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"         More and more, the absurd practice of texting while driving is becoming socially and legislatively unacceptable. And isn&amp;#039;t it about time?   President Obama has banned almost 2 million federal employees from this practice. Texting while driving is already illegal in about a dozen states, with six more following in January 2010. What&amp;#039;s more, in many of these jurisdictions, it&amp;#039;s defined as a primary offense; that is, sufficient reason in itself for being pulled over.   Will it be difficult for law enforcement to recognize driving texters?   I doubt it. Just look for the inattentive idiots wandering from lane to lane. Whether they&amp;#039;re texting, scrolling through e-messages, drunk or simply incompetent, they have no right endangering the rest of us.   A public service message produced by the police department of Gwent, Wales, U.K., depicts the dangers of texting and driving in details that are extremely graphic and bloody \u2014 yet likely tame: A teenager texting while at the wheel smashes her car head-on into another and then gets hit by a third car. Horrific enough, but there are no impacts with stationary objects at roadside, no fire, no rollovers and the occupants are all belted.   Some criticized the presentation, viewed by many on YouTube, as overly graphic. But it&amp;#039;s certainly a strong statement against the practice of texting while at the wheel.   Amazingly, a recent survey claims that more than one third of those queried admit to texting, using Facebook or Twittering while driving. Given that the information comes from Retrevo, a consumer electronics shopping site, my initial thought was that the sample was perhaps more skewed toward heavy-duty multi-taskers than those in the general population. However, the good folks of Retrevo tell me the survey was a general one of internet users, albeit a rather small sample size (771 online individuals).   This fact and the results of this survey frighten me out of my wits.   We all multi-task: chatting, strolling and munching street food, for instance. But, of course, when it&amp;#039;s driving a car and diverting hands, sight and attention to non-related successive \u2014 and acutely small \u2014 character recognition and activation, we&amp;#039;re talking heavy multi-tasking. And, as reported in a study done by Stanford researchers, heavy multi-taskers pay a significant price in each of the tasks they&amp;#039;re performing. What&amp;#039;s worse, they don&amp;#039;t recognize these functional shortcomings. They think they&amp;#039;re actually getting more done than the rest of us.   The Stanford study posited several key conjectures among two groups, those who regularly do a lot of media multi-tasking and those who do not. Were the heavy multi-taskers better at storing and organizing information? No, actually worse. Did they have better memories? No, not the case. Could they switch activities quicker and better? No, again they were outperformed by the light multi-taskers.   Maybe the federal ban, increased awareness at the state level, public service messages and this Stanford research might constitute a tipping point in the matter of texting while driving.   In the meantime, I have a two-word recommendation for these particular heavy multi-taskers: public transportation. Leave the driving to those of us who care about ourselves and others around us.   U.K. Public Service Announcement on Texting While Driving         "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/car-technology/news/a14977/texting-while-driving-is-getting-banned-finally/>