Eideard

The National Transportation Safety Board’s big, bold stroke encouraging all states to prohibit drivers from using cell phones faces a long, tortuous process in the nation’s statehouses…

This political reality stands out: Since states began legislating distracted driving or cell phone use in 2000, none has gone so far as to impose a complete ban on mobile devices behind the wheel, and only one state — Alaska — has considered such a blanket prohibition, just this year…

Barbara Harsha, executive director of the Governors Highway Safety Association, said opponents don’t like big government intrusions and savor their personal freedoms. “This is a controversial issue so you can assume it’s not going to pass right away,” Harsha said. “It’s going to take a long time for legislatures to pass laws, and a long time for states to begin to enforce the laws, and then a long time for behavior to start to change.

“The first seat-belt law was passed in the mid-’80s, and we’re now at 84 percent of drivers who are buckled up nationwide,” even though all states now have laws requiring drivers and passengers to wear seat belts, Harsha said…

In the past 10 years the NTSB has increasingly sought to limit the use of portable electronic devices — recommending bans for novice drivers, school bus drivers and commercial truckers. Tuesday’s recommendation, if adopted by states, would outlaw nonemergency phone calls and texting by operators of every vehicle on the road…

The initiative would apply to hands-free as well as hand-held devices, but devices installed in the vehicle by the manufacturer would be allowed, the NTSB said…

“There’s conflicting evidence” on whether hands-free cell phone conversations would be as unsafe as those by hand-helds, Harsha said, adding that more “definitive research” is needed. “If it shows both are unsafe, then a total ban may make the most sense,” she said.

There already are beaucoup studies proving that distractions are the cause – not the effect. The source of distraction affecting the human brain ranges from your passenger [if you have one] shouting “look at that!” – to noticing a particularly attractive member of the opposite sex in another car [depending on your gender identification I guess] – to a particularly uncomfortable gas pain.

Give mental pause whilst driving today – and reflect upon the artificial need for politicians to pass regulations to impress upon their peers and constituents alike that they’re earning their keep.

Consumers will not need any form of wallet to go shopping by 2016, the online payment firm Paypal says. But it is not the UK or the US that is leading the march to empty their pockets, it is Turkey, not known for its early adoption of new technology.

The death of cash has been talked about for a while. Claims were made by Visa a few years ago that the date would be 2012, which now seems unlikely. Now analyst firm Forrester, in a report paid for by Paypal, is the one wading in on the debate saying the tipping point is just five years away.

Near-field communication (NFC) on both mobile phones and in cards allows quick payments for smaller purchases by using a radio signal that activates when the chip is placed near a reader.

Market research company Allied Business Intelligence thinks that the watershed – or wallet-shed – moment will be even earlier, in 2014…

The countries which most prominently use credit cards – the US, the UK and Canada – have been relatively slow to change their ways. But one surprising country is amongst the leader in trialling the way forward for mobile payments – Turkey…

There are not that many branches of banks outside Istanbul so, until very recently it has been a cash-based society. ATMs are a fairly new concept. Not all cards work in all machines and the banking industry has been very fragmented.

In a country which is still classed as a “developing nation”, no one system of electronic transfer has yet become established so new ideas have less of a problem getting accepted. Another advantage it has is that the country has a relatively young population, willing to try new things who have not developed long-term habits which are notoriously difficult to change.

Mobile phone operator Turkcell is responsible for one of the success stories. Within four months of launching, 100,000 pre-paid cards registered on mobile phones were sold. They are used to buy goods from shops or for sending money and can be used without a bank account. Money can even be taken from ATMs.

Ironically, there is no money to made from cash transactions so making it as easy as possible to spend digital money is in a company’s interest, taking small percentages of the cost of payment as a transaction fee and lowering the cost of processing physical money.

It is those smaller transactions, still predominantly in cash, that could be the biggest change…

It’s all OK with me. As long as I am assured by my bank these transactions are secure – and insured by the bank – I only foresee one problem. As much of a geek as I am, since I’ve retired I have no need for a smartphone. So, my cell phone is capable of nothing more than voice calls.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Four people were pulled out alive Monday from the rubble of the Turkey earthquake after one managed to call for help with his mobile phone…

Dozens of people were trapped in mounds of concrete, twisted steel and construction debris after hundreds of buildings in two cities and mud-brick homes in nearby villages pancaked or partially collapsed in Sunday’s earthquake.

Worst-hit was Ercis – an eastern city of 75,000 close to the Iranian border that lies in one of Turkey’s most earthquake-prone zones – where about 80 multistory buildings collapsed.

