Rudeness is in the eye of the listener

Interesting morning at the fitness palace today. Someone described his very large dog--about 200 lbs--who ate four pounds, yes pounds, not sticks, of butter that had been put out for Christmas baking. So far, only one really bad mess (I think there will be more).

Then my friend, Joanne, and I were catching up on the treadmill after she'd been gone a few weeks. The guy on the treadmill next to her said very loudly into his phone that he couldn't hear the person he was talking to (loudly) because the people next to him were talking! Since I was saying something extremely important to my friend, I just leaned over and said to him. "And you think you're not talking too loud?"

It's not unusual to hear people on cell phones complaining about other people talking (not on their phones) talking too loud.

Phone etiquette

Hillary on the phone scandal

How cell phones have changed surveys

“Historically, phone-based surveys dominated as the method of choice among those looking for a representative sample of U.S. residents. However, the prevalence of cell-only households has changed that approach dramatically. In 2013, the CDC estimated that 39.4% of American households were cell only, a lifestyle particularly prevalent among the young and those in lower socioeconomic status groups.

Given the prevalence of cell-only homes, online panels specifically built to represent the U.S. population are now the standard approach. The Pew Research Center estimated that 86% of adults used in the Internet in 2013. Online panels do have biases, but these can be mitigated with an appropriate sampling and weighting strategy.” FAQ People for bikes survey

“Because of these limitations [bias, lack of access and no standard list], researchers use two main strategies for surveying the general population using the internet. One strategy is to randomly sample and contact people using another mode (mail, telephone or face-to-face) and ask them to complete a survey on the web. Some of the surveys may allow respondents to complete the survey by a variety of modes and therefore potentially avoid the undercoverage problem created by the fact that not everyone has access to the web. This method is used for one-time surveys and for creating survey panels where all or a portion of the panelists take surveys via the web (such as the GfK KnowledgePanel and more recently the Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel). Contacting respondents using probability-based sampling via another mode allows surveyors to estimate a margin of error for the survey (see Why probability sampling for more information).” Internet surveys, Pew Research

Distracted driving, teens and cell phones

A well known TV personality in Columbus is promoting awareness about distracted driving. His beautiful teen daughter was killed last year. Statistics are already grim for teens and driving, but add in a smart phone and we're all at risk if we're sharing the road with them (as I was yesterday). "Currently, 77% of drivers talk on their phones while driving, 81% of young adults write text messages while driving, and 92% of young adults read text messages while driving. Drivers are 23-fold more likely to crash if texting while driving." But it's not just teens. I see a lot of moms chatting on the phone with kids in the car, watching her behavior. http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1745570#WhatParentsCanDo

Other distractions about which older people need to be reminded: eating and drinking, changing channels on the radio or disc player, hands free phones, passengers in the car talking, checking the GPS, adjusting seats, taking off jacket or other clothing, looking for sun glasses, adjusting the visor to keep out glare, finding a tissue . . . keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road and the other drivers.

Distracted kids grow up to be distracted parents

"On October 1 (1990) the Wall Street Journal reported on the drop in literacy among school age children (Distractions of modern life)--even those whose mothers had spent hours reading to them as pre-schoolers. Children are too busy to read because of all their outside activities, no one converses with them, and they have developed two minute attention spans through TV and videos, concluded the article.

So that was 23 years ago, and those mothers who were too busy to read as children, now have smart phones, i-pods, i-tablets, e-books and they are posting on Face Book and Twitter and blogging, or tacking digital thingies on their Etsy page or Pinterest. They have children that hang out in groups with each child talking on the phone, but not to each other.

This doesn’t seem to be getting better.

NSA and Obama

http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/national/how-the-nsa-is-tracking-people-right-now/634/

“. . . the National Security Agency is collecting billions of records a day to track the location of mobile phone users around the world. This bulk collection, performed under the NSA’s international surveillance authority, taps into the telephony links of major telecommunications providers including some here in the United States.”

A real boondoggle for the phone companies.

This probably called a fee, not a tax, but it is, and it is soaring.

"The U.S. government spent about $2.2 billion last year to provide phones to low-income Americans, but a Wall Street Journal review of the program shows that a large number of those who received the phones haven’t proved they are eligible to receive them.

The Lifeline program—begun in 1984 [under Reagan] to ensure that poor people aren’t cut off from jobs, families and emergency services—is funded by charges that appear on the monthly bills of every landline and wireless-phone customer. Payouts under the program have shot up from $819 million in 2008, as more wireless carriers have persuaded regulators to let them offer the service."

http://www.bizpacreview.com/2013/02/12/obama-phone-scam-cost-taxpayers-big-bucks-last-year-19952

Our generation, not so much . . .

