NOW: Stuff reports: The [UK] Department for Transport has acted to ban drivers from using Google Glass – even before Google’s smart eyewear launches to the general public. Stuff has learned that the government department is concerned about the potential for distraction that could result from using Google Glass while driving, and has taken pre-emptive action ahead […]
Tag: driving
How to deal with bad drivers (by W.C. Fields)
W.C. Fields developed a method to deal with bad drivers. He filmed this dramatization of it (presented here in two parts): UPDATE: Those videos have been removed from YouTube. We do not know why. Here’s a description of what you would have seen. This is from an essay by Roger Fristoe, on the Turner Classic […]
The Moth to Flame Effect – is it real or not real?
‘The Moth to a Flame Effect’ (a.k.a ‘Perceptual Tropism’), was first formally described in 1953 by Clark, Nicholson and Graybiel in their paper ‘Fascination: a cause of pilot error‘ (for Journal of Aviation Medicine, 24(5):429-40.) Unfortunately, the paper doesn’t appear to be available online, but it describes how aircraft pilots sometimes fail to take evasive […]
PR Headline ‘o the Week: Singing & Simulate Driving
This week’s Press Release Headline of the Week appears in a press release from the publisher of a journal. The headline is: “A simulator study of the effects of singing on driving experience“. The study to which it refers is: “A Simulator Study of the Effects of Singing on Driving Performance,” Genevieve M. Hughes, Christina […]
Interview with Distracted-Driving Pioneer Senders
John Senders, whose daringly careful experiments during the 1960s earned him an Ig Nobel Prize in safety engineering, in 2011, has had lots of time to think about is work and its implications. Carolyn Johnson interviews him in today’s Boston Globe ideas section. Here’s part of that: Distracted driving, 1962 edition Long before cell phones, […]
Driving while blinding self with helmet
This video shows a man driving an automobile down a major highway while a helmet repeatedly flaps shut, blinding him. It documents the experiment described in “The attentional demand of automobile driving” [Senders, J. W., Kristofferson, A. B., Levison, W. H., Dietrich, C. W., & Ward, J. L., Highway Research Record, vol. 195, 1967, pp. […]
“Safety concerns aside”: phones/cars
A Science News article suggests a new twist on the notion of reverse engineering: Driving Distracts Cellphone Users … “Safety concerns aside, if the quality of a conversation matters to your business, then it is best to reserve your conversation for times when you are not operating a motor vehicle,” remarks psychologist David Strayer of […]