Can you multi-process (or multi-thread)?

[MarshalStealth]

The following link is to a game that illustrates the potential consequences of distractions like texting on your driving ability.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...ving-game.html

Courtesy of NYT

New studies show that drivers overestimate their ability to multitask behind the wheel. This game measures how your reaction time is affected by external distractions. Regardless of your results, experts say, you should not attempt to text when driving.

* Prefer the phrase "multi-processing" or "multi-threading" not multitasking.

[MarshalStealth]

More stuff
Distracted Drivers Video Library

U.S. Withheld Data on Risks of Distracted Driving

Drivers and Legislators Dismiss Cellphone Risks

[MarshalStealth]

Staying focused on one objective can be so difficult. ...
#
Taming Your Digital Distractions
By FARHAD MANJOO
Programs to improve productivity range from those that monitor your habits to those that block time-wasting sites.
#

[MarshalStealth]

Food for thought. ...

#
Attention loss feared as high-tech rewires brain
Benny Evangelista, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, November 15, 2009
In today's fast-paced, multitasking world, it's easy to get hooked on technology that's always online, delivering a steady stream of texts and tweets.

But some mental health experts fear that a growing technology addiction, perhaps accelerated by the popularity of smart phones and social networks, will lead to a breakdown of interpersonal relationships and an increase in attention deficit disorder.

"If our attention span constricts to the point where we can only take information in 140-character sentences, then that doesn't bode too well for our future," said Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, director of Stanford University's Impulse Control Disorders Clinic at Stanford University.

"The more we become used to just sound bites and tweets," Aboujaoude said, "the less patient we will be with more complex, more meaningful information. And I do think we might lose the ability to analyze things with any depth and nuance. Like any skill, if you don't use it, you lose it."

Dr. John Ratey, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, uses the term "acquired attention deficit disorder" to describe the way technology is rewiring the modern brain.

He noted that reliance on even the simplest programs - such as a spell-checker in a word-processing program or a contact list that memorizes all your phone numbers for you - are short-circuiting the brain's ability to process details.

"My favorite example is when I type the word 'tomorrow,' " Ratey said. "I know spell-check will get it right. It would take 30 milliseconds for me to make sure in my mind. But we depend on that (spell-check). Even when we take the time to write, we don't have the patience to give that a consideration."

To be sure, the digital revolution has increased productivity and opened vast new worlds of information and discourse. Some mental health experts say there's still not enough research to determine whether heavy use of computers, the Internet or video games is an unhealthy condition by itself or merely a symptom of recognized problems such as depression.




'This little appendage'

But experts such as Ratey and Aboujaoude say they are already seeing cases that go beyond addiction to the Internet, especially with the growing popularity of portable devices that make it harder to walk away from technology.

The signs are everywhere - college students texting as their professors lecture, pedestrians crossing the street with their heads down checking messages on a BlackBerry, and BART riders reaching furtively into their pockets thinking their iPhone has vibrated - even if it hasn't.

One of the firms generating the biggest buzz in technology, Twitter, caters to short attention spans with its text messages of 140 characters or less. Another new San Francisco company called Particle recently started Robo.to, which offers video updates no longer than four seconds. Pop star Justin Timberlake is the lead investor.

"We are definitely an addicted society," said Dr. Kimberly Young, the founder and director of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery of Bradford, Pa., and author of a series of books on Web addiction. "EBay goes down for a day, and everybody has a fit. It's like this little appendage that people have."

It even reaches into the bedroom. In a September survey, 36 percent of the people ages 35 and younger said they often used Facebook or Twitter after having sex. Men were twice as likely to tweet or post status updates after sex.

"It's the new cigarette," said Manish Rathi, co-founder of Retrevo.com, a Sunnyvale consumer electronics shopping site that commissioned the survey.

Separation anxiety

Software engineer Jeanine Swatton of Dublin said that when she goes to lunch or dinner with someone, she eats "fairly quickly" to get back to her computer and tends "to check my e-mail messages on my iPhone throughout the meal. Luckily, my friends understand."

