The National Safety Council estimates that 28 percent of all auto accidents are caused by drivers talking or texting on cell phones.

To put that into perspective – if a figure that large really needs to be put into perspective – in 2006, 9 percent of auto accidents were caused by alcohol or drugs, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Cell phone use causes 1.4 million crashes per year, and at least 200,000 additional accidents are caused by texting.

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Indiana University and Rutgers medical and engineering professors have had success in using virtual-reality video games as remote therapy – tele-rehab – for teens with hemiplegic cerebral palsy.

“While these initial encouraging results were in teens with limited hand and arm function due to perinatal brain injury, we suspect using these games could similarly benefit individuals with other illness that affect movement, such as multiple sclerosis, stroke, arthritis and even those with orthopedic injuries affecting the arm or hand,” said Meredith R. Golomb, Indiana University School of Medicine associate professor of neurology.

Participants in the study used “a specially fitted sensor glove linked to a remotely monitored videogame console installed in their home” to play games such as making images appear onscreen. Patients did this for 30 minutes a day, five days a week.

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Image via CrunchBase

You know what sort of fell off in the second half of 2009? Twitter stories.

It seemed like once the mass adoption phase of the microblogging service in the first half of the year quieted down, Twitter use plateaued in the second half of the year, giving us a fairly good idea of what the service’s reach would ultimately be.

In social networking news, Facebook’s steady growth overtook Twitter’s headlines, and while Twitter remained one of the year’s top stories, it appeared to hit its peak. Which was kind of disappointing as its competitor continued to pass milestone after milestone .

Twitter usage is notoriously difficult to put into metrics; unlike Facebook, much Twitter activity occurs on third-party apps that make up the rich Twitter ecosystem.

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Technology drives the astounding pace of contemporary language change, so it’s hardly surprising that most landmark words today come out of tech. That and the fact that this industry is responsible for the production of 9/10s of the world’s neologisms.

No matter what, 2009’s top words came from tech. The American Dialect Society’s word of the decade is ‘google,’ and ‘tweet’ is the ADS’s word of the year.

“Both words are, in the end, products of the Information Age, where every person has the ability to satisfy curiosity and to broadcast to a select following, both via the Internet,” said Grant Barrett, chair of the New Words Committee at the American Dialect Society.

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It’s fair to say that Facebook is not the best place to go if you’re trying to avoid the temptation to spend.

From the sometimes-effective-oftentimes-hilarious targeted advertising to updates on what your friends are purchasing – whether it be a vacation, dinner and drinks or Avatar tickets – the fact is that a lot of Facebook activity is predicated upon money spent, or waiting to be spent.

Until now.

Stop Me from Spending! is a Facebook app developed by Youth Media International (Youth Radio) and Context Optional to help young people budget.

“‘Stop Me from Spending!’ grew out of the recognition that young people are hugely influenced by their friends, so this was a real opportunity to tap that peer orientation in a positive way,” said Lissa Soep, PhD, senior producer and research director, Youth Radio.

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Experian Hitwise reported today that the number one search term for 2009 was Facebook. That’s really no big surprise, as 5 percent of total internet time is spent on the social networking site.

What is surprising is what happened over at Twitter. The event that was the highest trending topic this year was the Iran elections and the ‘Twitter revolution,’ field reporting and public solidarity with the people of Iran that the microblogging site engendered.

“Among all the keywords, hashtags, and phrases that proliferated throughout the year, one topic surfaced repeatedly,” writes Abdur (no last name given), a researcher at Twitter.

“Twitter users found the Iranian elections the most engaging topic of the year,” Abdur writes. “The terms #iranelection, Iran and Tehran were all in the top-21 of Trending Topics, and #iranelection finished in a close second behind the regular weekly favorite #musicmonday.”

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In the last five years, the number of people 65 and over using the internet has increased 55 percent, according to Nielsen.

“The over 65 crowd represents about 13% of the total population and with this increase in online usage, they are beginning to catch up with their offline numbers,” said Nielsen’s Chuck Shilling.

“Looking at what they’re doing online, it makes sense they’re engaged in many of the same activities that dominate other age segments – e-mail, sharing photos, social networking, checking out the latest news and weather – and it’s worth noting that a good percentage of them are spending time with age-appropriate pursuits such as leisure travel, personal health care and financial concerns,” Shilling said.

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At the International Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen today, Google announced a tool that could be used to track global deforestation. The technology prototype enables observation and measurement of changes in the earth’s forests with satellite imagery, scientific analysis and cloud-based computation.

According to the Google Blog, emissions from tropical deforestation are comparable to emissions for the entire European Union and greater than combined worldwide transportation.

As the Stern Review report’s analysis on land use change shows, protecting existing forests is a highly efficient way to cut carbon emissions and mitigate climate change. The United Nations has proposed Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries, a framework that would create financial incentives to the rainforest nations, therefore making these forests worth “more alive than dead.”

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IDC predicts that more than one billion mobile devices will be used to access the internet in 2013, more than doubling 2009’s 450 million mobile internet users.

To put that in perspective, the global population of total internet users just passed one billion at the beginning of this year.

“With a wealth of information and services available from almost anywhere, Internet-connected mobile devices are reshaping the way we go about our personal and professional lives,” said John Gantz, chief research officer at IDC.

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U.S. households consumed 3.6 zettabytes (360,000,000,000 trillion bytes) of information in 2008, according to UC San Diego’s How Much Information? (PDF) project.

That’s more than twenty times what all the hard drives in the world could hold at once.

The average American consumes 34 gigabytes and 100,000 words of information a day. That amount of information would fill one-and-a-half single-layer Blue-ray disks, and the amount of words consumed per day is more than the length of a standard novel (around 80,000 words).

That’s pretty incredible.

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