2009年8月27日 星期四

State Separates Mother and Child Over Language

custody Mexico USA baby mother immigration rights
Tay Rees / Getty

Can the U.S. government take a woman's baby from her because she doesn't speak English? That's the latest question to arise in the hothouse debate over illegal immigration, as an undocumented woman from impoverished rural Mexico — who speaks only an obscure indigenous language — fights in a Mississippi court to regain custody of her infant daughter.

Cirila Baltazar Cruz comes from the mountainous southern state of Oaxaca, a region of Mexico that makes Appalachia look affluent. To escape the destitution in her village of 1,500 mostly Chatino Indians, Baltazar Cruz, 34, migrated earlier this decade to the U.S., hoping to send money back to two children she'd left in her mother's care. She found work at a Chinese restaurant on Mississippi's Gulf Coast.

But Baltazar Cruz speaks only Chatino, barely any Spanish and no English. Last November she went to Singing River Hospital in Pascagoula, Miss., where she lives, to give birth to a baby girl, Rubí. According to documents obtained by the Mississippi Clarion-Ledger, the hospital called the state Department of Human Services, which ruled Baltazar Cruz an unfit mother in part because her lack of English "placed her unborn child in danger and will place the baby in danger in the future." (Read "Should a Muslim mother be caned for having a beer?")

Rubí was taken from Baltazar Cruz, who now faces deportation. In May, a Jackson County, Miss., judge gave the infant to a couple (it is yet unclear if for foster care or adoptive purposes) who reportedly live in Ocean Springs. Cruz is challenging the ruling in Jackson County Youth Court and hopes that if she is deported she can at least take Rubi back to Mexico with her. (She has not disclosed the father's identity.) (See the best and worst moms ever.)

Baltazar Cruz's case has been taken up by the Mississippi Immigrants' Rights Alliance (MIRA) and the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, whose lawyers say they can't comment on its specifics because of a judge's gag order. But Mary Bauer, the SPLC's legal director, says that on a general level, any notion that a mother can lose custody of a child because she doesn't speak a particular language "is a fundamentally outrageous violation of human rights." (Read "When Motherhood Gets You Jail Time.")

Before the gag order, advocates for Baltazar Cruz had charged that the problems sprang from faulty translation at Singing River. Baltazar Cruz arrived at the hospital after she flagged down a Pascagoula police officer on a city street. She was later joined there by a Chatino-speaking relative, according to MIRA; but the hospital declined his services and instead used a translator from state social services, a Puerto Rican-American who spoke no Chatino and whose Spanish was significantly different from that spoken in Mexico.

According to the Clarion-Ledger, the state report portrayed Baltazar Cruz as virtually a prostitute, claiming she was "exchanging living arrangements for sex" in Pascagoula and planned to put the child up for adoption. Through her advocates (before the gag order), Baltazar Cruz adamantly denied those claims. Since "she has failed to learn the English language," the newspaper quotes the documents as saying, she was "unable to call for assistance for transportation to the hospital" to give birth. The social services translator also reported that Baltazar Cruz had put Rubí in danger because she "had not brought a cradle, clothes or baby formula." But indigenous Oaxacan mothers traditionally breast feed their babies for a year and rarely use bassinets, carrying their infants instead in rebozos, a type of sling.

MIRA has accused Singing River and Mississippi DHS of essentially "stealing" Rubi. Citing the gag order, DHS will not comment on Baltazar Cruz's case; but before the order, one official insisted to the Clarion-Ledger that "the language a person speaks has nothing to do with the outcome of the investigation." Singing River spokesman Richard Lucas calls the MIRA charge "preposterous" and, while noting that the non-profit hospital delivered Baltazar Cruz's baby free of charge, he insists it "did what any good hospital would have done given her unusual circumstances" by alerting DHS.

