Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

The New York Times had a fantastic article today Drivers and Legislators Dismiss Cellphone Risks about the risks of driving while using a cellphone to make calls or send txt messages. Not to be under-emphasized is the incremental distraction risk other gadgets, such as GPS navigation, mp3 players, XM radio, and iPod docks, offer. Let’s take a brief look at some of the scientific research going into the problem:

The U.S. Department of Transportation, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a series of papers, one of which, Association Between Cellular-Telephone Calls and Motor Vehicle Collisions notes:

The risk of a collision when using a cellular telephone was four times higher than the risk when a cellular telephone was not being used. The relative risk was similar for drivers who differed in personal characteristics such as age and driving experience; calls close to the time of the collision were particularly hazardous; and units that allowed the hands to be free offered no safety advantage over hand-held units.

Another paper from the DoT, The Impact of Internal Distraction on Driver Visual Behavior highlights the hypothesis (yet to be tested in that forum) that increased complexity in processing non-visual stimuli leads to a direct reduction of visual processing ability:

It is known from past research (e.g., Miura, 1990) that patterns of visual search may be influenced by environmental complexity, such as that available in the road scene. There is also evidence that visual search behavior may be influenced, not only by the external environment, but also by factors internal to the person, such as the cognitive complexity of an ongoing task. Recently, Recarte & Nunes (2000) measured eye fixations while driving. They reported that drivers’ visual functional-field size was reduced (vertically and horizontally) when drivers performed a demanding cognitive task while driving.

According to the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, “the use of cell phones by drivers may result in approximately 2,600 deaths, 330,000 moderate to critical injuries, 240,000 minor injuries, and 1.5 million instances of property damage in America per year.” A particularly telling quote comes from University of Utah psychology professor David Strayer: “If you put a 20-year-old driver behind the wheel with a cell phone, their reaction times are the same as a 70-year-old driver who is not using a cell phone. It’s like instantly aging a large number of drivers.”

The problem seems to be quite simple: competing stimuluses rob our brains of the processing power to focus attention on driving, primarily a visual-motor task. The solution, I believe, comes from video games and the air force: HUD displays. If we can collapse all of the tasks we want to perform into a single visual field, motorists will be able to keep their focus on driving. There are lots of ways for technology to assist driving, if voice recognition can be used to direct navigation, with a display directly on the dash, if communications were built into the vehicle, and with additional range-sensing equipment to recognize and highlight obstacles and dangers.

BMW has already begun building heads-up-displays (HUD) into their cars:

Next-generation HUDs will wraparound the entire windshield and contain more, higher-density information. Cars should have the ability to highlight aspects of their surroundings and obstacles to the driver, or take corrective action in their own right. With a HUD to handle coherent output, and good voice-recognition to handle input, drivers will no longer be distracted by outside stimuluses when driving.

Sarah Palin, after winning John McCain’s VP nomination, has been in the news a lot these days. Photoshopped and real pictures showing her in her beauty pageant glory days have been flooding the web, while incriminating Youtube videos exploit her poor camera performance and public speaking ability. Everywhere I look, no one can take her as a serious contender for the Vice Presidency.

But that’s not why I think Sarah Palin sucks. I don’t care about her looks, her messy personal life, or her pregnant teenage daughter. I care about what she’s done, and what she’s willing to do, in office.

Sarah Palin: Eminent Domain

Sarah Palin, while mayor of Wasilla (1996-2002), decided to build a $15M multi-use sports facility as her legacy. However, when the city failed to close the $125k deal on the land where she wanted it built with the Alaska Nature Conservancy, they went ahead and began to build anyway. On someone else’s land. Sara Palin then invoked Eminent Domain law to sue the developer who held title to the land, Gary Lundgren, who eventually won the court case, and settled with the city to the tune of an additional $1.7M.

Sarah Palin sucks because she is willing to try to steal private property from its rightful owners for her own good.

Sarah Palin: Book Bans

According to Time, Sarah Palin, “asked the library how she could go about banning books” because some of her constituents believed they used “inappropriate” language. Sarah Palin also threatened to fire the librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, for not giving “full support” to the mayor.

Update: the following list of books Sarah Palin wanted banned, courtesy of Liveleak, looks similar to every other list I’ve seen of books the Christian right has wanted banned.

Update 2: The above list is a complete fabrication, a copy-paste job of an older list of books banned over time. Some fact checking shows that books late in the Harry Potter series are on the list, which came out after Sarah Palin’s inquiries into book-banning. The truth of the book-banning incident is apparently a rhetorical inquiry into how the librarians would react were she to issue the order… still scary…

Sarah Palin sucks because she is willing to censor anything that doesn’t fall into her narrow set of beliefs.

