Posts tagged ‘Newcastle University’

Watching the Detectives Rubbish

Living in Britain I as do I have become accustomed to the fact that, however much I don’t like it, I am spied upon on a daily basis by surveillance cameras operated by all sorts of public bodies and private companies under the nebulous idea of ‘safety’. How a fixed camera emplacement, unlikely to ever be watched in real time 24/7, keeps me safe is, as yet, a still unanswered question.

It should then really come as no surprise to me to learn that Newcastle University – or rather their School of Computing Science and their Culture Lab in conjunction with the universities of Lincoln and Duisburg-Essen – have decided to take surveillance one step further and are placing camera phones in bins – all in the name of encouraging recycling.

The ‘BinCam‘ (as it is somewhat obviously named) scheme works by having an app on the ‘phone rigged to take a photo of the contents every time the lid closes. The picture is then uploaded to Facebook for anyone to who adds the BinCam app to their profile to view. It is also sent to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk where a new Human Intelligence Test is created and some lucky soul somewhere gets to identify the contents of the bin (food, recyclable items) visible in the image. Two scores are then awarded to each bin – one for each category aforementioned – and at the end of each week the bins are ranked in a league.

So far five student households have signed up to the scheme and Anja Thieme, post-grad student and project leader says of it so far:

“A few times we even saw people throwing something away and then going back into the bin to take it out again.? During the focus groups, the students said they felt like the bin was watching them and that it definitely made them think twice about what they were throwing away.?? At the same time they felt motivated by the online league table to recycle more and improve their rating.”

No dear, what we have here is not a sudden conversion to the delights of recycling and the joys of sustainability by the participating students but rather a bunch of score whores all obsessed with being the top dog.

No matter what the field of human endeavour, put enough people in the same place and competition will always result – especially if there is some form of reward involved.

Nevertheless the university intends to extend this ‘competition’ to more student houses at the start of the next academic year with their ‘Waste Manager’ – a title that surely speaks for itself – saying:

“Students have busy lives and recycling competes with other demands. Anything that makes recycling easier is good – but when it is fun and innovative like BinCam it really encourages participation. The use of Facebook and the community peer pressure is fascinating and I am looking forward to introducing the application to other parts of the campus.”

Busy lives? Other demands? Unless things have changed radically from my own days then those demands are likely to be nothing more strenuous than drinking, surfing the ‘net, playing computer games and watching lots of TV. Plus some studying.

The idea is novel, I’ll grant you that, but how long until the novelty wears off and the students get sick of it? Will their new found enthusiasm for recycling hold or will they simply go back to what they were doing before?

Of course, if it does take off, then how long before some idiot civil servant or politician either here or in the EU decides to make the whole thing compulsory – and backed up with the obligatory fines for those who step out of line?