Still, despite DHS statements to the contrary, language seems a central issue in the state's case against Cruz. It wouldn't be the first time in the U.S. In 2004, a Tennessee judge ordered the child of a Mexican migrant mother who spoke only an indigenous tongue into foster care. (Another judge later returned the child to her family.) Last year, a California court took custody of the U.S.-born twin babies of another indigenous, undocumented migrant from Oaxaca. After she was deported, the Oaxaca state government's Institute for Attention to Migrants fought successfully to have the twins repatriated to her in Mexico this summer. In such cases, says the SPLC's Bauer, a lack of interpreters is a key factor. When a mother can't follow the proceedings, "she looks unresponsive, and that conveys to a judge a lack of interest in the child, which is clearly not the case," she says. She also argues it's hard enough for any adult to learn a new language, "let alone when you're a migrant working long hours for low pay."

One of DHS's apparent fears is that an infant isn't safe in a home where the mother can only articulate a 911 call in a language spoken by some 50,000 Oaxacan Indians. Bauer points out that children have been raised safely in the U.S. by non-English-speaking parents for well over a century. If not, thousands of Italians and Russians would have had to leave their kids with foster care on Ellis Island. "Raising your child is one of the most fundamental liberties, and it can only be taken from you for the most serious concerns of endangerment," says Bauer. "Not speaking English hardly meets that standard."

Rosalba Piña, a Chicago attorney who co-hosts a local radio program on immigration law, agrees. She likens Mississippi officials to those who fought to keep six-year-old Elián Gonzalez in the U.S. nine years ago because they argued his life would be better here than in impoverished Cuba with his father. "They're ignoring basic U.S. and international law," says Piña. "Unless there's some real threat to the child's life back in the home country, most judges know it's in the child's best interest to be with his parents." In the end, she notes, Rubí is a U.S. citizen who could return to this country at any time as an adult.

The next court hearing in Baltazar Cruz's case is slated for November. In the meantime, Mexican consular officials in the U.S. struck an agreement with Mississippi authorities this month to ensure that Mexico will be informed when nationals like Baltazar Cruz become embroiled in cases like this. Says Daniel Hernandez Joseph, director of Mexico's program for protection of citizens abroad, "The main concern of the Mexican government is not to separate immigrant families." Baltazar Cruz now has to convince Mississippi judges that it should be their concern, too.

2009年8月18日 星期二

CW
ArticleImage
Twitter is now thought to have around 23m users.
Tweeting all the way to the bank

WHENEVER the founders of Twitter, a social-networking service, have been asked about how much revenue they expect to generate from their creation, they have politely deflected the question. So when a hacker recently leaked documents after gaining access to the private e-mail accounts of a Twitter employee and the wife of one of its founders, the blogosphere was abuzz. The haul included a spreadsheet showing revenues reaching $140m by the end of 2010, up from $4.4m this year. Twitter dismissed the document as out of date, but it showed the firm's owners believe it has the potential to mint serious money.

Photos: :cw

Their confidence is not surprising: Twitter is now thought to have around 23m users. Other social networks have also been piling on members. Facebook, one of the biggest networks along with News Corporation's MySpace, has seen membership leap from 100m in August 2008 to some 250m today. With the number of people online worldwide expected to go from 1.5 billion today to 2.2 billion by 2013, according to Forrester Research, many of these networks will grow like Topsy.

They will also have a profound influence on consumer behaviour, prompting firms to shift a hefty chunk of their marketing budgets in their direction. That prospect has investors salivating. Marc Andreessen, a well-known Silicon Valley figure with stakes in both Twitter and Facebook, believes Facebook's revenues will amount to billions of dollars in five years' time, up from about $500m this year. A recent investment in Facebook by a Russian firm valued it at $6.5 billion. Other venture capitalists have been ladling cash into start-ups developing software applications for these online communities.

Yet some experts point out that although social networks have captured the popular imagination, the managers running them face a delicate balancing act. They need to reconcile a desire to drive up membership as fast as possible—which increases the value of a network to both existing and potential members—with the need to experiment with ways of raising money to fund long-term growth. If they push too hard for revenue in the short term, they might drive away users, undermining a network. Leave it too late to monetise and the business could collapse.