This is never a problem for us because of the age of most of the people with whom we socialize, but I sure wish the people at the next table would try it!

The illusion of safety

While I was in the car today I was listening to a talk show where the host and listener/caller were discussing texting while driving. The caller was a truck driver and he said it was a federal crime with a $2700 fine and points on your license to text and drive for truck drivers. But he was talking on a hands free phone--assuming that was safe! It's not the hands, it's the brain. It's the equivalent of driving while drunk.

The Illusion of Safety « All 2010 News « News « College of Liberal Arts & Sciences « University of Illinois

Teaching pre-schoolers to use the phone

I've been updating the family address and phone list. Everyone seems to have 2 phone numbers and work numbers, and e-mail, and they keep moving! It's getting a bit long now that more of my nieces and nephews' children are college age and they too have cell phones. My niece told me a funny story about her youngest, a very lively and challenging little boy.

"When he was three, we let him have an old cell phone to play with. I was having an especially crazy morning (oversleeping, running late, getting Wy ready for school, the dog had terrible "stomach" problems all over the carpet, etc. etc.) Wy was having a very long "conversation" with his sister on his cell phone. I was impressed at how long the conversation was and actually was thankful. . . it gave me a chance to clean up the carpet mess. I finally told him he had to tell her goodbye so that we could leave for pre-school, to which he said goodbye and then told me that she wanted to talk to me. I took the phone and quickly said goodbye. . . only to hear someone say, "Hello... Hello..." I was dumbstruck and asked who it was. She replied that she was the 911 operator. I was mortified. I had no idea that old cell phones, even when they didn't have service, could still dial 911. The pre-school had been teaching the little ones what to do in an emergency. . . dial 911. Upon further investigation, it seemed that this was the 3rd call that he had made that morning. He told her ALL about my bad morning, including all the gory details about the dog's mishap. I told her how sorry I was and she just laughed and said it was the best call she had ever gotten. Shortly after that is when I started noticing numerous white hairs. Wy definitely keeps us all on our toes and laughing pretty much on a daily basis.

Use a land line for important presidential-type talk

"President-elect Barack Obama may not find it that hard to give up his BlackBerry after all. Verizon Wireless has announced that some of its employees accessed his personal cell phone account records. The wireless provider apologized to the president-elect and said it would discipline the employees involved." Story here. Read the DNS story in the December Wired, and you may switch to land line anyway. Maybe the Verizon employees will just get a wrist slap like Gov. Strickland's
pro-Obama employee who plumbed the depths of Joe the Plumber's records in our state data bases. Routine, she says, for people in the news!

If only this could happen in restaurants

Cell phone karma



HT Bob C.

This research hit a nerve

I read about the cell phone drivers slowing everyone down during commutes last week in the WSJ, but when I googled the story today, that story seemed to be in every paper. It's the kind of thing everyone suspects is true, and then when someone really does the research, it's an Ah-ha moment. Here's the abstract from the research paper done at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Department of Psychology at the University of Utah and prepared for the Transportation Research Board:

ABSTRACT
This research examined the effect of naturalistic, hands-free, cell phone conversation on driver’s lane-changing behavior. Thirty-six undergraduate psychology students drove six 9.2-mile scenarios, in a simulated highway environment, with three levels of traffic density. Participants were instructed only to obey the speed limit and to signal when making a lane change. These simple driving instructions allowed participants to freely vary driving behaviors such as following distance, speed, and lane-changing maneuvers. Results indicated that, when drivers conversed on the cell phone, they made fewer lane changes, had a lower overall mean speed, and a significant increase in travel time in the medium and high density driving conditions. Drivers on the cell phone were also much more likely to remain behind a slower moving lead vehicle than drivers in single-task condition. No effect of cell phone conversation on following distance was observed. Possible implications on traffic flow characteristics are discussed. "Drivers’ Lane Changing Behavior While Conversing On a Cell Phone in a Variable Density Simulated Highway Environment" pdf here

Maybe slowing people down isn't all that bad and will reduce problems later. However, I know that accidents are caused by people distracted by their phones, although conversation with passengers doesn't seem to have the same affect. What bothers me is when I see the little faces of the children and babies, strapped in and bored, with mommy chatting away ignoring the opportunity to interact with them. Dumped even before the day-care door.