch le Maand. Once I'd twigged where that was I gave simple directions (go that way and turn right at the roundabout) only to have them zoom off in precisely the wrong direction.
"you couldn't find a coffee shop in Morningside"
Are there any?
There are coffee shops in Amsterdam. There are also incorrectly oriented women. I'm not sure if the two are connected.
My boyfriend tends to describe routes to places using pubs, shops, etc. I tend to not know what he's talking about, and require a map.
I don't know what this demonstrates.
chdot - I suspect not, only coffee emporia are found in Morningside.
Tricky using coffee shops. "Turn left at the 3rd Costa" sounds ok, but unless you've been that way recently you've no idea how many new Costas will have popped up since last time.
" only coffee emporia are found in Morningside"
Ah, my mistake.
@fimm i can sympathize mr srd doesn't so much remember places as say things like 'don't you remember, we came this way in 1996' or 'that was where we went at Christmas 2003'
maps everytime please.
@SRD haha yes been there (not that I remember that we came this way).
Boyfriend claims to have a good sense of direction (which is why I don't trust him to navigate in the hills, where relying on your sense of direction is a recipe for disaster - though he saw an experienced (female as it happens) Mountain Marathoner in action not so long ago and I think learned something from her about how it is done).
If you type "sense of direction women" into Google, the first article which is listed is from the Royal Institute of Navigation. This article begins as follows:
It is a known stereotype that men cannot multi-task and women have no sense of direction ...
Now I am seeking to challenge this stereotype. I am saying that for all practical purposes, men are very good at multi-tasking. No, that's not it. No, what I am saying is that in our day-to-day lives, there is nothing much so very different between men's and women's sense of direction. And the point is easily proved, because I am sure that everyone reading this would be able to point the way to ... I don't know - Edinburgh Castle, let's say, or the airport. (I earlier tested my nine year-old niece's sense of direction, asking her to point which way to her school, and guess what?)
Seemingly, under somewhat extreme and rather unrealistic circumstances, a woman's sense of direction proves to be slightly less reliable than a man's, but it's no big deal as far as I can tell.
Indeed, I noted in an earlier comment:
Women showed greater activity in the left and right pre-frontal regions, while men showed increased levels of activity in the hippocampus.
Further research on my part has shown that actually the hippocampus is larger in women than in men. So, as I also said, whatever differences there are seem to me to be quite academic.
The case is, a sense of direction is innate. This article from Scientific American covers most of the details.
Just as people have a sense of rhythm, or a sense of balance, or a sense of hot and cold, and so on, so people have a sense of direction. Where people genuinely claim to have no sense of direction, it might actually be the case that what they have is a mild form of dyspraxia.
In the hills - or on a mammoth walk with the dog, as I found out not so long back - our sense of direction can end up letting us down. In large part this is because there are no familiar landmarks to help us "stay found", and so we become disorientated.
Okay, now navigation is defined as the process or activity of accurately ascertaining one's position, and planning and following a route.
As we begin to navigate an unfamiliar environment, we depend heavily on landmarks. We look for these and use them to mark our way. As we begin to get more familiar with the environment, we start to remember the routes we take from landmark to landmark, using this to retrace our routes when required. Finally, as we start to gain this knowledge, we use our base of both landmarks and routes to create a cognitive map of the space, so we can make decisions based on spatial differences between landmarks. We can make abstract judgments about the best way to navigate based on the map we have in our heads.
(This "cognitive map" is exactly what chdot was referring to when he talked about the very comprehensive 'map' in his head of Edinburgh's off-road routes.)
The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that for all day-to-day purposes, there is nothing to separate men's and women's sense of direction, or even to the way in which we navigate our way around the place.
Try Googling "mouse bucket platform hippocampus" or variations thereupon and see what you get. When I did half a year of neuroscience a lecturer mentioned the experiment but never said which gender the subject mice were.
I always enjoy it when the "monkey better at puzzle than human" articles roll around.
One of my lecturers always retitled them "monkey more excited about peanut prize than humans"
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