Yalcin Akay was dug out from a collapsed six-story building with a leg injury after he called a police emergency line on his phone and described his location, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported. Three others, including two children, were also rescued from the same building in Ercis 20 hours after the quake struck, officials said…

As over 200 aftershocks rocked the area, rescuers searched mounds of debris for the missing and tearful families members waited anxiously nearby. Cranes and other heavy equipment lifted slabs of concrete, allowing residents to dig for the missing with shovels. Generator-powered floodlights ran all night so the rescues could continue.

Aid groups scrambled to set up tents, field hospitals and kitchens to help the thousands left homeless or too afraid to re-enter their homes. Many exhausted residents spent the night outside, lighting fires to keep warm…

The bustling, larger city of Van, about 55 miles (90 kilometres) south of Ercis, also sustained substantial damage, but Interior Minister Idris Naim Sahin said search efforts there were winding down. Mr Sahin expected the death toll in Ercis to rise, but not as much as initially feared. He told reporters rescue teams were searching for survivors in the ruins of 47 buildings where dozens could be trapped, including a cafe…

More than 2,000 teams with a dozen sniffer dogs were involved in search-and-rescue and aid efforts.

Several countries offered assistance but Mr Erdogan said Turkey was able to cope for the time being. Azerbaijan, Iran and Bulgaria still sent aid, he said.

I decided a long time ago that life was tough enough without adding earthquakes to the potential of forces completely out of your control that could affect your life.

A bus driver in Rome who was caught using two cellphones and steering with his elbows while driving has been suspended, according to a local official.

Video of the driver talking on one phone and trying to configure his e-mail on another while taking passengers to Rome’s Ciampino Airport was posted online by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica on Wednesday.

Using even one cellphone while driving is against the law in Italy…

On Thursday, La Repubblica reported that a regional transport commissioner, Francesco Lollobrigida, said that the driver had been “suspended pending disciplinary proceedings.” Mr. Lollobrigida added that the action was “necessary to protect passengers and also the image of the many public transport workers who have impeccable behavior and who are the majority in this region…”

If the driver does lose his job, he might consider a move to Nevada in the near future. As my colleague John Markoff reported this week, Google, a pioneer of self-driving cars, “is quietly lobbying for legislation that would make Nevada the first state where they could be legally operated on public roads. And yes, the proposed legislation would include an exemption from the ban on distracted driving to allow occupants to send text messages while sitting behind the wheel.”

Har!

Sunday is the anniversary of something that undoubtedly has changed your life.

Whether for good or for bad is a question only you can answer.

On this day in 1973 — on April 3 of that year — a man did something no one had ever done before…The man’s name was Martin Cooper. He was 44 at the time. He made a cell phone call.

The world’s first. At least the first public one; the cell phone had been tested in the lab, but never tried in the real world.

“As I walked down the street while talking on the phone,” Cooper once told an interviewer, “sophisticated New Yorkers gaped at the sight of someone actually moving around while making a phone call…”

Cooper, who was the general manager of Motorola’s communications systems division, had the idea that people didn’t want to be tethered to a stationary telephone, even if the phone could ride along with them in their car. He thought that the phone should be so portable that it could go anywhere they went.

As he explained it in a later interview: “People want to talk to other people — not a house, or an office, or a car. Given a choice, people will demand the freedom to communicate wherever they are, unfettered by the infamous copper wire…”

When Martin Cooper made that first cell phone call, he did not make it to another cell phone. People didn’t have them yet — who could he call?

No, he made the cell phone call to a land line — specifically, to the land line of his chief competitor at Bell Labs.

Motorola had beaten Bell to become the first company to make personal cell phones work. Cooper, you might say, rubbed it in. Think how the Bell Labs research engineer must have felt when he heard Cooper calling him from the noisy streets of Manhattan.

He’s still alive, by the way. He’s 82. He still works in the technology field.

Bravo! Some of my peers hope he doesn’t think of any else as disruptive.

Poisonally, I welcome change as critical as the communications revolution he kicked off. If your head is screwed on tight enough – you not only can deal with qualitative change, you should be able to turn it to your own advantage. If you wish to.

Is a woman in a 1928 film who appears to have a cell phone glued to her ear in fact a time traveler? That’s what some conspiracy theorists think this eerie scene (video below) from Charlie Chaplin’s 1928 film, “The Circus” is telegraphing, or rather phoning, and that the woman — who looks about as time-traveler-ish as Martha Stewart, is indeed a voyager from the vortex of time and space.