Sarah Palin: Creationist

According to The Lang Report, Sarah Palin in 2006 said in a gubernatorial debate, “Teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of education. Healthy debate is so important, and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both.” In spite of courts having (fortunately) ruled that teaching creationism is a violation of the separation of Church and State, electing someone with Sarah Palin’s beliefs will inevitable continue the Bush legacy of eroding America’s scientific prominence.

Note that the education arena is not the only area where Sarah Palin’s policy may have been shaped by her religious views. Her Pastor Kalnins believes in the “end times” or “last days,” and that Alaska may soon “be the refuge” for those fleeing the apocalypse of the world. These beliefs are absurd.

Sarah Palin sucks because she’s willing to compromise educational policy for her own personal religious beliefs.

Sarah Palin: Homophobe

I’ll submit the following quotation from The Bilerico Project, which lays out the facts fairly well:

Palin said she’s not out to judge anyone and has good friends who are gay, but that she supported the 1998 constitutional amendment. Elected officials can’t defy the court when it comes to how rights are applied, she said, but she would support a ballot question that would deny benefits to homosexual couples. “I believe that honoring the family structure is that important,” Palin said.

Sarah Palin sucks because she believes homosexual couples are inferior to heterosexual ones.

Sarah Palin: Racist

Sarah Palin’s attitude towards native populations living in Alaska, or black Barack Obama, indicates that skin color matters to her. The LA Progressive article Palin Is “Racist, Sexist, Vindictive, And Mean” sheds some light:

“Sambo beat the bitch” may be everyday language up in the bush. Whether it – and the outlook, politics and worldview Palin reflects when she says such things in public – should be part of a presidential campaign is another thing altogether. The comment says as much about McCain as it does about Palin, and it says a lot of things about Americans who overlook such statements (as well as her record) and vote anyway for McCain.

Sarah Palin sucks because she refuses to treat those she views as different as her equals in politics. America is a complex country, full of differing cultural groups and interest; only a president sensitive to the variety of man can successfully navigate the American melting pot.

Sarah Palin: Anti Sex Education

Sarah Palin oppose the “right to choose”, and advocates abstinence-only sex education. The Huffington Post quotes her saying, “The explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support.” This is a problem, because abstinence-only sex education is futile and ineffective, and has been thoroughly debunked. Reading statistics like “by age 18, about 71 percent of U.S. youth have had sexual intercourse” would lead one who cares about America’s youth to teach them safe-sex, not tell them a “no sex” message that will be ignored.

Update 3: For the other side of the story, you should read Newsweek’s great Sliming Palin: False Internet claims and rumors fly about McCain’s running mate story. Although I feel many of their anecdotes are just trying to muddy the waters, no issue in politics is black and white either, and this certainly deserves the “fair and balanced” treatment. Isn’t life just shades of gray?

Update 4: Check out what Matt Damon thinks of Sarah Palin:

If you haven’t had a chance to read Why Black Nerds are Unpopular by David Adewumi, you should run over there right now. It gives an interesting cultural explanation for why the author believes we don’t see many African Americans in IT / Computer Science. It’s the inspiration for this post, a sort of state of the world of black diversity in IT. In his article, David writes how few of his black friends are “nerds:”

I would say, as a young black male, there is a strong inverse correlation between being a nerd and black, and being popular. I’ve seen many black friends who are fairly intelligent that were mediocre students in high school, and either failed out or were equally mediocre at the University level. Why? Popularity is, as Paul mentions, often times a choice of priorities — some sacrifice intelligence for popularity — and for blacks, this probably happens for 9 out of every 10.

I would go so far as to say that the lack of black nerds is probably a cause for major concern, but within the scope of this writing, possibly too large a problem to properly address, although certainly an interesting one.

After some Googling, I was able to find data from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Science and Engineering Degrees, by Race/Ethnicity of Recipients: 1995-2004, with information about degree recipients partitioned by self-identified race:

In 2004, 5,934 black students out of 57,405 total (10.33%) received undergraduate degrees in computer science. Overall, among all degrees, 4.84% of black students chose a degree in Computer Science as opposed to just 3.15% of white students. I don’t have enough personal or intellectual background to discuss these figures, but to my uninformed eye, they look quite promising. More blacks (by percentage) are choosing to study Computer Science than whites (our baseline majority in the US). And, while at 8.4% black undergraduate students feel underrepresented, the news indicates graduation rates are improving.

America needs to moving forward on providing excellent education to all Americans, not just the privileged majority. Perhaps our next President–who looks to be Barack Obama–will be tougher on education than his “no child left behind” predecessor and we’ll see these numbers get even better.