“Cool? Or Just Clunky? The Fight Over Dashboard Touch Screens,” says a headline today in the New York Times. Without mentioning it, the Times report tells of the aftermath of technology that was honored thirty years ago with an Ig Nobel Prize. The Times explains: do-it-all touch screens, the nerve centers of many new cars, have […]
Driver education for rats—and how to improve it—is the subject of this new study: “Enriched Environment Exposure Accelerates Rodent Driving Skills,” L.E. Crawford, L.E. Knouse, M. Kent, D. Vavra, O. Harding, D. LeServe, N. Fox, X. Hu, P. Li, Clark Glory, and Kelly G. Lambert [pictured here], Behavioural Brain Research, epub 2019. The authors, at […]
How high is the risk of colliding on a highway with someone who is high, on a highness celebration day? The answer, if there is one, can perhaps be teased out by studying this new study of drivers in the UK and also older study of drivers in the USA: “The Relative Risk of Motor […]
Sad news. John Senders has taken his last gleeful spin through the universe. He died this week, just a few days shy of his 99th birthday. John, a clever, funny, kind scientist who was also an ace showman with an astoundingly resonant voice, won the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize for public safety, for conducting a series of […]
“John’s Story – The Science of Error” is a new documentary film about John Senders, the Ig Nobel Prize winning, pioneering student of human attention and distraction. Back Lane Studios produced the film: The 2011 Ig Nobel Prize for Public Safety was awarded to John Senders of the University of Toronto, CANADA, for conducting a series of safety […]
Researchers Francisco Alonso, Cristina Esteban, Andrea Serge and Mª Luisa Ballestar at INTRAS (University Research Institute on Traffic and Road Safety), University of Valencia, Spain, have performed a new study on shouting and cursing whilst driving. “The aim of this study was to describe the factors and perceptions related to aggressive behavior of verbally insulting […]
The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) as depicted above, was chosen as a reference for the ‘Networked Yawn Detector’ (a car-driver safety-monitor) developed by Zhengrong Yao and Haibo Li of the Department of Applied Physics and Electronics, Umeå University, Sweden. “We test our system publicly, 26 students from the Applied Physics and Electronic Engineering Department […]
Although car horn honking might be viewed by some as a measure of aggression it can also have its positive side. For example in driving simulators, where participants sometimes drive more slowly than they would do on a real road (when not attending to driving) – maybe a horn honk would encourage them to drive […]
Anyone who has driven a vehicle in various different countries might have observed that the national rate of ‘horn honking’ varies considerably – but why? A widely-cited study by Douglas T. Kenrick and Steven W. MacFarlane (published in 1986) investigated whether one simple variable – temperature – might be having an effect. The team organised […]
Are you one of those who believes that, when it comes to South African taxi drivers, road accidents are pre-destined, and not as a result of individual’s driving behaviour? If so, your beliefs could be erroneous – according to the results of a newly published study undertaken by Dr. Bright Mahembe (University of the […]