Belfast filmmaker George Clarke, a Chaplin fan, says he was watching the “behind the scenes of ‘The Circus’ ” and was “stumped” at what he saw.

“I kept winding it back, playing it; winding it back, playing it back, and I couldn’t explain this,” he says.

Watch the video. I clearly see her (?) holding something with the letters “K-y-o-c-e-r-a” on it. What else could it be?

A teenage girl who appeared topless in a “sexting” cell phone picture that was distributed among her middle-school classmates should face child-pornography charges so argues a Pennsylvania prosecutor before a U.S. appellate court.

In the first U.S. case to test the constitutional status of “sexting,” the American Civil Liberties Union countered that the incident does not come close to meeting the definition of child pornography which typically depicts graphic sexual acts with minors and is done for commercial gain.

The ACLU also said the Wyoming County prosecutor erred when he threatened 16 teenagers with the felony charges unless they agreed to a participate in a “re-education” course on why sexting was wrong…

Pictures showed two of the girls wearing white bras and another standing topless outside a shower with a towel wrapped around her waist, the ACLU said. The pictures did not show any sexual activity…

But the county argued that the pictures were pornographic because they were disseminated for the purposes of sexual stimulation and so would be of great interest to child molesters.

Appellate Judge Thomas Ambro said prosecutors are not entitled to try to “re-educate” minors. “I don’t know of anything that allows the district attorney’s office to play the role of teacher,” he said.

Courts and politicians that concern themselves with morality should wend their way into non-existence. Such courts have no place in a modern, educated nation.

Adjudicating harm and damages, crimes and misdemeanors, is tough enough. Presuming religious sway over behavior is a couple centuries out of place.

Cell phone exposure may be helpful in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease, a new study shows.

The study, involving mice, provides evidence that long-term exposure to electromagnetic waves associated with cell phone use may protect against, and even reverse, Alzheimer’s disease.

The study is published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.

“It surprised us to find that cell phone exposure, begun in early adulthood, protects the memory of mice otherwise destined to develop Alzheimer’s symptoms,” study researcher Gary Arendash, PhD, of the University of South Florida, says in a news release. “It was even more astonishing that the electromagnetic waves generated by cell phones actually reversed memory impairment in old Alzheimer’s mice.”

The researchers say they found that exposing old mice with Alzheimer’s disease to electromagnetic waves generated by cell phones reduced brain deposits of beta-amyloid. Brain plaques formed by the abnormal accumulation of beta-amyloid are hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease, which is why most treatments try to target the protein….

The study involved 96 mice, including mice genetically engineered to develop Alzheimer’s disease and normal mice. Both the Alzheimer’s mice and the normal rodents were exposed to the electromagnetic field generated by standard cell use for two one-hour periods daily for seven to nine months….

The researchers conclude that the findings could mean electromagnetic field exposure might be an effective, noninvasive, and drug-free way to prevent and treat Alzheimer’s disease in humans.

So, if it turns out that you get a brain tumor, at least maybe you’ll realize what is happening to you.

On Wednesday, a man drove a Bugatti Veyron into a lagoon in Texas after avoiding a low-flying pelican.

According to The Galveston County Daily News, the driver was checking out real estate in La Marque, Tex., when the pelican swooped into view:

The man jerked the wheel, dropped his cellphone and the car’s front tire left the frontage road and entered a muddy patch, which foiled his attempt to maneuver away from the lagoon…

The man was uninjured, physically, though after drowning the Veyron, which is priced at around $2 million, his ego might be a little damaged.

I’d be hard-pressed to feel sorry for someone dunking his $2million car in a salt-water lagoon. Distracted by a fracking pelican. And trying to pick up his cell phone.

A mobile phone lost at sea for four days washed up in perfect condition in Taiwan after drifting 37 km and was discovered by a park lifeguard who tracked down the shocked owner to return it, the finder said on Friday.

Yu Hsin-leh of Taipei lost the phone on July 24 while snorkeling near the Taiwan port city of Keelung, Taiwan’s United Daily News reported.

On Monday, it turned up in Longdong Bay Park on the island’s northeasternmost cape after floating past numerous towns and rocky outcroppings.

A small water-resistant case had protected the phone at sea, said park lifeguard Lin Huan-chuan, who found it.

Lin said he recharged the battery and called Yu’s wife by finding her in the phone’s list of saved numbers.

I don’t care what brand the phone was; but, I surely would love to know who made the waterproof case?