MySpace, which was bought by News Corp in 2005, offers a cautionary tale. It grew rapidly from its origins as a site focused on members' musical interests into a more eclectic network. But as it expanded, it spent too much time chasing revenue and too little improving its online offerings. Now it is bleeding users and advertising: eMarketer, a research firm, estimates that MySpace will bring in $495m of ad revenue from America this year, 15% less than in 2008. In June Owen Van Natta, the site's new boss, announced plans to cut hundreds of jobs at the bloated operation. He is widely expected to return MySpace to its roots in entertainment.

Executives at other networks stress that their priority is keeping users happy. But they acknowledge that the recession has sharpened interest in generating revenue. Some sites, such as LinkedIn, a professional network that helps its members further their careers, already boast healthy revenue streams. As well as selling job advertising, the site charges users a premium for some career-related services and firms for the use of proprietary software that helps them identify promising candidates. To LinkedIn the downturn is an opportunity to pinch business from weaker rivals, explains Steve Sordello, the chief financial officer of the company, which has been profitable since 2007.

Broader-based social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are reluctant to charge users fees. Instead Facebook is focusing its attention on driving many more marketing dollars to its site. There is a big opportunity here. After all, only a small fraction of marketing budgets are dedicated to social networks today. The networks also have plenty of useful data about their users' likes and dislikes.

But they have one big drawback. Users typically want to hang out with their pals when they are online and so tend to ignore advertisements pushed at them while they are gossiping. The social networks are therefore considered less effective marketing vehicles than search engines such as Google, whose users are seeking information on specific subjects and are more likely to click on ads relevant to their interests. This helps to explain why advertisers will only pay a pittance for page views on many social networks.

To address this issue, Facebook is experimenting with a host of ad formats that enable firms to strike up online conversations within social networks—without tarnishing users' experience, it hopes. Facebook is also targeting e-commerce revenues. These are already a big source of income for some Asian social networks, which take a cut on deals for everything from electronic greeting cards to digital games. In June Facebook launched a stored-credit system that allows users to pay easily for digital goods and services on the site, which pockets a small commission on each transaction. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, says that thanks to its advertising and e-commerce initiatives the social network is on track to increase revenue by 70% this year.

What about Twitter? Embedding advertisements in "tweets", short text messages that can be up to 140 characters long, is unlikely to appeal to users. A better bet would be for the firm to charge corporate users for premium services. For example, it could pocket a fee from businesses for verifying their Twitter accounts, so that users following their postings would know the firms' tweets are genuine. It could also develop a statistical toolkit that measures the effectiveness of tweets in generating sales.

Some analysts have warned that if social networks do not get smarter at generating revenue themselves, they risk seeing the best money-spinning opportunities siphoned off by those venture-backed start-ups. By some estimates, developers working on Facebook applications may pull in as much revenue this year as the site itself. In a report published in May, ContentNext Media, a research firm, concluded that Facebook should think of itself as a shopping mall and start charging developers "rent" to be on its platform. Twitter might ultimately want to follow suit. Such a move could bring in plenty of cash, even if it does appear a bit, er, anti-social.
The Economist
ArticleImage
Twitter is now thought to have around 23m users.
Tweeting all the way to the bank

WHENEVER the founders of Twitter, a social-networking service, have been asked about how much revenue they expect to generate from their creation, they have politely deflected the question. So when a hacker recently leaked documents after gaining access to the private e-mail accounts of a Twitter employee and the wife of one of its founders, the blogosphere was abuzz. The haul included a spreadsheet showing revenues reaching $140m by the end of 2010, up from $4.4m this year. Twitter dismissed the document as out of date, but it showed the firm's owners believe it has the potential to mint serious money.

Photos: :cw

Their confidence is not surprising: Twitter is now thought to have around 23m users. Other social networks have also been piling on members. Facebook, one of the biggest networks along with News Corporation's MySpace, has seen membership leap from 100m in August 2008 to some 250m today. With the number of people online worldwide expected to go from 1.5 billion today to 2.2 billion by 2013, according to Forrester Research, many of these networks will grow like Topsy.

They will also have a profound influence on consumer behaviour, prompting firms to shift a hefty chunk of their marketing budgets in their direction. That prospect has investors salivating. Marc Andreessen, a well-known Silicon Valley figure with stakes in both Twitter and Facebook, believes Facebook's revenues will amount to billions of dollars in five years' time, up from about $500m this year. A recent investment in Facebook by a Russian firm valued it at $6.5 billion. Other venture capitalists have been ladling cash into start-ups developing software applications for these online communities.

