accidents

Human behavior is changing at a blistering pace.

Why, someone in Starbucks held the door for me today and actually waited until I could grab the door from him, rather than letting it swing tantalizingly before I could get there.

However, a British office worker called James Coleman has pointed us toward the perils of over-committed tweeting. According to a report in the Telegraph, Coleman, 23, was jogging when he suddenly felt the enormous uncontrollable urge to pull out his BlackBerry and Twitter.

Perhaps you have experienced a similar sensation. The buttocks tighten, the eyebrows begin to quiver and your … Read more

How dangerous is your commute? The answer may depend on the weather.

In addition to speed traps and red light cameras, Njection.com is now offering people the option to view the traffic accident history of a route based on past weather conditions using the Njection Mobile iPhone application.

Njection took five years of accident data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and merged it with global weather conditions from WeatherBug.com. Using Microsoft Virtual Earth, this mashup enables people to see what accidents have occurred in a particular area, and if they want, filter the data to show … Read more

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) created a roof strength rating system to help customers assess a vehicle's safeness. Roof strength is critical to keeping passengers alive and in the car in the event of a rollover accident, according to a press release issued by the IIHS. The stronger the roof, the less likely it will deform.

More than 10,000 people die in rollover-related accidents. While any vehicle can roll in a crash, SUVs are three times as likely to roll in an accident than a passenger car.

To earn a good rating, the vehicle must have … Read more

Needless to say, automobile accidents aren't pleasurable experience. Often, the ordeal devolves into finger-pointing, pitting one person's word against another. By providing in-car video evidence, Voyager hopes to help drivers deal with the situation.

The just released Voyager Pro car camera with GPS logger packs an accelerometer that can detect fender benders and triggers a video recording of the 10 seconds leading up to and 20 seconds following an accident. The video is then stored on a removable 1GB SD card.

Additionally, the product lets drivers pinpoint the location of the accident by logging the GPS coordinates for … Read more

It may be a sad commentary on modern society, but we fully understand why people would want to install cameras in their cars specifically to document what exactly might happen in an accident. We just don't think the ideal solution is a model so big that it could obstruct a driver's view and possibly cause the very accident it's trying to monitor--no matter what Paris Hilton's parents have to say about it.

Clarion's "DriveEye" may be a good compromise, though Technabob says it's available only in Japan at present for about $412. … Read more

It's official: Crave has a link to Paris Hilton. A couple of weeks ago we panned the idea of this car-board black box device for any number of reasons. But today we read on GeekSugar that Kathy and Rick Hilton expressed interest in the Gadget Universe product for their ubiquitous daughter to keep tabs on paparazzi and other media hounds. We're not sure what to make of this latest development, but we do agree with GeekSugar's trenchant observation: "Personally I wonder if Paris really needs any more cameras around her than she already has."

Barely a day goes by in the Big Apple when we don't see someone get almost hit by a car while mindlessly chatting on a cell phone or listening to an iPod. State Sen. Carl Kruger of Brooklyn thinks this is a big enough problem to propose new legislation aimed at protecting distracted pedestrians.

Kruger's bill, which has not yet been formally introduced, would ban the use of electronic gadgets--including MP3 players and cell phones--by pedestrians using a crosswalk in New York state. Violators would be subject to a $100 fine under the plan.

Kruger told WCBS, "… Read more

There's one thing that brings people together every holiday season, and we're not talking about the mall: It's car accidents. Bad weather, bad drivers, bad last-minute-shopping attitudes make for a deadly combination. So Crave is doing our part to spread cheery thoughts by passing along the "RoadBox."

This "vehicle accident camera system" from South Korea, according to Red Ferret, "incorporates a speed and acceleration monitor to give you some all round information about the circumstances leading up to the crash, 14 seconds before and 6 seconds after." It just goes to … Read more

It makes sense that this latest product comes from Japan, which we maintain is headed toward a human-free society because of its declining population growth. Just as it has found so many ways to automate services, the Japanese have found one less duty for police to handle: fender benders.

As Plastic Bamboo notes, Fujitsu's automotive subsidiary has developed the equivalent of an airliner's black box to document "the scene and sounds of a traffic accident" with a system that includes a microphone, recorder and a camera with a 134-degree lens. The device automatically kicks in when … Read more