Page 7 - January_Newsletter_2017

This rather distracted behaviour has led to a an increase in accidents – in
fact in some ways it’s a little like Moores Law – you know the one that
states that power doubles every 18 months and costs halve.
Well these phone related accidents doubled each year in the US between
2005 and 2008, and I’m guessing that the common sense of the phone
users halved.
This problem is generally known as inattention blindness and is seen in
other areas, not just phone users. Anyone who is involved in an accident
or incident can often remember events rather differently to what actually
happened.
Researchers at a US university got a clown to ride a unicycle through part
of the campus – he was only noticed by about a quarter of the mobile
phone users. The others were obviously deep in thought about their re-
spective courses, or ordering a take-away for later!
I would recommend searching for texting while walking accidents and
watching some of the You Tube videos (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=wl0JojWH1rQ ) which shows how some people really cannot
spare any mental capacity to look after themselves while using their
phones.
It seems incredible that one woman simply walked off a pier into Lake
Michigan.

This problem is not likely to improve in 2016.
Pretty soon, Virtual Reality headsets will be able to immerse us into a
fictional world and I guess some people will have difficulty distinguish-
ing the real one from the fictional one.
Over the past decades there have been people who think that TV soaps
like Corrie are real – so what chance do they have when presented with
two versions of ‘reality’.
I think they’ll choose the one they like best.

Sci-Fi programs like the TV series Red Dwarf have featured Virtual Real-
ity technology. In one episode they lost four years of their real lives while