Yet some experts point out that although social networks have captured the popular imagination, the managers running them face a delicate balancing act. They need to reconcile a desire to drive up membership as fast as possible—which increases the value of a network to both existing and potential members—with the need to experiment with ways of raising money to fund long-term growth. If they push too hard for revenue in the short term, they might drive away users, undermining a network. Leave it too late to monetise and the business could collapse.

MySpace, which was bought by News Corp in 2005, offers a cautionary tale. It grew rapidly from its origins as a site focused on members' musical interests into a more eclectic network. But as it expanded, it spent too much time chasing revenue and too little improving its online offerings. Now it is bleeding users and advertising: eMarketer, a research firm, estimates that MySpace will bring in $495m of ad revenue from America this year, 15% less than in 2008. In June Owen Van Natta, the site's new boss, announced plans to cut hundreds of jobs at the bloated operation. He is widely expected to return MySpace to its roots in entertainment.

Executives at other networks stress that their priority is keeping users happy. But they acknowledge that the recession has sharpened interest in generating revenue. Some

2009年8月17日 星期一

Fatal Water

CW
ArticleImage
A disaster scene not far from the National Freeway exit in Guiren Township, Tainan County. Many residents of Syuejia had never seen such massive floods before.
Taiwan's Climatic Extremes
Fatal Water

With the arrival of Typhoon Morakot, Taiwan suddenly swung from drought to flooding. How are the woes of water altering life in Taiwan, and what can Taiwan do about it?

Photos:cw

A typhoon that arrived from Taiwan's east turned the most severe drought in the past seven years into the worst flood in the last half-century.

Dozens of towns in southern Taiwan – throughout the counties of Tainan, Jiayi, Kaohsiung, Pingdong and Taidong – were affected by the flooding, which covered 26 percent of the island's total land area. Southern Taiwan appeared to be a lone boat foundering in a vast ocean.

It was a great irony that one natural disaster (drought) needed to be relieved by another and that the driest part of the country – southern Taiwan – was the hardest hit by the storm. And yet, despite the staggering amount of precipitation that fell, if Taiwan faces high temperatures in the next three months and no more typhoons hit its shores, the country could face another bout with drought early next year.

Three days before Typhoon Morakot pummeled Taiwan, Shaw C. Liu, director of Academia Sinica's Research Center for Environmental Changes, predicted in an interview with CommonWealth Magazine that Morakot's rains would be extremely heavy. With Taiwan's large climatic swings and the warming of the seas around the island, typhoons are now absorbing even more moisture than usual and pelting Taiwan with shocking amounts of rain.

Chung-Ming Liu, the director of National Taiwan University's Global Change Research Center who has followed climate change for more than 20 years, says the danger of climate change is not just that climates will become extreme, but that they will also change extremely quickly.

Not long ago, climate scholars predicted that Taiwan was entering a decade of drought, and that in the next 40 years, it could face desertification. Within 24 hours, the idea that Taiwan could face water shortages became a joke.

But is it really true that Taiwan does not lack water? Instead of tempting fate and depending on typhoons to solve drought crises, can Taiwan rely on effective management to develop a more consistent water supply? As a country with one of the highest levels of precipitation in the world, why does Taiwan even face water shortages?

Water Crisis Getting Worse

Nobody is more sensitive to the problem of an unstable water supply than Taiwan Water Corporation vice president Nan-Jer Hu. At the beginning of April, Hu was already in a terrible fix. Five meetings on the looming drought had already been convened, with each meeting more worrying than the one before it.

Just after the water company announced in early August that a second phase of water rationing was imminent, a typhoon warning was issued that eased Hu's sense of crisis, but his anxiety shifted to the other extreme – from the dilemma of too little water to the quandary of too much. Having worked at Taiwan Water Corp. for 20 years, Hu has gradually accepted that his worries over drought conditions will resurface once every two or three years.

