[nabs-l] Fwd: [nfb-talk] Fw: Forget Gum. Walking and Using Phone Is Risky

Mon Jan 25 20:24:14 UTC 2010

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "John G. Heim" <jheim at math.wisc.edu>
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 09:49:05 -0600
Subject: [nfb-talk] Fw: Forget Gum. Walking and Using Phone Is Risky
To: NFB Talk Mailing List <nfb-talk at nfbnet.org>

Below is a copy of an article someone forwarded to meabout how dangerous it
is to walk and use your cell phone. The reason I'm forwarding it is that I
wwork on the campus of the University of Wisconsin and I can confirm that
this is a problem. Over the past few years, the number of collisions with
other pedestrians that I have experienced has increased dramatically. Almost
without exception, when I have a collision with someone, they're talking on
a cell phone or listening to an ipod.  Last summer I was hit by a girl on a
bicycle. She got knocked down and at first I was very apologetic. But then
on-lookers told me that she was talking on a cell phone when she hit me. So
she was riding her bike on a crowded sidewalk and talking on her cell phone.
In retrospect, I think she was lucky she didn't hurt me.

Sent: Monday, January 25, 2010 8:32 AM
Subject: Forget Gum. Walking and Using Phone Is Risky

> Driven to Distraction
> Forget Gum. Walking and Using Phone Is Risky.
> SAN FRANCISCO - On the day of the collision last month, visibility was
> good. The sidewalk was not under repair. As she walked, Tiffany Briggs,
> 25, was talking to her grandmother on her cellphone, lost in conversation.
> Very lost.
> "I ran into a truck," Ms. Briggs said.
>
> It was parked in a driveway.
>
> Distracted driving has gained much attention lately because of the
> inflated crash risk posed by drivers using cellphones to talk and text.
>
> But there is another growing problem caused by lower-stakes multitasking -
> distracted walking - which combines a pedestrian, an electronic device and
> an unseen crack in the sidewalk, the pole of a stop sign, a toy left on
> the living room floor or a parked (or sometimes moving) car.
>
> The era of the mobile gadget is making mobility that much more perilous,
> particularly on crowded streets and in downtown areas where multiple
> multitaskers veer and swerve and walk to the beat of their own devices.
>
> Most times, the mishaps for a distracted walker are minor, like the
> lightly dinged head and broken fingernail that Ms. Briggs suffered, a
> jammed digit or a sprained ankle, and, the befallen say, a nasty case of
> hurt pride. Of course, the injuries can sometimes be serious - and they
> are on the rise.
>
> Slightly more than 1,000 pedestrians visited emergency rooms in 2008
> because they got distracted and tripped, fell or ran into something while
> using a cellphone to talk or text. That was twice the number from 2007,
> which had nearly doubled from 2006, according to a study conducted by Ohio
> State University, which says it is the first to estimate such accidents.
>
> "It's the tip of the iceberg," said Jack L. Nasar, a professor of city and
> regional planning at Ohio State, noting that the number of mishaps is
> probably much higher considering that most of the injuries are not severe
> enough to require a hospital visit. What is more, he said, texting is
> rising sharply and devices like the iPhone have thousands of new, engaging
> applications to preoccupy phone users.
>
> Mr. Nasar supervised the statistical analysis, which was done by Derek
> Troyer, one of his graduate students. He looked at records of emergency
> room visits compiled by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
>
> Examples of such visits include a 16-year-old boy who walked into a
> telephone pole while texting and suffered a concussion; a 28-year-old man
> who tripped and fractured a finger on the hand gripping his cellphone; and
> a 68-year-old man who fell off the porch while talking on a cellphone,
> spraining a thumb and an ankle and causing dizziness.
>
> Young people injured themselves more often. About half the visits Mr.
> Troyer studied were by people under 30, and a quarter were 16 to 20 years
> old. But more than a quarter of those injured were 41 to 60 years old.
>
> Pedestrians, like drivers, have long been distracted by myriad tasks, like
> snacking or reading on the go. But the constant interaction with
> electronic devices has made single-tasking seem boring or even
> unproductive.
>
> Cognitive psychologists, neurologists and other researchers are beginning
> to study the impact of constant multitasking, whether behind a desk or the
> wheel or on foot. It might stand to reason that someone looking at a phone
> to read a message would misstep, but the researchers are finding that just
> talking on a phone takes its own considerable toll on cognition and
> awareness.
>
> Sometimes, pedestrians using their phones do not notice objects or people
> that are right in front of them - even a clown riding a unicycle. That was
> the finding of a recent study at Western Washington University in
> Bellingham, Wash., by a psychology professor, Ira Hyman, and his students.
>
> One of the students dressed as a clown and unicycled around a central
> square on campus. About half the people walking past by themselves said
> they had seen the clown, and the number was slightly higher for people
> walking in pairs. But only 25 percent of people talking on a cellphone
> said they had, Mr. Hyman said.
>
> He said the term commonly applied to such preoccupation is "inattention
> blindness," meaning a person can be looking at an object but fail to
> register it or process what it is.
>
> Particularly fascinating, Mr. Hyman said, is that people walking in pairs
> were more than twice as likely to see the clown as were people talking on
> a cellphone, suggesting that the act of simply having a conversation is
> not the cause of inattention blindness.
>
> One possible explanation is that a cellphone conversation taxes not just
> auditory resources in the brain but also visual functions, said Adam
> Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco.
> That combination, he said, prompts the listener to, for example, create
> visual imagery related to the conversation in a way that overrides or
> obscures the processing of real images.
>
> By comparison, walking and chewing gum (that age-old measure of pedestrian
> skill at multitasking) is a snap.
>
> "Walking and chewing are repetitive, well-practiced tasks that become
> automatic," Dr. Gazzaley said. "They don't compete for resources like
> texting and walking."
>
> Further, he said, the cellphone gives people a constant opportunity to
> pursue goals that feel more important than walking down the street.
>
> "An animal would never walk into a pole," he said, noting survival
> instincts would trump other priorities.
>
> For Shalamar Jones, 19, the priority was keeping in touch with her
> boyfriend. Last month while she was Christmas shopping in a mall near San
> Francisco, she was texting him when - bam! - she walked into the window of
> a New York & Company store, thinking it was a door.
>
> "I thought it was open," she said, noting that no harm was done. "I just
> started laughing at myself."
>
> The worst part is the humiliation, said Christopher Black, 20, an art
> student at San Francisco State University who 18 months ago had his own
> pratfall.
>
> At the time, Mr. Black said, the sidewalks were packed with pedestrians.
> So he decided he could move faster if he walked in the street, keeping
> close to the parked cars. The trouble is he was also texting - with a
> woman he was flirting with.
>
> He unwittingly started to veer into the road, prompting an oncoming car to
> honk. He said he instinctively jumped toward the sidewalk but, in the
> process, forgot about the line of parked cars.
>
> "I splayed against the side of the car, and the phone hit the ground," he
> said. He and his phone were uninjured, except for his pride. "It was
> pretty significantly embarrassing."
>
>

_______________________________________________
nfb-talk mailing list
nfb-talk at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nfb-talk_nfbnet.org

-- 
Darian Smith
Skype: The_Blind_Truth
Windows Live: Lightningrod2010 at live.com
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org

post from another list serve. I enjoyed  the article and the comments
that  the  person that forwarded them had  for it.