Swatton, 37, believes her attention span has shortened.

"If I do not have access to a computer, I will check my iPhone or will have a glass of wine to reduce the anxiety of being away from a computer," she said.

Indeed, technology has elevated the ability to multitask to a higher level. But a study published in August by researchers at Stanford University's Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab found multitaskers were more distracted by irrelevant details and didn't do as well as people who completed one job at a time.

Harvard's Ratey, author of the new book "Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain," said he fears today's tech-savvy generation is evolving away from the "genetic roots" of humankind, which used to have time for deep contemplation about complex problems without "being bombarded from stimuli from the outside."

"It's a challenge for many kids just to sit silently for a few minutes without moving around, looking for some kind of stimulation," he said. "We need that ability to center ourselves."

"A bigger portion are not learning to be more resilient, and we're going to have a lot of kids who are just not used to the challenges of defeat," he said. "It's just part of society that we're multitasking all the time. We can't stop to think, and if we have to stop and consider something, we get frustrated."

Writing habits change

Aboujaoude, assistant director of the Stanford School of Medicine's Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Clinic, said a few studies indicate a link between excessive Internet use and attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder in children and some adults, which could impair academic performance and social development.

The Internet, though, is only part of "one big virtual addiction," he said.

"One reason that ADD is on the rise is that our attention span is similar to our attention span on Facebook," Aboujaoude said. "Look at language. People are writing the way that they text. Anything complex that takes several paragraphs to develop is information overload at this point.

"I think of it as regressive. I don't think of it as progressive. It's becoming so normalized in our culture, it becomes hard to catch while it's happening."

E-mail Benny Evangelista at bevangelista@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...BUNI1AB1G2.DTL

This article appeared on page D - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

[LaiSteve66]

I'm sorry but texting while driving is one on the dumbest things I've ever heard of.

[AliBabaIncorporated]

Originally Posted by LaiSteve66

I'm sorry but texting while driving is one on the dumbest things I've ever heard of.

Clearly you don't spend enough time watching stupid videos on the internets. Behold, man using his iphone to drive a car while standing on top of it:
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/200...ne_a_frea.html

[MarshalStealth]

When going through the Bay Area bridges, I have seen females doing their makeups or guys shaving and/or texting while driving.

[drydem]

Originally Posted by MarshalStealth

The following link is to a game that illustrates the potential consequences of distractions like texting on your driving ability.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...ving-game.html

Courtesy of NYT

New studies show that drivers overestimate their ability to multitask behind the wheel. This game measures how your reaction time is affected by external distractions. Regardless of your results, experts say, you should not attempt to text when driving.

* Prefer the phrase "multi-processing" or "multi-threading" not multitasking.

no

[MarshalStealth]

Originally Posted by drydem

no

It is all in the process. To "multi-process", one must be willing to spend some time planning and preparing. That is the challenge. ...

[drydem]

Originally Posted by MarshalStealth

It is all in the process. To "multi-process", one must be willing to spend some time planning and preparing. That is the challenge. ...

I may have several thing going on at once
but I can only focus on one task at a time -
somewhat like a monitor program running a
round-robin task scheduling routine. If there
is only a few simple task with unique
priority levels I could handle an interrupt
driven multi-tasking environment for a
short time. I must admit that I am just
a classic pentium in a Core i7 world.

[MarshalStealth]

When one is internally centered and relaxed, he/she can focus on anything.

[drydem]

Originally Posted by MarshalStealth

When one is internally centered and relaxed, he/she can focus on anything.

You sound like Buddha!

[MarshalStealth]

Originally Posted by drydem

You sound like Buddha!

I doubt it. My previous point was based on my experience.

[MarshalStealth]

"One sprays. One pays. ..."

January 17, 2010
Driven to Distraction
Forget Gum. Walking and Using Phone Is Risky.
By MATT RICHTEL

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.”

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/technology/17distracted.html

The comments are interesting. http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/technology/17distracted.html?sort=recommended

"Do one thing. Do it well."