The drama of rapidly alternating droughts and floods has been repeatedly enacted in Taiwan in recent years. Drought has followed flooding at least five times in the past ten years (see Table), and the dual problem of controlling floods while preventing water shortages has become Taiwan's most serious challenge.

Water has already become the planet's most important strategic asset. Suddenly, this essential resource no longer appears to be inexhaustible, but is in fact in finite supply. A number of governments are gradually expanding their attention from CO2 to H2O, and the United Nations, in its World Water Development Report released in March, warned that the global water crisis is growing more severe by the day, and almost half the world's population will be living in areas of high water stress by 2030.

Taiwan is not immune to the trend.

The Decade of Drought Has Begun

Taiwan's average annual precipitation is nearly 2.5 times the world average. The country gets 90 billion cubic meters of rainfall per year, enough to fill its more than 40 reservoirs 45 times. So why does it go through periods when it lacks water?

The crux of the problem is not the quantity of rainfall but its uneven distribution.

Chung-Ho Wang, a research fellow in Academia Sinica's Institute of Earth Sciences who has long studied rainfall trends, says northern Taiwan gets more rainfall (an average of 2,800mm per year) than the south (an average of 2,200mm per year). Over the past 10 years, southern Taiwan has always been dry in the spring, because 90 percent of its rainfall comes between May and August. Once the rainy season ends, a long dry spell sets in.

Wang observes that over the past 60 years, precipitation has declined in three-quarters of Taiwan's land area, and in southern Taiwan the number of rainy days per year has fallen from 195 in the past to only 130 at present.

"Taiwan has already entered a 10-year cycle of drought," Wang asserts, pointing to a rainfall map of Taiwan on his computer.

The 2009 UN World Water Development Report, titled "Water in a Changing World," contends that the greatest threat to the world's water supply is poor governance, which causes water resources to be used excessively and incorrectly. Taiwan is guilty on both counts.

Water Resources Agency director-general Shen Hsien Chen acknowledges that water usage considerations in government policy need to be adjusted. In the past, whenever a water-using entity made a request, the agency would comply without a second thought. But today, water supply policies should change course, Chen argues, with a fixed supply dictating demand. Those who want water should be required to solve the problem themselves.

Among those who have done just that are the Formosa Plastics Group (to meet the needs of its sixth-naphtha cracker expansion project) and the Taoyuan High-Tech Industrial Park. Both built seawater desalination plants to meet their water needs and gain government approval for their projects.

Leaky Water Pipes

Other important governance flaws are poor reservoir management and leaky water supply pipes.

Academia Sinica's Liu says that in the past, rainwater would remain in the soil for two days before being discharged into the ocean. But as Taiwan has become more urbanized, Taiwan's soil has become less able to absorb water, and rainwater now flows into the ocean after just two hours. Thus, the country has become even more dependent on reservoirs to store water.

The only problem is that the capacity of Taiwan's reservoirs is limited. They are only able to store a total of 2 billion cubic meters of water, and in order to meet water demand, must be replenished three times a year (five times a year for Shimen Reservoir in northern Taiwan). When too few typhoons deliver too little rainfall or when they do not arrive at wide enough intervals, water supply becomes problematic. Exacerbating the challenge is the major build-up of silt in Taiwan's reservoirs, which steals away an average of 22 percent of their capacity. In other words, simply relying on reservoirs will not satisfy Taiwan's long-term water resource needs.

Another long-tolerated management oversight is Taiwan's leaky water pipes.

More than 22 percent of the water piped around Taiwan leaks away, higher than the world average of 18 percent (Japan's rate is only 7 percent). Aside from being wasteful, the leakage problem creates unnecessary economic losses. In the case of Taiwan Water Corp., its revenue totaled NT$26.7 billion in 2008, while it watched NT$7.4 billion worth of water seep away. Saving that money would have driven the company's net profit more than 100 times higher.

Taiwan Water's Hu admits that leaky pipes let billions of Taiwan dollars get away every year, but he maintains there is no way to efficiently solve the problem. According to International Water Association (IWA) standards, 1.5 percent of the total length of piping in a network should be replaced annually for water not to be wasted, but Taiwan barely meets that standard halfway, replacing only about 0.65 percent of its piping every year.

