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June 3, 2011

Strange But True!

Q. Who's in danger of running down an iPod pedestrian?

A. You are if you drive because “iPodestrians” are everywhere, oblivious to the dangers as they read and compose email, or text, or read Facebook and Twitter status updates, or scan RSS feeds, or “bliss out” on their favorite tunes, says Paul McFedries in IEEE Spectrum magazine. These iPod “zombies” join the world of iPhone zombies, BlackBerry zombies, cellphone zombies and more, including the iPod zombie joggers, dog walkers, rollerbladers, cyclists. Similarly, at your local Starbucks are the laptop zombies tuned out to everyone and everything else around them. Cognitive scientists call this “inattentional blindness,” or “the failure to detect the appearance of an unexpected, task-irrelevant object in the visual field.”


 
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