My Top Ten Tweets of the Last Seven Days

My Twitter Feed

Here are my top 10 Tweets that contain links shortened using ow.ly during the past 7 days. How many typos can you spot? I really need to proof better before hitting send.

I didn’t post often this week, and yet the hit count was high. Perhaps because the disaster in Haiti increased twitter use overall. Indeed, the tweet with the highest number of hits was to a video of Pat Robertson idiotically attributing the earthquake in Haiti to a Haitian deal with the devil to break free from colonialism.  I’ve said elsewhere that this shows heartless he is, but the more I think about it the more it really shows how stupid he is.

The fact that the increased total number of hits on my tweets is due to interest in Haiti is also supported by the fact that the second, third in fourth most popular tweets are separated from this one by a meaningful margin, and are very closely bunched with one another.  They are links to a story about the death of Teddy Pendergrass, a call for sessions in the NITLE Tools for Teaching in the Global Age series, and a story about VoIP in the UAE.  On the other hand, other tweets about Haiti are in the next eight.

Anyway, here’s the top 10: Continue reading

A Good Article on Mobile Devices and Driving

A 2009 AAA Foundation study found that 91.5 percent of drivers considered talking on the phone while driving a serious threat to their safety; 97 percent said it was completely unacceptable to send a text or e-mail while driving. But two-thirds of those people admitted talking on their own phones while driving, and 1 in 7 have texted while driving.

That little tidbit exposing the hypocrisy of the American driver comes from an article in the Christian Science Monitor, “Texting while driving: the new drunk driving.”  I wouldn’t be surprised if a good percentage of the 1/3 who didn’t admit to talking on the phone while driving were people who don’t even have phones. When the phone rings and you are driving, its a difficult temptation to resist.

I’m going to leave aside the question of texting while driving because, although I must confess I have done it, it is so obviously a stupid thing to do and clearly dangerous.  Apparently simply talking on the phone  is quite dangerous, as well, moreso than I realized.

At the University of Utah’s Applied Cognition Laboratory, Professor Strayer has been testing this do-as-I-say theory for a decade. Using neuroimaging and a drive simulator, he and his colleagues have watched what happens when drivers – including those who claim to be able to text, tweet, and talk safely at the wheel – mix cellphones and cars.

The results are stark: Almost nobody multiprocesses the way they think they can. For 98 percent of the population, regardless of age, the likelihood of a crash while on a cellphone increases fourfold; the reaction to simulated traffic lights, pedestrians, and vehicles is comparable to that of someone legally intoxicated.

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Now here is the thing I find really interesting.  Strayer’s research found that there was little difference between the distraction level of those on hand held sets and hands free headsets.

The disruption, he says, is cognitive. Unlike a conversation with a passenger sharing the same physical space of the car, the electronic conversation takes a driver into a virtual space away from the road.

“We record brain activity,” Strayer says, “and we can show that it’s suppressed from the cellphone conversation.”

That’s odd and interesting, but believable.  Phone conversations are different from in person conversations and even if you could hear both sides of the conversation, you would probably know very quickly it was a mobile phone conversation.  And I feel like a lot of people can’t even walk straight while talking on their mobile phones.  They wander around drunkenly obliviously to everything and everyone around them. Its very odd.

Anyway, this is a good article, full of interesting tidbits.  Check it out.