The Cabinet has noticed the embarrassingly high leakage rate, and will allocate NT$27.2 billion over the next four years to the water company to replace old pipes. But even with that investment, Taiwan's leakage rate will only improve to the world average.

Water Pricing: A Political Hot Potato

Another major issue authorities must contend with is the relatively cheap price of water in Taiwan. Among OECD and neighboring countries, Taiwan's average unit price of water is only higher than that in China and Korea. CommonWealth Magazine found, however, that measured in terms of national income, the price of water in Taiwan is only one-third that of China's. It has not been adjusted in 15 years, even though national income has grown 55 percent during that period.

The Water Resources Agency's Chen laments helplessly that water pricing is a political issue that nobody is willing to tackle. Water represents only 0.4 percent of an average family's expenses in Taiwan, far lower than the global average of 4 percent, and less than 1 percent of enterprises' operating costs. Such low prices provide little incentive to save water or develop a water conservancy industry.

That lack of environmental consciousness is reflected in water consumption. In Taiwan the average daily per capita water consumption for domestic purposes is 274 liters (350 liters in Taipei), 14 percent higher than the world average. Only 57 percent of water used in industry in Taiwan is recycled, compared to 90 percent in Japan and Germany.

Unpredictable Weather

The water delivered by Typhoon Morakot may have already made people forget that 2009 is destined to be an extremely dry year. The U.S.-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration observed over a month ago that eastern equatorial Pacific sea surface temperatures were at least 1.0 degree Celsius above average and were continuing to rise, a sign that the El Nino climate phenomenon will return this year in the northern hemisphere and peak in winter. It is expected to bring drought, which will reduce harvests and drive up world grain prices.

As the planet's climate grows more extreme, the weather is more difficult to predict. National Taiwan University's Liu suggests that, rather than relying on nature, Taiwan's water policy should be reconsidered based on the idea of diversifying the country's water sources.

Taiwan's domestic, agricultural and industrial water users are all supplied from the same source, but the IWA has suggested the use of a dual piping network to separate potable water and reclaimed water or rainwater, which would reduce the pressure on potable water supplies.

"Taiwan's homes all seem like they're wearing raincoats, deflecting rain away. In the future, buildings will have to be like trees and store water," Liu explains. Building large-scale water recycling systems into big structures will not only lower the threat of water shortages but also reduce dependence on water reservoirs, and it is the cheapest solution to the problem.

"If there's no water, there's no future," says the Water Resources Agency's Chen, repeating the warning he heard over and over from experts at an international sustainable development forum in South Africa six years ago. The biggest challenges to human survival and the world's hottest flashpoints are all entangled with the issue of water.

This is the reality that Taiwanese people, who pay one-ninth of the price Germans do for water and use twice as much per capita, must confront. Taiwan constantly seesaws between the extremes of too much and too little water, and it no longer has any leeway to use water as extravagantly as it has in the past.

Translated from the Chinese by Luke Sabatier

2009年8月16日 星期日

Distracted Driving: Should Talking, Texting Be Banned-2?

Driving to distraction
Sunny S. Unal / Corbis

(2 of 2)

Scientists at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute are skeptical, however, of simulator studies. In July the institute released a data analysis of the behavior of scores of drivers who agreed to have a camera placed in their vehicle for a year or so. After examining footage that preceded crashes and near crashes, the researchers concluded that while manual manipulation of a cell phone (dialing and texting) led to a greater risk of an accident, simple participation in a phone conversation (talking or listening) did not lead to a statistically significant increase in risk. The study will be presented next month at the first international conference on driver distraction and inattention, in Göteborg, Sweden. (Read "Texting and Walking: Dangerous Mix.")

In spite of the proliferation of anti-cell-phone laws, drivers' habits don't appear to be changing. A 2008 Nationwide Mutual Insurance survey found that only 63% of drivers planned to abide by laws prohibiting cell phones. So parents, employers and insurance companies are stepping in to help minimize driver distraction. In the next few months, several technology start-ups will release new products for phones that can detect when a car is in motion and automatically log incoming calls and texts much as a personal assistant would. All the products have provisions that allow both incoming and outgoing calls during emergencies.

Knowing that people will be unlikely to volunteer for a service that takes away their phone privileges, Nationwide has partnered with one of the start-ups and is planning to offer a discounted rate for those who use the distraction reducer. The insurer says its discount will most likely cover the cost of Aegis Mobility's DriveAssist, which will be available next year.

Meanwhile, the CAS is calling for more draconian measures. Now that it has uncovered the NHTSA research, it is filing a petition calling for all new cars to have a device installed that allows only emergency calls. "We do not see how [NHTSA] can turn down a problem that's rapidly turning out to be as bad as drunk driving," says Clarence Ditlow, CAS's executive director. "We're asking that technology be installed in cars to disable their cell phones whenever you shift out of park."

Though Ditlow admits that such a move could be years away, the organization's goal remains to "make talking and driving as socially unacceptable as drinking and driving," he says. "It's just a question of when we get there."

New Services to Reduce Driver Distraction
Key2SafeDriving
Parents can set up a password-protected profile that won't allow calls or texts when a Bluetooth device detects that the car is in motion.
$99, then $10 per month for Web services

Aegis Mobility DriveAssist
Downloaded software will use a phone's GPS to determine whether it is in a moving vehicle, then log incoming calls and texts, and respond with a message that you're driving.
$6 to $12 per month

ZoomSafer
The least restrictive of these three products, this downloadable software lets you dictate text messages and updates to social-networking sites while you're driving.
Free; premium subscription is $5 per month

Distracted Driving: Should Talking, Texting Be Banned?

Driving to distraction
Sunny S. Unal / Corbis

Most of us are neither pilots nor astronauts. We are not trained to steer large, hurtling hulks of steel and gasoline while manipulating small computers. So there's something blindingly obvious about the risks of texting while driving. Yet research is beginning to show that driving while simply talking on a cell phone — including using hands-free technology — can prove dangerous, even deadly.

In late July, the Center for Auto Safety (CAS) released hundreds of pages of a previously buried 2003 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) study that identified the cell phone as a serious safety hazard when used on the road. A bill introduced last month in the Senate would require all states to impose a ban on texting while driving; 17 states (including, most recently, Illinois, on Aug. 6) and the District of Columbia have passed such a ban, and seven states have outlawed driver use of handheld communication devices altogether. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood considers cell phones such a problem that he is planning a summit next month to discuss the dangers of driving while distracted. And though it's impossible to accurately gauge how many car accidents nationwide are cell phone related, David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah, estimates that only 2% of people are able to safely multitask while driving. (Read "Text-Messaging Behind the Wheel.")

Strayer, who for more than a decade has been studying the effects driving and cell-phone use have on the brain, says those 2% are probably the same people who would be really good fighter pilots. Rarities. Some of Strayer's other findings show that most drivers tend to stare straight ahead while using a cell phone and are less influenced by peripheral vision. In other words, "cell phones," he says, "make you blind to your own bad driving."

And even though the common assumption is that hands-free technology has mitigated the more dangerous side effects of cell-phone use — it's just like talking to someone sitting next to you, isn't it? — a series of 2007 simulator tests conducted by Strayer seems to indicate the opposite. A passenger acted as another set of eyes for the driver in the test and even stopped or started talking depending on the difficulty of conditions outside the car. Meanwhile, half the drivers talking on a hands-free phone failed, bypassing the rest area the test had called for them to stop at.

Part of the problem may be that when people direct their attention to sound, the visual capacity of their brain decreases, says Steven Yantis, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University. It can be as if a driver is seeing the image in her head of the person she is talking to, thereby decreasing her ability to see what's actually in front of her. "When people are listening to a cell-phone conversation, they're slower to respond to things they're looking at," Yantis says. "It requires you to select one thing at the cost of being less able to respond to other things."

This may explain why participants in one of Strayer's simulator studies were faster to brake and caused fewer crashes when they had a .08% blood-alcohol content than while sober and talking on a cell phone.

Read "Texting Drivers, Tempting Fate."

Read a Q&A with a texting motorist.